Today's Tweet

The wall we need is the one between church and state.

SOMEONE TOOK THE BIBLE OUT OF MY HOTEL ROOM & REPLACED IT WITH THE CONSTITUTION AND I NEED THEIR NUMBER SO I CAN MARRY THEM TOMORROW pic.twitter.com/J92gE7j8fI

— Brooke (@Brooke_Cale) July 24, 2017

Keith

Peeling off the Repubs - one and two and a few at a time.

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.

Keith

4 things we already know:

1. Sessions lied under oath about meeting(s) with Amb Kislyak during the campaign
2. Key members of 45*'s campaign operation were looking to do a deal with the Russians to fuck with the election
3. Kushner offered to set up secret communications with the Kremlin
4. 45*'s administration has conspired to cover it all up

Reiterating: you don't have to rob the liquor store. Conspiring to rob the liquor store is a crime, and your ass belongs in jail.

Today's Tweet

MAGA=Morons Are Governing America pic.twitter.com/d5YWgbCOUd

— KrisS (@MplsMe) July 24, 2017

A Pox On All Their Houses

Keep in mind The Daily Beast has been very much like that one mean girl who is kinda the champion mean girl, pretending not to be a mean girl at all, while constantly stirring the shit between rival cliques of mean girls, in order to assert her supremacy as Queen O' The Mean, even as she operates from a position of stealthy independence. 

They are less so now that Tina Brown is gone - but still - this could easily be an exercise in cat-fighting, which seems altogether fitting since that was pretty much the main objective of Russian Fuckery last year.

I've had this whole thing rattling around in my head for quite a while, and much of it fits with everybody's suspicions that The Bernie Bros and The HillBots and The Evil Duopoly crowd (and and and) were all stoked by the Russian rat-fuckers working overtime just to disrupt the process. 

Anyway, this piece has value - I just have to remind myself to check my Confirmation Bias regularly.

The Daily Beast:

Moscow’s attempts to cultivate America’s far-left long predate the presidency of Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin, according to available evidence, donated more funds per capita to the U.S. Communist Party than any other communist claque during the Soviet period, when Moscow’s intelligence operations against the “main adversary” involved recruiting agents of influence and spies of a progressive background who were sympathetic to the Soviet cause. But the past 18 months have seen a noted spike in information warfare aimed at gulling the Bernie Bros and Occupy-besotted alternative-media set, which saw Clinton as more of a political danger than it did Trump.

Perhaps the starkest case in point is Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her constituency. In December 2015, the Kremlin feted Stein by inviting her to the gala celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Kremlin-funded propaganda network RT. Over a year later, it remains unclear who paid for Stein’s trip to Moscow and her accommodations there. Her campaign ignored multiple questions on this score. We do know, however, that Stein sat at the same table as both Putin and Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump’s soon-to-be national security adviser. She further spoke at an RT-sponsored panel, using her presence to criticize the U.S.’s “disastrous militarism.” Afterward, straddling Moscow’s Red Square, Stein described the panel as “inspiring,” going on to claim that Putin, whom she painted as a political novice, told her he “agree[d]” with her “on many issues.”

Stein presents herself as a champion of the underclass and the environment, and an opponent of the surveillance state and corporate media, and yet she seemed to take pleasure in her marriage of true minds with a kleptocratic intelligence officer who levels forests and arrests or kills critical journalists and invades foreign countries. Their true commonality, of course, is that both Putin and Stein are dogged opponents of U.S. foreign policy.

It's The Humanity, Stupid

The Roanoke Times:

As the health care debate rages in the nation’s capital, patients and providers at the RAM Clinic are anxious for change. Most of them have a resounding demand for politicians in Washington, D.C.: Fix the nation’s health care system.

Located near the Virginia- Kentucky border, the clinic at the Wise County Fairgrounds attracts residents from a wide area. The clinic, the largest of the year, has 1,400 volunteers who serve thousands of people in one weekend.

At 5 a.m. Friday — the first day of the clinic — RAM founder and British philanthropist Stan Brock stood at the entrance of the clinic as volunteers prepared to let people through the gate.

Hundreds arrived at the fairgrounds in the dead of the night to secure a decent spot in line. They slept in their cars or pitched tents as they waited for the clinic gates to open. Before the sun crested the surrounding mountains, volunteers had given out all of the numbers for the day and began turning people away.

So, while people are suffering and often dying for the lack of insurance that would allow them to seek treatment when they need it, Coin-Operated Politicians are busy playing their high-school-fuck-around games.

This is where I usually go into my screed about how the "clear-eyed pragmatic free-market capitalists" are being stoopid because of their unwillingness to realize the huge savings of Prevention vs Remedy, etc etc etc.

But that was me being kinda stoopid myself.  When you turn a profit on people being sick, you want them to be as sick as possible. Even if "the wanting" is sublimated, or you're somehow unaware that you want it, there's no real difference. You want people to be sick because that's how you pay your mortgage.

Enjoying the benefits derived from the endeavor demonstrates your support for the endeavor itself - consciously or otherwise. Silence implies consent.

So anyway - Daddy State Economics: Socialized Risk and Privatized Reward.

My mistake was in assuming these assholes have some vestigial sense of humanity because they're people of honor. They don't, because they aren't.

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.

Deep Thoughts

On the phenomenon of hardcore 45* supporters:

You believe the lies. Or in the context of the current political culture - for whatever reason, it doesn't matter to you that 45* lies a lot.

(80% of people self-identifying as Republicans support him in spite of knowing he lies to them almost every day)

So, I'll go ahead and call you a dumbfuck lyin' sack of shit.

Now, if you care about the truth, and you know you're not a dumbfuck lyin' sack of shit, then you have a case to make that I'm behaving very badly - and I'll back you up on that one all the way.

If you know it's not true but you've established that lies don't matter to you, then anybody can say anything about you - good or ill - and you got nuthin', bubba. 

Zero Zip Zilch Nada.

There's nothing for you to feel proud about if they say nice things about you.

And there's nothing you can bitch about when they spread the shittiest most damaging lies about you. And eventually it will come around to that. It always has, and I can see no reasonable expectation for that to change.

The only thing worse than your failure to stand up to some jagoff like 45*, is realizing there's nobody willing to stand up for you.

Today's Quote

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. 

--Ayn Rand