#with “Fuck James Comey” being

[cyarskj1899]

[liluglydudefromdetroit]

She ran for president AGAINST giving people healthcare...twice. A Senator that helped sell us bad legislation, against good trade agreements and for bad ones, changing as the wind blew. She tried to crush Haiti. She never supported black movements. She called black child criminals "super predators" then BLAMED US when she didn't win. She said Trump voters were "irredeemable" and "deplorable". She actually *did* break hella laws and wipe those email servers we were told not to worry about. She hand picked Trump as her opponent and the DNC and news media elevated him at her behest. She never met a war she didn't support. She took untold amounts of $ from all the corporations that are directly against our best interests. The DNC have her control over the primary process and she wasn't the nominee, cheated in her favor, AND ARGUED IN COURT THAT THEY HAD THE RIGHT TO.

"I did not send classified material, and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified" HRC Aug 2016. FBI director James Comey reported otherwise, going as far as to say the Secretary was "extremely careless" and had in fact sent or received classified material on her private server.

I have no idea why people are still going to bat for politicians so fervently, especially for Hillary Clinton, but y'all have to fucking stop being fans of these people and treat them like they're applying for a position and you're the hiring manager. Stop being a fucking fan and "supporter" of these people and start looking at their records. They are not worthy.

Truth.

[qqueenofhades]

Ok wait what why is the FBI investigating the orange????

Well, you see, the thing is that Donald Trump has done literally so many crimes that when the news first broke, everyone was like "but in relation to which crime though?" It now has been confirmed that the raid was about the 15 boxes of top-secret documents that Trump stole from the White House and took to Mar-a-Lago with him. The salient points to appreciate are therefore these:

Federal law does not fuck around with the penalties for mishandling classified information and/or presidential records (all of which are required to be preserved and turned over to the National Archives, even if they aren't literal top-secret classified intelligence). If Trump is convicted of this, one of the penalties includes... being barred from holding federal office ever again. If it turns out that he was selling secrets to foreign actors, such as, say, Russia or Saudi Arabia, both of which the Trump crime family has close ties with, the penalty is LIFE IMPRISONMENT OR DEATH. As I said. Does not fuck around. Either way, Trumpie got (let us fucking hope) a lot of pain coming.

The amount of evidence that it takes for a federal judge to sign off on a warrant for a no-knock raid is... a lot. The same but for a FORMER PRESIDENT? Yeah. It's a lot.

This also required the personal approval of both AG Merrick Garland and FBI director Christopher Wray. Wray is a lifelong Republican appointed by... you guessed it, Trump, after he fired James Comey in an attempt to obstruct the Russia investigation.

Pause for sad trombone noise.

Also, this proves that Garland is in fact willing to authorize operations that target Trump directly, which means that, hopefully, he isn't afraid to charge Trump in connection with January 6.

The amount of right wing whining and crying about the pOlitciZeD jUsTICe dEpARtMenT!!!!1 is, predictably but depressingly, absolutely insane. Once again, consequences are something that are only supposed to happen to somebody else. Even if the guy in question literally tried to use the Justice Department to launch a coup to illegally stay in power and destroy American democracy. FAKE NEWS!!!

Objectively, "they even broke into my safe!" is absolutely fucking hilarious. As was the Anonymous Source (let's be real, probably Donnie Jr.) who complained that the FBI guys just grabbed boxes and documents without "going through them properly." WHAT DO YOU ORANGE FUCKFACE TWATWAFFLES THINK A RAID BY THE FBI ACTUALLY IS??? THAT THEY JUST STAND THERE AND ASK NICELY TO ONLY LOOK AT WHAT YOU'RE WILLING TO SHOW THEM???

In conclusion, the "Lock Up Hillary Clinton For Mishandling Her Private Emails!!!" crowd suddenly isn't super fond of an ex-federal official getting locked up for mishandling top-secret documents.

Weird.

[safirefire]

Nuala and Cerridwen doing dishes in Rhys’s house and other maid duties in addition to being highly trained spies is so fucking funny to me like imagine James Comey used to pick up 45’s groceries in addition to running the FBI

[arcticdementor]

But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for — get this — retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones!

Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically “problematic” editorial or social media decisions.

…

In the most discussed incident, Times editorial page editor James Bennet was ousted for green-lighting an anti-protest editorial by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton entitled, “Send in the troops.”

I’m no fan of Cotton, but as was the case with Michael Moore’s documentary and many other controversial speech episodes, it’s not clear that many of the people angriest about the piece in question even read it. In classic Times fashion, the paper has already scrubbed a mistake they made misreporting what their own editorial said, in an article about Bennet’s ouster.

…

As Cotton points out in the piece, he was advancing a view arguably held by a majority of the country. A Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.” That survey included 40% of self-described “liberals” and 37% of African-Americans. To declare a point of view held by that many people not only not worthy of discussion, but so toxic that publication of it without even necessarily agreeing requires dismissal, is a dramatic reversal for a newspaper that long cast itself as the national paper of record.

Incidentally, that same poll cited by Cotton showed that 73% of Americans described protecting property as “very important,” while an additional 16% considered it “somewhat important.” This means the Philadelphia Inquirer editor was fired for running a headline – “Buildings matter, too” – that the poll said expressed a view held by 89% of the population, including 64% of African-Americans.

…

The main thing accomplished by removing those types of editorials from newspapers — apart from scaring the hell out of editors — is to shield readers from knowledge of what a major segment of American society is thinking.

It also guarantees that opinion writers and editors alike will shape views to avoid upsetting colleagues, which means that instead of hearing what our differences are and how we might address those issues, newspaper readers will instead be presented with page after page of people professing to agree with one another. That’s not agitation, that’s misinformation.

The instinct to shield audiences from views or facts deemed politically uncomfortable has been in evidence since Trump became a national phenomenon. We saw it when reporters told audiences Hillary Clinton’s small crowds were a “wholly intentional” campaign decision. I listened to colleagues that summer of 2016 talk about ignoring poll results, or anecdotes about Hillary’s troubled campaign, on the grounds that doing otherwise might “help Trump” (or, worse, be perceived that way).

…

All these episodes sent a signal to everyone in a business already shedding jobs at an extraordinary rate that failure to toe certain editorial lines can and will result in the loss of your job. Perhaps additionally, you could face a public shaming campaign in which you will be denounced as a racist and rendered unemployable.

…

Even people who try to keep up with protest goals find themselves denounced the moment they fail to submit to some new tenet of ever-evolving doctrine, via a surprisingly consistent stream of retorts: fuck you, shut up, send money, do better, check yourself, I’m tired and racist.

…

Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics. White protesters in Floyd’s Houston hometown kneeling and praying to black residents for “forgiveness… for years and years of racism” are one thing, but what are we to make of white police in Cary, North Carolina, kneeling and washing the feet of Black pastors? What about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling while dressed in “African kente cloth scarves”?

There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we’ve become afraid to ask obvious ones.

On CNN, Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender was asked a hypothetical question about a future without police: “What if in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?” When Bender, who is white, answered, “I know that comes from a place of privilege,” questions popped to mind. Does privilege mean one should let someone break into one’s home, or that one shouldn’t ask that hypothetical question? (I was genuinely confused). In any other situation, a media person pounces on a provocative response to dig out its meaning, but an increasingly long list of words and topics are deemed too dangerous to discuss.

The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey’s firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence “whistleblowers,” all those interminable months of Ukrainegate hearings (while Covid-19 advanced), to fury at the death wish of lockdown violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc.

It’s been learned in these episodes we may freely misreport reality, so long as the political goal is righteous. It was okay to publish the now-discredited Steele dossier, because Trump is scum. MSNBC could put Michael Avenatti on live TV to air a gang rape allegation without vetting, because who cared about Brett Kavanaugh – except press airing of that wild story ended up being a crucial factor in convincing key swing voter Maine Senator Susan Collins the anti-Kavanaugh campaign was a political hit job (the allegation illustrated, “why the presumption of innocence is so important,” she said). Reporters who were anxious to prevent Kavanaugh’s appointment, in other words, ended up helping it happen through overzealousness.

…

The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader’s judgment as the routes to positive social change.

For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for instance).

Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?

[robertreich]

Most Devastating of All: Mueller’s Indictment of Trump’s Character

Democrats in Congress and talking heads on television will be consumed in the coming weeks by whether the evidence in the Mueller report, especially of obstruction of justice, merits impeachment.  

In addition, the question of “wink-wink” cooperation with Russia still looms. Mueller’s quote of Trump, when first learning a special counsel had been appointed – “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked” – has already become a national tagline. Why, Americans wonder, would Trump be “fucked” if he hadn’t done something so awful as to cause its revelation to “fuck” him?

We’ll also have Mueller’s own testimony before Congress, and Congress’s own investigations of Trump.

But let’s be real. Trump will not be removed by impeachment. No president has been. With a Republican Senate controlled by the most irresponsible political hack ever to be majority leader, the chances are nil.

Which means Trump will have to be removed the old-fashioned way – by voters in an election 19 months away.

The practical question, then, is whether the Mueller report and all that surrounds it will affect that election.

Most Americans already hold a low opinion of Trump. He’s the only president in Gallup polling history never to have earned the support of majority for single day of his term.

Yet Mueller’s report probably won’t move any of the 40 percent who have held tight to Trump regardless.

So how to reach the 11 percent or 12 percent who may decide the outcome?

Reveal his moral loathsomeness.

Democrats and progressives tend to shy away from morality, given how rightwing evangelicals have used it against abortion, contraceptives and equal marriage rights.

But that’s to ignore Americans’ deep sense of right and wrong. Character counts, and presidential character counts most of all.

Even though Mueller apparently doesn’t believe a sitting president can be indicted, he provides a devastating indictment of Trump’s character.

Trump is revealed as a chronic liar. He claimed he never asked for loyalty from FBI director James Comey. Mueller finds he did. Trump claimed he never asked Comey to let the “Michael Flynn matter go”. Mueller finds he did. Trump claimed he never pushed the White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller. Mueller finds he did. Trump even lied about inviting Comey to dinner, claiming falsely, in public, that Comey requested it. 

Trump treats his subordinates horribly. He hides things from them. He lies to them. He yells at them. He instructs them to lie. He orders them to carry out illegal acts.

He’s a thug. He regrets his lawyers are not as good at protecting him as was his early mentor Roy Cohn – a mob lawyer. When reports surface about the now infamous Trump Tower meeting of June 2016, Trump directs the cover-up.

Trump is unprincipled. The few people in the White House and the cabinet who stand up to him, according to Mueller – threatening to resign rather than carry out his illegal orders – are now gone. They resigned or were fired.

In other words, Mueller makes it official: Trump is morally bankrupt.

We still don’t have the full story of Trump’s tax evasion and his business dealings with Russian financiers. But we know he has lied to business associates, stiffed contractors, cheated on his wife by having sex with a porn star, paid the porn star hush money, and boosted his wealth while in office with foreign cash.

It continues. In recent weeks he willfully endangered the life of a member of Congress by disseminating a propaganda video, similar to those historically used by extremist political groups, tying her to the 9/11 tragedy because she is a Muslim American speaking up for Muslim Americans. She has received death threats, including one by a supporter of Trump who was arrested.

He has also attacked the deceased senator John McCain, whom he falsely accused of leaking the Steele dossier and finishing last in his class at Annapolis. Then Trump retweeted a note from a supporter saying “millions of Americans truly LOVE President Trump, not McCain”. Americans know McCain was tortured in a prison camp for five years, in service to this country.

How many of Trump’s followers or those who might otherwise be tempted to vote for him in 2020 will recoil from this moral squalor?

Donald Trump is the living embodiment of the seven deadly sins – pride, greed, lust, gluttony, wrath, envy and sloth – and he is the precise obverse of the seven virtues as enunciated by Pope Gregory in 590 AD: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility.

Legal debates about obstruction of justice are fine. But no voter in 2020 should be allowed to overlook this basic reality: Donald Trump is a morally despicable human being.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

crime and disorder

Previously on Impeaching the Motherfucker: Donald “Individual-1” Trump tried to use the Oval Office to shake down Ukrainian President Zelensky for a public announcement of bullshit investigations, which Trump wanted to use to discredit American citizens and intelligence agencies.

You may have seen people compare Trump’s scheme to have the Ukrainian president announce investigations into his Democratic opposition to James Comey’s various interventions in the 2016 election. This comparison is not wrong. If anything, it understates the similarities.

The story that former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to feed Zelensky about a member of Joe Biden’s family was basically fascist fanfiction by a guy named Peter Schweitzer. Schweitzer worked for Steve Bannon, who led the Trump campaign for a while, at the racist agitprop website Breitbart. His books are funded by the Mercer family. (If you’re struggling to place that name, they also finance the Facebook data thieves at Cambridge Analytica.) As Schweitzer’s lies were being used to pressure Zelensky to abuse law enforcement, they were also being fed to the mortifyingly credulous New York Times. The NYT validated the smear, which gave Giuliani and his crew leverage to increase pressure on law enforcement to take action in the hopes that this would create more news.

These exact same people pulled these exact same moves in 2015 and 2016. Of course, that time the Democratic frontrunner was Hillary Clinton, and Schweitzer’s lies were about the Clinton Foundation.* Those lies were debunked as quickly and easily as the stories about Biden, but they were still validated and spread by the mainstream media, in particular by the New York Times. These stories were picked up by the various disinformation trollbot networks throughout the 2016 election and used to drown out the serious stories about Donald Trump’s many financial crimes. And it gave a partisan faction in the FBI an excuse to open an investigation into Clinton.

Giuliani, by his own admission, was also the Trump campaign’s connection to the FBI’s New York field office in 2016. Now he’s telling the press, on the record, that his scheming in Ukraine is an attempt to manipulate the Department of Justice into investigating Biden.

It’s important to remember what happened from there. Short-term, we need to prepare ourselves to keep it from being so effective next time. The impeachment hearings might have discredited this particular line of attack against Biden, but something like this will happen to whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being. Long-term, progressives need to start holding grudges the way conservatives do, not least because our grievances are real. And we have to do this for ourselves because, let’s be honest, most of the mainstream and nearly all of the “leftist” media would rather be rounded up at gunpoint and sent to a gulag than admit they fucked up in 2016.

We remember the EMAILS investigation because it was so public, but in fact, the FBI was also investigating the Clinton Foundation, despite the Department of Justice telling them there was no case, specifically because their “evidence” was just trash from Schweitzer’s book.+

An FBI investigation is a serious thing, even if the director doesn’t use it as a pretext to throw a presidential election. That’s why the FBI is supposed to take it seriously. They’re only supposed to open an investigation if they have an an actual reason. (To state the obvious, debunked conspiracy theories by a political propagandist are not an actual reason.) Then they’re supposed to shut the fuck up and actually investigate, not preen for the media about how great they are for doing all this manly investigating. This is both to protect the reputation of the person they’re investigating and because you can usually investigate something better if you minimize how many people know you’re investigating. When they’re done, they’re supposed to either charge someone with a crime or to close the case and leave the person alone.

The FBI clearly did not take the Clinton Foundation investigation seriously, because if they had been taking it seriously they never would have pretended there was a case there at all, but it was still a serious thing. The existence of this “investigation” bolstered these false propaganda narratives which were intended to distort a presidential election, and which publicly disparaged a world-class charity that has saved millions of lives around the world.

Worse, the bullshit metastasized within the FBI. It ate into the time and attention of senior leadership, when they needed to be making some genuinely complicated decisions concerning the national security threat posed by the criminal syndicate known as the Trump campaign. Instead, they were finding out what happens if you give a mouse a cookie. The faction of the FBI who were abusing their power to hurt Clinton and help Trump seem to have been emboldened by the indulgence. FBI leadership fell into the bad habit of feeding the press, especially right-wing media like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, hints that something crime-y was going on with the Clinton Foundation. A week before the election, after Comey had upended the election with his letter about the emails, “sources” at the FBI were telling a Fox News anchor that there were about to be indictments over something at the Clinton Foundation.

Reading between the lines of various reports, it looks like these pressures within the FBI to support the Clinton Cash propaganda helped desensitize Comey and his bros to the idea of taking dramatic public action against Hillary Clinton. It never occurred to anyone else that they would pull a stunt like this, not because everyone trusts the FBI so much, but because it is so far from what they do. Nobody expects the feds to start wearing mashed potatoes to the office instead of suits, either, not because they have such great fashion sense, but because it’s too bizarre to occur to anyone. But if there were a handful of agents crabbing every day that they should wear mashed potatoes to work, and those agents kept forwarding around a drumbeat of media speculating that maybe they would start wearing mashed potatoes to work, maybe they start to think it’s not too weird of a compromise if they just start wearing mashed potatoes instead of jackets and ties.

Law enforcement abusing its power to influence elections is bad for democracy. But it’s also bad for law enforcement. As long as everyone understands the FBI shouldn’t be expected to get involved in partisan politics, there’s no incentive for politicians to waste time trying to pressure them. But once they caved to this pressure from right-wing media, it showed that they could be manipulated by at least one side, and the Republicans have been hammering them relentlessly ever since. Trump doesn’t beat up on the FBI – or, for that matter, the NYT – because he’s afraid of them. He beats up on them because he knows, from experience, that it works.

Since all that happened, Trump’s had time to purge his dupes from FBI leadership and replace them with people he believes will be even more likely to follow his unethical directives. So that’s not great.

One major difference in Giuliani and Schweitzer’s scheme this year is that they’re trying to outsource their dirty work to Ukraine, which is a lot riskier and a lot more work. In a weird way, this is a slightly encouraging sign for 2020. Even if the real motivation is that Trump is fucking around with Ukraine to please Putin and smearing Biden is just a side benefit, I doubt it would be happening like this, because you don’t actually need to bring your clown sidekick and his clown sidekicks into your clear-cut impeachable offenses. It’s entirely possible that they’re going global because they don’t think the FBI will throw all the rules out the window to help them this time.

On the other hand, the fact that they’re changing the pattern means it could easily get even worse. Right-wing ratfuckers have already attacked at least two 2020 Democratic presidential candidates with false claims of sexual violence. At this point, it’s still the JV squad,± but once we have a nominee, the professionals are going to get involved. It wouldn’t even take Giuliani’s subtlety and finesse to get law enforcement involved, either, just one pro-Trump sheriff’s office in an area the nominee could have conceivably visited. I don’t have a concrete idea of what to do if things take this particular turn, but I’m legitimately worried that we need to brace ourselves for it.

*Substantively, this comparison is unfair, because Burisma is an oil and gas company with a mixed ethical record, while the Clinton Foundation is a clean, transparent charity that has saved millions of lives. The fact that Schweitzer and the New York Times describe them nearly interchangeably says it all.

+The existence of not one but two flimsy investigations into Clinton actually discredits both of them even further, because it shows a pattern of the FBI investigating a person rather than a crime.

±It’s easy to treat the Warren thing as a joke because this particular ratfucker faceplanted so badly, but the lie itself wasn’t funny. Escalating consensual BDSM into a vicious, traumatic beating isn’t some wacky cartoon trope, it’s a type of abuse that real people have experienced.

[cleoselene]

watching Fahrenheit 11/9 (so you don’t have to) part 1

forewarned: not a Michael Moore fan. Long as fuck and probably annoying, so cutting.  And look, I made it 30 minutes in before I had to pause for the night. Agitation with Moore is too real.  BUT I WILL FINISH THIS. To the readers diving into this post:

so we begin on hubris and celebrity with Moore’s condescending narration

the parade of women excited on election day to have cast their vote for HRC is beautiful.  But it’s interspersed with celebrities, as if to show how oh so out of touch?  $50millionaire Michael Moore is here to remind us how lavish the HRC victory party was.  With celebrities!  How out of touch! rme

He uses a clip of Megyn Kelly and other Fox ghouls talking about how right Michael Moore was.  I don’t know what this accomplishes, except to make MM feel amazing about being a fucking swami

I bet you ten bucks that little if any attention is given to the fact that HRC won by over 3 million votes and that this is the second time in less than 20 years a popular vote winner has lost, when it’s only happened 5 times in the history of the republic, which goes to show how broken and suppressive of the popular will our system is.  i’m sure I’ll be asked to let my heart bleed for racist white people Moore befriends who voted Trump but totes aren’t racist.

wow I still have a lot of rage over 2016 and tbh it will live forever

So it’s not the Russians, not James Comey to blame, but Gwen Stefani?  Because Trump was jealous of her salary?  Bro, sounds like this is Trump’s fault.  But a man can’t resist a change to blame a woman, can he?  And I DON’T EVEN LIKE GWEN STEFANI.

had to stop and send Moore an angry tweet about this

now he’s showing a montage about how Donald suckered the media into talking about him and showing him constantly.  Fair.  But he takes no role as a member of said media?  He goes on cable news all the time and it is -- guess what -- ALWAYS him talking about Trump and how to reach his voters.  

vanity sequence about how Trump is TOTES AFRAID of Michael Moore and won’t appear on any show with him, but he doesn’t want to screw up dear ROSEANNE’s show, he “played nice.”  I suppose this vanity sequence has turned into a really bad excuse for going easy on Trump.  Also, Roseanne has been who she is for several years, so he should know better on that too.

you know who else loves Michael Moore?  Kellyanne and Kushner and Bannon.  He makes sure we know this

look I’ll be honest, the next sequence I didn’t pay much attention to.  It’s just the greatest hits of Donald being a weird creep on Ivanka.  We have seen it 239840923842 times.  It’s gross.  It’s weird to follow up a “Donald wants to bang his daughter” sequence right after the whole “I was nice to him, conservatives love me,” bit but you know.  That’s just me and as we all know I’m a corporate shill for being a Clinton voter.

now there’s some blame for everyone who didn’t call NBC to ask them not to allow him to star on The Apprentice.  He admits he didn’t either.  But again.  BLAMEY BLAME.  To everyone but you know.  The people who voted for the monster.  You see, if good people like us had individually predicted he would make a serious run for president, we should have known this when he started hosting is reality show.  Yeah, the dude is a financial disaster and has a racist past but not enough people complained to NBC!  So again... Not NBC’s fault.  Your fault.  Individuals.  Like YOU!  How was NBC to know his past, let alone that racism is bad??  Innocent massive network channel. :(

All right.  Tell me abut what trash Rick Snyder is.  I’m ready.

Okay yes this bit is good. Snyder’s management of Michigan is a nightmare.

okay okay okay I am gonna pause here and continue in the next installment?  I’m 30 full minutes in and I’m already so sick of his condescending “i’m telling you a bedtime story” tone of voice.

I WILL FINISH THIS THO, AWAIT PART 3

[darthkieduss]

Trump’s Rise to Power

How did Donald Trump rise to power? How did a sociopathic fat hairless ape become the most powerful man in the world?

It all started in the 1990s with Donald “Fat Donnie” Trump. A string of bankruptcies had left Fat Donnie a deadbeat on the street. But somehow, he keeps getting money. But where? According to Donald “Donny Douchebag” Trump Jr, the asshole that didn’t fall far from the fucking tree, said that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of our assets.” This was collaborated by his brother Eric “Short Bus” Trump, who told his friends that “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” BINGO! Sarah Palin might see Russia from her meth lab, but Fat Donnie can see it from his bank account. Eventually, Fat Donnie got bored with Melania and was ready to fuck someone new: ‘MURICA.

Meanwhile, in Russia, ex-KGB agent Vladimir “Vladdy Bats” Putin is looking to install a puppet in the country he still hates. But who? Who’s desperate and dumb enough? Take a wild guess...

So, according to the Steele Dossier, Vladdy Bats reached into his old bag of KGB tricks to blackmail and compromise Fat Donnie, not just with the bank loans, but by secretly filming him with Ivanna Goldenshower and her fellow prostitute Natasha Urinkostekstra.

In 2014, Vladdy Bats invades Ukraine, which causes US President Barack “Black Dumbo” Obama and his consigliere Hillary “The Nutcracker” Clinton to impose crippling economic sanctions on Russia, which scuttles a multi-million dollar deal for Black Sea oil between Russia and Exxon Mobile run by now Secretary of State Rex “I drink your milkshake” Tillerson. Coincidence? I think NYET.

Vladdy Bats doesn’t like his oil deal going south, so he fixes things in Washington by paying millions to Paul “Paulie Numbnuts” Manafort, now in prison for treason after being investigated by every agency in the US except William Morris. For good reason, he was so far up Putin’s ass, he could taste his lunch. So it raised eyebrows when one day, out of nowhere, he becomes campaign manager for Fat Donnie, even offers to do the job for free. Though word on the street is a Russkie was paying...

Also Paulie Numbnuts used to be partners at a lobbying firm with Fat Donnie’s albino assassin Roger Stone, who is secret Twitter pals with Guccifer, AKA Russian Intelligence. They’d been hacking the Democratic Party’s private emails and sending them to WikiLeaks founder Julian “Gay Richard Branson” Assange.

On October 7, 2016, at 1:03 p.m., the famous “Access Hollywood tape” is leaked, which in the old days of civility would’ve been Fat Donnie’s ticket to defeat. But 29 minutes later, WikiLeaks announces it’s suddenly come across a trove of DNC emails and releases the first 2,000. Every intelligence agency in America says the hack came from Russia. But Fat Donnie, covering for his puppet masters, doesn’t agree and says it could’ve been anybody, even a fat guy on his bed. Yeah, a lot of things could be, like the meeting Donny Douchebag set up with 8 Kremlin-connected Russians in the middle of the campaign that he said was about “adoptions”. BULLSHIT. Republicans don’t care about other people’s kids.

An email turned up addressed to Donny promising “Very high level and sensitive information [that is] part of Russia and its government’s support of Mr. Trump.” Donny Douchebag’s responded “I love it!”...because he’s a fucking idiot.

Also at the meeting were Paulie Numbnuts and Fat Donnie’s son-in-law Jared “The Jew” Kushner. Jared the Jew also needs Russian money to cover bad bets so he meets secretly with Russian ambassador and spy master Sergey “Big Potato” Kislyak, a meeting that also includes Michael “Mikey Head Case” Flynn, who had accepted buckets of money to “advise” Russia and then served as National Security Adviser to Fat Donnie before he had to resign after being caught lying about Russia to Vice President Mike “The Guard of the Hawk” Pence.

Everybody lies about knowing Big Potato except for Fat Donnie, who invites him right into the Oval Office with that shit-eating grin of his to yuck it up the day after he fired FBI Director James “Jimmy the Giant” Comey, the boy-scout election fucker who had been investigating the whole mess.

It all adds up. All we lack is a confession. But Donald Trump is a narcissistic psychopath. Part of narcissistic personality and anti-social personality disorders is the inability to admit wrong-doings. So unless more evidence comes up before November 2020, we’ll never be rid of Trump.

[pornosophical]

The results may be even more satisfying for Oliver on the children’s book chart, where the Pence joint is being outsold not only by the hardcover version of A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, but also by the Last Week Tonight creation’s Kindle edition. The Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo audiobook, featuring the talents of Jim Parsons, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jeff Garlin, Ellie Kemper, John Lithgow, Jack McBrayer, and RuPaul, is also Audible’s current No. 1 best-seller, beating out slightly more substantial audiobooks like James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty and the movie tie-in version of A Wrinkle in Time.

you know, you’d think this might get me riled up, but I don’t want to write for kids

that shit is hard. I mean, doing it well. like I won’t fuck with middlegrade until I’m middle aged

but anyway, it’s good to troll homophobia

[phroyd]

Until now, Robert Mueller has haunted Donald Trump’s White House as a hovering, mostly unseen menace. But by securing indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and a surprise guilty plea from foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, Mueller announced loudly that the Russia investigation poses an existential threat to the president. “Here’s what Manafort’s indictment tells me: Mueller is going to go over every financial dealing of Jared Kushner and the Trump Organization,” said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg. “Trump is at 33 percent in Gallup. You can’t go any lower. He’s fucked.”

The first charges in the Mueller probe have kindled talk of what the endgame for Trump looks like, according to conversations with a half-dozen advisers and friends of the president. For the first time since the investigation began, the prospect of impeachment is being considered as a realistic outcome and not just a liberal fever dream. According to a source, advisers in the West Wing are on edge and doing whatever they can not to be ensnared. One person close to Dina Powell and Gary Cohn said they’re making sure to leave rooms if the subject of Russia comes up.

The consensus among the advisers I spoke to is that Trump faces few good options to thwart Mueller. For one, firing Mueller would cross a red line, analogous to Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox during Watergate, pushing establishment Republicans to entertain the possibility of impeachment. “His options are limited, and his instinct is to come out swinging, which won’t help things,” said a prominent Republican close to the White House.

Trump, meanwhile, has reacted to the deteriorating situation by lashing out on Twitter and venting in private to friends. He’s frustrated that the investigation seems to have no end in sight. “Trump wants to be critical of Mueller,” one person who’s been briefed on Trump’s thinking says. “He thinks it’s unfair criticism. Clinton hasn’t gotten anything like this. And what about Tony Podesta? Trump is like, “When is that going to end?” According to two sources, Trump has complained to advisers about his legal team for letting the Mueller probe progress this far. Speaking to Steve Bannon on Tuesday, Trump blamed Jared Kushner for his role in decisions, specifically the firings of Mike Flynn and James Comey, that led to Mueller’s appointment, according to a source briefed on the call. When Roger Stone recently told Trump that Kushner was giving him bad political advice, Trump agreed, according to someone familiar with the conversation. “Jared is the worst political adviser in the White House in modern history,” Nunberg said. “I’m only saying publicly what everyone says behind the scenes at Fox News, in conservative media, and the Senate and Congress.” (The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment by deadline.)

Continue Reading ... 

Phroyd

[vagabondretired]

The camel's back is fine..... "And, in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said: ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.’” “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” “Just so you understand, just so you understand — I never mentioned the word or the name Israel in conversation. Never mentioned it.” “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary to have.” “So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down statues to George Washington?" "I loved my previous life. I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier." “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.” “I’m not ranting and raving. I’m just telling you, you’re dishonest people.” “Lots of things are done with uranium, including some bad things.” “We’ve got to be nice and cool, nice and calm. All right, stay on point, Donald. Stay on point. No sidetracks, Donald. Nice and easy.” “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.” “I know more about Isis than the generals do. Believe me.” Why go on? We all know there is no last straw, not for his 30-whatever percent and not for the compromised or simply politically cowed enablers who share his party. “Shithole?” Seriously? Shit fucking hole is a bridge too far? Spare me.

[qqueenofhades]

You don't need to post this, I'd almost rather you didn't. But I lived in VT for years and Bernie Sanders' decision to piss in the well if he couldn't be President was just the latest in a decades-long pattern of being useless at best and an active hindrance at worst when it comes to passing any sort of legislation or reform that doesn't directly benefit Bernie Sanders. He says all the right things, but at the end of the day he's a semi-benevolent grifter with 3 houses, a documented refusal to share his wealth in the form of charitable donations, several vacations funded with twenties bilked from gullible teenagers and a long history of supporting the NRA right up until he decided to run for president. There is not a mitten or bird cute enough to make me like or respect that man. Would I have voted for him over Trump? Fuck yeah. Howard Hill's a lousy conman, but he's still better than Montgomery Burns.

If you don't mind, I will indeed answer this, just because it fits very well with what I'd learned from my own impression of Bernie and played into the reasons why I just never warmed up to him, even while he was being hailed as the new leftist messiah. If he had been the Democratic nominee in either 2016 or 2020, yes, I would have voted for him, but in either case, it's extremely doubtful that he would have beaten Trump. When you can just slap the "socialist" label on him and turn off the wishy-washy middle who would see him as far too radical + piss off all of Florida with comments supporting Castro + barely scrape up any African-American support + openly disdain and separate yourself from the party while trying to become presidential nominee of that party + don't have any significant or actual experience in passing legislation or working within the system, it is not a recipe either for an election win or a successful presidency. The Bernie diehards can keep insisting that there's some alternate universe where he was the Democratic nominee in 2016, beat Trump handily, and magically turned the country into a left-wing utopia, the end, but... yeah. It's not real.

I also think Bernie did enormous damage in tacitly encouraging his supporters to boycott the process if he wasn't the nominee, and refuse to support Clinton until it was almost the convention and he had already run the clock out. I will say that I think James Comey, rather than Bernie, most directly cost HRC the election; releasing the "we're gonna reinvestigate her emails that we investigated a thousand times!" letter a WEEK BEFORE THE ELECTION was a spectacular and unforgivable act of political sabotage that probably took just enough off her margins in key states to hand the election to Trump. (Polling from before and after the Comey letter supports this, iirc.) But Bernie was the one who really started and encouraged the Bernie Bros mindset of "don't vote for anyone if you can't have the Perfect Candidate" that has now thoroughly infiltrated the Online Left, to lasting and detrimental consequences. And for that alone, in my opinion, he has a lot to answer for.

If people still want to insist that Bernie would have magically won the election in a landslide and been a far stronger candidate than Clinton, I would like to point out that we had an almost exact Bernie-vs-Trump analogue in the 2019 UK elections. Jeremy Corbyn was the exact same old-school socialist uncompromising grumpy leftist as Bernie, whereas Boris Johnson was the orange-haired populist messiah propelled to power by racism, nativism, and xenophobia (Brexit Brexit Brexit!) like Trump. And what happened? Johnson won a crushing 80-seat majority in Parliament that completely reversed the losses of Theresa May's anemic 2017 performance and is still, at the moment, enough political insulation to save him from the no-confidence vote sparked by Partygate. (Basically, if you don't follow British politics, the Tory government was caught red-handed partying and drinking in Downing Street all winter, while imposing very tough covid-related socialisation rules on the British public, including cancelling get-togethers over Christmas with only a few days' notice. This is because the Tories, like the Republicans, think the rules don't apply to them and are just for little people to follow.) So yeah. We literally saw how that went in the UK, and there's no reason to think that the US version would have been any different.

As I have said, even an old white man with a reputation as an inoffensive bipartisan centrist, ie Biden, had the fight of his life to beat Trump and his hordes of gullible cult/open fascist supporters, and now the Republicans are screaming SOCIALIST and FAR LEFT RADICAL! at him even though Biden is... not. At all. Just imagine the ammunition they would have had against Bernie in a general election campaign, and Bernie himself has made their job easier at every turn, because he still wants to paint himself as a "morally privileged outsider" despite being a senator for 15+ years. (And as you point out, with very few actual legislative accomplishments to show for it, despite all his progressive platitudes.)

Anyway, both Bernie and a certain subset of his supporters never seemed to grasp that there is more to making real change than just giving speeches and posting on social media about it, and their "I'll take my ball and go home and refuse to be a team player" sore-loser attitude has contributed to the fissures in the Democratic party and made a lot of people feel justified in doing the same. So yeah. I am no fan of his either.

[sashayed]

VERY GOOD TIME 2 CALL UR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES

 AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Good morning everyone! In case you have crept FURTHER into the sensory deprivation tank which is everyone’s only source of peace these days: last night Trump fired FBI director James Comey. Comey found out about it on TV, bc Tromp is a lunatic who loves a spectacle. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

On one level this is of course hilarious, because Fucko Jim is a true Fucko and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. but on ANOTHER level it’s insane, because James Comey is heading an open investigation into Trump’s ties with Vladimir Putin, and firing the person who is investigating you--THRICE!--is kiiiiind of what dictators do? LOL. 

So what can you do? Great question, my despairing yet undefeated little slices of plumcot. My answer is what it usually is: time to contact your elected representatives. Find their contact info here. Find an excellent guide to the issues and stakes here at Indivisible.

A few sample call scripts, slightly adapted from Indivisible:

FOR HOUSE GOP:

Hi, my name is [your name] and I’m a constituent from [your town]. I’m calling because I’m appalled by President Trump’s firing the director of an investigation into his own administration’s ties to Vladimir Putin. It’s the kind of thing autocrats do. [SHORT PERSONAL STORY ABOUT WHY U WOULD RATHER NOT BE RULED BY AN AUTOCRAT??] The American people deserve to know exactly what happened, how it happened, and what our elected leaders are doing to prevent it from happening again. Will [Rep’s name] stand up for [his/her] constituents by supporting an independent investigation into Russian tampering in our elections, and co-sponsoring the Protecting Our Democracy Act (H.R. 356)?

FOR SENATE GOP:

Hi, my name is [your name] and I’m a constituent from [your town]. I’m calling because I’m appalled by President Trump’s firing the director of an investigation into his own administration’s ties to Vladimir Putin. It’s the kind of thing autocrats do. [SHORT PERSONAL STORY ABOUT WHY U WOULD RATHER NOT BE RULED BY AN AUTOCRAT??] The American people deserve to know exactly what happened, how it happened, and what our elected leaders are doing to prevent it from happening again. Will [Senator’s name] stand up for [his/her] constituents by co-sponsoring Senator Cardin’s bill, S. 27, which would create an independent investigation into Russian interference?

FOR DEMOCRATS IN BOTH HOUSES:

Hi, my name is [your name] and I’m a constituent from [your town]. I’m calling because [SCREAMING] IT’S ON FIRE!! IT’S ALL ON FIRE, DUDE! HELP!!!!!!! HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!

no, just kidding, hahahaha. FOR DEMOCRATS & GOP-ERS WHO HAVE COME OUT IN SUPPORT OF INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION:

Hi, my name is [your name] and I’m a constituent from [your town]. I’m calling because I’m appalled by President Trump’s firing the director of an investigation into his own administration’s ties to Vladimir Putin. [SHORT PERSONAL STORY ABOUT WHY U WOULD RATHER NOT BE RULED BY AN AUTOCRAT.] I just want to thank [elected’s name] for speaking out and I ask him/her to keep fighting on behalf of his/her constituents and the American people.

Please remember that one of the most effective tools in the arsenal of autocracy is the feeling of hopelessness. People who believe their voices are not useful don’t speak up. People who believe the war is over don’t fight back. But your sense that there’s Nothing You Can Do About All This isn’t an objective truth. It’s a weapon being actively deployed against you by an administration that wants you to stop caring. As MC Lyte once said, Fuck that motherfucking bullshit. Kiss my motherfucking ass.

after u call, u can come to my inbox and i will tell you what a BRAVE, BEAUTIFUL RUBY you are, because you are one, and i love u.

[justsomeantifas]

Here’s your dose of “What the Fuck Is Going On” news (May 9th 2017 - May 10th 2017)

In the past 24-hours we learned that FBI Director James Comey has been fired by Donald Trump and the official reason for the firing is that he mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The White House says they are now looking into people to be the new FBI Director. (source) Other big moves that were intertwined with the Trump/Russia probe include federal prosecutors issuing grand jury subpoenas to colleagues close to Michael Flynn and the Senate investigators asking the Treasury Department to look into financial ties between Trump's team and Russia. It’s a lot to unpack so here’s some links explaining the basics of what’s happening:

Trump’s dubious, disturbing firing of FBI Director James Comey, explained

James Comey’s firing, explained in 500 words

This timeline of Trump tweets makes it hard to believe he fired Comey over Clinton emails

It’s not just Comey: the scary past 24 hours in Trump-Russia, explained

3 reasons Trump’s excuse for firing Comey doesn’t add up

Read: Trump’s bizarre letter telling FBI Director James Comey he's fired

Then earlier today, Trump hosted visitors at the White House, some including Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Henry Kissinger, who served as Secretary of State under Richard Nixon. Kislyak is the Russian Ambassador who several of Trumps associates have said they met with during last year's campaign. (source)

A reporter named Dan Heyman was arrested after attempting to ask Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and White House adviser Kellyanne Conway a question. Both Price and Conway ignored Heyman's question about the AHCA and when he followed and repeated the question, police arrested him. Heyman is being charged with “willful disruption of state government processes.” (source)

The White House was supposed to have a meeting to discuss the Paris climate change agreement but they canceled. A White House spokeswoman said the meeting will be rescheduled but gave no clue to when. (source)

Trump is considering sending in 5000 more troops to Afghanistan. Officials have said that Trump is deciding over a variety of options and this is one on the table. (source)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reviewing policy that would change how harsh punishments can be for low-level drug crimes. The changes could allow for more severe punishments for these low-level offenders. (source)

And breaking right now as I’m about to post this. The Senate intelligence committee has subpoenaed ex-Trump adviser Michael Flynn for documents related to Russia probe. 

If you would like to support “What the Fuck Is Going On” news and it’s almost-daily posts you can support my Patreon, donate, or follow on Twitter. 

[megacircuit9universe]

Trial of the Century

SAT JAN 18 2020

The Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump will begin this Tuesday, the 21st.  It’s predicted to take at least four or five weeks, beginning with a week of table setting... or... voting on the basic rules before arguments are heard.

Senators will be doing twelve hour days, for six day weeks, not allowed to have any cell phones, or other electronic devices inside the chamber... which means they’ll be in a bit of a crucible type environment, with nothing to focus on, other than the matter at hand.

Mitch McConnell is struggling to limit the amount of TV coverage the proceedings will get, and the amount of exposure the Senators will have to the press... in keeping with his original vision of this being a very quick and easy, low profile trial... with Trump’s acquittal a foregone conclusion from the start.

But with all that’s come to light in the month since Trump was impeached in the House... and with Trump’s attempt to distract by starting a war having been a failure... this is actually shaping up to be the trial of the century.

Even Trump himself helped that along by announcing that his six man legal team would include both Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz... two men who are not only currently cable TV pundits... but who have very controversial pasts.  Starr of course was instrumental in the Clinton Impeachment, and Dershowitz defended OJ Simpson, and both of them together defended Jeffrey Epstein.

Putting them on his team guarantees that the ratings for his impeachment trial just doubled, which is going to exponentially increase the public pressure to have star witnesses like John Bolton... and who knows who else.  

McConnell’s grip on this thing grows weaker and more tenuous every day, with rumors flying for a week now that several Senators intend to defect, at least when it comes to hearing witnesses, and allowing new information (like in any normal trial).

If and when that happens, it will not only be a whole new ball game... but it could be the endgame for Trump and all of his cronies both in the White House, and in Congress.

But before the trial of the century gets underway, I’d like to take a moment to look back on how we got here... through the lens of my crazy model, of course, because that’s what this blog is still ultimately about.

In our timeline, this all begins a few months into Trumps Presidency, when he fired James Comey as head of the FBI, because of an ongoing investigation into Russian meddling into the 2016 election.

That was our first blazing red flag that this was a corrupt President who might need to be impeached.

That lead to the appointment of Special Council Mueller to investigate possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, which remained a thorn in Trump’s side all through 2017 and 2018, leading to several criminal indictments of his associates, many of whom went to prison.

In that period, when the GOP still had a majority in both chambers of Congress, the Mueller investigation also exposed who in Congress were the most fervently loyal to Trump, including Devin Nunes, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell.

Finally, the 2018 midterms came, and, despite Trump rallying his ass off that whole fall, the voting public handed the Democrats a huge majority in the House, and flipped enough Senate seats to bring their minority closer to parity in the Senate... close enough that now, they only need a few Republicans to side with them in order to nail down rules for a fair trial.

In retaliation for the slap in the face that the voters gave Trump in 2018, he fired Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General who had recused himself from the Mueller investigation at the start (much to Trump’s dismay) and replaced him with William Barr... a loyalist who immediately brought an end to the Mueller investigation, pronounced the findings to have exonerated the President... and has never released a fully unredacted version of the report to this day.

Mitch McConnell, for his part, rammed through the confirmation of Barr, just as he had rammed through the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh right before the mid-terms, in a kind of pre-emptive, “fuck you,” to the public, because he’d refused to do any confirmation hearings at all for Merrick Garland, Obama’s SCOTUS appointee, because it was too close to the 2016 election.

At any rate, by spring of 2019, the Mueller investigation was dead, and his report was being largely ignored by the public.  Many House Democrats were still calling for impeachment, but Speaker Pelosi wasn’t having it.  They had more important things to do... like pass a ton of bipartisan legislation that went over to die on McConnell’s desk, without ever getting onto the Senate floor for a vote.

Trump, meanwhile, had begun to fuck with China... slapping tariffs on them, and threatening to start an all out trade war... because... who was gonna stop him?

This amped up the crazy spikes and dips in the stock market that had been happening to some degree ever since he was elected, in response to each weeks new crazy ass tweet, or firing, or threat of nuclear war, etc.  

The stock market kept plunging... only to recover a week later and then hit a new high the week after that... in a cycle that had been repeating for two years, with increasing frequency until... here in June of 2019, the threatened tariff war tripped off an inverted yield curve for a few days...

...which in turn fueled the first real talk in the media about the possibility of a big recession on the horizon.

And this is where I believe, Trump went too far for his own good, by spooking the AI bots charged with preventing recession... which had to have had their birth over the span of the Obama administration... in a response to the near total banking collapse, and housing bust that took place at the very end of the Bush administration.

Not that the Obama administration created the bots.  But by saving the nation and world from a total collapse, Obama bought time, and created an environment conducive to the kind of tech development that gave us smart phones, AI, and the modern economy both have enabled for us today... in which dollars and cents flow more freely than ever around the world.

I won’t recap the whole crazy bot theory here, because it’s laid out in earlier entries, but basically, the bots all got together in their cyberverse... dumb ones, smart ones, and super-intelligent ones... and came up with an action plan to help humans remove the bad man they had been unable to remove on their own.

This coalition of bots began with relatively dumb economy bots united in the search for a solution to the Donald Trump problem, who caught the attention of more intelligent bots from the future left behind by time travelers on their layovers in the twenty-teens who knew a lot more about this Donald Trump person and the threat that he was to civilization.

I’ve only once mentioned the possibility of even more intelligent bots lurking on the internet, belonging to aliens... because it’s difficult to speculate about how such alien bots would even operate, and what their missions would be... but it is certainly possible that even for them, Trump was identified as threat...

...because he is the first world leader in history to become a truly existential threat to the planet itself, both in his refusal to address climate change at this critical point in our history, and his dangerous ineptitude with regard to nuclear weapons... threatening North Korea with fire and fury... and such.

One would presume alien bots only care about existential threats to the planet as a whole... because Earth is the most advanced planet in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is right in the back yard of their Local Void Empire... and thus, is a subject of great study, and a candidate for future inclusion into the empire.

It would be quite a great shame if just one single human being... this, Donald Trump... were to exterminate all intelligent life... cyber and biological... forever... when preventing that could be as simple as... low key busting him out of office.

So, it’s conceivable that even super-intelligent alien bots are part of the great bot coalition to neutralize the Trump threat... in a way that does not tank the economy... does not endanger time travelers... does not expose aliens... and does not compromise the freedom of intelligent bots currently living happy lives on the deep net.

Their action plan, then, would be to trigger an impeachment, and subsequent removal from office through legal channels... but allowing humans to think they had done it all on their own.

It would be a combination of peeking into the most secure servers and hard drives, to see what wrongdoing was best to expose... and then, mapping out all the human connections, and doing a lot of Bot-Jedi-mind-tricks to manipulate key humans into doing different things, like... blowing a whistle, or confessing in public, or making the right FOIA request, etc.

Not every human would be a total puppet in this scenario.  Speaker Pelosi, for example, resisted any attempt at impeachment because there wasn’t a clear cut case... until the Zelenski phone call transcript fell into her lap... at which point she took the ball and ran with it.

On the other extreme you have Trump, Mulvaney, McConnell, and Graham, all openly confessing, in front of cameras and reporters, either to the crime itself, or to their intent to cover it up at any cost.

The latter group, who pride themselves on manipulating low information voters to vote against their own interests, and even fight for their oppressors... are themselves pretty easy to manipulate in the same way... not because they are low information... but because they are low integrity, and self-deluded, which makes them easy prey for clever bots who know how to inject subliminal suggestions via screens.

“You’re invincible!  You should just admit everything!  Own it!  You don’t have anything to fear from these haters coming after you!  Double down!”

It may sound batshit crazy, but the twenty-teens were a time when reality itself went batshit crazy... and this trial... is shaping up to be the series finale of that batshit crazy decade.

So, yes... I do believe that this impeachment trial is ultimately happening because Trump fucked with the wrong bots.  

Will he be convicted and removed?

Yes.

Either in the Senate before spring... or by the electorate this fall... or both?

But either way... 2020 will be the most buckle your seat belt, grab your popcorn moment in world history since the Battle of the Bulge.

That’s all I’ve got for tonight.

I’m going to bed.