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This Blog Goes to 11…

This is how realignments happen…

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

Shocking, but not surprising.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Also, too.

Too inconsequential to be sued

No one could have predicted…

Han shot first.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

Mission Accomplished!

A snarling mass of vitriolic vicious jackals

What fresh hell is this?

We are aware of all internet traditions.

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

The Math Demands It!

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

Women: They Get Shit Done

How has Obama failed you today?

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread

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Mr. Malamud is a Soviet immigrant…

Always check in with the head office before rolling out the new campaign:

#BunkerBoy is #PutinsPuppy

The ‘conservatives’ are skeptical!

Even Mr. Megan McArgleBargle:

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Trump’s Speech

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BunkerBoy emerged to tell us that he’s going to send the military if governors won’t shut down protests in their states. As with all Trump statements, it’s worth waiting to see how this plays out, but there’s danger in his words and actions so far.

The governors are primarily responsible for law and order in their states, but Trump has been urged by some of his courtiers to invoke the Insurrection Act to override the Posse Comitatus Act and allow him to send the military in. He has not done that yet.

A selection of tweets:

Open thread!

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Buckle Up, Buttercups

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The bunker occupant held a conference call with the nation’s governors this morning. He wasn’t in a happy mood:

Buckle Up, Buttercups

I wish activating Bill Bar and activating him “very strongly” referred to a mechanism for launching a projectile — a trebuchet containing Bill Barr aimed at the side of the DOJ building would be ideal. But I’m thinking Trump means to subvert the rule of law even further, perhaps to empower head-knockers in a bid to save his (Trump’s) own ass from this humiliating spectacle. Coincidentally, that was the Fox & Friends advice this morning, if you read between the lines.

One NYT reporter says Trump told the governors he was putting the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs “in charge.” Is that even legal? Fuckifino.

Anyhoo, it’s alarming, obviously. But as Cheryl correctly pointed out on Twitter, it’s pretty clear there’s no real strategy here. Just a small, scared shitbird squawking in a gilded cage. Still, he’s a shitbird with the nuclear codes and military forces, so yeah, I’ll categorize this display as alarming AND disorganized for now.

Courage, friends. The only way out of this dangerous time is through it.

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Resignation

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Reports emerged over the weekend that Trump was briefly taken to the White House bunker on Friday due to protests in nearby Lafayette Park. The protests continued all weekend. Last night, the exterior lights were turned off at the White House. Can’t remember that ever happening before.* I think this guy nailed it:

True in every sense but the technical one, which is unfortunately what counts. So, we’ll be slogging through this multi-faceted catastrophe for the next several months, essentially leaderless and except where hindered by a toxic orange internet troll, while Trump’s Republican enablers continue the smash-and-grab.

From The Post:

Never in the 1,227 days of Trump’s presidency has the nation seemed to cry out for leadership as it did Sunday, yet Trump made no attempt to provide it.

That was by design. Trump and some of his advisers calculated that he should not speak to the nation because he had nothing new to say and had no tangible policy or action to announce yet, according to a senior administration official. Evidently not feeling an urgent motivation Sunday to try to bring people together, he stayed silent.

The loudest mouth in the country wasn’t completely silent yesterday evening: Trump tweet-screamed “FAKE NEWS” and “LAW & ORDER.” But it seemed a bit pro forma, to be honest. He’s said nothing for hours, possibly because Kellyanne and Ivanka each have a hold on one tiny thumb.

Overnight, the #BunkerTrump hashtag was trending on Twitter. There’s nothing worse for a bully than to be revealed as a chickenshit, so the coward will probably amp up the tough guy talk today at some point. Political advisors are split on how Trump should respond, according to The Post:

Some on Trump’s reelection campaign team, as well as some White House staffers, have been pushing for the president to deliver an Oval Office address, and he could decide to do so later in the week. But aides first want him to embark on a listening tour of sorts to develop constructive ideas, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans.

Listening? Ideas? What a fucking joke. Trump is still smarting from the “bad reviews” he got for the disastrous Oval Office address on COVID-19, so it’ll be a challenge for Jared to make him sit still for 10 minutes and recite words off the teleprompter.

I can only think of two words that would be helpful right now: “I resign.”

He wouldn’t even need a goddamn teleprompter for that. Just quit and fucking go away and let us begin the work of de-Trumpification. It will be a multi-generational task.

*Duff the Baker confirmed my suspicions about the unprecedented nature of the White House’s lack of exterior lighting last night:

What a wondrous time it must be for Team Blue political ad designers, with the symbolism pouring down like rain and all. Open thread.

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Late Night Open Thread: Choose Your Side

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… The country is almost three months into a bewildering and totally unprecedented nationwide public lockdown. Thirty or forty million people have lost their jobs. More than (probably many more than) one hundred thousand people have lost their lives. And – critically – this great civic storm has been borne disproportionately in the nation’s great cities and among its black and hispanic working classes. Meanwhile much of May has been taken up with public discussion and protest about people’s demands for haircuts and freedom from cloth masks. I’m not saying this is because of the pandemic. But it’s certainly the context outside of which none of this can be truly understood…

We are still in the midst of this historical moment in which rising and growing public demands for a more equitable and just society are colliding with a consolidating backlash against them. This is the confrontation that gave us Trumpism and his presidency – inextricably bound up with his brazen and indifferently predatory personality – is only intensifying the conflict. Trump first tried to inflame the violence in his favor. In the last 24 hours, much as he did with COVID, he seems to have gotten tired of the civil conflict and wanted to move onto something more fun – to space launches, judicial nominations, anything. Shortly enough, he’ll return to incitement. It is hard not to look at all of this and not see an escalating gyre of public crises and catastrophes, many of which are not entirely the fault of the President, but all of which are deepened, accentuated and inflamed by his disastrous and cataclysmic presidency.

Living in history is about not knowing the future. As observers and participants all we can do – what we must do – is align our values and the future we would like to live with the reality of the moment and our actions within it and push forward to whatever that future will be.


The NYTimes, still insisting ‘we’ should all gobble down that… Shinola:

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Sunday Evening Open Thread: In Hellworld, Mockery Is Our Sharpest Weapon

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Meanwhile, Trump has declared that he will declare ‘Antifa’ a terrorist organization. He will also declare ‘wind’ — he calls it ‘the nasty element, very bad, it kills many many birds and causes the windmill cancer’, even apart from its insolent treatment of strong important very manly hair arrangments — a terrorist element, with just as important an effect on tomorrow’s weather as trying to stamp out a mostly non-hierarchical movement by force will have on the anarchists…

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Open Thread: Suddenly, the (Rest of the) GOP Is “Concerned”

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… Republican strategists are increasingly worried that Trump is headed for defeat in November and that he may drag other Republicans down with him.

Seven GOP operatives not directly associated with the President’s reelection campaign told CNN that Trump’s response to the pandemic and the subsequent economic fallout have significantly damaged his bid for a second term — and that the effects are starting to hurt Republicans more broadly. Some of these operatives asked not to be identified in order to speak more candidly.

Several say that public polls showing Trump trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden mirror what they are finding in their own private polls, and that the trend is bleeding into key Senate races. The GOP already had a difficult task of defending 23 Senate seats in 2020. The job of protecting its slim 3-seat majority has only gotten harder as the pandemic has unfolded. States like Arizona and North Carolina, once thought to be home to winnable Senate races now appear in jeopardy.

Trump himself is being alerted to the problems. Politico reported this week that two of Trump’s own outside political advisers, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, warned the President last week that his support was falling in some swing states…

… To which the Squatter-in-Chief responded with a blizzard of offensive tweets, reinforcing every Repub weakness. So much for strategery!

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Trump Cowers in the White House

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There were protests outside the White House last night, and they scared the shit out of Trump, who reports that he was peeping out the window at the action. We got a “sir” story on Twitter a while ago to confirm Trump’s pants-soiling terror, the “sir” thing being an infallible indication of a big fat whopper:

Cowardly Trump scared shitless by protests outside the White House

The “most vicious dogs” and the “most ominous weapons,” plus strapping young agents vying for the privilege of protecting Trump’s cowardly orange hide, probably with tears in their eyes from an excess of devotion. Bullshit. They protected the building and the current resident, which is indeed their job.

I wonder where Trump got the information about the DC cops standing down, and if it’s true? That’s probably a lie too.

Anyhoo, Trump was never in any danger, of course. But he’s a coward, and as a chickenshit, yellow-bellied, sniveling punk, he got a tiny glimpse last night of what it was like to be Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania in the run-up to Christmas in 1989. It scared the shit out of him.

Good.

I say it’s good because fear for his own personal safety is probably the only thing that might give Trump pause as he pours gasoline on the flames of rage and despair that are engulfing the country. Trump feeds on that sorrow and anger. He uses it to stoke division, which he regards as potential deliverance from the trap in which he finds himself ensnared, thanks to his own towering incompetence and fathomless malice.

Here’s hoping fear will serve as a restraining force. Compassion, empathy and intelligence certainly won’t.

UPDATE: Well, there goes my hopeful theory:

So, Trump is summoning the MAGA choads to the White House so they can clash with protesters. In the middle of a pandemic.

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Late Night Open Thread: World’s Most Powerful Twitter Troll

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Open Thread: Man S-M-R-T (Women Smarter)

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TikTok takes a ton of abuse (and not without reason), but it can also be a weapon for the relatively powerless — “Women on TikTok have cracked the code on how to satirize Trump”:

Kylie Scott, a social worker turned film student, was dutifully obeying stay-at-home orders in California when she caught a clip of the president riffing on antibiotics and coronavirus. On TikTok, where lip-syncing is a popular pastime, somebody had mimed the president’s monologue as if he were a clueless substitute teacher, forced to lecture on a subject he knew nothing about. But to Scott, the president’s speech seemed like something much more basic: the 3 a.m. ramblings of a drunk girl in a club.

So that’s what she turned it into. Scott threw on a sparkly top, grabbed a bar glass, and spent 30 minutes learning to lip-sync the president’s address — “The germ has gotten so brilliant” — before recording her reinterpretation and throwing it on TikTok, where it promptly gained more than a million views.

If you’ve had an extra hour or 90 to stare at a screen in the past two months, you might have seen one of Scott’s videos. The settings change, from bar crawl to birthday toast to Uber ride, but her character remains the same: Scott is a runny-mascara’d hot mess who is definitely going to borrow your purse and then puke in it. She just happens to be delivering the monologues of the president of the United States. “I’m not splicing anything together,” Scott says. “They’re all full sound bites that he’s said directly.”…

… Comedians have long complained that Trump is difficult to parody: He says things that are weirder than what any writers’ room could come up with, with a delivery that’s practically beyond exaggeration. Lip-sync remixers like Scott have found a way to revive presidential satire by simply keeping the word vomit and changing everything else.

Sarah Cooper is another master of this method. Wearing her own street clothes and in her own Brooklyn apartment, she’s filmed a whole series, including “How to Medical” — using Trump’s comments about injecting disinfectant to kill the virus — and “How to Obamagate.” Already an author and working comedian, her Twitter following has grown from 60,000 to 600,000; when I talked with her on the phone this week, she said she’d been “taking meetings,” one of those Hollywood terms that often means somebody powerful wants to make you into somebody famous…

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Cannibal-in-Chief

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Bossie’s an old-school, successful ratfvcker — which is why the #failsons and luzers in Trump’s permanent cortege hate him. Lewandowski’s a no-neck two-bit thug, which probably intimidates Jared and Stephen Miller, and it won’t surprise me when rumors leak out that he tried to throw hands on Parscale. Insert ‘Let them fight’ gif —

… Republicans involved with setting up the Thursday meeting with Trump’s state directors said they were taken aback by Bossie and Lewandowski’s warning. They felt the need to mollify Trump, who has been kept abreast of his reelection effort but hasn’t always been aware of the granular, on-the-ground details.

The sequence, which was described by four people familiar with what transpired, offered the latest snapshot of Trump’s angst about his battleground state standing. With just five months until the election, the president has been privately expressing concern about his poll numbers and senior Republicans are openly sounding alarms about his swing state prospects...

When the discussion turned to Arizona in the Thursday meeting, Trump and his political advisers expressed concern about GOP Sen. Martha McSally’s campaign to win the seat to which she was appointed in 2018. The president waved in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who was there to meet with him on a separate matter, for the discussion.

Those present in the meeting also voiced worry about the prospects of another red state senator, Georgia Republican Kelly Loeffler. The senator had at the time been under federal investigation for stock trades, though the Department of Justice has since dropped the investigation.

Georgia, like Arizona, hasn’t been won by a Democratic presidential candidate in decades. But recent surveys have shown Trump on shaky ground, including one commissioned by the political team of GOP Gov. Brian Kemp that had the president running neck-and-neck with Biden.

On Tuesday, the campaign announced that it was promoting former White House political director Bill Stepien to deputy campaign manager. The move was described as an attempt to provide additional support to campaign manager Brad Parscale, though some in the White House viewed it as a check on Parscale…

Whisper: Mitch McConnell doesn’t care whether Trump wins in November. Mitch has his wife’s multimillions to fall back on, not to mention his own ties to Putin. Mitch would be just as happy to see a Democrat in the Oval Office next year, so he could go back to being ‘the (dis)loyal opposition…

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‘Maximizing His Time’

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As I’ve mentioned in this space before, my fondest wish for the present era is that Trump’s fall will be so humiliating that it blights the political prospects of all the horrid wingnut remoras who attached themselves to Trump during his rise. Mike Pompeo is one such horrid wingnut remora, and boy does he deserve ruin for nestling so close to the Trumpian anal fin.

Ever seen Pompeo interviewed? He seems really angry. He’s definitely not enjoying life, despite having taxpayer provided dog-walkers and dry cleaning picker-uppers.

He snaps out pained, exasperated, prefab responses to softball questions and gets super prickly and sneery when gently queried on Trump’s lunatic pronouncements or — the sheer effrontery, the unmitigated gall! — the propriety of Pompeo’s own actions. You can almost see the thought-bubble over his head that reads, “DON’T YOU PEOPLE KNOW WHO I AM?!?”

From The Hill:

Ex-Pompeo staffers asked to sign letter against ‘smear campaign’

Former House staffers to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are being asked to sign a letter offering him support after a “smear campaign” that he and his wife asked staffers to carry out trivial tasks such as bringing him lunch or getting his dry cleaning.

The letter obtained by The Hill says Pompeo, while serving as a House member from Kansas, picked up his own dry cleaning and that if there was a deviation, it was to maximize his time with constituents…

“In our time working with them, Mike and Susan never expressed that a task was so trivial or mundane as to be beneath them,” the letter states.

“To set the record straight: Mike picked up his own dry cleaning. Mike bought his own lunch. And yes, Mike picked up the phone and took constituent calls,” it says. “Any deviation from these norms was in order to maximize Mike’s time serving constituent needs. Misreporting on these practices is such a gross misuse of journalistic resources at a time of a global pandemic that it boggles our imaginations.”

Bolded text = Busted. According to The Hill’s sources, it was the missus who turned congressional, CIA and then State Department staff into personal butlers, but that’s probably a load of horseshit too. I’m willing to speculate they’re both arrogant, entitled shitheads, and if the Trump era marks the last stop on the federal gravy train for the Pompeos, something positive will have emerged from this shit-blizzard after all.

Open thread.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Convention Par-TAY!

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*Boring* Democrat lanyard-wearers, whining about ‘superspreader events’ and ‘massive public health risk’!

… Spreading the events across several locations would dilute the traditional pageantry of the convention — and limit the masses of delegates and onlookers who flock to the events. But it would allow the party to target specific areas where it hopes to turn voters its way in November, according to the two Democrats, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private planning…

The presidential conventions, marquee events for each political party that traditionally offer four full nights of televised appeals to voters, are one of the few major events of the summer to remain on the calendar, although the Democratic gathering has already been pushed back from mid-July to Aug. 17 in hopes that the coronavirus outbreak will diminish over time…

Why not get out there and reap the massive ‘earned media’ benefits that the Greedy Old Perverts are not too proud to grasp after, for the entertainment of the horse-race political touts?

Speculation is that such a ‘get’ would be a reward for Florida’s Trump-tastic Governor, Ron DeSantis. But also, of course…


Just enough room for him, a battery of sycophants, and a yuuuuge media corral. No germ-laden swag-flashing peons to distract from the TRANSITION TO OBAMAGATE INFRASTRUCTURE AGAIN, or whatever that week’s slogan turns out to be!

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Monday Evening ‘End of the Holiday Weekend, Except Lockdown’ Open Thread: FORE!

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The Wall Street Journal assures us that this… “Shinola”… is actually delicious chocolate pudding!

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Never Enough Popcorn

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One way or another, sounds like we should be prepped for another GOP Hellweek…

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