Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

Verified, but limited!

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

What fresh hell is this?

Shocking, but not surprising.

The Math Demands It!

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

Too inconsequential to be sued

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

How has Obama failed you today?

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

No one could have predicted…

The house always wins.

Yes we did.

Word salad with all caps

This Blog Goes to 11…

Usually wrong but never in doubt.

Mission Accomplished!

This blog will pay for itself.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Han shot first.

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Dolt 45

Sunday Evening Open Thread: Perspectives

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What’s on the agenda as we buckle up for another week?
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Saturday Night Open Thread: Old Man Yells At Crowds

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Saturday Morning Clowns Open Thread: Not Gonna Get Easier, Repubs

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Aaaand now… Onwards, to the Zombie-Eyed Granny-Starver’s Ayn Rand wet dream…

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Late Night Open Thread: SAD!

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(Courtesy of Schroedinger’s Cat)
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Not us Dems, of course — but this guy:

What’s that again, Donald?…

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Some Well-Earned Schadenfreude

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Anything is possible in this fallen world, so there’s still a chance that Ryan and Trump between them can bribe, charm, or bully enough Repub holdouts into voting for their “health care” “plan” (Trump air quotes). But the betting odds are against it, at least for today… and it’s always sweet to see such a bunch of grifters and cravens suffer.

Apart from cheering for more GOP defectors, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up another long week?
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Late Night Open Thread: Nazi Pajama Games

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The Repubs have soooo much respect for our military, they want to use it as a dumpster for all the fantasists and grifters who aren’t sharp enough for the business grifts:

… Mattis was widely embraced on both sides of the aisle when President Donald Trump nominated him. Republicans and Democrats alike expressed hope that the retired four-star general would be a moderating force on the volatile commander in chief.

But Republican lawmakers and senior congressional aides said in recent interviews they’re running out of patience with Mattis’ staffing decisions, which have disappointed Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee hoping to see their ideological allies elevated to senior levels in the Defense Department. Others are grumbling about Mattis’ refusal to advocate a bigger increase in the defense budget, which defense hawks believe was gutted disastrously under President Barack Obama.

“He certainly has got a tough job, but it sometimes feels like he forgets that we won the election,” said one aide to a GOP senator on the Armed Services Committee, who declined to speak on the record for fear of publicly alienating the defense secretary.

“We’ve waited eight years for this, to be able to fill these posts with Republicans,” said another top GOP Hill staffer. “We know Trump isn’t part of the establishment and that it’s going to be a bit different, but it should go without saying that a Republican administration is expected to staff federal agencies with Republicans.”…

Defense Department veterans say the White House has put Mattis in a nearly impossible position given that a large swath of the Republican foreign-policy establishment was openly critical of Trump during the campaign. Some say that has left Mattis with little choice but to turn to Democrats and to those without a political background to fill senior posts.

“In picking Mattis, the president got someone who had bipartisan credibility and was seen as a tough national security official who wasn’t going to toe the White House or the GOP line,” said Jeremy Bash, a former Pentagon spokesman under Secretary Leon Panetta. “Independence is an important attribute in a SecDef. But when you get that, you get frustration from the political folks. When you’re not coming out of the establishment, you have the credibility to do bipartisan things. You’re just going to take incoming from Democrats and from Republicans from time to time.”…

There’s also a longwinded story about Mattis paying insufficient attention to Senators Cotton and Cruz and their Very Serious Military Theorists cosplay, and a sidebar that he’s not sympathetic to re-introducing GOP grifters into Pentagon budget planning.

… Others said it’s crucial that Mattis embrace the reality of navigating the Hill. “Everybody thinks very highly of him, but he doesn’t have any political sense, and he doesn’t think he needs any political sense,” said one former Bush administration Defense Department official. “But it’s quintessentially a political job.”

We don’t want capable people with experience! We want cushy berths for our grifters and ideologues!

Bonus watching, another Trump ‘terrorism expert’ gets Bee-burned..

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Some Dare Call It Treason

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As perceived by the ex-CIA, #NeverTrump candidate in 2016:

There’s an old political story about LBJ deciding not to run for reelection once the major news media started reporting unvarnished details about the ongoing war in Vietnam: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Trump has only been in office for two months, but he’s already lost at least two Very Serious Media Voices. Thomas Friedman, aka ‘the Moustache of Understanding’:

… The last time our country faced such a cancer on the presidency, the Republican Party’s leadership stood up and put country before party to get to the truth. But today’s G.O.P. is a pale imitation of that party. With a few exceptions, it has declared moral bankruptcy and abdicated its responsibility to draw any red lines for President Trump…

If you say and do nothing when the nation’s leader smears his predecessor — and then maintains his fantasy as fact — not only will he never have the credibility to call on any other country to uphold the highest standards for rule of law, democracy and human rights, but neither will all of you. We will become a lesser country and the world a more dangerous place.

Friedman’s fellow NYTimesman Nick Kristof:

The greatest political scandal in American history was not Aaron Burr’s shooting of Alexander Hamilton, and perhaps wasn’t even Watergate. Rather it may have been Richard Nixon’s secret efforts in 1968 to sabotage a U.S. diplomatic effort to end the Vietnam War.

Nixon’s initiative, long rumored but confirmed only a few months ago, was meant to improve his election chances that year. After Nixon won, the war dragged on and cost thousands of additional American and Vietnamese lives; it’s hard to see his behavior as anything but treason.

Now the F.B.I. confirms that we have had an investigation underway for eight months into whether another presidential campaign colluded with a foreign power so as to win an election. To me, that, too, would amount to treason…

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: “Just Not FUN Anymore, Paulie Boy!”

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Okay, I’m a little obsessed right now. Because I’m hoping for the political equivalent of a Trump-Ryan murder-suicide pact, and I don’t even care which partner goes first.

Apart from keeping one eye on the perpetrators at all times, what’s on the agenda for the day?
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Late Night Open Thread: Pathologically Small Man in A Big, Big Job

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Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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Politico, “Trump’s penchant for vengeance casts shadow on health care vote”:

Donald Trump didn’t have to issue his threat seriously — “I’m gonna come after you,” he said jokingly Tuesday to a ringleader of House GOP hard-liners opposing his health care bill — to be taken seriously by the 200 Republicans gathered in the Capitol basement.

For a president with a penchant for vengeance — who named “an eye for an eye” as his favorite biblical passage, who banned media outlets from campaign events when he didn’t approve of their coverage, who after the election ousted a GOP state chairman whom he viewed as disloyal, who just last week reminded a GOP governor who hadn’t endorsed him that “I never forget” — the roll-call vote on the Republican health care plan, expected Thursday, will be the first accounting of who’s with him and who’s against him on Capitol Hill…

Greg Sargent, at the Washington Post — “Trump’s lies are failing him, and it is making him deeply frustrated”:

The events of this week are revealing with a new level of clarity that President Trump and the White House have ventured far beyond unconventional levels of dishonesty. Instead, they are revealing on their part something more remarkable and challenging to our system: a kind of deep rot of bad faith — a profound contempt for democratic process and the possibility of agreement on shared reality — that is wildly beyond anything in recent memory and strains the limits of our political vocabulary.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: You Repubs Think You’re Sick of This Crap?

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Apart from saying I TOLD YOU SO, what’s on the agenda for the day?

…The testimony of Mr. Comey and that of Adm. Michael S. Rogers, his National Security Agency counterpart, will most likely enervate and distract Mr. Trump’s administration for weeks, if not longer… But it’s the obsessiveness and ferocity of Mr. Trump’s pushback against the Russian allegations, often untethered from fact or tact, that is making an uncertain situation worse.

Mr. Trump’s allies have begun to wonder if his need for self-expression, often on social media, will exceed his instinct for self-preservation, with disastrous results both for the president and for a party whose fate is now tightly tied to his.

And Mr. Trump’s fixation on fighting is undermining his credibility at a time when he needs to toggle from go-it-alone executive action to collaborative congressional action on ambitious health care, budget and infrastructure legislation…

The problem, from the perspective of Mr. Trump’s beleaguered political fire brigade, is that the president insists on dealing with crises by creating new ones — so surrogates, repeating talking points the president himself ignores, say they often feel like human shields….

Focus groups and polls conducted by two Democratic strategists this month have shown that many voters, even some who support Mr. Trump, have grown weary of his tweets as president. That was also borne out by a Fox News poll last week, showing that a mere 35 percent of Trump voters approve of his Twitter habits, and that only 16 percent of all voters approve of them. Some 32 percent said they “wish he’d be more careful” with his feed.

“His tweeting defines him, and not in a good way,” said Geoff Garin, a veteran Democratic pollster. “Voters not only think Trump’s use of Twitter is unpresidential, they also see the tone and content of his tweets as an indication that he is lacking in self-control.”…

COULD NOT HAPPEN TO A MORE DESERVING BUNCH OF GONIFFS.

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Late Night Open Thread: Violins So Tiny, Even Lord Smallgloves Could Play One

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Open Thread: You Know It’s Bad for the Repubs, Because They’re Already Trying to Cover It Up

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Aaaand here comes Rep. Trey ‘But Her Emails’ Gowdy… Per USAToday:

Rep. Trey Gowdy used Monday’s House Intelligence Committee hearing to cite Obama administration officials, including the former president, as potential sources for leaks.

The South Carolina Republican was questioning FBI Director James Comey during the House Intelligence Committee’s hearing as part of its investigation into Russian interference with the U.S. election.

Like many of his Republican colleagues, Gowdy used his time to focus on recent leaks of classified information to journalists. But he went a step further by raising specific names of people from the former administration to show they had access to leaked classified material, implying they might have been sources of the leaks…

Gowdy argued that “unmasking” Flynn’s name was a felony because it was part of a confidential intelligence gathering and had previously been “masked” to protect his identity.

“I’m not going to get either that particular case, that matter, or any conversations I had involving the president. So I can’t answer that question,” Comey responded.

But Obama wasn’t the only one. Gowdy also rattled down a list of people who had held high-ranking positions in the Obama administration and asked whether each would have had access to the “unmasked” name. He included former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan, former national security adviser Susan Rice, former White House adviser Ben Rhodes, former attorney general Loretta Lynch and former deputy attorney general Sally Yates.

“In the universe of possible motives of felonious dissemination of classified material, we could rule out wanting to help the intelligence communities and the law enforcement communities. Those are two motives that are gone now, that leaves more nefarious motives,” Gowdy said…

How dare those filthy Democrats try to expose our treason on behalf of the higher cause! Do they not understand that targeted leaking is only permissible by OUR party?

ETA:

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The Way We Live Now: A Simple, Marketable Primer for Dealing with the Toddler-in-Chief

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Okay, President-Asterisk Trump is not working nearly as effectively as his biggest boosters hoped, in those heady days after the election. But you deal with the gulls you have, not the gulls you wished you had, so… Politico founders and self-styled machers Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen share some #Savvy in their newest venture, Axios:

Top CEOs have a new First Customer. With President Trump taking a hands-on approach to negotiations, here are five tips for surviving and thriving — based on conversations with executives, aides and friends who have battled Trump in private and found some success…

– Get to the table, whether you love him or not. Trump is a transactional guy with unformed views on many topics. He frequently seeks advice and occasionally takes it. While it might feel right to buckle to pressure and refuse meetings, you lose your leverage, instantly and profoundly.

– Give him something he can call a win. Trump has an elastic view of winning, as seen by his trumpeting of companies announcing new U.S. jobs that were set in motion long before the president won. He NEEDS something to tweet, but often needs the specifics filled in, several business leaders told us…

– Find and exploit common ground — on people, real estate, politics or private aircraft… He has a surface-level-at-best understanding of most policies, so going in for arcane policy discussions doesn’t work.

– Know he’s a vindictive guy who harbors grudges long beyond the moment. If you refuse to meet with him or put out anti-Trump messages, prepare to suffer revenge. He pays close attention to critics, and his aides hand him printouts of anti-Trump statements made by people or companies they don’t like. They have a notional enemies list that gets used for everything from rejecting appointments to key jobs, to deciding who gets a voice in policy debates.

– Work Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. Both men sit it on key meetings, and often get Trump alone afterward to shape reaction and follow-up to interaction. Both are accessible by text and cell, and like playing the role of the Trump whisperer.

Then sit back and pray he doesn’t whack you with a Saturday morning tweet…

Just think of Trump as a sort of half-bright talking bear with access to vast wealth and powerful quasi-military resources. Prepare to trick him into sharing the first with you, without unleashing the second on you. Contact us for more tips and our very affordable consulting rate sheet!

This is the sort of world-weary how-it-works handout that used to be standard for business-journal articles about third-world dictators like Idi Amin or Muammar Gaddafi.

THANKS FOR BREAKING AMERICA, REPUBS!

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Early Morning Open Thread: Is Our Press Corpse Learning?

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Interesting, if true:

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Late Night Open Thread: The Common Clay, a/k/a Crab Bucket Politics on A Global Scale

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How dumb are your voters, Mr. Trump?… Very fuggin’ dumb indeed, Mr. Carlson!

So, McDonald’s twitter account got hacked…

Our Modern Victorians (who, like their forebears, are inherently patriarchal and racist) are busy promoting the myth of the noble-savage Trump voter, straggling survivors of an earlier more primitive culture whose quaint customs and fantastical beliefs must be respected (but never honored). These simple, unlettered tribalists — the last of their kind! an endangered almost-human species! — are to be granted endless lip service for their perceived grievances and genuine sufferings, as long as doing so doesn’t involve one iota of inconvenience or expense for Their Betters. Let them vote, predictably for grifters who lie to them about revenge upon their traditional enemies and the return of the buffalo herds good jobs in their neighborhoods that don’t require education. The results of those votes are only going to impact other members of the lower classes, anyway. (If there were any risk those votes would affect Very Serious People, well, *that* would be quite a different just-so-story.)

As any Irish country-dweller under English occupation, Native American exiled to a reservation, or Appalachian hillbilly during the last century could’ve warned the Trump voters, the people who romanticize your poverty and ignorance are not your friends.

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