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Gastritis Broke My Calculator

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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Dolt 45

Horrorshow Open Thread: Repub Healthcare Prop Comedy

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Remember the ‘tube sock full of dog turds‘ I mentioned earlier? I think someone hit Sean Spicer across the back of the head with it.

And he may not have been the only victim…

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread

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(Jeff Danziger’s website)
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Apart from protesting Ryan’s pathetic attempt to destroy the ACA… and the President-Asterisk’s administration’s second attempt at a Muslim ban — what’s on the agenda for the day?

Professor Krugman, on “A Party Not Ready to Govern“:

… It goes without saying that Donald Trump is the least qualified individual, temperamentally or intellectually, ever installed in the White House. As he veers from wild accusations against President Obama to snide remarks about Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s doing a very good imitation of someone experiencing a personal breakdown — even though he has yet to confront a crisis not of his own making. Thanks, Comey.

But the broader Republican quagmire — the party’s failure so far to make significant progress toward any of its policy promises — isn’t just about Mr. Trump’s inadequacies. The whole party, it turns out, has been faking it for years. Its leaders’ rhetoric was empty; they have no idea how to turn their slogans into actual legislation, because they’ve never bothered to understand how anything important works…

The story of Obamacare repeal would be funny if the health care — and, in many cases, the lives — of millions of Americans weren’t at stake.

First we had seven — seven! — years during which Republicans kept promising to offer an alternative to Obamacare any day now, but never did. Then came the months after the election, with more promises of details just around the corner…

Sure enough, the new plan reportedly does look like a sort of half-baked version of the Affordable Care Act. Politically, it seems to embody the worst of both worlds: It’s enough like Obamacare to infuriate hard-line conservatives, but it weakens key aspects of the law enough to deprive millions of Americans — many of them white working-class voters who backed Donald Trump — of essential health care.

The idea, apparently, is to deal with these problems by passing the plan before anyone gets a chance to really see or think about what’s in it. Good luck with that…

But whatever the eventual outcome, what we’re witnessing is what happens when a party that gave up hard thinking in favor of empty sloganeering ends up in charge of actual policy. And it’s not a pretty sight.

Tuesday Morning Open ThreadPost + Comments (209)

Open Thread: DC Press Corps Contemplates the Remnants of Sean Spicer’s Career

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I understand that ‘DC is wired for Republicans‘, but there there must be some limits…

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Trumpstunting Open Thread: Literally Trying to Hand-Wave Away the Lies

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When you’re reduced to using Sarah Huckabee (Yew know who ma daddy wuz?) Sanders as your spokesperson, it’s not a great omen, let’s face it…

Even Mike Allan — founder of Politico, currently of Koch-funded Axios — is beginning to lose his enthusiasm for cheerleading the Trump maladministration:

… Towergate is a fascinating test of Trump’s great gamble that he can do the job of president in a totally new way: largely improvisational, driven by whims, moods and obsessions; thinly staffed, like his campaign, and with poorly enforced process, not taking advantage of the massive safety net available to him; heavily reliant on family; and unconstrained by manners, rituals or precedent…

A Democratic theory is that if Trump believes problematic transcripts of recorded calls with Russians may dribble or gush out, why not discredit them in advance as a political dirty trick? Then when they emerge, you can say “Aha!” rather than being on the defensive.

But a Republican close to the White House said that’s overthinking it: That “view is quite plausible. But I do not believe they are playing chess. I think they are playing Trivial Pursuit.”

Yeah, more like they’re playing Candyland — but they think it’s Monopoly.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: At Least We Have A Circus to Amuse Us

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Apart from taking what pleasure we can, what’s on the agenda as we start a new week?

Some backstory, for those of you sensible enough to stay away from news media over the weekend…

The woman Raddatz is jousting with is Sarah Huckabee Sander, whose only marketable skill seems to be having been born Mike Huckabee’s daughter, bless her heart.

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Late Night Open Thread: Impotent Outrage All Over the Trump Compound

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DougJ linked to this Washington Post article, but it’s too schadenfreudelicious not to share more:

… Trump enters week seven of his presidency the same as the six before it: enmeshed in controversy while struggling to make good on his campaign promises. At a time when White House staffers had sought to ride the momentum from Trump’s speech to Congress and begin advancing its agenda on Capitol Hill, the administration finds itself beset yet again by disorder and suspicion.

At the center of the turmoil is an impatient president increasingly frustrated by his administration’s inability to erase the impression that his campaign was engaged with Russia, to stem leaks about both national security matters and internal discord and to implement any signature achievements…

Gnawing at Trump, according to one of his advisers, is the comparison between his early track record and that of Obama in 2009, when amid the Great Recession he enacted an economic stimulus bill and other big-ticket items…

Trump, meanwhile, has been feeling besieged, believing that his presidency is being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned critics, federal bureaucrats and intelligence figures — not to mention the media, which he has called “the enemy of the American people.”…

Trump was brighter Sunday morning as he read several newspapers, pleased that his allegations against Obama were the dominant story, the official said.

But he found reason to be mad again: Few Republicans were defending him on the Sunday political talk shows…

Gosh, Lord Smallgloves wonders why the GOP apparatchiks he tore up and climbed over to reach the Oval Office aren’t loyal? ‘Tis a puzzlement!

Much more chewy detail at the link. Betting line among the Media Village courtiers seems to be that Reince Preibus (speaking of party apparatchiks) is next off the sledge, but there’s so many weird characters in Trump’s train, there’s always another plot twist.

Not to mention the Rosencrantz & Guilderstern characters, such as a certain foundational Nixon-alumni ratfvcker, who (per Esquire) “Forgot Other People Can Read His Tweets“[warning: possibly NSFW]:

show full post on front page

Late Night Open Thread: Impotent Outrage All Over the Trump CompoundPost + Comments (89)

Sunday Evening Open Thread: Prime PBS Totebagger Viewing Time

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Of course it’s seriously tragic that the So-Called Leader of the United States (#SCROTUS) is threatening our democracy this way. On the other hand, if we’re gonna re-litigate you-know-what (Waterbedgate?), then at least us aging totebaggers should be able to get some entertainment out of it, yes?

Sunday Evening Open Thread: Prime PBS Totebagger Viewing TimePost + Comments (70)

Open Thread: Somebody Pull Up the Drawbridge, Y’All!…

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… Release the danged alligators, already!…

CNN:

… With so much on the administration’s plate — leaks, Russia story, pending executive order and Obamacare repeal and replacement — Priebus said he would not go to Florida with the President this weekend as had been previously planned, a source told CNN. He was on the manifest, and a big donor reception by the Republican National Committee which Priebus used to chair was on Preibus’ schedule.

But the President said he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea since he is not happy with the state of matters right now, the same source said.

A White House official disputed that Priebus was supposed to travel to Florida, adding that he stayed home this weekend for a family celebration.

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who initially decided to also stay in Washington Friday, ended up traveling to Florida Saturday and is joining Trump, Sessions, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross at dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

Another Night of the Long Sporks?

Open Thread: <em>Somebody Pull Up the Drawbridge, Y’All!… </em>Post + Comments (239)

Schadenfreude Open Thread: Almost Too Much Fun for One Weekend!

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If we must put up with “Waterbedgate: Second Time, As Farce”, you can’t hardly blame some people for enjoying the spectacle…

Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire:

… “Unthinkable” is one of those Washington CYA words that does a lot of work until a lot of people start thinking about something seriously. (The president ordered a cover-up of a burglary? The president signed off on sending missiles to Iran? The president was doing the help? Unthinkable!) Let us assume for the moment that, if there’s a shred of truth to what the president* is saying, then the previous occupant of the White House didn’t do it without availing himself of the legal requirements.

If he requested a FISA warrant and got it, then there’s something out there that troubled not only the previous administration, but also some federal judges on a secret court. If that happened, then what President Obama did was not in any way “illegal.” You can argue that it might be improperly political during an presidential election season, but then you get hung up on why Lyndon Johnson didn’t blow the whistle on how Richard Nixon jacked around with the Paris Peace Talks. It’s impossible to conclude in retrospect that the country was well-served by LBJ’s uncharacteristic delicacy in that matter. If this keeps up, the demand for complete transparency is going to become overwhelming…

There is a critical mass building quickly concerning the connections between the president*, his administration, his aides, and the Putin regime. There’s just too much of it right now for the administration to contain. Given that, it probably would have been helpful if the president* hadn’t had another episode on Saturday morning…

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: The Mastodon in the Room

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For a best-possible-faith counterpart, here’s Josh Marshall’s “The Innocent Explanation, Part #1”:

… The simplest explanation isn’t necessarily the right one. But in the spirit of Occam’s Razor, we should prefer it because it usually will be. To state the key point for clarity and emphasis, it is not the simplest explanation. It it is the simplest explanation which accounts for all the known facts. That distinction makes all the difference in the world.

With this prologue and with the above in mind, here is what I would call the innocent explanation of the Trump/Russia story. I don’t think it is necessarily the true story. Or, to put it more precisely, I don’t think it is necessarily the whole story. But I think it accounts for most of the what we know so far…

1. In the late 90s and early aughts, Donald Trump ran out of lenders. A string of bankruptcies on top of numerous ventures where he walked away unscathed and lenders lost their shirts convinced every major US bank to stop lending to him… This put Trump’s whole family business under great strain. In response he increasingly took capital from abroad, especially from Russia and other post-Soviet successor states… What we don’t know is quite the degree of his dependence on money from the former Soviet Union, both for investment capital and for the purchase the numerous apartment units which make up his ubiquitous high-rises. None of this is illegal or wrong. Foreign capital is pervasive in the New York City area real estate market.

2. Trump gets into this world. He associates with these people. He starts thinking like they do. Perhaps along the way, people in this murky Russian world where oligarchs and mafiosos and legitimate businesspeople are hard to differentiate and perhaps not really different at all, find out about his dirty laundry. Nothing extravagant like sex tapes. Just the more garden variety stuff business associates find out about each other from long association. We know Trump is highly secretive. His myriad partners and investors likely know a lot of those secrets…

4: Now the 2014 Russian seizure of Crimea comes along, to be followed by the low intensity intervention in eastern Ukraine and, critically, the imposition of western sanctions. If Trump is significantly dependent on capital out of Russia, those sanctions are going to put a crimp on all his ventures. It won’t be fatal. But it will hurt – potentially a lot…

5: So by 2015, this gets you to a pretty clear storyline: Sanctions wrong; Russia good; Putin good; Putin strong. To me this provides a fairly satisfying explanation for most of what we’ve seen over the last year and a half: Trump’s weirdly fawning attitude toward Putin, hostility toward Russia sanctions, insistence on the obviousness of ‘getting along’ and ‘making a deal’ with Putin. It also gets us most of the way to explaining why he has so many people in his orbit with conspicuous on-going communications and relationships with suspicious figures in the Russian intelligence world or the criminal underworld….

You should read the whole thing, but Marshall’s theory does seem to explain some of the weird cluelessness that the people in Trump’s orbit are showing about this whole ugly mess: You hang around with bad people, you gradually get inured to bad behavior — even very bad behavior. The nuns in my parochial school warned us about the importance of avoiding the near occasion of sin; my old man taught us the joke about the innocent young lady who took a day job scrubbing floors at the local whorehouse.

Saturday Morning Open Thread: The Mastodon in the RoomPost + Comments (58)

Late Night Open Thread: Don’t Get Our Hopes Up…

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(Alexis Coe: Historian. Co-host: Presidents Are People Too!)

How do you spell “Teapot Dome” in Cyrillic?

(But if there’s a posthumous Trump WH sex scandal, I’m not sure I wanna think about the parameters.)

Late Night Open Thread: Don’t Get Our Hopes Up…Post + Comments (78)

Friday Morning Open Thread: Sanctuary Sessions

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On Sunday, March 5, traditional Irish musicians through the U.S. and in Dublin, Ireland, will come together to make music, encourage positive dialogue and raise money for the ACLU’s continued effort to support civil rights. The Sanctuary Sessions were organized by members of Boston’s Irish music community. These musicians reached out to the broader traditional music community and found a large number of musicians around the country who agreed to participate by holding fundraisers in their home communities. There are now events planned in over 20 communities.

Thanks to commentor Origuy for the tip. More details available on FaceBook, if you’re a member, or check the music bulletin boards for your area…

What else is on the agenda, as we (hope to) wrap up another very busy week?
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Early Morning Open Thread: The GOP Rot Goes All the Way Up & Down

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After watching Sam Bee dissect “the Pride of Janesville,” I’m guessing tickets to her April 29th #Not The White House Correspondents Dinner must be very scarce indeed…

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But, speaking of weak reeds, if Nixon had relied on people like Carter Page for his dirty work, the Watergate scandal would’ve broken before the 1972 election…

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Late Night Open Thread: A Solution for the ‘Mike Pence Would Be Worse’ Worriers

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Doghouse Riley could’ve told us, his Congressional colleagues didn’t call him ‘Mike Dense’ because his hair was so thick and luxurious. USA Today:

INDIANAPOLIS — Vice President Mike Pence routinely used a private email account to conduct public business as governor of Indiana, at times discussing sensitive matters and homeland security issues.

Emails released to The Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network, in response to a public records request show Pence communicated via his personal AOL account with top advisers on topics ranging from security gates at the governor’s residence to the state’s response to terror attacks across the globe. In one email, Pence’s top state homeland security adviser relayed an update from the FBI regarding the arrests of several men on federal terror-related charges.

Cybersecurity experts say the emails raise concerns about whether such sensitive information was adequately protected from hackers, given that personal accounts like Pence’s are typically less secure than government email accounts. In fact, Pence’s personal account was hacked last summer.

Furthermore, advocates for open government expressed concerns about transparency because personal emails aren’t immediately captured on state servers that are searched in response to public records requests…

Pence fiercely criticized Clinton throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, accusing her of trying to keep her emails out of public reach and exposing classified information to potential hackers…

“There is an issue of double standard here,” Gerry Lanosga, a professor at Indiana University and past president of the Indiana Coalition for Open Government. “He has been far from forthcoming about his own private email account on which it’s clear he has conducted state business. So there is a disconnect there that cannot be avoided.”…

IMAX only wishes their equipment could project with the strength of your average Republican.

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