LOL, that actually is the only negative here.

Spicer must be grinning from ear to ear.

All of that ... just to get rid of Preibus?

Even I can't figure out THIS one.

Does it actually count? His official start date was August 15th.

yeah some reports have Spicer helping with the resignation message, so it must be a very big grin indeed. I like that Kelly is taking over like this from Day 1. but I will reserve my judgment until he names a replacement.

Hope he goes after Bannon next

Doesn't firing Bannon complicate matters since he can use Breitbart against the Trump administration?

well he already has all the media except Fox and Breibart against him already, so what's one more? I think he could get away with it with the same excuse he used with "mooch".

Eh... Bannon has been a huge fan of Kelly's, so I doubt Kelly is going to turn around and fire one of the guys that was instrumental in getting him the CoS job.

This probably won't help Rep. Flake make any friends in the White House (not that he had many)

My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump - POLITICO Magazine

Mooch is the Quentyn Martell of the Trump administration.

Well his supporters only read those outlets. When state media turns against you, it makes things a little harder.

I do think Fox will stay loyal but Bannon has the power to hammer away at him online if they want.

FWIW, I saw Huckabee Sanders press conference today. I thought she did well in the parts that I saw, much better than Spicer

Happily, some pushback against Scaramucci's "hair and makeup" comments.

Hell, he just got my vote next time he runs.

When you start firing close staff in embarrassing ways, they're going to talk. This is a doozy.

Trump dictated son’s misleading statement on meeting with Russian lawyer - The Washington Post

What a CF. Scaramuicci blows in and forces Spicer and Preibus out, then gets bounced by Kelly. Seems Spicey and Reincey got put out to pasture for nothing...

The 4D chess explanation is that Scaramucci was brought in to force Preibus out because that's how it works in the business world and Trump is a businessman.

Which made sense, and worked ... but surely that isn't the only person that needed to be chased off, so I'm not getting chasing the chaser so quickly.

Maybe it's personalities though, maybe Kelly will rub the next one/batch more wrong than Mooch.

Which would mean Mooch destroyed his life because Trump was too much of a puss to fire people on his own.

And what's the explanation for Trump not just doing that himself?

The NYT folks keep hinting at a re-rise of Bannon, who may now be licking his lips, in forcing the Mooch ouster.

Just a bad day all around for the Mooch.

Anthony Scaramucci erroneously listed as dead in the new Harvard Law alumni directory - The Washington Post

Oh, and his estranged wife also ...

I believe I half jokingly questioned whether or not Trump understood that he could be charged with obstruction even if a crime wasn't committed at some point in this thread and reports are saying no, he in fact doesn't understand that.

Today in Trump WTF:

A story that says Trump dictated Don Jr's initial meeting statement

and

A story that says Spicer met with the Seth Rich conspiracy guy before the story aired on Fox.

And the white house worked with Fox news directly on it.

He's never had to tell anyone theyre fired.

From Wired:

I think that promoting General Kelly is a smart move by Trump.

:lol:

Maybe his lawyer can inform him...


...oh.

The good news from there is if he's working as his own publicist that could mean that we'll get John Barron as his next Communications Director.

Apologies if this Michael Lewis/Vanity Fair article was posted last week. I had it open on my work laptop and finally got around to reading just the first 20% or so of it. I think this came out among the transgender ban/HC failure/Mooch going crazy hoopla so may have overlooked it.

Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House | Vanity Fair

Good God these two sentences are so condescendingly brilliant.

Thanks for the link, Logan.

maybe youve just been wrong?

Thanks, Logan. I shat my pants, barfed a little and now I can't sleep.

There's that, but there's also the "Trump creates chaos to distract from other things" narrative.

How true? Who knows. OTOH, there was Senate testimony going on about how Russian intelligence uses kompromat during Mooch's brief tenure.

Which seems more likely? That he was used for 10 days to get rid of Spicer and Priebus, or that he was used as a circus act to distract from the hearings?

Nah, cause too much of it has made sense to this point really. And they did shed themselves of Preibus so things fit pretty well right up to there.

There's been too much that made sense for it to be mere stopped clock exceptions.

Incidentally, I'm still stuck on how to set the over/under line for Kelly as CoS.
I'm leaning toward the high side and thinking 32 days.

You know, even if I agreed with the man's politics or thought he was brilliant, I don't honestly know how I could remain in the company of such a man for more than a few minutes. I mean, at some point, I am pretty sure I would tell him he needs to shut the f $#!@ up. Or I would physically attack him and get shot by the secret service.

Or maybe Trump creates chaos....because Trump creates chaos?

I wouldn't be shocked to hear that Trump wasn't aware of Mooch's pre-election comments about him until after he was brought in. As in, maybe he had a vague idea but not exactly quotes or audio. I mean, it's plausible anyway.

Also regarding Russia and Don Jr, etc....seems to me that Trump is a good example of terrible ineptitude mixed with narcissism. He doesn't even think to ask if there are rules against something because he is convinced they don't apply to him anyway. Whereas your average scumbag politician at least tries to appear above board.

This.

I think we have enough evidence to put to bed the notion that he's playing 11 dimensional chess. He's a toddler. It's as simple as that.

Bingo

JiminMGA is just overthinking it IMO

But that speech he gave in West Virginia.

Boy Scouts dispute Trump claim that their leader called his speech 'the greatest' | TheHill

I like imaging the White House administration having an intern call Trump pretending to be the Head of Boy Scouts to tell him it was the greatest speech they ever heard.

Lies > Truths

My finger in the breeze says this change is for real (whatever that even means in this context) and he'll be there forever... like several months, even.

Especially not while golfing.

Great article, though it is completely one-sided. Interesting to read about my company in there - I did a little of the preliminary work on the Metcalf investigation, definitely some scary stuff. The precision and obvious intent behind it was slightly terrifying...the fact that we couldn't tie it to anything more than what was done even moreso.

God I wish I was a WH intern right now!

Would you rather blow the President or be blown up by the President?

Taken from Facebook:

Those Calls to Trump? White House Admits They Didn’t Happen

So in other words, we can't believe anything the President says.

Dmitry Medvedev on Twitter: "The Trump administration has shown its total weakness by handing over executive power to Congress in the most humiliating way"

Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "Our relationship with Russia is at an all-time & very dangerous low. You can thank Congress, the same people that can't even give us HCare!"

I guess one way to get around accusations of secret meetings with foreign agents is to just try and undermine American institutions on Twitter instead.

The only thing that Trump and truth have in common are the first three letters.

From the leaked transcript of Trump's first call to the Australian PM:

Wow, the transcripts are pretty much what I would have expected, I guess, but it's just painful to read through.

Transcripts of Trump’s calls with Mexico and Australia - Washington Post

He thinks that people in a refugee camp are "in prison".

My favorite

We're supposed to believe what he means, not what he says.

To Trump his speech was the greatest the Boy Scouts had every heard, and Mexico should be thanking him for talking about his wall. So those phone calls are something Trump believes he could be told, which is basically the same as them actually happening. And that makes Trump a straight shooter who tells it like it is.

pic.twitter.com/sSuwxolM4b

— Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) August 3, 2017

Ya know it's sad that our own President needs an interpreter

/wonders how DD is doing in his drug-infested den

Trump really needs an Arrested Development style narrator at all times.

“I won New Hampshire..."
He didn't.
"...because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den.”
It isn't.

"I am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people into the country."
Uhhhh, what?

I eagerly await next week's Twitter rant about "Rhode Island, pus-ridden lair of toothless whores".

I think he has Kelly Ann Conway for the former and there would be 702 other scapegoats ahead of me for the later. So I'll just leave him messages from {insert organization here} and tell him how great his latest speech was.

17 day golf vacation for the CiC. Hope he can come back relaxed.

Fake news alert: Mueller has reportedly impaneled a grand jury.

a brief check of "the_donald" subreddit, I'll cherry-pick this as my favorite highly upvoted comment:

CNN: Grand Jury
MSNBC: Grand Jury
Fox News: Are zebras a kind of horse?

The Grandest Jury! You've never seen a jury this Grand! Obama never had juries this Grand!

Looks like Kelly is off to a good start as Chief of Staff:

Kelly cracks down on West Wing back channels to Trump - POLITICO

By looking at Trump's history and business strategy, I have zero doubt the end game here is litigation. He will react to any viable threat to remove him from office by suing and attempt to entangle this in litigation for years to come.

Richard Nixon, he ain't.

Can he get him to stop talking to Sean Hannity?

Not a fan of transcripts like this leaking. But it does show the President blatantly lied to the public yet again.

It's tough to read that stuff and not wonder if he's suffering from early on-set dementia or something else. It's just not how a healthy person converses with people.

His behavior/manner is entirely consistent with chronic cocaine use. Just sayin'.

It's how a stupid narcissist out of their depth and with a mistaken belief in their ability to bullshit intelligent people act.

"We lost a lot of factories in Ohio and Michigan and I won these states – some of these states have not been won in 38 years by a Republican and I won them very easily. So they are dancing in the streets. You probably have the same thing where they are dancing in your streets also, but in reverse"

I'm intrigued by this "reverse dancing in the street" concept. What's the reverse of dancing in the streets? Not dancing in the streets? Or rioting?

Reverse Dancing in the Street:

Trump tonight:

"There were no Russians in our campaign"

Had some RL stuff happen the last few days, but to catch up on a worthwhile discussion:


Depends on whether you mean the right to counsel in general or the right to have an attorney provided for you if you can't afford one. The first is very much fitting with my original point.


The second isn't a right in the 'Bill of Rights' sense. Right or wrong is different from 'unalienable rights', and people who talk about healthcare being a basic human right aren't talking about being moral/just. They're putting it on the level of the second group. This is fundamentally not just about semantics.


The second one, more or less. There are many things which can cause death which were obviously not intended to be covered.


Doesn't necessarily follow at all, and I'm regularly confused by this line of argument. I understand how it follows from a certain point-of-view, mind you, but that's not the traditional conservative one which is being questioned here. That view would in general say that the biological parents of the child are responsible for bearing the cost of their own behavior. Again there's a rather massive difference between believing government has a duty to protect life, and believing it has a duty to mitigate unwanted consequences. Whether that difference is meaningful is going to depend a lot on where one falls on the political spectrum, but they aren't even close to being the same thing.

.02

Except that the "unwanted consequences" don't happen in a vacuum, and this is where conservatives miss the boat. This isn't "don't want chlamydia? don't have sex."

The birth and upbringing of children is very much a social thing. I don't mean Hillary Clinton's "it takes a village"; that's a different discussion.

What's at issue here is what becomes of the next generation and whether or not the children born into that generation become a drag on society.

Conservatives, traditionally, abhor the social welfare state and the idea that there are generations of welfare babies who are born into welfare and birth their own children into welfare.

You want to talk about logic, it is deeply illogical for conservatives to wring their hands over the societal burden children born into poverty become, while at the same time working to prevent impoverished young women from controlling their own fertility. You can't have it both ways. If it's a moral issue that impoverished young women should bear the consequences for their choices, or that women who are raped should bear the consequences for the choices of others (and remember, "rape and incest" are by no means universally approved exceptions to the conservative anti-abortion orthodoxy), then it's a moral issue for the state to help the children born as a result escape the cycle of poverty.

And, no, that doesn't mean taking away those babies and giving them to wealthy, infertile, white couples. That's ALSO a moral issue.

So, I mean, is the state compelled to act in its own best interest? Because I would argue that it is in the state's best interest to either actively assist its citizens in controlling their own fertility, or at least benignly not prevent them from doing so.

In whose interest is it for a child to be born into a situation wherein that child grows up to have three or four children of their own in the same desperate circumstances?

Who does that benefit other than free-marketers who want distressed labor as cheaply as they can politically acquire?

"This culture of leaking must stop." - Roman Catholic Church
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Tobacco Companies
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Nixon
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Bernie Madoff
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Enron
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Banking industry
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Oil Industry
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Trump Justice Department

I like how "stop being so laughably incompetent that folks feel the need to leak about what you are doing to save the country" isn't part of the strategy.

Again, a tweet for every scenario.

Why is @BarackObama always campaigning or on vacation?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2011

"Don't take vacations. What's the point? If you're not enjoying your work, you're in the wrong job." -- Think Like A Billionaire

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2012

When will Obama next go on vacation if he wins the election? The day after.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2012

Pres. Obama is about to embark on a 17 day vacation in his ‘native’ Hawaii, putting Secret Service away from families on Christmas. Aloha!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2013

President @BarackObama's vacation is costing taxpayers millions of dollars----Unbelievable!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2012

Not from their POV it isn't. We're now far afield from the original issue that was under discussion, but if you apply non-conservative assumptions to conservative positions(or do a similar exercise with any other worldview), you're going to come up with a lot of conflicts. For the purposes here, it should be enough to recognize that some people think these things do basically occur in a vacuum and they would take issue with other assumptions being made here as well. That doesn't make them illogical; if there held liberal assumptions about the world, they'd probably be liberals, not conservatives.

I was on the plane last night and was watching CNN special on the 80's regarding Ronald Reagan. It was pretty cool re-living events, some of you around in the 80's should check it out.

There was a Korean airline that was shot down by the Soviets during the height of the Cold War in the early 80's.

The episode said that when intel told Ronald Reagan that this mistake happened because the Soviets really thought the US would do a first strike, he was surprised that Soviets really thought this way and decided to start discussions and have the 2 leaders get to know each other. The first meeting was a get to know each other and it ultimately progressed to a reduction in nukes.

I don't think now that mano-mano talks can happen with NK (and Trump doesn't have the charisma of the Gipper and he'll threaten vs negotiate) but do wonder if Obama could have tried the personal charm offensive.

Just an interesting coulda, woulda, shoulda what-if scenario.

Logic has nothing to do with "point of view."

What you're talking about is willful cognitive dissonance.

"All life is precious until it's born" is what it boils down to when a one votes for a politician who simultaneously wants to take policy actions that negatively impact a woman's ability to control her own fertility while at the same time taking actions to restrict said woman's ability access to things like SNAP, health care, y'know.

I'm not trying to make a case for ABORT ALL THE BABIES here.

What I'm saying is if evangelical conservatives really thought through the implications of their single-issue voting, they'd realize that on this issue there is no way to have their cake and eat it too. They can have heavy restrictions or bans on fertility control, or they can reduce dependency on the social safety net.

That isn't a Gordian knot that can be cut unless you're willing to go back to before the 1960s and say "20% poverty is a completely acceptable tradeoff in exchange for government codifying my moral beliefs into law."

Which is itself at odds with the alleged moral-religious beliefs of that crew.

And, yes, there are issues where liberals engage in some cognitive dissonance of their own. But those aren't the issues under discussion at this moment.

Have sex only under circumstances which are acceptable to us, or you deserve poverty. Basically what it boils down to for that crowd.

Or maybe they're right to view abortion as murder, and not "controlling fertility," but dead wrong on compassion after birth.

He actually came blame Obama for his latest vacation. Work was scheduled on the White House when he was still in office to do this work (air conditioning I think) for this time when the President traditionally takes a vacation-so probably good he is not there. But yeah still its amazing how he completely forgets that he tweeted against something when Obama was President, but suddenly now it is okay.

Republican donor sues GOP for fraud over ObamaCare repeal failure | TheHill

Good luck with that.

And also wrong on birth control and sex ed.

No I'm not. Let's use one of your examples, since I used to believe the way you incorrectly describe.


Again, not necessarily. You can believe in limited government, and through that prism find that taking money from your fellow citizens to fund such things is wrong, while at the same time believing there is a governmental mandate under the concept of justice to protect the unborn from being unjustifiably killed. Those two things do not necessarily conflict. Everyone -- and I do mean everyone -- wants to do certain things to protect life, and not certain other things(I don't know anyone who thinks every single person should be under constant guard to avoid threats and have an automatic 100k income, for example). Drawing the line at a specific point does not mean you no longer value life, it's simply a recognition of where your boundary is on what government should and should not do.

I am more in this group. However, no one should receive a blank check for having kids and sitting on their butt.

That said, if you go to a class, have to show up weekly for a check in, or have social services go out to a house to check in regularly? Put me down. I am all about teaching a man to fish.

Heck, I'll even shift gears a bit, growing up, the kids that were gifted cars, for the most part, did not take care of them. Those that had to buy a car, or heavily invest to maintain the car, kept their car spotless.

It's a matter of care and responsibility. If you know, regardless of what happens, you will receive something. Who cares about taking care of things? When you have to work for it, people tend to take better care of things because they are invested and it is a matter of pride.

After starting to type up responses to recent posts about 10 times and stopping, I just went back and found this quote that sums up most of my feelings ideally.

And yet because the left forgot that poor white people actually exist and are also not secretly rich, they lost the last election.

See how that works? No one gets anywhere taking the other's stances and pushing those stances to ridiculous extremes, just to pat themselves on their own morally superior backsides.

All that does is create division.

Instead, let's acknowledge that both sides have good ideas and bad ideas and hopefully they can work together to find a happy middle. And if their supporters stop tearing into each other on social media every day, maybe the reps in DC will start to think they can actually make intelligent policy decisions, instead of catering to the extremes of their own parties to ensure re-election.

Working in Bedminster, N.J., as long planned construction is being done at the White House. This is not a vacation - meetings and calls!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2017

Everything's a con.

I want to know what the conservative ideas that help poor people are.

I'll pretend that's an honest question and say: the conservative approach is to allow private organizations to do the work. Some do a great job of it. Some are just fronts for taking people's money.

The problem with the "conservative" approach is that the religious organizations that actually do the work the right way are under attack from the alt-right/Trump dumpster fire and have been since day 1.

"In their private lives, religious Americans are extremely generous. According to the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving at Indiana University, donations to congregations, denominations, mission board, and TV and radio ministries account for roughly one-third of all annual giving in the U.S."

"In 2001, the University of Pennsylvania professor Ram Cnaan tried to tally the financial value of all congregational social services in Philadelphia, estimating that it added up to roughly $247 million."

"If programs like the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grants are cut, as Trump has proposed, many religious organizations would lose major parts of their operating budgets. This kind of federal-spending cut can have tangible consequences: World Relief, an evangelical organization that works with the federal government on refugee resettlement, cut 140 staffers and closed five offices earlier this year when the Trump administration announced a sharp decrease in the number of refugees that will be accepted into the United States."

"Using a national survey of religious congregations in the U.S., the Duke Divinity School professor Mark Chaves found that 83 percent of congregations have some sort of program to help needy people in their communities."

Can Religious Charities Take the Place of the Welfare State? - The Atlantic

Obviously, there would be a lot to replace if current government programs went away, but the people most likely to do so are typically conservative politically.