Slouching Towards Oblivion

Saturday, January 21, 2017

Yeehaw And Away We Go

Somebody who's better at this than I am would prob'ly find it fairly easy to run it down and make sure, but I'm thinking this is prob'ly a nice little payoff for somebody in Trump's Krony Klatch.

HuffPo:
With what may have been his first presidential order, Donald Trump made it more expensive for working- and middle-class Americans to buy their first homes. The move will increase costs for 750,000 to 850,000 Americans in the next year alone, according to the National Association of Realtors.
The Obama administration had said last week that the Federal Housing Administration would drop the cost of mortgage insurance it sells by almost a third to 0.60 percent. But after Trump took office, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the FHA, told lenders the fee cut was off. The reversal of the reduction will mean that homebuyers who borrow $200,000 under the program will see their mortgage insurance fees go up by $500 a year relative to what the Obama administration had ordered, according to figures released by the FHA when the cut was announced.
The reduction was intended to help partially offset the cost of rising mortgage rates and was scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 27. The government sells the insurance in case borrowers default.
- and -
Julian Castro, Obama’s HUD secretary, said when the fee cut was announced that the FHA’s reserve fund had grown by $44 billion in the last four years and that it was time to share these gains with borrowers. Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee to run HUD, said in his confirmation hearing that he supported undoing the fee cut, and lending trade publications reported that a reversal was likely.
Profits for me and costs for thee.

Phony-ass POTUS

I don't know all that much about it, but this body language doesn't exactly scream "Church-Goer" to me.


@aravosis

Today's Tweet & GIF

The Haunting

Friday, January 20, 2017

Today's Tweet



Not exactly the adoring throngs he was hoping for.

A coupla screen caps from WaPo's live feed:



Where else do we see "presidential parades" where the security forces outnumber the crowd?

This does not bode well.

And y'know, it occurs to me - if almost literally nobody shows up to acknowledge the installation of the POTUS, maybe we only think there's a guy in the office, but we don't really have a president.

My Guy Is Smokin' Hot

...your guy ain't doodly squat

On Hoping It's Not The End


I make a conscious effort not to get too starry-eyed about anybody, but I'm afraid I'll be missing that Obama guy somethin' awful.

Inauguration Day


We always have great hope for a new president.  This is the first time I can remember including the hope that this ass-wipe schmuck doesn't just rob us blind and then set it up to get us all killed to cover his get-away.

не мой президент

Fuck you, Trump
and the horse's ass you rode in on

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Boycott

Fake Lord Have Mercy

Again, Governor - those glasses ain't foolin' nobody.


hat tip = @kylegriffin1

And how long before we're treated to a headline along the lines of:

Energy Sec'y Perry Announces 
Nuclear Arsenal Maintenance Contract
Awarded To JiffyLube

More Than One Way


At last count, the number of Congress Critters who've said they won't attend the inauguration is pushin' towards 60.

Cummings nails the point when he says it's about the need to defend our institutions, and he's doing it his way while everybody else does it their way.

It sucks that this is where are are now.
It sucks that we're just kinda stuck with this particular battle.
It sucks that, by default, we have to own this bit of history.
It just sucks.
All we can be expected to do is to what we're able to do,
Hoping to be surprised at how able we are.

Embrace the suck
Do what you can do
Stay in the fight


...but take a break once in a while too

Inside Out

I can't keep up. The twists and turns just in this one angle of this one story is enough to overload my circuits - which I think is mostly the point.  And unfortunately, it seems to be working pretty well.

HuffPo:
Two brief quotes from Breitbart’s interview with Prince should suffice:
Prince claimed he had insider knowledge of the investigation that could help explain why FBI Director James Comey had to announce he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server last week....”[NYPD] found a lot of other really damning criminal information [on Weiner’s computer], including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than twenty times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times,” he said. “The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress, was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI, and they said, ‘We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments,’” Prince explained. “I believe—I know, and this is from a very well-placed source of mine at One Police Plaza in New York—the NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making in this investigation, and they’ve gotten huge pushback, to the point of coercion, from the Justice Department.”
Virtually all of this is untrue. Prince continued:
“So NYPD first gets that computer. They see how disgusting it is. They keep a copy of everything, and they pass a copy on to the FBI, which finally pushes the FBI off their chairs, making Comey reopen that investigation, which was indicated in the letter last week. The point being, NYPD has all the information, and they will pursue justice within their rights if the FBI doesn’t. There is all kinds of criminal culpability through all the emails they’ve seen of that 650,000, including money laundering, underage sex, pay-for-play, and, of course, plenty of proof of inappropriate handling, sending/receiving of classified information, up to Special Access Programs....The point being, fortunately, it’s not just the FBI; five different offices are in the hunt for justice, but the NYPD has it as well....From what I understand, up to the commissioner or at least the chief level in NYPD, they wanted to have a press conference, and DOJ, Washington people, political appointees have been exerting all kinds of undue pressure on them to back down....This kind of evil, this kind of true dirt on Hillary Clinton—look, you don’t have to make any judgments. Just release the emails. Just dump them. Let them out there. Let people see the light of truth.”
Prince’s statements of November 4th—whether given with the knowledge that they were untrue or without any knowledge of their accuracy whatsoever—underscore the sort of disinformation Comey feared would be given to voters, and, more importantly, believed by voters, if he did not complete his investigation into the duplicate emails and announce his findings before Election Day. This alone explains his deviation from FBI protocol prohibiting discussion of open cases (and announcements regarding major investigations within two months of a general election).
While I guess you could make the point that this has happened more than once before, if you're making that argument as a way to shrug it off and rationalize your indifference to it - well, to be as polite and as diplomatic and as non-threatening as I think the situation requires - go fuck yourself with a dry pinecone.

Today's GIF

There's at least some minimal probability that Trump isn't the first president to harbor such proclivities, but I think it's a safe bet that this is the first time it's been so widely known.


And yeah OK, there's also a fair probability that he isn't really into that, but c'mon - it's Donald-fucking-Trump. What thoroughly horrible thing is there about the guy that we're supposed to think just couldn't possibly be true at this point?  He invites that impression as a means of attracting our attention - we wouldn't wanna be rude by denying him, would we?

Today's Tweet

Thank Goodness It Wasn't Me

On Trump's plan for the White House press corps: