I want to thank Cheryl for putting up her congressional hearings post as I couldn’t get to it in time, but since she’s having trouble with the video embeds, I figured I’d put up a post to resolve that problem.
Here’s the live feed for AG Sessions’ appearance before the House Judiciary Committee.
And here’s the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the President’s authority to unilaterally order nuclear strikes:
Open thread!
Villago Delenda Est
Another day of Jayuff Sayshuns lying his entitled racist white ass off.
Ho hum.
? Martin
“Now, Pramala, I know it’s scary up there in that witness box but, t’ain’t no need to fear me… [He crows loudly.] I’m sorry. I thought you was corn.”
? Martin
“I was hatched ready! Honourable judge heads, yonder crawdad done ate up our flag.”
Eric NNY
He just said something to the effect of “if you respect the rule of law, then an Attorney General shouldn’t give legal advice by the seat of his pants”. I don’t know what the context was or what that could possibly mean but it was enough to make me turn that off.
Elizabelle
Jim Jordan got me to click the set off. Although, things to do. People to see.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors. Treason, traitors.
Steve in the ATL
What’s the over/under on how many times he commits perjury today?
MomSense
Shorter Poe (Reprobate from Texas)
That conniving black lady broke the law with the untrustworthy NSA to unfairly target Republicans.
NotMax
Open Thread?
One man’s trash is another man’s … trash.
Kay
It’s such a shame the attorney general now lies with impunity just like the president.
How can ordinary people be asked to follow laws if none of these people do? This is a real problem! If the system doesn’t have any credibility people will stop complying because why should they? If Trump is special and Sessions is special then why can’t anyone claim the same exemption? The thing only works at all because MOST people don’t break the law. If we had a whole country full of Sessions and Trumps it would collapse.
What if everyone did this? What if everyone lied several times a day on really serious matters and were never held accountable? The country wouldn’t function at all. You’d have to verify everything from whether your car ACTUALLY has an airbag if the manufacturer says it does to whether the bank just handed you counterfeit money they were printing in the back. Everything would grind to a halt.
These special snowflakes are only able to behave this way because MOST people behave better.
Elizabelle
@Kay: Defining Deviancy Down. Applied to the political set.
Lies, treason, corruption.
MomSense
Who is that Aunt Lydia sitting behind Sessions?
MisterForkbeard
@MomSense: …wait, who is he talking about? The former AG?
TenguPhule
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: Heads on Pikes.
sigaba
@Steve in the ATL: Sessions never commits perjury, his memory simply fails him. Given the quality of his memory it’s s surprise he’s still allowed to operate a car.
TenguPhule
@Steve in the ATL: All of em, Katie.
MomSense
@MisterForkbeard:
Pretty sure it is Susan Rice’s evil unmasking.
Kay
@Elizabelle:
I’m not an expert but in my experience lying under oath is the exception rather than the rule. Most people don’t do it. I don’t know if it’s fear of prosecution or maybe they’re just not big fucking liars but they get up there and generally play by the rules, even if it’s humiliating or unfavorable to them.
So the AG is like the bottom 10% on honesty and ethics? Great! The 90% can comfort themselves with that, I suppose. That they’re better than he is. It seems like with this many people to choose from we wouldn’t be hiring from the bottom cohort. Can we even get “top 90%”?
TenguPhule
@Kay:
Wait wait wait. You can’t ask those questions here Kay, that’s defeatism and negative and disturbs the feel good energy of our activist community.
Humdog
In many ways, I miss good old hypocrisy. I mean, i remember fondly when R’s cared enough about looking virtuous they’d pay society the compliment of of pretending. Now, blatant lies and lawlessness make it feel there is no hope to return to the good old days of us slagging hypocrites.
MisterForkbeard
@MomSense: Oh, well thank God our AG doesn’t push publicly and repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories in an official setting.
Maybe it’s just his memory again and he “forgot” that was a pile of horseshit.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
Most of the time, its fear that the prosecution could get them on perjury charges.
Being caught in a lie under oath usually ends up losing your case.
germy
Coretta Scott King warned us.
Kay
@TenguPhule:
I feel you are referring to some argument I’m not involved in :)
I will join! I’m a taker-of-sides.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
Don’t insult the floor by comparing them to the basement.
Adam L Silverman
@Villago Delenda Est:
https://www.facebook.com/marlette.cartoons/photos/pb.877045575660338.-2207520000.1497676324./1592018677496354/?type=3&theater
TenguPhule
@Kay: I’ve been saying the exact same thing for months. This has resulted in at least four instances of being accused of being a doom and gloomer, being pied by various upset individuals and other upset reactions. So I like to parody them just to get across how absurd they’re being.
Kay
@MomSense:
Someone should write a piece about the fucking bizarre hatred of Susan Rice because it wasn’t just far Right conservatives- it was media too. They hated her at Hillary Clinton levels. Off the chart.
Eric S.
@Steve in the ATL: I will assume he gets the response to “State your name, ” correct. After that, I’d assume every time he speaks.
TenguPhule
@Kay: Black woman who did a good job in government.
Do you even have to ask?
Adam L Silverman
@MomSense: Mrs. Sessions.
TenguPhule
@Eric S.:
I will presume no such thing.
feebog
Gowdy making it clear he is going after Comey. What bullshit.
Roger Moore
@Steve in the ATL:
Eleventy zillion.
MomSense
OMFG IRS TARGETING SCANDAL!!!!!
It doesn’t matter how many times these bullshit scandals are debunked–they will never quit.
No Drought No More
Today is just a preview, a coming attraction of the pending trial of The People of the United States of America vs. Foghorn Leghorn.*
*(apologies to the real Foghorn Leghorn, who is a good egg).
MomSense
@Kay: Both Hillary and Susan are smarter than they are – hence the resentment and loathing.
Kay
We can and should blame ordinary Trump voters for being such poor judges of character but we have a real problem in this country with the ethical standards of our elites.
We have low quality elites. We may ALSO have low quality peons but these people are fucking ethical train wrecks and they are VERY educated so it has jack-all to do with “education”. They don’t lack education. They’re very “well informed”- they just happen to also be crooks.
Adam L Silverman
@feebog: He’s going to need a bigger boat!
Roger Moore
@Kay:
They can’t stand strong women, and strong black women are even worse.
oatler.
@feebog: Obama, Obama, Obama…
Villago Delenda Est
@Adam L Silverman: Outstanding!
Roger Moore
@MomSense:
Zombie lies are the best lies.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kay: Yet another reason for my nym.
Wipe them out. All of them. Chuckles the Toddler twice.
MJS
@Adam L Silverman: I do hope Gowdy goes after Comey. He (Gowdy) will come out of that encounter very damaged, I think.
Adam L Silverman
@Villago Delenda Est: BTW: I had a blue tick and that was an insult to all blue ticks everywhere. I demand satisfaction!
Elie
@TenguPhule:
The problem is that you undermine actually doing anything about it and have not, to my knowledge, said what you are working on to address the problems that you cite. I am definitely not saying that the problems that you see do not exist. My comments relate to ok, now what are we going to DO about it. You usually present something like “destroy them” or some such without many specifics. Its ok to vent but sooner or later you have to DO SOMETHING or else you are just dumping grievance. That becomes subversive in itself and is why you get taken to task, pied or ignored. I am working with local Democrats to build on grassroots power. We did well in recent races last week and are working on getting good candidates in 2018 from the cemetery board up to State representatives in the legislature. Our work helped flip the WA state legislature to all Democrat. What have YOU done except bang the keyboards with your anger and resentment?
Kay
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’m almost to the point where I’m like “well, it SAYS it’s milk in this jug but it could also be flavored water!”
I don’t think they understand the full implications of lying so much. This thing runs on trust. No one has time to fucking verify everything! We won’t be able to function. It’s like they don’t get WHY it’s so bad. It’s not just a saying or a nice idea. It’s essential. Volkswagon can’t make up engine data because if they do and they get away with it then ordinary people can’t buy cars without taking an engineer along. If for NOTHING else one would think they would get it in terms of wheels ‘o commerce.
hueyplong
@MJS: Gowdy vs. Comey seems like a mismatch. Gowdy still hasn’t recovered from his encounter with Hillary Clinton.
Villago Delenda Est
@hueyplong: Hillary cleaned his clock, but good. The flop sweat was flowing like Lake Erie over Niagara Falls.
NotMax
@hueyplong
Bambi vs. Godzilla comes to mind.
Kay
@hueyplong:
Comey is sort of a showboat, though. It’s his undoing. He cares too much about what people think of him. There was no reason to get tied up in knots like he did. He has an exalted view of the importance of his reputation- in some way only sees himself as he’s reflected by others. It’s like the humble version of the same disease Trump has. It wasn’t about him.
TenguPhule
@Elie:
Blue state, blue reps, completely crushed the GOP here. Not a lot to do here beyond what’s already been done.
We are being hit hard at the federal level by Trump’s actions. So far we’ve avoided the worst effects of his bans, but that’s likely to start changing soon.
So yes, its extremely frustrating to see what’s happening and have no way to change it. But what you don’t grasp and what a lot of other people keep skirting around is that the fundamental assumptions about the laws and rules of this country are not the steady rock we’ve all gotten accustomed to thinking of them as.
We’re facing a fundamental shift in perspective here. Its really coming down to loyalists and traitors.
And guess what, you can’t negotiate with traitors. You can’t co-exist with them. Otherwise they wouldn’t be traitors.
The system simply wasn’t designed to handle this.
Steve in the ATL
@Humdog:
Seriously–how sad is that we miss the days when republicans were merely assholes?
Elie
@Kay:
You’re right, you can’t fact check everything, but we must on an individual basis, confront dishonesty openly and directly. One variant that I see among liberals is the exaggeration of a stance against some position or party because the view or cause is unpopular. This has plagued occasions when you want to present multiple views of an issue to the public. The “bad guys” should not be allowed to speak.
On a more minor issue,in my choir, wearing scent is a huge issue. Most people do not wear it during practice but some have been accused of wearing it and without evidence folks have literally been driven out of participating on just someone’s informal say so.
These occasions must be confronted directly and in both of these instances, I spoke up. It doesn’t change anything necessarily right away, but it more people do it, these folks will not be as brazen. It begins with all of us on our “local” level if we are to ever have a chance with anything higher. Confront it when you see it each time and call it out over and over.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
As long as they can make the numbers for this quarter look good, the rest will take care of itself.
That’s their mindset. And its going to get a lot of people killed. Again.
TenguPhule
@Steve in the ATL: To be fair, they were just as bad with the masks on, just restrained because they weren’t in absolute control yet. But inevitably they were always headed here.
D58826
Is this Sessions hearing about current policy or are we rehashing Hillary/Obama years.? I know the answer of course. As we rehash her e-mails.
Elie
@TenguPhule:
Ok what are YOU going to do about it? And stop impugning what I know. I know we are teetering and that much of our system requires non written customs of honesty and civility. Unlike you however I am doing what I can to push back where all you do is bleat your wounded sense of right and wrong. We have to work against this not just scream that the sky is falling.
Ruckus
@sigaba:
Sessions is one of people who are lucky that autonomic functions exist, if they didn’t he’d lie about rememberimg to breathe. Dense is so dense that he’d just forget to breathe.
D58826
Nicolle Wallace keeps saying that after 8+ years in the Bush WH and McCain campaign she Never met a Russian and yet Sessions manages to forget all of these meetings with Russians. I might not remember my last trip to Dunkin Donats but I think I would remember meeting Russian ambassador.
PAM Dirac
@TenguPhule:
So the answer to the actual question asked is Nothing. You will do nothing but tell people that are doing something how dumb they are.
Chris
@TenguPhule:
Note that “the numbers for this quarter” needn’t even mean the numbers for their company. The numbers for themselves are fine, too.
See also Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, and George W. Bush as businessmen who left a long string of broken and failed businesses behind them but came out of it just fine personally, over and over.
ruemara
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: Sit by me.
TenguPhule
@Elie:
I do what I can. And I also know what I can’t do. Telling people to “do something” when their actions will not affect the ultimate outcome isn’t helping. You “know” we are teetering, but you don’t believe it. Not really. I still have trouble believing how bad it is.
Its a tidal wave.
PST
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
boatboy_srq
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: #NotPatriotic
boatboy_srq
@Kay:
Impunity is the name of the next fourteen-year-old victim.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Elie
@TenguPhule:
Oh wonderful. You say that telling someone to do something when it won’t effect the ultimate outcome says everything about you. Your hopelessness is a curse to us. Your intense whining is just trolling. I will not be responding to anything you write going forward. I don’t respond to trolls
Gelfling 545
@Kay: While I agree that they don’t understand the implications, I doubt very much that they’d care if they were made to understand.
'Niques
@Roger Moore: Strong women frighten weak men.
J R in WV
@Kay:
Here you go. Susan Rice is a total success, being attractive, athletic, brilliant, and accomplished. Valedictorian in high school at a selective private school, Stanford grad, phi beta kappa, became a Harry S Truman Scholar, then a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford, where her dissertation won the Royal Commonwealth Society’s Walter Frewen Lord Prize for outstanding research in the field of Commonwealth History, as well as the Chatham House-British International Studies Association Prize for the most distinguished doctoral dissertation in the United Kingdom in the field of International Relations.
So pretty much blew everyone away in regard to academic brilliance, even though she’s a black woman!
While at Stanford she created an alumni fund that withheld funds from the University as long as Apartheid existed or until the University stopped investing in South Africa. Not popular at a famously conservative institution! A liberal black woman!
When she was 34 (or so) she became one of the youngest Assistant Secretaries of State ever, although her identity as a Washington “assimilationist” didn’t help her with the Congressional Black Caucus. First black woman to be seated as Ambassador to the the United Nations as well.
Then Benghazi happened, and conservatives took advantage of the fog of war to attack her intensely, for reporting the plausible current intelligence available about a terrorist attack – I think they hated her already for being a successful black woman with power, surely enough reason for Republicans and bigots of all parties. Benghazi was just a reason to pile on, and so clearly and obviously not race-based, right? /s
So there you have it. Why she was so successful, why she was so hated. The reasons are the same, only the believers are different.
J R in WV
@J R in WV:
I left it out, but she was also point guard on the HS basketball team, and team captain. So athletically successful as well. Beautiful, brilliant, strong, powerful, Black – they have to hate her. It’s their nature as scorpions!
Chris
@J R in WV:
That Susan Rice crap was demented even by CDS standards. The entire attack revolved around something that she literally read off of the briefing she got through channels from the CIA people. She had absolutely no involvement in the incident in question or power over the people involved.
(Speaking of the CIA, one of the most revealing things about the whole Benghazi shit-show was that General Petraeus was never remotely a target of right-wing ire. Never mind that as CIA director, the Benghazi installation was as much his baby as the Secretary of State’s, and never mind that as CIA director, it was his job more than almost anyone else in government to know what was going on and to give the rest of the government a clear picture of it. But of course, he wasn’t a Democrat, he wasn’t black or a woman, and he was a soldier-hero who wasn’t yet tainted with anything like the sex scandal that came out a little bit later. So for right-wing ideologues, there was nothing there to punch).
Duane
@sigaba: “I don’t remember” is a pretty sure sign of lying. Bart Simpson level of lying.
Roy Moore couldn’t remember the teenagers he dated. A 32-year old man that dated an 18-year old cheerleader is going to remember. Forever. May feel pretty skeevy about it, but definitely remember.
Chris
@Duane:
This is also the thing that gets me about Trump’s BSing. It is or at least should be instantly recognizable to anybody who’s ever been caught short and had to come up with a bullshit answer to a teacher’s question when they didn’t do the reading, or to an interviewer asking about a skill you don’t have, or to Mom and Dad when you have to say that, why yes, I totally finished my homework! Sarah Palin was this way too. (“All of them, Katie!”)
To be clear, everybody does this from time to time. I’m not dismayed that politicians do it too. I am slightly concerned, however, when politicians like Palin or Trump or Moore are clearly in Bart-Simpson-level-of-lying-mode constantly and without interruption.
Gravenstone
@TenguPhule: You know you’re free to leave, any. fucking. minute. now.
Silent no more
Some folks here are from the VA area, right?
We’ve been looking to move to a significantly cheaper part of the country, and are considering Staunton, VA as one of the choices. Anyone know the political climate around there? I’m worried about being on a blue island with the spouse amidst a red sea. Any and all info would be welcomed.
rekoob
@Silent no more: Currently in Richmond, after a number of years in Alexandria. Staunton (pronounced STAN-tin) is indeed a bit of purple surrounded by red. Consider Fredericksburg, which is about the same size, with better transit to/from the Eastern Seaboard, but it’s more expensive. Richmond has a good vibe, in general, and is solidly in CD-4 now.
catclub
@Roger Moore: if it is a choice between going after a black woman or David Petraeus ( who I think was head of CIA at the time) I have no doubts.