All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[Gray Lensman]

Saw this little tidbit from a Dem Congressman on CNN....

"Ask yourself why nothing favorable to Trump has been leaked by the Republicans. It isn't because Republicans don't leak. It's because there is nothing favorable for them to leak."

That wasn't word for word, of course. But it conveys the point.

[PaulBullion]

Trump is losing his friendlies pollster:



9 days ago, Trump still had a net positive approval rating. Now the spread is at minus 13.

[Malvolio]

Beastie's Cartoons of the Week:

Sure, let's keep up the myth that liberals hate the rich, so we can call them hypocrites for liking Bernie. It's not that we hate the rich. We just hate that the rich often get richer at the expense of the rest of us.

[Theleviathan]

Speaking of McConnell, that snub is amazing.

I went in with high hopes on clicking this. It well exceeded my expectations.

My god, I want that gif of McConnell on loop for the rest of my life. Put that **** on billboards all over Kentucky.

[jetengine]

Sure, let's keep up the myth that liberals hate the rich, so we can call them hypocrites for liking Bernie. It's not that we hate the rich. We just hate that the rich often get richer at the expense of the rest of us.

Its rare to get rich without exploitation and I also see it less as rich targeted and more "Bernies not that different guys"

[InformationGeek]

A horrible story with a lot of familiar ugly faces in it. WBE, you'll definitely need to make a note of this for when their profiles come up.

“This is child abuse. People need to start to stand up against this bullshit. Enough is enough,” Don Jr. wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning. The president’s son, who has lately embraced the role of transphobic bigot, was referring to the case of a seven-year-old trans child named Luna Younger, whose mother Anne Georgulas has, for the past year, been battling her ex-husband Jeffrey Younger for custody of Luna.

Normally, custody proceedings, even contentious ones, would barely warrant a blip in the news—but because Luna is trans, the custody battle between Georgulas, who is supportive of her child’s gender identity, and Younger, who very vocally and publicly is not, has become the latest chapter in conservatives’ culture war against trans people. In the months that rightwing media has obsessively covered the case, Georgulas has become a villain, looking to abuse and “chemically castrate” her child, who in their minds has been pressured by her mother to identify as a girl.

On Tuesday, a jury in Dallas ruled against Younger, finding in an 11-1 decision that he should not get sole custody of Luna. In response to the news, a whole host of conservative blowhards waded in, delighted to use a seven-year-old child as chum in their ongoing efforts to paint gender-affirming practices as harmful to children. In a widely circulated tweet, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk wrote that Luna “is being forced to become a girl against his will.” “Children must be protected,” Kirk added. Senator Ted Cruz echoed Don Jr., calling a parent allowing a child to medically transition (which is not what is actually happening in this case) “child abuse” and describing Luna as a “pawn in a left-wing political agenda.” Seizing on a story seemingly tailor-made to generate rightwing outrage—the maligned father, the tender age of the child, the “diabolical” mom—on Wednesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that both the state’s attorney general and the Department of Family and Protective Services were examining the case.

Here's the Ted Cruz bit.

This is horrifying & tragic. For a parent to subject such a young child to life-altering hormone blockers to medically transition their sex is nothing less than child abuse.
https://t.co/sl8VcBgfTD via @nypost

[Tendrin]

Why are they so clumsy and unprofessional though. If they aren't accidentally sending talking points to democrats. They are butt dialing reporters and leaving conspiracy theory voicemail s

When you get away with so much for so long...

[numberthirty]

When you get away with so much for so long...

Well, this is Rudy we are talking about. No?

On his most competent day as whatever sort of "Worldwide Man Of Mystery" that he is, how competent would anyone guess that he would be?

- "Elmer Fudd"?
- "Wile E. Coyote"?
- "Yellow Pinkie"?

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Its rare to get rich without exploitation and I also see it less as rich targeted and more "Bernies not that different guys"

It's still a stupid argument. By congressional standards Bernie Sanders isn't that rich, he's advocating for policies that would lessen his own personal wealth and the bulk of his millionaire status comes from writing book. It's a pretty weak attack. He's worth like 2 million. Which is kinda like barely passing the threshold to label him and quite frankly that's like "you did something moderately successful once money" like some musician who is just starting to getting notoriety or an author who just had their first book that did well type money.

The guy who just made a million or two million isn't the problem with society. It's the big business owner who is paying 75% of his workforce minimum wage while he is making 100's of millions. Or the owners of Wallmary who quite literally make double Bernie's net worth in about an hour while their employees are treated like expendable jackasses.

To me it's very difficult to make the case that "Bernie's not that different". It's kind of a cheap gotcha attack based primarily on him having one book that did well.

[SquirrelMan]

Well, this is Rudy we are talking about. No?

On his most competent day as whatever sort of "Worldwide Man Of Mystery" that he is, how competent would anyone guess that he would be?

- "Elmer Fudd"?
- "Wile E. Coyote"?
- "Yellow Pinkie"?

That's America's Mayo you are talking about.

[Jackalope89]

The snubbing of Moscow Mitch was very satisfying. And well deserved.
Still, just a drop in the ocean of what needs to happen.

Mitt Romney, if nothing else, can suck away support from the Orange Menace, being one of the few GOP left unafraid to stand up to him.
And that poor kid. Already she's going to have enough issues with her own father being like that, but now the GOP assholes promoting her case to this extent?
Law and Order SVU actually had an episode, back when Stabler was still on, that dealt with something very similar (though a few extra things thrown in). Sadly, I don't see Luna's case wrapping up like that one did.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Elijah Cummings Honored At Baltimore Funeral: ‘He Led From His Soul’

Friends, family and former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama gathered to pay tribute to the congressman in his home district.

**********

Ex-Ethics Chief Issues Ominous Warning About ‘Anti-Patriots’ Backing Donald Trump

“We are in dangerous territory,” Walter Shaub cautioned in a lengthy Twitter thread. That goes without saying.

**********

Judge Rules DOJ Must Turn Over Mueller Grand Jury Evidence To House Democrats

Democrats had requested the material as part of their impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump. Good!

**********

Fox News Host Calls Out Trump’s ‘Petty’ Cancellation Of Newspaper Subscriptions

Howard Kurtz said the White House’s refusal to renew subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post is “a symbolic slap.” Whoa! Someone else who isn't toeing the Faux News pro-Trump party line? Say it ain't so!

**********

Tulsi Gabbard Goes On Fox News Before Announcing She Won’t Run For Congress Again

The Hawaii congresswoman criticized the House’s impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump as “very partisan.” So, Faux News is now a safe space for Tulsi the Russian Asset.

[Tami]

Trump speaks at HBCU Benedict College as students are asked to stay in dorms

COLUMBIA, S.C. – In a way, what happened outside Benedict College's gates in the heart of downtown felt quite small. At its peak, the crowd covered less than 100 yards of the sidewalk. But the scene itself represented something much bigger: the fractured, divisive, sometimes ugly and often loud American political climate.

Protests erupted outside the 150-year-old historically black college where inside a school auditorium President Donald Trump spoke to a room filled with more political allies than students.

The event was billed as a keynote speech on bipartisan success in criminal justice reform, which the president tied to the booming economy he takes credit for and that he told his audience has helped black people more than ever before.

Benedict students, who the week prior pondered what questions they might ask the president once his surprise visit to the forum" was announced, were asked to stay in their dorms.

Seven students were allowed inside for the speech.

[Tami]

Trump decided to leave troops in Syria after conversations about oil, officials say

“This is like feeding a baby its medicine in yogurt or applesauce,” said the official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal U.S. deliberations.

One senior NATO diplomat said Esper offered few details about the new deployment during the NATO meeting.

“He’s trying to elaborate on Trump’s intuitions,” the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door discussions. “It’s hard.”

[Tami]

Bill Barr's alternate universe "investigation" has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

Students of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990s. It's true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative "three legged stool" of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.

But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society, with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the "unitary executive," originally advanced by Reagan's odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.

Barr is described as supremely confident in his beliefs, which is to say that his overweening arrogance is not an act put on someone who is overcompensating to hide insecurity. He believes in this theory and when it became obvious that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not long for the job, Barr and his legal cabal appear to have seen the clueless and corrupt Donald Trump as a perfect instrument to test their theory, and perhaps set legal precedents that would enable future right-wing presidents to use the full power of the presidency to dominate American politics without regard to democratic norms or congressional checks and balances. Indeed, they had been setting the stage for such a man for decades.

It's also obviously the case that Barr, and perhaps his Reaganite cronies as well, are suffering from the malady known as Fox News Brain Rot, the symptoms of which are an extreme susceptibility to absurd right-wing conspiracy theories and an inability to believe anything that contradicts them. (Barr once said that there was more evidence for the bogus Uranium One charges than the Russian interference in the 2016 election, which confirms the diagnosis.)