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Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

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Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

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This is how realignments happen…

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

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

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Potential Book Club Material: “A Very Stable Genius”

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I’m kidding, of course — we know most of this crap already. But kudos to the authors on the timing of their release…

President Trump reveals himself as woefully uninformed about the basics of geography, incorrectly telling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.” He toys with awarding himself the Medal of Freedom.

And, according to a new book by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig, Trump does not seem to grasp the fundamental history surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor…

“A Very Stable Genius” — a 417-page book named after Trump’s own declaration of his superior knowledge — is full of similarly vivid details from Trump’s tumultuous first three years as president, from his chaotic transition before taking office to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation and final report…

The book by the two longtime Post reporters — who were part of the team that won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Trump and Russia — was obtained ahead of its scheduled release Tuesday.

Many of the key moments reported in the book are rife with foreign policy implications, portraying a novice commander in chief plowing through normal protocols and alarming many both inside the administration and in other governments.

Early in his administration, for instance, Trump is eager to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin — so much so, the authors write, “that during the transition he interrupts an interview with one of his secretary of state candidates” to inquire about his pressing desire: “When can I meet Putin? Can I meet with him before the inaugural ceremony?” he asks…

In spring 2017, Trump also clashed with Tillerson when he told him he wanted his help getting rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a 1977 law that prevents U.S. firms and individuals from bribing foreign officials for business deals.

“It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump says, according to the book. “We’re going to change that.”

The president, they go on to explain, was frustrated with the law “ostensibly because it restricted his industry buddies or his own company’s executives from paying off foreign governments in faraway lands.”

The book, the duo writes in an author’s note, is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 200 sources, corroborated, when possible, by calendars, diary entries, internal memos and even private video recordings. (Trump himself had initially committed to an interview for the book, the authors write, but ultimately declined, amid an escalating war with the media).

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday…

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How to Stop a War

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Our Commander-in-Chief:

President Trump told reporters Friday that the United States had killed Qasem Soleimani, one of Iran’s top military figures, in a bid to “stop a war.” The president, speaking at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, urged Iran not to retaliate.

“We did not take action to start a war,” he said.

So it goes something like this, see if I’m paying attention:

  1. Kill top general of the opposition forces.
  2. ?????
  3. War stopped. QED

Other thoughts in the same vein:

  • “I didn’t go running in traffic to get hit by a car, but to cross the street.”
  • “I didn’t have unprotected sex to get pregnant, but to have some fun.”

Open thread.

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Late Night NATO Open Thread: They’re Not Laughing *With* Him, They’re Laughing *At* Him

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It’d be funnier, if not for the war crimes part…

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You hate to see it…

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In several ways, this clip of former NSC official Fiona Hill being questioned by House GOP Counsel Stephen Castor is the perfect microcosm of our national political moment:

Castor opens by trying to get Hill to deny that she was upset with Bolton and “the way things were going.” Hill gives a forthright account of her anger at Sondland, owns up to being “a bit rude” to him and talks about how commonly women’s anger is misunderstood in professional situations.

Hill then throws the flaming bag of shit right back at Castor, noting that Sondland’s testimony convinced her she was angry at Sondland for the wrong reason. Sondland was following Trump’s orders on a “domestic political errand,” which put his actions at odds with those of Hill and the rest of the State Department’s Ukraine team, who were executing “national security foreign policy” at the moment its objectives diverged from Trump’s political goals.

It was a remarkable moment, but it won’t matter. As I’ve complained in this space before, having a leering misogynist like Trump in the White House is a daily insult to women, a constant reminder of our second-class citizenship that is made even more painful by the complicity of so many (mostly white) women who elevated that buffoon to the office. But it’s not just Trump.

It’s the brisk, no-nonsense, intelligent competence of Fiona Hill vs. the smirking and mugging of large check-writer Gordon Sondland. It’s the bravery of Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony contrasted with the angry public tantrum thrown by Brett Kavanaugh. It’s Nancy Pelosi’s resolve to follow the Constitution juxtaposed with Mitch McConnell’s bottomless cynicism.

And the worthy, competent, intelligent women might win the battle, but they lose the war because that’s the way the game is rigged. I’m pretty goddamned sick of it. That is all.

Open thread.

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The Chucklefuck Clown Cavalcade

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¡Buenas noches, Juicers! Yeah, I was going to start things off with my usual elan and graciousness, but due to circumstances where I really wish I could slap the stupid out of people’s genes, I’m going to commence with rant and we’ll do the formal howdy doody and cat pics the minute we get images to work on the blog? Ok? Good talk, glad we’re on the same page.

Lo, the ultrafuckery. And it’s not even CNN?! I can’t tell if I’m marveling at CNN not delving into this level of commentary or disappointed at NBC News for grabbing a shovel and digging right to the Marianas Trench level of analysis. Deep Stupid, indeed.

Whenever I’ve said I was against impeachment, even to the point of don’t discuss impeach club, the media was why. We don’t have great journalism. We never had universally great journalism, but we had a standard that managed to keep mostly on target. Regular old journalism is boring statement of facts. Some obvious, some not, & some you have hunt them down because they’re hella elusive. Instead, we have a packs of styrofoam peanuts shoved into Hugo Boss suits always looking for a hot mic. The American press is always looking for the highest highs, the flashiest story. Much like watching McG’s cinematic oeuvere, they think everything should be the noisiest, most explosive drama, no matter how serious the issue is. When our media behaves like this, no wonder we’re pretty far gone into fascism. I can’t see a future where we survive this mess and the press stays the same. I’ve watched it locally and seen how it mirrors the national media. Reporters, pundits, analysts – they want flash & smoke. What they don’t get is that this teaches people who need to be told about the facts, that the issues aren’t really that important. …

It’s a good profession, journalism. Pity so few are actually working in it.

Maybe somewhere, a batch of good journos are trying to do something about this mess bourne of 24/7 news channels and the idea that news should be as glitzy as tv show. I bid them good luck. And I chuck a hefty twitter brick at this media analysis about impeachment hearings needing PIZZAZZ.

For real pizzazz, Jonathan Allen should just watch Joel Grey & Gonzo do Fosse.
THAT’S PIZZAZ!

Dems shouldn’t be required to put on a carnival for members of the 4th estate to do their duty on reporting cleanly, smartly and accurately so we have an informed citizenry.

alright, I’m trying to finish 3 pages today, back to work.

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Late Night After Dark Open Thread: When Horseshoe Poles Touch

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“When the President does it, it is not a crime”:

Elsewhere…

And finally…

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Rallying His Base Rallying Him

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Like any other addict, an adulation junkie needs to keep upping his dosage to get the same boost. Trump’s recent rallies just haven’t been doing the job for him — even the LameStream Media is bored watching the same MAGAt DeadBrainHeads yowl LAWKERUP like it was a prayer. So he’s flailing around, looking for that special attention-getting message that will make him feel alive again.

His handlers had him all set up for a good time in Minneapolis — where people vote for Muslim immigrants who are also Black, and even female! — but the natives didn’t take the bait:

Friday night, he was shipped to Louisiana to bath in some old-fashioned hardcore racist GOTV… but ended up spending most of the evening angrily defending himself against the morgue’s worth of still-rotting corpses falling out of various Trump closets.

So for his weekend retreat, he dropped in on the hardest of the hardcore — the “Values Voters Summit” evangelical beanfest / witch hunt, where those media representatives not of the body can be barred from spoiling the ‘where we go one, we go all’ happytimes…

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Spiraling Decompensation Open Thread

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Late Night Open Thread: How Can They Tell?

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What passes for ‘real’ among the Repub cognoscenti:

(FiveThirtyEight reports Trump’s current approval rating at 41.9%)

ETA: Bess Levin at Vanity Fair has an explication for the ‘Google stole mah votes!!!’ bullshite Cole mocked this morning:

… Seven minutes prior to the tweet, Fox Business aired a segment discussing congressional testimony from psychologist Robert Epstein. In June, Epstein told Ted Cruz that Google’s bias had likely resulted in at least 2.6 million undecideds voting for Clinton, and that in 2020, Big Tech could band together and throw an extra 15 million-odd votes toward whomever the Democratic nominee turns out to be. As TechCrunch notes, Epstein puts out “anti-Google editorials almost monthly,” and has been attacking the company since 2012, when Google helpfully warned visitors to Epstein’s website that it had been hacked to serve malware to anyone reading it…

In April, Epstein presented another study in which he argued that Google’s algorithms are biased because their search results are dominated by news from mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, rather than conservative sites like Breitbart. In other words, Epstein’s basis for saying Google is biased is that it gives more weight to legitimate new sources and less to the since abandoned love child of Steve Bannon and erstwhile Trump sugar daddy Robert Mercer. Using this theory, Epstein tracked “47,300 searches by dozens of undecided voters in the districts of newly elected Democratic Reps. Katie Porter, Harley Rouda and Mike Levin,” and then claimed that an estimated “35,455 voters who were on the fence were persuaded to vote for a Democrat entirely because of the sources Google fed them.” Yes, people read stories from news outlets that have never had an entire section called “black crime,” and made a decision based on those stories. Or, as Epstein would put it, they were manipulated into voting for a Democrat by Google, a move the site may pull again in 2020…

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Yup, We’re Doomed

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(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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Like earthquakes, wildfires, and floods, recessions are recurring problems. And as with those (other) ‘natural’ catastrophes, it’s easier to prepare for them in advance and survive them afterwards if we’re not dependent on grifters, political cultists, and soggy-brained showboaters…

Catherine Rampell, at the Washington Post — “Move over, Illuminati. The conspiracy against Trump’s economy is massive”:

… Trump, aided by his economic brain trust of cranks and sycophants, believes any indicator showing the U.S. economy could be in trouble must be fabricated. It’s all part of an anti-Trump conspiracy, he rants, according to reports in The Post, the Associated Press and the New York Times.

And move over, Illuminati, because this particular conspiracy is massive.

It’s led by the Federal Reserve, Democrats and the media, of course, or so say Trump and his Fox News minions. But it also includes the entire U.S. bond market, which flashed a warning sign last week when the Treasury yield curve inverted (meaning long-term bonds had lower interest rates than short-term ones, which usually predates a downturn).

Also colluding are the many farmers, retailers, manufacturers and economists who have been warning for more than a year that the burden of Trump’s tariffs is mainly borne by Americans, not China or other trading partners, and also that uncertainty over trade tensions can paralyze hiring, investment and purchasing decisions, which we need to keep the economy expanding…

The White House has reportedly declined to develop contingency plans for a downturn because it doesn’t want to validate this “negative narrative.” This is, in a word, idiotic. As others have analogized, it’s like refusing to buy a fire extinguisher because you’re afraid of feeding a “negative narrative” that you might someday face a fire.

Administration officials decided the best way to deal with recession risk, which they of course aren’t personally worried about, was through a show of force on TV. There, Trump’s economic advisers assured Americans they definitely, certainly, cross-their-hearts-and-hope-to-die don’t see reason to worry…

… Kudlow’s call for optimism has a whiff of Peter Pan logic about it: If only we believe in fairies hard enough, we can always save Tinker Bell — even when we’re sending her out into a hailstorm. If you believe, clap your hands; don’t let Tink die!

It’s hard to imagine nervous Americans are really this credulous. Then again, perhaps we were never the intended audience for such performances. Sure, maybe White House aides are trying to fool the public into believing recession warning signs don’t exist. But maybe they’re actually just trying to fool their boss.

A frightening conspiracy theory, indeed.

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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Chill Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Phallic Symbolism

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That’s a version of the 100-round drum magazine that enabled the Dayton shooter to kill and injure so many people in under a minute. Think of it as a stylized totem to a particularly bloodthirsty god…

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An ABC of Election Theft…

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This is amazing…a font created entirely out of gerrymandered districts:

 

Go here for a proper, high resolution image of the font, and the chance, if you’re so minded, to download it for free.

Here, by the way, is my first composition in this latest gem in the long history of typography:

It’s all a hoot — but it hurts too much to laugh.

(Note: this was up for ~15 seconds last night, but I pulled to avoid triggering my werebigfoot side.)

Open thread, jackals!

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: ForPol Thoughts That Keep Us From Our Rest

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Early Morning Sundae Sermons Open Thread

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This is true! Spare a single tiny tear for the professional Panglossians, paid by Our Betters to remind all ‘sensible’ readers that well-groomed center-right white men with the correct credentials are obviously the best people to lead us, that’s just science. The Oval Office Occupant has been almost as much a disaster for their quiet careers as he is for the rest of the world… a sloppy, shambling, semi-literate professional faker who continually demonstrates not only his own unfitness, but the general shoddiness of the Panglossians. One tear, maybe a swift kick, and move on without them.

When you’re a privileged white dude, not getting first chair (and right of refusal) feels like a demotion…

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