Journalistic assassin weighs in:
In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in North Carolina — 49.8 to 46.2. Today, he’s basically tied with Joe Biden in the state polling averages. But Trump tells his supporters here that he thinks the crowds are bigger at his events this cycle than they were last time. pic.twitter.com/TS28w3Ang8
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) September 8, 2020
Several Trump one-liners have fallen flat with the crowd here in North Carolina. He called the Green New Deal the “Green New Nightmare” with delivery that left room for a beat of laughter or applause. It didn’t come.
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) September 8, 2020
Don’t you think he looks… tired?
Let me sum up this presser for those of you who are not Trump cultists: he is terrified
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 7, 2020
Every time Trump steps to the microphone now it's like the end of A Face in the Crowd, except everyone pretends it's not.
— Schooley (@Rschooley) September 7, 2020
Andy Griffith libel! (Nobody would greenlight a production about Putin’s media-made mouthpiece, DonJon ‘Pissy’ Rhodes… )
you’re gonna get a lot more of these morose tantrums as he realizes the morose tantrums are not working https://t.co/4vSBcaSNI7
— kilgore trout, non mini-stroke haver (@KT_So_It_Goes) September 7, 2020
The unsaid in Trump’s campaign cash problems is that he won in 2016 via foreign help and media complicity more so than by running an actual campaign.
In 2020, he has already set fire to a mountain of money on a campaign op about as successful as one of his casinos. https://t.co/PwR6MnxHAg
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) September 8, 2020
On The Road After Dark – Lapassionara – Paris in the daylight
Major Major Major Major
May the failures continue!
also, lolsob:
NotMax
If I didn’t know there was no such pill I’d swear Dolt 45 was addicted to humanity suppressants.
RaflW
Trump is considering putting $100M of his own cash into the campaign exactly the way he is considering releasing his new health care plan two weeks ago.
Geoduck
Interesting to note that a lot of the crowd was wearing masks.
dmsilev
@RaflW: It’s an Infrastructure Week miracle!
sanjeevs
I’ve been reading Compromised – the book by Peter Strzok , Comey’s head of Counterintelligence at the FBI. I really wanted to know what happened with the CI investigation and so far I’ve just read up to the Election.
The Ciinton emails controversy
BruceFromOhio
Nothing is more dangerous than a person who believes there is nothing left to lose.
Except maybe an agitated cobra. That’s pretty dangerous.
Elie
Problem is that the more he swirls down his financial and other resources, the more reckless and crazy he will become. We have not demonstrated any way to contain his most destructive actions — who — WHO/WHAT will stop him from destroying whole agencies and programs — impacts worse than we have experienced for REAL PEOPLE. The military leadership has been ultra disciplined but what are their margins? This guy will try to destroy the old US of A if things don’t go this way. Do you have any doubts about that? So what the fuck are the options for those of us who care to retain our country’s government? Stop bullshitting me with the fog of “who knows?” — we are fast approaching a decision point where we better have some answers — and most of this is likely to come before things are really “settled” from the election…. We are a civilian led government for now — but how do we address what may be civilian led insurrection from Trumps MAGAT militias? Lets not wait to talk about it until after the election….
sanjeevs
The Trump Campaign Investigation (up until the Election).
Jean
If anything is working so far for Trump, it may be the socialism scare. I hear it among Republicans I know (with whom I don’t engage). I wonder what they think socialism means–giving free stuff to poor people? Communism? I don’t get it. They certainly like Medicare, Social Security, Public education, interstate highways, etc. Over at the Orange Satan, there crying about Florida–we’re tied there, according to some polling, and not winning Latinos by the same margin Hilliary did.
Another Scott
@sanjeevs: Thanks for the review.
I saw a brief news report about him and his book recently and it was almost interesting enough to consider putting it on The List.
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/515543-peter-strzok-trump-is-compromised-on-national-security
Fortunately, your post disabused me of that idea, so thank you very much!
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
@BruceFromOhio
Bobby McGee being an exception to the dangerous part.
:)
sanjeevs
@Another Scott: Yup. Would not recommend. I really wanted to see what his explanation was for the pathetic counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.
Chetan Murthy
@sanjeevs: All these “heroes” were 100% on the “nuke Hillary team”, ready to do whatever it fuckin’ took. And then, they got their wish, and boy howdy talk about buyer’s remorse. And they’re tryin’ to patch back together their run-thru-a-woodchipper reputations.
Citizen Alan
@Jean: Socialism. Communism. Marxism. The assholes don’t know what any of those words mean and they don’t care to. This is because they use those words merely as placeholders because they know in 2020 that they can’t get away with calling us n*****-lovers, which is how 90% of Republicans in the country refer to us in their inner monologues.
Chetan Murthy
@Citizen Alan: This is 100% right. 100%.
Chetan Murthy
@Citizen Alan: But it’s OK. We know them, too. “You’re a GrOPer, eh? Rapist, pedophile, or both? Or do you just like to watch?”
Morzer
@Chetan Murthy:
Nothing has done more to destroy what little faith I had in the FBI than the spectacle of Comey and his best and brightest publicly revealing day after day just how unprofessional, arrogant and unfit for the job they all were. They are apparently too stupid and self-absorbed to realize just how much they are showing the world about themselves – and it’s an amazingly unpleasant and embarrassing picture.
Roger Moore
@RaflW:
When Trump says he’s considering putting $100M of his own money into the campaign, you have to remember he considers all the campaign money his personal property. Putting his own money into the campaign effectively means not embezzling that much.
Redshift
@Jean: Republicans have been running on socialism=Soviet dictatorship since the 1970s, in my memory, and I’d guess since the 50s. That’s enough for the older Republicans; now they try to reach a bit younger by adding that anything socialist will inevitably lead to becoming Venezuela.
So no, they will not accept that anything like Social Security or Medicare are socialist, or that numerous European countries have had socialist prime ministers who were later voted out without having become dictators.
Jean
@Citizen Alan: I agree that “socialism” is used as a “placeholder” for Democrats are scary. They don’t seem equally frightened about far right extremists or authoritarian government, and would be astonished by any accusation of how this current trend as exemplified by the Trump administration can lead to American fascism.
sanjeevs
@Chetan Murthy: Yeah. I was trying to figure out why the CI investigation was such a wet noodle.
It’s clear they all idolized Comey. A guy who, like them had risen to the top echelon at the FBI then went to the private sector where he scored a 7m a year sinecure at Bridgewater before returning to the FBI.
They didnt do a proper investigation of Trumpco because they’re Republicans. Start Investigating finances and you risk pissing off the Mercers, Dalios and Erik Princes that were going to provide that sweet retirement package.
James E Powell
@sanjeevs:
He is either lying or just so fucking stupid it isn’t worth listening to him. Is it possible that he was not aware of the “visceral hatred” the NY FBI agents expressed for Hillary Clinton?
This is evidence that neither he nor the FBI cares about corruption as long it’s Republican corruption. Looking the other way, letting things go, that’s just how they do things in the FBI. Unless it’s a Clinton. Then it’s pull out all the stops and abandon all the rules.
Redshift
@sanjeevs: Didn’t someone else’s book or article recently reveal that Rosenstein had made the counterintelligence investigation part of Mueller’s assignment because the FBI really thought there should be one, and then ordered Mueller not to pursue it without telling the FBI, so there never was one?
Chetan Murthy
@Redshift: That FTFNYT fucker Schmidt’s book, yeah.
sanjeevs
@Redshift: Correct. I haven’t read the post-election part of his book – I’ll post about it when I do if anyone is interested.
Calouste
@Jean: I don’t know what the shitgibbon has against communists. He’s probably jealous that they could build a wall (the East German ones anyway), and he can’t.
Mallard Filmore
@Jean:
Socialism is evil and must be strictly reserved for the rich.
sanjeevs
@James E Powell: She didn’t trust the FBI and she was proven right. She thought she’d be safer with a private email server and she was right (State Department was hacked, she wasnt).
She said half Trump’s supporters were ‘deplorables’ (racists) and she was right. She called Trump a Russian puppet to his face whilst the FBI was fucking around trying to get a warrant on Carter Page.
cain
@Morzer:
And it’s just really unfortunate that Obama kept this man as head of the FBI instead of someone else. I feel like all this feel good kumbaya and adding the opposing party has turned into a farce.
Jean
Why did they hate Hillary Clinton so much? I’ve never understood it.
Chetan Murthy
@cain: No more fuckin’ GrOPer daddies.
Jean
@cain: That’s a great question. When my husband was working for Tim Kaine, he had a positive view of Comey. It made the whole Clinton attack seem very bizarre. Why Obama chose Comey instead of someone else is also weird.
James E Powell
@Jean:
I never did either. And I know plenty of Democratic voting tote-baggers who have hated her since 1992.
I don’t know if the video is available, but there was a concert for New York City after 9/11 and when NY Senator Hillary Clinton began to speak, there were boos. Why? I have no idea. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that this nation has a lot of very fucked up people in it. Ignorant, hateful bigots.
Splitting Image
@Calouste:
Under communism, he wouldn’t have been able to turn away black residents from his rental buildings. He got sued for this back in the 70s and he’s held a grudge ever since. Racism is the one and only thing he has truly believed in all of his life.
sanjeevs
@Jean: Not sure I understand that either.
But even apart from that is that the criticism from Republicans matters a lot to the FBI. This is really clear in the book.
They don’t care about Congressional Dems, Dems at the DoJ or even Obama.
Why? Mabye because of who hands out the lucrative post-FBI career jobs. It’s not Democrats.
cain
He believe in himself more than anything else.
piratedan
@sanjeevs: please do, if nothing else, tomes like this should be on file and into the historic record and used to unfuck the agency. It’s obvious now that they’re subject to the same organizational biases as our 4th estate and if we can’t find people willing to simply follow the rules and follow the established protocol without using their thumbs on the scales then you don’t need to be in public service anymore and don’t expect us to be fucking grateful that you fucked up in your job so egregiously.
Makes me wonder how many qualified people out there could be potentially working for the government but weren’t hired because they’re weren’t conservative white males with shitty haircuts.
Bill Arnold
Re the end of A Face in the Crowd, here’s the dialogue:
And the scene:
https://youtu.be/P4_GCMBMll8?t=7492
cain
@James E Powell:
I wasn’t a big fan of her either. I think it’s just because she just wasn’t particularly inspiring and all the political shit that happens around her is so tiring.
They ruined a good candidate with their constant shit throwing over 30 years.
HumboldtBlue
Can we get the California folks to check in?
There are several fires burning in the region and 160 miles south Willits is not doing well.
Sebastian
@sanjeevs:
He wants a PRIZE for missing the biggest intelligence attack by a major foreign adversary in the history of the republic???
Chetan Murthy
@Sebastian: “You don’t understand; the [slur for woman, starts with “b”] was gonna win!”
Sebastian
Turns out there is a fucking deep state but it’s blind towards Republicans and only attacks Democrats.
Sebastian
@Chetan Murthy:
They should all be summarily demoted. All of them.
Fucking incompetent arrogant asshats. IT HAPPENED ON THEIR FUCKING WATCH.
Origuy
@HumboldtBlue: San Jose here. We’ve been getting the smoke from the Mendocino fire. Earlier today it stayed in the upper atomosphere, but in the afternoon it lowered and the air quality got worse. I’ve been monitoring the Creek Fire around Shaver Lake. It’s starting to get out of the mountains and into the foothills to the south. One evacuation center in Oakhurst had to be closed because the area was evacuated. It’s heading north towards Yosemite, too.
Up in Oregon, the outskirts of Medford are on fire. We could lose a medium-sized city.
piratedan
@Sebastian: I feel the same, all of this shit that has gone down and what do we get? Do we get remorse? Do we get introspection? No, we get, “I got a book deal and once everyone reads it they’ll be completely on board with how this went down….”.
THEY STILL don’t think they did anything wrong….
Mike G
@HumboldtBlue:
Just a little smoke here on the Central Coast and no fires too close, but we’re about the only part of the state not seriously affected right now. At least it’s cooled down a little, the last few days were brutal for heat, even by the ocean.
https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/
Steeplejack
@sanjeevs:
I think this is a big background cause of the (long-term) rot in the DOJ (and especially the FBI). They are mostly nice, polite Republicans, but they buy into GOP framing even more than the mainstream media do, and it colors everything that they do. That’s why Mueller was so persnickety about how he conducted his (too narrow) inquiry, and it’s why many of them didn’t realize for years what a monster Barr is. The signs were there in his first go-round in the Reagan administration. They act like they’re all collegial members of a wise gentlemen’s club, and the Democrats don’t even come into it.
Mallard Filmore
@HumboldtBlue: South end of the Big Valley here. No fire danger in my area. Smoke all day, must be in the upper atmosphere as there is no strong smell.
It’s taking about 20% off my solar panel output.
HumboldtBlue
@Origuy:
Oh no
Chetan Murthy
@piratedan:
The media give ’em a pass, too. I mean even Wonkette (all hail The Editrix, may her red correction pen never run dry) doesn’t call out Strzok at all for being such a Hillary-hater at a time when the real threat was Putin’s Pet Coprophage.
Steeplejack
@sanjeevs:
Yeah, what Another Scott said. Thanks for the detailed review.
Steeplejack
@sanjeevs:
Yes, I’m interested.
piratedan
@Chetan Murthy: and I sit back here and I try to list all of the transgressions committed by Hilary Clinton against the United States of America and it’s a pretty thin damn list….
For this she is apparently one of the most hated women in politics and its a long burning visceral hatred.
Not much of a list although I have to say, its a freaking miracle that she’s never been served papers to defend herself in court, and the best reason I can think of, is that they understand #4 all too well and wouldn’t like being shown up by a woman.
sanjeevs
@Steeplejack: Meant to add one more line about that. The pre-election investigation was a Trump campaign investigation only.
They must have known about the tape Evan McMullin made, where Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy have a good laugh about Putin paying Trump and Rohrbacher.
I presume the FBI knew about Maria Butina too and the other Russian operations on GOP reps and associated organizations like the NRA.
But Strzok never mentions any of this.
Chetan Murthy
@piratedan: She refused to stay at home and bake cookies, instead going out and becoming one of the country’s top lawyers: that was her real crime.
piratedan
@Chetan Murthy: good catch, my guess is that the cookies would have had raisins in them if she had…
Steeplejack
@sanjeevs:
“It was all Trump, not the Republicans!” They don’t see the rot because they’re immersed in it.
Kent
Plenty of racism under communism. It’s just flavored to each individual country’s history.
USSR – Holodomor and many mass ethnic deportations and massacres
Cambodia – Genocide against ethnic Vietnamese and other ethnic minorities launched the whole thing.
China – Uighurs and Tibetans
I don’t know what Trump would have been under communism, but nothing good.
Mary G
@HumboldtBlue: Here’s the LAT article on the Bobcat Fire, set by idiots revealing their baby’s gender:
We had a much cooler day in coastal OC today and no Santa Ana winds have showed up yet. Usually my joints hurt before they show up and I feel fine, but it could all go to hell in a minute.
scott (the other one)
@sanjeevs:
Here’s the thing. Strzok and Comey clearly think they’re in the mold of Eliot Ness or maybe Harry Callahan or, hell, maybe Martin Riggs or even Jack Bauer.
But one of the things most of those stories make clear is that the characters know and understand—whether they say it or not, and either way, the AUDIENCE knows and understands—that they may need to break the rules, go outside the law, to get the bad guy…but that if they’re wrong, they’re screwed.
That’s the trade-off those heroes/anti-heroes make. They bend or break the rules to get the villain. And if they get it wrong, they’re fired, they lose their badges, they maybe go to jail. They understand that’s how it works: the fact that they’re willing to risk everything is what makes them heroes (in the context of these stories).
Comey and Strzok and the rest of them don’t get that second bit. They just think the rules don’t apply to them being, well, obviously, they’re righteous. And that’s reason enough, no?
So Comey and Strzok need to have their pensions stripped, their clearances stripped and, in the case of Comey, be disbarred. Make it crystal clear to these wannabe heroes that if they’re going play with the big boys, they’re going to reap the consequences if they’re wrong.
Or, in the future, such guys could, you know, just do their damn jobs right.
HumboldtBlue
@Mary G:
Monrovia/Arcadia, that’s a lot of people.
I’ve got a half-dozen on watch in San Diego.
Morzer
@atrupar
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@HumboldtBlue: The sky in the afternoon was a creepy orange here in Ukiah from the Willits “Oak” fire, and with all the smoke, it was actually almost dark by around 2 p.m. The silver lining was the smoke kept it noticeably cooler today, only getting up to around 89 degrees (it had been forecast to be about 99, which was already down from the weekend 107) so that was a break for the firefighters. Hwy 101 is still closed both directions around Willits and some suburbs (e.g. all of Brooktrails) are evacuated. The fire is heading north; no news yet on what caused it
It’s 863+ acres, about 10% contained now, up from 5% this afternoon.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Plus he’d have to have that money available. $100 million? Yeah I don’t think he has that laying around. In any form. He may have a bit but $100mil is more than just a bit. And he’s so good with money….
Ruckus
@HumboldtBlue:
Socal has issues as well. The Bobcat fire is thought to be threatening quite a few bedroom communities and they are telling people to prepare to evacuate. The home I grew up in is in that area. It’s over 100 yrs old now. Mom moved out quite a while back and I haven’t seen the place for a while but still. So the north sides of Arcadia, Monrovia, Duarte, Azusa and Glendora are all under a possible evacuation order. This is the fire that started 2 days ago that I wrote about being 4-5 miles from me has grown to over 10,000 acres and is only 10% contained and Santa Ana winds are expected tomorrow.
smike
@cain:
Exactly! The millions and millions of dollars spent returned a dividend. Right wing in action.
Ruckus
@Mary G:
The gender reveal fire is the El Dorado fire in Yucaipa, also at 10,000 acres.
The Bobcat fire is under suspicion but the cause is as of yet unknown.
Morzer
@Ruckus:
I think you are absolutely right – and that shortage of money is one of the reasons Trump got Bill Barr’s Criminal Department to take over from his lawyers in his latest rape case.
Mary G
@Ruckus: Thanks for correcting me; there are so many I can’t remember which is which.
Feathers
@Steeplejack: The background checks and recruiting standards at the FBI means that it is full of Mormons and Catholics who wanted to be priests, but decided on the FBI instead. High on their own supply of self-righteousness.
The crime solving of the FBI (and even more so in local police departments) is seriously hindered by the fact that everyone needs to have been a special agent (or regular beat cop) before moving into a specialty or becoming a detective. There are lots of people who would be very good at fighting white collar crime, but have little or no interest in carrying a gun and being a a cop or special agent.
I can see why and how law enforcement evolved in this way, but it is another thing really holding the profession back from becoming truly modern. These people join other agencies or the state investigative units, but a police force needs to be more diverse than all cops or cops who’ve been promoted.
Chetan Murthy
@Feathers: Esp. given that the biggest form of property crime (by value) is accounting control fraud, and that shit is rarely prosecuted, much less punished.
lgerard
Given the cash crunch killing his businesses, there is no way the papaya pinochet has 100 million bucks laying around even in the unlikely event he would waste them on his own campaign.
This is just happy talk in an attempt to assure the nervous vendors that they won’t be stiffed, even though history tells us they will be.
TS (the original)
When I saw the top tweet all I could thing of was
I hope it rains on their parade
HumboldtBlue
@Ruckus:
The Valley fire directly impacts family in San Diego.
The next few days of wind and high temperatures does not bode well.
SectionH
@HumboldtBlue: @Mary G: The Valley Fire is still burning. East San Diego County. I almost feel guilty reporting at all, because I’m in the city, but I used to live in North County, and I remember the Cedar fire – still in the “top” 5 ever worst CA fires, and I really hope it stays there, and the Witch, so I’m really twitchy right now.
So far, the Valley fire’s still burning, but SD had an incredible marine layer last night, fanned I guess by some of the strongest on shore winds I’ve seen in the mere 20 years or so I’ve been around here. Srsly, I had one narrow west-facing window in my bedroom open with one window in a north-facing wall in another room open, and the wind was so strong, one gust knocked 2 pictures off 2 different walls in the bedroom. I reckon those winds must have driven moisture a lot farther inland than usual.
Tonight, everybody who’s paying attention is worried about the wind reversal – big Santa Anas were/are forecast until Wednesday 8pm. So far (I checked a minute ago) CalFire SD has nothing new to report. May it stay that way.
HumboldtBlue
@SectionH:
High winds are a primary concern.
May the wind be fair for you.
James E Powell
@scott (the other one):
The only gripe I’ve got against Strzok is that he is apparently trying to make himself out to be a hero. He’s not, no one thinks he is, and he’s at most a footnote.
Comey, on the other hand, should find a hole in the wall, crawl inside, and die. If that’s too cruel, maybe shave his head and join a monastery of cloistered monks. At the very least he should shut up and go away somewhere.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Fuck the FBI
They investigated the emails for 16 months. That’s way to long to read 30,000 emails. We saw Hillary’s emails, they were small paragraphs about gefilte fish. Let’s say you read 10 emails per hour during a 10 hour day – that’s 100 email per day. You assign 10 agents to the task, that’s 1,000 emails per day. At that slow rate, you can comb through the batch of 30,000 in 30 working days. At 5 days per week, it would take 6 weeks at most.
But no, they dragged it out for 16 months to damage her.
They got everything they deserved. Typical blowback. CIA armed and trained Osama bin Laden and they’re shocked their monster turned on them. FBI aided and abetted Dump and they’re shocked their monster turned on them.
Fuck’em.
Dan B
@sanjeevs: Mind boggling book report. The blindness to Russian interference seems intentional – chase a few blind alley leads and ignore the powerful people in the Trump campaign. What security agency does this? Is it blindness or is Strzok compromised?
Thanks for a great synopsis! I forgot about the fires for a few minutes.
J R in WV
It seems that the whole FBI has for most of its life has been focused on the wrong things. Once it was unions, which to the Republicans just had to be commies! Then it was the black integrationist movement, which to Republicans just had to be commies, then the gay liberation movement, THEY just had to be commies, fag commies, ask any Republicans FBI agent! And the anti war people, if the Republican FBI can just get deep enough in their organization, they have to be commies!
But none of these movements are actually commies, they’ve patriotic Americans trying to improve the nation. In the meantime, wealthy Republican industrialists are breaking the unions, building plants in Russia, cheating on their taxes, and working to weaken the country, with all the power and resources of the Republican FBI behind them! No wonder they can’t do their own job, they’re crazy on account of their distorted beliefs about who is working with actual enemies of the nation, the Republicans! But you can point to how Republicans are damaging the nation and the theocratic patriarchy in charge of the FBI can’t see it for the blinkers they have to wear!
90% of them need to be transferred to a different organization where they can’t be so dangerous to law enforcement. Maybe doing tax audits?
While we hire new youngsters who aren’t in the Federalist Society for actual law enforcement, catching right wing terrorists and Republicans owned by Putin, businesses fighting the environmentalists trying to reverse global climate change, bad cops, etc. Real fascists, not Republican fantasy fascists.
cliosfanboy
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: CIA did not train and arm Bin Laden. He’s so rich he funded himself. The groups CIA armed to fight the Soviets were the other groups.
Morzer
@Dan B:
I suspect that it’s not about Comey’s people being compromised. They were obviously not particularly intelligent individuals and had serious biases built into their assessment of the evidence in front of them. They certainly weren’t going to go looking for anything that might contradict the worldview that they had held for decades, much less anything that might reveal that they had been wrong from the start.
Baud
@J R in WV:
There were some commies out there, especially in labor. But yeah, the FBI mostly seems to miss the mark.
Baud
I will never spell Peter Strzok’s last name correctly ever again.
dopey-o
They hated Hillary because …. because …… Right-wing hate radio told them to hate Hillary. Shrinks talk about the intensity of an emotional affect being important data. Because she’s a ‘gurl.’ Because they’re all bullies and they follow their pack like good little germans. To Vice-Signal their fascist bona fides.
I have always been amazed at the blind uncritical vitriol heaped on her, and what it says about the infectious spread of toxic ‘masculinity ‘ (and I’m looking at some of you ladies, too.)
Present company excluded.
Chyron HR
@Baud:
So business as usual, then?
yellowdog
@Morzer: It is not a rape case. Trump is being sued for defamation by the woman he raped. The defaming statement was made while he was in office, which is why Barr claims the DOJ can act in his defense. Still an idiotic arguement that the statement was part of his duties as president. The rape occurred more than 10 years ago. I don’t know if it is still a criminal case. Even Barr would have a hard time arguing the DOJ should defend the shitgibbon for something that happened before he was in office. Of course, that wouldn’t stop him from trying.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That, these are boomers who’ve been trained all their lives that communism = satanism.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That is funny how Ford gets a buy for building the Soviet Tank factories in the ’30s at the time the US was still deporting people for Communism.
Kay
Photo choice is interesting too– photo of Lynch for the outrageous act by the Democrats, photo of the alleged Trump victim for the “unusual move” by the Republicans.
Matt McIrvin
@Jean: It doesn’t help, here, that thanks to Bernie Sanders, maybe the younger third of the Democratic Party now happily refers to the generous Western European-style social democracy they want as “socialism”. Everyone over 60 hears that and imagines Stalin’s purges and the Great Leap Forward.
Matt McIrvin
@Jean: The hate for Hillary Clinton went nationwide in 1992 and it was because she didn’t present as a traditional wife and was unapologetic about it. She made a sarcastic crack about staying home and baking cookies. That made her the great Satan forever. It really is not more complicated than that.
That developed into an idea that there must be something indefinably sinister or criminal about her, and the media emphasis on that affected even people who wouldn’t have been bothered by the original cookies remark, 20+ years later.
Kay
A Right wing nut ran the FBI for 50 years. It would be astonishing if they weren’t Right wing. The ideological bias was baked in at the start and simmering along for 50 years.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
Wow, talk about wielding a broad brush. More than a few here resemble that remark, and not as you blithely state.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So that was toxic masculinity with Obama in the 2008 Dem primary? I mean it was theHilary’s campaign that started the Birther nonsense, I can’t imagine why the Dem turn out was down for her. It must be toxic masculinity.
Baud
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Turnout wasn’t down for Hillary in 2016 because of the 2008 primary. Toxic masculinity may not be the only factor, but it was a big one.
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: I almost wrote “over 50” and should have. Because *I* hear the word “socialism” and think of the USSR and the PRC. Not that I’m some McCarthyite red-baiter and think Communist horrors would literally follow from an expansive welfare state–I pretty much favor Bernie’s stated policies myself; I’ve been having this argument for decades. But the associations with the *word* “socialism” are there in my mind, because I remember the Cold War and the Bernie kids don’t. That’s the psychological gap.
Why Bernie himself insists on the word, I’ll never really understand.
Kay
Well, the US Department of Justice strategy. The publicly-paid lawyers there hope to delay the case to protect Donald Trump. Not protect the United States, because obviously it’s better for the public if they hear any information on the President that might be revealed in the lawsuit before the election and not after it, but Donald Trump.
Not “Donald Trump’s strategy”. The US Department of Justice strategy.
No one has to discredit them. They discredit themselves.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: All the kids insist that the word “socialism” has lost its punch. I hope they come out to prove it in November.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Baud:
You will face the wrath of zhena gogolia.
Kay
So it’s 2 months before the election and the DOJ is intervening in a highly political civil case to protect Donald Trump. I think we can safely assume any professional disinclination to violate “norms” is out the fucking window. No telling what they’ll do to protect Dear Leader up to election day and probably after election day.
Yet we’re told over and over we have some obligation to continue to employ these people – that it’s essential they capitulate to every demand by their corrupt boss so they can “keep their jobs”
Why do we want them to keep their jobs if they’re corrupt? If they don’t adhere to ethical constraints when they have a corrupt boss what are the ethical constraints for? For when they don’t have a corrupt boss and therefore don’t have to rely on them? The whole point of ethical constraints is “corrupt boss”. They’re not there solely to rat out underlings.
trnc
But he doesn’t understand why she didn’t trust the FBI. Okaaaaaaaay.
jonas
@sanjeevs: The FBI spends virtually all of its existence looking for Russians under every rock they come across, especially any rocks near unions or civil rights orgs, then an entire presidential campaign emerges with all sorts of mysterious ties to Russians and the reaction is “Huh. This is odd. Let’s monitor a low-level aide for a few months and then drop the case.”
This makes tons of sense.
Omnes Omnibus
@Matt McIrvin: Funny, if you say socialism, I tend to think of Ramsay MacDonald, Jean Jaures, Bernard Shaw, and the Webbs.
Omnes Omnibus
You keep saying this, but who is telling us this?
dlw32
really, no one’s going to comment on the Doctor Who reference?
“Don’t you think he looks… tired?”
Brilliant! Fantastic! Allons-y!
:)
scott (the other one)
@James E Powell:
Fair enough. And I guess maybe it’s petty of me, but I think of Bill Murray in Caddyshack, and I want Strzok to experience total consciousness of just how wrong he was and how that institutional wrongness had disastrous consequences for the country he loves.
Sister Golden Bear
Latest fire update. Here on the SF Peninsula, it’s been like an apocalyptic dawn all day thanks to a combination of the marine layer and fire smoke. Sky is orange and is so dark many of the streetlights are on. It’s really quite eerie and totally messing with my sense of time.
I can’t even get a good photo of it, because the iPhone refuses to accept that the sky looks like that and keep auto-correcting photo, even before I edit it.
But allegedly the air quality isn’t too bad because smoke is above the marine layer, those my sinuses disagree. And to be thankful for small things, at least it’s cooled down after last weekend’s triple-digit heat.
brantl
@sanjeevs: This is badly reasoned: “I have no idea how long it takes to get a FISA warrant. I’m guessing if these had been scary brown people it wouldn’t have taken over 2 months.”
You could have at least googled the average amount of time a FOIA request takes.
“These can be processed in one to five workdays. Normal – These are usually processed in six to twenty workdays. Complex – requests that involve the entire contents of a case file, or that require extensive search, review, referral, consultation, and analysis. These can be processed in twenty-one to sixty workdays.” This assumes no one contests it, of course. 60 days not being unusual, when it is a lot of stuff.