I know this isn’t exactly shocking to us here, but those who don’t follow this stuff closely will “have their roofs blown off.”
Trump isn’t foreign. He was born in Queens and thinks he’s a king.
The committee filed something last night in federal court wrt Mark Meadows. The filing names Congressmen per witness testimony.
ETA: Marcy Wheeler has gone over the filing.
MTG was present at that December 19 meeting scheming on how to impede what had, until then, just been a formality - to rubber stamp Biden’s victory. Just saying, in case she’s forgotten.
I think the Freedom Caucus should be sued out of existence.
2nd Anniversary! Can you believe it?
I hate sincerity.
Almost from the start I’ve thought that this was a grifter story, rather than a national security story. A few years ago I wrote an article about a guy who did something similar—no national security overtones, but the same kind of wild role-playing and mad dash from grift to grift, and ability to suck people into his imaginary universe: https://writerbeware.blog/2015/04/09/the-strange-and-twisted-tale-of-peter-senese-serial-con-man/
Tangent: When did (mis)spelling impostor with an E become so widespread? In my head, this annoying surrogate always rhymes with poster, as in “a poster child for creeping descriptivism.”
(Now get off my lawn.)
I don’t hate sincerity. In fact, I’m sincere even when I don’t mean it.
I used to be a life long democratic socialist and then I saw someone use “adapter” instead of “adaptor.”
It is far too early to try to fathom that statement.
Welcome. I think you may be right about the grifting. The thing that lifts this story above the noise is that Secret Service working in proximity to POTUS and FLOTUS are involved and not in a good way. What with Raskin’s implication that the USSS were also involved in the attempted coup on Jan. 6, the national security threats of this scheme are seriously concerning. JMO
Some highlights:
He Was Stalked by a Mime in New York City 🤷🏻
He Woke Up to a Naked Guy Eating a Fudgsicle at the Foot of His Bed 🫣
He Once Almost Bought a Cave to Have Sex With His Wife in It
He Shroomed With His Cat
Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help
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In fact, way too many of the political press were distracted by the anticipation of Trump’s reaction than the important story: Kevin’s tangled web of lies.
The whole affair resembles all those meetups between Trump and/or his minions with figures from Russia, the Persian Gulf states, or borderline intelligence/organized crime figures. It instantly has the whiff of being right-wing, and reeks of the seamy underworld, debauched behavior, and utter amorality. A bit like the decayed atmosphere in an Eric Ambler novel like The Mask of Dimitrios.
And it’s always in right-wing states (the connection here is Iran and possibly Pakistan) that have state-enforced religion and a prudish moral code where the decadence is greatest. You see a kind of mini-version of this in the US, where the red states always lead in crimes of violence, spousal abuse, divorce, rape, child abandonment, drug abuse, suicide, etc.
OT: a very insightful article
- Ukrainians are sitting in the bomb shelters, by Kinder Album
Excerpt:
The day that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Kinder Album, the pseudonym of an artist from the west of Ukraine, vowed never to leave her country. “I didn’t want to read about the war in the news,” she said, “I felt it was important to stay and feel all these events. I wanted to actually experience them. The whole atmosphere of fear, of shelters and threats, of bombings, helped me to make war art.
“It changed in terms of speed,” she said of her process. “Because now I need to draw, I don’t have time to think, I need to express the feelings of the moment, because tomorrow something else will happen. Before the war, I had a lot of time. Now I don’t. And when I look at my drawings, which I did when the war just started, they capture totally different feelings and emotions compared to more recent ones.”
“Drawing war for me is like art therapy,” she said. “First of all, it is a way to express feelings and emotions. I just put them out of myself. And secondly, it is my routine and something I did before the war, so when I do it, it kind of feels as if there is no war, that these are peaceful times.”
It’s become a consistent and predictable aspect of far-right politics and activities, that the very things that those people accuse others, and especially Dems, libs and the left, of, are things that they themselves engage in, flagrantly and regularly, and then try to deflect and misdirect from with such projection, not only in a public sense, but to themselves, as it looks like many of them are actually denying, to themselves, that they do these very things, which is basically tantamount to psychosis, given such a profound disconnect with reality. In fact more than racism, misogyny, nativism, chauvinism, hatred, rage, paranoia and dishonesty, perhaps the most fundamental, unifying and worrisome quality of today’s far-right is outright insanity, on an individual and collective scale. Of course not all crazy people do evil things, but crazy people with a crazy agenda and beliefs such as theirs do tend to, historically, especially when led and exploited by psychopaths such as Trump.
Once again the media becomes the news. I can’t think of another country where that happens. I could be wrong. In any case, it’s got to stop.
I am convinced that most journalists are little more than glorified gossip journalists eager for a juicy quote or scoop than getting to the real bottom of things, which takes works and involves risks to one’s future access, career, and in some cases these days even personal safety. It’s so much easier and safer to just skate on the surface of things. Most readers or viewers won’t care or notice, most copy editors won’t care if it keeps readership or viewership above a certain level and please the legal department, and it avoids those messy situations when inconvenient truths are revealed and the inevitable backlash ensues. Better to keep things superficial and “scoopy” and not dig too deep. Plus that’s hard work, and who has time for that what with Hamptons season approaching and the need to get back in shape and but all those new summer outfits.
Thankfully, we still have the Jane Mayers, David Leonhardts and Rachel Maddows of the world, who don’t give a shit about all that and just do their actual jobs, investigate and report, consequences to them and others be damned.
A principal reason you’re not a Republican.