Bulwark Takes

You know you're in a really bad place when the most important profit center driving your business - and your business decisions - is the guy monitoring Trump's social media feeds.

Closer And Closer

It's not a terribly smart thing to hold your breath on this shit.

• Trump is pressuring Boebert and Mace hard to get their names off the discharge petition
• Even if the vote is called, there's bound to be delays - debate, conference meetings, etc
• If the thing passes, there's no guarantee Johnson will act quickly to deliver the demand to Bondi
• Bondi almost absolutely fight it and stall and do whatever Trump instructs her to do
• This is Trump, so he'll take it to court and we'll spend a year waiting - unless enough Republicans get antsy enough about the re-election chances if it drags out and remains an issue during the mid-term campaigns

So yes, it's pretty damned close to being the smoking gun, but since there's no honor in MAGA, the GOP, or the White House - we can't reasonably expect any of them to act honorably.

A New Golden Age

We are now fully arrived at the 21st Century Golden Age Of Quackery.

Spaghetti

Dear President Putin

Uh-Oh

It's not definitive, but there's an awful lot of smoke here.

And what's up with Tulsi Gabbard doing a full blown press conference today?

And isn't it a little interesting that everybody (me too, BTW) gets very circumspect and cautious when information pops up that might actually be the smoking gun?

Suddenly we all get real careful to say things like "allegedly" and "it appears to be".

More Slotkin Please

Elissa Slotkin may be a bit more military/CIA than I'm willing to snuggle up to. But she hits it on the head and gets directly to that point.

1. I may work with somebody I wouldn't piss on if he was on fire, but the job is to get shit done, and you don't get shit done when all you do is sit around and bitch at each other.
2. Sometimes, defense helps you not lose, but it's offense that wins it for you.
3. Harris in particular, and too many Dems in general, went into 2024 with an Everything-Everywhere-All-At-Once "plan", and when you try to win everywhere, you almost never win anywhere.

Communication is 10% words, 20% tone and inflection, and 70% body language. So stop smiling all the fuckin' time.

That's my main problem with the way too many Democrats present themselves - particularly guys like Michael Bennett and Tim Kane and until recently, Mark Warner. I think they're good and decent people, but when one of them puts that stupid little smile on his face as he lambastes some Republican jackass who applauds the anti-abortion laws that are obviously and proveably killing women, all I want to do is slap that smile around to the other side of his fuckin' head.

Get mad

Look mad

Stay mad

And stomp those jagoff MAGA Nazis

until there's nothing left

but a greasy spot on the rug.

Anyway - Elissa Slotkin is talkin' sense.

Two Weeks

We're closing in on being able to establish a new system for measuring political timelines.

• 1 Friedman Unit = 6 months
• 1 Scaramucci = 11 days
• 1 Trumplefuck = 2 weeks

This is a lot of 2-weekses

The Florida Finagle

I don't like thinking I'm adding to the problem of the Fire Hose Of Shit, but when practically every day gives us another major grift, I don't know how I can just brush it off, and let it become part of a very ugly process of normalizing official corruption.

So - sorry - here's today's shit.

Press Poodles Clutching Pearls

The US Constitution works on the honor system.

Trump is exactly the guy Madison and Hamilton worried out - the unscrupulous jerk who would use the founding documents as a guide to subvert them, and to warp government structure to serve his own ends - to make his own law.

A slug like Trump lives in SmarmSpace© (where loopholes are found, or manufactured).

He simply doesn't care about honor, or the rule of law, or right-n-wrong.

Unfortunately, there are about 275 people in Congress who are willing to go along with all this shit - because they're either cowardly phonies, or active participants in the project to tear down our traditions of democratic self-governance in order to replace it with a corporate-style plutocracy.

It's not a bad thing for media to keep these things in public view, but instead of the usual 10 minutes of exasperation, we need an acknowledgement of the fact that these assholes are actively working to kill democracy, and we need to know how we go about beating them - including civil disobedience.

The Two Fatal Flaws

Two things always eventually become obvious, and take the Daddy State regime down.

1. Incompetence
2. Corruption

A Rant

Tim's rants are becoming my favorite Bulwark content.

Krugman Speaks

One truly great point he makes: nobody's rushing to engage the US in tariff negotiations because nobody knows what the fuck Trump wants.

So the White House telling us there are 75 countries kissing Trump's ass right now is all but certainly bullshit? Huh - imagine that.

Today's WTF

Just wondering what the Over/Under is on the number of days before the Press Poodles let this shit slide and we never hear about it again.

Can you say, "Memory hole"?

Bill And Sarah

Starting at about 25:45, Sarah makes 2 great points

1. If Republicans want to cut stuff, let them do their fucking jobs and cut it out of a proper budget bill 
2. Trump is setting the pretext to ignore the courts when they try to rein in his excesses

Strangling

The Bulwark

DON'T OBEY IN ADVANCE

About Today

Considering how some of these MAGA assholes behave - how they put their thoughts into action - there are no words that are adequate beyond "fuck you."

Be sure to catch the shittiness of Deb Ficher's husband, starting at about 6:30.

Buckle Up, Kids

Tim Miller nails it.

ie: Trump's guys fix their "facts" around the preferred narrative, and then jump up and down, yelling, "Look at me! Look at me! I done good, huh, boss!"

The reason we know how bad authoritarian regimes have been is the fact that everybody in those regimes has incentive to document their crimes, because they get ahead by showing the boss that their shitty behavior is shittier than that other guy's shitty behavior.

Get ready, boys and girls.

Heather Cox Richardson

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/