This Russia thing with Trump and Russia

May 12th, 2017 9:05 am | By

The Post explains how Trump pulled the rug out from all the people who had been saying he fired Comey because the Deputy AG sent him this overwhelming memo and he leaped up and said “Fire him right now!” It never sounded very plausible, and the part about Clinton’s emails sounded even less plausible, but they stuck to it – until Trump stuck his lips out at Lester Holt and told a completely different story.

President Trump threatened Friday morning to end White House press briefings, arguing that “it is not possible” for his staff to speak with “perfect accuracy” to the American public.

Trump’s comments come after his description of his decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey

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James Comey better hope

May 12th, 2017 8:45 am | By

Trump has been erupting on Twitter again. He’s still descending. Bottom not yet in sight.

The last item yesterday was this clownish exclamation:

That guy next to him is the enforcer. He has the piss-the-bed tapes strapped to his leg.

Today is all Comey-Russia-press jabber.

“Again,” he says, as if repetition=truth.

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Trump begged Comey to cuddle him

May 12th, 2017 5:39 am | By

So Trump invited Comey over for dinner this one time. Comey didn’t want to go but didn’t think he could say no, so he went. It was a week after the inauguration.

As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies. The president then turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him.

Sly. That wasn’t the two of them making small talk. It was Trump boring on about his Crowd Size and Comey swallowing the urge to tell him to grow up.

Then Trump made a wholly inappropriate demand for “loyalty,” as if Comey were his personal assistant.

Mr. Comey declined to

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The broad, well-established, interdisciplinary scholarly fields

May 11th, 2017 4:58 pm | By

But wait, there’s more. One of the people who signed the letter attacking Rebecca Tuvel – one of the “colleagues” who signed it – wrote a piece for the CHE saying why the signers were right to sign it.

As one of the many scholars involved in writing the open letter calling on Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy to retract the essay “In Defense of Transracialism,” by Rebecca Tuvel, I am compelled to come forward and attempt to reclaim a narrative spinning increasingly out of control.

Five words in the bullying starts – she has to make clear that it was many scholars. (I’m not sure they are all genuine scholars; I think some are adherents rather than … Read the rest



Rat shan’t visit party

May 11th, 2017 4:18 pm | By

So all last weekend Donald was fuming about Comey’s “mild nausea” at the possibility that his blather about Clinton’s emails might have affected the election – yet today, always resilient, always willing to think the whole world adores him, he was planning to visit the FBI to give them a nice morale boost…until he found out that they don’t love him all that much. He’s not a quick study, is he.

The White House has abandoned the idea of President Trump visiting FBI headquarters after being told he would not be greeted warmly, administration officials told NBC News.

Amid the continuing fallout over his decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, Trump was considering an appearance at the

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Donald doesn’t know what he doesn’t know

May 11th, 2017 3:34 pm | By

Today in an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News Trump called Comey a showboat.

Yes that’s right. Trump called Comey a showboat.

Trump called Comey a showboat.

He also said he asked Comey whether he was under investigation.

“Sir, sir, please sir, am I under investigation?”

He says Comey told him he wasn’t. Yeah right. He also said Obama spied on him in his jammies at Schlump Tower, so what he says happened isn’t worth a dog’s fart.

“I actually asked him” if I were under investigation, Trump said, noting that he spoke with Comey once over dinner and twice by phone.

“I said, if it’s possible would you let me know, ‘Am I under investigation?’ He said,

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Oh, are they Russian?

May 11th, 2017 11:29 am | By

Yesterday the traitorous lying thief in the White House held a meeting with his Russian buddies and kept the press out. He kept the press out. He really does think he’s a dictator and can do any damn thing he wants to, and that we are his peons.

When President Trump met with top Russian officials in the Oval Office on Wednesday, White House officials barred reporters from witnessing the moment. They apparently preferred to block coverage of the awkwardly timed visit as questions swirled about whether the president had dismissed his F.B.I. director in part to squelch the investigation into possible ties between his campaign and Moscow.

They prefer lots of things that are in their interest … Read the rest



A pointed rebuke

May 11th, 2017 10:37 am | By

Awkward for Donald: the acting director of the FBI says Donald’s claim that the agents didn’t love Comey any more is Not True. So much of what Donald says is Not True.

McCabe is testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee right now.

Mr. McCabe rejected the White House’s assertion that Mr. Comey had lost the backing of rank-and-file F.B.I. agents, a pointed rebuke of what had been one of the president’s main defenses for the move.

“Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the F.B.I. and still does to this day,” Mr. McCabe said at the hearing.

“The vast majority of F.B.I. employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey,” he added.

But but but but the president saidRead the rest



Voter suppression time

May 11th, 2017 10:22 am | By

The Times reports:

President Trump plans to name Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has pressed for aggressive measures to crack down on undocumented immigrants, to a long-promised commission to investigate voting fraud in the United States, a White House official said Thursday.

The commission is the official follow-through on Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that several million “illegals” voted for his Democratic rival and robbed him of a victory in the national popular vote.

An unsubstantiated claim of that kind is more properly called a lie, especially when it’s made with malice by a sitting president. Trump just makes shit up, and since he’s not six years old and not talking about pixies in the … Read the rest



can we get this person fired

May 11th, 2017 9:35 am | By
can we get this person fired

Commenter helterskelter alerted us to a Facebook post by Zoé Samudzi on April 28 vehemently dispraising Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article and suggesting a letter.

It turns out it’s a public post, so we can all read it.

who’s on the editorial board over at hypatia? i honestly want to talk about this absolutely disgusting and harmful legitimization of “transracial” identity beyond adoption. what kind of garbage de-raced and probably trans-exclusionary gender studies professor wants to pretend that socially constructed identities use the same logics and are interchangeable? is gender suddenly inheritable the same way race is?

who wanna put together some kind of letter because i refuse to allow this garbage to gain traction. if anyone has institutional access

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An enraged president stewing

May 10th, 2017 5:25 pm | By

The Times has the inside scoop on how it all went down inside Trump’s brain psychotic rage organ and the surrounding buildings.

The countdown to President Trump’s dismissal of James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, began last weekend with an enraged president stewing over Mr. Comey’s testimony to Congress last week, when he admitted to being “slightly nauseous” about doing anything to get Mr. Trump elected.

Mr. Trump, according to people close to the president, had been openly talking about firing Mr. Comey for at least a week. Despite the objections from some of his aides about the optics and the lack of an obvious successor, the grumbling evolved into a tentative plan as he angrily watched the Sunday news

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Please sir, can I have some more?

May 10th, 2017 3:53 pm | By

They just wanted to slow the investigation down a little, that’s all.

Days before he was fired, James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in resources for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to four congressional officials, including Senator Richard J. Durbin.

Mr. Comey made his appeal to Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who also wrote the Justice Department’s memo that was used to justify the firing of Mr. Comey this week, the officials said.

“I’m told that as soon as Rosenstein arrived, there was a request for additional resources for the investigation and that a few days afterwards, he was sacked,” said Mr.

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Ideological alignment dressed up as intellectual expertise

May 10th, 2017 11:53 am | By

At Quillette, Oliver Traldi on the Rebecca Tuvel uproar.

The letter he refers to is the open letter explaining how Tuvel was wrong wrong wrong.

The letter’s most important point is hidden in the first complaint: that Tuvel “uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields.” In the Daily Nous comments, academics in these subfields struggled to identify precisely which arguments Tuvel failed to cite or address, or where her thinking might have gone wrong on a more than superficial level. Indeed, many philosophers of both gender and race have come out against retraction. But “the relevant subfields” are not really the academic studies of gender and race. They are the

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Roger Stone is delighted

May 10th, 2017 10:07 am | By

Politico reports that Trump has been increasingly furious about the way Russia keeps upstaging him, so Rosenstein’s memo was an excellent excuse to give Comey the hook. Apparently he thought that if Comey went away everyone would forget all about Russia.

Trump had grown angry with the Russia investigation — particularly Comey admitting in front of the Senate that the FBI was investigating his campaign — and that the FBI director wouldn’t support his claims that President Barack Obama had tapped his phones in Trump Tower.

And yet his claims were simply made up, out of the thin dry air of his own brain. It’s fatuous to expect the FBI director to support one’s personal fantasies.

But the fallout seemed

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Very simply he was not doing a good job

May 10th, 2017 9:29 am | By

Now he’s called in Kissinger in hopes that that will make him look not-lunatic.

In his first in-person statement to the press since he fired now-former FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump did not mince words.

“Very simply he was not doing a good job,” Mr. Trump told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan Wednesday during a meeting with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

If it’s so simply that he was not doing a good job, why did it take so long to fire him? If it’s so simply, why didn’t Trump fire him as soon as he took office? If it’s true that he was not doing a good job, why was Trump apparently unaware of it until … Read the rest



And then there’s the money-laundering question

May 10th, 2017 9:08 am | By

The Post gathers up some items under the heading: After the president fired James Comey, the cloud hanging over the White House just got bigger and darker.

— Donald Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants and amateurs who are either unwilling or unable to tell him no

He’s got no one intelligent and independent to warn him when he’s about to walk off a cliff.

That’s not surprising, of course; it’s more like inevitable. No one intelligent and independent would want to work for Trump. That’s perhaps the fatal flaw in being as comprehensively awful as Trump: the awfulness repels people of quality and doing without them can’t work forever.

— Senior officials at the White House were caught off

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So he persisted

May 10th, 2017 8:32 am | By

Meanwhile, in Trump’s US, reporters are not allowed to ask administration officials questions if the officials don’t feel like being asked questions. By “not allowed” I mean they get arrested and charged with a crime if they do.

A veteran West Virginia reporter has been arrested and charged with “disruption of government services” in the state capitol for “yelling questions” at visiting Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price and White House senior advisor Kellyanne Conway.

Daniel Ralph Heyman, 54, with the Public News Service of West Virginia, was freed on $5,000 bond Tuesday night on a charge of “willful disruption of government processes,” according to a criminal complaint.

“The above defendant was aggressively breaching the secret service agents

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Trump says he’s draining the swamp

May 10th, 2017 7:57 am | By

You’ve probably seen them already, but I can’t not post Trump’s After the Firing tweets.

Well, first there’s the characteristic vulgarity and inappropriateness – a stupid childish epithet as the first word, from the sitting president. Then there’s the ludicrous point-missing. The issue isn’t the merits of Comey. It’s why now and not last July; it’s the investigation; it’s the suddenness and randomness; it’s the investigation; it’s the conspicuously shitty way it was done; it’s the investigation.

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Library trolling

May 9th, 2017 5:02 pm | By

The BBC’s live coverage of the Tuesday Afternoon Massacre:

Richard Nixon Library stands behind its man
Posted at
16:37
Richard Nixon’s presidential library is effectively trolling on Twitter, pointing out that the disgraced former president managed not to fire the director of the FBI.

Trump’s dismissal of Comey drew widespread comparisons with Nixon’s actions over the Watergate scandal, leading ‘Nixonian’ to trend on Twitter.

#Watergate is also trending on Twitter.

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The previous coup

May 9th, 2017 4:52 pm | By

Via Ira Flatow:

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