"The butt of global jokes": who might this be? (Talk Trump)

[Scot Dutchy]

Always hope.

[Svartalf]

frigging unlikely, even if he should be impeached or judged after he leaves the White House, the worst that can happen to him will be informal house arrest, btween the NY Frump Flower and his mar a lago estate...

[Animavore]

Hope? Fuck hompe. Hope died in 2016. Quit dreaming.

[Forty Two]

For one. Why has he not been locked up. He is a criminal.

Well, the US still goes by the old tradition of having to actually have committed a crime to be a criminal. Just pursuing political agendas that some whackjob leftists find distasteful is not (yet) a crime.

[Forty Two]

Hope? Fuck hompe. Hope died in 2016. Quit dreaming.

Hope was reborn in 2016. Despite the lunatic protestations of weirdos who think that low unemployment and a strong economy are less important than whether someone calls xir by the wrong pronoun, the lot of and prospects for the future of the common person in the US were greatly improved by the Trump administration.



The efforts and desire to ruin it, and take us back to the politics of fear and self-loathing, coupled with your "any means to an end" mentality, are downright awful.

[Seabass]

The relentless onslaught of corruption from these assholes is just staggering.

tldr version:
Trump appointee Zinke under investigation by Inspector General for corruption.
Maneuvers are made to replace IG with the same toadie that Ben Carson used to turn the other cheek on his excessive spending.
They get caught, so they lie and say they were doing no such thing.
Backpedal on replacement; "nothing to see here".

Amid confusion, Interior Department says HUD official is not taking over as agency watchdog

The confusion over the Interior watch dog started last Friday when HUD Secretary Ben Carson sent an email to his agency bidding a "fond farewell" to Assistant Secretary Suzanne Israel Tufts who he said would be the new "acting Inspector General" at the Interior Department.

The email was quickly leaked and raised alarm bells among those who view inspectors general as impartial, non-political investigators of government waste, fraud and abuse. Carson's announcement came amid multiple IG investigations into Zinke.

Tufts is an attorney from New York who Trump appointed to be an Assistant Secretary at HUD. Her resume touts her work as a poll watcher for the Trump campaign on Election Day in 2016, as well as her work at Trump campaign events.

News of Tufts' new role broke on Tuesday and alarmed a group of inspectors general who were meeting on Wednesday at an awards ceremony in downtown Washington. One official who attended the event said it was "astonishing" to move to replace an inspector general with a political appointee who lacked government oversight experience.

[Tero]

The Onion
President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has received more than $106 million for his bid for reelection in 2020, new Federal Election Commission reports show. What do you think?

“It’s exciting to see the 1 percent putting their tax cuts to good use.”

PHOEBE CROCKER • MUSTARD BOTTLER

[Seabass]

Meanwhile, a more in-depth analysis of the journalist assault incident can be read here.

Apposite remarks in that article include:

... the president and his conservative allies are attempting to characterize their political opponents as a “violent mob.” Make no mistake: The only modes of communication the president accepts are obsequious praise and sniveling deference, a standard his legions of defenders have adopted as their own. Any criticism of or opposition to Trump they see as illegitimate by definition.

It is in no way surprising that those who defend free speech while encouraging state punishment of political critics, or who champion due process while demanding Trump’s rivals be imprisoned, would evince a similarly insincere commitment to political nonviolence: One of the core principles of Trumpism is that the rules only apply to others. But there is perhaps still more to the president’s endorsement of political violence than meets the eye. The president and his party are facing a potentially disastrous midterm election that, despite a monumentally successful effort to rig district maps and election rules in their favor, may still cost them their congressional majority in the House.

By endorsing violence against journalists, the president may be able to shift coverage away from his administration’s effort to aid the cover-up of a murder by a U.S. ally to whom the president has direct financial ties, and toward terrain where the president feels he has the advantage: Trump’s war against the fake-news liberal media.

Republicans have been hitting the panic button for weeks. Trump’s signature legislative achievement is cutting his own taxes, an accomplishment Republicans have struggled to sell to their constituents. In states like North Dakota and Georgia, Republicans have sought to disenfranchise Democratic voters in order to rig elections in their favor. Having run for years on repealing Obamacare, Republican candidates all over the country are lying to their constituents by insisting that they have supported its core protections. In district after district, Republican incumbents are running race-baiting ads invoking terrorism and immigration, in the desperate hope that appealing to prejudice can rescue their grip on the House.

In short, it's an attempt to distract from the fact that the Trump administration has been shitting on pretty much everyone but the über-rich, whilst lining their own pockets at the expense of ordinary Americans, in the hope that these distractions will prevent a "blue wave" from rolling over them in the midterm elections. An attempt that also points to an essential nastiness at the very heart of Trump's GOP - a nastiness that sees critics and vulnerable people alike, as fit only to be beaten to a pulp. Yet the same thugs and bullies of the GOP, in a cosmic exercise in projection, seek to tar the Democrats with the GOP's own nastiness.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Hilariously lying for the boss, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders claimed that the change in plans for the FBI building was done at least partly because Il Douche 'wanted to save the government money.' In fact, scrapping the previous plan will cost the government significantly more.

'Did Trump spike FBI HQ relocation plans for personal gain? House Dems want to know'

House Democrats are probing whether President Trump scuttled a yearslong plan to relocate the FBI's headquarters from a prime real estate location in Washington, D.C., to a more suburban locale for his own financial benefit.

New documents, including emails, purportedly show that Trump during a Oval Office meeting in January approved of a proposal to instead raze the existing structure and rebuild a new campus in its place, according to the group of top Democratic House lawmakers Thursday. Their broad assertions are supported by a report released in August by the internal watchdog overseeing the General Services Administration, which manages federal properties. Some of the emails, however, appear to be newly resurfaced.

The change of plans, a more expensive alternative to simply selling or leasing the site in exchange for constructing a new FBI headquarters elsewhere, prevented "Trump Hotel competitors from acquiring the land" on which the J. Edgar Hoover Building now stands, the House Democrats wrote in a Thursday letter to GSA Administrator Emily Murphy.

“As a direct result of President Trump’s clear conflict of interest on this matter, we are now requesting information and documents to determine whether the President is making decisions about the FBI headquarters building based on what is best for the country or what is best for his own financial bottom-line,” Rep. Elijah Cummings, the House Oversight Committee's ranking member, wrote.

[Scot Dutchy]

Those armament contracts are speaking:

Donald Trump says he finds Saudi explanation of Khashoggi death 'credible'

The US president welcomes admission as ‘important first step’ amid widespread scepticism in Washington

[Svartalf]

Yeah, of course they do, I mean, we sell ordnance to the saudis even though they are deeply involved in the Yemen kerfuffle and we have a regulation that ought to forbid us from selling weapons when there's a significant risk they be used in the commission of war crimes...

[Brian Peacock]

Paul Manafort to appear in court in prison jumpsuit to work out sentencing details.

[Scot Dutchy]

The cunt is at it again.

Trump says US will withdraw from nuclear arms treaty with Russia

Experts warn of ‘most severe crisis in nuclear arms control since the 1980s’ as Trump confirms US will leave INF agreement

His "friends" have built new weapons and want sell them. A small treaty is in the way.

[Svartalf]

great, back to cold war, is that guy a total moron or what?

uh, wait...

[Scot Dutchy]

Well his "friends" made a "killing" in the last cold war.