US Politics, June 2018: This is a total goat rodeo.

btw FOX News showing images of Eagles players kneeling while praying and NOT during the anthem (in fact, none of them did) feels extra propagandish

the defeatism this month is really starting to piss me off. people looking at the approval polls as if they make a hen's lick of difference. it takes time and effort to hate somebody, and if people don't want to waste their time disapproving of the president this month, i'm not bothered by it. i know silver is only feeding us obsessives' demand for data, but data is, at this point, of no actual use, because it tells us absolutely nothing about what will happen in november. we have a president who thinks he's andrew jackson but is actually john quincy adams, and i'm not going to predict how it plays out, historical precedent is just as much cherry-picking as polls, but a bloodbath wouldn't surprise me.

i do think the whitman county thing is more important than tombot gives it credit for, because republican party policy is set in places where the republican party is powerful - on the west coast that's out east, places like whitman county in wa and malheur in or. it's the reverse of the problem the democratic party has re: gerrymandering - republicans in cities, which is to say the numerical majority of them, don't count for shit. what counts is the racists who only go to the cities to start street fights with antifa and then go home and elect somebody who believes what they believe to congress.

Presidential Job Approval Ratings for Barack Obama, 2010

Approve Disapprove No opinion
2010 Jun 28-Jul 4 46 45 9
2010 Jun 21-27 45 46 9
2010 Jun 14-20 47 45 8
2010 Jun 7-13 46 46 8

stop trying to make me feel sorry for jeff sessions you fuck

The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself...I would have quickly picked someone else. So much time and money wasted, so many lives ruined...and Sessions knew better than most that there was No Collusion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2018

They’re taking a leaf from the religious righr’s book: run for city council/school board and introduce boilerplate legislation c+p’d from [their right-wing think-tank of choice].

So many lives ruined :(

I might feel sorry for Jeff Sessions if someone ran him through a human-sized Veggetti slicer. Otherwise, nah.

xp okay who the hell is he referring to there? this is breaking my brain

I think we thought it was Hope Hicks? Because the media circus is obviously the worst thing that happened to her.

Always safe to assume that Little Lord Flatulence is referring to the one person in the world that he recognizes as real.

btw FOX News showing images of Eagles players kneeling while praying and NOT during the anthem (in fact, none of them did) feels extra propagandish

just to add to this I'm sure FOX will not offer any sort of retraction or clarification on this while CNN had to spend an entire day apologizing for implying that Trumps "animals" comment was directed at immigrants in general, even though it clearly was

i feel like if you're scrutinising trump's tweets for correlations to objective reality your brain might alreayd be broken tbh

(People of the future, please note that bizarro's post was written prior to the point when reality underwent a wholesale renovation during one of our quad-monthly Infrastructure Weeks and had a gaudy, 40-ft. high TRUMP bolted to its side.)

(We have as yet failed to recognize that our emperor has clearly been fully-dressed this whole time, but we'll come to our senses soon enough.)

ha ha ha like yeah sure there will be people in the future, get the fuck outta here with that crazy talk

I say 'people of the future', you say 'horribly mutated survivors of multiple apocalypses who only resemble us inasmuch as they're wearing our tattered skins to keep warm'. Let's stop splitting hairs.

WH official tells me -- last Thurs, the Eagles submitted 70+ names to attend. On Fri, Eagles tried to resked event for days when POTUS was gonna be in Singapore. On Mon, they said the group avail on pre-planned date wld be TWO or THREE players + owner + MASCOT.

— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) June 5, 2018

You know you're hot when you can count an inanimate eagle costume among your supporters.

I didn't live through Nixon, obviously I could read about it but that wouldn't impart the same visceral sense, so: when Watergate was happening, how strong was the general level and sentiment of people agreeing that it was all a witch hunt

Xp Lol anyone whose been alive since like 1985 knows with this douchebag you keep EVERY receipt for future reference. [he still wont pay and you end up in court or writing off loss]. So lets see the player list iggles

I didn't live through Nixon, obviously I could read about it but that wouldn't impart the same visceral sense, so: when Watergate was happening, how strong was the general level and sentiment of people agreeing that it was all a witch hunt

I've not listened to all of this yet, but I think it is helpful in chronicling the era and the context http://www.slate.com/articles/slate_plus/watergate.html

GOP didn't turn on Nixon (like, at all) until the Saturday Night Massacre, and even then it was just a handful of Senators

for most of 1973 it didn't register. It took the hearings over the summer and the Saturday Night Massacre later in the year to turn the tide.

i remember the Admin and its puppets declaring "One year of Watergate is enough"

I would say things are different now, and it's going to take something much more extreme to dislodge GOP support than the firing of Sessions/Rosenstein/Mueller which at best is only going to (maybe) sway the votes of Hucklberry Butchmeup and Grassley and Corker

House GOP caucus will clearly never turn on Trump, even if a live boy/dead girl is involved

That watergate podcast is so great. All the different forgotten individual players they focus on are fascinating in their own way. I didn’t live through it but really gives you a contextualized and convincing POV of what it felt like to see each new shoe drop. It seems framed to make you compare to what’s happening now for sure but doesn’t push that angle too heavy.

"Witch-Hunt" was used in the headline of a Woodward-Bernstein story in July '73

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/19/15659314/trump-nixon-watergate

That's WH staffers being quoted anonymously. To get "the people's" sentiment you might have to check Gallup.

I can't find the thread for congressional and state-level politicking, so I'll put this here -- Roger Wicker's Senate seat is up for re-election but isn't getting any ink because he's likely a lock. One of the "Dem" candidates is the venture-capitalist husband of actress Sela Ward -- he was a Republican in California who donated $5000 to Wicker last year but then registered to vote in MS last September. Speculation is that he's just there to fuck up the candidacies of actual Dems. (Primary is today.)

yeah, obviously staffers then and now have and will always call such things a witch hunt, what I'm specifically interested in is the level to which a large swath of the general public also agreed

(and obviously I learned about it in school, but in general, a lot of history is taught in schools as if everyone was on the "right side of history" and objections were scattered and inconsequential)

My understanding, katherine, based on Woodward-Bernstein's accounts and Mary McCarthy's invaluable little book is that the case was off the radar until well past the 1972 election, nearly a year and a half after the break-in occurred.

since he won a big landslide when the story was barely 4 months old, it took awhile to turn the 'Nixon Democrats.' But nearly everyone who voted for McGovern hated him, I think it's fair to say. Middle-aged Dems had hated him since they were teenagers.

The podcast makes the point and (plays clip) of McGovern ineffectiveky trying to make hay out of it during the election (I had previously assumed it never came up) but again was really early.

There's also just so much shit going on under the surface that no one knows about for sometimes decades. Was just this morning reading about Nixon employing Anna Chennault to sabotage the Vietnam peace talks prior to the '68 election. Can't wait to see what comes oozing out of our current era 20-30 years after the fact.

in 2018 conservatives would think Trump goons doing Watergate is "Cool"

guy's a maverick. plays by his own rules. any means necessary to keep illigetimate dems out of office and save our constityoooshun

hey just a little b & e to own the libs

Was just this morning reading about Nixon employing Anna Chennault to sabotage the Vietnam peace talks prior to the '68 election

That was a big o_O moment in the Burns doc.

Also worth noting that he was, at the same time, saying that he wouldn't dream of making any public statement that might endanger the possibility of a resolution. Such pure and undiluted sociopathy.

The real crime is all the norms he violated in the process.

Norm Crosby, Norm McDonald, etc.

Was wondering why everything seemed so quiet lately. Then I realized this thread was created.

waiting for prez tweet on the end of the Miss America swimsuit competition

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/390784-mcconnell-cancels-senates-august-recess

“Due to the historic obstruction by Senate Democrats of the president’s nominees, and the goal of passing appropriations bills prior to the end of the fiscal year, the August recess has been canceled," McConnell said in a statement.

Turtle gonna Turtle

very canny of him to say "historic" rather than "unprecedented". hell, everything the Senate does goes into the historic record, so when they pass a resolution announcing that ice cream tastes good, it is "historic".

um

Letter from @LindseyGrahamSC to Dep AG Rosenstein:
1) Are you a witness in Mueller’s Investigation?
2) If not, why not?
3) If so, should you recuse yourself? pic.twitter.com/ni3rvov4dG

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) June 5, 2018

1) Are you a member of the Republican party?
2) If so, are you currently on fire?
3) If not, should you immolate yourself?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/9e/ThingsThatMakeYouGoHmmmC%2BC.jpg/220px-ThingsThatMakeYouGoHmmmC%2BC.jpg

I truly don't understand what Graham is trying to accomplish there, or why.

He is known to have no Trumpophilia. He's not even up for reelection this time; even if he's trying to avoid a challenge from the right no one will remember this stunt in 2020.

Is the DOJ's internal integrity his "ethics in gaming journalism"?