Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

[Mothra]

Really worth a watch.

[Mongrel]

omg really

why does anything this white house does surprise me anymore

[Thad]

Great WaPo article: Inside Trump’s anger and impatience — and his sudden decision to fire Comey

Not a lot of surprises, but quite well-assembled and -organized.

Mainly, as per usual, Trump does not understand the difference between government and business, and thought the FBI's job was to back him up. He was pissed that Comey kept going off-script: yes, we're investigating the Trump campaign's ties to Russia; no, Obama did not wiretap Trump Tower, etc. And of course Trump *hates* all the leaks to the press and does not understand that it is not the FBI's job to investigate them.

I don't suppose I really need to point out what effect Comey's firing has had on the leak situation. I can't imagine there is more than one person who is surprised by this outcome.

Trump has now admitted that he'd decided to fire Comey before receiving the DOJ recommendation to do so. This could be because Rosenstein allegedly threatened to resign if Trump continued to blame it on him, but I think it's probably just that keeping his story straight has never been a priority for Donald Trump. (And because he can't bear to give anybody else credit for anything. He can't even bear to blame his fuckups on somebody else, because his ego's too big.)

Acting Director McCabe is not playing ball with Trump's narrative, at all. I think this is a good sign, partly because it'll piss Trump off but mostly because it supports the hypothesis that getting rid of Comey is going to backfire spectacularly.

[Mongrel]

Golly gee whiz! Where on EARTH can all these leaks be coming from?!

[Thad]

Soooo Trump straight-up admitted in an interview with Lester Holt that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation.

Holt did not ask a follow-up question, which I gotta admit severely impacts my opinion of Lester Holt as a journalist. The President of the United States admits he fired the FBI Director because he was investigating his campaign's potential ties to a foreign power, and you just move on to the next question? What the fuck, dude.

He did ask about the investigation into Russia's interference with the election later on in the interview (and Trump made some noises about how it's very important to investigate that and make sure it's done right), but that's not really the same thing.

[Mongrel]

Hoo hoo ha ha hoo hoo



EDIT: "I believe the Senator from Connecticut has some salient information on this matter he'd like to share."

[Mongrel]

Oh holy shit Trump

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/12/polit ... index.html

(CNN)US President Donald Trump thinks the F-35 fighter is "pretty cool," but he seems to be a bit confused over what the newest US warplanes have been up to in Japan.

In a White House interview with Time magazine published Thursday, Trump said almost three dozen of the stealth jets flew over Japan undetected during a visit to Tokyo by US Defense Secretary James Mattis in February.

"They had 35 of them fly over Japan ... and they were not detected by the radar. They flew over and everyone said where the hell did they come from? That's stealth. It's pretty cool, right," Time quotes Trump as saying in the interview.
"Thirty-five of them flying at a high speed, low, and they were not detected. They flew right over the top of the deal, nobody knew they were coming. Pretty cool, right?" the US commander-in-chief is quoted as saying.

[Yoji]

"Pretty cool?" Pretty cool?? Rock climbing or 3D-printing a lightsaber is pretty cool. Buzzing an ally's airspace with stealth jets is creepy and smacks of authoritarianism.

I'm very much getting an impression of an 11 year old playing GTA with cheats on.

Yeah, what he said.

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

Politico: How Trump Gets his Fake News

tl;dr - aides occasionally slip fake news in with the real news Trump receives in efforts to manipulate him.

[Grath]

Trump revealed highly classified information to Russia just to brag, jeopardizing the US relationship with a key source of intel. "But her emails!"

[zaratustra]

well the good news is, you don't have to worry about russians putting listening devices in the oval office

then again, they might have the biggest listening device of them all in there

[Sharkey]

︻╦̵̵͇̿̿̿̿══╤─E

[Mongrel]

At least there's SOME consistency.

[Mongrel]

NYT: Comey provides paper trail memos that indicate Trump asked him to quash the Flynn investigation

Ooooooops. I hear fucking with a high-ranking intelligence guy known for extensive CYA documentation can be a bit dangerous.

[Mongrel]

Is this it?

[Spooky Skeleton]

The problem for me though is that, impeaching Trump really doesn't matter.

Get him out, get rid of this gluttonous, non-stop lying, moronic, opaquely profiteering, orange clown makeup wearing, televisionaholic who tweets at SNL like a baby for making fun of him like they have done to every President prior to him.

So what?

Hurray, Mike Pence is now president and everything will proceed as scheduled.

The problem isn't Trump, the problem is that republican voters picked him as their candidate and then the GOP ran him, and then they voted for him again because the only other choice was Hilary. The problem is that the Republicans control the senate and congress and will willingly back this imbecile while idiots in your country wear red caps, worry about their gun rights over the sick and the ill dying, claim that the police are under attack because people keep telling them to stop murdering people, and go to Berkeley to protest in favour of free speech while jabbing at people with spear tipped flag poles.

The damage is done, America voted to affirm that they are stupid and that George W Bush's second term wasn't some fluke. Impeaching Trump is akin to the action of moving your surviving belongings out of the house you voted to not burn down, but that other people living in that house voted to burn down and then won due to the structure of the electoral college. It's a good idea to see what you can salvage, you should do it, but it's not going to reverse the fact that your roommates decided the best course of action was to burn your own house down.

I don't know where America goes from here. Your political climate and society in general seems to be fundamentally broken in a way I'm not sure how to fix. As long as the Republican party remains as evil and petty and yet still as relevant as it is, and as long as the DMC remains as inept and visionless as it has become, I don't see how you can ever progress in any useful direction.

In Canada there was a Conservative Prime Minister who did super well in the election because he was able to make his opponents look like low energy wusses and corrupt cronies; his name was Brian Mulroney. He won the largest majority government in Canadian history up to that point with 211 seats and fed the Liberals the worst defeat of any incumbent government as they scraped out only 40 in response. But once he was in office, he eventually pulled a bunch of boner moves that made everyone hate him. His approval rating fell to 11% and he had to step down as leader. In the resulting election his Conservative party couldn't distance themselves from him and got DESTROYED by the Liberal party, winning only 2 seats and no longer even being considered an official party as the minimum number of seats for that is 12.

The point is, in some countries, when people are this incompetent and corrupt and terrible, their party actually suffers some sort of consequence proportional (or sometimes even exponential) to the blunder. But that never seems to happen in the United States and I don't know how such a system can continue to function and fix a problem like this last presidential election.

[Mongrel]

Geo, a few posts back, I posted a quinnipac poll that shows the highest margin of "I would vote for a democrat over a republican" ever recorded (15%~), so it's possible - possible - that there is indeed a reckoning coming.

I doubt the gerrymandered-to-hell-and-back Republicans are going to go down to two seats in the House, but unprecedented, or at least generational political losses are in the realm of the real now.

Will it actually happen? Well, fuck we've still got a year and a half. But Trump being impeached (not actually likely while Republicans control the House and Senate) sure doesn't help the Republicans and President Pence being creepy, weird, and generally an uncaring asshole wouldn't really be a better sell.

Also, Trump being impeached would be an indication that at least SOME of the originally-designed checks of government are still functioning, however creakily.

[nosimpleway]

The thing about actual literal treason is that if Trump goes down, so does anyone else who may have been at all involved in the info leaks or coverup or whatever. It's possible we have to go a few spaces down the list of "who replaces the president when the vice president and secretary of state are both also unavailable".

And I mean... I fear that Trump is a disastrous president. Getting Trump out in favor of a president who is merely terrible is still a step up.

[Brantly B.]

There's also the problem of, if you remove every single Republican from office, you now have a government full of god damned Democrats.

The reason we're happy enough to take our improvements where we can is because actual solutions would require some kind of Messianic force that wields way more power than the President does but only ever does good things.