The Gaetz Report

So there's a good probability that we'll never see the Ethics Committee report on what a low-life whale-shit-eating slug Matt Gaetz is.

I think it's a safe bet that we're in negotiations on that one.

And that's just not something I can get next to. First off, who thinks it's even possible to negotiate with people who have no honor? They walk around practically bragging about having no honor.

Second, what's to negotiate? The guy's not qualified for anything but maybe a part time gig as a fluffer for a low-budget porno operation.

But here we are, allowing this shit to flow. Has anybody heard anything from the Dems on the Senate Judiciary Committee? I mean other than the polite letter Dick Durbin sent to DOJ requesting pretty please, Mr Garland - if it's not too much trouble sir - can we maybe take just a quick peek at your investigation report?

In the balls, Dick - you have to kick them in the balls.

So fuckin' sick of "the old Potomac two-step".

Our Next President

I'm putting this up as a prayer. Just as every vote is a prayer. Every time we get up and go to work, it's a prayer. Every time we look at a kid or a teenager or anyone younger that we are, and wonder about their future - it's a prayer.

We live on the promise of love and the bonds of honor.

🤞🏻😎🤞🏻

Mark Cuban Explains

It has to be about honor - honorable people behaving honorably.

It sounds pretty hokie, but that's everything this democracy is based on, which makes it a very difficult thing to maintain.

Cynics - and "practical" thinkers (who are too often authoritarian assholes) - have said it's foolish to try to create a form of government that requires a change in human nature. They argue that humans are, by nature, animalistic and barbaric and savage, so it's not realistic to expect them to behave in any other way. Dog-eat-dog - only the strong survive - get yours before the other guy gets it, and take it by force when you have to.

But that denies the actual human experience of survival and progress through higher concepts like cooperation, collaboration, shared responsibilities and benefits. You know - the stuff we all teach our kids - the things that have taken humans out of the cave and put them on the moon.

The moon. Have you seen any lions or badgers or wolves on the fucking moon lately?

Anyway, here's Mark Cuban on why you never go with anyone who's proved time and again what a dick he is, which has to be a fair indication that he intends to go on being a dick forever.

Mark Cuban on Trump: “When you rip off hard-working Americans, you are not qualified to be president of the United States of America.” pic.twitter.com/yxUPDDSu72

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 5, 2024

so·cial con·tract

noun

an implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, for example by sacrificing some individual freedom for state protection. Theories of a social contract became popular in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries among theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as a means of explaining the origin of government and the obligations of subjects.

It's A Reality Show

It's easy enough to assume someone's affinities would match up a little bit with a candidate or a celebrity they choose to support or hang out with or whatever.

And sometimes, that's a mistake because we know there are people in the world who have a very flexible relationship with morality and honesty and such, and a mortgage can be a very powerful motivator.

I get it - I don't have to like you in order to do business with you, or to make common cause politically.

So it's always a pretty good idea to look for confirmation - is that asshole actually an asshole? Because sometimes they're just being an asshole to fit a role they're playing. And this is especially true when considering guys like Donald Trump and Hulk Hogan. They don't care if they're the hero or the heel as long as the check don't bounce.

I think Hulk Hogan is the asshole he appears to be.

And remember what Grandma said:

People will know you

by the crowd you run with.

Social Media Politics

It's a time-honored thing -

• "My pamphleteers will destroy you!"
• "I'll use my newspaper to destroy you!"
• "I'll use my radio broadcast to destroy you!"
• "I'll use my cable TV show to destroy you!"
• "I'll destroy you with my vast reach on TwiXter and Instagram and whatever!"

I don't know what it'll take to break this fever, but it's been broken in the past and it'll be broken again.

But we have to hang on, and we have to remember to behave like honorable people.

James Lankford Says 'Popular Commentator' Threatened Him Over Immigration Bill

The Oklahoma Republican has faced major right-wing backlash for seeking a bipartisan compromise on immigration.

WASHINGTON ― Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said Wednesday that an unnamed media personality promised to “destroy” him for seeking a bipartisan compromise on immigration.

Lankford said in a Senate floor speech that a “popular commentator” told him four weeks ago that he would face negative consequences if he pushed forward with drafting a bipartisan immigration bill.

“If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election,” Lankford said he was told.

The Oklahoma Republican spent months drafting a compromise immigration bill with Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.). The resulting legislation, unveiled Sunday, would limit asylum and parole while making it easier for authorities to deport migrants, including a requirement that the Department of Homeland Security deny all entries when daily border crossings reach certain thresholds.

The bill includes no pathways to citizenship for any undocumented immigrants, something Democrats usually push for in bipartisan immigration deals. Instead, Democrats asked for military assistance for Ukraine.

However, the deal blew up in Lankford’s face thanks to opposition from former president Donald Trump, who urged Republican senators to kill the legislation, as well as a lot of conservative commentators ― including the unnamed but presumably prominent right-wing media personality that allegedly threatened Lankford.

“By the way, they have been faithful to their promise and have done everything they can to destroy me in the past several weeks,” Lankford said in his floor remarks.

Lankford declined to name the commentator when HuffPost asked.

The package failed in a Senate vote on Wednesday afternoon, thanks mostly to Republican opposition.

A variety of prominent Republicans inside and outside Congress have falsely claimed the Lankford bill provides “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants. Lankford said he’s repeatedly told people that’s not true, but that it’s been hard to break through.

“For some reason, we still believe everything we read on the internet,” Lankford said.

Disassociating

A spineless, soul-less chickenshit Republican attempting to un-Trump himself, but doing it by proxy. He praises Pence in order to signal his resurfacing dislike of Trump (and the MAGAbots) in that very Lindsey Graham-ish passive aggressive way.

There is no honor in any of this.

Today's Steve

What a despicable man is Lindsey Graham.

Today In Both Sides Don't

Most people (ie: normal decent people), when they see a hole in the law or the constitution, they try to fix it.

Amy Klobuchar is one of those normal decent people.

Others - manipulative, self-dealing assholes like John Eastman and Marjorie Trailer Park Greene - see those glitches in the law as opportunities to dive into SmarmSpace and exploit the loopholes in furtherance of their own narrow interests.

IMHO, the glitches are there, and haven't been addressed, because the whole thing has worked pretty well on the honor system. ie: People of honor see and recognize that doing some shitty thing may be technically "legal", but it's not an honorable thing to do.

And yes, the SmarmSpace rangers know they're doing shitty things.

Honorable people don't do shitty things.

It's not honorable to make a move to monopolize power under a constitution so obviously constructed to prevent someone monopolizing power.

The GOP seems to have flopped all the way over to "If it's not specifically prohibited, then it's both peachy and dandy - let's knock this shit out."

Opinion

The plan to stop a future Trumpist coup moves closer to reality

It turns out our political system might prove capable of defending itself against future subversion after all.

In a big step forward for protecting democracy, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced Tuesday that he expects action in the lame-duck session on reform of the arcane law that Donald Trump exploited during his attempted 2021 coup.

“I expect an omnibus will contain priorities both sides want to see passed into law, including more funding for Ukraine and the Electoral Count Act,” Schumer said, in a reference to an end-of-year spending bill the two parties are negotiating.

Speaking about reform of the ECA, the 1887 law that governs how presidential electors are counted in Congress, Schumer added: “It will be great to get that done.”

This is welcome news. The Senate version of ECA reform would clarify the vice president’s role in counting electors as purely ceremonial, make it harder for Congress to invalidate legitimate electors and make corruption of the appointment of electors at the state level much harder.

All these points would make a rerun of Trump’s 2020 effort less likely, in part because they would patch up ECA vulnerabilities that invited him to attempt it. He pressured his vice president to halt the electoral count, got Republican members of Congress to vote to cast out Joe Biden’s electors and pressed state legislatures to appoint sham electors for him instead.

Because of this, ECA reform has long risked being seen as “anti-Trump.” That might have rendered it unlikely that 10 GOP senators would support it and make it possible to circumvent a filibuster.

But Schumer’s announcement is cause for real optimism. That’s because it’s unlikely Schumer would have made it if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hadn’t quietly indicated support for attaching reform to the omnibus.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a longtime proponent of ECA reform, says she’s optimistic that Republicans will remain behind this endgame. Klobuchar notes that McConnell voted for ECA reform in the Rules Committee, and it’s supported by well over a dozen other GOP senators.

“It’s clearly a top priority,” Klobuchar told me, speaking of how ECA reform is seen by McConnell and its Republican supporters. Klobuchar noted that negotiations over it have been a “strong bipartisan effort” and reform boasts some “very conservative members supporting it.”

“This law is just crying out for updating,” Klobuchar said. While some House lawmakers want new tweaks to the Senate bill, a person familiar with the situation says the Senate version is the one that will move forward.

In a twist, the prospects for passage might be improved by attaching it to the omnibus. As this column recently noted, holding a stand-alone Senate vote on ECA reform might subject it to more attacks from MAGA-loyal forces in Congress and in right wing media, making it harder for GOP senators to support it. Schumer’s plan allows McConnell to move it forward a bit more quietly.

New developments this week forcefully underscored the need for reform. In a widely noted speech, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) openly declared that had she been in charge of Trump’s insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, it would have been “armed.”

And text messages from House Republicans to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, unearthed by Talking Points Memo, show members of Congress scheming in the run-up to Jan. 6 to overturn Trump’s loss in all kinds of ways, with one even calling for Trump to declare martial law.

What all this means is that the insurrectionist spirit will run strong in next year’s GOP-controlled House, which would be likely to try to help with any effort by Trump — or an imitator — to subvert the 2024 presidential election. Under current law, if a GOP-controlled state legislature appointed electors for the Republican nominee in defiance of the state’s popular vote, the GOP House could count those electors, leading to a stolen election or constitutional crisis.

Reform of the ECA would make that much harder to pull off. It would require governors to certify lawful electors, create new pathways for legal challenges to corruptly appointed electors and require Congress to count the electors validated by the courts.

“The clock is ticking towards midnight,” Matthew Seligman, a legal scholar and ECA expert, told me. “Congress seems poised to pull us back from the brink, at a moment when the extreme wing of the GOP House seems more eager than ever to trigger a crisis.”

Passage of these fixes, especially along with this cycle’s defeat of numerous gubernatorial candidates who were essentially running on a vow to subvert future elections, would amount to major action in defense of democracy and self-rule. As the unabashed and continuing insurrectionism of Greene and other House Republicans demonstrates, it’s poised to come not a moment too soon.

Odd Thoughts

Teaching school kids everything that's actually happened in America - from The Three-Fifths Clause and Slavery and Critical Race Theory, to The Trail Of Tears and the slaughter of the buffalo in support of an attempted genocide, to Jim Crow and Greenwood, to Vietnam and the War On Protesters, to assassinations and attempted assassinations, to Murder-by-Drone and the myriad fucked up CIA misadventures, to Iran-Contra, to Voter Suppression etc etc etc - that's what conservatives are calling "teaching kids to hate their country".

They're admitting that knowing the truth about America will make those kids hate America. But instead of making changes in what we do and how we do them, so better things can happen - so our history is more often something we can be proud of - they'll just lie and pretend everything's peachy, and hope those kids don't ever find out.

That is nine kinds of fucked up right there.

The Late Great GOP

It ain't over til it's over, and I don't want to start singing the elegy just yet, but the stench of putrefaction has grown very thick, and there seems to be the sound of low and sonorous bells pealing in the distance, growing louder by the day.

Republicans are not people of honor, so there's practically no way for them to act in good faith.

They can't be trusted - shit, they can't even trust each other.

They're lost, and at this point, not worth the effort to find them and finish burying whatever's left of them.

We have to let them go.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: Kevin McCarthy plumbs new depths of political cowardice

Democratic and Republican negotiators agreed last week to create a high-level, expert commission with subpoena power to conduct an examination of the Jan. 6 Capitol invasion, one of the lowest moments in U.S. history. But House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Tuesday threw his negotiators under the bus, condemning the compromise and vowing to oppose the bill creating the commission when it comes to a House vote Wednesday. This is cowardice, distilled.

Many Republicans do not want an impartial panel to remind the public of their party’s role in the event. A fair inquiry would examine how GOP lawmakers fed the election lies that inspired the mob, and how they built Jan. 6, which should have featured a pro forma counting of electoral votes, into a showdown over the 2020 presidential election. Republican lawmakers who signed a spurious lawsuit seeking to overturn the results bear some guilt; those who went on to object to the counting of electoral votes from several swing states bear even more.

An honest proceeding would also require Mr. McCarthy to testify under oath about his eyewitness experience of the violence — and to then-President Donald Trump’s apparent indifference. Mr. McCarthy has resisted offering the public a frank accounting of his interactions with Mr. Trump, including on a phone call during which Mr. McCarthy reportedly begged Mr. Trump to stop the mob. Mr. McCarthy has concluded that whatever political benefits he receives from embracing Mr. Trump are worth the price of his integrity.

- more (pay wall) -

Politico:

McConnell opposes House’s bipartisan Jan. 6 commission bill

Former President Donald Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy are also against the commission proposal.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Republicans on Wednesday that he is opposed to an independent commission investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection as envisioned by the House, casting serious doubt on the future of the proposed bipartisan panel.

McConnell had signaled on Tuesday that he was undecided but came down more firmly after another day of deliberations, according to a person with direct knowledge of his remarks on Wednesday morning. He explained his stance in more detail on the Senate floor, calling the House’s proposal “slanted and unbalanced” and saying the ongoing congressional investigations are sufficient to probe the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol.

“It’s not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could lay on top of the existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress,” McConnell said.

The Kentucky Republican’s stance suggests that legislation creating a bipartisan commission on the Capitol riot — a bill set to pass the House later Wednesday — is likely doomed to fall to a Senate filibuster if major changes aren’t made. Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) had forged a deal with House Democrats to allow equal partisan representation on the 10-member commission and to give it subpoena power to focus on the events of Jan. 6.

Yet Republicans are now wrestling with how much more they want to litigate the presidency of Trump, whom McConnell no longer speaks to or talks about.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that regardless of McConnell’s stance, the Senate will vote on the commission bill. The measure will need the support of 10 Senate Republicans to pass.

“The American people will see for themselves whether our Republican friends stand on the side of the truth or on the side of Donald Trump’s big lie,” Schumer said on Wednesday morning.

A number of House and Senate Republicans have expressed support for the commission, but the weight of the party's leaders is now beating back that sentiment. Both Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy are opposed to the commission proposal, and McConnell’s opposition will further pressure rank-and-file Republicans to oppose it.

Gaming The System

The law is both a shield and a sword.

But no matter what the intent, it's the outcome that matters.

And in the end, the whole thing is totally reliant on people acting honorably, in good faith, and with the very sense of justice that the spirit of the law is supposed to be all about.

Via Stitcher, NYT's The Sunday Read - The Accusation by Sarah Viren (March 2020)

The Editorial

This morning in the Washington Post:

Our democracy is holding. Americans will remember who defended it — and who didn’t.

With all due respect, it’s fair to say that until recently few of us had heard of Aaron Van Langevelde or Norman D. Shinkle. That was a good thing. Not many of us knew there was such a thing as the four-member Michigan Board of State Canvassers, on which the aforementioned Mr. Van Langevelde and Mr. Shinkle are the two Republican members. That was a good thing, too.

Our ignorance in this instance was an indicator of the health of our democracy. Like thousands of other public servants across the country, the members of the Board of State Canvassers are partisan officials to whom we have entrusted a nonpartisan job: the management and oversight of elections. The system may be peculiar, but it has worked, and it worked again this year. Secretaries of state of both parties, county judges, tireless vote counters and state boards like Michigan’s have managed a successful election, with a record number of Americans voting despite the challenge of a pandemic. Some of these officials undoubtedly rejoiced at the results, some undoubtedly despaired; they all did their jobs.

Now President Trump is attempting to foul this quintessentially American structure of self-rule, inducing Republicans to conspire in his lies about election fraud and overturn the free and fair results of the election. For the most part, he has been failing, as local and state officials have shown an integrity lacking in Republicans on the national level. His target Monday is the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, which is scheduled to meet to certify the results in their state, which Democrat Joe Biden won by the healthy margin of 154,000 votes. Ronna McDaniel, the servile chair of the Republican Party, and her Michigan counterpart, Laura Cox, on Saturday called on the board to delay certification. Their ostensible justification: “numerical anomalies and credible reports of procedural irregularities.”

As usual, there was no substantial evidence. Officials found only minor anomalies in Detroit affecting a small number of votes, and affidavits alleging irregularities were so weak that Trump campaign lawyers dropped the lawsuit based on them. Mr. Trump lobs sweeping allegations of a “rigged” and “stolen” election; his enablers such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) nod solemnly about letting him make his case — and judges across the country point out, again and again, that there is no case.

The latest such rebuke came from federal Judge Matthew W. Brann in Pennsylvania, and it’s worth reading his opinion if you can spare the time. Judge Brann, a conservative Republican before his appointment to the bench, noted that the Trump campaign was asking him to nullify almost 7 million votes.

“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens,” the judge wrote.

“That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”

Yes, and our people, laws and institutions deserve more. We hope that Michigan’s board on Monday performs its work honorably. And we hope that when this is all over, Americans remember who defended democracy, and who joined in the campaign to upend it.

An honorable man knows we're punished by our sins and not for them.

Republicans are proving unworthy of the public trust. Too many seem to be plotting and scheming and working to tear down our traditions of (small 'd') democratic self-government in order to replace it all with plutocracy.

There's no discernible honor in the GOP anymore - only a blind fealty to whoever peddles the kind of dark bombast and wildly negative fantasies that appeal to the basest, ugliest instincts of a feral mob.

We deserve a helluva lot better than that.

Steve Schmidt

Do Not Be Afraid. Do not tremble. Do not waiver. Do not doubt either the goodness of our people or the possibilities for our future.

Do not let small men with tyranny and malice in their heart (Donald Trump) or hypocrites with no core (Mike Pence) make you afraid for our future or for your countrymen and women. Do not let the fascists, racists and conspiracy theorists make you afraid of your neighbors or the stranger who could be your friend. 

We should all be grateful that we have been chosen by this rancid and dangerous hour to stand up and fight.

What we do now matters. Our capitol is occupied by a cabal of small and low men and women who have betrayed all of us, the American experiment, their oaths and basic decency in service of a corrupt and malignant cult of personality that is vandalizing our principles, ideals, inheritance, future and fundamental goodness. 

200,000 of our country men and women are dead. At least 150,000 of them could be alive but for Trump’s lethal lying and the immoral, supine complicity of his collaborators and enablers. 

Let us resolve to rise up and strike down Trumpism. Let us put it down with righteous anger and fury. Let us resolve to never let this happen again. Let us do our duty as American citizens. Let us be conscious that we are called to safe action when we consider the blood, sacrifice and courage of ordinary people who stood their ground on a fields in Lexington and Gettysburg. The men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and dropped from the skies over France to crush fascism are smiling at our cause. 

The men and women who taught the world the meaning of the words “human dignity” as they protested segregation, absorbed the beatings and marched across the Edmund Pettus bridge are watching and judging us. We are in the right and for the right. We are fighting for the good. Trumpism is UNAMERICAN. It is illiberal, demagogic, dishonest, cruel, corrupt and disgusting. Let us strike it down. We will. 

Have joy in this fight. RBG is with her husband again. She is arguing with Scalia and meeting Washington and Lincoln. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas are there. Susan B Anthony is there and so is Elise Wiesel. A great champion of freedom has arrived in heaven. Her work is done. Her burden is now our’s. Let us honor her legacy by doing our duty.

Fight - Register - Vote.

"I DISSENT" are the most American of words. Thank you, Madame Justice. May your memory be a blessing. We all know that it is.

There's No Bottom

...to the emptiness of a man who has no soul and no honor.

The Atlantic (pay wall):

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.

Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice have interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

There's more, but I can't take it any further than right here. It's making me sick.

Today's Brian

Brian Tyler Cohen

It would seem 45* is weeks behind on information that should be considered when making decisions about what to do in response to COVID-19. He "cites" the statistics, but he either omits new information, or he demonstrates his ignorance of it.

I think we should know by now that it doesn't matter whether or not he doesn't know or he doesn't care.

And we should stop wondering about, and arguing over, whether or not he knows right from wrong. He doesn't care about what's right or wrong. For a man who sees everything as a straight up transaction, right and wrong are just a coupla more items on the list of negotiable items.

What matters is that we have a "president" who spouts whatever bullshit he thinks will get him what he wants right now.

He is the absolute epitome of the bad salesman who thinks only in terms of what he has to promise, and not what he has to deliver.

Bye, Felicia

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This New America

We're living in a new America now - not a nation of laws, but a nation of, "make me".

"I do what I want" is our new national motto. Right and Wrong have become fungible. There's no honor in the way we're doing things.

Which is why it's the perfect atmosphere for a Donald Trump.

This is not a guy who does what's right because it's the right thing to do. And he doesn't restrain himself from doing what's wrong simply because it's wrong and people shouldn't do it.

Trump will sign on the dotted line and then have no problem reneging when it comes time to settle up.

The approach is that he'll do what he's promised to do only if his lawyers convince him that your lawyer's can force him to do it.

So notice how he's constantly going after the courts. He's trying to bring social pressure against specific judges in order to sway their decisions. 

And he's getting lots of help from Mitch McConnell, who's been very busy stacking the federal bench with ideologues who have no real function other than to find ways to agree with the Daddy Staters.

This shit gets worse until Trump is forced out of office, but then we have to concentrate on moving against the other elements of the Daddy State - which, conveniently enough, happen to be largely Republican, so we keep hammering away at the GOP until the "moderates" can get back in the saddle over there.

Overheard On The Toobz

From a bunch of posts across Twitter and Facebook and Reddit et al:

Out of the blue, I asked, "Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?"

Obama's tone changed. "I love him. He's one of my favorite philosophers."

So I asked, "What do you take away from his writing?"

"I take away," answered Obama, "the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world; and hardship; and pain. And we should be humble and modest in believing we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense that we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swing from naive idealism to bitter realism."

We've had presidents who think about - and can articulate - some great notions.

We've had some great presidents. And we can have them again, but not without a fight.

Adult Supervision

It's particularly appalling and altogether galling to know this is where we are now.

It really should be a fairly simple concept:

We have to learn how to live our lives without needing a cop, or mommy, or Jesus looking over our shoulder the whole fucking time.

On the other side is the little red flag that's gone up in the back of my brain clutter that wants me to ask why Mad Dog Mattis feels the need to put this out now. In a system with built-in Checks-n-Balances, why does the boss at the most powerful government agency on the planet think it's necessary to remind people to behave appropriately? - as though the reins were being removed.

You Know What They Say

"Well, y'know [insert any compliment about anybody here], but he cheats at golf, so...yeah - fuck that guy"

Starting with Dana Milbank at WaPo:

Golf is a game of humility: Even the best players are brought low by nature and chance. And it’s a game of honor: You keep your own score and are often unseen by other players.

Then there is Trump golf. He breaks rules, exaggerates scores and ignores the game’s decorum. Sound familiar? He is, Sports Illustrated asserted, “easily the best golfer” ever to occupy the White House. Likewise, he is an enormously talented politician, with a genius for marketing. Yet in golf, as in life, he doesn’t leave it at that. He gilds the lily with dishonesty.
Golf.com - With special reporting by Michael Bamberger, Ben Baskin and Pete Madden.

[This article appears in the Aug. 7, 2017, edition of Sports Illustrated.]

Trump will sometimes respond to a shot he duffed by simply playing a second ball and carrying on as if the first shot never happened. In the parlance of the game, Trump takes floating mulligans, usually more than one during a round. Because of them it is impossible to say what he has actually shot on any given day, according to 18 people who have teed it up with Trump over the last decade, including SI senior writer Michael Bamberger, who has done so nine times. In 2007, Trump called Bamberger to brag about a 68 he had shot at Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles. Trump's handicap index is officially 2.8, but he has posted only three scores since '14. Els, a South Florida resident who has known Trump for many years, estimates he is "an eight or a nine." For Trump to shoot 68 on a tough course like Bel-Air would require him to play nearly perfectly from tee to green while making a number of substantial putts. One of his playing partners that day confirmed that Trump played "good," but that he took all the usual liberties common among everyday golfers: mulligans, gimmes, improved lies, etc. There was no mention of the 68 in a subsequent story, and Bamberger heard about it from Trump.

-and-

In a 2013 tweet aimed at entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Trump wrote, "Golf match? I've won 18 Club Championships including this weekend. @mcuban swings like a little girl with no power or talent. Mark's a loser." Trump has never made public a list of his club titles, and fact-checking calls to all of the Trump properties on this subject went universally un-returned. Winged Foot is the one non-Trump club at which the President is a member, and his name does not appear on any of the honor boards in the old clubhouse.

It seems the guy is simply not capable of telling the truth abut anything.

Bonus BTW:

Here Trump interjected, "It's a crazy—no, I actually I said I was the best golfer of all the rich people, to be exact, and then I got a hole in one. So it was sort of cool."

That little slice of a story is probably not totally untrue - it's likely as close to "the truth" as 45* will ever get - but the point here is that I'll bet you dollars to dingleberries he's said exactly the same thing on many many occasions just before stepping up and shanking one into the lake.

But it paid off that one time, so he throws up a little variation on a Logical Fallacy called The Texas Sharpshooter.