A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 29 of 725

PREV PAGE 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 NEXT PAGE

THGRRI

Friday, January 5, 2018 5:39 PM

FBI Ties 'Alt-Right' to Amtrak Terror Attack

A 26-year-old white man who attempted to commit a terror attack on an Amtrak train in rural Nebraska also attended the doomed “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August on the white supremacist side, according to a court document.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fbi-ties-alt-right-to-amtrak-terror-
attack/ar-BBHTbFm?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp

T

SECOND

Friday, January 5, 2018 8:54 PM

Trump’s attempt to silence a book made it a bestseller instead.

Yesterday Trump’s lawyer sent Wolff and his publisher a cease and desist order to stop the release of the book. Despite — indeed, perhaps because of — Trump’s efforts to undermine Fire and Fury, the book is on course to be a bonafide bestseller.

Wolff’s book has been resting comfortably at the number one spot on Amazon’s overall bestselling books list yesterday and today.

In publishing, Trump’s denunciation may prove even more lucrative than an endorsement from the Midas of book sales, US talk show host, Oprah Winfrey.

https://qz.com/1172846

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Friday, January 5, 2018 10:55 PM

Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, could have repercussions far beyond United States borders. Foreign governments have been struggling for the past year to negotiate with the Trump administration. Now some of their representatives say the excerpts they’re read so far confirm their worst fears about the White House’s erratic decision making.

“It does look like a total mess,” said Jorge Guajardo, the former Mexican ambassador to China who now advises companies and governments in DC. “Nobody knows who is in charge of what,” said Guajardo. Foreign ministers visiting Washington struggle to find counterparts with any decision-making authority and “at the end of the day they all end up in the White House — and even there they can’t get what they agreed to,” he said.

Latin American leaders have been visiting DC since Trump became president, “assuming institutions work,” Guajardo said. But the message the book drives home is that “it doesn’t matter who you talk to or what they agree to. It is irrelevant.”

So far, China’s Communist Party government has crafted perhaps the most concrete strategy for “handling” the Trump administration — seizing the opportunities it creates to advance China’s role on the international stage, while sloughing off previous Western demands that China become more democratic, and trying to appeal to the Trump family clan.

As other governments realize the opportunity that the chaos in the Trump White House creates, expect America to get left even farther behind.

https://qz.com/1171673

SECOND

Saturday, January 6, 2018 5:00 PM

Faustian Bargain on the Potomac
www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/opinion/faust-on-the-potomac.html

Paul Krugman JAN. 5, 2018

I haven’t yet read Wolff’s book – do I really have to? — but the basic outlines of his story have long been familiar and uncontroversial to anyone with open eyes. Trump is morally and intellectually incapable of being president. He has also exploited his office for personal gain, obstructed justice, and colluded with a hostile foreign power. Everyone who doesn’t get their news from Fox has basically known this for a while, although Wolff helps focus our minds on the subject.

It seems to me that that the real news now is the way Republicans in Congress are dealing with this national nightmare: rather than distancing themselves from Trump, they’re doubling down on their support and, in particular, on their efforts to cover for his defects and crimes. Remember when Paul Ryan was the Serious, Honest Conservative? (He never really was, but that was his public image.) Now he’s backing Devin Nunes in his efforts to help the Trump coverup.

As Brian Beutler says, Republicans have become the Grand Obstruction Party. Why?

The answer, I think, is that the cynical bargain that has been the basis of Republican strategy since Reagan has now turned into a moral trap. And as far as we can tell, no elected Republican – not one – has the strength of character to even attempt an escape.

The cynical bargain I’m talking about, of course, was the decision to exploit racism to advance a right-wing economic agenda. Talk about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, then slash income taxes. Do Willie Horton, then undermine antitrust. Tout your law and order credentials, then block health care.

For more than a generation, the Republican establishment was able to keep this bait-and-switch under control: racism was deployed to win elections, then was muted afterwards, partly to preserve plausible deniability, partly to focus on the real priority of enriching the one percent. But with Trump they lost control: the base wanted someone who was blatantly racist and wouldn’t pretend to be anything else. And that’s what they got, with corruption, incompetence, and treason on the side.

Nonetheless, aside from a handful of Never Trumpers, just about everyone in the Republican establishment decided that they could work with that. They knew what Trump was, but were willing to overlook it as long as they could push their usual agenda. What about the populism? They guessed, correctly, that this wouldn’t be a problem: Trump didn’t even hesitate about abandoning all his campaign promises and going all in for cutting taxes on the rich while slashing benefits for the poor.

Early on, some speculated that this would be a temporary alliance – that establishment Republicans would use Trump to get what they wanted, then turn on him. But it’s now clear that won’t happen. Trump has exceeded everyone’s worst expectations, yet Republicans, far from cutting him loose, are tying themselves even more closely to his fate. Why?

The answer, I’d argue, is that they’re stuck. They knowingly made a deal with the devil, and can’t back out.

More specifically, Trump’s very awfulness means that if he falls, the whole party will fall with him. Republicans could conceivably distance themselves from a president who turned out to be a bad manager, or even one who turned out to have engaged in small-time corruption. But when the corruption is big time, and it’s combined with obstruction of justice and collaboration with Putin, nobody will notice which Republicans were a bit less involved, a bit less obsequious, than others. If Trump sinks, he’ll create a vortex that sucks down everyone involved.

And so we now have the Republican party as a whole fully complicit in Trump’s crimes – because that’s what they are, whether or not he and those around him are ever brought to justice.

What this means, among other things, is that expecting the GOP to exercise any oversight or constrain Trump in any way is just foolish at this point. Massive electoral

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, January 6, 2018 5:29 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s attempt to silence a book made it a bestseller instead.

Ahhhh... The Streisand Effect.

Whoops.

I might actually get the book. Would be good reading material for the shitter.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

SECOND

Saturday, January 6, 2018 6:46 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s attempt to silence a book made it a bestseller instead.

Ahhhh... The Streisand Effect.

Whoops.

I might actually get the book. Would be good reading material for the shitter.

You read your laptop on the toilet?

There is a long excerpt from Michael Wolff's 'Fire and Fury': Inside Trump's White House at
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fu
ry-book-donald-trump.html

The entire book:
https://thepiratebay.org/search/Wolff Fire and Fury/0/99/0

40% of the likely voters approve of Trump. That’s good enough to win.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/voters/

From the book's Epilogue:

Quote:
Trump, in Bannon’s view, was a chapter, or even a detour, in the Trump revolution, which had always been about weaknesses in the two major parties. The Trump presidency — however long it lasted — had created the opening that would provide the true outsiders their opportunity. Trump was just the beginning.

Standing on the Breitbart steps that October morning, Bannon smiled and said: “It’s going to be wild as shit.”

Read it on the toilet, 6ixStringJack.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, January 6, 2018 8:05 PM

I don't have a laptop, but I was recently given a kindle and a tablet.

Thanks for the link. Why am I surprised that it's already on TPB?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

THGRRI

Sunday, January 7, 2018 3:57 AM

More departures on horizon for struggling White House staff

Already setting turnover records, President Donald Trump's White House is bracing for even more staff departures and an increasing struggle to fill vacancies, shadowed by the unrelenting Russia probe, political squabbling and Trump's own low poll numbers.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/more-departures-horizon-struggling-white-ho
use-staff-074043869.html

T

SECOND

Sunday, January 7, 2018 4:51 PM

Our Cartoon President (2018) Official Trailer

Trump defends his sanity in a series of tweets amid questions about his mental state

President Donald Trump, coming off a week of heightened scrutiny over his mental health, sought to put the topic to rest on Saturday by declaring himself extraordinarily intelligent and undeniably right in the head.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, January 7, 2018 5:11 PM

Wow. How brave of Showtime. Right on the heels of Kathy Griffon tanking her career by holding a severed head of Trump half a year ago.

Yawn.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

PREV PAGE 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 NEXT PAGE