Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

Democrats are back in array!

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

I was promised a recession.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

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

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

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

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / What’s the story, morning glory?

What’s the story, morning glory?

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I guess the email to Trump Jr. just gave a link to already public knowledge about Wikileaks emails:

A 2016 email sent to President Trump and top aides pointed the campaign to hacked documents from the Democratic National Committee that had already been made public by the group WikiLeaks a day earlier.

[….]

The full email — which was first described to CNN as being sent on Sept. 4, 10 days earlier — indicates that the writer may have simply been flagging information that was already widely available.

Reader Interactions

40Comments

  3. 3.

    trollhattan

    I wonder how his lawyer explained the meaning of “scintilla” to li’l Donny Jr.?

    O/T, this fucking guy.

    A police officer charged with the murder of an unarmed man in the US state of Arizona has been found not guilty. Philip Brailsford shot and killed 26-year-old Daniel Shaver in the hallway of a hotel in early 2016. Bodycam footage of the incident, released after the verdict, showed Mr Shaver on his knees asking officers not to shoot him just before he was killed.

    Mr Brailsford was acquitted of murder and a lesser manslaughter charge.

    Mr Shaver was shot five times with a semi-automatic rifle as he crawled towards the officers, sobbing. Prosecutors argued that the officer had responded appropriately, according to his training, when Mr Shaver reached towards his waistband – because he believed there was a concealed firearm there.

    Mr Shaver was confronted by police responding to a report of a man pointing a gun out of his hotel room window in January 2016. The police report said he showed guests in his hotel room a rifle he used for work, killing birds. It later emerged that the rifle was an airsoft or pellet gun, rather than a genuine firearm.

    Looking at the pics of the cop and the victim, if I were to encounter either of them at random I can tell you which one looks worthy of avoiding at all cost (hint: it’s not the now-dead guy).

    Arizona and Alabama seem to be having a little side-competition.

  7. 7.

    Roger Moore

    @Tbone:

    If it was publicly available, why would they need a special link?

    To make it seem special and thereby gain extra attention and credibility.

  10. 10.

    Mnemosyne

    Ugh. Between my knee hurting and all the crap in the air from the fires triggering my asthma and the whole Franken thing, it’s been a crap week. I’m looking forward to putting on my jammies tonight and forgetting about all of this crap for at least 24 hours.

  11. 11.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    Thought I’d drop this here:
    The Worst of All Possible Worlds: Did Market Leninism Win the Cold War?

    Imagine an alternative universe in which the two major Cold War superpowers evolved into the United Soviet Socialist States. The conjoined entity, linked perhaps by a new Bering Straits land bridge, combines the optimal features of capitalism and collectivism. From Siberia to Sioux City, we’d all be living in one giant Sweden.

    It sounds like either the paranoid nightmare of a John Bircher or the wildly optimistic dream of Vermont soci*list Bernie Sanders.

    Back in the 1960s and 1970s, however, this was a rather conventional view, at least among influential thinkers like economist John Kenneth Galbraith who predicted that the United States and the Soviet Union would converge at some point in the future with the market tempered by planning and planning invigorated by the market. Like many an academic notion, it didn’t come to pass. The United States veered off in the direction of Reaganomics. And the Soviet Union eventually collapsed. So much for “convergence theory,” which like EST or cold fusion went the way of most crackpot ideas.

    Or did it? Take another look at our world in 2015 and tell me if, somehow we haven’t backed our way through the looking glass into that very alternative universe — with a twist. The planet currently seems to be on the cusp of a decidedly unharmonic convergence.

    Consider what’s happening in Russia, where an elected autocrat presides over a free market shaped by a powerful state apparatus. Similarly, China’s mash-up of market Leninism offers a one-from-column-A-and-one-from-Column-B combination platter. Both countries are also rife with crime, corruption, growing inequality, and militarism. Think of them as the un-Swedens.

    […]

    Instead of converging toward Scandinavian soci*lism, the U.S. has been slouching toward illiberalism for some time now. The Tea Party bemoans the “nanny” and “gun-control” state, but misses the deeply sinister ways in which that state has been captured by the forces of illiberality. The United States has expanded its archipelago of incarceration, our homegrown gulag, so dramatically that we have more people in prison — in total and by percentage of population — than any developed country on Earth. Our political system has been taken over by a club of the rich — our own nomenklatura — with corruption so embedded that no one dares call it by that name and critics instead speak of the “revolving door” and “voter suppression” and the “influence of money in politics.” The deterioration of public infrastructure has, as in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, turned the country into an embarrassment of falling bridges, exploding gas lines, bursting pipelines, backward railroads, unsecured power plants, and potential ecological catastrophes.

    Add in spreading governmental surveillance and secrecy, unsustainable military spending, and a disastrously interventionist, military-first foreign policy and the United States is looking a lot like either the old Soviet Union or the Russia of today. Neither is a flattering comparison. America has not yet descended into despotism, so the convergence is hardly complete. But it might be only one right-wing populist leader away from that worst-case scenario.

    The article was written in early 2015. Prophetic.

    The thrust is this: history never ends and we seem to be expecting that authoritarian regimes (UnSwedens) in places like Turkey, Russia and China will eventually become more like the West: liberal and democratic. But China has surpassed our economy to become the largest in the world and doesn’t appear to be ready to end it’s one party rule any time soon. The article does end on a hopeful note. We are not slaves to history and can change our system to become something that is truly great and most optimal for everyone. We just have to want to and fight like hell.

    One of its flaws is it does seem to ignore the effects of racism and general xenophobia.

  12. 12.

    Spanky

    Some here (and you know who you are) might get a kick out of this WaPo review:

    Starbucks’s Christmas Tree Frappuccino tastes like broken promises and Thin Mints

    … The Christmas Tree Frappuccino, which debuted Thursday, is the latest in 2017’s miserable slog of Instagrammable drinks known more for the mythical creatures and flora they supposedly resembled, rather than their flavors, which were immaterial. There was the Unicorn Frappuccino, which tasted like sour birthday cake and shame, followed by the Dragon Frappuccino, the Cherry Blossom Frappuccino, the Zombie Frappuccino, Vampire Frappuccino, and, after we barely escaped pumpkin spice season alive, finally, the Christmas Tree Frappuccino….

  14. 14.

    gene108

    @trollhattan:

    Hopefully Shaver’s family can bankrupt Mesa with their wrongful death lawsuit.

    Only way this changes is if cities lose so much money in civil suits, they feel a need to enforce better policing.

  15. 15.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    This is a big blow to the “True Progressives” like Matt Taibbi et. al. who have spent the past year insisting Wikileaks was objective and Drumpf never worked with the Russians.

    HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCOONODE!

  17. 17.

    Patricia Kayden

    @trollhattan: I’m not second guessing cops but I wonder if they could be trained to shoot to maim instead of to kill. If someone is “reaching for a weapon” (which it seems that every unarmed victim allegedly does), why not shoot to stop that instead of straight up shooting to kill? And then somehow, it always turns out that the victim doesn’t have a weapon. **eye roll**

  18. 18.

    HumboldtBlue

    @trollhattan:

    Don’t watch the fucking video, that’s all I’ll say. Policing in this country has become making war on anyone who has no influence. If you are poor and you interact with a cop and you get murdered in cold blood, even with video, you can be almost certain the cop will face no discipline at all. Maybe Harris and Gillibrand and Feinstein and Speier and McCaskill will call for the cop to resign because because he aint gonna lose his job any other way.

  20. 20.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @germy: What a snowflake. Doesn’t want any dissent or criticism in his mentions. Dainty flower.

  24. 24.

    Patricia Kayden

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: Were they on drugs when Julian Assange went on Bill Maher’s show and made it clear that he was going after Secretary Clinton but not Donald Trump? Anyone with a brain cell could have figured out that Wikileaks is all about Russia, Trump and rightwing politics. They tried to mess with Macron and were pro-Brexit. Taibbi and Greenwald are playing dumb.

  28. 28.

    TenguPhule

    @Patricia Kayden:

    I’m not second guessing cops but I wonder if they could be trained to shoot to maim instead of to kill.

    Not possible. They’re trained to shoot at central body mass. Trying to shoot at arms or legs is heroic fiction.

  30. 30.

    Duane

    Three high school students died Thursday from gunshot wounds at their New Mexico school. I’ve not seen any mention of it here, and little in the national news.
    Surprising how we’re becoming desensitized to gun violence. Another day in the USA, sadly.

  33. 33.

    rikyrah

    Female aides said Franks suggested intercourse to impregnate them
    12/08/2017 03:54 PM EST

    Arizona Rep. Trent Franks allegedly made unwanted advances toward female staffers in his office and retaliated against one who rebuffed him, according to House GOP sources with knowledge of a complaint against him.

    The allegations, which reached Speaker Paul Ryan and top GOP leaders in recent days, led to Franks’ sudden resignation this week. Franks originally announced that he would resign on Jan. 31, 2018. But just hours after POLITICO inquired about the allegations, he sped up his resignation and left office Friday.

    The sources said Franks approached two female staffers about acting as a potential surrogate for him and his wife, who has struggled with fertility issues for years. But the aides were concerned that Franks was asking to have sexual relations with them. It was not clear to the women whether he was asking about impregnating the women through sexual intercourse or in vitro fertilization. Franks opposes abortion rights as well as procedures that discard embryos.

    A former staffer also alleged that Franks tried to persuade a female aide that they were in love by having her read an article that described how a person knows they’re in love with someone, the sources said. One woman believed she was the subject of retribution after rebuffing Franks. While she enjoyed access to the congressman before the incident, that access was revoked afterward, she told Republican leaders.

  34. 34.

    Duane

    @TenguPhule: Give it a few days. Does Vegas take bets on when we’ll have the next mass shooting? It’s one thing that’s dependable in this country.

  36. 36.

    Mnemosyne

    @Steve in the ATL:

    Nope. We’re pretty siloed at the Giant Evil, so I don’t think I even know anyone in the tax department. I used to know someone in compensation, but I haven’t talked to her in years.

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