In your kindergartner's defense, they thought being president would be a lot easier and less frustrating.
I cannot wait for this school year to be over, though summer will I'm sure bring its own fresh hells. I hope it gets better for you guys.
Today's presidential shitbaggery.
"I loved my previous life. I had so many things going," Trump told Reuters in an interview. "This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier."
...
More than five months after his victory and two days shy of the 100-day mark of his presidency, the election is still on Trump's mind. Midway through a discussion about Chinese President Xi Jinping, the president paused to hand out copies of what he said were the latest figures from the 2016 electoral map.
"Here, you can take that, that's the final map of the numbers," the Republican president said from his desk in the Oval Office, handing out maps of the United States with areas he won marked in red. "It's pretty good, right? The red is obviously us."
He had copies for each of the three Reuters reporters in the room.
I think at this point he's dynamited below even the low expectations of the commentariat. (Of course we still have lots of risk from a Republican autopilot government.)
I was just marvelling today at how much the comprehensive incompetence of the Trump White House has so far protected us from the worst anticipated consequences.
And almost no one in the media really knows how to deal with the oddball corrupt mix that is Trump. They have been feasting on the behind-the-scenes fighting and glimpses of the true fucked-upedness of Trump's thinking (although I saw a clip of Andrew Card as part of a general negative review of the fucking first 100 fucking days say "the communication has been great"--for some definitions of "great" I guess for the MAGA sense of "great") but they can't seem to figure out how to report on the actual stuff. (Of course they have a great longing for "normalization"; Glenn Thrush* who is rounding nicely into a thin-skinned NYT Politics** dude capped off a week of escalating assholishness by tweeting: Dear Twitter: The states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania 'normalized' @realDonaldTrump as an example.)
I do think they would report on the 100 days as a big win if he had actually been more successful at thoroughly fucking over the country.
*His and Maggie Haberman's interview with DJT a week or so ago was a perfect example. On whole it was as bonkers as all of his interviews are, but they clickbaited it to the max by their asking if Susan Rice had committed a crime*** (Trump had brought her up unprompted but they brought up "crime) and then championing their "news" on Twitter and headline (which did later get modified). Fuckers. They have also been in on the "leave Ivanka alone" beat.
**As much as I rail against the Times they are actually in a more difficult position than before the election. They are for better or worse the paper of record in the US. To continue in that role they need to become the paper of record for the autocratic kleptocracy. Going full oppositional reduces that de facto status. Institutionally they will give due regard to the king (unless the Trump Admin cracks open in really obvious way). For instance, it is no surprise that it was the Post**** and not the Times who dug in on Watergate.
***The way that whole lying abuse of power by the Trump admin has fallen off the press radar is disgusting. My God, don't become a powerful black women***** in a Democratic admin (or a powerful woman period for the most part).
****The Post somewhat pulling in its neocon horns and being confrontational has probably been the best media development of the past year or so. (Although the Syrian missiles got some of their dicks hard again (David Ignatius, for example)). Oh, and Cilizza sliming his way over to CNN measurably improved the Post.
*****See also the saga of Loretta Lynch and the whitest white man in America, James Comey (revealed as a self-regarding supercilious Republican-favoring cunt--I don't think he was consciously working to favor Trump, but his superciliou cuntitude led him there anyway.).
As you can see I have many feels.
I have feels and incoherence.
I also hate everything and everybody in case I haven;t mentioned that recently.
5 is the most terrible truth. Any removal of Trump just makes the Party of Destruction more efficient.
I missed this bit:
No slight is too small to ignore. West Wing staffers have even fumed about news coverage of the Easter Egg Roll. First, it was that Trump's White House wouldn't be smart enough to pull it off. Then, it was that no one would be there. And after the Easter Egg Roll went off without a hitch, "no one wanted to give us any credit," said one senior administration official.
9: What's that from? Not that I doubt it, I just don't see it in the only link in the thread, so I'm curious.
The Politico "education of DJT" article being passed around by all and sundry.
Can we just talk about Korea?
-Tillerson last week threatens war.
-Trump tweets more war threats to DPRK.
-We install THAAD, thereby antagonizing China who even Trump acknowledges is a key player in any plan to reign in DPRK.
-Trump, schooled by Xi Jinping says that isn't it incredible Korea used to be part of China, thereby antagonizing US ally ROK.
-Trump says he may end trade agreement with ROK thereby antagonizing US ally ROK.
This is all inside of two weeks.
This is absolute genius level ignorant fuckuppery. Have I missed anything? Oh, yeah, the carrier group business.
Anything else?
PS We're all going to die. I love you all. I thought you should know that before the inevitable.
Doesn't Trump want SK to pay for THAAD?
9 is incredible in its pettiness. Yet all to credible at the same time.
5 is very true.
13 Yes, I had intended to put that after the install THAAD entry.
It's all just so fucking incredible.
Before we die, I admit I'm laughing to the point of tears at the Fyre Festival thingy. "The 'gourmet cuisine' this weekend was included in the ticket cost. We are being fed salads and ham and cheese sandwiches out of this tent."
Some of my friends in Japan are starting to get panicky about North Korea, especially since the government put out this leaflet on how to protect yourself against a missile attack. (Basically, try and stay within 10 minutes of an underground shopping mall at all times. If they use chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, you're fucked. It brings back all the memories of "Protect and Survive" from 1980s Britain.) My friend who lives in Seoul is completely blasé, though; she assumes it's the usual rhetoric, just ramped up a few notches.
11: thanks. The thing that jumps out at me is that even their retrospective on the Easter egg hunt is nuts.
OK, "it went off without a hitch" in the sense that no one died or got arrested, so good for them, it could have been worse. But it did in fact have a lower turnout than the same event in the last few years. (I can't find a chart of year-by-year turnout figures and can't be bothered to make one myself, but Trump's first had 21,000, Obama's first had 30,000, and Obama's last had 37,000. The record if anyone counts those might be one of FDR's with 50,000.) It did in fact dis-invite local schoolchildren and as far as I can tell the only open question is whether that was the result of innocent incompetence or deliberate racism.
They expect to get credit for doing a good job on that? A good job for these people is the lack of a disaster at the most administration-friendly event there is? The mind boggles.
I agree simultaneously with 4 and 5.
A part of me hopes 17 was on purpose, to troll rich people. Maybe they can all get a free Juicero as compensation.
I heard Wall Street done paid Obama 1,000 Juicero for a speech!
20: Yup. Also if any "senior administration official" is investing any time or energy into the planning egg roll - traditionally a First Lady's Office thing - something has gone horribly wrong already.
17: I am hoping that it was either a brilliant scam from the start, or some kind of political prank. Of course, my thoughts and prayers are with all of the affected Instagram stars.
Is that Jenner shithead involved with it?
26: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-kendall-jenner-fyre-festival-20170105-story.html
Since I did the extensive research required to find this out, I figured I would share.
Yeah, apparently they had to put on a last-minute push involving 400 volunteers mostly from previous years/admins to pull it off at all, and the wooden egg company had to prod them with a reminder that they had better order some eggs. "We're really focused on quality of the experience over quantity of attendees," -- Melania's communications director.
Obviously who gives a shit, but fuck 'em I'm piling on everything.
Trump got a better deal on the eggs because he threatened to cancel the event until they caved and lowered their prices.
Wooden eggs would have to give hemorrhoids to the hens.
James Comey is very tall by the way.
23- The future world reserve currencies will be Bitcoin, Juiceros, and iPhones (the latter to pay for health care)
With naked mole rat orgasms as the underlying unit of value.
17 could be more Ballardian if they all started hunting and/or eating each other. And livetweeting it. And there were Komodo dragons.
I think I may be a bit Halfordismic.
Regarding 4/5: I'm amazed by the strength of my superstitious need to get past 9/11/17 before passing any judgment. It's not that I expect that history to repeat itself literally, but it feels so much like April 2001 right now. I guess it's time to speculate about how Trump's "My Pet Goat" moment would play out.
(Not so amusing, though, since the thought of this government handling a real crisis inspires stomach-churning fear.)
I wish papers would stop with the "impulsiveness, or tactical move by Trump?" He has never done anything with some larger strategy in mind, he's President Dory.
Fear makes people piss themselves. Trump has prostitutes to do that for him.
Are there many Komodo dragons in Ballard?
37: He makes sense to me as the kind of seventy-year-old man that, had he no money, would be calling into talk radio or writing into the smallville paper with a grand solution based on whatever he'd heard about that week.
37: Somewhere I saw "malevolent Chauncey Gardner."
I am pretty sure "deal" is supposed to be that he will sign whatever Repub Congress sends him and in turn they will let him loot and enrich himself and his family.
43: And they're not even doing that right! At least on the congressional side. I'm sure the looting is going fine.
For those enjoying the Fyre Festival details, here are more. (Worth reading to the end for the kicker.)
Today in vocabulary fails: we got a house cleaner solicitation masquerading as a booking request for AirBnB: "I work as a house cleaner with my mother! We are very capricious and careful in everything we do!"
How is that a fail? Soliciting you that way seems capricious.
Everybody in the Trump Administration seems incompetent except the guy who was put in charge of the FCC, who appears to be adept at dismantling everything good that his predecessor accomplished.
Very narrowly, re Korea:
1. THAAD for ROK has been in the works for years;
2. China opposes THAAD because it can protect US and allied bases in the region from the missiles China is pointing at them;
3. Caving to China on THAAD would be more of the kind of alliance mismanagement that is already Trump's biggest legacy so far;
4. The timing does make it harder to deal with the DPRK, but that was always going to happen anyway, see (1).
37: He makes sense to me as the kind of seventy-year-old man that, had he no money, would be calling into talk radio or writing into the smallville paper with a grand solution based on whatever he'd heard about that week.
I mean, he had money and he did that. If by writing into the smallville paper you mean taking out ads in all the New York papers.
Everybody in the Trump Administration seems incompetent except the guy who was put in charge of the FCC, who appears to be adept at dismantling everything good that his predecessor accomplished
Pai was already on the FCC under Obama as one of the two Republicans.
You know, if you wanted to compare someone to an animal because of their fickleness and abrupt changes of mind, wouldn't "felicious" make more sense than "capricious"?
Not when your pantheon has a goat-god of chaos.
Sorry, 52 was me. Just got back from seeing Manic Pixie Dream Girl Strikes Back with my little sister, Natilo Panna. (Bet you thought Paennim was my surname, didn't you?)* I thought it was fairly solid politically, no reunification of the nuclear family at the end, although the rather facile logic of woman:nature::man:technology got a little strained. AH's tattoos were right on for the character -- and her all-black costuming at the beginning and end was a clever reference of various Western heroes. And to that, of course, there was significant Korean participation in the project, so the East/West interactions and comparisons were markedly different from what you might expect to see in a purely Hollywood movie.
*Our other sister, Natilo Pomsoc, lives on the other side of the country, of course, so she couldn't make it. It wasn't really her speed anyway, so all for the best.
Without a goat-god of chaos, it's hardly a Pantheon at all, is it?
I think you were a horse once. Maybe a goat at some point also?
What the actual fuck:
The noun caprice, which first appeared in English in the mid-17th century, is a synonym of whim. Evidence shows that the adjective capricious debuted about sixty years before caprice; it's likely, however, that both words derived via French from the Italian capriccio, which originally referred not to a sudden desire but to a sudden shudder of fear. Capriccio in turn derives from the Italian capo, meaning "head," and riccio, the word for "hedgehog." Someone who shuddered in fear, therefore, was said to have a "hedgehog head"-meaning that his or her hair stood on end like the spines of a hedgehog.
My former coworker in Omaha owns a hedgehog. And a bunch of cats, so its cool.
Fortunately for my theory, the goat-god of chaos was also a goat-god of fear.
The one male goat I've met was hardly chaotic. Single-minded, really.
The female goat seemed charming enough, but I didn't really get it.
49 All good points but it's just one more thing in the clusterfuck. The truly Trumpian bit there is the attempt to extort a billion USD from ROK for it, via Twitter FFS.
ITSM the broader point is that the Trump administration is so hollow and inept that most of its policy will consist in fact of inaction; and so a great deal of what the US does will be whatever oozes out of the bureaucracy by sheer inertia, and those actions should be evaluated on their merits.
Capricious doesn't mean 'goatlike'? For me, given that most of my legal career is devoted to showing that various agencies weren't capricious when they did whatever they did, this changes everything.
That would be a good quality in house cleaners, they could eat all the garbage.
58: I am suspicious of that explanation. Etymologies that have to take you through multiple intermediate steps of purported metaphors turn out to be spurious more often than not IMX; they're very easy for an amateur to honestly concoct.
And indeed, looking at the OED, the entries for "caprice" and "capricious" refer me to the earlier "capriccio", which has:
Etymology: < Italian capriccio sudden start, motion, or freak, apparently < capro goat, as if 'the skip or frisk of a goat' (in Spanish capricho ) < Latin type *capriceus. (For the sense compare capriole n.)
And then "capriole" is "a leap or caper, as in dancing"; "caper" is believed to be originally an abbreviation of that.
But the Oxford Dictionary of English lists the hedgehog explanation, so maybe that has some provenance too. Hard to tell when most of the search hits are flat assertions.
The goat explanation is better because it doesn't multiply entities unnecessarily. More importantly, it makes me right.
Also there seems to be a lot of fluidity as to what the riccio is said to mean in that series of metaphors- in Italian it can mean "hedgehog" or "curly" (of hair) or a lot of other things; "hedgehog" is the etymology, Latin ericius, but many sources assert it's being used to mean "bristling, standing on end" as if in direct allusion to "hedgehog" when "bristling" doesn't actually seem to be one of the Italian meanings. (I found an 1896 letter to the editor pointing out this problem and preferring the goat explanation.)
Something more satisfying and less indefinite: English "urchin" comes from that same Latin ericius, hedgehog. Had that meaning all through Middle English, started to be used metaphorically (hunchbacks, goblins, brats) in the 16C.
And of course is still used literally in "sea urchin".
Because they try to sell you newspapers and shoe shines.
How's Pokey doing in general, Heebie?
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, but bubble gum isn't allowed in school.
This Yglesias post is very good:. http://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/29/15471634/american-airlines-raise
They have a replica of David, but I think they made his penis bigger than Michelangelo did.
"This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again," wrote Citi analyst Kevin Crissey in a widely circulated note. "Shareholders get leftovers."
We as a society owe Crissey a cure for his delusions of persecution.
It's kind of amazing that Yglesias's suggested treatments are the deprecated debt-fueled public employment and CEOs becoming more generous. Redistribution must not be mentioned.
With the Fyre Festival and now this Wall Street/AA thing, this has been a great week for people who love "rich people being dicks to other rich people" stories. (Airline pilots and people who have enough disposable income to buy tickets to Fyre Festival count as rich.)
What's this Wall Street/AA thing then?
(And don't forget the Juicero)
There is blackjack and there is dealer-cleavage blackjack.
Seeing the fountain show from the airport shuttle. It was impressive.
Why must everybody laugh at my mighty light saber?
Being infinitely fast, all lights are infinitely long.
Anyway, no free charging your phone here. I can't see a single outlet, but there is a pay station.
Almost as if you are in a land of pitiless unbridled capitalism.
James Comey is very tall by the way.
Google says 6'8".
There's a Max and Erma's in the Detroit airport. Which I thought you should know.
89: Toldja! You learned more about blackjack dealers than I did, though.
Infused baiju is better than uninfused, but remains inescapably baiju.
The prunes were good. Raisins unpalatable. How's the rescue vodka?
Raisins are always unpalatable, even baiju could not improve them.
98: You need shejiu, stat. Then we'll see how you feel.
WTF Barry. Next thing you'll be telling me to watch Malick movies.
98
Why am I not surprised. After the nuclear apocalypse, there will be cockroaches and baijiu left.
The baijiu will absorb the radiation and become even more baijiu than it previously was.
42- Wait, is Chance the Rapper a play on Chance the Gardener/Chauncey Gardner?
My gin remains fantastic, but munchkins keep depleting my strategic tonic reserves.
95: Jesus. You never think of assholes being up that high.
Anyway, my real reason for commenting is that I wanted it on the record that Heebie's OP construction of, "Ugh, why is this goddamn shithead still our president," now that I've read it repeatedly, is really satisfying. My thoughts about the Trump presidency often wander onto much more elaborate paths, but in a day-to-day kind of way, like when I've been happily thinking about other things and then remember, Heebie's phrasing with almost exactly the same wording is what drifts into mind.
A White House source said Gorka's role has always been unclear and said Gorka never had national security issues in his portfolio. "This guy has always been a big mystery to me," the source said of Gorka's contributions to the staff.
The source said Gorka's only known duties included speaking on television about counterterrism, as well as "giving White House tours and peeling out in his Mustang," but added that he had few notable responsibilities.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sebastian-gorka-to-accept-role-outside-white-house/article/2621719
They're re-assigning him to General Burkhalter, I guess.
It's true that there has never been an escape from Stalag 13.
109: Agree that it is an apt turn of phrase for the times.
Although I'm not sure I agree completely with 5 and 8. But too boring to expand on that much. Of course he's "merely" a symptom but I think his particular manifestation of the Republican rot brings some of its own unique vilenesses. Prepare for the dignity wraithification of many, many people and organizations. We will all end up hating lots of nominal allies.
Per Mat Johnson on the twitter: If Trump isn't the end of the world, he's at least its trailer.
Executive producers Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, with a special shout out to dysfunction pioneer Newt Gingrich.
Per Mat Johnson on the twitter: If Trump isn't the end of the world, he's at least its trailer.
Executive producers Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, with a special shout out to dysfunction pioneer Newt Gingrich.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/law-constitution-trump-president-abuse-power
Did you know that if you move a bottle of water in a Vegas hotel, even if you put it right back, they charge you $8?
It's because all the water has to be carried from Colorado by mules.
This has probably already been addressed elsewhere, but I'm savoring every new story about the Fyre Festival Fiasco. Maybe in this era of Trump, stories about rich assholes getting fleeced by other rich assholes are the best we can hope for.
Theranos, Juicero, and the Fyre Festival really seem to embody our current cultural moment perfectly.
If you put the Frye Festival cheese sandwiches into a Juicero, I bet they would be gourmet food.
I just attempted to post about the Fyre festival but the topic wandered some. Still, there is a new dedicated post.
A grain of good news: the new budget detail no longer guts the NIH, in fact ups its funding by $2b. (Most not for basic research but for constituency-pleasers - opioid abuse, Alzheimer's, cancer - but there seems to be $200m left in across-the-board increases "to every Institute and Center" after all that is accounted for.)
There's sort of reasons those please constituents.
Spending Other People's money is one of Trump's core competencies. (And Republican's they just like to symbolically exclude some categories.)
NIH has been pretty good about making sure that their $$ is distributed broadly, so they get buy-in from as many congress critters as possible. There's even a web site where you enter your zip code and it tells you how much NIH money has been spent in your congressional district over the last X years.
124: Not saying they're bad things to be putting money into!
My district got over half a billion in 2016. I think that may be over the average.
I feel like Theranos, Juicero, and the Fyre Festival represent a political moment that passed in November. It was a simpler time, back before social media destroyed America.
It does explain how they fucked this up so badly. The festival was basically a promotion for the app/service. It's clear from the pitch deck where their energies/competence lay. There's basically no operational detail whatsoever on how the festival would be run.