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.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Verified, but limited!

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Everybody saw this coming.

Tick tock motherfuckers! Tick fucking tock!

Shocking, but not surprising

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

… makes me wish i had hoarded more linguine

The willow is too close to the house.

It was down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Han shot first.

Not all heroes wear capes.

False Scribes! False Scribes!

What fresh hell is this?

It’s the corruption, stupid.

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Dolt 45

Late Night Scumbags Open Thread: If This Is History Repeating, Did It Have to Be Such A Lousy Farce?

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… The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the D.N.C., according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said….

The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations last year between Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States. In those calls, which led to Mr. Flynn’s resignation on Monday night, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia in December…

… Given his short stay at the top, Mr. Flynn’s case might be quickly forgotten as an isolated episode if it did not raise other questions, particularly about what the president knew and when. Even more broadly, it underscores lingering uncertainty about the relationship between the Trump administration and Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, a subject of great interest given American intelligence reports of Moscow’s intervention in last year’s elections in the United States.

As leaders of both parties said on Tuesday that they expected the Senate to investigate and probably even summon Mr. Flynn to testify, more details emerged about a drama that played out largely in secret inside a White House riven by competing power centers. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, revealed that Mr. Trump had known about concerns that Mr. Flynn lied for more than two weeks before demanding his resignation on Monday night. But Vice President Mike Pence was kept in the dark and did not learn that Mr. Flynn had misled him about his Russia contacts until reading news accounts late last week…

(Somewhere in Hell, dead Spiro Agnew weeps at the GOP’s reduction to the likes of ‘Mike Dense’.)

“The mountain has labored, and brought forth a mouse. But did it have to be a wall-eyed mouse in a clown suit?”

Late Night Scumbags Open Thread: If This Is History Repeating, Did It Have to Be Such A <em>Lousy</em> Farce?Post + Comments (65)

GOP Venality Open Thread: REMAIN CALM! ALL IS WELL!

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Sooo… let me see if I have the timeline correct… when Acting Attorney General Sally Yates ordered her Dept. of Justice lawyers not to enforce Trump’s totally-not-a-Muslim-ban Executive Order, she already had a pretty good idea his minions were looking for an excuse to fire her? As they did?

How many of us expected the Trump Administration to reach Nixon-post-Watergate levels of corrupt incompetence during its very first month?

And the leading lights of the GOP Congress step forward to cover themselves with… well, it ain’t glory…

GOP Venality Open Thread: REMAIN CALM! ALL IS WELL!Post + Comments (313)

Open Thread: What’s the Japanese Translation for “Grifter-in-Chief”?

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CNN [warning: autoplay]:

… Swanning through the club’s living room and main dining area alongside Abe, Trump was — as is now typical — swarmed with paying members, who now view dinner at the club as an opportunity for a few seconds of face time with the new President.

But as he sat down for the planned working dinner with Abe, whose country is well within range of North Korea’s missiles, it was clear his counterpart felt it necessary to respond to the test. The launch occurred just before 8 a.m. on Sunday morning in Japan.

Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and chief strategist Steve Bannon left their seats to huddle closer to Trump as documents were produced and phone calls were placed to officials in Washington and Tokyo.

The patio was lit only with candles and moonlight, so aides used the camera lights on their phones to help the stone-faced Trump and Abe read through the documents…

Eventually Trump and Abe, along with their collection of aides, stood and moved from the dining terrace and toward a marble-trimmed ballroom, whose gilded columns were concealed by more sober-looking black drapes.

Standing in front of an American and Japanese flag, a stern-faced Abe called the launch “absolutely intolerable,” and insisted North Korea adhere to United Nations Security Council resolutions barring it from testing of ballistic missiles.

Trump, in his short remarks, didn’t mention the launch. He used a short statement to vow support for Japan instead…

He declined to read from a set of prepared remarks, which photographers captured images of, that were resting on his podium. Those remarks did mention the missile test specifically and vowed cooperation between allies to “safeguard and protect” against North Korea’s “provocative acts.”…

Trump left the impromptu briefing room without taking questions, having delivered the first emergency foreign policy statement of his presidency.

But even as he confronted one of the gravest matters of his office, Trump nonetheless found it impossible to resist dropping in on a nearby wedding reception, already underway in his treasured Grand Ballroom. Trump designed and built the space himself after purchasing Mar-a-Lago in the 1980s.

Entering the ornate room, Trump took a photo with the bride and her bridesmaids, who posed in red gowns next to the commander in chief, mimicking his signature thumbs-up.
Then he grabbed a microphone.

“I saw them out on the lawn today,” Trump said of the bride and groom, who were standing nearby. “I said to the Prime Minister of Japan, I said, ‘C’mon Shinzo, let’s go over and say hello.’ ”

“They’ve been members of this club for a long time,” Trump said of the newlyweds. “They’ve paid me a fortune.”

Yeah, Trump knows just how to handle an international crisis — now that he’s President-Asterisk, membership fees at Mar-a-Largo have doubled.

The Japanese government must be nostalgic about the good old days, when the worst diplomatic faux pas was Bush Sr. vomiting on the Prime Minister during a state dinner.

Open Thread: What’s the Japanese Translation for “Grifter-in-Chief”?Post + Comments (121)

Open thread – Someone should ask Frederick Douglass what he thinks….

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Further to my earlier post, I want to note that I am not suggesting for a moment that Australia holds any high moral ground when it comes to immigration and race relations. It isn’t what anyone would call a good actor in this situation.

Its attempt to fob off a thousand refugees on America is just the latest gambit in aid of a longstanding policy of systematic, heartless abandonment of its international obligations over the last 20 years, under governments of both stripes – demonising refugees, capturing them before they enter Australian waters, and then shipping them off to concentration camps foisted upon Australia’s client states by fiat and run by profit-driven corporates, stripping desperate, endangered people of protection, agency and dignity, all while allowing most Australians to pretend the refugee problem doesn’t exist.

And this is by no means a recent phenomenon. Australians have dabbled happily in racism since the white invasion – from the odd massacre and the old blanket trick, to language tests and White Australia, up to the appropriation of an entire nation from its legally nonexistent indigenes, the ongoing poverty/health/everything else crisis amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and full scale genocide.

Still, Australians have, at the very least, avoided electing a petulant ambulatory yam as their head of state. People like Cory “man on dog” Bernadi and Pauline Pantsdown still comprise the nutty right down here, rather than the entire government, unlike some countries I could mention.

However, the lesson here is not that Australia is any better than America.

It is (as if we needed to be reminded) that, with the ascendency of the Wanker in Chief, the bedrock assumptions of our international polity are shattered, and for the next four years we’re all going to be more rooted than a five dollar hooker in a Kings Cross dunny.

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Open thread – Someone should ask Frederick Douglass what he thinks….Post + Comments (66)