US Politics May 2019: " If I was burned at the stake, I would ask for a mirror"

Psh, Trump just can't get a break. He spells shit wrong and people complain. He spells "socks" right and people still complain! There's just no winning for this guy.

xpost Didn't Nunes team with Schiff to support getting the entire Mueller intelligence report?

Karl, I think it rattled the WH a little.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Wednesday criticized Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee for not informing him that President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. would be subpoenaed by the panel as part of its ongoing probe into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.

In an interview with CBS News, Mulvaney said it was “bad form” for the Republican-led committee to subpoena Trump Jr. without giving him advance notice.

“I have no difficulty with bipartisanship, but to subpoena the president of the United States’s son and not at least get a heads-up, I thought was — let’s say — bad form,” Mulvaney said.

mulvaney knows that as the chief of staff of the well-oiled machine that is the trump administration, he's in a good position to criticize the "bad form" of others

GOOD MOURNING

WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that the United States was in a “constitutional crisis” and warned that House Democrats might move to hold more Trump administration officials in contempt of Congress if they continued their refusals to comply with committee subpoenas.

Speaking to reporters in the Capitol, Ms. Pelosi said she agreed with Representative Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who said Wednesday that the nation was in a constitutional crisis after his committee recommended the House hold Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over an unredacted version of the special counsel’s report, along with the report’s underlying evidence.

“The administration has decided they are not going to honor their oath of office,” she said.

Ms. Pelosi said Democrats would bring the contempt citation to the floor for a vote of the full House “when we are ready.”

Democrats have not settled on a precise date for the vote to hold Mr. Barr in contempt of Congress, though Mr. Nadler said after Wednesday’s vote that he wanted it scheduled “rapidly.”

Democratic leaders may wait to pair the Judiciary Committee’s contempt recommendations with another, most likely from the Intelligence Committee should its conflict with the Justice Department get to that point.

The committee’s chairman, Representative Adam B. Schiff, issued a subpoena on Thursday for Mr. Barr to hand over the full Mueller report and evidence, as well as all counterintelligence and foreign intelligence generated by the special counsel’s investigations. He gave the Justice Department until May 15 to comply. If Mr. Barr ignores that deadline, the Intelligence Committee would probably hold its own contempt proceedings and send another recommendation to the House floor.

There are other possible contempt citations in the wings as well, including for Donald F. McGahn II, the former White House counsel who is under subpoena by the Judiciary Committee, and witnesses in unrelated Oversight and Reform Committee investigations.

“In terms of timing, when we’re ready, we’ll come to the floor,” Ms. Pelosi said. “There might be some other contempt of Congress issues that we want to deal with at the same time.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/us/politics/pelosi-constitutional-crisis.html

rank these things that have all happened in the last couple hours, in terms of importance:

25% tariffs on $200B of chinese goods starts tomorrow
US just seized a north korean ship in retaliation for missile launches
ongoing constitutional crisis

ok, 2 of the 3 are thing that did not happen in the last 2 hours, but otherwise that was a good description of the list, i thought

hadn't heard about the NK ship! sounds spicy

Life over the last couple of years feels kinda like being a tornado chaser who waits until there's like five cyclones whipping through a cornfield and gets out of his jeep to see how long he can leap and dodge between them before being ripped to pieces. Fun, in other words. A lot of fun.

so it's not just sanctions on NK, but a blockade? i guess might makes right in these matters, but that doesn't sound 'legal'

Eh, the metaphor I'd use is more like being kidnapped and stuck in the backseat of said tornado chaser, or learning the bus driver on a mountain road is a member of a death cult.

https://makeagif.com/gif/christopher-walken-annie-hall-gvf8Pt

Or rather

https://dz7u9q3vpd4eo.cloudfront.net/wp-content/legacy/posts/d0744f52-b206-49ea-a7c9-27f820968fbf.jpg

Taken aback by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s subpoena issued to Donald Trump Jr., President Trump on Thursday defended his son, leaning on special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to do so.

...“He’s now testified for 20 hours or something — massive amount of time. The Mueller report came out. That’s the bible. The Mueller report came out and they said he did nothing wrong. The only thing is, it’s oppo research,” Trump continued, arguing that his campaign was simply engaged in a routine search for damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

...“My son is a good person. My son testified for hours and hours. My son was totally exonerated by Mueller, who frankly does not like Donald Trump — me, this Donald Trump,” he said. “And frankly for my son after being exonerated to now get a subpoena to go again and speak again after close to 20 hours of telling everybody that would listen about a nothing meeting, yeah, I’m pretty surprised.”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/donald-trump-surprised-subpoena-son-don-jr

confirmation that trump did not read the mueller report

or rather, he's read as much of the mueller report as he has the bible

You got it wrong: this Donald Trump.

Mueller, who frankly does not like Donald Trump — me, this Donald Trump

omg

This Donald Trump is the new This Fuckin' Guy.

Confirmation that the hole in the front of Donald Trump's head is capable of emitting words that adhere closely enough to the general structure of our language that people still hopefully insist that the sound they hear is anything more than a random collage of words not terribly unlike the utterances of a parrot.

i read that as him saying his son didn't like him

"According to his first wife, Ivana, Donald Trump was never keen on bequeathing his name to anybody," Julia Ioffe wrote in GQ. "It was Ivana who wanted to call their newborn Donald junior. 'You can't do that!' Trump is quoted as saying in Ivana's memoir, 'Raising Trump.' 'What if he - as in that Donald Trump, not this Donald Trump - turns out to be a loser?'"

that would have been embarassing

That anecdote, in complete isolation, is sufficient justification for the woodchipperizing of its subject imo. Who but an irredeemable POS worries that their unborn/newborn baby might be a loser.

I mean, it was a legitimate worry in this instance, but still.

loooooool

"I don't know WHAT TO DO!!"

"Look I can prove I'm the real Donald Trump, and that man is an imposter"

"Me, this Donald Trump, is the real one the other is a fake!"

BAM!

"Phew! That was a close one. You almost shot the fake Donald Trump!"

this guy makes his living by stamping his name on tacky shit

Look, if you're gonna throw shade, at least wait until Congress is done with the guy so he can defend himself.

Personally, I think Tacky Shit Trump has more of a ring to it than Donald Jr., but I can see where it might've made his schooldays rough.

Trump's "joke" about shooting migrants last night has inspired a fraction of the blowback that Ilhan Omar's critique of AIPAC did. Which is telling. https://t.co/yZlepmj1Il pic.twitter.com/Kn8IQfYaGW

— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) May 9, 2019

oh for the Left to have one tenth the energy, strategy, and media’s deference of the rightwing outrage machine

media’s deference of the rightwing outrage machine

the right wing controls most of the media. the whole myth of a liberal media bias is the product of the right wing and has been propagated through... the media.

Only someone brainwashed by the liberal media would make such a preposterous assertion.

well, good morning!

it's kind of amazing how an ideology that's supposedly 'losing the culture war' has done such a thorough job of shaping the narrative of liberal bias, conservative victim mentality, both sides-ism (but always always always the left side *more*) etc

i've got casually engaged liberal friends who've parroted the "librul media" line in the post-Obama era about every mainstream entitiy outside of Fox and i'm just how the fuck are you even for real

I remember a kind of hilarious segment on like On the Media (?) where Ira Glass was saying he didn't hear any bias in NPR's reporting, then they brought on a conservative who thought NPR was a liberal Gomorrah and asked him to point out all the liberal bias he could find. Mostly he was mad that the reporters didn't explicitly spell out conservative dogma, or implied that there was a correlation between taxes and govt. revenue.

i think there's an idea even among libs that if you're not actively demonizing gays and POCs, or only doing so 'a little', then you're totally in the tank for the liberal agenda.

corporatism & rah rah militarism/ imperialism? nbd

media bias is real, for example I've noticed sports media is very biased against the Miami Marlins these days

^^We joke, but I saw somewhere that Disney is selling (or trying to sell) Fox Sports Network to Sinclair.

already did:

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/how-sinclairs-purchase-of-baseball-sports-networks-will-affect-you/

House Ways and Means Committee subpoenas Steve Mnunchin over Trump's taxes.

Steve Mnuchin already sadly with the state of his sub poenas

damn, i can't even form a poenas joek properly

tgif

Time to dig up the 10,000 quotes from Republican senators and representatives deploring "the imperial presidency" and extolling the oversight functions of Congress. You could make a one hour supercut of the highlights.

of course, one effect of their constant obama-era complaints is that now that the democrats are making similar claims, the whole thing comes off to the general public as more partisan bickering - this is just a thing that happens in politics now, the opposing party claims that the president and his administration are corrupt and that the only reasonable reaction is to try to grind what they're doing to a halt. 'republicans had #benghazi, now democrats have russiagate, it's all the same', etc

in other words, it's in the GOP's interest to be outraged over bullshit when they're the minority party, because that way when Democrats are outraged over ACTUAL THINGS when they're the minority party, it all starts to seem the same to an outside observer

i agree - i think it is part of this ongoing, multifaceted, almost rhizomatic nonsensical-ization of public life which has the effect of allowing those in power to perpetuate it

just thinking as these subpeonas roll out and are ignored, DNC and the candidates as a chorus should bleat away from here to Nov 2020 a simple refrain w the same frequency and volume as "No Collusion"

WHAT IS THE PRESIDENT HIDING?

over and again ad nauseum. It's dumb but simply demanding the taxes is a rhetorical dead end, it fails to frame GOP's concealment as a tacit admission that something is dirty there

yeah but qualmsey did it

I think he got burnt out because it wasn't working