Today's Tweet

Trump's 1st foreign trip will give him the rare opportunity of bein' in a country where he's not under criminal investigation for treason.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) May 18, 2017

Today's Tweet

Breaking: Paul Ryan right now. #Blabbergate pic.twitter.com/ZpL7z1Sc9v

— Megan Ahsens (@MegAhsens) May 16, 2017

Today's Pix

Keith

And now it doesn't matter how much Russian smoke there is - the fire is in 45*'s reactions to all that smoke.

Vote Like Ya Mean It

#BREAKING: Supreme Court turns down NC voter ID case, leaving in place 4th Circuit ruling that struck it down. A big win for voting rights! pic.twitter.com/goirrGYtyL

— Caroline O. (@RVAwonk) May 15, 2017

We don't get to know who voted for what, but having Gorsuch on the court didn't serve to move that NC shit up the food chain at all. On to Texas and Wisconsin.

WaPo:
It was one of numerous voting rights changes passed by Republican-led legislatures after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act. That decision effectively removed federal oversight of states with a history of discrimination.

“This is a huge victory for voters and a massive blow to Republicans trying to restrict access to the ballot, especially in communities of color,” said Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez.

The 4th Circuit on July 29 agreed with allegations from the Justice Department and civil rights groups that North Carolina’s bill selectively chose voter-identification requirements, reduced the number of early-voting days and changed registration procedures in ways meant to harm African Americans, who overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic Party.

The appeals court did not allow the law to be used in the 2016 election, and voters replaced the state’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, with Democrat Roy Cooper.

[Supreme Court won’t let North Carolina use voting-law changes]

Cooper and the state’s new Democratic attorney general, Josh Stein, told the Supreme Court they did not want to appeal the lower court’s decision that the law violated the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act.

“We need to be making it easier to vote, not harder — and the court found this law sought to discriminate against African-American voters with ‘surgical precision,’ ” Cooper said in a statement after the Supreme Court acted. “I will continue to work to protect the right of every legal, registered North Carolinian to participate in our democratic process.”

What We're Up Against

Politico:

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Trump.

Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.

Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life.

The guy has spent his whole life playing outside every parameter.  It's how he's made his way in the world forever.  In confusion there is opportunity, and he believes the greater the confusion, the greater the opportunity. So he creates confusion every chance he gets.

It's part of his basic approach of playing the SmarmSpace - that little bit of daylight between making a commitment to do something and then actually doing it.

His pattern has always been to Over-Promise and Under-Deliver, which I've attributed to his being an extraordinarily bad salesman. ie: it's not about doing what needs done. It's only about saying whatever gets the other guy to commit. 

45* knows this basic concept:

You will go to great lengths to keep your word.  

Because making a promise means something to you, he gains great advantage by being not just willing to go back on his word, but building it into the plan - which is why (I think) he never tells anybody what he's planning to do. And it's not just that he doesn't want you to know - he's so completely invested in his approach, he plays the SmarmSpace with everybody around him.  They do their best to spin it as 45* being some kind of strategy genius, but they don't have one fuckin' clue what the guy will do from one minute to the next. At best, they're just guessing and that's because he wants it that way.

One of the best examples of playing the SmarmSpace was 45*'s threatening tweet about how Comey better hope there's no tape of his conversations.

That is straight-up Daddy State Basics - 45* fears (ie: he prob'ly knows) there're tapes of him talking with or about the Russians, with some damning bits that'll blow him up, so he has to turn that around and point it at Comey or whoever else comes to mind in order to get it all directed away from him. Is any of it true? Doesn't matter. He may know absolutely there's no such tape, but he also knows you and I will have to stop and consider the possibility, because we have some scruples - and a respect for process, and for logic, and for critical thinking - and he doesn't.  He only has that animal instinct for preserving and benefitting himself.

So then along comes someone else who also cares about nothing but furthering their own agenda items, and we get a staffer willing to pimp the "Climate Hoax", knowing 45* will not think beyond "what's in it for me?".  Almost literally, all they think they have to do is meet him in that SmarmSpace and he'll do what they want him to do.  But he won't be changing his rules; he won't alter his approach; he'll be looking for the SmarmSpace within the SmarmSpace.

This really has degenerated into what Ayn Rand called The Politics Of Pull.  Getting power and wielding power and keeping power eventually reduces the system to trading in favors - not goods and services (another reason "Gov't Should Be Run Like A Business" is pure bumper sticker bullshit, but that's part of a different rant).

Anyway, it makes for the perfect environment for a SmarmSpace peddler like 45* because there's no way you can specify a value for those favors that everybody can agree on. I may think I'm doing you a solidly huge one, but when I come around to collect, all you have to do is downplay it - something 45* has made a long and very lucrative career of doing.

There is no soul and no honor in this.

Workday Poem

Coffee

blah blah blah

Drive home

Wine

The Trump Tapes

The Hill:

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee leading the probe into Russia’s meddling in the presidential election, said Friday that President Trump’s tweet about FBI Director James Comey was “inappropriate.”

"But to say more would be a mistake,” Burr added, according to WRAL.

Burr was referring to Trump’s Friday morning tweet in which the president threatened the former FBI chief.

No, guys - that's not how you respond to 45*'s threatening tweet.

This is how you do that:

Mr President, if you have something on Comey - like a taped conversation that indicates something nefarious, or is just embarrassing, or whatever.

If you have something, then bring it. Otherwise, fuck the fuck off you fucking fuck.

This is just another attempt to put the chill on people - folks who want to stand up for something honorable by showing us just how fucked up this Daddy State bullshit is getting.

Can you say "Prior Restraint"?

Andy Borowitz

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Donald Trump boasted that, if he is impeached, the television ratings will be higher than those of any other impeachment in history.

“Everywhere I go, people tell me that if I am impeached, they’re going to watch it,” he said. “The ratings are going to be through the roof.”

He said that he expected his impeachment ratings to be “many, many times” the size of the audience for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, in 1998.

Yeah OK, Borowitz is weird and goofy and he goes crashing into the absurd pretty regularly, but he makes this kinda thing work because it's towards the logical extreme.  There's something about it that doesn't seem all that crazy considering just how nutty 45* behaves almost daily.

Trouble With The Numbers

Quinnipiac:

So I'm wondering about 45*'s obsession over his Ratings and his Poll numbers (knowing of course, he'll just lie his ass off if they're not good etc etc), but he is in fact obsessed with such things, and it's interesting to connect that up with the usual GOP mantra about how they don't pay attention to the polling and they make their decisions according to good old fashioned Republican values and blah blah fucking blah.

The GOP always loved slagging Hillary (esp) because she was so "Poll-Driven" and "She never says anything that hasn't been focus-grouped to within an inch of its life". 

But btw - when you see a focus group on your liberal TV box these days, isn't it almost always Frank Luntz? 

How do they reconcile any of that?  Is it even necessary to try, especially in light of the pretty simple fact that we rarely hear about any of it anymore, even from the Repubs?

And then also too - 82% of people self-identifying as Republican say the approve of 45*'s performance?

First off: What the actual fuck, Repubs?

But: It seems like that could easily indicate just how down-to-the-bottom-of-the-barrel the GOP has gotten.  If 45* is driving supporters away (as it sure as hell looks like he's doing), then the only folks left are those die-hard rubes who're still with him even as he is obviously in the run-up to when he starts shooting people on 5th Avenue.

Anyway, it's a wonderment.