Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

In my day, never was longer.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

The words do not have to be perfect.

You are here: Home / Politics / An Unexamined Scandal / Terrifying Read: “Department of Justification”

Terrifying Read: “Department of Justification”

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In case anybody’s still wondering whether it’s worth the trouble of evicting Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III from his current position, here’s Emily Bazelon in the NYTimes — “Stephen Bannon and Jeff Sessions, the new attorney general, have long shared a vision for remaking America. Now the nation’s top law-enforcement agency can serve as a tool for enacting it“:

One night in September 2014, when he was chief executive of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon hosted cocktails and dinner at the Washington townhouse where he lived, a mansion near the Supreme Court that he liked to call the Breitbart Embassy. Beneath elaborate chandeliers and flanked by gold drapes and stately oil paintings, Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, sat next to the guest of honor: Nigel Farage, the insurgent British politician, who first met Sessions two years earlier when Bannon introduced them. Farage was building support for his right-wing party by complaining in the British press about “uncontrolled mass immigration.” Sessions, like other attendees, was celebrating the recent collapse in Congress of bipartisan immigration reform, which would have provided a path to citizenship for some undocumented people. At the dinner, Sessions told a writer for Vice, Reid Cherlin, that Bannon’s site was instrumental in defeating the measure. Sessions read Breitbart almost every day, he explained, because it was “putting out cutting-edge information.”

Bannon’s role in blocking the reform had gone beyond sympathetic coverage on his site. Over the previous year, he, Sessions and one of Sessions’s top aides, Stephen Miller, spent “an enormous amount of time” meeting in person, “developing plans and messaging and strategy,” as Miller later explained to Rosie Gray in The Atlantic. Breitbart writers also reportedly met with Sessions’s staff for a weekly happy hour at the Union Pub. For most Republicans in Washington, immigration was an issue they wished would go away, a persistent source of conflict between the party’s elites, who saw it as a straightforward economic good, and its middle-class voting base, who mistrusted the effects of immigration on employment. But for Bannon, Sessions and Miller, immigration was a galvanizing issue, lying at the center of their apparent vision for reshaping the United States by tethering it to its European and Christian origins. (None of them would comment for this article.) That September evening, as they celebrated the collapse of the reform effort — and the rise of Farage, whose own anti-immigration party in Britain represented the new brand of nativism — it felt like the beginning of something new. “I was privileged enough to be at it,” Miller said about the gathering last June, while a guest on Breitbart’s SiriusXM radio show. “It’s going to sound like a motivational speech, but it’s true. To all the voters out there: The only limits to what we can achieve is what we believe we can achieve.”

The answer to what they could achieve, of course, is now obvious: everything. Bannon and Miller are ensconced in the West Wing, as arguably the two most influential policy advisers to Donald J. Trump. And Jeff Sessions is now the attorney general of the United States. The genesis of their working relationship is crucial to understanding the far-reaching domestic goals of the Trump presidency and how the law may be used to attain them over the next four years. Bannon and Sessions have effectively presented the country’s changing demographics — the rising number of minority and foreign-born residents — as America’s chief internal threat. Sessions has long been an outlier in his party on this subject; in 2013, when his Republican colleagues were talking primarily about curbing illegal immigration, he offered a proposal to curb legal immigration. (It failed in committee, 17 to one.)…

At a time when other, more libertarian conservatives had begun to embrace critiques of the criminal-justice system, each man saw crime as yet another way that the fabric of society was deteriorating. While Bannon was chief executive, Breitbart created a specific tag for articles called “black crime” and ran article after article demonizing the Black Lives Matter movement (calling protesters “blood-lusting junkies”) and showing Latino immigrants as violent (“One Sex Offender Illegal Alien Caught After Another Alleged Offender Legalized”). The site also frequently covered Sessions’s condemnations of criminal-justice reform. Opposing a bipartisan bill to reduce sentences for some nonviolent drug offenses, Sessions said last May that Republican supporters of the legislation “in no way represent the conservative movement” and warned against “signing death warrants for thousands of American innocent citizens.”

As the Republican primary season progressed, it became clear to Sessions and Bannon that Trump could be the vessel for their brand of Republicanism. Back in August 2015, Bannon emailed a friend, according to The Daily Beast, that while he felt good about other candidates like Ted Cruz, he was ready to pick Trump, because he was “a nationalist who embraces” Sessions’s immigration plan. Six months later, Sessions became the first senator to endorse Trump for president. Last August, Sessions helped create a new immigration policy for Trump, which called for reducing immigration by, among other things, tightening the rules about visas for high-skilled workers. That same month, Bannon took over Trump’s campaign.

Their shared view was central to Trump’s Inaugural Address, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, Bannon and Miller principally wrote…

It is through the Justice Department that the administration is likely to advance its nationalist plans — to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, promoting what seems to be a longstanding desire to reassert the country’s European and Christian heritage. It’s not an accident that Sessions, who presumably could have chosen from a number of plum assignments, opted for the role of attorney general. The Department of Justice is the most valuable perch from which to transform the country in the way he and Bannon have wanted. With an exaggerated threat of disorder looming, the nation’s top law-enforcement agency could become a machine for trying to fundamentally change who gets to be an American and what rights they can enjoy…

Reader Interactions

127Comments

  1. 1.

    schrodingers_cat

    Vichy Times installed these people in the White House and now it wants to us be terrified of them. What exactly is your agenda, Vichy Times? NYT, they are not benign or liberal. They have been foremost in fluffing the New Yorker.

  3. 3.

    lgerard

    I find Miller to be the scariest of all these dudes
    He is a little hothouse flower raised in the far right ecosystem, with zero outside influences at any point in his life

    Anyone who saw his robotic performance that one Sunday when they tried him out as a spokesperson had to come away thinking that this is not a real person in any sense of the word.

  4. 4.

    XTPD

    @schrodingers_cat: The FTFNYT owners all deserve to have their heads boiled in their own assholes.

    Also, really hope that this is the beginning of a Sessions resignation.

  7. 7.

    Immanentize

    I saw this yesterday and I admit that I could only get half way through before hyperventilating and having to quit the article.

  8. 8.

    Thru the Looking Glass...

    With an exaggerated threat of disorder looming, the nation’s top law-enforcement agency could become a machine for trying to fundamentally change who gets to be an American and what rights they can enjoy…

    This… this is what I’ve suspected was their endgame all along…

    Unfortunately, that pesky Russian problem keeps rearing its ugly head… in the moment…

    Look out for a Reichstag moment… they NEED something to happen to justify much harsher measures…

  9. 9.

    Mai.naem.mobile

    I get what they are trying to do but I don’t see how you turn back the clock in the browning of America. They aren’t going to convince white women to have five kids to make up for the higher birth rate of non-whites and furthermore there’s way more non 100 percent pure KKK whites. You’re closing the barn door after the horses have trotted off to the next county over.

  10. 10.

    Adam L Silverman

    @lgerard: Actually he grew up in a left of center, mainstream, affluent LA suburban Jewish American home. He claims that his epiphany occurred after reading Wayne LaPierre’s book when he was 16. He is, however, in for a very unpleasant time if what he states should happen actually does happen. The real white nationalists, as in the ones who’s religion is not Judaism, don’t have any interests in including Jewish Americans in their desired white/European American ethno-state.

  12. 12.

    lgerard

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Yes

    And evidently he gave rabble rousing speeches as trump’s warm up guy at all those rallies
    Too bad his part was never televised or even much reported

  14. 14.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: They fell down on the job during the last campaign, was it incompetence or something more. T was in their back yard they never scrutinized him it was all emails all the time. Fucking VIchy Times and FBI swiftboated HRC. I cannot take anything they put out seriously. I quit reading them in October.

  15. 15.

    gene108

    In what way is it surprising Sessions would want to use the DoJ to bust up blacks and browns and make voting harder?

    The guy tried to indict three NAACP members for voter fraud, in the 1980’s when he was a US Attorney.

    He’s an unrepentant racist, who the cowardly Republicans installed to be their hatchet man to make sure they disenfranchise enough voters to cling to power.

    The increased incarcerations of blacks and browns, the arresting of demographic changes, and the rest is hot fudge, whipped cream and a cherry in top of the voter disenfranchisement sundae.

  16. 16.

    Adam L Silverman

    @lgerard: It was televised and many of those Trump Campaign Rally live feed post I put up had video of him warming up the crowd with lots of red meat.

  18. 18.

    Davis X. Machina

    The Department of Justice is the most valuable perch from which to transform the country in the way he and Bannon have wanted.

    It’s Coup 101. You always take the defense, interior, and justice portfolios in the transitional, multiparty coalition government. You don’t even mind if you don’t get any of the others others.

  21. 21.

    lgerard

    @Adam L Silverman:

    What I meant is that he has never had a real job, or spent time in the service where he would rub up against real people. He was in the David Horowitz incubator since he was 16, and has only associated with fringe lunatics.

    BTW It is pretty sad when you have to cite Wayne La Pierre, The Cowardly Lobbyist, as your inspiration,

  25. 25.

    Adam L Silverman

    @lgerard: Yes, you are correct. Not that that is unusual for the professional conservatives. Speaker Ryan, other than waiting tables in college to supplement his Social Security Survivor Benefits, has spent his entire adult life either working at conservative think tanks or for GOP members of Congress or serving in Congress as a Republican.

  26. 26.

    Kay

    It’s funny because I find this oddly comforting. One thing I’ve noticed about the Trump Revolution is it’s a comfortable revolution. None of them are risking anything. If this fails they just get the ordinary United States back and these people were doing very, very well in the ordinary pre-Trump United States.

    It’s such a soft revolution. Comfy. Big puffy pillows under all of them to catch them if they fail.

    It’s all rewards, Trumpism, for the main players. I just fundamentally don’t believe that’s the essential nature of revolutions. The leaders risk a lot in real ones. They could lose their fortunes or their families or their place in society or their freedom. Nothing happens to Bannon or Sessions if this fails. They retain everything they had at the launch.

    These are people who whine incessantly about being disliked. Is that a big thing with revolutionaries? That the people they plan to overthrow or whatever be their pals?

    I don’t know- you think of other revolutions where people were traveling on underground railroads and risking firing squads and beheadings and seizure of their fortunes and then you see puffy, pampered Bannon and that little weasel Sessions and they don’t even look like people who can change a tire. Can you get all the glory of being a “revolutionary” with absolutely no risk? I …don’t think so.

  28. 28.

    TenguPhule

    Fair trials, convictions and executions. That’s all the Republican Party deserves at this point.

    And I’m being generous here. We are literally 3 months away from mob lynchings at this point.

  30. 30.

    gene108

    @Adam L Silverman:

    He is, however, in for a very unpleasant time if what he states should happen actually does happen. The real white nationalists, as in the ones who’s religion is not Judaism, don’t have any interests in including Jewish Americans in their desired white/European American ethno-state.

    Miller’s only 31. He graduated from high school probably in 2003 or so. There really is something wrong with the guy mentally to be so young, educated and so fucking cluelessly racist.

  31. 31.

    Smiling Mortician

    @Kay: This needs to be pointed out repeatedly. They are soft, pampered, and unfamiliar with actual suffering or even struggle.

  32. 32.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Thru the Looking Glass…: It has, and I’m not trying to sound pollyanish, but there are also some positive signs. That the Jewish American and Muslim American communities are now pulling together, to the point that Muslim American veterans are offering to provide unpaid, private security at Jewish organization’s facilities – JCCs, synagogues, cemeteries, etc, and Jewish American communities are offering Muslim Americans places to hold services and providing donations to rebuild damaged mosques and community centers is very, very, very encouraging. To the point that I will say this now, and as someone that worked at the Secretariat level on the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement in 2014, that the relationships and trust that are built as a result of this is what will, eventually, create both the momentum and space to properly resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

  35. 35.

    Thru the Looking Glass...

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Speaker Ryan, other than waiting tables in college to supplement his Social Security Survivor Benefits, has spent his entire adult life either working at conservative think tanks or for GOP members of Congress or serving in Congress as a Republican.

    In other words, next-to-know experience in the real world… given his rather draconian attitude towards such issues as health care and social security, I’m not surprised…

  36. 36.

    TenguPhule

    @Adam L Silverman:

    to the point that Muslim American veterans are offering to provide unpaid, private security at Jewish organization’s facilities

    And if that isn’t an excuse for whitey white FBI komrades to start ratfucking, I don’t know what is.

  38. 38.

    slag

    In all the smoke here, it’s very difficult to focus on the reality that Republicans very likely coordinated with a foreign adversary to shift US policy toward that adversary in exchange for that adversary’s help in winning a presidential election. All while waving like 60 million USAUSAUSA flags. And the main problem with Democrats and Hillary Clinton was that they had no principles.

    The patriotism. It reels.

  41. 41.

    Epicurus

    “…the country’s European and Christian heritage…” News to all the non-Christian/non-Europeans whose ancestors settled this country. Fcuk these bigoted a-holes.

  42. 42.

    Thru the Looking Glass...

    @Adam L Silverman: Okay… I am impressed and pleased to hear all of that… I had seen some news about groups on either side of that divide reaching out to help the other but hadn’t realized it had gone that far, that quickly…

    I am AMAZED that so many people in Trump’s camp could appear to be so compromised w/ all the Russian stuff and not think it’d ever catch up to them… and thank god it appears to be doing just that…

    I’m not sure I’ve seen anything this bad in my lifetime…

    Maybe, just maybe the sheer fear of the Cuban Missile Crisis – NUKES COMING TO AMERICA!

    But Viet Nam… Watergate… Iran-Contra… 9/11 & the reaction… nope, not as scary…

  43. 43.

    Adam L Silverman

    @gene108: I have a theory. The first part is that he’s internally wired for conservatism. Basically he’s afraid of change. Anything he perceives as change freaks him out. The second part is that 9-11 basically so scared him, like it did so many others, that it changed how he assesses threats and, as a result, his political and social attitudes. Anything that is different is dangerous. This is, by the way, the implicit subtext of LaPierre’s book – anything and anyone unknown can be a threat to one’s person, one’s property, and to one’s freedom. The book just articulated what he was already feeling. I’m guessing he was bullied in elementary and middle school, which also contributed and consolidated his inclinations and preferences.

  44. 44.

    efgoldman

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans supporting each other very publicly and quite vociferously.

    Yup; saw a story about that tonight, don’t remember where it was.
    Actually, in most decent places, the faith communities support each other pretty well, for instance offering space for services/school if a church/synagogue/mosque is damaged, whether by malice or natural causes.
    It’s always heartening, and was so even before the racist assholes took over.

  47. 47.

    Kay

    @Smiling Mortician:

    You just think of voting rights. Now THAT was a revolution. Those people got the shit beat out of them. They weren’t sitting at a big desk in the DOJ signing orders restricting voting rights. They were facing down attack dogs and getting thrown in jail.

    What happens to Jeff Sessions if he fails in his quest to stop black people from voting? He..becomes a lobbyist? Lists on the Right wing speaker circuit? Oh, the humanity. The sacrifices! You could weep for these brave revolutionaries standing firm when faced with…Paul Ryan waving an immigration bill.

  48. 48.

    Anne Laurie

    @Adam L Silverman: Not to be overlooked: Miller craves celebrity, and it’s a lot easier to get attention as the KKK’s Token Good Jew than as just another J-Street BothSiderist. He’s been rewarded, since he was in high school, for overplaying his BE AFRAID OF SCARY STRANGERS!!! schtick — hell, it’s gotten him walk-in access to the Oval Office. Of course he’s gonna shriek and gibber every time the brown-ish guy at the lobby newstand kiosk gives him a nasty look for skimming all the tabloids and never buying one.

  49. 49.

    Ian G.

    @lgerard:

    You know Quint’s unforgettable monologue in “Jaws” where he describes his ordeal as a sailor on the USS Indianapolis and talks about how sharks have “lifeless eyes”? That’s what I think whenever I see a photo of Miller. Lifeless eyes. The eyes of someone in a different time or place would have found his calling machine-gunning children in a place like Nazi-occupied Poland, or Bosnia, or Rwanda, or Turkish-controlled Armenia.

  50. 50.

    Lyrebird

    @Adam L Silverman: From your lips to the ears of the Almighty!

    I won’t try to see that far ahead, and we’ve already seen harm from this Republican administration (e.g. needlessly cruel deportations) and its fans (murder in KS), but I agree that there are real silver linings (clumsy metaphor, sorry) and that they merit attention…

    How awesome to see reports – even when we have a Hater in Chief – of those Bonhoffer-inspired signs, “First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT THIS TIME M#[email protected]#!!!”

    I loathe Sen. Cotton, but I’ll give him credit for actually holding a real town hall (unlike so many others) and standing there getting raked over those coals…

    I hope the pushback comes soon enough on a national level to protect the vulnerable, but at least in NC, even while public support for voter suppression is going strong, at least the resistance to trans-phobic horrid laws won out… (okay for some it was maybe more like “we can’t keep losing those sports dollars!” more than “why create a law just to harrass one small group of people?”)

    Okay this has been this week’s edition of Stress Basket Typing Too Much In An Attempt to Stay Somewhat Positive.

    YAY Balloon Juice and good night!

  53. 53.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I’m guessing he was bullied in elementary and middle school

    I was bullied a bit in middle school. Smaller kid, new in town, played the violin, etc. The first time I came home with a black eye, my dad took me out and the back yard and taught me some bar-fighting shit. He also told me that I needed to mark the other guy – even if I got my ass kicked, if we both walk into class the next day with black eyes, it would looked even. After a couple of months, people decided that is was more fun to pick on other people.

  54. 54.

    efgoldman

    @Adam L Silverman:

    eventually, create both the momentum and space to properly resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

    “Eventually” meaning when Bibi and his buddies, and their enablers over here, are out of power.

  56. 56.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: Tracking. My guess is that what you did, he either didn’t or tried and failed. In my case I basically hit puberty at about 9. And by the time I was 9 and 1/2 I looked 14 and was bigger, taller, and stronger than even the 8th graders. There were still the occasional prank, but no one tried to do anything direct from that point out. Also, and I didn’t learn this till years later, the reason I wasn’t allowed to participate in PE with the other kids is that other kids’ parents complained that they didn’t want me, being so much bigger, hurting their kids. So I basically had my own individual activities. Or I read. Also, no one thought to mention this to my parents. The Jewish day school I went to should have been shut down as a hazard to the student’s attending it!

  58. 58.

    Adam L Silverman

    @efgoldman: Not just that. Prejudice is both created and destroyed because of actual interactions with people from other groups. When you realize, because you’ve supported each other through a time of great stress, upheaval, and threat that you can trust the other group and that you have more in common, which is what is happening now, this will create upwards pressure regardless of who is in charge to equitably solve the problem.

  59. 59.

    lgerard

    @Ian G.:

    If you saw one of his Sunday performances, that is exactly what he looked like…reciting absurd statements like he was reading them off a teleprompter. (which I think he was)

  62. 62.

    efgoldman

    @Anne Laurie:

    every time the brown-ish guy at the lobby newstand kiosk gives him a nasty look for skimming all the tabloids and never buying one.

    Not the tabloids. More likely a certain kind of magazine, which is as close as he ever gets to a woman.

  63. 63.

    danielx

    @gene108:

    Yes. Which explains some of Sessions’ obsession with de-legalizing marijuana; it’s a method of social/political control. Arrest and conviction for as many black people as possible, plus as many white people as possible depending on circumstances, political activity, etc. Fourth Amendment violations gonna become pretty normal pretty soon. Plus Big Pharma hates legalization, so it’s a win-win.

    Disenfranchisement: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

  64. 64.

    TenguPhule

    @efgoldman: It hasn’t even been 2 months and look where we are. The entire executive branch and most of the legislative branch is fucking compromised, the judicial branch is one vote away from going along with a Russian coup. We’ve got the Nazis coming out of the woodwork to attack the American Jews and Muslims and not ONE of our institutions or safeguards are working.

    If you have a better idea that doesn’t involve unicorns in 2018, I’m all ears.

  65. 65.

    James Powell

    @schrodingers_cat:

    NYT, they are not benign or liberal. They have been foremost in fluffing the New Yorker.

    And let’s never forget their 20 year witch hunt against both Clintons.

  66. 66.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: Times change. Most of the stuff I did for fun as a kid – riding my bike everywhere at all hours with no helmets or pads, taking off for hours on end around the extended neighborhood with my friends and/or brother, climbing trees, jumping out of trees, etc – would get me taken away and placed in foster care today.

  67. 67.

    Lizzy L

    Lyrebird said goodnight, so I’m not replying to her/his comment as such, but I am much heartened by what I believe to be robust responses from democratic (small-d) institutions: the press doing its job — not all of it, certainly, but some of it — voters making their opinions heard, the courts acting as a check on the executive, state governments protecting their citizens — again, not all of them, but some. Is everything going to be just fine? Hell no. But we ain’t dead yet.

  68. 68.

    XTPD

    @lgerard: I think I speak for everyone when I say that Anthony Weiner truly deserves murdered, or that the very least violently castrated.

  69. 69.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @TenguPhule:

    If you have a better idea that doesn’t involve unicorns in 2018, I’m all ears.

    A better idea than doom porn? Volunteering. Hard work. Fighting voter suppression. Talking to friends who are left leaning, but nonvoting, to get them to turn out. That’s some stuff off the top of my head.

  70. 70.

    Patricia Kayden

    @gene108: True. No one is surprised that a racist is about to unleash more racism. We know what Sessions is going to do. Somehow our side is going to have to push back.

  71. 71.

    danielx

    @Adam L Silverman:

    All of that and more…my mom used to tell me to go find something to do outside and not come back for a couple of hours, she had housework to get caught up on. Normal.

  72. 72.

    lgerard

    @XTPD:

    i saw something on the internets recently that claimed that Weiner was set up by the Russians so, something, something, something.

    Everything can and will be turned into a conspiracy.

  73. 73.

    danielx

    @Davis X. Machina:

    You don’t care if you get the others, because you have control of the various organs with guns. And once you have Justice, you can do pretty much what you want domestically.

  75. 75.

    burnspbesq

    I’m willing to bet that reading Alito and Thomas’ concurring opinions in the Virginia racial-gerrymandering case really fucked with Sessions’ head. Both of them were willing to make it even harder to get away with shit than the majority.

  76. 76.

    Gvg

    @Adam L Silverman: actually no. I was a foster mom. Foster care is too short handed and under funded to take all the kids they probably should. Even more funding wouldn’t it completely. Foster parents are volunteers who don’t even break even and have to put up with a lot of burracracy and nessesary inspections. There aren’t enough people who will actually do it. I had lots of people who gushed how great I was for doing it but only one actually listened when I said ” you” should do it too. We got placement calls all the time even when we were at licensed capacity. They were always trying desperately to place more kids. Well if they have no safe place to put a child, they don’t take them. Sure you hear about a rare stupid story, but it can’t happen much.

  78. 78.

    opiejeanne

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Reminds me a bit of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition and related things back in the ’90s.

    In the 90s. It seems a lifetime ago.

  79. 79.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @opiejeanne: But it was a good thing. Moms on both sides got pissed off about losing their kids. It mattered to the peace movement.

  80. 80.

    Thru the Looking Glass...

    @Mike in NC:

    The fascists are planning their Reichstag fire.

    I’m certainly worried about this, especially if and as this whole Russian mess continues to mushroom out of control on them… they’re gonna need a bigger boat soon…

  81. 81.

    danielx

    @Mike in NC:

    I’ve no doubt, the difference being that Josef Goebbels and his minions were competent. The fools in charge of government at the moment couldn’t slap their collective ass with a mirror and a patented ass-slapping machine.

  88. 88.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @opiejeanne: I am not cheerful right now, but I am willing to get all up in the face of doom porn people. They are tiresome.

    We are not in a good position, but we aren’t Occupied France.

  90. 90.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @lgerard: Oh, nonsense. Weiner is the proximate cause of Weiner’s fall. If the Russians did anything, they planted emails in the right places to create the impression of scandal for others.

  92. 92.

    Repatriated

    @Timurid:

    One little sliver of hope is that if these geniuses attempt a false flag attack, they will almost certainly fuck it up.

    The other basis for hope regarding this is that in times of crisis, popular opinion hardens around preexisting narratives. Given the President and the GOP Congress’ respective record low approval ratings, it’s entirely likely that the overall public reaction would not be to rally ’round the flag, but instead to blame the Administration and Congress for failing to prevent it.

    And that’s assuming they can succeed in placing the false flag on the incident in the first place.

  94. 94.

    Peale

    @Repatriated: Yep. I’ve said this before. 9/11 and the boost Bush got from it was rather singular. We can handle wild gunmen. But we aren’t going to tolerate something on that scale. The job of the Administration is to make sure something like that can’t and won’t happen. The next president who presides over something like that is going to be seen as an incompetent dumb ass right away.

  95. 95.

    frosty

    @Thoroughly Pizzled: This isn’t original with me, it’s from dengre/DennisG. Abe Lincoln has nothing to be ashamed of about the Republican Party. Following the Civil War, there have been three parties in the US: Republicans, Democrats, and Confederate.

    The Confederate Party was part of the Democrats until Johnson signed the civil rights legislation. Nixon then moved them to the Republicans. Reagan et al cemented it. There may be some of Abe’s Republicans left, but they’re non-aligned or Democrats now. The Confederates hijacked his party.

  97. 97.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @frosty: The party that was once the Party of Lincoln is now the Party of Jefferson Davis. The party of treason.

    This time, the resolution of the conflict will be conducted with full knowledge of the failure of the last resolution.

  98. 98.

    MobiusKlein

    @Ian G.: your description of miller reminds me of my first thought when I saw Ralph Reed’s pic:
    I don’t know if there is such a thing as a soul, but if there is, that man does not posses one.

  100. 100.

    amk

    didn’t the WV clown for a senator vote for sessions as the AG? wonder what he feels now.

  101. 101.

    frosty

    @Adam L Silverman: I was small. I didn’t hit 100 lb until 12th grade. I don’t remember being bullied — I don’t think I was worth their effort. In any case, if things got weird I joked my way out of it. Classic comedian story: they want entertainment and a self-deprecating joke is as good as a punch.

  102. 102.

    Smiling Mortician

    in case anyone cares, here is what’s driving me nuts right now. After reading the reports of the Obama administration’s leaving of bread crumbs for intelligence agencies, Congress, etc. to pick up, I’m getting kinda annoyed that they’re still just dripping it out a piece at a time. I mean, I know. Suspense, right? Timing, right? But those documents are all available to the “good guys,” and many of those documents are unclassified. My need for instant gratification is being thwarted here. Dish more! Dish faster!

  103. 103.

    seaboogie

    @Adam L Silverman: Yeah – I like that bit quite a lot. Some seriously good grassroots activism in the marginalized/demonized communities right here – amongst obvious enemies in the ME.

  104. 104.

    frosty

    @Adam L Silverman: Stuff we did as kids: not to mention stuffing our model boats full of saltpeter and sugar, setting fire to them and shoving them out in the creek so we could watch them burn to the waterline and sink. I don’t think you can buy saltpeter (sodium nitrate?) at the corner store any more.

  105. 105.

    seaboogie

    @Smiling Mortician: Be patient, Grasshopper – they are working the ADD newsies and – well – folks like you.

    Also possibly a question of which threads to pull to get it all to unravel, without revealing more than necessary in the moment.

  107. 107.

    frosty

    @Timurid: The other glimmer of hope is that we’ve got the history of the Reichstag fire. It’s hard to pull it off if people have seen if and are expecting it.

  109. 109.

    opiejeanne

    @Omnes Omnibus: Usually not because it’s unthinkable to shoot someone’s mom for being a mom, but didn’t one mom get killed? I seem to remember that one did.

  110. 110.

    seaboogie

    @Mnemosyne:

    If your house collapses, you build a new one.
    Our institutions have failed. Now we build new ones.

    They haven’t all failed – and chanelling the Oroville Dam during recent rains and overcapacity – an auxilliary spillway has been opened. Granted, it’s the CIA, but then with all the Russia business, it would have to be them anyway.

    I don’t think the dam will fail . There is enough structure in the system – and a means to alleviate the overwhelming influx so as to prevent a catastrophically destructive flood. And on that front, yes – the EPA is being gutted – but the science nerds have been backing up info for several weeks now. The research won’t be lost.

  111. 111.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Smiling Mortician: It’s called only use what you need to accomplish your mission. Don’t waste resources you don’t need to. Drip drip drip does the job.

  115. 115.

    Thru the Looking Glass...

    @frosty:

    I don’t think you can buy saltpeter (sodium nitrate?) at the corner store any more.

    You’re probably right about that… I used to make my own gun power as a kid… salt peter, charcoal, & sulfur… crude but effective…

  117. 117.

    Anne Laurie

    @lgerard:

    saw something on the internets recently that claimed that Weiner was set up by the Russians so, something, something, something.

    Not-yet-dead Andrew Breitbart claimed that he set up Weiner (the first time). So, several years & six degrees of separation later, I can see where some people would accidentally conflate two separate enemies of the state anti-Democratic agencies.

  119. 119.

    seaboogie

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Congrats! – and try to focus on the road instead of your energy usage screen. I’ve driven behind of few of those, and it’s pretty obvious in a rather annoying fashion. I trust that you will be fashionably *un-annoying* en route to your next photo gig.

  120. 120.

    Thru the Looking Glass...

    @frosty: I’ve heard in other places that sugar (carbon!) burns really well… where I grew up, a fire broke out one day in some old grain silos and boy, did they burn hot and fast… spectacular fire… someone was was welding in one of the towers and sparks ignited the grain dust…

  122. 122.

    TenguPhule

    @Omnes Omnibus: So you want ice cream with your unicorns then? You seem to think we’re going to be able to hold normal elections in 2018. All signs so far point to that NOT HAPPENING.

  123. 123.

    J R in WV

    @Kay:

    Actually, Kay, I’m hoping and preying (sic) that Jefferson Beauregard Session III goes to prison for that “tiny little” perjury that he committed on video tape. Especially after he spent the last 20 years putting Bill Clinton down for Clinton’s lack of morals for lying about a blow job in an attempt to shield his wife from embarrassment, while Sessions is perhaps the biggest hypocrite in the history of white racist traitors.

    Lying about conspiring with this nation’s most dangerous enemy does not compare to lying about sex between two consenting adults AT ALL. You know this, we need to pound it like a drum for the rest of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s lowly life.

    PS, grammar nazis, is that where you should put the ‘s possessive on that rat’s name? Best I could do based on how I would speak it aloud.

  124. 124.

    J R in WV

    @TenguPhule:

    ….the judicial branch is one vote away from going along with a Russian coup.

    Well, I think this part of your violence theory is off. I think the Supremes are right now 6-2 for all of this reicht-wing nonsense. so the worst one more R-W justice could do is 6-3. And that -2 or -3 might surprise lots of people.

    Clarence may see that these folks are dangerous to his personal ass. Because they would lynch him as quickly as a mooslim terrerrist. That is, in a flash! And I think he’s smart enough to see that. His whole conservative schtick is just that, an act to get on board that right-wing gravy train. But now he’s on it. He doesn’t have to keep that act up any longer, he can switch to the conservative but patriotic flavor now.

  125. 125.

    sherparick

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: Les Moonves of CBS/Viacom committed a “gaff” (e.g. speaking an awkward truth out loud) when he said Trump may be disaster for the United States, but he is great for the media’s bottomline. CNN/Time-Warner, NBC Comcast (NBC/MSNBC/CNBC), Bloomberg, Disney/ABC, are all enjoying record ratings and profits. The Orange Terror may be the most disastrous ruler since Nero/Caligula, but he is great TV.

    I try to take comfort that these guys are ideological idiots to some extent, brought up in the hothouse protected bubble of the Conservative Movement and hence incapable of dealing with real problems and politically inept. But I remember reading William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and the Nazi leadership, except for media manipulation and propaganda, was just as inept. Yet they managed to co-opt the efficiency and competence of German business and the German General Staff and came near to conquering the world. Resistance has to be constant and ferocious and fire must be directed at a MSM media that would love to collaborate with fascism if given half a chance.

  126. 126.

    sherparick

    @TenguPhule: Yes, that is my fear. I would not be surprised to see Trump and Sessions call out and and nationalize the National Guard and send it to voting locations to prevent “illegal voting” (also known as voting while Black, Brown, Asian, or just a Democrat).

    I expect the Bannon/Sessions/Miller to move on a “Protect the Vote” bill that also attacks the 14th Amendment doctrine that if you are born in the United States, and not the child of a parent present in the U.S. under diplomatic credentials, e.g. take away citizenship from so call “anchor babies.” Whether this will apply to children where both parents are undocumented, one parent is undocumented, or where one or both parents are permanent resident aliens I guess will depend on how embolden they feel.

    Although I expect as sop to business and agriculture, they may create a “guest” worker program modeled on the program used in the Northern Mariana Islands under the W. Bush Administration. http://www1.american.edu/ted/saipan.htm

    I would expect in any law written by Sessions, Bannon, and Miller write it will require that guest workers in these programs to live in camps and will not have liberty to travel in American society outside of work and that any children born will be consider nationals of the guest worker. In other words, they will be practically prisoners and slaves and subject to the worst kind of human rights abuses. Which of course for our Republican friends is a feature, not a bug.

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