Today's Tweet

Politics 101

When GOP controls government, you get fascism.
When DEMs control government, you get health insurance.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) July 25, 2017

It Gets Worse

The Mooch - the guy 45* brings in to be this century's version of Nixon's Plumbers - one of the pros - yeah, that guy - he called Ryan Lizza more or less outa the blue, talked pure shit about Reince Preibus for 30 minutes or so, and then bitched because he'd meant for it to be off the record, but hadn't bothered to make that clear to Lizza.  Yeah - the guy's a real pro.

The New Yorker:

On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director. He wasn’t happy. Earlier in the night, I’d tweeted, citing a “senior White House official,” that Scaramucci was having dinner at the White House with President Trump, the First Lady, Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine. It was an interesting group, and raised some questions. Was Trump getting strategic advice from Hannity? Was he considering hiring Shine? But Scaramucci had his own question—for me.

“Who leaked that to you?” he asked. I said I couldn’t give him that information. He responded by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. “What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,” he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source. He continued to press me and complain about the staff he’s inherited in his new job. “I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can’t help themselves,” he said. “You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.”

In Scaramucci’s view, the fact that word of the dinner had reached a reporter was evidence that his rivals in the West Wing, particularly Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, were plotting against him. While they have publicly maintained that there is no bad blood between them, Scaramucci and Priebus have been feuding for months. After the election, Trump asked Scaramucci to join his Administration, and Scaramucci sold his company, SkyBridge Capital, in anticipation of taking on a senior role. But Priebus didn’t want him in the White House, and successfully blocked him for being appointed to a job until last week, when Trump offered him the communications job over Priebus’s vehement objections. In response to Scaramucci’s appointment, Sean Spicer, an ally of Priebus’s, resigned his position as press secretary. And in an additional slight to Priebus, the White House’s official announcement of Scaramucci’s hiring noted that he would report directly to the President, rather than to the chief of staff.

Scaramucci’s first public appearance as communications director was a slick and conciliatory performance at the lectern in the White House briefing room last Friday. He suggested it was time for the White House to turn a page. But since then, he has become obsessed with leaks and threatened to fire staffers if he discovers that they have given unauthorized information to reporters. Michael Short, a White House press aide considered close to Priebus, resigned on Tuesday after Scaramucci publicly spoke about firing him. Meanwhile, several damaging stories about Scaramucci have appeared in the press, and he blamed Priebus for most of them. Now, he wanted to know whom I had been talking to about his dinner with the President. Scaramucci, who initiated the call, did not ask for the conversation to be off the record or on background.
Score Card
Fuck - 6
Cock - 3
Shit - 1

Overheard on the intertoobz: "The guy's a pinky ring with legs."

Remember Your Orwell

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me. They do not feel enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only doing their duty, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil."

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

Today's Pix

Today's Tweet

I never knew what #Kushner sounded like. But he sounds better with #zebras pic.twitter.com/R3NGpBp8mz

— Chris Sampson (@TAPSTRIMEDIA) July 25, 2017

Trae Crowder

An important reminder: It doesn't matter why they're doing these shitty things. It matters that they are doing these shitty things.

The Old Is New Again

And suddenly, we've got Democrats acting all Democrat-ey and shit.

I'm just hoping we don't have to put up with a lot of self-righteous fart-breathing told-ya-so from the Purity Warriors who said they actually wanted 45* because what we really need is a lot of debilitating anxiety and pain so we'd wake up and blah blah blah - fuck that and fuck you.

Letting us in for all that anxiety and pain in order to force us to go along with your idea of good policy makes you no different from the Repubs or the Neo-Liberals who use the same tactics - the Repubs and Neo-Liberals you're always calling assholes.

But hey - it wasn't really your fault. Putin made you do it, right?

Sometimes, our reaction to trauma is what motivates us to change. That does not mean you get to manipulate us by deliberately instigating the trauma.

That's not Smart Politics. That's Terrorism.

This Slope Seems So Slippery

GOP base interviewing one of their prime candidates

These Kids Today

A little Facebook nonsense:

The tendency is to do a little bragging about the shit you pulled as a kid, because (I guess) it satisfies a fantasy that you were (and still are, maybe?) some kinda badass or whatever.

The main point of interest for me is that most of the people doing most of the bragging are the ones who spend lots of time on Facebook complaining about how fucked up everything is - blaming bad parenting and single moms, etc, for a general permissiveness they believe is at the root of all the rotten things all these rotten kids are doing.

And yes, I'm pointing out something that's ridiculously obvious - I ain't no genius, y'know.

So why is this not just as obvious to everybody else, particularly to the people playing these silly games on Facebook?

It is a wonderment.

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.