Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Infrastructure week. at last.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

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

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

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

No one could have predicted…

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

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

Hot air and ill-informed banter

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Let there be snark.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

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

You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / An Unexamined Scandal / Getting The Band Back Together

Getting The Band Back Together

Dark Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Trump Rallies His (Extremely) Base

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I’ll put most of this below the fold, but my Irish sense of grievance convinces me that you shouldn’t take your eyes off these people, not for one bloody-minded minute.

It was Dan Dale’s first live-tweeting of a Trump rally for CNN — flatter than Dale’s usual, but that’s probably not his fault.

Per the Washington Post:

… [A]t around 1:30 p.m., clouds charged in, and with them a heavy breeze that left vendors trying to hold their tents to the ground. Just as the man at the gate announced that he could not let anyone else into the arena, thunder boomed. Shortly after, a voice on the loudspeaker declared that anyone not in line at that moment would not be making it into the building right away.

Moments later, a drenching rain fell.

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Late Night Eye-Roll Open Thread: Bernie Goes to Brooklyn

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New York is always a high-stress venue, and the early 1970s was one of the rougher eras. Lots of natives fled for quieter climes — I was one of them! (And not ashamed I did, although I should not have persuaded my sweet freshman roommate from Iron Mountain that NYC had a secret lottery system requiring a certain percentage of city-born high school graduates to leave, in order to make room for all the Midwesterners who wanted to move into the Big Apple.)

Just a few years earlier, Bernie Sanders was another escapee, who went on to make a good life for himself in a whiter quieter place. But, one way and another, things have changed back in the nabe — and Bernie Is Back, Beyotches!…


But you just might be at Mirror-World CPAC, on the other leg of the political horseshoe. Different True Believers, same fevered enthusiasm for The Narrative!

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Still More Reasons to GOTV

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***********
Newt Gingrich is a two-bit hustler, but then, so is the Oval Office Squatter, so…

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Also, too: At the first threat of actual oversight, the people actually carrying out Trump’s worst ideas will scurry for the exits…

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Aren’t They All Just Proud Boyz, Though?

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Per the original story, in the Washington Post:

… In an interview with a website associated with the party, King (R-Iowa) declared that “Western civilization is on the decline,” spoke of the replacement of white Europeans by immigrants and criticized Hungarian American financier George Soros, who has backed liberal groups around the world.

King spoke to the Unzensuriert site Aug. 24 in Vienna, a day after concluding a five-day journey to Jewish and Holocaust historical sites in Poland, including the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The trip, including airfare to and from Europe, was financed by From the Depths, an international nonprofit group that seeks to educate lawmakers about the Holocaust.

Unzensuriert, which translates as “Uncensored,” is a publication associated with Austria’s Freedom Party, which was founded by a former Nazi SS officer and is now led by Heinz-Christian Strache, who was active in neo-Nazi circles as a youth. While the party has distanced itself from those connections, it recently embraced a hard-line anti-immigration stance while seeking ties with other far-right parties and leaders abroad.

“What does this diversity bring that we don’t already have?” King said in the interview. “Mexican food, Chinese food, those things — well, that’s fine. But what does it bring that we don’t have that is worth the price? We have a lot of diversity within the U.S. already.”…

In an interview Thursday, King… accused his “political opposition” of “ginning this up” ahead of the Nov. 6 election…

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Open Thread: Watergate History Lesson

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Late Night Open Thread: FEAR of A Bob Woodward

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Bob Woodward is the Establishment’s Guy. Most of his big fat doorstops-with-indexes are launched to certify that All Is Well In This Best of All Possible Worlds. Occasionally, as with the book that launched his & Bernstein’s journalistic careers, the message is This Individual’s Become A Problem That Will Be Dealt With As Harshly As Required.

His new book seems to fall squarely in the second category. The question: Does Trump understand the verdict that has just been passed upon his “presidency”? Or perhaps it should be phrased: Will any of Trump’s staff bother trying to explain the situation to the Oval Office Occupant?

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Late Night Speculation Open Thread: The Permanent GOP Washes Its Hands of Donald Trump

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Or so — in conjunction with Paul Ryan’s run for the exits — I have to assume. They no longer have any interest in defending the current Oval Office occupants, just in pushing through whatever convenient pardons and legal shortcuts can be managed before the collapse. There will be pushback on a Libby pardon, media attention to the high crimes & misdemeanors of the Bush Regency crime cartel for which Libby took his fall, and (apart from pwning the libs) no immediate upside for Donald J. Trump, Oval Office Occupant. Since Donny Dollhand has never been one to do a favor without promise of immediate reciprocation, presumably the GOP has promised him something of value in return. Ceremonial burning of the much-discussed pee tape? Cancellation of all his many debts? Pallets of gold bullion and a safe escape flight to a Sevastopol hideaway, or the rumored Bush family compound in Paraguay?…

Per the NYTimes, because they’re the experts on the delicate handling of sensitive topics for plutocrats and other Republicans:

Mr. Libby’s case has long been a cause for conservatives who maintained that he was a victim of a special prosecutor run amok, an argument that may have resonated with the president. Mr. Trump has repeatedly complained that the special counsel investigation into possible cooperation between his campaign and Russia in 2016 has gone too far and amounts to an unfair “witch hunt.”

Mr. Libby, who goes by Scooter, was convicted of four felonies in 2007 for perjury before a grand jury, lying to F.B.I. investigators and obstruction of justice during an investigation into the disclosure of the work of Valerie Plame Wilson, a C.I.A. officer. President George W. Bush commuted Mr. Libby’s 30-month prison sentence but refused to grant him a full pardon despite the strenuous requests of Mr. Cheney, a decision that soured the relationship between the two men.

A pardon of Mr. Libby would paradoxically put Mr. Trump in the position of absolving one of the chief architects of the Iraq war, which Mr. Trump has denounced as a catastrophic miscalculation. It would also mean he was forgiving a former official who was convicted in a case involving leaks despite Mr. Trump’s repeated inveighing against those who disclose information to reporters.

Critics of Mr. Trump quickly interpreted the prospective pardon as a signal by the president that he would protect those who refuse to turn on their bosses, as Mr. Libby was presumed not to have betrayed Mr. Cheney. Mr. Trump has not ruled out pardons in the Russia investigation.

Mr. Trump has shown no particular interest in Mr. Libby’s case before. In 2015, during his campaign for the White House, Mr. Trump was asked if he would pardon Mr. Libby and declined to say, calling it an irrelevant issue. It was unclear when Mr. Trump would issue the pardon, which was first reported by ABC News…

The case tested the limits of journalistic independence. Judith Miller, then a reporter for The Times, went to prison for 85 days rather than disclose that Mr. Libby had discussed Ms. Wilson with her. She was freed after Mr. Libby released her from any promise of confidentiality…

The case has its connections to Mr. Trump because Mr. Fitzgerald was friends with James B. Comey, who was then the deputy attorney general who assigned him the investigation after the attorney general recused himself. Mr. Cheney long suspected that Mr. Comey was taking revenge for a dispute between them over the legality of a surveillance program…

(I blame it all on the Republicans who advised Gerry Ford to pardon Nixon back in 1974. Without a public examination of all the CREEPster crimes, its perpetrators were free to reemerge repeatedly over the last forty years, trailing foul clouds of treason and financial impropriety every time.)

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