If true, this is a big mistake

2018 should be a huge opportunity for third party candidates.  I understand they'll need funds, though. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

My guess: she doesn't know it's still up

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

DJ and CJ

The president who can lie on the spot in the most ridiculous ways.

 "Thing 2" is a compilation of this type of Trumpism.

Just. Wow.

Pelosi asks Ryan to remove Nunes from Committee chair

I'll be shocked if Ryan makes a move on Nunes, even though Nunes absolutely should be removed, but what this does accomplish is that if he doesn't do it, his reputation is forever tied to Nunes'.  Also, rumors are still swirling that Ryan plans to retire from Congress this year.

I don't think these Republicans give a shit about their reputations, however. They're riding a wave of unprecedented disrespect for the Constitution and the rule of law which Trump keeps in play as long as he's in office, allowing these creeps to enrich themselves and open the last territory of once limited corporate abuses. But, at the moment, this formal request may be all the disempowered and disgraced Democrats can do.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote Speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday demanding the removal of Rep. Devin Nunes as Intelligence Committee chairman, saying he has "disgraced" the committee with "dishonest" actions related to an ongoing probe of Russia and the Trump presidential election campaign.

[...]

"It is long overdue that you, as Speaker, put an end to this charade and hold Congressman Nunes and all Congressional Republicans accountable to the oath they have taken to support and defend the Constitution, and protect the American people," Pelosi, D-Calif., wrote Ryan, R-Wisc.

"The integrity of the House is at stake," she wrote.

  CNBC

Ryan has no honor, and the Republican party has no accountability. Nor does the House have any integrity.

Here's Pelosi's letter in full. "Honorable" is a laugh when used to address Congressmen.

The Honorable Paul D. Ryan
Speaker of the House of Representatives
H-232, United States Capitol
Washington, D.C. 20515 Dear Mr. Speaker:

The decision of Chairman Nunes and House Republicans to release a bogus memo has taken the GOP's cover-up campaign to a new, completely unacceptable extreme.

Both the DOJ and FBI oppose releasing the Nunes memo. As the Department of Justice warned, the public release of the memo would be an "unprecedented action" and "extraordinarily reckless." The FBI also expressed that the agency has "grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy."

It has now come to our attention that Congressman Nunes deliberately and materially altered the contents of the memo since it was voted on by the House Republicans. This action is not only dangerous, it is illegitimate, and violates House rules.

From the start, Congressman Nunes has disgraced the House Intelligence Committee. Since pledging to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation, Congressman Nunes has abused his position to launch a highly unethical and dangerous cover-up campaign for the White House.

Congressman Nunes' deliberately dishonest actions make him unfit to serve as Chairman, and he must be removed immediately from this position.

House Republicans' pattern of obstruction and cover-up to hide the truth about the Trump-Russia scandal represents a threat to our intelligence and our national security. The GOP has led a partisan effort to distort intelligenceand discredit the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities.

It is long overdue that you, as Speaker, put an end to this charade and hold Congressman Nunes and all Congressional Republicans accountable to the oath they have taken to support and defend the Constitution, and protect the American people.

The integrity of the House is at stake. We look forward to your immediate action on this subject.

Sincerely,

NANCY PELOSI
Democratic Leader

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Just. Wow.

UPDATE:

Just as you might guess...Ryan defends Nunes. Ryan is as corrupt and self-serving as any Congressman ever was.

Or, Paul Ryan is lying.

Say what?

Another shutdown looming

A group of the No. 2 leaders from each chamber — Cornyn, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) — are getting nowhere in their immigration discussions.

[...]

[M]any rank-and-file GOP lawmakers who reluctantly backed the last temporary funding bill, including conservatives and defense hawks, are balking at yet another patch.

With Congress now staring down its fifth short-term spending bill since September, frustration is spreading across the House Republican Conference, particularly as negotiations have stalled over raising stiff budget caps and providing relief to so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows is threatening to withhold votes for another funding bill without more concessions on immigration. The North Carolina Republican told reporters this week that members of his hard-line caucus couldn’t vote for the bill until Speaker Paul Ryan makes good on his promise to push a more conservative immigration plan.

  Politico

They'll all still blame the Democrats for a shutdown. His Highness is already tweeting it out.  And the Democrats are famous for folding in the face of bad publicity.

Several Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee are pushing GOP leaders to attach a full year of defense spending to the next “continuing resolution.” After this month’s politically painful shutdown, they believe Democrats wouldn’t dare vote against it.

They know their opponents very well.

“One of the arguments we heard from Senate Democratic leadership last week against the CR was: ‘It hurts the military.’ OK, it doesn’t if you do the defense appropriations bill,” Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.) said in an interview Tuesday.

Yeah, Democrat Claire McCaskill tried to get that done, but Mitch McConnell blocked her, so how do you blame Democrats? Easy, apparently. Just say it's their fault. And if the Democrats are too timid to fire back with the truth of the matter, it's their own fault they come out the bad guys.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

CDC Director resigns

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar had planned to send a clear message to Congress and his new boss in the White House that he would not tolerate ethically questionable behavior.

[...]

Less than 48 hours after being sworn in, Azar accepted the resignation of CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald amid questions about her judgment and conflicts of interest.

[...]

“Alex has a really low tolerance for drama,” a person familiar with Azar’s thinking said. “He wants the president to look at HHS and say, ‘This is my workhorse. This is the place where I’m getting stuff done.’”

  

Sorry, Alex. His lordship doesn't give a shit whether anything is working, and he's not impressed with ethics.

Sources inside HHS and the CDC say there were several reasons to believe Azar couldn’t stand for any more public relations problems in his agency. Fitzgerald’s lingering problem with an ethics recusal — she wouldn’t do work on cancer detection or some aspects of the opioid crisis — posed enough of a problem for the CDC.

“We have like the worst flu epidemic ever, and she’s not out there,” a source close to the department said of her inability to testify. “That’s mind-boggling at a very basic level.”

Recall that Fitzgerald bought stock in tobacco firms as soon as she got the position with the CDC and then had to sell it when the fact was uncovered.

Sometimes even the Trump cabal can get too greedy too fast. I know it seems like that's not possible.

I think that the GOP are under the impression that it's now a free-for-all, and they're going to support Trump for as long as they can in order to personally enrich themselves. I don't know how long this can go on, but I know it can go on too long, and the country collapse under the weight of corruption.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

I wonder why the Pequot tribe can't get a new casino approved

Federal law gives Interior just 45 days to issue a yes-or-no verdict after a tribe submits proposed changes to its gaming compact with a state, as the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot tribes note in a suit they filed against Zinke and the department. But the department declined to make any decision in this case, an inaction that raises questions about whether an intensive lobbying campaign by one of the gambling industry’s biggest players muscled aside the interests of both the tribes and the state of Connecticut.

“I think the Department of Interior has been derelict in failing to give approval” to the tribes’ request, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told POLITICO. “We asked for a meeting, but they were unresponsive. They never even responded.”

Meanwhile, MGM and its allies had direct access to Interior. Zinke had multiple conversations last year with Sen. Dean Heller and Rep. Mark Amodei — two Nevada Republicans whose state is a major center of employment for MGM, and who have each tried to impede the tribes’ casino plans. The company also doubled its lobbying spending and assembled a team that includes Bush-era Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Florida-based Trump fundraiser Brian Ballard.

[...]

An Interior spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment, but the department is due to respond by next week to the suit the tribes filed in November. MGM has sought to join the suit on Interior’s side.

[...]

The proposed Connecticut casino would sit on non-tribal land just across the border from a billion-dollar casino that MGM is planning in Springfield, Mass. The Pequot tribe’s Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut has previously provoked the ire of former New Jersey casino owner Donald Trump, who complained during a 1993 congressional hearing that “they don’t look like Indians to me.”

  Politico

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Well, what a fucking surprise

How about we start calling these ridiculous claims what they are: lies.

The heart of darkness.  The heart of Hell.

Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress early last year attracted at total of 47.7 million viewers, for example, while former President Barack Obama had 48 million in Jan. 2010 and 52 million in Feb. 2009 and former President George W. Bush had 62 million in Jan. 2003 and 51.9 million in Jan. 2002, according to Nielsen.

  The Hill

State of the Union addresses are just smoke-blowing. They could be fifteen minutes long and still get everything - which is never anything but self-flattery and bullshit - in. By all rights, this president, who is so outrageous and predictably unpredictable, should have drawn enormous numbers of people just waiting to hear or see what outrage he might offer. The fact that the viewer numbers were as comparatively low as they were is a sign that we don't even care about that any more. The country is apparently exhausted with this asshole.

It was the most elaborate of charades, the most sophisticated of masquerades, that played itself out in the chamber of the House of Representatives on Tuesday night. The amount of pretense required to keep all sensible people—which is to say, any person who was not a Republican—in their chairs must have been heroic.

[...]

Everyone had to pretend that a freak show was Shakespeare, and that a rumbling, stumbling geek was Lincoln, and that the whole tableau unfolding before the Congress was somehow made noble despite the obvious fact that the whole event was an endless procession of lies and half-truths, and that the only truly remarkable thing about the speech was that it was such a perfectly round and complete crock of shit.

  Charles P Pierce

After a night’s reflection, I have come to the conclusion that, while delivering his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, the president* really didn’t know what he was saying. By this, I don’t mean that he didn’t understand the subjects he was discussing; that is a given with this president*. (For example, when the president* discussing “beautiful clean coal,” he not only is discussing something that doesn’t exist, he’s also discussing something he doesn’t understand, even in the theoretical sense.) I mean that he was not wholly aware of the words that he was speaking.

  Charles P Pierce

Pretty sure he was doped up. I didn't watch the charade, but I've seen some clips, and like all his telelprompter speeches, he sounded sedated.

My evidence for this is the fact that, before the address began, we were handed a copy of the prepared text so that we could follow along and, in the not inconsiderable possibility that the president* would pause to bite the head off a live chicken, mark where in the text he chose to do so. Generally, these texts are printed on official stationery and they are presented essentially as a document in conventional prose. Instead, for reasons known only to god, what we were handed were copies of the speech as the president* would read it from the podium. Words and phrases he was supposed to emphasize were written in all caps, not unlike what you’d see in the angry part of a Tweet. For example:

“As I promised the American People from this podium 11 months ago, we enacted the BIGGEST TAX CUTS AND REFORMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”

This curious happenstance enabled us to watch in real time as the president* utterly botched the stagecraft of his address. He blew through most of the capitalized points of emphasis, only occasionally leaning into them the way he was supposed to. So, even on its most basic level, the speech was completely unbalanced in what it chose to emphasize.

[...]

[T]here is such an overwhelming sense of the malignantly whimsical to everything he says and does that nothing seems important, and there is evanescence where there should be emphasis. Nobody knows where the applause lines are any more.

There aren't any. But, if you watched the Republican side of the aisle, they were everywhere. Perhaps they had a cheerleader who cued them.

Here goes Ron Wyden again

This disgusts me.  This is why Ed Snowden is in exile.  Because Ron Wyden is a twat and publicly admitted to knowing something "sensitive" and "classified" and outrageous that was being done by the NSA, but wouldn't tell us what it was.  If the American people deserve to see something, he has the power to show us. And he won't go to jail or exile for it, like so many whistleblowers have.

We no longer have Congressmen with conscience.  

Amen.

The worst kind of people's representative: I know something that is harming you, but I'm not going to do anything about it, because: rules.

Fuck off, Wyden.

UPDATE:  Here's Jeremy Scahill defending Wyden.  I'm not swayed.