US Politics, October 2018: next week will be even longer

tbh I don't care much about this story -- more American perfidy. Woulda happened under Obama, totally commonplace in the Poppy Bush and Reagan administrations.

v true

This kinda thing should have provoked outrage then too.

it did.

yep

and it didn't matter.

How often did cable news cover Obama's support of the war in Yemen?

Ding ding ding. Trump's said he prefers hauling in a couple of billion in arms sales. Mohammad bin Salman is a ruthless ruler. And Erdogan's Turkey is one of the worst led nations in history.

USA, Turkey, Saudi Arabia: the true axis of evil.

― lbi's life of limitless european glamour (Le Bateau Ivre), Tuesday, October 16, 2018 10:33 PM (fifty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you forgot israel

really the only difference this time was Trumps' forthrightness in stating that it wouldn't interfere with any "deals" from the jump

Yes. Listening to "Morning" Joe guests this morning mourn the end of American exceptionalism and a belief in Reagan's shining-city-on-a-hill made me cackle into my smoothie.

tbh I don't care much about this story -- more American perfidy. Woulda happened under Obama, totally commonplace in the Poppy Bush and Reagan administrations.

― You like queer? I like queer. Still like queer. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, October 16, 2018 6:59 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is this really the case? I don't mean giving Saudis a pass on human rights in general, but dismembering a dissident reporter in your consulate? Seems p clear that MBS feels he has an even more special kind of cover than his predecessors because Kush, "fake news," press as enemy of the people etc.

agree. would this have happened under Obama without some reckoning?

One of the suspects identified by Turkey in the disappearance of Khashoggi was a frequent companion of MBS, three others have ties to him https://t.co/yOW3o5FrAy

— Michael Del Moro (@MikeDelMoro) October 16, 2018

Honduras and El Salvador were abattoirs in 1984.

we shouldn't give up on calling them to account

xp No doubt, but there's something about the brazenness and stupidity of this murder that seems correlative to the shamelessness and idiocy 45 projects all day long

awww

Chief Justice Roberts tonight went out of his way to address the "contentious events in Washington" in recent weeks. Said he won't criticize the political branches but wanted to emphasize how the judical branch "must be very different". Very rare for him to comment.

— Ariane de Vogue (@Arianedevogue) October 16, 2018

Woulda happened under Obama, totally commonplace in the Poppy Bush and Reagan administrations.

seems mostly otm, however there seems like a decent chance that trump and/or his son-in-law could be directly implicated in this one. previous presidents knew enough to let other people take the wheel when it comes to letting to murdering journalists . it also seems like other administrations would have had a #benghazi level scandal afterwards. we'll see his this one goes, but most likely it will just be tossed onto the bin of the many corrupt things trump has been involved with that republicans never mention again.

I'd gotten so used to proclaiming 'con artistry' as Donald Trump's one demonstrable skill that I've been remiss in acknowledging his equal skill at gracefully traipsing between the raindrops of each and every scandal that would certainly have sunk the career of any other politician. It's getting to the point where I'm almost willing to accept a supernatural explanation because, well...for fucking fucksake, already.

trump was conjured by voodoo economics

In keeping with my ongoing thought experiment: imagine any former president offhandedly calling a woman 'Horseface'. Even wholly divorced from this particular context (the context where the woman is a pornstar the president has basically admitted to having paid money to sleep with and then more money to hush up), just imagine. Imagine. Or, y'know, not even a former president. How about a senator. Or even just a congressional candidate. R. Budd Dwyer committed suicide on live television over less than this. But Donald Trump will be sleeping soundly tonight, wholly untroubled in soul or by the horrified entreaties of polite society.

^^^

R. Budd Dwyer died for somebody's sins, but not the modern GOPs.

The court actually has been mostly bad for anyone not wealthy, white and connected and many of the the decisions people mention to defend the court are decisions people like Roberts think are terrible. https://t.co/zitBEDrRmT

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) October 17, 2018

The yield to political pressure thing is important though, because it’s Roberts foreshadowing the court going farther to the right than the majority of Americans want it to, and he wants to preemptively frame those decisions as acts of integrity rather than partisan goals.

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) October 17, 2018

and he could just as easily have implied that the Court responded to Political Pressure in 1937 when the Court started going FDR's way.

The SCOTUS is magic and it only works if you believe in it. There’s a reason almost nobody knows what “justiciable” means.

somewhere lurking in the deep background of the SCOTUS's magic act is the government's monopoly on force which ultimately backs up its authority. but the whole apparatus works far more smoothly when the face of authority is acceptable to the great majority and the foundational threat of force is scarcely noticed or needed. that's what putatively has Chief Justice Roberts, um, 'worried', so they say.

previous presidents knew enough to let other people take the wheel when it comes to letting to murdering journalists .

secret of trump is he appeals to people who don’t mind journalists getting murdered

“secret”

JUst reading through some of the twitter links I got yesterday. & therefore being reminded that trump really needs to retire this guilty until proved innocent thing. If he's used it in places where the guilt was pretty obvious already then I think it takes on the colour of the cases he's used it in, so he might as well just state I know I'm covering this up.

Probably has already taken on the 'yes, this is an obvious lie' flag.
(just thinking of obvious semiotic substitutions)

guilty until proved innocent*

* birth certificates / emails excepted

Probably has already taken on the 'yes, this is an obvious lie' flag.

The old joke ("How can you tell when X is lying? His lips are moving.") has never been more appropriate than with this president. Literally every utterance is not just a blatant lie, but the direct mirror image of the truth.

the historical political independence of SCOTUS is a giant fucking horselaugh

well, good mourning!!

impeach the president!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/beto-orourke-ted-cruz-debate-texas-senate.html

Reading this bummed me out

if it makes you feel any better, when the GOP keeps control of congress (despite losing the aggregate popular vote by 10,000,000+), they can bury proof of the president's treason

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/411785-mueller-to-present-key-findings-related-to-russia-probe-after?

Good news! Turns out America's problem is that rich white people are fighting with each other, and everybody else is doing fine and wishes white people would just shut up!

America is an increasingly diverse nation but a loud, hyper-active group of well-to-do whites on the left and right are tearing it apart from the edges, according to an astonishing new study of our electorate.

The big picture: 14% of America, roughly half left and half right, consistently shouts, posts and votes, while 67% of us are exhausted.

You have about 8% of Americans in the hard-left camp — almost all white (80%), all well-educated, all voting, all giving money and time to campaigns, all active on social media. Their combined voices dominate Democratic politics.

You have about 6% in the hard-right camp — almost all white (88%), all well-educated, all voting, all giving money and time to campaigns, all active on social media. Their combined voices dominate Republican politics.

Oh, and these two groups basically hate everything about each other.

This eye-opening breakdown comes from "Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape," by the international nonprofit group More in Common.

The report, one of the largest-ever studies of U.S. polarization, is based on an 8,000-person poll by YouGov, with about a 1% margin of error.

I learned about the study from a column by the N.Y. Times' David Brooks, ("The Rich White Civil War: A smarter look at America’s divide"), who said these two extreme wings of U.S. politics have become "cultish."

...

Be smart ... Good news for third-party dreamers: Tw0-thirds of Americans (the study's "Exhausted Majority") have had it with this white fight — and yearn for something new.

secret of trump is he appeals to people who don’t mind journalists getting murdered

the secret of trump is he appeals to people who don't mind anyone who's not already just like them getting murdered imo

i fuckin' wish hard-left voices dominated democratic politics xp

Trump appeals to those who ever considered demonic possession from an aspirational perspective.

Be smart ... Good news for third-party dreamers: Tw0-thirds of Americans (the study's "Exhausted Majority") have had it with this white fight — and yearn for something new.

of course! The bylines are the give away.

let me guess, "something new" will be a business-friendly status-quo centrist party that rejects such "hard-left" ideas as a social safety net, and such "hard-right" ideas as, hrm, well, we can't really think of any that are SO bad they'd be worth making a fuss over

NEW:

Ivanka and her dad have been lying around the world to pump up their real estate deal sales.

A former fed prosecutor told us: "We have seen those sorts of claims form the basis for criminal cases in a number of different settings." https://t.co/EmIfq54lYy

w/ @WNYC https://t.co/Xud3Wl6SrA

— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) October 17, 2018

another well-researched investigation into the president's finances that not a single member of congress will be asked to comment upon

let alone act upon

I wonder if a string of mysteriously-disappearing GOP senators followed by Trump appearing in public wearing a series of human-skin suits while munching on femurs would prompt more than a congressional harrumph.

Third party dreamers are also entitled white people.

"something new" will be a business-friendly status-quo centrist party

The Love Song of Michael R. Bloomberg

lol forget what talking head i saw on TV the other day gushing about what a great pres he would be. ugh!

Well anything would probably look better than the current one.
Just like a dream.

Do hope people are going to recognise what a low this point in history is and not repeat it.
& not trigger a deeper drop.
Hope the US bottoms out and recovers, takes the 12 steps about who gets to be a higher power and so on.

i came here to post about this study and am delighted to find everyone already hating it