Even the bottom feeders can’t find the bottom of this barrel.
But we know all we need to know about this crew and there is no news about them that matters any more except how to ensure their departure(s) ASAP as the fires of climate change and plague they refused to manage burn on.
“[The Coronavirus pandemic] is like a forest fire, full steam ahead. And wherever there’s human wood to burn, it’ll do it.” —Michael Osterholm
With Nixon, it was AGs, with Trump it’s IGs.
Wherever there is evil…The Kremlin is not far from the source.
And yet his approval numbers have been inching back up and his disapprovals inching back down. Not a lot, 1-1.5% in either direction, but it’s still something, and going in the wrong direction. Around 41% or so of voting-age Americans simply cannot bring themselves to abandon him, no matter what, except a very small portion of them, and then only briefly, the way you might “break up” with someone for a few weeks, knowing deep down that it’s not for real.
The vast majority of these people are either flaming idiots, massive racists, delusional cultists, enraged malcontents or selfish assholes–or some combination of these. In fact ALL of them are at least one of these, and most are more than one. They just can’t bring themselves to abandon him, because they either genuinely like him, like what he’s been doing for them, or hate Dems.
Even the “smart” ones, the ones with advanced degrees from good schools who are good at whatever they do for a living. They’re in this pool too, driven by hatred, resentment, delusion, racism, sexism or selfishness. Intelligence has nothing to do with character, morality or judgement.
What are we going to do with this 41% when he’s out? Is there some island we can put them on, preferably the one in Lost (they are our “Others” and “Hostiles”, after all)? Can we “convert” some of them? Will the virus kills of appreciable numbers of them, and “convert” yet others? Can we pit them against each other, or otherwise demoralize them?
It’s like we’re on a lifeboat and 40% of us are threatening to sink it or otherwise kill us all, because they’re stupid, crazy, have horrible attitudes, are homicidal maniacs or suffer from disastrous panic attacks. At a certain point, you start throwing some of them overboard, to save the rest.
Gee, who could have predicted something like this could happen?
Being that ammonium nitrate is a salt and highly soluble in water, one way to dispose of it is to place it “aboard an ailing, Russian-owned cargo ship”, tow it out to deep water, and sink it. I’d prefer they use it for agriculture (lots of nitrogen for plant fertilizer), but just leaving it to sit in a densely populated area was criminally stupid. This is the same substance Tim McVeigh used in OK and he only used a single truckload. It can be used to make IEDs.
Some might ask “how do you sink a ship without explosives and a violent outcome?” The answer is simple. You drill a hole in the ship. When it starts filling with water, you drill another hole to let the water out.
Tim McVeigh was a fan of ammonium nitrate as well, wasn’t he? 
Yes, but why do federal agencies have IGs (or OIGs)? Are they required by the federal statutes that set up the agencies, for example? If so, which are the statutes and what do they say? We need something deeper than wikipedia to answer such questions!
It’s the sort of thing that seems so clearly and massively stupid and reckless, you have to assume it was LIHOP or such. It’s not that different from giving a small child a loaded gun to play with.
Is Beirut run by Republicans?
Yes, OKC was a fertilizer/fuel oil bomb. But I think it was about 1 ton (fit in the back of a van). Beirut (assuming reporting is accurate) and Texas City were both just large amounts (> 2000 tons) of ammonium nitrate.
It happened in West, TX 4 years ago too.
GOP justice is an oxymoron.
LIHOP? Maybe, but I suspect it was more due to a barely functional government bureaucracy. Lebanon has had it really rough for a long time now. They apparently confiscated the shipment from the Russian-owned vessel. Why wasn’t the cargo sold? Was there an open lawsuit regarding the shipment?
he asserted the primacy of his sincerely held religious beliefs.
I believe the IG positions were created by Congress to report to Congress. However, the IG position is part of the Executive branch. And now you see the problem…
One part of it. The bigger problem is that the IGs all work for their department.
How in the heck they’re supposed to potentially investigate the bosses who ultimately sign their paychecks independently…
West Texas 2013 explosion.
The purge of the inspectors general under Trump is now just scandal 47 sub © on the list. Had Obama ever fired an inspector general, the Republicans would still be holding hearings.
As a recovered alcoholic, in our meetings we frequently talk about all of the new normals we created. I never drank in the morning until I did. I never drank on the job until I did. I never drove while drunk until I did. Every act established a new worse normal in the debasement of our behavior. Every new normal allowed for the next failure to live up to our now severely reduced standards of living. If you don’t stop, eventually every standard you ever held as a person gets subverted to support the only important thing left - staying drunk.
What we now accept from this administration with shoulder shrugs and opinion pieces on the destruction of “norms” has slid so far south into open corruption and inherently impeachable actions by any other president that we actually can’t keep track of all of the crimes, both petty and enormous, that are happening. The failure of the Republican party to remove this guy when they had the chance will go down as the biggest failure in American democracy since the post Civil War period. The Republicans, led by criminal Mitch McConnell, are responsible for this. Not Obama Trump voters, not Bernie supporters, not economically deprived low education white people or suburban moms - it is the Republicans. They have shown, to a person, that they do not care if American democracy is destroyed in pursuit of power and money. As much as I dislike Mitt Romney, he is the only Republican in the Senate who did not condone overt criminal actions by the president. The only one.
There are many Republicans now coming out and saying that the GOP must be burned to the ground and rebuilt. I will believe that bullshit when I see it. The way I see it, they have nothing to rebuild with and nothing to rebuild on. You don’t rebuild once you have signed a deal with the devil - you just grab everything you can on your way to hell.