Also out of surprise - but not out of (pained) laughs.
Quote:
A report in in the New York Times, which paints a picture of chief-of-staff Reince Priebus trying to assert greater control, says he has set in place a set of checks and processes before new policies and Executive Orders are issued.
Checks? Processes? Isn't that exactly the kind of Washington-insider bureaucracy Trumpochka was elected to overturn?
Also, I dug into the NYT article, but it doesn't provide much reference for its assertion
Quote:
Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council
Images of the tangerine gobshite experiencing anger may just be wishful thinking.
As a result, many were startled when Mr Bannon was elevated to the National Security Council’s principals committee, the top interagency group for discussing national security.
Who was startled? I'm not even mildly taken aback. Of course that's what happened. People don't realize who we've all been looking at the past eighteen months? Fucking racist libertards of the Breitbart, Infowars etc varieties. If anyone with an ear to the political ground for the past 10 years is shocked at the Bannon position, they should declare themselves officially clueless and stop trying to explain politics to other people.
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Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
I guess I assumed, for no reason, that Trump at least had some vague notion of what he was signing, but yeah, I'm having to adjust my perceptions slowly lest the pressure changes make my organs implode or something. When people are that dumb, I guess I always assumed that they were at least part faking it for effect, but you're right. I should have known they weren't. (But now I don't know how they dress themselves and drive cars and stuff like that.)
This is why I've always been a little bit uncomfortable with people always warning each other not to read the comments on news stories. What's happened here is that, for all intents and purposes, those comments sections are now holding the highest political office in the nation.
This is exactly what angry right wing commenters think that means. They can't really wrap their heads around the concept, for intellectual or emotional reasons, so they just use it as empty invective, like calling something poopyheaded. They toss that around all the time with absolutely nothing to back it up.
There are a lot of dirtbag Republicans right now thinking Trump (Bannon) is their useful idiot, but it's the other way around. And the chickenshit Democrats who aren't consistently standing up against it aren't much better. They need to go look at their local papers, turn off their blockers, and read the barely literate, racist middle schooler style temper tantrums down there, because that's their base. That's their god now. That's who they answer to, and that's what defines them now. I'm going to do my part to ensure that nobody ever forgets that.
If anyone with an ear to the political ground for the past 10 years is shocked at the Bannon position, they should declare themselves officially clueless and stop trying to explain politics to other people.
The assertion of the NYT is the Chump himself didn't realised what he was signing over to Bannon. So I agree with you 100%, Drumpf should declare himself officially clueless.
Then he'd finally get most of America, nay the world, agreeing with him. He would be so happy!
Stephen, how much does the context of the ban factor into this decision, and the later court ruling down the line? For instance, this is clearly the 'Muslim ban' Trump has campaigned on, and he spoke about giving Christian refugees priority over Muslim ones from these countries. Do these factor into determinations of the legality, or is it purely based on the words contained in the executive order?
Evidence of discriminatory intent is relevant to at least two of the constitutional claims and at least three of the statutory claims. Weirder things have happened, to be sure, but I doubt the government will have much success limiting consideration to the order's language.
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it. Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies!
I'm in charge! I'M IN CHARGE DAMMIT! The fact that he has to assert his author-i-tay in his first month is a tasty little bit of schadenfreude. I need a fuckload more, but still.
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hide, witch, hide / the good folks come to burn thee / their keen enjoyment hid behind / a gothic mask of duty - P. Kantner
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Last edited by Sock Puppet; 02-07-2017 at 12:05 AM.
Reason: KJO is my current favorite. Bless you, The Man.
I guess they are unaware that VA government health care is not Obamacare...
... or they are lying.
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What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. ... The origin of myths is explained in this way.
Stephen, how much does the context of the ban factor into this decision, and the later court ruling down the line? For instance, this is clearly the 'Muslim ban' Trump has campaigned on, and he spoke about giving Christian refugees priority over Muslim ones from these countries. Do these factor into determinations of the legality, or is it purely based on the words contained in the executive order?
Evidence of discriminatory intent is relevant to at least two of the constitutional claims and at least three of the statutory claims. Weirder things have happened, to be sure, but I doubt the government will have much success limiting consideration to the order's language.
__________________ The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. -Eugene Wigner
There was a terror attack in 2015 which Conway confused with Bowling Green. It happened in Chattanooga, which is in Tennessee, not Kentucky (but close enough that she might characterize her mistake as an ‘alternative fact,’ rather than an outright falsehood).
In this attack, an Arab American gunman assaulted two military recruiting facilities, killing four Marines. If you’re wondering why the Trump administration hasn’t bothered to point to her confusion of this real incident with faux Bowling Green, there are two reasons both of which are quite embarrassing: first, the Chattanooga shooter was Kuwaiti. In other words, he would not have been among those banned under the Trump travel ban, since Kuwait is not among the seven restricted countries. Second, the killer had lived in the U.S. since 1996. He never left the U.S. to become radicalized. He was a homegrown terrorist, the kind hardest to detect. He had not been on any terror watch list or been monitored by counter-terrorism officials.
Oh, and there actually was a Bowling Green Massacre, just not in Kentucky. Rather it was in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1643. The then-governor ordered his soldiers to attack a camp of Lenape Indians at the site of what is today Bowling Green (New York City). 80 Native Americans were slaughtered in cold blood. Many of them babies torn from their mothers arms and hacked to pieces before their eyes. That’s a fact. An inconvenient one for Kellyanne.
On March 15th, each of us will mail Donald Trump a postcard that publicly expresses our opposition to him. And we, in vast numbers, from all corners of the world, will overwhelm the man with his unpopularity and failure. We will show the media and the politicians what standing with him — and against us — means. And most importantly, we will bury the White House post office in pink slips, all informing Donnie that he’s fired.
Postcards, so they don't need security scanning.
Pink, because.
March 15th. Or:
Quote:
If you are out of the country, it will take longer to arrive. Figure out the timing so it arrives around March 17th!
It is about time we did something about poor billionaires who are being denied the opportunity to cash in on holding public office!
I have to confess that the allegations that she'd worked as an escort actually did make me somewhat more sympathetic to her at the time, because if true, they would mean she actually had done honest work at some point in her life. Of course, her reactions to the story have largely erased whatever sympathy I felt at the time.
The fact that stories like this are automatically considered harmful to one's reputation in this country is rather emblematic of what I regard as a significant problem with American culture.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
In more dispiriting news, Sessions has been confirmed. Manchin was the only Democrat to vote for him, so maybe our Democrats is finally learning. However, we're still incredibly fucked.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
So what do we do? I think, first of all, it’s worth noting that, under an authoritarian government, all protest will be vilified anyway. Even before Trump, people got very upset that quarterback Colin Kaepernick didn’t stand during the national anthem. You’d think that would fall under the list of White People Approved Forms of Protest, along with leaving a voicemail for your senator kindly asking them to stop shooting black people in the street. Personally, I think there’s limited value in moralising with, or fact-checking, regimes that don’t care about morals or facts. In Britain we also have an increasingly authoritarian government. We send them petitions telling them that we don’t want them reading our emails, which they presumably already know from reading our emails. We face a brief political period that, unchecked, will bring at least irreversible climate change and, at worst, nuclear war.
Morally, I think you have to look at what you can do to change your own country first, as that’s the bit you have most influence on. This is complicated in Britain as we have a government that has undergone what is known in the business world as “regulatory capture” by corporate and financial interests, and is, broadly speaking, a vassal state of the US. What can we do practically to influence our own government that would truly affect the Trump administration? Well, in a country supposedly filled with restored national pride, we could not renew Trident and refuse to be his missile base. That kind of strategic loss would damage him deeply. No amount of likes or memes or petitions can achieve this. Really, if we want to survive as a species, it’s time for organised civil disobedience. It’s time to stop writing to your MP.