Tillerson saying the State Department cuts are fine, because the US won't be involved in as many wars, while simultaneously rattling sabers at North Korea.
Didn't Tillerson just go to Japan yet neglect to visit the embassy? What kind of Secretary of State does that?
Didn't Tillerson just go to Japan yet neglect to visit the embassy? What kind of Secretary of State does that?
And now he's cut his visit to S Korea short because of fatigue. Low energy administration.
Tillerson seems bad in a way that I hadn't anticipated. I'd had my concerns that he would bring dangerous competence to the task of being garden-variety evil. But I hadn't realized that he was dedicated to the task of destroying the State Department from within.
I think the lesson he took from the experience of being Exxon CEO at a time when State Department-prompted sanctions were making it harder for Exxon to make money off of Russia is that there should be no State Department. Somehow this issue didn't come out in his confirmation hearing.
George Osborne to be the new editor of the Evening Standard, while staying on as an MP (and getting paid £650,000 a year by Blackrock for four days' work a month). Previous journalistic experience, according to the BBC: "He failed to get a place on The Times' trainee scheme after graduating from Oxford ... and was briefly a freelance reporter on the Daily Telegraph's diary column."
Pre-emotive action against North Korea WTF? Remind me again of how many dug-in artillery pieces the DPRK has within striking distance of Seoul. 50,000? More now?
Pre-emotive action against North Korea WTF? Remind me again of how many dug-in artillery pieces the DPRK has within striking distance of Seoul. 50,000? More now?
Pre-emptive. Mostly I'm still outraged at fucking autocorrect.
We should bomb autocorrect before we bomb North Korea.
As I mentioned in the Indulge Me thread, I'm looking at elimination of the agency that funds my research, so not particularly thrilled by this budget. I'm too busy stressing about my mom's green card to worry about it right now, but it's on the list of things to freak out about as soon as I have some mental bandwidth free.
The budget proposal is typical of the Trump administration: Sloppy, poorly thought out, written with no understanding of the pre-existing order or of how changes will affect it. They have a cartoon understanding of how the government works.
After which we can send North Korea a bill. http://www.smh.com.au/world/fury-in-cambodia-as-us-asks-to-be-paid-back-hundreds-of-millions-in-war-debts-20170311-guvxyp.html
Wayne Tracker is kinda sorta like Wry Cooter.
Can I be upset that, after having gotten our hopes up people are now trying to tell us not to expect proof of Trump/Russia collusion?
12 is horrible. Its an example of the US being horrible, and the IMF backing up the US on the horribleness.
6. I comfort myself that at least the Evening Standard can't get any worse than it is now.
14: The problem with that piece is that the issue is not explicit collusion with the Russians, it's corrupt ties of senior administration officials to Russian oligarchs and Putin. There's no need for collaboration to subvert the election in order to show that the Russians did influence the election and that Russia has an outsized influence on the administration due to strong economic ties of senior officials (including Trump) to various corrupt parties in Russia. There is no need for an explicit quid pro quo for there to be corruption.
I have a dread that 7/8 stems from something extra-venal, like maybe it's Tillerson trying to tell his boss through the media "This is my job, I can scare the world with a comment, stop having Kushner bypass me."
And now South Korean press is reporting Tillerson cut his trip short due to "fatigue." The right-wing journo along for the trip has not filed yet, however.
the IMF backing up the US on the horribleness
US also pushing the IMF to be horrible on Greece.
President Trump inherited probably the biggest inventory of problems, certainly foreign policy problems, than any other president ever has.
- Dina Powell (U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy) ... also another Goldman-Sachs alum
people are now trying to tell us not to expect proof of Trump/Russia collusion?
Greenwald is telling us this. His credibility on the Trump/Russia story is shot on account of the depth of his complicity with the whole thing.
Tillerson in a no-win situation with staff, because if he's even a little sympathetic, it's disloyalty to Trump. Maybe he doesn't want press with meeting with foreign officials because he knows that if his winks and nods get reported, he's toast.
OK, I don't actually believe that Tillerson is subverting Trump, but he's already seen enough to be afraid enough to keep his head down.
I suspect those rumors that he is on the outs with Trump are misdirection. He's keeping his head down because he knows he can do more damage in the shadows.
The Osborne appointment is fascinating, at least for those parochially fascinated by the workings of the English media elite. Obviously there will be someone else hired to do the actual work of editing the paper. That's traditional with sleb editors, such as Jan\et stre\et Po:uh at the Sindie, where her deputy made sure there were words between the advertisements, and news was covered -- all the boring stuff -- while she got on with the important parts of the job, like having opinions on television. That was also the pattern at the Lebedev-owned Independent when it appeared in print. The editor, a special friend of the younger Lebedev, who is not at all gay, left a lot of the tedious stuff to his older and more journalistically experienced deputy. I don't yet know who will be doing that job at the Lebedev-owned Standard but it will emerge soon enough.
But given that Osborne is elderly and straight, why did he get the job at all? The answer, given the way that Russian oligarchs do business, is that the Lebedevs have obviously decided that Brexit is a bad thing, and that Osborne is going to be the nearest thing to an opposition leader that they can find. Labour is finished for at least ten years. Only the pro-European tories and the lib dems form the nucleus of a credible alternative government if and when the May enterprise collapses. So an investment in someone who may well be among the leaders of Britain's England's next government is a sensible way to guarantee their importance here and that, in turn, gives them some measure of protection against Putin in Russia.
After all, you have to wonder why they have invested in London media at all. The idea that it's a hedge against misfortune back home is the only one that makes sense. It certainly doesn't make them a lot of money.
Come on, Truman had it in the bag, DDay was already successful, VE day was a month away, oh and Mr. President here's a new secret weapon that can utterly destroy your enemies. He was playing the game on cheat mode and got all the credit.
28: I'll carry all the water in the world for FDR, but ouch.
27: And once we beat the Germans and Japanese, it was all smooth sailing from there!
Seriously, I read stuff like 21 and I don't understand how to respond other than slapping in the face. It's such a steaming pile of horseshit, it's disrespectful to everyone in the audience.
I admire that the Republicans ability to spout completely self-serving lies. Obama came to office with worse foreign policy problems, and much worse domestic-policy problems, and yet the Democrats could barely muster that level of rhetoric in 2008.
I'll temper my previous anti-IMF statement by noting that bombing IMF offices is not an appropriate response.
21/22/28: Pretty sure Lincoln takes the cake here.
The body language guy also thinks Pruitt is an opportunistic climate change denier.
I read the quote in 21 as evidence of a secret program to remotely assassinate liberals with high blood pressure.
Dude, it is working. I get quarterly blood tests, to monitor the cancer. Nothing got into dangerous territory, but everything we measure was slightly worse. My lifestyle hasn't changed, so I figure it is stress of living under Trump.
And since we're airing outrages, I continue to be mystified, in an outraged kind of way, at just what the fuck Theresa May OR Jeremy Corbyn think they're doing, given the week's Brexit news. I've never seen such seemingly unmotivated self-and-country-distructive behaviour on the part of political leadership.
34
Also the claim that cutting meals on wheels is compassionate because it's taking into account the taxpayer, and it's unfair to ask a single mom in Detroit for her tax dollars to go to Head Start. (Too nauseous to quote verbatim, google it if you haven't already seen it).
I'm beginning to suspect they think high blood pressure is too slow and they're going for rage aneurysms.
36
True. American leadership at least seems strongly motivated by evil, and we apparently have actual Nazis running the helm.* The British leadership just seems confusingly feckless. Like, "oh jolly well chaps, let's just press this big red self-destruct button."
*"Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos"
unfair to ask a single mom in Detroit for her tax dollars to go to Head Start.
Yes, and also single mothers should have to pay taxes to fund PBS.
No, they have to save that money so they can afford to send Trump to MaraLago.
37: The quote that's going around is evidently three answers spliced together nastily. Kevin Drum has a good piece explaining what's behind it.
41
I watched the video footage. It wasn't a pithy quote, but the jist was clearly what it's been claimed to be. If the video was spliced, then they did a very good job of it.
They have a cartoon understanding of how the government works.
Amply demonstrated by this cartoon of a budget. Looking at pictures of it I guess it is about 50 pages long. Collender is correct.
Anyways, I would recommend people watch the video themselves and then decide how much of a cold-hearted asshole the spokesperson is.
I suspect those rumors that he is on the outs with Trump are misdirection. He's keeping his head down because he knows he can do more damage in the shadows.
Wouldn't put it past him or Bannon et al, but I don't think Trump has the attention span to maintain such a ruse. I'm sure his latest terrifying NK tweet was not part of any plan.
Also Tillerson might think he knows what he's doing, but he doesn't in fact have the guidance he needs - apparently, the story going around about him cutting this trip short because he was tired comes from Korean officials, and such a story could easily have been forestalled if he had brought press along to feed tidbits to.
I'm sure his latest terrifying NK tweet was not part of any plan.
I'm hoping whoever is in charge in S. Korea now that they've dumped their President has already been on the phone to Mattis to tell him in emphatic language what they would think of a bunch of nuclear air bursts 200 km from Seoul.
We use CDBGs to fund everything for the poor in Heebieville. If they get slashed, we'll be up a major shit creek. Simultaneously the state is trying to cap the rate at which towns and cities increase property taxes. They truly want everything to accelerate how things fall apart for poor people.
Well, this is moderately encouraging regarding the viability of anything like Trump's budget proposal. In short: the Budget Control Act (aka sequestration) is still in effect until 2021, and it would be almost impossible to get around it, and it bars in various ways what Trump would like to do.
What seems much more likely is that Trump will find himself in a similar position to Obama, and that this Congress will find itself in a similar situation to past Congresses. Dramatic proposals will soon become piddling changes. Grand budget deals will instead become a series of muddling-through continuing resolutions.
I haven't read the Stan Collender linked above, but I'm guessing he says something similar.
41: Drum's charitable reading might be reasonable on that Meals on Wheels response specifically (video at the top of the Politico article he links to), but Mulvaney also went on in response to a follow-up question (second video at the link) to explain that taxpayers shouldn't be expected to pay for school lunch programs, because they hadn't been proven to help kids get better jobs. No comment on whether they'd been proven to make kids less hungry. We don't need to extend Mike Mulvaney any charity.
We don't need to extend Mike Mulvaney any charity.
But maybe we do. He might have had to skip lunch.
48- Yeah, someone mentioned that elsewhere- the whole point of the sequester was that it explicitly said defense and domestic cuts were linked to make it painful for both groups who wanted one and not the other. They could make the domestic cuts but not while raising defense spending.
Well, I laughed out loud at this, amid all the doom:
"Sean Spicer conducts every press briefing like he's on a hostage video. I mean he essentially has an audience of one," said Rick Tyler, a former communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign who knows Spicer.
Good, good, let's keep the right-on-right bitchiness coming. Important for morale.
The piece on the Mercers is frightening. But really worth reading.
I am experiencing major outrage fatigue.
I did, however, truly enjoy this story.
57's fake-ass Irish proverb is perfect Trump. In his mouth it reads as a threat to anyone who he perceives as having betrayed him or slighted him. His treatment of Merkel was an example of this. OTOH there have been some great Merkel/Trump memes floating around Facebook this morning.
My daughter works in the Federal Gov't and got pulled into an effort to answer a series of "justification" questions for her portion of her department. Questions such as why the work could not be done by the private sector or the states. It was labelled as a "Response to EO xxx" (whatever the reorg one was). Not sure if it was something being produced by all departments or something hers did on its own.
58
I watched the footage of Trump & Merkel, and it was so awkward I almost had to turn it off due to second hand embarrassment.
WTF? Apache helicopter guns down boat full of Somali refugees.
A blast from the past in recent Trumpmentia: Apparently Andrew Napolitano's "source" for the British wiretapping allegation was Larry " Whitey Tape" Johnson, who had broadcast it on RT.
8 year sentence for illegally voting in two elections. I mean, since it's Texas I guess she's lucky they didn't seek the death penalty, but WTF.
If the Trump administration does manage to zero out the Woodrow Wilson Center, then I think Germany should purchase the whole thing, or maybe hold it in "trusteeship," as was the language of the League of Nations. I have mentioned this to a few people in Berlin, who are not sure whether I am serious.
In additional WTFery, the Austin American-Statesman reports that a US Magistrate Judge said in court ICE had launched its raids in Travis County as retaliation for the new (woman) sheriff's sanctuary policy.
An ICE spokesbot said that was totes not the case and went off to polish its jackboots. I'm sure gswift will be along to tell us this was all hunky-dory.
I'm sure gswift will be along to tell us this was all hunky-dory.
That'd be cool. Then you could get a nice warm glow from calling him a Nazi again.
The first guards at Dachau were regular Bavarian police. Their political affiliation wasn't all that important, as long as they did what the new chief of police told them to do.
I think gswift would do what the new chief of police told him to do. I've been here a long time, though a bit more sporadically of late, and I don't think I've ever seen gswift say "Yeah, the cops messed up there." Track records are what they are.
I've been here a long time, though a bit more sporadically of late, and I don't think I've ever seen gswift say "Yeah, the cops messed up there." Track records are what they are.
He definitely has done this; the Walter Scott case in South Carolina is the one that sticks in my head, but there are others as well. He's definitely been more willing than anyone else here to argue the police line on a lot of these incidents, but he's not at all a completely reflexive apologist.
Chuck Barris dies the same week as Chuck Berry? I'm starting to believe the "Matrix is having glitches" theory of everything that's happened in the past year (World series, Super Bowl, election, Oscars).
Fuck this fucking laptop ban. I am pissed off.
OK, if thread is reinvigorated, a couple of small tells that Gorusch is a total dick.
Used "Democrat" as an adverb as in "Democrat Party."
Petulance at having to work a bit to get his lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.
"There's a lot about this confirmation process today that I regret. A lot. A lot," Gorsuch told Whitehouse. "With [former Justice] Byron White who sat here, it was 90 minutes. He was through this body in two weeks and he was smoking cigarettes while he gave his testimony." Gorsuch continued: "There's a great deal about this process that I regret. I regret putting my family through this."Boo HOO... But he's a standard Republican dick like Roberts and Alito so on to the court he will go.
Seconding 68. gswift's priors certainly aren't mine but he has both criticized decisions made in parts of these incidents (of the form "while these parts were fine and are standard procedure or are defensible , this part was questionable or incomprehensible") and been completely against the police in the Scott incident and probably others I'm forgetting. I've definitely disagreed with him on what's a reasonable reaction, but he's not reflexively pro-police even if he gives them much more leeway than anyone else here.
71 Byron White didn't start a fucking "Fascism forever" club in high school. Fuck him.
How many times has Gorsuch been voted All-Pro?
"There's a great deal about this process that I regret. I regret putting my family through this."
Step down, then. It's not too late!
Christ almighty, I just got wind of the proposed 18% cut to NIH in the Trump budget. I guess nobody expects it to pass at that level, but a cut that size all at once would be SO disruptive, I can't even imagine the fallout. I can't believe this motherfucker.
Byron White didn't start a fucking "Fascism forever" club in high school
I thought Gorsuch hadn't, either. But he clearly a standard-issue, polished Republican monster.
The story in 61 is appalling. A straight up war crime.
Garland only got zero minutes of questions. How come the Democrat got off easy?
77: he didn't. That was the Daily Mail, lying.
I guess nobody expects it to pass at that level, but a cut that size all at once would be SO disruptive
Disruptive! That's awesome!
80 Fake news? With this crowd in the WH it was so plausible I'm having a hard time not believing it.
Definitely plausible, but in this case it seems not true; it was a joke in his school yearbook entry based on him being so keen on fascism.
America magazine looked into it, according to Snopes, and printed this unintentionally hilarious quote:
It was "a total joke," said Steve Ochs, a history teacher at Georgetown Prep who was the student government advisor during Mr. Gorsuch's junior and senior years at the Bethesda, Md., school.
"There was no club at a Jesuit school about young fascists," he told America. "The students would create fictitious clubs; they would have fictitious activities. They were all inside jokes on their senior pages."
A fascist organisation? At a school run by conservative Catholics? Why, the very idea is ludicrous!
...it was a joke in his school yearbook entry based on him being so keen on fascism.
As one does.
Well, quite. He must have really stood out for that to be the joke about him at that school. It's like knowing that someone went to Eton where his nickname was "Posh Boy".