From the still-ongoing Yates hearing (hearing-watching thread downstairs):
Sally Yates just shut down Ted Cruz on Constitutional Law. pic.twitter.com/ONlwEYm64D
— jordan ? (@JordanUhl) May 8, 2017
Thwack! Open thread!
Florida woman, still rocking a punk rock ethos in the 2020s, which is kind of sad. Betty Cracker has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2012.
by Betty Cracker| 191 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes
From the still-ongoing Yates hearing (hearing-watching thread downstairs):
Sally Yates just shut down Ted Cruz on Constitutional Law. pic.twitter.com/ONlwEYm64D
— jordan ? (@JordanUhl) May 8, 2017
Thwack! Open thread!
by Betty Cracker| 129 Comments
This post is in: Dolt 45, Election 2016, Election 2018, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, DC Press Corpse, Decline and Fall, General Stupidity, Our Failed Media Experiment
Someone sounds awfully worried about Sally Yates’ testimony before the senate today:
Yates will be questioned this afternoon about her warning to the Trump people regarding Flynn’s Russia problem. So Trump is preemptively intimidating her like a sub-literate mafia goon while simultaneously blaming the Obama administration for his own shitty personnel decisions.
President Obama FIRED Flynn before Trump picked him off the trash heap, wound him up and sent him on the “LOCK HER UP!” tour. And apparently Trump’s band of grifting idiots didn’t bother to vet the utterly compromised crackpot Flynn before sharing highly classified information with him as erstwhile NSA. But President “The Buck Stops Anywhere But Here” can’t be bothered with such details.
What are we to conclude from this, aside from the obvious, which is that the person who occupies the Oval Office is a lying, irresponsible, addled dolt — which we already knew? He’s worried about this Russia thing, which just won’t go away. Should he be?
I hope very much that the Russia investigation turns up a bombshell that removes Trump from office, but I have zero faith it will. Comey is a preening hack who seems convinced that hostility from Republicans and Democrats validates his “last honest man in D.C.” conceit. The GOP controls congress, and they’ve already sold out the country to a demented demagogue, so they’ll hamstring every investigation that could endanger their hold on power.
But 2018 hasn’t happened yet, and there’s still time to prevent the next round of interference. The Democrats have their role to play to stop a hostile foreign power from undermining democracy. The FBI and intelligence communities have theirs. And the media has a responsibility here too.
This might sound like a crazy suggestion, but maybe media outlets like the NYT, etc., could use recent developments abroad as well as upcoming events like the Yates testimony as an excuse to reset the way they approach the gigantic elephant in the room: a hostile foreign power’s ongoing meddling in U.S. elections. The way their colleagues in France dealt with a similar attempt by the same outfits to sleaze a fascist into power might be instructive.
Yates’ testimony is expected to directly contradict what Spicer and Priebus told the media about Team Trump’s handling of Flynn. Trump, knowing the testimony is likely to be damaging, implied that Yates committed a crime in the above tweet. We know Trump lied about President Obama’s “wire tapp” — the mainstream press was surprisingly forthright in saying so. I guess there’s a slim chance they’ll treat Trump’s slander of Yates in a similar manner.
I understand that ironic detachment and profitable horse race babbling are tough addictions to overcome, but it’s no exaggeration to say democracy is on the line. And while the Beltway hacks like to pretend they don’t want to be part of the story, the opposite is true: they glory in a scenario that allows them to be players rather than merely covering the game.
Well, here’s your chance, hacks. The Trump administration has lied to you and vilified you for months. You’ve refused to engage in serious introspection about your 2016 political coverage, but here’s a flashing red neon scandal that doesn’t even require that: a recognition that this meddling isn’t going away, and a chance to do something about it. Go be little Murrows. Your country needs you, God help us.
by Betty Cracker| 160 Comments
This post is in: Election 2016, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Our Failed Media Experiment
Interesting write-up at The Daily Beast on how the Macron campaign may have foiled Russia’s attempt to undermine another Western democracy via fascist hack-holster Assange:
As the news broke, suspicion focused on the same “Fancy Bear” Russian hackers who fiddled with the American presidential campaign last year. As The Daily Beast reported 10 days earlier, they have been working hard for the election of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-European Union, anti-euro, anti-NATO, anti-American, Pro-Trump Le Pen.
Literally at the 11th hour, before the blackout would silence it, the Macron campaign issued a statement saying it had been hacked and many of the documents that were dumped on the American 4Chan site and re-posted by Wikileaks were fakes.
The mainstream French media carried the Macron campaign statement, but virtually nothing else. In addition to the normal proscription of campaign “propaganda” on election eve, the government issued a statement saying specifically that anyone disseminating the materials in this dump in France could be liable to prosecution, and calling on the media to shoulder their “responsibility” by steering clear of them.
Meanwhile, Wikileaks jumped on the document dump, but didn’t seem to be familiar with the material in it. Responding to the Macron statement that some of the items were bogus, Wikileaks tweeted, “We have not yet discovered fakes in #MacronLeaks & we are very skeptical that the Macron campaign is faster than us.”
Ah, but there’s the rub. As reported by The Daily Beast, part of the Macron campaign strategy against Fancy Bear (also known as Pawn Storm and Apt28) was to sign on to the phishing pages and plant bogus information.
“You can flood these [phishing] addresses with multiple passwords and log-ins, true ones, false ones, so the people behind them use up a lot of time trying to figure them out,” Mounir Mahjoubi, the head of Macron’s digital team, told The Daily Beast for its earlier article on this subject.
This might be one option for political campaigns that want to participate in elections free of Putin’s influence. In the U.S., it’s clear Republicans aren’t going to do anything to ensure the integrity of our electoral processes, not as long as interference favors them. We’re on our own.
by Betty Cracker| 216 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Sports
This song always makes me think of the Kentucky Derby:
Who do you like in the race? I picked Tapwrit, so if you’re betting, take that into account and mentally add 15 points to the odds.
Open thread! ???????
PS: I did pick Limousine Liberal in one of the earlier races, and he or she won!
PPS: One virtue of horses that is too rarely noted is that their poop is among the least offensive in the animal kingdom. It doesn’t really stink much (at least outdoors and in single doses), and sometimes it shapes vaguely like dinner rolls.
by Betty Cracker| 256 Comments
This post is in: Birdwatching, Domestic Politics, Open Threads
It’s a lovely day here in West Central Florida — sunny, breezy and 72 degrees. Last week, temps hit the 90s, so I didn’t think we’d see beautiful weather like this again until September. Happy to have been wrong.
I’m a bit cranky because I have to work on such a gorgeous day, but I dragged the old laptop to the tiki bar, so it’s all good. Here’s a photo of my spoonbill friend who resides on a nearby golf course:
Aren’t they just the weirdest looking things? My daughter says I ruined spoonbills for her with my new camera because “they’re so ugly up close.” She’s wrong, IMO; they are magnificent, yes, even their Rubbermaid-looking bills, freaky red eyes and bizarre nostrils and ear-holes.
As I’ve reiterated ad nauseam in this space, nature is my solace in troubled times such as these. Books too. And food. And booze. Care to share your coping mechanisms? Or discuss other things. Open thread!
by Betty Cracker| 277 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Ryan Lyin' Weasel, Trump Crime Cartel, Assholes
Charlie Pierce has an excellent post up over at Esquire: The Resistance Cannot Wait Until 2018. It addresses a thought that occurred to me while watching (with disgust, and only until I located the remote!) the Republicans high-five and swill Bud Lite to celebrate the House passage of Trumpcare and rip healthcare away from tens of millions.
My thought was: “I know they’re cruel, but are these motherfuckers stupid?” I was seeing the visions of attack ad story boards dancing in Democratic ad makers’ heads, juxtaposing shots of photogenic families facing medical bankruptcy, plutocrats wallowing in piles of cash and those gleeful Republican assholes high-fiving.
But Pierce is right — the GOPers aren’t worried about what normal people think of all this shit. If they were, they wouldn’t have passed a bill that has a 17% approval rate:
And, as much as I hate to doubt the good heartland people who voted for this guy, I think they’d react worse to losing an illusory victory over Them than they will to losing their actual healthcare. For the foreseeable future, Republican politicians, House and Senate, remain more threatened by the wrath of The Base than they are by any unfortunate mother and child who pop up on the local news. Whatever emerges from this process will be a Republican bill, thickly coated in banalities about freedom and marketplace solutions, but with nothing resembling a commitment to the same goals that animated the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Sounds about right. We’ve got to make the bastards fear us, and as Pierce notes, a win for Ossoff in Georgia and Quist in Montana would be a good first step. Swing Left just blew past $1 million in contributions since the GOP healthcare atrocity yesterday:
We just hit $1 million! This movement is amazing. Keep it up and let's take our country back: https://t.co/IrBD3TYfoW pic.twitter.com/6KXuIlARgP
— Swing Left (@swingleft) May 5, 2017
Pierce is correct: 2018 will be too late. We’ve got to make it sting for these evil shithooks every single day between now and then. I certainly plan to devote myself to that task.
by Betty Cracker| 218 Comments
This post is in: 2020 Elections, Austerity Bombing, Election 2018, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Ryan Lyin' Weasel, Trump Crime Cartel, Assholes, Decline and Fall, General Stupidity, Get Angry, Not Normal, Rare Sincerity
Here’s a tweet from The Hill a couple of days ago and my response:
Here’s a link to the article. I think it’s spot on regarding Trump’s goal here, and I’m glad the writer used the word “brand,” even though it’s usually annoying to see life-or-death matters discussed in the language of an ad campaign.
It’s appropriate because Trump thinks in those terms. Fellow citizens, our country has empowered a malignant narcissist with a massive inferiority complex. And he is bent on unmaking President Obama’s legacy because it drives him insane(r) that Obama is more loved, accomplished and respected than Trump will ever be.
Does Trump have a fucking clue what’s in the AHCA? Nope. He might actually believe the lies he’s telling about the bill covering more people and costing less. More importantly, that’s not what matters to him. Probably the only thing that confers wood to the flaccid little appendage Trump’s wife dreads is the prospect of undoing something Obama achieved.
What’s worse, the Republicans have figured this out, so they’ll continue to manipulate Velveeta Voldemort to their nefarious ends with “wins,” like ripping away healthcare for millions, unleashing predatory bankers, getting rid of consumer protections, disenfranchising voters and persecuting women, gay people, black and brown people, Muslims, immigrants, etc.
They’ll stop at nothing, the GOP — both in Congress and their hate-filled base — including collusion with a hostile foreign power. So we have to stop them. We simply have no other choice. Suit up, Juicers. We’re in for the fight of our lives, and I don’t know about you, but if I’m going down, I’m going down swinging.