Have I got an international laughing stock for you:
h/t my on-the-Zeitgeist son.
There really is nothing funny about what’s happening now, though the shoots of resistance are encouraging as we look towards the hope of spring. But I give our Dutch friends credit. The above made me laugh out loud.
Open thread.
Major Major Major Major
I’m seeing on my news alert that Mnuchin is registered to vote in two different states, so that’s fun.
Yutsano
RIP Mary Tyler Moore. Thanks for the laughs and the smiles.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
The fortune teller sighed. “It will get worse before it gets better.”
“Is there nothing we can do?”
“Of course! That’s why it gets better.”
Micro SF/F stories
Mnemosyne
Now I want to go to the pony park. It looks awesome.
Major Major Major Major
Also, this is the most spectacular piece of propaganda I’ve seen in a while:
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
So are Bannon and Tiffany Trump.
Mike J
@Major Major Major Major: MOre intereesting than that, Trump is still using his unsecured android and his advisors all us RNC email addresses.
Major Major Major Major
@Mike J: How do you know the secret service or NSA or whoever didn’t get him a secured Android? Just because he’s tweeting ‘from Android’ doesn’t mean it’s from his old one.
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: Per a Dutch friend of mine it’s not all that spectacular. I’d still like to see it.
tpherald
@Major Major Major Major: When someone moves, the voter registration is not automatically updated to remove you from your state of origin.
I mean, so what if your name is listed in two states.
For that to make a difference, there’d have to be millions of people willing to travel between states on Election Day to vote twice.
It’s just a canard to move toward national ID cards.
Bodacious
My daughter lives in Amsterdam and sent me this a few days ago. Just what the doctor ordered…..but lets keep them in our thoughts. Their own nightmare is lurking on the horizon….Hair Franken-Geert.
elm
@Major Major Major Major: Do you think Twitter is on the NSA’s whitelist of approved apps?
@tpherald: It’s the PR campaign for a scheme to steal the right to vote from millions of people.
Applejinx
It creeps me out how happy Paul Ryan seems. Is he another Russian mole? Certainly the plans he’s made up are all complete trolls and he doesn’t care one bit that they’re nonsensical. And he does the Putin fitness thing, popular among authoritarian strongmen.
I totally get how many Republicans are like ‘crap, we’ll end up owning this, could be trouble’ but why is Ryan on cloud nine?
Major Major Major Major
@tpherald: Oh, I know it doesn’t matter, it’s the hypocrisy and sheer idiocy that’s amusing.
Ian G.
@Major Major Major Major:
Poe’s law and all, but is this serious? Because it reads like a press release from the government of Iran.
Spanky
@Major Major Major Major: My guess is that he borrowed the phone from his piss hooker, now that Melania is out of his hair.
Major Major Major Major
@Ian G.: It appears to be real, or else the author is engaged in a very, very long piece of performance art.
The Moar You Know
@Major Major Major Major: Because there is no “secured Android”. Nor is there a secured iOS. Blackberry, ATM, is the only mobile OS that can be locked down to the required level of security.
ETA: everyone hates Blackberry
Personally, I’m not sure Android’s ever going to be securable (the moneymaker for Google in all this is ad delivery, which is inherently insecure) and Apple seemingly has decided, I think correctly, that it’s not worth the cost to make and deliver a secured build of iOS to the US government.
Yarrow
@Applejinx:
It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
elm
@The Moar You Know: The NSA does have a secure phone platform built on the Android Open Source Platform, but it would not be running arbitrary apps like Twitter and would not be running Google’s services.
hovercraft
@Applejinx:
No not a mole, he just knows that the orange smurf is going to make all his wet dreams come true, we are about to enter the Brownback age of America. Maybe not in quite a s pure a form as Kansas, but closer than they ever dreamed possible.
Ohio Mom
@tpherald: For a while at least, Ohio was sending out absentee ballots to all registered voters, whether you asked for them or not.
We got a pair for the previous owners, who had not just moved out of state upon selling us the house, but had also died in a gruesome car accident shortly after (it was the talk of the subdivision, plus their family ran an obit in the paper and I am old enough to skim those daily).
I called up the Board of Elections to tell them to save the postage. They told me they kept voters on the list until, and now I forget the details, they hadn’t voted in a certain number of elections. I think there might have also been an option for a family member to send in a death certificate. At any rate, I kept tearing the ballots up and trashing them until they finally stopped arriving.
So yes, I can see how it would be very easy to end up on two or more set of voter rolls. The secret is not to actually vote more than once.
Mnemosyne
@Applejinx:
They promised Ryan that he can kill Social Security and Medicare. Plus he knows that if Trump and Pence fuck up too badly, it’s hello President Paul Ryan. From his sociopathic POV, what’s not to like?
hovercraft
@Mike J: @Major Major Major Major:
NYT: Trump Still Has His Unsecured Cell Phone To Keep Him Company
President Donald Trump is living in the White House, but he has held on to his unsecured Android cell phone, according to a New York Times report.
Per the Times, Trump uses his phone when he’s alone at his new home:
Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, went back to New York on Sunday night with their 10-year-old son, Barron, and so Mr. Trump has the television — and his old, unsecured Android phone, to the protests of some of his aides — to keep him company. That was the case after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump appeared to be reacting to Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, which was airing a feature on crime in Chicago.
It appears that Trump’s latest tweets were sent from an Android device, suggesting that he used his unsecured personal cell phone at the White House.
The latest news follow a New York Times report last week that Trump had handed in his unsecured Android for a secure device, as former President Barack Obama did.
Major Major Major Major
@hovercraft: Well, there you go.
tpherald
@Ohio Mom:
Voting restriction advocates are intentionally conflating voter registration rolls curation with in-person voter fraud.
Voter registration lists are likely very messy while in-person voter fraud is very, very rare.
Origuy
The thing about Bannon is not that he was registered in two places, but that the place he was registered at in Florida was unoccupied. Florida officials haven’t found any evidence that he ever voted there, however.
hovercraft
While we are all distracted, the grift is ramping up big time.
Report: Fee To Join Mar-A-Lago Club Doubled To $200k After Trump Win
and we can all look forward to ugly gold monstrosities polluting our skylines, yay.
Report: Trump Hotels CEO Pledges Huge U.S. Expansion
“There are 26 major metropolitan areas in the U.S., and we’re in five,” Danziger told attendees following a panel discussion at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit in Los Angeles, according to Bloomberg News. “I don’t see any reason that we couldn’t be in all of them eventually.”
Yarrow
Uh huh. Hey, CIA–did you guys tell him this at that speech where he lectured you about his inaugural crowd size?
Ian G.
@Major Major Major Major:
A convicted felon who serves in the House of Lords? Jesus, I feel like his existence is nature playing a Poe’s law joke on us.
hovercraft
Report: Trump Hotels CEO Pledges Huge U.S. Expansion
and
Report: Fee To Join Mar-A-Lago Club Doubled To $200k After Trump Win
Peale
@Origuy: Yep. The only reason to do what he did was maintaining the appearance of a Florida address for something like tax evasion or auto insurance fraud.
O. Felix Culpa
@hovercraft: I’m shocked – shocked – to find that profiteering is going on here!
Major Major Major Major
@Ian G.: Right??
hovercraft
@Yarrow:
He may want to, but given this push back from the senate already, plus, Adam correct me if I’m wrong, the IC wants absolutely no part of this, they got burned by the shrub people last time.
Sen. John Thune: Torture Is Banned As ‘A Matter Of Settled Law’
By Lauren Fox Published January 25, 2017, 2:34 PM EDT
PHILADELPHIA – President Donald Trump can’t bring back torture even if he wanted to, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) told reporters during the Republican retreat Wednesday.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday on a draft executive order calling for the Trump administration to re-examine opening CIA black sites, reigniting a debate about “enhanced interrogation” techniques used under the Bush administration. Thune said Trump cannot make that call without Congress playing a role.
“Those issues are settled law. Congress has spoken,” Thune said. “When it comes to enhanced interrogation techniques and that sort of things, my understanding is–I haven’t seen the new executive action and what’s being proposed– but my understanding is that they’re going to examine some of those issues, but with regard to torture, that’s banned. The Army Field Manuel makes that very clear.”
Already Wednesday, Sen John McCain(R-AZ), a torture survivor himself, came out vehemently against the draft executive action.
“The law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America,” McCain told the New York Times in a statement.
Thune also suggested that members of Congress had already weighed in.
“We view that to be a matter of settled law,” Thune said. “With regard to how most members of Congress perceive or view that, we’ve spoken on that.”
Iowa Old Lady
Somehow I hadn’t realized how much the lying and gaslighting would get to me once he was president. It feels qualitatively different, maybe because now there’s no one to serve as a check on him.
Come back, Obama!
Yarrow
@Iowa Old Lady: I hope he comes back sooner rather than later as a moral voice. We need people of standing to play that role.
hovercraft
@Major Major Major Major: Charles Black has been a whack job for years, I became aware of him went he was on trail, years ago. I remember thinking how the hell can this moron run any type of a business, he’s insane. Now to find out that it’s actually not uncommon.
hovercraft
@Iowa Old Lady:
Michelle will cut a bitch ! Leave her boo alone ;-)
Quinerly
@Major Major Major Major:
So are Bannon and Tiffany Trump.
Iowa Old Lady
It’s embarrassing how easy the US President is to parody.
Kay
My email has gotten so good since Trump was elected. Ideas of all kinds from all kinds of people!
I love how it’s ALL CAPS and also how she writes “liberal media elites” like it’s a real category :)
When I get my hat I’m wearing it.
Lizzy L
The torture draft EO is a big shiny — after the pushback from McCain, Thune, and the FBI, the WH has disavowed it. (Not ours, we didn’t write it.) Uh huh. The voter fraud investigation is a big shiny. I don’t think Jerry Brown and Andrew Cuomo are scared. The Mexican wall EO is a big shiny, because as has been pointed out, a project of this magnitude takes money and time. Think about how long it takes your state department of transportation to do any kind of major construction. There’s a project in my neighborhood to reroute a freeway entrance/exit: CalTrans has been working on it for over two years.
T is bored, so they’re printing things for him to sign. Let’s not get distracted by the dangling shiny objects. We need to look for the real stuff. The Feds control immigration, so the EO about restricting immigration is real. What else? What is Congress doing? Killing the ACA. Trying to kill Medicare and Medicaid. That shit’s real.
Yarrow
Jake Tapper has a strong segment on the supposed voting fraud. “A stunning allegation for which the White House is providing no evidence. And there is a reason they are providing no evidence: there is no evidence. It is not true.” Goes on to say that Spicer didn’t share the belief that there is widespread voter fraud and then speculate why. He points out that if it were true then massive investigations would be required and they aren’t happening. He stresses the word “belief” several times, indicating it’s not fact it’s just a belief. It’s good stuff. Worth a look.
J R in WV
@Yarrow:
Of course it “works” – you can make them tell you whatever you want !!
Isn’t that the whole point? Trump isn’t interested in facts, he needs to make people confess to whatever he needs them to confess to. Torture absolutely works for that, or to get “information” that will convict an enemy of – well, whatever you want.
How is that not working, for some values of working? You gotta get wit da plan, guys!! You’re thinking Justice Department, when you should be thinking New York Mob!
That’s what Trump is thinking about, after all.
It’s all he knows, innit?
Lavocat
The funniest thing about this video is that it perfectly captures how the rest of the world sees America right now. They realize that while most of us remain sane, a large portion of us have totally lost our shit. I think they’re mostly hoping that Donny Boy is more incompetent than he is evil. And he keeps proving them right every day.
Kay
All a big staged, lie:
Look at the photo of the Trump Family standing there with the phony folders probably full of blank sheets of paper. They lie like other people breathe.
zhena gogolia
@Lavocat:
I’m sorry, he’s more evil than he is anything. Anything.
zhena gogolia
@Kay:
SNL did a great thing with that. The lawyer tried to pick one up and they were all glued together in one phony cardboard heap.
Mnemosyne
@Lizzy L:
Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan thanks to voter suppression. I am not going to take ANY of his statements about “voter fraud” for granted. Ever.
Sab
@Ohio Mom: Did they die out of state? In my county in Ohio the board of elections is informed when the death certificate is issued. I was executor of my (disheartened Republican) mother’s estate.I went down to the board of elections to get her name off the roll so that the local repubs couldn’n’t cast a fraudulent absentee ballot, and her name had already been removed.
PIGL
@Major Major Major Major: Conrad Black should have walked into a bullet a long time ago. On behalf of Canada, I apologize to the world for his existence. OTOH, it was your lot who let him out of prison.
PIGL
@Major Major Major Major: Oh, it’s real enough. Conrad Black is an incredible piece of work….creepy malevolence wrapped in fake erudition.
John M. Burt
My wife and I would like to say,
“Dear Netherlands: Can we join you? We used to think we’d like for Oregon to be annexed to Canada, but upon reflection, we think you might be a better fit for us.
“We’d makes a swell 13th province for you. You’ve already got a North Holland and a South Holland, we could be West Holland — or East Holland, either one would do.
“We’d even settle for being a colony. It’s true that in spite of how enlightened and decent you are at home, you were actually the second-worst colonial power after Belgium, but would it be worse to be the Dutch West Indies (West) or the Dutch East Indies (East) than to be part of Donald Trump’s USA? It’s hard to imagine how.
“We’re even willing to learn Dutch. We hear you have all the best words. Besides, Dutch sounds so much like English, much more than any other language (many English speakers have noticed this). Maybe we could sort of ease into it by learning Frisian.
“Please contact Governor Kate Brown at http://www.oregon.gov/gov/Pages/contact.aspx
“Erg Bedankt, John and Kathe Burt”