Today's GIF

FCC spokes-critter answers the public outcry:

Sorry For The Delay

...but we were waiting for confirmation.

Here's another live shot of the skies over Alabama yesterday.

The Web

Ajit Pai is a lyin' sack of shit.  Net Neutrality is the deregulated internet. This jackass wants to deliver it into the hands of privateers and rent-seekers.

First - fuck you, Mr Pai. The web is absolutely vital to people who are just trying to get on in their everyday lives. (eg) It's nearly impossible now to apply for a job without internet access. Killing Net Neutrality translates into people having to pay for the privilege of looking for a job. Obviously, there's a cost to it now, but your "deregulation" opens it up to massive potential for abuse.

How do we know this "Plan To Restore Internet Freedom" is bogus? The name. When these assholes are selling something that's aimed at fucking us with our pants on, they give it a name that's exactly the opposite of what happens if they put it into practice.

The Clear Skies Act: allowed for massive increases in air pollutants.

The Clean Water Act: raised the allowable amounts of things like arsenic in drinking water. 

The Healthy Forests Initiative: opened protected Public Lands to logging - including clear-cutting in certain cases.

When we deregulated banking the 1st time in the 80s, we got the Savings & Loan crisis.

Deregulating the airlines - are there more air carriers now? Do they offer better service at a lower price?

How 'bout electric utilities? I seem to recall something called Enron.

Deregulating banks again in the 90s gave us a near-total collapse of the world economy, and a "recession" that we're still stuck in.

When 45* fucked up Bears Ears recently, his closing pitch was "protecting our precious resources".

We don't protect our resources by handing them over to private mining interests.

It's the game of opposites.

And by the way:

• Uranium deposits in Utah (Bears Ears)
• Pimping the Uranium One scandal
• Hillary Clinton gave away 20% of our precious uranium supply!?!
• We must do something to compensate
• I know - we'll sell off some of the National Monuments for peanuts and let a few rich guys get a lot richer at tax-payer expense
• Yeah - that's the ticket

As stoopid and incompetent as Cult45 is, there's a whole school of very adept sharks and flocks of talented vultures cashing in.

Today's Tweet

The ones who show up get to make the decisions.

So show up or shut up.

#unhackthevote
Today we all saw it.
Suppression
Elimination from the Rolls
And what happened

We showed up in numbers and won.

Can we do this?
Damn right

Will we do this?
Absolutely.

Voter Registration Drives need to be Starting.

Let's take it back!

— MikeFarb (@mikefarb1) December 13, 2017

Turnout was not all that great, but it looks like Dems - especially WOC - made the difference.

Way To Go 'Bama

Looks like Doug Jones has pulled it off.

Alabama's Secretary of State is a guy named John Merrill. Mr Merrill goes to observe elections in Russia, and pronounces them 'free and fair'.

What the fuck is it with these assholes and Russia!?!

Anyway, the in-person voting was solid enough to make the absentees not such a big deal, but let's not forget or underestimate the GOP's capacity for rat-fucking.

It's Late

...but I'm hoping against hope that Doug Jones pulls it off.

Cuz too many of these fuckin' goobers really are just that stoopid.

Today's Political Maxim

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity - but don't rule out malice."

--Robert Heinlein

(paraphrasing Hanlon's Razor)

Way Way Out

I had to get this one up because it warrants preserving for the historical record:

It would seem there's nothing negative that these knuckleheads won't co-opt, and then double down on. And since they can't be that tone deaf - because NOBODY'S that tone deaf - there has to be a method to their madness. 

So Occam's Razor requires us to consider the probability that "Whatever Makes A Liberal Mad Enough To Cry" is being pushed hard towards the Logical Extreme.

People With Living Thinking Brains: "That's gotta be as bad as it gets - they can't go any lower than that."

GOP: "Hold my beer, Cletus, and watch this."

Sing It, Bubba

Randy Rainbow

Today's (disturbing) GIF

When Roy Moore wins tomorrow:

Today's Pix

click a pic and start the show

"Unsubstantiated..."

But knowing what we know - what we've heard 45* say out loud and on record - even allowing for the total bluster of a guy who so rarely tells the truth about any-goddamned-thing at all - how hard is it to believe what this woman is telling us?

Today's Tweet

"Hello - how are you today?"

WATCH, SHARE, and stay until the very end where Roy Moore starts speaking Russian fluently after praising Putin.
Then, watch again, share again, and repeat. pic.twitter.com/r3jAoOrwOM

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) December 11, 2017

Yes - There Was A Crime

Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker:

(there's a full audio at the link above, but I couldn't figure out how to embed it)

For now, Sekulow and Cobb are sticking to their original strategy. They have advertised their willingness to coöperate with Mueller as a sign that Trump has nothing to hide, and their reaction to Flynn’s guilty plea reflects this view. “Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Mr. Flynn,” Cobb said. With regard to Mueller’s broader investigation, the White House lawyers’ position continues to be that President Trump didn’t commit a crime because no one did—or could—because there is no federal crime called “collusion,” and Rosenstein’s order did not refer to any criminal statutes that may have been violated. In several conversations with me, Sekulow emphasized that collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, even if it did take place, wouldn’t be illegal. “For something to be a crime, there has to be a statute that you claim is being violated,” Sekulow told me. “There is not a statute that refers to criminal collusion. There is no crime of collusion.”

The Mueller investigation appears to consist, roughly, of three areas of inquiry. The first focusses on illegal lobbying by people affiliated with the Trump campaign; the second relates to the hacking of e-mail accounts associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee; and the third involves possible obstruction of justice by Trump and others after he was inaugurated. (Mueller’s office declined to comment.)
- and -

The broad outlines of the grounds for impeachment are more or less settled. Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, who recently published “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” told me, “The Framers wanted some kind of check on the executive, but they didn’t want to see impeachments for routine disagreements between Congress and the White House. They wanted to preserve the separation of powers, so they tried to set out criteria which would not compromise the executive branch.” One rule that’s clear is that an impeachable offense doesn’t have to be an actual crime. For example, a President who joined a religious order and took a vow of silence would surely be impeached without having committed a crime. At the same time, not all criminal offenses are supposed to be impeachable. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65, impeachable offenses must involve “abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

It seems clear, too, that a President can be impeached for conduct that took place before he took office, especially if the misdeeds led to his electoral victory. George Mason, one of the most eloquent of the Framers, asked rhetorically during the Constitutional Convention, “Shall the man who has practiced corruption & by that means procured his appointment in the first instance, be suffered to escape punishment, by repeating his guilt?” As Sunstein told me, “If you procure your office by corrupt means, that would be an impeachable offense.”

The unusual facts of the Russia investigation may implicate another, lesser-known part of the impeachment provision in the Constitution. Article I states that a President can also be impeached and removed for treason and bribery. Treason is defined in the Constitution as “levying war” against the United States, which seems inapplicable to Trump’s conduct, but his business dealings with Russian interests may yet produce evidence of bribery. Trump’s financial affairs, especially with regard to Russia, remain opaque, but it’s possible to imagine how they might give rise to an impeachable offense. A straight payoff to Trump—cash in return for, say, a relaxation of the sanctions imposed by President Obama on the Putin regime—would certainly be impeachable even if it were not technically a crime under American law. Trump’s known business dealings suggest the possibility of a quid pro quo with Russian interests. In 2015, for example, Trump signed a “letter of intent” to build a tower in Moscow. Felix Sater, a Russian associate of Trump’s, wrote of the project, in an e-mail to Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. . . . I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.” That deal never came to fruition, but the intent expressed on both sides is deeply troubling.

Today's Tweet

We are so fucked.

Sadly, the Roy Moore pedophilia accusations have successfully distracted from Roy Moore being a batshit lying homophobic Constitution-hating misogynist fake-Christian racist.

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) December 10, 2017