I don’t have an attorney general. It’s very sad.
Never Forget. This is the same man that had the audacity to wear a tan suit.
You can’t plead Trump on this one, Republicans. You can’t say the base drank the Trump Kool Aid, and you had no choice but to submit. [With the indictment of Maria Butina] we are staring at clear evidence that the Russians decided in or before March 2015, before Trump was remotely in the picture, that they were going to target your party, working through the NRA, and bank on your winning the 2016 election so that America would become more pro-Russian.You need to ask yourselves why they might have thought this.
Yes, yes; you opposed Putin on Crimea and Ukraine, and you attacked Barack Obama for not being tough enough with him. But even so, Republicans, the Kremlin felt it could play you. If I were you, I’d be asking myself: What was it they saw?
Maybe they saw what some of the rest of us here in America see. That you became, before the rise of Trump, a party devoid of any principle except the maintenance of power. Or that if they won over the NRA, they’d have you, because you’d never cross the NRA. Or maybe they saw that what really matters to you at the end of the day is that if Barack or Hillary was against it, you could be persuaded to be for it. And just maybe they peered a little deeper and saw the growth of the authoritarian turn of mind in your party’s base and liked what they saw.
That is what you became, even before Trump. And look what you’ve become now. Look what you’ve given us. Some of you howled in protest at what Trump did Monday in Helsinki (but it’s still worth noting that many did not). Well, it’s a little late now, isn’t it? You have placed an anti-patriot in the Oval Office. Exactly as the Russians bet you would. Never again browbeat us with your cheap shows of patriotism. You’re the un-Americans.
Donald Trump is unequivocal proof that A’s hire B’s and B’s hire C’s, and Trump hires people without the judgment, qualifications, ethical foundations, and moral stature to run an underground bum-fighting operation. Scott Pruitt’s obvious money problems should have screamed out in any background check, to say nothing of a Senate confirmation hearing.
Pruitt is a man, like so many of Trump’s claque of low-rent hoodlums, bus-station conmen, edge-case dead-enders, and caged-immigrant child porn aficionados, utterly unsuited to a role of public trust and responsibility.
I really don’t understand the Democratic messaging problem here. Every Democrat from dog catcher to Senate Minority leader only needs to remember three words: “Merrick Fucking Garland.” Repeat any time a microphone is near. He is the only acceptible nominee for this or any seat on the court until he is seated. Period. The fucking end. Anything else is window dressing and a needless and message-diluting distraction. After Garland is ensconced, we can start to talk about the legitimacy of any Trump nominee for any position, assuming the Orange Man isn’t already in jail by then.
There should be at least 1 million people surrounding the Capitol right now with one simple demand: Garland is seated or no one leaves this building. These are the messages that the modern GOP can and will understand.
Opinion | Inside the coming campaign to block Trump’s Supreme Court pick
Whether or not you think public shaming should be happening, it’s important to understand why it’s happening. It’s less a result of a breakdown in civility than a breakdown of democracy. Though it’s tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and humiliates their fellow citizens. Trump installed the right-wing Neil Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole from Barack Obama. Gorsuch, in turn, has been the fifth vote in decisions on voter roll purges and, on Monday, racial gerrymandering that will further entrench minority rule.
All over the country, Republican members of Congress have consistently refused to so much as meet with many of the scared, furious citizens they ostensibly represent. A great many of these citizens are working tirelessly to take at least one house of Congress in the midterms — which will require substantially more than 50 percent of total votes, given structural Republican advantages — so that the country’s anti-Trump majority will have some voice in the federal government.
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
Perhaps the biggest change from stock GNOME in Ubuntu 18.04 is the ability to put folders and files on the desktop.
In my view, Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration. When prime-time hosts — who have never served our country in any capacity — dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller — all the while scaremongering with lurid warnings of “deep-state” machinations — I cannot be part of the same organization, even at a remove. To me, Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.
Cambridge Analytica is just one part of an entire industry set up around this sort of information. Peter Thiel’s Palantir does much the same general sort of stuff, but Thiel is smart, and does it for the US military and spies, so he is protected, even though Palantir does far more evil.
Lemkin 