Slouching Towards Oblivion

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Simon's Cat

Happy Halloween


More Pix For Today

I love this kinda shit


















Keith


...but perhaps it's the end of the beginning.


Arguing The Real Shit

We need an honest debate, and we need to know how to conduct ourselves in an honest debate - a debate that stands a chance of moving things forward - we can expand a little on the rules and the weird shit we need to watch out for.

Here's a taste:


Let It Percolate


Last year, 139 million Americans voted.

129 million of them got at least a few Facebook memes from a ghost account that most likely originated in Russia.

100 million eligible voters stayed home.

45* "won" by less than 250,000 votes in a small handful of states.

Get up off your ass and go vote.

Today's Tweet



Nobody's better at this than driftglass.

 


Today's Today

















All Hallowed's Eve

His arrival was foretold in the ancient murals


Monday, October 30, 2017

One Down


Next, please.

This Week's Amy Siskind


Amy Siskind is keeping the list.

Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember.

1. Axios reported Trump pledged to spend at least $430k of his own money to pay some of the legal bills for WH staff due to the Russia investigation. The RNC has paid roughly $430k to cover Trump’s and Donald Jr.’s lawyers.
2. Reuters reported Canada is granting asylum to people who fear being deported by Trump. More than 15K people crossed the U.S.-Canadian border to claim refugee status this year. Many were in the US legally.
3. The US Air Force responded to Trump’s executive order in Week 49 which allows them to recall retired pilots, saying the Air Force did not know about it in advance and does not “currently intend to recall retired pilots.”

4. Defense One reported the Air Force is preparing to put nuclear-armed bombers back on 24-hour ready alert, a status not seen since the Cold War ended in 1991.
5.On Sunday, on the same day the Kremlin added him to the Interpol list, the State Dept revoked a visa for British citizen Bill Browder, a hedge fund manager turned human rights activist responsible for the Magnitsky Act.
6. On Monday night, the US cleared Browder to enter. The explanation given anonymously by a Trump regime member is the initial action blocking had been taken automatically in response to an Interpol notice filed by Russia.
7. Veselnitskaya detailed the Kremlin’s gripes with Browder in a memo she brought to the June 9 meeting with Donald Jr., Kushner and Manafort.
9. Atlantic reported Trump is rush-shipping condolences to Gold Star families following his false claim he had called “virtually all” of the families. Four families received next-day UPS letters from Trump.
10. McCain took a swipe at Trump on C-SPAN3 saying those “at the highest income level” avoided the draft by finding a doctor who “would say that they had a bone spur.”

And that's just the top 10.

A Widening Loop


Just off-stage, while the big drama of Manafort is going on, this is almost lost in the shuffle.

Josh Marshall, TPM:

George Papadopolous, another of those first five campaign advisors announced in March 2016 (Carter Page was another), pleaded guilty on Oct. 5, 2017, to making false statements to FBI. Unsealed this morning.

More soon.

Remember, days after being appointed, Papadopolous went to work trying to set up meetings between the Trump campaign and “Russian Leadership – Including Putin.”

We’re reading through the Papadopolous charges now. They are pretty bad and go directly to the Russia issue. More soon.

Don't assume the Papadolpolous plea wasn't intended to come in under the radar. This 45*-Russia thing has more moving parts than a high-end German sports sedan.

I thought they'd start with the little fish, using them as bait for the lunkers.  Leading off with Manafort could be an indication of low-hanging fruit, which in turn could indicate either a target-rich environment, and/or the degree of difficulty tying the whole thing together.

Today's Tweet



Hoping for the best with today's indictment.

 

Sunday, October 29, 2017

What Does It Take?


"Fact: Donald Trump is a feckless racist catastrophe who would gladly light the world on fire just to see his name printed in the last newspaper ever published."


You have to wonder what Jeff Flake and Bob Corker are thinking today. I'm sure neither were expecting their Sunday to be this quiet. These two stalwart bedrock pillar Senate Republicans dropped a couple of building-sized bricks on the White House last week, and all that came of the resulting DONK was yet another hashtagged rhetorical victory lap by Donald Trump.

According to normal political gravity, this was the sun rising in the West. Flake and Corker took Reagan's 11th Commandment -- "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican" – and fed it to the bears. Two major figures within the GOP brutally attacked a sitting Republican president on national television, using phrases like "debasing the nation" and "flagrant disregard for truth or decency," and in any other time in US history, it would have been a nine-days wonder.

It should be noted that Flake and Corker’s words assailing Trump do not bump them to the head of the line for beatification. Their profile in courage is shorter than the flyers you find on your windshield. Flake happily voted several times to strip millions of Americans of their health insurance not long ago, and Corker just voted to blow up a major consumer protection regulation.
Both have voted with Trump 90 percent of the time.

The smiling hyena will still eat your children.

Job Hunting Tip


Interviewer:
What did you like best about your last job?

Candidate:
Sometimes people had birthdays and they'd have free cake.

Revisit And Relearn

An explainer from Carlos Maza at Vox - one I keep going back to.

Today's Tweet



Gotta love a good Twitter Poem

 

Saturday, October 28, 2017

How Green Was My Campaign Fund

Playing both ends against the middle - and vice versa


Those bills again are:

  • 2013: HB 2261
  • 2014: SB 459 and HB 848
  • 2015: SB 1334 and SB 1349
  • 2017: HB 1760 and HB 2291
I didn't check all the bills mentioned, but the ones I did check were all passed by percentages in the 90s - like a couple of votes short of unanimous.

The old saw holds that sausage-making is an ugly thing.

And the closer you look, the uglier it gets, especially when big corporations have government locked in a grip that seems unbreakable. 

But it's not any worse now than it was in the early 20th century.

That doesn't mean we just sit on our asses and wait for shit to get better - that should be obvious, but that's exactly what an awful lot of us seem to be doing.

Anyway, it's not easy; it's not supposed to be easy; the fact that it's hard to do is partly what makes it worth doing.

"We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win."
--JFK




Samantha Bee

As usual these days, we get better news coverage of the stuff that matters from half-hour comedy shows.

And stay with it to hear the Ingrid Michaelson tune.

Badboy Behavior

"...by my calculation, seeing Bill O'Reilly's dick is 21,000 times worse than radiation poisoning."

Keith


"It's painful to contemplate, but he is the FDR of Twitter"

A Breakdown

A Russia-born observer helps us understand what that John Kelly show was about.

Masha Gessen, The New Yorker:

Consider this nightmare scenario: a military coup. You don’t have to strain your imagination—all you have to do is watch Thursday’s White House press briefing, in which the chief of staff, John Kelly, defended President Trump’s phone call to a military widow, Myeshia Johnson. The press briefing could serve as a preview of what a military coup in this country would look like, for it was in the logic of such a coup that Kelly advanced his four arguments.

Argument 1. Those who criticize the President don’t know what they’re talking about because they haven’t served in the military. 
To demonstrate how little lay people know, Kelly provided a long, detailed explanation of what happens when a soldier is killed in battle: the body is wrapped in whatever is handy, flown by helicopter, then packed in ice, then flown again, then repacked, then flown, then embalmed and dressed in uniform with medals, and then flown home. Kelly provided a similar amount of detail about how family members are notified of the death, when, and by whom. He even recommended a film that dramatized the process of transporting the body of a real-life marine, Private First Class Chance Phelps. This was a Trumpian moment, from the phrasing—“a very, very good movie”—to the message. Kelly stressed that Phelps “was killed under my command, right next to me”; in other words, Kelly’s real-life experience was recreated for television, and that, he seemed to think, bolstered his authority.
2. The President did the right thing because he did exactly what his general told him to do.

3. Communication between the President and a military widow is no one’s business but theirs.

4. Citizens are ranked based on their proximity to dying for their country.

Today's Tweet



What I've said for a long time: Go ahead and re-criminalize abortion. But be sure you include the law enforcement resources necessary, because you'll have to be ready to investigate every pre-menopausal woman in this country every month.

And understand that you're not making abortion unavailable. If my daughter is pregnant, and she doesn't want to stay pregnant, we're on a plane to Montreal tomorrow.

You haven't done anything but make safe abortions unavailable to poor women - and I'm wondering why that's never included when "conservatives" rant and whine about "Class Warfare".