On Ryan Zinke

Charlie Pierce, Esquire Magazine:

As my grandmother and her sisters used to say, who the hell is this guy when he's at home? From The Washington Post:

A security staffer takes the elevator to the seventh floor, climbs the stairs to the roof and hoists a special secretarial flag whenever Zinke enters the building. When the secretary goes home for the day or travels, the flag — a blue banner emblazoned with the agency’s bison seal flanked by seven white stars representing the Interior bureaus — comes down. In Zinke’s absence, the ritual is repeated to raise an equally obscure flag for Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt. Responding this week to questions from The Washington Post, a spokeswoman for Zinke, a former Navy SEAL commander, defended the Navy flag-flying tradition as “a major sign of transparency.”

Oh, just shut up.

“Ryan Zinke is proud and honored to lead the Department of the Interior, and is restoring honor and tradition to the department, whether it’s flying the flag when he is in garrison or restoring traditional access to public lands,” press secretary Heather Swift said in an email.

Tell your email to shut up, too.

Bob Cesca

Something I think most of us missed (I did anyway) - Jody points out the staging of 45*'s little paper towel stunt. (starts at about 11:00)

Which underlines this crapola thing that's been bouncing around Facebook:

see also - Snopes

The End Of The Beginning?

Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter:

Given the nation’s problems, from the unsettling situation along the Korean Peninsula, to the destruction left by Hurricane Harvey, to general income inequality, to terrorism, to climate change, our timing in bringing a man like Donald Trump into the White House really couldn’t be worse. The man is clearly unfit for any kind of public office, let alone the highest office in the land. The majority of the electorate knew this when they went to the voting booths. His “many sides” response to the events in Charlottesville during his horribly eventful, 17-day vacation sparked a run on his remaining popularity. (As Trump’s better, Winston Churchill said, “I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.”) The members of the president’s vaunted business panels left him. The members of his arts panel left him. The Republican leadership blanches at the mention of his name. His popularity in the swing states he won is on a downward spiral. Even charities that had booked space for their fund-raisers at Mar-a-Lago, his mid-market wedding-and-birthday rental facility, are pulling out. He still has the neo-Nazis and the racists, which must give him some comfort. This is going to sound unkind, but why are supremacists invariably the worst specimens of the race they are claiming to defend?

With normal presidencies, history often takes its time reaching a verdict. But once in a while, the verdict arrives with the speed of a tweet after an imagined slight. Judging from the assessments of six distinguished historians—see “History’s First Draft,” such is Trump’s grim fate. His time in office, like so much of his life, will be deemed a corrupt, messy shambles. The only lingering question is the extent of the damage he will have done by the time he is forced out of office.

Reading the essays by Jon Meacham, Stacy Schiff, Robert Dallek, Edmund Morris, A. Scott Berg, and Garry Wills, you come to the realization that our 45th president resembles none of the others—there is no true parallel. He is a mutant. In terms of temperament and judgment, he is the opposite of a Monroe or an F.D.R. He may be as intellectually hollow as Reagan, but he lacks Reagan’s humor, grace, and core of principle. He may be as psychologically disfigured as Nixon, but he lacks Nixon’s intelligence and stamina.

Today's GIF

There's always a dark and sinister side to populism, but as long as we have people who can stand off and make fun of it all, we'll have the best of checks-n-balances.

And when it comes to the issues of Net Neutrality, that's kinda the whole fuckin' point. Fight for it.

Because "Checks and Balances" is a metaphor, not a mechanism. It doesn't work if we don't work it.

Demand Progress

Check in with the ACLU

Yeesh

These last few days have provided a good lens for me to focus in on why I have a solid Love/Hate Relationship with politics.

John McCain escapes from a hospital in Arizona, kinda wobbles his way thru a short address to the Senate, and votes in favor of going forward with debate on a bill that fucks everybody over who isn't pullin' down about $200k a year - I can hate that one pretty bigly. 

But maybe by doing that, whatever version of this piece-of-shit bill McConnell has up his scaly sleeve today finally gets exposed as a piece-of-shit bill - so maybe I don't hate that one so much.

Meanwhile, 45* continues to shit on his AG because he thinks the guy in charge of the DoJ is supposed to be loyal to the POTUS instead of holding him (and everybody else) accountable before the law.  So I love showing 45* up for the Daddy State Swingin' Dick he obviously is.

But that means I'm forced into the position of having to defend a malignant leprechaun like Jeff Sessions, and fuck me, I hate the shit outa that one.

Today's Tweet

"All I'm doing by deleting the tweets is sending people a message," @Scaramucci tells @jaketapper in fiery exchange https://t.co/qj3jnz8abI

— CNN (@CNN) July 23, 2017

OK - the guy complains about "purity", and tries to use that as an excuse to make his own history disappear by deleting a boatload of his tweets. Which does what? It makes him appear far more in line with 45*'s "positions" - aka: the quest for Purity.

These fuckin' guys.

Lining It Out

Dunno about the rest of y'all, but I'll have to hear the 45*/Russia timeline several more times and several more ways and from several more people before I can get my think soupy brain wrapped around just what a ginormous shitball this thing is becoming.

Ezra Klein at Vox:

I think I've said before that I was in front of our crappy little black-n-white portable TV in the kitchen of my parents' house all thru the summer of 1973 - like my ass was bolted to the chair.

Watergate moved pretty slow compared with this shit.  And we kinda had some time to kick back for few minutes each day and cogitate on "what the fuck just happened here!?!"

We don't have that luxury now.  And it makes me wonder what all we're going to miss as we rush thru, trying to get it to just fucking stop already.

This is gonna hurt pretty bad for a while.

CO2 Cycle

From NASA - in 3D - as of Dec 2016.

I can't confirm that this is the kind of thing negatively effected under 45*'s Executive Order that purportedly reduced or eliminated the part of NASA's mission that included research on weather and Climate Change, but with Pruitt at EPA, Sessions at AG and Tillerson at State, am I s'posed to be surprised if that's the case?

Theres a good rendition of this with some decent narration at Vox

It pays to track those pesky Executive Orders

They Never Go Away

Authoritarians are always there.  And they're forever trying to pull the same shit.

In this case, we can look at Voter Fraud and Intimidation and violence against the innocent perpetrated by Democrats at the direction of the Clinton campaign - as hypothesized by none other that Carter Page.

For anybody who's been paying attention, we know that when you're dealing with 45* and his minions, every accusation is a confession.

A piece by Jon Schwarz at The Intercept:

CARTER PAGE, briefly a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, sent a peculiar, rambling letter this week to the Department of Justice, asking it to review “the severe election fraud in the form of disinformation, suppression of dissent, hate crimes and other extensive abuses led by members of Mrs. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their political allies last year.”

Page is reportedly one of several targets of a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI into possible links between Trump associates and Russian officials.

This move - fuck with the election, and then proclaim loudly that the election's been fucked with - is straight out of the School of the Americas training the CIA used to provide for people in Central and South American countries in order to get "our guys" into power and keep them there.

You may recall, it was widely presumed that Manuel Noriega was a prize pupil, and became such a sore spot that Poppy Bush felt compelled to invade Panama in an effort to clean up a mess he helped create.

But anyway. It should seem really clear now that the initiative to investigate voter fraud is a setup. Once they splash the inevitable hyped up scary scenario across DumFux News and Breitbart, and it bounces around in the echo chamber for a while - even though it'll be practically nothing but unsupported assertions and rumors the states will have all the "justification" they need - cuz hey, it's coming from the FBI so it's gotta be official - and the Voter Suppression efforts will balloon.

And those new restrictions will include (buried in the amendments language) the legal structure to wipe those 3 million Hillary voters off the rolls.

Now, those last coupla paragraphs are almost pure speculation. Obviously, I think there's a better than even chance I'm right about what's coming (or what they intend to try), but that's not evidence. So grains of salt, even when you're here reading your favorite blogger's outstandingly noble and awesomely righteous bullshit.

Careerism On Steroids and Triple Shot Espresso

We're not talking about if there will be an implosion, but when.

New York Magazine:

The president is a 70-year-old child whose TV time must be closely monitored — because any news story that upsets his ego will trigger a temper tantrum followed by irrational demands that his indulgent, overwhelmed guardians will be helpless to refuse.

Or so Donald Trump’s aides keep confiding to the nearest available reporter.

On Sunday, one of the president’s confidantes told Politico that his staffers have to “control information that may infuriate him,” a task made difficult by the fact that the leader of the free world “gets bored and likes to watch TV.”

-and-

Nearly a dozen of Trump’s closest confidantes helped plant an embarrassing news story about how their boss can’t handle embarrassing news stories. Which is to say: A president who prizes loyalty in his subordinates has already been betrayed by a huge swath of his inner circle.

 

hat tip = Bob and Chez Podcast

Of Our Fathers

Jeff Sessions is not his father. But like the man said - the bag never falls very far from the douche.

hat tip = @juliaioffe

More Lying Numbers

• Clinton got 2.8 Million votes more than Trump, but Trump's the new Prez.
• In races for the House, Repubs got 49% of the votes and 55% of the seats.
• In the Senate, the GOP owns a "majority" even though the Dems got 23 Million more votes.

Somethin' ain't right.

Shades Of Things To Come

Let's just fast forward to 01-21-17, and look in on Trump's first day in office:

Who'da Thunk It?

I really hope there's absolutely nobody in Washington who's surprised by this shit:

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter 5-year-old civil war.

The fighting has intensified over the past two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other as they have maneuvered through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

"Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it," said Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq.

This is straight outa some fucked up movie.  And it's the work of an awful lotta people who really do (mostly) know what they're doing.  

Now try to imagine just how bad it gets with Trump or Cruz in the White House, running from one disaster to the next. Thanks anyway, guys.

One More Time, Indiana

Apparently, Mike Pence has been quite surprised and even a little shocked that the reaction to his little Fuck-Them-Uppity-Queers-Anyway law has caused such a stir.  I'd really like to see the law as just another political calculation to appease the Right Radicals who got out the vote and put his ass in the governor's chair etc etc etc, but I think he's being fairly genuine here - I think he was actually convinced that what he did was gonna be OK with everybody.  

And I think he believed it because he's so totally insulated from everything that might in any way run contrary to his preconceptions.  Nobody ever says 'no' to this guy, and that's the way he wants it.

Pence is like your knuckleheaded brother-in-law or Uncle DumFux who never seeks out any information that might require him to modify his positions, or to rethink any of his opinions on  policy.  Call it Government By Confirmation Bias, or whatever, but here's the thing, Mikey:  when you've got your head up your ass, even if you open your eyes, all you're gonna see is your own shit.

hat tip = phantom power at Democratic Underground

And I'm still wondering (as well as still waiting for a Press Poodle to step up and ask) - precisely what "religious freedom" has been lost that makes government intervention necessary to restore it?

They Ain't My Guys

Just in case anybody was wondering what it takes to make a buncha theocratic Iranian shit-sniffers look like the 'good guys' - ladies & germs, I give you a buncha theocratic American shit-sniffers 47 Republican Senators who're working really hard to raise the level of partisan fuck-uppery to new heights.

How is it that Iran's Foreign Minister knows more about how the US Gov't is supposed to work than the propeller-heads we hired to run the US Senate?

"The authors may not fully understand that in international law, governments represent the entirety of their respective states, are responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs, are required to fulfil the obligations they undertake with other states and may not invoke their internal law as justification for failure to perform their international obligations."

But wait - "conservatives" need Iran to be the enemy.  They need some bullshit reason to keep the rubes riled up.  And does anyone need convincing that some of these "public servants" need their stock portfolios to get another nice fat injection of War Bucks?  What could be worse for them politically than having to make nice with an Islamic government after they've spent so much time and energy and Koch Family Money© demonizing it?

And what're they supposed to do with all that silly rhetoric about Obama being a secret Muslim and all the Libtards loving all things Islam?  They can't let all that go to waste, so it naturally fits for them to say they're just being tough on Iran - cuz "Obama can't be", or whatever - in order to keep the bad ol' Mullahs from getting the bomb; with the main point being they can't let anything Obama tries to do go unchallenged.  

That's what all this Party Purity crapola is really good for BTW.  No matter how stoopid your idea is on its own merits, anything you wanna do is OK as long as it hurts Obama and/or makes the Libruls mad.

But guess what, kids - Iran is going to get the bomb no matter what anybody says or does.  It's gonna happen sooner or later.  So why do you send a threatening letter to Mr Fariz?  Maybe it's because you wanna speed things along a little.  Maybe you want Iran to get the bomb ASAP so you have justification for war - which you can blame on Obama's "policy of appeasement"(?), and get back to the good old days of Us vs Them; of enemies within and enemies without.

History doesn't actually repeat itself, but it sure as fuck rhymes.

Obama Roll

I used to call him President Lawnchair - mostly because I tho't he folded completely instead of really sticking it out on ACA (Public Option in particular).  And I continued that criticism for quite a while because it just looked like the guy wasn't all that willing to smack the Repubs around the way I tho't he should.

I can tell y'all now that I've changed my tune a bit lately, and while it'll take some study from an historical distance to see what all is what, I gotta say there might actually be something to the meme about how this guy plays a mean game of Fourple Dimension Chess; and we may be seeing a pretty good example of just how far into the future he's able to play.

I guess it's also possible he's been playing for this point in time all along, and he's about to kick over that one pawn that puts things in motion like a political Mouse Trap Game. (hey - let an old guy dream)

Obama wants to do something meaningful on Immigration, but he knows the Teabillies insist on forcing Baron von Boner and Mitchy-Mac to give guys like Chuckles Koch a loud sloppy blowjob in public, which makes it nigh-onto impossible for them to do anything else but stand in the way (or kneel if they're feeling particularly adept at multi-tasking), so Obama decides to use his authority as the boss of DHS to move ever so slightly forward.

Which means Boehner has only one tool, which is to threaten to withhold the funding for DHS, which means the "National Security Party" is saying "we're willing to drop all this pretentious chest-thumping bullshit about keeping America safe just so we can fuck over the Mexicans - and Obama".  Oops - Im betting they didn't mean to let it slip that DHS really is mostly pretentious chest-thumping bullshit, but for most of us, that cat's been outa the bag for quite a while - so maybe it's just time to let it go(?)  And as for "fuckin' over the Mexicans" - who doesn't know by now that that's what they wanna do?  Fuckin' somebody over is always what they wanna do, is it not?

Obama kinda has 'em by the nuts on that one.  

Now, add that to this:  The pentagon's latest assessment (QDR 2014) has concluded (again) that Climate Change (ie: congressional paralysis due to Climate Change Denial - hint hint) poses a significant threat to US National Security.  And that's across the board; from "Threat Multiplier" to just plain "making our job harder than it has to be".

Climate change poses another significant challenge for the United States and the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating. These changes, coupled with other global dynamics, including growing, urbanizing, more affluent populations, and substantial economic growth in India, China, Brazil, and other nations, will devastate homes, land, and infrastructure. Climate change may exacerbate water scarcity and lead to sharp increases in food costs. The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world. These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.

CHAPTER I: FUTURE SECURITY ENVIRONMENT 8 

(quick little note - this kind of straight-up declarative statement doesn't make the final cut without the approval of a lotta people who wear some very heavy hats)

So what's a poor Boehner to do?  

Obama is saying he wants DHS to do something about immigration and the Repubs are saying they'd rather close DHS down altogether than take the risk of getting something done on one of the GOP's favorite issues. (say wut now?)

Obama and DoD want to do something about Climate Change (even if it's just some attempt to mitigate the negative effects), while the Repubs insist first on doing nothing about Climate Change, and oh by the way, then insist again on doing nothing while Sequestration strips away the tax dollars that get poured into Defense Contractors' pockets; then laundered thru PACs; and then eventually find their way back into the campaign war chests of Coin-Operated Politicians - like John Boehner.

So who's all about the security of the homeland, and who's not?
Who's all about supporting the mission of our exalted military, and who's not?

From where I sit, I'm just wondering if there's ever been a Speaker of the House who ended up switching parties.  That dude is fucked 9 ways from Sunday.

But wait - do we need to talk about how maybe Boehner's playing the role of Sacrificial Savior of the Party?  Maybe he's whipping this thing into a rich creamy lather on purpose, making all the bubble brains float to the top so they can be skimmed off into the shitter(?)

Yeah, OK.  We'll call that one Low Probability #37, but I purely do like to hedge my bets.

Following Up

So I went to Mark Warner's website and left a message about how I needed to see him blah blah - going along with my idea to give him an excuse to duck out on Netanyahu next month (see my post from earlier today), and this is what I got back from a guy who made his fortune in the "Communications Technology" bidness:

We are so very fucked.

Irony-Challenged

Whenever I hear "Frivolous Lawsuit" or "Litigation Crazy" or "Litigious", it's pretty automatic that I'm going to think "GOP" because they're the ones who're always carping about how everybody just wants to sue everybody whenever they don't get their way, or they're just looking for a nice fat payday for doin' nuthin' blah blah blah.

Is there anything more frivolous than the crazily litigious House Republicans voting to sue Obama - at the end of the least productive legislative session since Hammurabi and right before these douche nozzles leave town for 5 weeks of vacation?

China Hack

Via HuffPo:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Chinese hackers broke into the computer networks of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management earlier this year with the intention of accessing the files of tens of thousands of federal employees who had applied for top-secret security clearances, according to The New York Times.

Senior U.S. officials say the hackers gained access to some of the agency's databases in March before the threat was detected and blocked, the Times reported in an article posted on its website Wednesday night. How far the hackers penetrated the agency's systems was not yet clear, the newspaper said.

Accusations of hacking by China and counterclaims of such activity by the U.S. government have strained U.S.-Chinese relations. Chinese hacking has been a major theme of U.S.-China discussions this week in Beijing, though both sides have publicly steered clear of the controversy.

First off, who didn't think this kinda thing was going on - or wasn't going to happen eventually?

And then, let's consider how the Press Poodles are shocked - shocked I tells ya - about revelations of dirty dealing.

High School Fuck-Around Drama du jour.