Fear and Loathing in Flight.

The scene in the air traffic control tower at Dulles International Airport during a tour by the Federal Aviation Administration along with UPS and United Airlines as they gave a firsthand demonstration of the NextGen technology called Data Communications on Sept. 27, 2016. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post).

If you need another reason to fear or loathe the American flying experience, the Tiny Tyrant has you covered! Privatizing, that will work, you bet. I guess the whole farce of airport security wasn’t quite enough of a total fuck up.

The White House on Monday will formally endorse a plan to spin off more than 30,000 federal workers into a private nonprofit corporation, separating the nation’s air traffic controllers and those who work on a $36 billion modernization program from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The Trump administration proposal, which will be presented at the White House later Monday, essentially is an endorsement of a plan that failed to gain sufficient traction in Congress last year.

The plan, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is in keeping with the stated desire of the administration and congressional Republicans to streamline government and transfer some functions into private hands.

[…]

That National Air Traffic Controllers Association backed Shuster’s plan, saying the new corporation would ensure more stable funding than Congress could provide, while the 11,000-member Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union strongly opposed it.

“It is unfathomable, even dangerous, to consider gambling with the future and safety of our air traffic control system through privatization,” PASS President Mike Perrone said in a statement last month.

Mirroring much of Shuster’s 2016 proposal, a four-page White House proposal underscores that “no group should have the appearance of influence over the board of directors,” countering the argument that the airlines would dominate the board.

The new corporation would pay for itself through user fees for airlines and “reasonable” fees passed on to passengers, the administration said. It also would have the authority to adjust air routes after seeking public comment, recognizing that NextGen routing will cause noise over houses that haven’t previously experienced low-flying planes.

Hmmm. How does “the appearance of influence” work? Does that mean if you don’t appear to have influence, you’ll be free to have actual influence? I really don’t like such weaselly language, reads to me like loophole language. I don’t fly much, but yet more “reasonable” fees tacked on to the cost of flying? Don’t see that one being terribly popular.

The Washington Post has the full story.

Mr. Tweet’s Incoherent Ride.

Mr. Tweet has gone on yet another tweetstorm, this time, spilling the truth, which I’m sure was an accident. The Tiny Tyrant has become well unraveled after the terror attack in London, and the mass amounts of scathing scorn heaped on his head over his initial response. (That response was basically “guns! if you had guns…”).  Now he has unleashed a set of tweets which are garnering yet more scorn. I’m rather amazed his head isn’t burning at this point. This is the last tweet in a long line of them:

The Tiny Tyrant: “In any event we are EXTREME VETTING people coming into the U.S. in order to help keep our country safe. The courts are slow and political!”

You know what else is slow and political? You, dumbshit. So far, a near-fatal eyeroll hasn’t killed me, but if they keep happening at this pace…

President Donald Trump kicked off Monday morning with a tweetstorm calling for courts to allow a travel ban barring travelers from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.

[…]

For months, the White House has argued that Trump’s ban on travelers was not a “Muslim ban,” even going so far as to delete a campaign statement on “preventing Muslim immigration.” In January, Trump claimed the media was “falsely reporting” that he had ordered a Muslim ban. That same month, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump’s executive order “is not a travel ban.”

Yet at its core, Trump’s recent tweets speaks to the intent that he is indeed preventing Muslims from entering the United States. In hearings on whether to lift the injunction on Trump’s ban, judges cited the president’s previous comments about “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” as evidence that he’s specifically discriminating against Muslims.

Particularly with Trump’s “politically correct version” tweet, it would now likely be more difficult for his lawyers to continue to argue that he’s not intending to bar Muslims.

Think Progress has the full story on the import of these tweets, and Raw Story has a selection of choice responses to the Fucking Idiot.

The Tiny Tyrant, Disavowed.

Oh, poor li’l Donny, no church wants to own his decidedly not christian arse. The Tiny Tyrant has been disavowed.

A new CNN report on President Donald Trump’s fraught relationship to Christianity reveals that not only is the president unwelcome in his childhood church in Queens, but that the son of the last religious leader he was close to has publicly renounced him.

According to the report by journalist MJ Lee, the evolution of Trump’s quasi-Christianity took him from First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens, where he was raised and confirmed, to Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.

Although Trump was close to Marble’s former reverend and author of the bestselling self-help book “Power of Positive Thinking” Norman Vincent Peale, the late pastor’s son has publicly rebuked the president. Prior to the election, Peale’s son John said he “cringes” when Trump invoked his father’s name on the campaign trail.

“I don’t respect Mr. Trump very much. I don’t take him very seriously. I regret the publicity of the connection,” Peale’s son wrote. “This is a problem for the Peale family.”

The Peale family weren’t the only ones to distance themselves from Trump — during the campaign, Marble Collegiate issued a statement rejecting Trump’s claims that he attends their church and stated he “is not an active member.”

Though the Trump family is reportedly church-less, the president enjoys touting the religiosity of his supporters.

Looks like the list of people who have no use at all for the Tiny Tyrant is growing by leaps and bounds. Full article at Raw Story.

Sunday Facepalm.

Okay, this is going to be something of a roundup, because there is a whole lot of facepalm to be had on this fine Sunday. We start with that Prince of Purple Prose, Lance Wallnau, who simply gets goofier and more absurd as he attempts to find good things about the Tiny Tyrant. His latest took place on a Christian Cruise of Nuttery.

“That same unpredictable, erratic Twitter twitch that he has is in the hand of the Lord,” Wallnau said, asserting that Trump’s tweets about China forced Chinese president Xi Jinping to come to America “to try to just get a handle on him because he’s tweeting these crazy tweets.”

That meeting was fortuitous, he explained, because it happened just as Trump ordered airstrikes on Syria for its use of chemical weapons against civilians.

Wallnau said that “it was the hand of the Lord” that Trump bombed Syria while President Xi was visiting because that move showed China that it must take steps to rein in North Korea.

On top of that, Wallnau celebrated Trump’s ignorance about world events, saying that he doesn’t have to understand these sorts of issues because “when you are anointed, you can get away with a lot of things.”

Where to start? I suppose ‘unpredictable, erratic Twitter twitch’ suits Jehovah well enough; it is a bundle of psychopathy, whims, and tantrums. I rather doubt the Tiny Tyrant’s Twitter Twitch has forced anyone to do anything. Meetings with global leaders is standard protocol anytime there’s a new president Fucking Idiot in the white house. The supposed reason for the Syria bombing was Ivana Jr’s upset over those poor babies. I expect it was more in the line of “I can use my toys! Look what I can do!”

I have described the current regime in terms of Nineteen Eighty-Four more times than I can count, and now I don’t think that’s quite enough. Yes, people can get away with a lot of shit here in Amerikkka if they have enough money, are white, and in particular, in politics. We have an outdated constitution, which is closer to dogma than policy, and a highly broken, fucked up political system. It’s not being anointed. Although, I wouldn’t be averse to oil being dropped all over Donny, followed by a ton of glitter. I’m evil like that.

Via RWW.

Yesterday, Religious Right pundit Michael Snyder unveiled “a list of 100 things liberals hate about America,” warning that if liberals get their way, “the country that you and I love so much today will be gone forever.”

The list of things liberals hate about America includes big trucks, big cheeseburgers, Jesus, Israel and Dolly Parton.

Oh, Sweet Zombie Jesus, this post would be a mile long if I tackled each item on the list. I will note that Jesus comes in at #29, well below both Trump and Pence. Pretty sure that qualifies as some kinda sin. If you’d prefer to stay away from Charisma News, and who could blame you, RWW has the full list. And for the record, I like Johnny Cash. Just sayin’.

And then there’s trumPence, trying to sound all veeply, opining over why climate change became an issue at all:

Pence hailed Trump for demonstrating “leadership” by pulling out of the international accords and standing “without apology for the American people.”

He added that he was perplexed as to why people, particularly liberals, even care about climate change: “For some reason or another, this issue of climate change has emerged as a paramount issue for the left in this country and around the world.”

I can answer your bafflement, sir – we don’t want to fucking die, and we don’t want to live in utter hellholes, tortured in every way, before we fucking die. Not so sure if I mind if you drop dead and spare us the oxygen.

Via RWW.

And last, we have that sterling moron, Wayne Allyn Root, who, after boasting about his abilities to beat the shit out of a liberal, went on to whine about how mean young people are, especially on Twitter. After that, he went on a rant about race. I’ll let you good folks click over and read that part, I haven’t had enough tea or functioning server for that one yet.

Despite his tough talk, Root spent a good portion of his radio program yesterday complaining that vulgar liberals were being mean to him on Twitter, at one point saying that calling him “old” is no different than calling a black person the N-word.

Root said that he has been the target of “the most disgusting, low down, revolting profanity-laced, filthy, wash your mouth out with soap gutter language you ever heard from liberals” on Twitter. He was particularly upset by the fact that “every single young liberal in the world, every single one of them [was] calling me ‘old man,’” despite the fact that he is only 55 years old.

“There’s no difference in when you call someone ‘old’ versus when you call someone the N-word,” Root said. “There’s no difference. It’s a lack of respect. It’s filthy. It’s disgusting.”

Root said he was shocked by the racism of the “millions and millions of Hillary voters, Bernie voters, Obama voters, liberals in general, young liberals who think anyone over the age of 30 should be called an old effin’ white man.”

“Every young liberal in this country, from what I’ve seen answering me, needs a bar of soap to wash their filthy little mouths out and maybe a mother with some class who would have taught them something about how you speak to somebody,” he stated.

I’m 59 years old, looking at 60 in November. Yeah, I’m old. So what? I know when I moan about old people, in particular, old white men, it’s not their age as much as that their brains atrophied about 50 years previously. As an old hippie, I well remember don’t trust anyone over 30. We had that on stickers, man. Nothing new under the sun, and at 55 years old, Root should at least be aware of hippies and the counterculture. It’s not an insult to be called old. Lots of places, societies have a great deal of respect for their elders. I suggest if you’re getting such flak, it’s because your tiny pea brain is indeed atrophied, and there’s that whole fucking idiot business. You really need to climb down off that cross, Mr. Root, it’s very flimsy and about to collapse.

RWW has the full story.

Trump Toilet Paper.

Mock-up of Trump toilet paper packaging.

Now, this is a good idea. A shame it won’t be marketed in uStates, I imagine it would be a bestseller.

A Mexican businessman says he is introducing “Trump” toilet paper because he’s “really bothered” by President Trump’s past remarks about his nation.

“My thinking was: We can’t keep quiet, right?” corporate lawyer Antonio Battaglia said Wednesday in a phone call with The Associated Press. “So with this insult that was made, [I figured] I’m going to add my grain of sand in response.”

Battaglia said he has signed a contract for a small initial run worth about $21,400, enough toilet paper to fill two cargo trucks. He added that he hopes to create enough demand to expand production.

The AP reported that the product will be marketed under the slogans “Softness without borders” and “This is the wall that, yes, we will pay for.”

Packages are expected to start rolling off production lines later this year, the AP reported, with 30 percent of the profits pledged to programs supporting migrants.

Battaglia gave the AP a mock-up package that says it contains four “puros rollos” — a double entendre that literally means “pure rolls” but can also be interpreted as “pure nonsense.”

The packaging also includes a cartoon roll of toilet paper with Trump’s iconic blond hair, smiling and flashing a thumbs up.

Battaglia’s trademark for Trump toilet paper was approved in October 2015, according to records from Mexico’s Institute of Industrial Property.

The AP reported that the Trump Organization failed to obtain a trademark on what is called “hygienic paper” in Spanish.

It seems that the branding company that is the Trump family forgot to trademark Trump in the hygiene products sector. Hmmm, someone, quick, trademark Trump Ass Wash™, and get some cheap soap in a bottle on the shelves.

Via The Hill and The Guardian.

Target: The Tiny Tyrant. Brilliant!

As always, artists are at the forefront of the latest Tiny Tyrant Total Fuck Up, brilliantly skewering Trump’s idiotic, uniformed, grossly mistaken decision to withdraw from the Climate Accord. Apparently, Trump asked “at what point do they start laughing at America”, being utterly oblivious to how people have viewed this lost country since his campaign and election. Ever the Fucking Idiot.

Marian Kamensky, America First. Click for full size.

You can see more of Marian’s shiny skewering here.

 

Vasco Gargalo, Little Man.

You can see more of Vasco’s work here.

Ose Koer.

You can see more of Ose’s work here.

David Rowe. Excusez Moi.

You can see more of David’s extremely sharp work here.

You can see more at Raw Story.

Trumpholes.

Trump supporters at a rally in Minnesota on March 4, 2017. (Fibonacci Blue/Flickr).

As the Tiny Tyrant continues his quest to “Make America Great” by turning it into a 3rd world hellhole, we can all turn to the Trumpholes, those bastions of stupidity and willful ignorance, for the current hole we find ourselves in, as we slide ever deeper.

Wesley Easterling took him at his word. Like so many of his neighbors, Easterling relies on Medicaid and food stamps to provide for his wife and daughter. His Kentucky county is among the poorest in the country. When he cast his ballot for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, he never imagined the president would gut essential federal assistance programs.

“He had a kind of charisma about him, something different,” Easterling told CNN. “He played me for a fool.”

Fellow Trump voters, particularly those in rural counties where his proposed budget cuts would wreak the most havoc, increasingly feel the same. As of May 31, the president’s approval rating sits at 39.1 percent against a disapproval rating of 54.9 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight. If he was profoundly unpopular in March, Trump is now plumbing new depths.

More revealing is new data suggesting the president’s bedrock of support is beginning to crumble.

[…]

Yet for every Wesley Easterling, Krista Shockey and Michael Williams, there’s a Scott Seitz of McDonald, Ohio. A two-time Obama voter, he claims he switched parties because Trump spoke to the one issue that mattered most to Seitz: jobs. Seitz’s family has succumbed to the white working-class plagues of heroin addiction, unemployment and single parenthood. While he insists he would have “voted for Bernie Sanders in a heartbeat,” he’s still willing to give the country’s scandal-plagued president a chance. “We put him in, and we will hold him accountable,” he told Vanity Fair.

Oh, right, you flaming fucking idiot of a doucheweasel. That holding him accountable business is really working out, isn’t it? Jesus Fuck.

Then, there are the Idiot’s Idiots sprinkled about:

As CAFE.com video producer Matt Binder points out, Trump fans at Reddit’s /r/The_Donald produced multiple posts asserting that Trump’s tweet was actually a covert message meant to express solidarity with the Afghani government in the wake of the terrorist attack in Kabul earlier this week.

Over the past day, the following posts have received copious votes from r/The_Donald users:

Commenters on the posts were ecstatic at the purported revelation that their “God-Emperor” had seny them a coded message.

“26D chess!” exclaimed one. “He got everyone to cover the ‘covfefe scandal’ and once it is realized by the normies that he did actually mean something, they’ll be forced to cover that too! F*cking genius Trump!”

“So he wanted the media and the leftist retards to think he screwed up,” wrote another. “He let them go on and on and on, while we just had a blast with it. That Magnificent Mad Man.”

Another Trump supporter, meanwhile, said that tweet proved that Trump was working on converting Arabs to his cause.

“He’s redpilling them in their own language!” the fan gushed.

Right now, I could lay down under a pile driver and get it over with, but since there isn’t one anywhere near, I’m declaring this day my personal ignorance is bliss day, and I’m going to play with paint. What with the FTB server being down every five fucking minutes, I don’t need more reasons to spike my blood pressure.

Via Raw Story, One, Two.

And, The Idiot Fucks Us All Into The Ground.

President Trump announced Thursday afternoon that he is withdrawing the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, a move that honors a campaign promise but risks rupturing global alliances and disappointing both environmentalists and corporate titans.

But Trump said he would seek to negotiate a new climate deal that is, in his view, “fair” to America’s interests.

“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord but begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers,” Trump said.

“We’re getting out,” he added, “but we will start to negotiate and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. If we can, that’s great. If we can’t, that’s fine.”

Trump argued that the Paris agreement would “punish” the United States and instituted “onerous energy restrictions” that would stymie economic growth, especially in manufacturing industries. The president claimed that meeting the accord’s greenhouse gas emission standards would cost the United States close to $3 trillion in lost gross domestic product and 6.5 million industrial jobs.

I can’t go on. Not right now. Jesus Fuck, the idiot is going to kill us all. Full story is at The Washington Post. Read at your peril. Also, stay the hell away from twitter, it’s infested with fucking idiots, waving their tiny flags, which are considerably bigger than their brains.

There’s also this, but there’s no funny business with Russia, no, no.  And this: Trump’s argument for withdrawing from Paris agreement contains multi-trillion dollar math error: In a cost-benefit analysis, you’re supposed to analyze the costs and the benefits.

The War On Autonomy.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer.

It seems I never come to the end of people who weakly defend the Tiny Tyrant because Pence. “He would be worse!” I am very tired of hearing that. No, he would not be worse. We’ve had theocrats in office before, remember George faith-based initiatives and abstinence only Bush Jr.? He was a born-again christian theocrat. So yes, Pence would be a theocrat, and while Trump cannot be accurately described as such, he’s acting as  theocrat, so what fucking difference does that make? None. At least Pence would be less likely to let the nukes fly. Although, that said, Pence is up to his pasty neck in the Russia business, too.

Women have been repeatedly targeted in the Fuck You Care Plan, and Trump is happily enabling the ‘moral objection’ shit, along with making some very dangerous moves in regard to abortion. Trump also didn’t waste anytime in removing guidelines and protection for transgender people, including children, and wiped out many protections in place for all LGBT peoples. Trump is more than happy to give the Religious Reich whatever they want, and in return, they will do whatever they think is necessary to keep his abundant arse in power.

The Trump administration is poised to roll back access to birth control by severely weakening Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate —  and, at the same time, dangerously weakening the distinction between “religious” objections and “moral” objections to reproductive health care.

During the Obama years, the birth control wars largely focused on the tension between people seeking contraceptive coverage and religious employers who object to birth control in some form or another. Both Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Zubik v. Burwell, the two contraception cases heard by the Supreme Court in the last several years, involved employers who objected to providing birth control coverage on religious grounds.

Yet a handful of hardliners — the March for Life, the Alliance Defending Freedom, Justice Samuel Alito — have tried to blur the line between religious objectors and moral objectors. While cases like Hobby Lobby and Zubik involved claims that people with religious objections to the law often have the right not to follow it, the hardliners would extend this right of defiance to people who raise moral objections not rooted in religious belief.

That’s a major shift that would seriously undermine the efficacy of the law as a whole. And, in a document leaked to Vox’s Dylan Scott and Sarah Kliff, the Trump administration appears to embrace this shift. Under the rule described in this document, employers who do not want to provide birth control coverage to their employees will be permitted to do so so long as they claim that doing so would violate their “moral convictions.”

Think Progress has the full, in-depth story.

On May 31, 2009, Scott Roeder killed Dr. George Tiller, a late-term abortion provider, in Wichita, Kansas. By all accounts, Roeder waited in the pews of Tiller’s church, and then following service, he walked into the church foyer and shot him directly in the forehead. Roeder, who was staunchly anti-abortion, committed murder because of Tiller’s national prominence as an abortion provider. Now, eight years later, the country is recreating and expanding the same environment of extremist views that allowed for Tiller’s murder.

Since Trump came into office, his administration and the Republican-majority Congress have been on a mission to impede the rights of people — especially women, girls, and their providers — from accessing constitutionally protected health care services. Earlier this month, the House passed the American Health Care Act (AHCA) of 2017 which Trump vehemently supported. The AHCA disproportionately targets women: domestic abuse, rape, pregnancy, C-section, and maternity care can all be considered preexisting conditions. Less than two weeks later, Trump expanded the Mexico City Policy, also known as the Global Gag Rule (GGR), a death wish for women around the world seeking abortion services. The GGR, newly named “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance,” says that foreign aid can go only to organizations abroad that “neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning.” The rule could affect up to $9 billion in funding that is also used to combat health concerns like HIV/AIDS, Zika, and more.

Trump, an accused sexual assault perpetrator, has always promoted violence and hatred against women, including being able to access safe and legal abortions without criminal prosecution. During his candidacy, Trump said that women who seek abortions should be subject to “some form of punishment” if the procedure was banned in the United States. Trump eventually changed his mind (his fourth position on abortion in just three days) and claimed that only “the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman.” Nonetheless, this position still leaves abortion providers on the hook for performing a medical procedure that should be decided on by only a doctor and their patient. This kind of rhetoric would only embolden people like Roeder.

Allowing extreme policies against reproductive rights will increase the numbers of unintended pregnancies, which will increase the number of unsafe abortions. If pregnant peoples’ rights to immediate services are curtailed, this will undoubtedly cause a delay in options. As a delay continues, so does the potential for an unwanted pregnancy which could cause seeking a late-term abortion — the same abortions performed by the late Tiller. That, in turn, allows people — who are like Roeder — to effectuate their extremist views on those seeking healthcare services, including but not limited to abortion and family planning options.

Think Progress has the full, in-depth story.

Today marks the beginning of Pride Month. The Regime, however, is not celebrating. They aren’t even mentioning it, no. Instead, it’s all about:

Yep. You can read all about it here.

A Smithsonian Noose and Lynching Threats.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Facebook).

Yet another noose has been found at The Smithsonian, this time on the floor of an exhibition about segregation.

A noose, a symbol of racial lynching, was found on Wednesday on the floor of an exhibit about segregation at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution officials said.

[…]

“The Smithsonian family stands together in condemning this act of hatred and intolerance, especially repugnant in a museum that affirms and celebrates the American values of inclusion and diversity,” the institution’s secretary, David Skorton, told the staff in an internal email. “We will not be intimidated.”

Full story here.

Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has been forced to cancel portions of her book tour, thanks to coverage from Fox News, who painted her as an evil anti-Trump person.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor delivered the commencement address last month at Hampshire College, and Fox News aired a portion of the 20-minute speech Sunday that called attention to her criticism of President Donald Trump, reported The Stranger.

Taylor, a Princeton University professor of African-American studies, described the president as a “racist, sexist, megalomaniac,” and the Fox News report suggested that she was encouraging activists to lawlessly thwart the Trump agenda.

After the report on her “Anti-POTUS tirade” aired, Taylor said she has received more than 50 hateful and threatening emails — some of which were issued with such specificity that she canceled portions of a tour to promote her new book, “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.”

“Shortly after the Fox story and video were published, my work email was inundated with vile and violent statements. I have been repeatedly called ‘n****r,’ ‘b*tch,’ ‘c*nt,’ ‘dyke,’ ‘she-male,’ and ‘coon’ — a clear reminder that racial violence is closely aligned with gender and sexual violence,” Taylor said. “I have been threatened with lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum put in my head.”

She accused the conservative network of airing the report in an attempt to silence her and other Trump critics.

“I am not a newsworthy person,” Taylor said. “Fox did not run this story because it was ‘news,’ but to incite and unleash the mob-like mentality of its fringe audience, anticipating that they would respond with a deluge of hate-filled emails — or worse. The threat of violence, whether it is implied or acted on, is intended to intimidate and to silence.”

This awful reactionary shite on the part of conservatives everywhere is seriously out of hand. Not long ago, PZ had a post up which included a terrifying view of how the GOP thinks, and they think that liberal people are so darn scary, it justifies hiring Three Percenters and Oath Keepers and the like to protect them, because us evil liberals think they are Nazis. Yes, well…if you’re willing to embrace white supremacist ideology and hire Nazis, you should probably expect that sort of thing. People are being murdered; threats are amping up; hate crimes are again spiking. We must carry on fighting, more than ever before.

“Their side uses the threat of violence and intimidation because they cannot compete in the field of politics, ideas, and organizing,” she said. “The true strength of our side has not yet been expressed in its size and breadth, and so they believe they are winning. We have to change this dynamic and begin to build a massive movement against racism, sexism, and bigotry in this country. I remain undaunted in my commitment to that project.”

I stand with Professor Taylor. The right insists that liberals are horrible, violent people, because we do things like criticise, and protest. Oh yes, there are those vicious letter writing campaigns, too. There’s a hell of a lot of projection on the Right Reich’s side, and they are willing to embrace actual violence along with Nazism.

Full story here.

Magnetic Personalities, How Do They Fuckin’ Work?

Hope Hicks, left center, attends a White House press briefing in January. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post).

A statement by Hope Hicks on Monday truly highlights the absurdity of the Tiny Tyrant and the Wannabe Regime. It not only reads like a parody, it reads like a bad comic book parody, being chock full of magnetism.

President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000. He has built great relationships throughout his life and treats everyone with respect. He is brilliant with a great sense of humor … and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible.

Um, that’s so over the top, you kind of need to keep staring at it, in the hope the ol’ brain will comprehend it one day soon. It’s so full of “oh, no, no, nope, so fucking wrong” it has the ability to reduce people to sputtering wrecks, morphing into balls of tearful laughter somewhere on the floor. If Trump loaded himself down with magnets, he wouldn’t have a magnetic personality of any kind. He may be considered charismatic to some, although I’m hard pressed to think of any. Even his diehard fans don’t consider him charismatic, they liked him because he 1) wasn’t a politician and 2) was  a hateful, asshole bigot who promised them white vengeance. No charisma in sight.

Brilliant? Right. We are talking about the Fucking Idiot who said: “You know, I’m, like, a smart person.” A sense of humour? Where? Because I’m pretty sure if there ever was one residing in Trump, it jumped ship ages ago. Making people feel special? Huh. Like refusing to shake hands with Angela Merkel? Or the thousands of tweets denigrating just about everyone on the planet? Or all the Trump Tantrums™ and insults he lets fly all over the white house? Jesus, I haven’t even warmed up on this one yet, the list could go on forever here.

Hicks composed the statement in response to a Washington Post report on Trump’s habit of cutting down staffers with insults. The most jarring thing about her characterization of the president is not the inaccuracy; it’s the sudden rejection of Trump’s entire political brand.

To say that Trump “exudes positive energy” is to ignore the whole premise of his campaign. He would not need to “Make America Great Again” if America were currently great — and Trump made very clear that he believes it is not.

Not only that, but the Tiny Tyrant ran on a platform of bigotry and hate. All of it was “those people are criminals! rapists! awful! evil! stealing your jobses, precious!” and so on. FFS, not only does this represent a brand new low in fucking idiocy, this blatant attempt at pandering to, um, whoever, will not work. Most people know it’s absolute bullshit, and his diehard followers don’t want a magnetized Trump, they want the stupid, evil asshole they voted for, so the point of all this? No idea.

The Washington Post has the full story.

The Tiny Tyrant’s Intelligence.

Trump. AP News.

It seems the Tiny Tyrant shares Bush Jr.’s love of comic style intelligence. Oh, yay. Not only a fucking idiot, but proud of it.

President Trump consumes classified intelligence like he does most everything else in life: ravenously and impatiently, eager to ingest glinting nuggets but often indifferent to subtleties.

Most mornings, often at 10:30, sometimes earlier, Trump sits behind the historic Resolute desk and, with a fresh Diet Coke fizzing and papers piled high, receives top-secret updates on the world’s hot spots. The president interrupts his briefers with questions but also with random asides. He asks that the top brass of the intelligence community be present, and he demands brevity.

As they huddle around the desk, Trump likes to pore over visuals — maps, charts, pictures and videos, as well as “killer graphics,” as CIA Director Mike Pompeo phrased it.

“That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate,” said Pompeo, adding that he, too, prefers to “get to the core of the issue quickly.”

The fawning ass kissing of Pompeo and Coats is sickening, to say the least.

Yet there are signs that the president may not be retaining all the intelligence he is presented, fully absorbing its nuance, or respecting the sensitivities of the information and how it was gathered.

Goodness. Perhaps I’ll find time to be shocked after I make every effort to recover from this near-fatal eyeroll.

Intelligence officials were prepared to deliver daily briefings to Trump throughout the transition period, but the president-elect often turned them away, usually agreeing to sit for briefings only once or twice per week.

“You know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years,” Trump told Fox News last December.

If you need to, like, tell people you’re smart, like, all the time, you’re a fucking idiot.

Trump prefers free-flowing conversations over listening to his briefers teach lessons. “It’s a very oral, interactive discussion, as opposed to sitting there and reading from a text or a script,” Pompeo said.

I’ll refrain from the easy joke here. I. Will. Refrain. I. Will…

When he took office, Trump signaled to his national security team that he favors concise points boiled down to a single page.

“I like bullets or I like as little as possible,” he said in a pre-inaugural interview with Axios. “I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.”

Trump also has encouraged his briefers to include as many visual elements as possible. This is a reflection, aides said, of Trump’s career as a real estate developer who evaluated blueprints and renderings to visualize what a property eventually would look like.

Oh yes, being a sleazy, mobbed up real estate con, why that’s just like presidenting! Golly, there must be an easy peasy blueprint for everything!

The Washington Post has the full story.