Honoring the U.S. service members killed this year

Salute. 

Breitbart/Bannon is doubling down on a pedophile

Below is a screen capture from tonight (click on image to enlarge).

He may be a pedophile but he is our pedophile

Max Boot (military historian, foreign policy analyst, and conservative) on Republican response to Roy Moore revelations (link):

This episode is the sorry culmination of two trends that have disfigured the conservative movement beyond all recognition: contempt for the facts and desire to win at all costs. Republicans are increasingly reliant on ‘alternative facts’ manufactured by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart, which claim that global warming isn’t real and neither is the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee. The real scandal, they tell us, is the Steele dossier paid for by the Democrats in an attempt to uncover Trump’s Russian connections. Or is it the evidence-free claim that Obama supposedly wiretapped Trump?” 

“In the final analysis, no indictment of their candidate will convince the faithful. As Trump once said, ‘I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters’ Or, more to the point, Roy Moore could molest a 14-year-old girl and not lose votes. Because for Republican partisans, their opponents are ‘the forces of evil,’ and anything is preferable to that. Even Donald Trump. Even Roy Moore. So in ostensibly fighting evil, Republicans have become complicit in it.” 

“This is a party that does not deserve to survive.”

It is "SAD" when parody = reality

Click cartoon image below to enlarge. Link.

Trump's carnage

From The Economist - summary of opinion piece (link).

 For all its flaws, America has long been the greatest force for good in the world, upholding the liberal order and offering an example of how democracy works. All that is imperilled by a president who believes that strong nations look out only for themselves. By putting “America First”, he makes it weaker, and the world worse off.

Roy Moore is toast

Link.  Someone clever managed to suppress this story until Moore's name could not be removed from the ballot.  

Virginia House of Delegates harbinger

Link from conservative Weekly Standard.

Put [it] in perspective for a moment: The Democrats began the night just one net loss away from giving Republicans a supermajority. They finished it one seat away from parity.

This transgender candidate beats 13 term conservative Republican upset (and others like it in state and local elections across the country yesterday) will influence the future behavior of those seeking federal reelection in 2018.  In short --

Virginia voters elected the state's first openly transgender candidate to the Virginia House of Delegates on Tuesday.

Danica Roem unseated incumbent delegate Bob Marshall, who had been elected thirteen times over 26 years . . .

Just another outrage

Trump is threatening to fire his chief law enforcement officer if Sessions doesn't open an investigation into Trump's political opponents.

Link.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said he is “disappointed” with the Justice Department and won’t rule out firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, if Sessions won’t investigate Democrats.

"I forgot"

Link.   How is it possible for Trump to recover?  Best case scenario for him seems to be maintaining the status quo, which is not good at all.

Quote:

President Donald Trump said Friday that he does not “remember much” from a 2016 meeting attended by then-campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty earlier this month to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. . . 

The president’s claim that he did not recall much from the 2016 meeting comes nine days after he claimed to possess “one of the great memories of all time,” a defense he put forward to argue that his recollection of a conversation with a military widow was more accurate than that of the widow herself and a Democratic congresswoman who heard the call on speakerphone.

Donald Trump philosophy of life closely resembles Steve Martin's character from this bit from the 1970s. Trump started with millions of dollars from his father, and it seems more likely than not that (1) Trump did not pay all of his taxes  and (2) at least turned a blind eye to some shady foreign dealings (financial and political).

Trump's "I didn't know" seems to be morphing into "I forgot".

Why staff the federal government?

Link.

President Trump says "I'm the only one that matters" in setting U.S. foreign policy, downplaying the importance of high-level jobs such as the assistant secretary of state, which is currently vacant.

Moron.

"The end of the beginning"

Link. 

That’s not to say the media isn’t liberal or anti-Trump; I’ll grant you all that. But in a desperate effort to dismiss what Mueller has unearthed, conservative media has purposely conflated a bunch of things that, taken in context, aren’t terribly relevant at the moment . . .  

The only thing for sure right now is that Mueller has his talons into some Trump associates who would probably throw the president off a plane before they’d spend a single day in jail, so it’s fair to assume that whatever they know will be known to all of us before long.

Opening indictments

From the analytical, scholarly, objective LawFare (link):

This is only Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s opening salvo. As opening salvos go, it’s a doozy. . .  

We will say this: Mueller’s opening bid is a remarkable show of strength. He has a cooperating witness from inside the campaign’s interactions with the Russians. And he is alleging not mere technical infractions of law but astonishing criminality on the part of Trump’s campaign manager, a man who also attended the Trump Tower meeting. 

Any hope the White House may have had that the Mueller investigation might be fading away vanished this morning. Things are only going to get worse from here.  

"John Kasich Is Already Running"

Please.  Link.

New chapter - first indictments

Nine months from inauguration, the first "criminal" shoe drops.  The next year is going to suck worse than the last one for the country.  Count 1: "Conspiracy against the United States".

Pdf of indictment here.

UPDATE:  From Facebook.

Keep an eye on the ball

From LawFare: "The (Ir)relevance of the Trump “Dossier” 

"One important point is sometimes lost in the discussion.  The dossier itself played absolutely no role in the coordinated intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in our election."

GOP reckoning

The reckoning within the GOP has momentum, thank goodness.  Silent or otherwise complicit Senate Republicans are now all Trump Republicans.  Link.  The crazies must be defeated.    

Flake quits

Flake announces retirement as he denounces Trump

If Flake's floor speech — and retiring Republican Sen. Bob Corker's scathing criticism of the president earlier Tuesday — was any indication, Trump could be in for a long year of vocal opposition from prominent members of his own party before they leave the Senate. 

Flake will be treated kindly by the history books.  He never endorsed Trump, and later wrote a book repudiating everything Trump.

More Corker

Corker continues his assault on Trump this morning.

"I think the things that are happening right now that are harmful to our nation, whether it's the breaking down of . . . relationships we have around the world that have been useful to our nation," he said. "But I think at the end of the day, when his term is over, I think the debasing of our nation, the constant non-truth telling, just the name-calling ... I think the debasement of our nation will be what he'll be remembered most for, and that's regretful."

"Debasement of our nation."  That sums it up perfectly.

UPDATE: NY Times. "Mr. Corker, who supported Mr. Trump in the 2016 presidential election, told CNN on Tuesday that he would not do that again."

McCain and Corker v. Trump

Senator McCain and Senator Corker, both liberated of any reelection concerns, have opened a two-front Republican battle with Trump on terms that Trump understands - personal digs.

McCain essentially called Trump a coward with his recent comments about deferments during Vietnam for "bone spurs" without mentioning Trump by name.

Corker went further.

Same untruths from an utterly untruthful president. #AlertTheDaycareStaff

— Senator Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker) October 24, 2017

Now there are at least two in open revolt against Trump in the ranks of Senate Republicans. When will it be 10? 20? The sooner the better, for the sake of the country.

End of blog hibernation

My last post here was more than 3 years ago. That post (just below) shared information about the incredible growing menace of ISIS. Just last week, the retaking of Raqqa marked the end of ISIS' territorial "Caliphate".  A lot can happen in 3 years.

The next 3 years are going to have incredibly lasting historical significance. Trump is a runaway train and it seems to me that complete derailment is almost inevitable before 2021.

The blog is open again, and for at least the next 3 years.