Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

When we show up, we win.

White supremacy is terrorism.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

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

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Let me file that under fuck it.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

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

“Look, it’s not against the rules anywhere, but a black woman with power was dating and there has to be something wrong with that.”

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

You are here: Home / 2019 / Archives for June 2019

Archives for June 2019

Because of Course He Did

by | 84 Comments

This post is in: ,

This is not even remotely surprising:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) pushed officials at the state’s Department of Public Safety to scour driver’s license records for noncitizens and forward that information to the Texas secretary of state, a fellow Republican, in advance of the state’s botched voter purge, according to emails made public Tuesday.

Texas officials would go on to falsely claim that they had found nearly 100,000 noncitizens registered to vote. They later admitted that number was based on deeply flawed data. But some Texas officials knew all along that they could access more information in order to determine whether the people whose driver’s licenses said they were noncitizens were actually noncitizens, the emails suggest — and pushed ahead regardless.

The emails, obtained by the Campaign Legal Center as part of litigation over the purge effort, provide the first look behind the scenes into a highly controversial state effort to identify noncitizens on Texas’ voter rolls. The state has refused to comply with a congressional request to turn over communications and documents related to the January incident.

It doesn’t matter if you are actually a citizen, Republicans don’t consider you a full citizen if your skin is a certain color or if your last name is harder to pronounce than Smith. And nothing will happen in John Roberts’ post-racial America.

Because of Course He DidPost + Comments (84)

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: The Neverending Battle

by | 111 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Current mood:

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: The Neverending BattlePost + Comments (111)

Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Nobody Loves A Charmless Grifter

by | 26 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,


The NYTimes withdrew the tweet, but Maggie Haberman’s two-faced encomium remains — “For Trump, London Visit Is a (Royal) Family Affair”:

… Whether they had official roles in the visit or not, the extended Trump family seemed to materialize in London overnight — all save the president’s youngest son, Barron, who stayed home. But Monday’s lavish audience with the British royals was the culmination of more than a month of planning by White House officials who have grown accustomed to accommodating President Trump’s children, whether that includes redrawing plans for a state visit or evicting guests from their seats at the State of the Union address.

As Mr. Trump presides over a White House with unprecedented turnover, he has relied on his children the same way he has for decades — asking them for advice or seeing them as surrogates in the fight against his real and perceived enemies.

On this visit, another family opportunity surfaced: The Kennedys have long occupied the American political culture as the unofficial royal family, but this week, the Trumps appeared to present themselves as the 2019 version…

Our British ‘cousins’ have an expansive acquaintance with that class of professional grifters which organize themselves as an Aristocracy, so they have rather higher standards for such gentries’ entertainment value than the gawping rubes of Trump’s loyal (very) Base. Per the Daily Beast, “William, Harry and Kate Deny Trump What He Wanted Most: a Photo Op”:

Prince Harry and his brother Prince William have successfully denied Donald Trump the opportunity of appearing in a photo with either of them or their glamorous and popular wives during his state visit to the U.K., which would have been invaluable PR for his 2020 re-election campaign, after the president used the word “nasty” while discussing Harry’s wife, Meghan Markle…

It was also noticeable that when Trump visited Westminster Abbey on Monday to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, he was not accompanied by William, as might have been expected, but by Prince Andrew, the queen’s second son.

Andrew’s name-recognition in the wider U.S. is minimal, meaning the trip will have little PR value for the 2020 campaign…

[Perhaps the two men had met before: “Randy Andy” was notoriously another Friend of Jeffrey Epstein.]

And yet, President Trump has made it clear to those close to him that he actually does care about his reputation among the British royals. According to several former and current White House officials, Trump will grow visibly more animated or excited when the topic of meeting prominent members of royal families comes up, including the British royals. He makes a point of repeatedly asking aides about what he and others should wear during state visits and high-profile events with foreign countries’ royalty, the sources said, and enthusiastically asks advisers about what kind of pomp and pageantry he should expect…

…[A]Whitehall official told The Times that the queen’s meeting last year with President Trump was “kept to the bare minimum. The Queen will do her duty, but among the wider family, they were not as enthusiastic as they were when [President Barack] Obama came over.”

Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Nobody Loves A Charmless GrifterPost + Comments (26)

Thirty Years Ago Today In Tiananmen Square

by | 33 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Thirty years ago today the government of the People’s Republic of China sent in the Soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army to liberate the lives out of the protestors in Tiananmen Square in what is described as the massacre that ended the six weeks and six days of protests. Tomorrow, the 5th of June, will mark the thirty year anniversary of the iconic images of Tank Man, the Chinese citizen, holding a shopping bag in each hand, who braved a column of tanks trying to roll to and through Tiananmen Square.

The BBC has done an excellent job in its coverage of the anniversaries of these events. I’d like to highlight two different videos they’ve done. The first focuses on Wang Zhixin, one of the leaders of the student protests in Tiananmen Square as he returns there for the first time in thirty years.

The second focuses on the coercive power of states, especially single party, authoritarian states, to leverage information and the control over it to propagandize, indoctrinate, and/or intimidate its own citizenry.

I’ll end with the iconic video showing images of true resistance and real bravery. Video of Tank Man, which had to be smuggled out of China. Tank Man’s actual name is Wang Weilin. He was a 19 year old student when he stood down the column of tanks. His whereabouts and ultimate fate have been unknown for thirty years!

Open thread!

 

 

Thirty Years Ago Today In Tiananmen SquarePost + Comments (33)

Russiagate Open Thread: One Step At A Time…

by | 151 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , ,

Note carefully, he’s not disagreeing with Pelosi — this is the next step in the essential choreography to block off every Repub bolthole:

Former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who as recently as last month cautioned Democrats about the perils of pursuing President Trump’s impeachment, now says the House should open an impeachment inquiry that might or might not lead to a formal effort to remove him from office.

“It’s not the right thing to do nothing,” Reid said in an interview Monday with USA TODAY. “It’s not the right thing to jump into impeachment without doing an inquiry.”

The most important goal, he said, would be to “give the American people a view of what’s going on.”

The House could establish an impeachment panel to investigate the allegations that some say amount to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” necessary under the Constitution to remove a president from office. But such a panel wouldn’t necessarily vote to impeach Trump — that is, to approve Articles of Impeachment that would send the process to the Senate for a trial….

Reid’s comments are also notable because he had what he called “a front-row seat” at the nation’s last impeachment trial, when Reid was Senate minority leader. Then, the Republican-controlled House voted to impeach Clinton, but the Senate didn’t convict him in the trial that followed.

That impeachment effort rebounded politically against GOP candidates in the 1998 midterm elections.

Reid acknowledged the potential political blowback and the likelihood that the current GOP-controlled Senate would never vote to remove Trump from office…

In the end, he said, “I just think that Republicans are going arm-in-arm with Trump, right over the cliff.” But he said public opinion might be affected by a systematic effort to explore allegations that Trump tried to obstruct the special counsel’s investigation and engaged in other wrongdoing….

Russiagate Open Thread: One Step At A Time…Post + Comments (151)