Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This fight is for everything.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

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Open Thread: Trump’s A Peach — His Orange Skin Is Very Thin & Bruises Easily

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“President Bannon” yet to meet Rasputin’s fate, though…

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72Comments

  2. 2.

    Sean

    Captain Insecurity isn’t doing so well. But I hope he’s able to keep up this level of insanity because it’s keeping Congress from acting on his and their promises. They’re too busy denying they know him without sounding like they don’t support him to do any legislating.

  3. 3.

    Spanky

    First thing that jumped out at me too. “Accumulation of data”? From Trump? And spelled correctly? Na ga happen.

  7. 7.

    FlyingToaster

    @Sean: Also, their phonelines, voicemail, e-mail inboxes, and mailboxes are all full of people telling them to not vote for _________ that Trump or Ryan or McConnell want. And Melissa McCarthy Spicer is up there claiming we’re all paid protestors.

    Keep up the good work, folks!

  8. 8.

    schrodingers_cat

    From the last thread:
    I think vetting is misspelled. I don’t think banning refugees will help but a trip to the urologist might.

    Devolution of the office of the President in 70 years:
    Fear nothing but fear itself.
    to
    Fear everything.

  10. 10.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: Its backstopped by Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs tied to Putin. My guess is that if anyone could get some sunshine into the funds the Mercer’s run, they’d find a lot of Russian oligarch money in it.
    http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/211152/trump-data-analytics-russian-access

    This is the thing that we come back to over and over and over. Everything within two links of the President, the people in his immediate circle, including his family, is Russian oligarchs or the Bratva. And those folks all link back to Putin. I realize its all circumstantial, but at some point you have to recognize that the amount of it is just staggering.

  11. 11.

    lamh36

    @PhilipRucker
    Trump: “[Obama] likes me.”
    O’Reilly: “How do you know?”
    Trump: “I can feel it. That’s what I do in life. It’s called, like, I understand.”

    Um Don…you’re obsessed

  12. 12.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    So-called “general” Barry McCaffery is a total loser.

    He’s a complete hater – unlike me.

    I like people who weren’t wounded in combat, okay.

    And his wife is ugly. I mean have you ever seen such a face?

    Sad!

  18. 18.

    jl

    I guess a good sign that Mornin’ Joe Jughead is using SNL feed for his show. Well help him keep his facts straight. I don’t watch the show, just commenting for a friend here. And from what clips I see.

    Thinking about Trump, I can see how could go for the Great Bowling Green Massacre gambit. A guy who’s recent hard business cash flow comes largely from marks who would sign up for Trump University would have certain ideas about what sells.

    Bad as W was, I imagine that if Cheney and Rummy had come up with this stuff, W would be on the phone very quickly: “Dad, Dick and Rummy’s talking reealll funny these days. It don’t sound right.”

  19. 19.

    Oatler.

    I remember a Eugene Mirman bit about an airline that might apply: “like hiring an insincere baby with amnesia to solve a crime IT committed.”

  20. 20.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: I can credibly talk about the strategic communication portions of it, but the computer/tech portions are outside of my areas of expertise. From what I understand, it was effectively used as part of a focused, multi-pronged strategic communication strategy across multiple social media and other media platforms. How effective? I’m not sure anyone knows how to measure it beyond: Brexit passed and the President won a narrow victory in three states that gave him a slim majority in the electoral college.

  25. 25.

    Gvg

    Something to keep in mind with trying to get under his skin is he watches “the shows” but doesn’t read. He has been known to boast he is on the cover of magazine stories that are negative about him. If it’s written, he won’t get it. It has to be video.

  27. 27.

    Mai.naem.mobile

    Dolt 45 is all the crappy stuff he tweets. He’s a loser,he’s sad and he’s fake . Also he’s been PUT ON NOTICE by a majority of the country who don’t like him.

  29. 29.

    MomSense

    My god. I finally caught a bit of whatever it was that trump did this afternoon in public. The man was unraveling in real time.

  32. 32.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    Melissa McCarthy had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her … whatever

  33. 33.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: I don’t know. I also don’t know what the Russian connections mean. But if I was looking for a front that could be used to crack into political consulting/campaign communication in democratic countries I wanted to destabilize, this would be a good way to do it.

  35. 35.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    So twitter tells me that one of the attacks the Trump White House claims has been covered up by the crooked media was “Santa Bernadette”

  36. 36.

    Anne Laurie

    @Sean:

    They’re too busy denying they know him without sounding like they don’t support him to do any legislating.

    I need someone with better tech skills to do a NEW PHONE WHO DIS meme with Trump and McConnell!

  39. 39.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    This year’s Super Bowl ads were weak and a TOTAL DISASTER!

    No bikini clad women frolicking around while being hosed down.

    This is Obama’s fault.

    I will make Super Bowl ads great again!

  43. 43.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: Loaded guns don’t shoot themselves.
    (Recognizing that those made before the introduction of drop safeties, those that have had significant modification to the their triggers, etc may, in fact fire when not intended to.)

  44. 44.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Josh Barro ‏@ jbarro 9m9 minutes ago
    WH list of terror attacks the media is hiding from you includes the Bataclan and Pulse massacres.

  45. 45.

    dm

    @Major Major Major Major: I sort of view them as akin to Palantir. Weaponized social network graphs.

    More sinister than the Obama campaign (and its spin-offs) in terms of their customers, but maybe not more sinister in terms of the technology involved.

    In other, um, news: ‘fake news’ begins to find an audience on the left (that’s the Guardian, so I basically trust it). Paranoia: a way to discredit reporting about Trump (e.g., the Martin Luther King bust story writ large).

  46. 46.

    Loneoak

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I can somewhat credibly discuss the data mining aspect of it. It’s not really anything outside of the new-normal of behavioral micro-targeting. Cathy O’Neil (aka mathbabe) has a good blog post about them. I think they stand out because they appear to be especially grifty with 1) the overpromising on their psychological profiles (just because data is granular doesn’t mean it supports equally-granular individual analyses); 2) the self-dealing of paying campaign funds to a Kushner investment; and 3) the Bratva money behind it all. Being nefarious on 2) and 3) doesn’t not imply effectiveness with 1), and might actually work against it. Hiring CA didn’t work for Cruz, why should we assume it worked for Trump?

  47. 47.

    jl

    If the Matrix disinformation program were a self destructing Rube Goldberg contraption with frayed string, hamster wheels, and rubber bands put together by a drunk, I guess it would look something like what the WH is pumping out. I hope it stays that way.

    Edit: Sorry, i forgot the airplane model glue. Must be a lot of airplane model glue involved.

  50. 50.

    p.a.

    I like Cheetolini. Angry Circus Peanut also too.

    ‘Fake news’ is just rebranded ‘liberal bias’ newspeak thought control, as I pointed out to my winger relatives, but they couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag if given a machete and written instructions.

  51. 51.

    Loneoak

    @dm: One difference between Palantir and CA is of course the vast amount of intelligence community-controlled data Palantir has access to.

  52. 52.

    dm

    @Loneoak: With Bannon on the CA board, who knows how long that difference will hold?

    PS, Cathy O’Neil just published a book about data mining/machine learning/modeling that has one of the best titles ever: Weapons of Math Destruction.

  53. 53.

    Shana

    Hubby just forwarded something to me: #TheIdesofTrump. I hadn’t heard of it before. We’re encouraged to send postcards to SCROTUS on March 15th telling him why we oppose him and his policies. I love this idea. If he gets a million postcard, or more, he would have a harder time thinking it’s not organic. Your thoughts?

  55. 55.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Loneoak: Correct, but as someone who’s used Palantir and CPOF (Command Post of the Future) and Analyst Notebook and a number of others in that environment, at the end of the day the people pushing these programs miss the point. Every commander I’ve dealt with – from Battalion to Brigade to Division to Corps to Army Service Component Command, as well as many other members of Command Groups and the senior staffs all like having data presented in ways they’re comfortable with. I made a fancy chart using Analyst Notebook my brigade’s deputy commander. What he wanted, and what I went back and did, was just something simple. He just wanted the names of the people he was dealing with in the local government, with pics of their faces replacing the default male icon, with their tribe and religious sect below their names. While he did care about who was connected to who and how strongly and other connections, that’s not what he wanted.

    At the end of the day all these programs are great. Especially when you’ve got good data to put into them. But as the end of the day turns to night you have to be able to qualify what you’re talking about to whoever has to digest that information and make a decision. And that usually doesn’t involve edge scores.

  56. 56.

    chopper

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    trump is one of those guys who remembers the last thing he hears. since he was probably talking to bannon last, he had to use ‘marginalized’ and ‘accumulation of data’.

  58. 58.

    Zinsky

    Trump is a sexual pervert and degenerate who has raped a 14 year old girl and at least 17 women have stated that he sexually assaulted them. We should never, ever let the American people forget this! He is NOT NORMAL. HE IS ONE SICK PUPPY! Tell everyone you know, as often as you can!

  59. 59.

    efgoldman

    @Shana:

    If he gets a million postcard, or more, he would have a harder time thinking it’s not organic.

    No, he wouldn’t. “Thinking” is your mistake, here.

  61. 61.

    dm

    @Adam L Silverman: I have no hands-on experience with these tools, but I thought the idea was that these were primarily tools for analysts to find connections (i.e., generating hypotheses), not so much for making the final presentation.

    @Loneoak: I figured I should have started out with “As you probably already know…”. A propos the PredPol stuff in your blog post, Pro Publica’s work on that “sentencing guideline/bail-modeling” software was one of the things that made me start sending them money.

  62. 62.

    Adam L Silverman

    @dm: They should be. The problem is that they are often pitched, in training people on them, as “here’s how you make your briefing look high speed…”.

  64. 64.

    Adam L Silverman

    @dm: Yep. And that’s often part of the pitch as to why these things are better than CPOF. If you’re using CPOF every thing has to be done in CPOF. If you use analyst notebook or ARC GIS or Falcon View or Palantir or… you can make whatever you’re doing into an image and embed it into a powerpoint or a report. This, of course, kind of defeats the purpose as all the goodness resides in the data that can be accessed within each program. We call these images dumb images or dumb charts or dumb maps.

  67. 67.

    Bupalos

    I’m going to disagree on the “marginalize” and “accumulation of data” terms. They are used improperly. This is Trump trying to sound “smart” like the “smart people” in his little orbit, proving he’s really the smart one behind these smart moves. It’s Trump trying to translate Bannon and… that guy, you know, that guy that I let pork my Melvaniaka, the one avenging his father. Good boy. Good guy. What were we talking about??

  68. 68.

    dm

    @Bupalos: Well, there’s an easy way to figure it out. Did the tweet come from an iPhone or from an Android? If the former, it’s not Trump, but a staffer. If the latter, maybe Trump.

  69. 69.

    Bupalos

    @schrodingers_cat: That’s very good.

    That would play out here in the sticks.

    1935 U.S. President: We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

    2016 U.S. President: OMG guys, these guys are so scary, and if something happens it’s not my fault remember I tried to shut the door and run away except these liberals wouldn’t let me. Okay? Okay? Guys?!? Not my fault, right?

  70. 70.

    J R in WV

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I was on a jury of a murder trial – the deadly weapon was a Thompson Contender pistol shooting 7mm Mag with a trigger pull measured by the ballistics guys at ~20 oz. It seemed much lighter to me, we had the gun in the jury room during deliberations.

    When the gun went off, it was in a Uncle Mike shoulder holster, not being worn, just being handed around. Victim had bits of fiberglass enbedded all over his chest. So they can go off unexpectedly!

    Ballistics expert asked how many police ready rooms he visited? “Hundreds!” How many did not show any sign of an unintentional discharge? “Not many at all…”

    Not guilty.

  72. 72.

    steverinoCT

    @J R in WV:

    how many police ready rooms… did not show any sign of an unintentional discharge?

    I remember using the indoor pistol range at the Newport RI base, where the Naval War College is and apparently NROTC training. The overhead sound baffles were peppered with bullet holes.

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