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

When the IG's investigation concludes that the DOJ and FBI's FISA applications met all legal and policy standards, Trump is going to fume and sputter and fire off some very angry tweets about it.

At forum yesterday, Mitt Romney said he’s more rightwing than Trump on immigration: “I’m also more of a hawk on immigration than even the president. My view was these DACA kids shouldn’t all be allowed to stay in the country legally.” https://t.co/9kbtm0T9hL

— Niraj Warikoo (@nwarikoo) March 27, 2018

what a craven dipshit

what a craven dipshit

"a hawk on immigration" is a very chilling construction

Romney was an asshole in his rhetoric in his previous run, and may be seeking to amp it up again in service of a challenge from the "right" or building a coalition there to otherwise bring Trump down, but consider the possibility that the rhetoric may be a right-wing gloss on what's simply a proposal to add a national service requirement - something he and his Dad before him long harped on - to the pathway to citizenship. It surely hasn't escaped him that Trump got into office by lying his ass off to low-info voters.

So are we calling the April thread "Goodbye Hicksville" or the like

it's unbelievable what comic book villains all these republican presidential types are. am i going fucking crazy? romney, head of "bain capital" which specialized in buying struggling firms and selling the pieces at a profit after firing everyone. gingrich, who divorced his wife as she was dying of cancer. it goes on and on. trump is the ne plus ultra of course but all these guys have enough specific villainy to spawn their own spin-off series

and like.... i really don't think i'm saying that just because i'm on the other side? wary of getting caught up in tribal hatreds but fuck man

in that case Jeb is the hapless henchman who fell into the wrong crowd

April Thread: Stormy Weather

newt has a book out called "understanding trump" or something

jeb is buster bluth

ITEM!

BREAKING: Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin to resign and President Trump will nominate his personal physician, Ronny Jackson, to succeed him - White House officials pic.twitter.com/XrrYwvrzPI

— Reuters Politics (@ReutersPolitics) March 28, 2018

newt has a book out called "understanding trump" or something

Got to be about as slim a pamphlet as any of the Trumpfaith books...

https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/webRNS-Trump-Books-020718.jpg

Gah! Damn that's huge!

So we're going to get a Senate confirmation hearing where where a nominee will be asked something like "So did you say he was in good health so you could get the job?"

xp wait...that's not..this guy, is it?

https://hips.hearstapps.com/esq.h-cdn.co/assets/17/05/640x420/gallery-1486058441-trumpdoc.jpeg

oh nvm it's that guy from the press conference

Re: Trump appointing his doctor to head veterans affairs, it has consistently amazed me over the past year and change that the fucking presidency doesn't have the level of basic checks against nepotism and conflicts of interest that, say, a mid-level Target manager would have to be wary of wrt his hiring practices. I think we might need another amendment to that Constitution of ours.

I mean Jackson does have more experience than Big Lebowski

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/16/578469226/dr-ronny-jackson-the-white-house-doctor-who-gave-trump-a-clean-bill-of-health

But even so, c'mon.

It's a kind of sad surprise that the other doc doesn't yet have a cabinet position.

i think what i and others are aghast at is your assumption that fascism is a _logical_ endgame in a resource scarce future

I draw heavily on Timothy Snyder's Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, where German fascism is an expression of "ecological panic" after WWI, when 500-900k Germans starved during the Allied blockade. A similar sort of ecological panic was present in Japanese colonialism/seizure of croplands and mineral resources in the 30s and early 40s. The map of recent insurgencies, conflicts, and genocides coincides well with prior food insecurity.

If relatively mild losses of opportunity lead to the nativist movement behind Trump, what happens when people become food insecure?

As for hopes of new green revolutions, alas, Haber-Bosch and Borlaug et al's development of dwarf hybrids, together responsible for about 4 billion alive today, may remain a singular event. While there have been yield increases since the 1960s as Green Revolution techniques of heavy fertilization applications spread, in mature agricultural areas yield stagnation is evident. There's some interesting genetic work seeking to clear bottlenecks in photosynthesis, but this is intrinsically orders of magnitude more difficult than inserting a single glyphosate tolerance gene. The headwinds from climate change, soil erosion, aquifer depletion, and phosphate scarcity suggest to me its going to be a Red Queen's race just to maintain current yields.

Anyway, this digression began because Trump is beaming about the military taking over his stupid wall idea. Hopefully, Mattis can use the opportunity to direct him to the decades of research the military has conducted looking at climate change scenarios.

By the way, there is a pretty successful barrier against migration / infiltration, visible from space. On the ground, its just razor wire, floodlights, and a willingness to use lethal force.

I think dr jackson is "his" personal physician in that he serves the president, no? he's just a government doctor

hey it’s infrastructure week again

this means there's a 95% chance that either a cabinet secretary is going to jail or, like, we find out Mike Pence is Benjamin Button-ing pic.twitter.com/PbNW860d4Q

— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) March 29, 2018

Whoops!

Michael Cohen's attorney just claimed on @OutFrontCNN that Trump was not aware of the Stormy Daniels agreement or the payment, which means that there was no contract between Trump and Daniels, and Daniels can release the materials. Why would he admit this on national television?

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) March 28, 2018

Further to which.

Here is Michael Cohen's lawyer and spokesman saying categorically that Cohen negotiated agreement w/o ever telling his client DJT anything abt it and made him a party to the agreement w/o any intention of telling him abt it or having him sign it. @MichaelAvenatti @renato_mariotti pic.twitter.com/xqNLvcx1uX

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 29, 2018

The best people

God, all this shit is endlessly exhausting.

Oh shit, Trump's lawyer's lawyer better get a lawyer

I don't believe this guy is representing Cohen in this matter, he's just a bag of gas doing advance work

God, all this shit is endlessly exhausting.

yup, the "circus" part of the equation

so the story now is that Michael Cohen just randomly gave a porn star $130,000 AND negotiated an NDA with her without Trump's knowledge, even though Trump never slept with her and was just trying to get her on Celebrity Apprentice?

[entire crowd chanting]

PISS TAPE
DICK PIC
PISS TAPE
DICK PIC

lisa needs braces

it'd be dreadful if the people concerned were saving the worst stuff for a month of mounting horrors steadily released in the leadup to November

God, all this shit is endlessly exhausting.

Not if you don't have a fantasy league of the lawyers. I mean, Jesus Christ, who cares.

Not going quietly.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/29/597866101/fired-va-secretary-says-white-house-muzzled-him

Fired Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin tells NPR's Morning Edition that political forces in the Trump administration want to privatize the VA — and he was standing in the way.

"There are many political appointees in the VA that believe that we are moving in the wrong direction or weren't moving fast enough towards privatizing the VA," he said. "I think that it's essential for national security and for the country that we honor our commitment by having a strong VA. I was not against reforming VA, but I was against privatization."

Those political forces may be responsible for why Shulkin says he wasn't allowed to speak out to defend himself against an ethics controversy that he says was overhyped and intended to weaken him.

"This was completely mischaracterized," Shulkin said, defending himself. "There was nothing improper about this trip, and I was not allowed to put up an official statement or to even respond to this by the White House. I think this was really just being used in a political context to try to make sure that I wasn't as effective as a leader moving forward."

wow i can't believe it never occurred to me to have a fantasy cabinet that would at least add a little risibility to this nonsense

it'd be dreadful if the people concerned were saving the worst stuff for a month of mounting horrors steadily released in the leadup to November

― startled macropod (MatthewK), Thursday, 29 March 2018 06:21 (seven hours ago) Permalink

OPPO DUMP 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO (or should that be POOGALOO?)

I do occasionally wonder if anyone's sitting on nuclear-grade news with the intention of a strategic bomb drop in the election season. I don't even know what would count as 'nuclear-grade' at this point, though. Video of Trump parading around in a suit made of human skin? Yaaaaaaaawn.

I regret to inform you that the lady who did a Nazi salute on national TV is at it again

David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA...totally predictable given acceptance rates.) https://t.co/wflA4hWHXY

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) March 28, 2018

this is disturbing, but also somewhat amusing in that it opens up a window to a parallel universe where ordinary kids' college decisions are as scrutinized as a five-star athlete's

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZdso6IW4AA3Owm.jpg

why is TIME running photos of horny toads

All children in so-called sanctuary cities will be designated crisis actors and subjected to televised wedgies, swirlies, etc.

that is one of the least flattering photographs i've ever seen. combo of retouching it to make him look like an evil asshole (he didn't need any help) and him making a weirdass face that doesn't even resemble his resting face

honestly i'd rather they just go all the way and depict him in an inner circle of hell, being ripped apart by satan on a frozen plane

palpatine’s conversion is going well and proceeds apace xp

https://us-east-1.tchyn.io/snopes-production/uploads/2015/05/beck.jpg?resize=620,351