US Politics, March 2018: Why do people leave the White House for good?

In your heart

I would not be shocked if some Trump Organization activities fall under RICO statutes. I'd be more surprised if they didn't.

this country is much more like Burger King with an army than it should be

i'll bet anyone a big mac and two scoops of ice cream that our descendants (if civilization survives) will marvel at the shakespearean irony of trump foreshadowing his own tax return tragedy by making a spectacle of himself rising to serious political prominence demanding barry's birth certificate

These days, Jake has reverted to his nightcrawler persona. Jake doesn’t take his shirt off at the beach anymore.

― Karl Malone, Thursday, March 15, 2018 2:45 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Jake G was reportedly outside my building a half hour ago.

Wild and shirtless?

Uh-oh! Another Peter Schweizer story: https://nypost.com/2018/03/15/inside-the-shady-private-equity-firm-run-by-kerry-and-bidens-kids/

#secretempires #corruptdems #dirtyjoe

a subpoena for the Trump Org can only accelerate the whole firing Sessions and replacing him with Pruitt thing. Trump previously "warned" Mueller that investigating his personal finances was a a "red line"

god what a joke

he probably thought he was being so smart by warning Mueller not to do that

If it's financial stuff then that can likely be prosecuted at the state level, too.

the orange russian of mar-a-lago: a five-act tragicomedy sequel to cocktail with tom cruise taking the paul newman role and a young crooked donald as the color of money apprentice. two scoops up

https://act.moveon.org/event/mueller-firing-rapid-response-events/search/

From AP:

BREAKING: Trump administration accuses Russia of ongoing, deliberate operation to penetrate US energy grid.

(cue nationwide blackout)

lol "trump administration"

heh, yeah. just like the "trump administration" is finally saying the russian spy poisoning was a bad thing.

maybe dumb question: assuming that Mueller getting fired actually helps the dems in November, could a new majority appoint a special prosecutor? or can that position no longer exist

Trump is like Keith David in "They Live." People have been punching him for months, telling him to put on the stupid glasses. He finally relents and sees that, yeah, Russia is up to no good.

And then he takes off the glasses and goes back to doing shady illegal shit.

this is how don, jr. and vanessa trump met https://t.co/6W2FfsVBQW pic.twitter.com/I0Mo2vveYu

— Kenzie Bryant (@kenzbry) February 8, 2018

xposts
seriously though, this stuff is frightening. a cyberattack on the grid, whether from russia or elswhere, seems so likely and inevitable that i'm not sure how it hasn't happened yet. there have been a string of cyberattacks on Saudi industrial/energy facilities in recent months, including one that was intended to cause an explosion (http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/12/21/cyber-attack-targets-safety-system-at-saudi-aramco/ and https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/technology/saudi-arabia-hacks-cyberattacks.html). i will feel slightly better when the trump administration is not in charge of cybersecurity.

a cyberattack on the grid, whether from russia or elswhere, seems so likely and inevitable that i'm not sure how it hasn't happened yet.

They're saving it for when it best serves some larger strategic purpose?

yeah he had to raise you

— C (@zergmans) March 15, 2018

zergmans!!!!!!!

xpost Like during the Games of Thrones series finale or something? Putin plays the long game.

It would be a fairly major attack, crippling the electricity grid has the potential to kill millions of people as food and water distribution breaks down. It’s probably up there with a nuclear attack in terms of impact and disturbingly easy to pull off. Russia probably keeps its cyberwarriors poking around as a threat, provocation and to make sure they have the capability.

They'll wait until 8+ years of Trump swinging his dick at the world has effectively bottomed out any international sympathy for the US and then pull the plug.

Xpost Yeah Megan McCain sucks and she left herself open for the easy joke but idk maybe don’t dunk on someone taking an anti-torture stance?

a cyberattack on the grid, whether from russia or elswhere, seems so likely and inevitable that i'm not sure how it hasn't happened yet.

― Karl Malone, Thursday, March 15, 2018 7:18 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How certain are you that it hasn't?

Wild and shirtless?

― Buff Jeckley (Tom D.), Thursday, March 15, 2018 6:18 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Engaged with local wildlife, but unlikely to have been deshabille.

guys, gabbneb is a Russian bot

moo vladimir

imagine all the lost bitcoins if the energy grid got hacked

How certain are you that it hasn't?

yeah exactly! i'm sure someone's already gotten far enough to do plenty of damage and see how easy it was to get there. if it were me, i'd wait until juuuuust after trump refuses to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election and accuses the opponent of cheating

I hate Trump as viscerally as anyone here, but we've seen that Vanessa quote like four times already itt.

Speaking as a human (and btw the father of an intellectually disabled child), there is a limit to how many times I want to see people throw "retarded" around as a fun pejorative thx

Energy grid getting hacked is a pointless worry, akin to getting nuked by NK. It's not going to happen, and if it did, that's pretty much the end of things, so why worry about it?

i'm going to quietly bookmark that permalink so that i can reference it with absurd quickness when a major energy grid cyberattack occurs. or, uh, after the internet comes back up

another easily forgettable (for me) nuke/grid parallel being relative localization of disaster -- the country and the world are big, and a major city (or several) getting knocked out would be awful but not immediately synonymous with the end of all life as we know it

sooooooooo, people leaving and people getting fired and all that: is it WAY more than other administrations? i haven't actually read anything about that. he hasn't been president long and it seems like a lot of people fleeing/getting booted but i have no idea how normal/abnormal it is.

way more

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-administration-first-year-turnover-departures-highest-rate-761546

is it WAY more than other administrations?

short answer: yes

Mail bombs are killing people in Texas but Donald Trump hasn’t said a thing. There’s a reason for that. https://t.co/4UWhKeV9IE by @ShaunKing

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) March 15, 2018

JJ MacNab's rundown on the mosque bombers:

U.S. Attorney Identifies 3 Suspects In Mosque Bombing https://t.co/Qckw5sVi2C

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) March 13, 2018

To summarize, a former sheriff deputy, who had been convicted of abducting his daughters to a Mennonite community in Belize in 2006, set up a phony company to build Trump's border wall, and then led a local militia to bomb a mosque and to attempt to bomb a women's health clinic.

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) March 14, 2018

+ a home invasion on someone they thought was a "hispanic drug dealer"
+ some walmart robberies
+ declaration of war against the state of IL (ok fine)

"way more"

wow, yeah, okay. and that newsweek article is from december. well, he always wants to be the biggest at everything. he has finally found his strength.

Of note -- the URL does not reflect the story, which is updated:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cia-cables-detail-its-new-deputy-directors-role-in-torture

Correction: Trump’s Pick to Head CIA Did Not Oversee Waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah

looks like the republicans' benghazi investigation, i mean steele report investigation, might continue on in the senate

The Judiciary panel’s chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), was joined by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) in requesting that DOJ name a special prosecutor to zero in on possible mishandling of the FBI’s Russia investigation prior to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. Specifically, the quartet raised concerns about the FBI’s relationship with Christopher Steele, who compiled a dossier of verified and unverified intelligence alleging a Russian effort to compromise now-President Donald Trump.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/gop-senators-call-for-new-special-counsel-to-investigate-fbi.html

McMaster out

Trump's a real McMastermind.

link?

praying john bolton suffers a sex scandal or something in the next week or so, fucking terrifying imagining that warmongering cretinous maniac back in a position of power