Our Shadow-President Stephen Bannon would like to let “the media” know that he wishes they’d just shut the fck up and go sit in a corner somewhere for the next four years. In an interview with the New York Times, Bannon said, “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just… Continue reading “Secret President Stephen Bannon says media should STFU, sit in the corner”
It has to be frustrating for the Intel community when seventeen U.S. intelligence services report that there was a definite Russian interference in our election process and it was met with with criticisms, rebukes and then deaf ears by the president even though his inner circle is now part of those inquires. Yet, when Kansas Secretary… Continue reading “Why does the cheeto trust Kris Kobach more than the CIA?”
BREAKING NEWS:
Report: Entire state department management team abruptly steps down https://t.co/iAoyn2POIl pic.twitter.com/27f9Y8tPLJ
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) January 26, 2017
"All are career foreign service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations." https://t.co/fY4gDADdiM
— Adam Smith (@asmith83) January 26, 2017
https://twitter.com/USSMAGA/status/824658191501848580
Digby on the efforts to preserve government data before the Trump administration blows it all up:
Many of the programmers who showed up at UCLA for the event had day jobs as IT consultants or data managers at startups; others were undergrad computer science majors. The scientists in attendance, including ecologists, lab managers, and oceanographers, came from universities all over Southern California. A motley crew of data enthusiasts who assemble for projects like this is becoming something of a trend at universities across the country: Volunteer “data rescue” events in Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Michigan over the last few weeks have managed to scrape hundreds of thousands of pages off of EPA.gov, NASA.gov, DOE.gov, and whitehouse.gov, uploading them to the Internet Archive. Another is planned for early February at New York University.
Hackers, librarians, scientists, and archivists had been working around the clock, at these events and in the days between, to download as much federal climate and environment data off government websites as possible before Trump took office. But suddenly, at exactly noon on Friday as Trump was sworn in, and just as the UCLA event kicked off, some of their fears began to come true: The climate change-related pages on whitehouse.gov disappeared. It’s typical of incoming administrations to take down some of their predecessor’s pages, but scrubbing all mentions of climate change is a clear indication of the Trump administration’s position on climate science.
“We’re having a heart attack,” said Laurie Allen on Friday afternoon. Allen is the assistant director for digital scholarship in the University of Pennsylvania libraries and the technical lead on a recent data-rescuing event there. “In the last four days I think we’ve been working 22 hours a day, because we were hearing that these precise changes were going to happen.”
As Digby points out, these are not paranoid people. Go read the whole thing.
I mean, he forgets what he says, he can’t focus, he does whatever Vlad tells him to do, is easily distracted by anything that offends his vanity, is belligerate — and his father died from it.
Now, are his cabinet members ever going to remove him from office? Hell, no.
So now what? How do we deal with a mentally ill puppet in the White House?
The Washington Post’s Robert Costa is describing the new hire at the White House as an enemy of Paul Ryan: When House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s redbrick Georgian revival in Janesville, Wis., was surrounded last July by women whose children were murdered by undocumented immigrants, conservative writer Julia Hahn published a scathing report and a blurry… Continue reading “The White House bombthrowers get a new recruit”
Listen to Liss, she knows what she’s talking about:
To be clear: I am not suggesting that Trump is stupid. I am observing, based on Trump’s own comments, that he doesn’t care about policy; that he is willfully ignorant about an enormous amount of policy because to be well-versed in it serves no purpose to him, as it does not cater to his grandiose ego and would steal time from the things that do.
Trump explicitly wanted a vice-president who “would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy,” leaving Trump free to “Make America great again,” whatever that means on any given day. Tweeting at SNL on one day; provoking China by calling the Taiwanese President on another.
Everything else belongs to Mike Pence, who was a radically conservative governor and has already made several notable trips to Capitol Hill to meet with Congressional Republicans to see what radically conservative legislation—starting with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act—they can bring to Trump’s desk for his disinterested signature.
In December, Gallup noted Pence’s influence squarely sits on the shoulders of Trump’s lack of experience: “As has been true for previous vice presidents, Pence’s background complements that of the president. But this seems particularly important for the incoming administration, given that Trump will be one of the few presidents without any elected political experience (the last was Dwight Eisenhower in 1952). Pence’s legislative and policy experience may make him the ‘quarterback’ on the White House legislative team who has to deal with complex congressional processes. And his experience as a state governor may make him someone Trump relies on to help navigate 10th Amendment issues.”
Trump’s comprehensive inexperience leaves a void that Pence will be happy to fill.
Trump has almost certainly not learned the details of the Global Gag Rule, nor will he, but he didn’t need to know them. Pence knew them. He is an extreme anti-choicer who, as Indiana’s governor, waged war on Planned Parenthood, defunded clinics, and criminalized miscarriages. You bet he knew the details of the Global Gag Rule. You bet it was one of Mike Pence’s priorities.
This, then, is a perfect and terrible example of why I am the brokenest of broken records about keeping our eyes on our most powerful vice-president ever, including even Dick Cheney.
And so it begins. On the first rule day of the Trump regime, in an astounding press conference, the White House press press secretary shrilly attacked the press for insisting on facts about turnout.
And yesterday, the odious Trump minion Kellyanne Conway was all over the news, belligerently insisting Sean Spicer (aka Baghdad Bob) has “alternate facts.”
The White House is working with a merry band of right-wing extremists who have for a long time studied the uses of propaganda in authoritarian regimes. Now they get to experiment with the American psyche. What fun!
The media is not yet worthy of a martyr’s crown. They are showing some signs of life (CNN in particular gets props for refusing to broadcast the press conference) but if you watched coverage of the Women’s March, reporters carefully avoided any mention of the fact that it was a march against Trump. Instead, it morphed before our eyes into an “expression of positivity” and “assertion of girl power” rather than an angry march against a sexual assaulter. (Were all those pink pussycat hats and “Pussy Grabs Back” signs of female cat fanciers?)
It certainly had nothing to do with feminism. I didn’t hear the word once.
But we have to support them when they do get it right. Watch carefully. Let them know when they get it wrong — but support them when they get it right. (Follow them on Twitter so you can respond in real time.)
The Trump regime will divide us into groups: The ones who say “he’s lying,” the ones who say the president wouldn’t lie, the ones who don’t care if he lies, and the ones who can’t figure out who’s telling the truth. We need to move as many people as possible into that first group, because the more people can’t figure out the truth, the more likely they are to become politically detached. We can’t afford that.
This is a dangerous time. We expected it, and those of us who have been strategizing behind the scenes for the past year know where it’s headed. We need every single one of you to push back on every front, because they’re fighting a multi-front war, flinging crap in all directions.
Signing up here is also a good way to start.
On a Saturday. Turns out it was to yell at the press for being “dishonest” and “lying” about the turnout for Trump’s inauguration. You have never seen anything quite like this — unless you live in a dictatorship:
The clip of Sean Spicer walking out, using reporters as hate objects, and leaving without taking a single question. https://t.co/FhuO3hadUs
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) January 21, 2017
I hate to link to the National Review, but this is important. Because I expect something like this will be replicated here:
I believe that Vladimir Putin came to power as the result of an act of terror committed against his own people. The evidence is overwhelming that the apartment-house bombings in 1999 in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk, which provided a pretext for the second Chechen war and catapulted Putin into the presidency, were carried out by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Yet, to this day, an indifferent world has made little attempt to grasp the significance of what was the greatest political provocation since the burning of the Reichstag.
I have been trying to call attention to the facts behind the bombings since 1999. I consider this a moral obligation, because ignoring the fact that a man in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal came to power through an act of terror is highly dangerous in itself. Russian human-rights defenders Sergei Yushenkov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, and Alexander Litvinenko also worked to shed light on the apartment bombings. But all of them were murdered between 2003 and 2006.
By 2007, when I testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about the bombings, I was the only person publicly accusing the regime of responsibility who had not been killed. The bombings terrorized Russia. The Russian authorities blamed Chechen rebels and thereby galvanized popular support for a new war in Chechnya. President Boris Yeltsin and his entourage were thoroughly hated for their role in the pillaging of the country. Putin, the head of the FSB, had just been named Yeltsin’s prime minister and achieved overnight popularity by vowing revenge against those who had murdered innocent civilians. He assumed direction of the war and, on the strength of initial successes, was elected president easily.
