Trump, May 2017: 100 days of [unintelligible]

xp Greil Marcus should do something with that analogy!

David Roberts otm but sort of common knowledge?

yeah Roberts' point isn't news, which is why he first made it nearly a year ago, when it was becoming increasingly obvious

Sorry, didn't catch that.

He looks like Elvis the day before (or the day after) his death.

OTM.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/7f/f6/4c/7ff64c00578b2eac5d43f8300c41f851.jpg

It's mollifying to imagine that the GOP might eventually turn on Trump because he violated some sacrosanct moral principle and betrayed both the American people and the fundamental ideals of our great nation, but because he already does that four or five times a week at this point, I'm much more inclined to believe they might throw him under a bus because he's violated the sanctity of a cush ten-year federal-level appointment or somesuch.

Actually, E. looking too good there. More like this:

http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/journalstar.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/8/55/85585cc9-2cb8-5d2e-b756-0ede42ce3561/85585cc9-2cb8-5d2e-b756-0ede42ce3561.preview-300.jpg

Updates from that townhall:

room just erupted in a chant of "single payer" https://t.co/WYhcCeZXIX

— noah kulwin (@nkulw) May 10, 2017

"let the congressman finish!" one constituent yells

"he's finished in 2018" another shoots back

this is how this is going

— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcS) May 10, 2017

Am enjoying the twitter embed feature, btw. Thanks to Stet or whoever coded it in

How do you do it?

Just paste the URL in the post box, gets converted.

Let's see if it works for mobile with this poll:

https://mobile.twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/862444742583267328

That'd be a no.

Who should be the special prosecutor?

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) May 10, 2017

instructions in "formatting help" below.

Cagily phrased, this letter.

First on CNN: In ltr to FBI staff, Comey says he's "long believed a president can fire an FBI director for any reason or no reason at all" pic.twitter.com/AxKWwyk1PZ

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) May 11, 2017

my fav Sinatra song

Meantime, the current US Ambassador to Qatar (appointed 2014)

Increasingly difficult to wake up overseas to news from home, knowing I will spend today explaining our democracy and institutions.

— Dana Shell Smith (@AmbDana) May 10, 2017

Separately, Kevin McCarthy (House Majority Leader) seems a hair confused

.@GOPLeader: In Washington, "we serve at the pleasure" of the president.."if we lose the confidence,'' then we can lose our jobs

— Carla Marinucci (@cmarinucci) May 11, 2017

Ah, turns out he's in town here tonight. I don't know what he was thinking when he asked this:

When @GOPLeader asks SF audience who else in the crowd voted for Trump -- just one or two hands go up at #PlaybookExchange

— Carla Marinucci (@cmarinucci) May 11, 2017

someone's been watching "The Apprentice" long enough to believe it

xpost re McCarthy

If you go for a walk in the park early enough, you can see the sunrise and hobos washing their balls in the drinking fountain.

— Del Freaky (@iAmDelFreaky) May 9, 2017

Strange way to describe House Leadership

Meanwhile:

Daily adventures of cocaine Rab pic.twitter.com/uaISASdS5v

— Jacob Welna (@WelnaJacob) May 10, 2017

Leakers be leakin

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-trumps-anger-and-impatience-prompted-him-to-fire-the-fbi-director/2017/05/10/d9642334-359c-11e7-b373-418f6849a004_story.html?utm_term=.3e295015c33b

Key bit:

But the private accounts of more than 30 officials at the White House, the Justice Department, the FBI and on Capitol Hill, as well as Trump confidants and other senior Republicans, paint a conflicting narrative centered on the president’s brewing personal animus toward Comey. Many of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to candidly discuss internal deliberations.

Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped. He was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists.

Also:

Many employees said they were furious about the firing, saying the circumstances of his dismissal did more damage to the FBI’s independence than anything Comey did in his three-plus years in the job.

One intelligence official who works on Russian espionage matters said they were more determined than ever to pursue such cases. Another said Comey’s firing and the subsequent comments from the White House are attacks that won’t soon be forgotten. Trump had “essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI,” one official said. “I think there will be a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.”

*tongue click* shouldnna kicked the Stasi

cue Glenn Greenwald smirkin'

Elsewhere...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article149836319.html

Various bits about expanding the probe to other former campaign officials, but I was most interested in this:

Some career investigators may not take kindly to the political pressure, said Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at Harvard Law School.

“If they feel like this was designed to push them back, they will be emboldened,” Whiting said, and may confront Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who has taken the reins of the Russia probe because Attorney General Jeff Sessions withdrew from involvement in the inquiry after it was disclosed that he met twice with Russia’s ambassador last year.

Whiting said he believes Rosenstein “is very weakened” as a result of his role in Comey’s “orchestrated firing,” and will soon feel pressure from senior Justice Department officials to name a special counsel to take over the Russia influence investigation.

“It’s very possible that in the next few days, the political pressure will be so intense that he’ll have little choice,” Whiting said.

He said many career Justice Department officials care deeply about its image and the perception that it remains free of political meddling.

“Any time that there’s a perception that the independence of the Justice Department may have been compromised by a political decision, that’s very damaging to the institution,” Whiting said. “And it’s a lasting damage.”

And in this story:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-comey-had-requested-more-money-for-fbi-s-russia-investigation-before-being-fired-u-s-official-1494433061

Mr. Comey started receiving daily instead of weekly updates on the investigation, beginning at least three weeks ago, according to people with knowledge of the matter and the progress of the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe. Mr. Comey was concerned by information showing potential evidence of collusion, according to these people.

Fun stuff all over the place tonight!

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1862WP

The anger behind Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday had been building for months, but a turning point came when Comey refused to preview for top Trump aides his planned testimony to a Senate panel, White House officials said.

Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had wanted a heads-up from Comey about what he would say at a May 3 hearing about his handling of an investigation into former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.

When Comey refused, Trump and his aides considered that an act of insubordination and it was one of the catalysts to Trump’s decision this week to fire the FBI director, the officials said.

"It gave the impression that he was no longer capable of carrying out his duties," one official said. Previews of congressional testimony to superiors are generally considered courteous.

When Conway was dragged from cold-storage:

https://media.giphy.com/media/3oKIPxRuQQtVbQz35S/giphy.gif

what's the rationale on 4chan for why the president of the united states met in the oval office with a representative of the russian government (allowing russian press in, but not US press) less than a week after the russian government hacked the french election?

i don't know but it has something to do with penises

Meanwhile, direct from a meeting in my former hometown:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article149829784.html

News of the Comey firing broke just as the Republican National Committee’s spring meeting was getting underway at a luxe oceanfront resort here near San Diego. In interviews with current and former top RNC members on Wednesday, veteran Republicans called the timing politically problematic, with some warning of potentially serious consequences for the 2018 midterms.

“It worries me for the midterm elections,” said a Republican national committeewoman who called the optics “bad” and the timing “odd” and “inconsistent.” “It looks like we’re shooting from the hip all the time with no real rhyme or reason. If people can’t figure out the logic about what we’re doing, how can they support it?”

Agreed a former top RNC member: “If he wears the base down where eventually they say, ‘Maybe I can’t defend this so much anymore,’ and all of the enthusiasm is on the Democratic side in 2018—I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but it could be a wipeout kind of year for us. I think we need to be more careful about that.”

Yeah but emails

Interesting; thanks, Ned!

The smarter adult in my household made a very good point just now, about #31 in the David Roberts tweetstorm ; what's absolutely terrifying isn't that the president is deranged, it's that all these other people around him, including those who are supposed to be serving as a check (media, CONGRESS, CONGRESS, also CONGRESS) are just taking him as if he's secretly sane on some level.

That's how we get everyone killed. That's how we enable higher-functioning sociopaths and their ilk to do truly horrible, irreversible things (i.e. Sessions). Having a demented fucked up crazy person in the Oval Office is not terrifying, it's not even really unprecedented. Having so many concentric circles of flying monkey enablers and suckups is what's new, and that's what will destroy us all.

There's also the fact that he's a moron. A smarter sociopath could have gotten rid of Comey in a way that didn't cause such a shitstorm. I guess his brainlessness might ultimately be our saving grace.

^yeah and how dumb are Pence (not surprising i guess) and Priebus (maybe slightly more surprising?) for backing his termination now? and Bannon's the guy showing restraint? jfc

any "mainstream republican" who thought they could roll with this trump thing and turn it into something positive for themselves is extraordinarily dumb. so that's basically all of them.

I'd say the chances of Trump serving out his full term are in decline, but of course that leaves us with Pence

if trump is forcibly ousted from office that would mean things have gotten so bad for the republicans they would be totally crippled.

the longer this goes on the worse it's going to get. there are still hundreds of vacancies in this government -- tons of work that just isn't getting done -- and this will catch up with them. you can only blame obama for so long. like, what if there is a major terrorist attack? how would "kneecapping the fbi" -- as a gentleman on npr put it -- look then?

i mean, who knows. but the republican fantasy of quietly looting the nation while maintaining the aspects of statesmen in the eyes of 1/2 the populace just cannot be sustainable.

eh if he goes any time soon i really don't see the GOP changing course at all. they'll keep moving like dead-eyed sharks with pence til they get those tax cuts and judges, or until their stymied by *possible* losses in 2018.

i am not saying they will change, i am saying they will become pariahs

that they won't just lose but collapse. they're all in with this trump fellow now.

i shouldn't prognosticate but you know

yep. it will certainly be interesting to see them try to detach if this whole Trump phenomenon shits the bed

like wtf is that going to look like lol

i shouldn't prognosticate but you know

― Treeship, Wednesday, May 10, 2017 10:15 PM

but you don't

i am not saying they will change, i am saying they will become pariahs

― Treeship, Wednesday, May 10, 2017 10:14 PM

can we post threads from 2008? 2006? Was ILE around during the Poppy/Clinton race?