Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

This blog will pay for itself.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

T R E 4 5 O N

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

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Open Thread: It’s Official – Donald Trump Brings the Idiocracy

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trump happy face fuhrer toles

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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Buzzfeed reports:

Early in the 2016 primary race, comedy screenwriter Etan Cohen began to notice some similarities between the Republican candidate, mendacious former reality star Donald Trump, and Cohen’s 2006 movie Idiocracy, which features fictional wrestling champ-turned-president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews). Ever since, those similarities have only grown, leading to Cohen and Mike Judge, who wrote and also directed Idiocracy, now working on a series of anti-Trump ads with Crews reprising his role.

The 2006 satire shows a semi-distant future in which the world has been overrun by dummies and, as a result, is falling apart. At first, the parallels to the real primary race were “just a general lizard brain kind of thing: The presidency is all about entertainment value,” Cohen, who also directed and wrote the 2015 comedy Get Hard and co-wrote the 2008 hit comedy Tropic Thunder, told BuzzFeed News over the phone. “Then it started to get, as the year went on, weirdly specific. People pointing out things like, ‘Oh, Camacho was a wrestler and Trump was a wrestler.’ … It’s like, the more things go on, the more it actually seems to be kind of merging in a very specific, eerie way.”…

Throughout the process, Cohen and Judge have struggled to satirize Trump because he is already so outrageous. “If you’re making Idiocracy 2, and you’re trying to write whoever’s the heir to Camacho, if you put in Trump, it would be too silly to be in a movie,” Cohen explained.

But they worked through it — Cohen felt a call to action, saying these ads are very important to him. “This is what satire is for … to be able to hold up a mirror and say, ‘This is crazy,’” he said. “Idiocracy was like that, but this all of a sudden felt like a very immediate need for the true meaning of satire and what it can actually do.”…

“The most dangerous contrast to Trump is that Camacho actually realizes he needs advice from other people, and knows that he’s not the smartest guy in the room,” Cohen continued, noting that he would “definitely” vote for Camacho over Trump. “Also, not a racist.”

I’m actually kinda looking forward to those ads. Will Baby Donald bitch about the totally inaccurate, very biased, very unfair comparisons? Or will he embrace it as another form of celebrity endorsement?

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Open Thread: They’re Calling Trump A Racist Because, Well…

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Comes a point in time where even the GOP-oriented Media Village Idiots can’t avoid the elephant carcass in the room…

(CNN) Donald Trump on Friday vociferously defended his claims that a judge overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University is biased because of his Mexican heritage — pushing back against criticism that his objections are racist.

Speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead,” Trump repeatedly referenced his plans to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and renegotiate trade agreements between the two countries.

The presumptive GOP nominee said U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, a federal district judge in the Southern District of California, has made “rulings that people can’t even believe.”

“He’s proud of his his heritage. I respect him for that,” Trump said, dismissing charges that his allegation was racist. “He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.”…

Last week, Curiel ordered parts of internal documents, including “playbooks” regarding running the enterprise, to be released as part of a lawsuit against Trump University.

The documents were released in response to a request by The Washington Post…

And Trump is German-American, we fought a war against people of his heritage, but you don’t see the media invoking Godwin’s Law. Yet.

Video at the link, but I figured some of you might still be eating dinner.

Even the remnant #NeverTrump Repubs are pleased to pile on, because say what you will about dogwhistles, at least their use is an ethos!

Paul Campos, at LGM, thinks “There’s a non-trivial chance that Trump actually withdraws from the race at some point prior to the election.” If it’s true that he only jumped into the race in the first place to escape legal scrutiny for his numerous shady business practices — how’s that working out for ya, Donald? — maybe the RNC can scrounge up a few hundred millions and a couple of “safe” district judges, get him to step down before the convention?…

ETA:

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Friday Evening Open Thread: Trump Has Found His Schlesinger

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trump be my urologist luckovich

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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President Kennedy had a Harvard-trained intellectual; wanna-be-President Trump gets this guy…

Not a (deliberate) joke. Politico:

… Morris will have a column in the Enquirer’s print edition each week, and will also write for its website and do video commentary.

A former Clinton campaign staffer, Morris has become a cable news regular by virtue of his reliably critical takes on his former employers.

“The National Enquirer is one of the few journalistic outlets that has the courage to publish the truth,” said Morris in a statement. “As this critical election approaches, I am thrilled to have a perch from which to tell the unvarnished truth, particularly about Hillary Clinton — facts other publications just don’t print because it doesn’t fit.”…

***********
Apart from bidding farewell to another handful of IQ points, what’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?

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Open Thread: Cravens Cowed by A Revenant

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The mainstream GOP goes in fear of the angry, shambling corpse of resentments past, and Paul Ryan is… well, not their leader, but the most visible media figure. Word in the media is that he timed his tepid endorsement of Donald Trump to coincide with Clinton’s big speech yesterday — whether to bigfoot the speech or to take advantage of a distracted media remains a question — but enough people took notice in any case:

Mr. Charles P. Pierce, on the man he calls the “Biggest. Fake. Ever.“…

… Moody and morose, Paul Ryan has stalked the parapets of his own ego ever since it became clear that He, Trump would be the nominee of the Republican party for president of the United States. (It’s helpful to write it out that way a couple of times a day just to make sure you haven’t subconsciously blotted the reality out of your memory.) He invited several of his more prominent acolytes in the elite political press to join him in his lengthy walks along the fogbound ramparts of his carefully cultivated public persona. What is a policy wonk, public intellectual, numbers guru, sympathetic friend of the working poor to do?

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of an outrageous charlatan, and take arms against a sea of playground insults and, by opposing them, end them…

…or you can just take to the pages of The Janesville Gazette and surrender so abjectly that you ought to be hanging on the wall in the game room at Mar-A-Lago…

show full post on front page

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Trump’s First General Election Ad

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I saw something today that captured the essence of Donald Trump’s political rhetoric:

 

Here’s the transcript:

Applebee’s now has trained meat cutters cutting every steak by hand.

For the juiciest, most tender steak ever.

Don’t believe us?

Ask the guy with the knife.

Think about it:  this is every Trump claim ever:

My steaks are the best!

Why?

Because reasons.  (Some guy in the back (of a warehouse three states over) cut a boneless piece of meat into smaller pieces!)

But trust me:

Believe me:  they’re the best.

How can you tell?

Because I say so.

And my guy can kill you.

For the record:  I do not plan to order a steak at Applebee’s, should I ever find myself with no other alternative than to eat in one. But this ad did give me some comfort.  It’s the kind of thing that can pass as kind of a coherent claim on a single, inattentive viewing.

But as the backbone of a five month long attempt to convey plausibility?  Not so much.  Not at all.

Open thread, everyone.

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Open Thread: Pro-HRC Argument from the Opposition

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As the novelty value of President Comments-Section-Made-Flesh fades, the not-actually-brain-damaged Conservatives are beginning to see reason. Josh Barro, for instance:

In investing, risk requires compensation. Investors will expect a higher return from a risky bet, and — conversely — will pay for certainty. It’s why you pay double-digit rates on your credit cards, while the federal government can borrow for next to nothing.

Let’s apply this analysis to the election. A Hillary Clinton presidency is the safe bet. She offers, more or less, an extension of the Obama presidency. You might think that that’s a bad return, but at least you know almost exactly what it is.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a wild card. Who the hell knows what he would do if elected?…

Because the distribution of possible Trump-presidency outcomes is wide, you’d have to expect him to be a better president than Clinton on average in order for him to merely be equally as good a pick as Clinton. That is, if Trump were a stock, then you’d be demanding a risk premium to buy him.

In fact, Trump calls for a huge risk premium because, while he probably wouldn’t be a disastrous president, the low-probability disasters that he might cause would be immensely costly. Some of them involve nuclear weapons and global mass deaths. Pricing those risks in properly should push his share price comfortably below Clinton’s, even if you think she is very bad…

Maybe President Trump would default on the national debt. Maybe Chinese officials wouldn’t love Trump’s insult-comic shtick as much as New York Republican primary voters do, and he’d manage to blow up a minor diplomatic incident into a nuclear war. Maybe he’d dissolve the military alliances that have helped keep Europe out of war for 70 years. Or maybe he’d just go ahead and nuke Europe.

I don’t think that these outcomes are terribly likely. I think Trump is probably sensible enough not to fire a nuclear weapon at Europe. But if he won’t rule it out himself, then why should I?…

People are failing to price in the small risk that a Trump presidency could cause us to lose everything we value, and that scares the hell out of me.

So you can share this with your “But HILLARY… “ social media acquaintances: Don’t think of it as voting for That Woman; think of it as voting against Risky Investment Trump.

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Trump – A Revenant, for the Revanchists

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Revenant: A visible ghost or animated corpse that is believed to have returned from the grave to terrorize the living.

Revanchism (from French: revanche, “revenge”) is the political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war or social movement used since the 1870s…

More context here. Via:

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