Worth Repeating

From way back in March - Alcee Hastings gettin' after 'em.

The take-away quote comes up at about 6:50.

"I don't have to be nice to nobody when you're bein' nasty to poor people"

Debate-Watcher's Tip: When Red Team Guy starts bitchin' about the Blue Team Guy's "tone", it means Red Team Guy knows he's losing so he has to tamp down on the visceral enthusiasm that the audience will pick up from Blue Team Guy's passion or outrage or whatever.

It's also about stalling - you need a little time to regroup so you can get back on offense.

The GOP has since come out with We-Don't-Fuckin'-Care 4.0, and let's be clear - there's not much that's changed because this is not about healthcare or coverage or looking out for people. They want their fucking Tax Cuts.

If you further weaken Da Gubmint by decreasing its revenues, people will feel the pain (of shitty roads and shitty water quality and poisoned food, and poverty creep, etc) and eventually, they'll agree to practically any level of Fuckery just on the remote prospect of relieving some of that pain.

And it makes no difference who gets fucked over, as long as enough people get fucked over enough - they have to make us tap out so we'll give the Plutocrats everything they want, including ownership - or at least control.

The National Privatization Festival has picked up some speed, and they need financing for their coming acquisition spree - have you priced a National Park lately?

These assholes are selling themselves as Reformers, but their motivation is no different from that of any other radicals who always ride in promising Bread-n-Freedom, and delivering neither.

But there's an extraordinarily shitty little twist.

"Government should be run more like a business" is cover; it's a dodge; it's nothing but chaff.

With the interjection of the Russians, we've put people in power who honestly believe Mobsters are justified in the way they operate because after all, the Mob is private enterprise patterned after the government.  

So why not take that next step?

"Government is like the Mafia - so let's be honest and run it that way".

And hey, relax - it ain't personal. It's just business.

Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer in WaPo:

My view was: Collusion? I just don’t see it. But I’m open to empirical evidence. Show me.

The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that there’s a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a “Russian government attorney” possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the Kremlin is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor. (Error: Britain has a Crown Prosecutor. Russia has a Prosecutor General.)

Donald Jr. emails back. “I love it.” Fatal words.

Once you’ve said “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.

“It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame,” Donald Jr. told Sean Hannity. A shame? On the contrary, a stroke of luck. Had the lawyer real stuff to deliver, Donald Jr. and the others would be in far deeper legal trouble. It turned out to be incompetent collusion, amateur collusion, comically failed collusion. That does not erase the fact that three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play.

It may turn out that they did later collaborate more fruitfully. We don’t know. But even if nothing else is found, the evidence is damning.

You don't have to rob the liquor store. 

Conspiring to rob the liquor store is a crime and you go to jail.

Today's Quote

The first amendment is like a vagina. It's beautiful, and complicated, and angry guys on the internet have no idea how it works.

--Jim Jeffries

Today's Pix

Nailed it

driftglass lands a big one on Matthew Dowd.

I just want to really know from Trump apologists, what could the President or WH do that would cause you to no longer support them?

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) July 12, 2017

Says a man who proudly pissed his vote away on a vanity candidate because he was just too fucking pure to sully himself by voting for the only candidate who could have actually stopped Trump.

So I just want to really know from all the Purity Angels including Mr. Dowd what could President Stupid or the White House do that would cause you to admit that you fucked up. Bigly.

Where The Fuck Are We?

Colbert's question - Have we come to the point where colluding with a foreign power in an attempt to effect the outcome of our elections is a Left vs Right thing?

It's of some import to remember that while 45*'s approvals are in the mid- to high 30s overall, for people self-identifying as Republican, that approval number is still in the mid- to high 80s.

We can cheer and feel hopeful as more "rock-ribbed establishment" Repubs bail on the party and squawk about it, but 45*'s core constituency (as low-life and bottom-of-the-barrel as we know them to be) will likely stay with him for as long as they see him as the guy who went up there to Washington and showed all them buttheads a thing or two.

Because: The point of the exercise for an awful lot of "conservatives" is simply to make liberals mad enough to cry. There's almost literally nothing else to it for some of these mooks.

Corollary: If their guy does something that makes you mad or scared or whatever, then you're a liberal, and nothing you say matters because nothing you say can be the truth because you're a liberal, and liberals are always wrong, and we win again. All this winning!

But the real kicker is that we can't go on trying to see any of this thru our filter of the Presumption of Regularity.

45*'s hardcore supporters aren't really the ones who put him there, but they're convinced they did exactly that, so they're the ones who have to be convinced he has to go. And we can't sway people who are Fact-Hostile to the point where they've become immune to reason. We have to fight the mechanisms that propagate that hostility - and I don't know how to do that.

"Turbo-Fucked" is a pretty apt descriptor for what we are right now.

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.

Today's Tweet

Why does everyone involved with Trump look like a scene-stealer in a Coen brothers movie? pic.twitter.com/BOoJx0DOL4

— Jason Sinclair (@jlsinc) July 11, 2017

It Gets Worse

The ever-widening Circle Of Fuckery is about to include Kellyanne Conway and possibly Chris Kobach as well.

Peter Stone and Greg Gordon at McClatchy:

By Election Day, an automated Kremlin cyberattack of unprecedented scale and sophistication had delivered critical and phony news about the Democratic presidential nominee to the Twitter and Facebook accounts of millions of voters. Some investigators suspect the Russians targeted voters in swing states, even in key precincts.

--and--

One source familiar with Justice's criminal probe said investigators doubt Russian operatives controlling the so-called robotic cyber commands that fetched and distributed fake news stories could have independently "known where to specifically target … to which high-impact states and districts in those states."

All of the sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation, led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, is confidential.

Top Democrats on the committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election have signaled the same.

Schiff said he wants the House panel to determine whether Trump aides helped Russia time its cyberattacks or target certain voters and whether there was “any exchange of information, any financial support funneled to organizations that were doing this kind of work.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article160803619.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article160803619.html#storylink=cpy

Today's Quote

If we came from god, why is there still a god?

--@iamAtheistGirl