US Politics, February 2018: Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots

Shot:

"It's school safety. It's not about gun laws right now. Let's fix the schools," says the grieving father, Andrew Pollack.

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 21, 2018

Chaser:

pic.twitter.com/JM1olR8rF0

— RonaldRump (@Ronald__Rump) February 21, 2018

I believe the man's grief is as real as real as can be, but clearly he just wasn't pulled out of a hat. Emma Gonzales and David Hogg sure aren't in that room.

shot/chaser about a dead girl v good zing

It's not a shot/chaser about a dead girl, it's about this president once again stage managing everything to reflect his own greatness.

Trump's crib notes during the WH gun violence listening session: "5. I hear you" pic.twitter.com/XRI0X78b5U

— David Mack (@davidmackau) February 21, 2018

6. Breathe

At least Reagan could inject emotion into his 3X5 card scripts.

Does he have 45 on his cuffs?

cool cufflinks, helps him remember who he is in a way he can understand

also note that was clearly written on the first notepad they could find (THE WHITE HOUSE) when they realized he was going to fuck it up ten minutes before it started.

tbh i'm also struggling to hear any of those lines coming out of his mouth. maybe "what would you most want me to know about your experience?" but only because i'm imagining him delivering it with the tone of "what do you want me to do about it?!"

Yeah seinfeldian emphasis on the ME?

maybe "what would you most want me to know about your experience?"

i figure he'd just improvise on it, maybe "what would you most want to know about my experience? i went to wharton, great school, did very well..."

1) Not his handwriting; Hicks or Sanders
2) It's a cliche at this point, but tiny fingers - that sheet looks like it has roughly the dimensions of a bookmark
3) Tie dangling past his crotch, sitting in his usual defecatory posture

this is really great: https://www.gq.com/story/on-rudeness/amp?__twitter_impression=true

anything that aims to take David Brooks down a peg or three is worthy.

surprising no one, it seems the shithead president's hot take is to get rid of gun-free zones near schools and possibly arm teachers, if they are well-trained. That should do the trick.

that was a friend of a friend's take last week and I told him it was the dumbest idea I'd ever heard.

it'll go well when teachers, already weary from being underpaid and taxed with being forced to teach to tests, are now expected to be armed guards. so they'll leave the field and in 20 years, "teachers" will be ex-bouncers who are 6'6, 240 pounds, armed to the teeth, and only teach "street smarts"

i've got a sneaking feeling this does not end well

http://www.wcjb.com/content/news/Levy-County-School-District-addresses-planned-walk-outs-474646963.html

nice tone deaf message guys, hit a home run w/ that one

The District stated in a Facebook post, "while students have a First Amendment right of freedom of speech, it cannot be done so in a manner that is disruptive to the school environment."

ah yes, the famous "no school disruption" clause in the first amendment

It looks like Ivanka wrote her dad's notes on how to handle himself during the "student listening session" . The photo on the left is from @CKaster took. pic.twitter.com/ifiFHT1L5i

— Ray [REDACTED] (@RayRedacted) February 21, 2018

my friend's son doesn't go to the school but she already told him if he gets suspended for walking out from the one he does go to, she is fine w/ that.

xpost god I hate this country and the manbaby trying to run it

bless the teens

quite an amazing effort. some 71 odd meetings with legislators set up (those were the ones that were accepted, many more attempts were rejected).

Meanwhile...

Florida State Rep. Matt Caldwell is one of the 71 lawmakers who voted yesterday against debating a possible weapons ban. He has an A+ rating from the NRA.

"I think the worst scenario — the absolute worst scenario — is that we go out, and we ban guns and we tell everybody that we've solved this problem, and we haven't," he told CNN. "And then you're going to have another attack and people are going to ask, 'Why? I thought we solved this with this gun ban.' And that didn't do anything to change the circumstance."

Today, he's meeting with some of the school shooting survivors who traveled to Tallahassee to advocate for gun control and other reforms to end gun violence.

"You'll see, I'm wearing the ribbon for Parkland in remembrance," he told CNN.

go fuck yourself dude.

I would love to see some these kids perform a protracted, Occupy-style protest in front of their statehouses and city halls. I'd send them all the pizzas I could afford.

The District stated in a Facebook post, "while students have a First Amendment right of freedom of speech, it cannot be done so in a manner that is disruptive to the school environment."

ah yes, the famous "no school disruption" clause in the first amendment

― i remember the corned beef of my childhood (Karl Malone), Wednesday, February 21, 2018 7:06 PM

To be fair, though, the first amendment isn't absolute in schools (though it probably should be). Fraser and Tinker and Keysian and Hazelwood make it pretty clear that first amendment rights are limited by:

1) the extent of the disruption created by the speech
2) offensiveness of the speech w/r/t local standards
3) if the speech is contrary to the school's educational mission

I think it is incumbent on the SCHOOLS to clarify and support their policies in advance of the walk-out, and to work with student leaders/activists rather than staying mute and acting punitively during the protests.

This is good.

To speak the obvious has become nearly forbidden . . . not just on the subject of the POTUS's treason, matt, but the environment, universal healthcare, tax levels, gun laws, infrastructure, education funding, the "competence" of the opportunity-hoarding nepotistic ruling class . . . it's a long (and not unrelated) list!

They just about lost me with 'Trump isn't an idiot' but I'll give it a shot.

that's a pretty good case but not a great one, imho. lots of "the ONLY reasonable explanation is (sinister doings)" when in fact Occam's razor points the other way...

still feel strongly the most reasonable read on all this is that there was a certain level of russia/campaign collusion, but with very little coordination/knowledge/direction from the president

Morons can be crafty – look at Reagan and Andrew Johnson.

They just about lost me with 'Trump isn't an idiot' but I'll give it a shot.

I thought the exact same thing. What are you doing, vox copy editor?

at this point the thing that undoes Trump, much like Nixon, will probably be his obstruction of the investigation

What are you doing, vox copy editor?

Just got laid off, I expect.

The shakiness of the points Yglesias makes for Trump not being an idiot kinda underlie my reasons for thinking that it's possible he's not directly involved in collusion. He's crediting Trump with a number of canny moves that were almost certainly orchestrated by people other than Trump himself.

What's the line between "Trump does it himself" vs "Trump check boxes drawn by other people"? That's the presidency since forever.

xpost Unless I'm failing to give Trump enough credit for, e.g., his expert-level knowledge of the nuances of bankruptcy law.

I have no way of knowing for sure, obvs, but if Trump himself is guilty of collusion with Russia, it's on par with some dumb low-level hood who unintentionally gets pulled into a larger criminal conspiracy not because he's a savvy operator who sees the big picture for what it is but because he's a venal turd who's just following the money.

(Vox.com was mostly untouched by the layoffs. It affected the Curbed brands (Curbed/Eater/Racked) most acutely, and their "social video" teams more specifically. Damn Facebook.)

much of it comes to inherited wealth allowed him to hire savvy (ruthless) advisers. and the wherewithal to litigate the little people into submission. but I’m not sure occam’s razor cuts in favor of absolute idiocy.

if Trump himself is guilty of collusion with Russia, it's on par with some dumb low-level hood who unintentionally gets pulled into a larger criminal conspiracy

yeah, inclined to agree

however, i think regardless of the degree to which he was personally exposed to russian influence it's obvious that he's been desperate to do everything he can since taking office to cover the tracks of the crew of charlatans, grifters and idiots who attached themselves to him during the campaign, and as a result is at the very least guilty of obsturction of justice

I have to say I sent a good thought out to Alfred when I saw The Plankton getting roasted, assumed you had an extra martini

the thing where he says "If we did that we'd have to ban all semi automatic guns" and the crowd erupts in cheers and he had to stammer "fair enough....fair enough" was seriously amazing

The string of tweets justifying his "arm the teachers" argument this morning are seriously migraine/nightmare-inducing.

I doubt he was always an idiot. But a lifetime of wealth and years spent wandering the hinterlands of Hollywood and licensing his name out to shit to make an easy buck while passing the hard stuff on to a small cadre of much more malevolent enablers has likely left his brain rather ... vestigial. The bottom line is it's very difficult to make a rich person poor. But to make a rich person richer, that takes some savvy, and his greed plus his general ineptitude as a wealth generator (again, he goes for the easy bucks, at demonstrable cost to his potential worth, vs., say, the stock market) could very well have led him to look for several more shortcuts. Which could very well have included sketchy Russian money, which has been a major part of general international sketchiness at least since the fall of the Soviet Union.

if Trump himself is guilty of collusion with Russia, it's on par with some dumb low-level hood who unintentionally gets pulled into a larger criminal conspiracy

That's the irony of the situation. Trump, the guy ostensibly on top, is the dumb low-level hood. But he has long surrounded himself with relative criminal masterminds, like Manafort and Cohen, whose fatal flaw was hitching themselves to the Trump train.

Trump's intellectual curiosity and lack of geopolitical know-how is undoubtedly what has caused him the most problems. He probably understood regular old financial schemes and corruption, but running for office opened the scope and scale of that beyond his purview. Which is no doubt also why he was unable to grasp the problems with Flynn or why canning Comey was a bad idea or why hiring his kids or Kush to run things might lead to problems beyond merely mundane nepotism.

The string of tweets justifying his "arm the teachers" argument this morning are seriously migraine/nightmare-inducing.

i've said this several times already on ilx but i just can't get over the utter fucking idiocy of expecting teachers to murder people as part of their jobs now, and the blithe incomprehension of the horror of killing on the part of the people who repeat it

'respect the troops' is bad enough but 'respect the teachers, our last line of defence against school shooters' is abhorrent

xposts Yeah, the better analogy is maybe that Trump is like some hapless stooge who got installed as the head of a puppet regime.

Wait, did I say 'analogy'?