@jmakin: Piss right off with that garbage. Playing golf almost every ****ing weekend as POTUS is wrong. Using tax payer dollars to fund trips to your private club where you have doubled the membership fee in order to profit off the Presidency is wrong. Spending hundreds of millions of tax dollars (over 4 years) to secure your family's extravagant lifestyle while proposing gutting programs that help the poor and cost less than that is wrong. Criticizing the former President for doing something that you do to a more extreme degree by a factor of 10 is wrong. Pretending to be a generous billionaire while you force the tax payers to foot your bill is wrong. You have accepted the normalization of Trump's hypocrisy and corruption. What he is doing is wrong, and he should be called on it.

The video of Trump's cabinet meeting today is one of the most surreal things I have ever seen.

Norquist is just a religious fundamentalist, he's high priest in the church of no taxes. Any attempt to frame his positions based on intellectual perspectives will fail, the same as they would for any other religious fundamentalist.

The discovery phase could get interesting.

So, what is wrong with Melania staying with baron for 5 months to wait for him to finish school?

You're losing sight of the forest for the trees, **** off with that self righteous crap. Everyone knows he's a corrupt moron. Focus on the big things.

Kim Jong Trump.

Sitting through it is quite a challenge - I searched for it, thinking I'd see 2/3 mins of vomit-inducing sycophants say a word or two each, but was way way longer that. I can't recall seeing anything quite like that before. Just the worst people.

I think there is a good point that Trump offers enough material that is so plainly wrong and abnormal and corrupt (you mentioned some of them!) that it's a little counterproductive to also be highlighting stories that are, like, slightly worse than when the derposphere cried endlessly about the cost of Obama's family trip to India.

They're billionaires, and it's their choice to do it this way. They should pay the extra security themselves. It's correct to ask leaders to show some reflection and restraint when spending our money on themselves. This isn't a trivial thing (it pisses off the Fox and Breitbart crowd, who agree with him ideologically on everything), and I'm sick of this bull**** argument that mentioning Trump's corruption in Way X is a distraction from his corruption in Ways Y and Z. I think we can ****ing handle more than one thought at once.

Not about Trump really, but a story that reflects the thought processes we are dealing with.

From FoxNews:

Shark bites off NC woman's arm in Bahamas

She got away, she's fine now, going to be fitted with a prosthesis...but two things stood out:

Doctors in Bahamas stopped the bleeding in her arm, but she couldn't get back to the states because of passports and customs issues. A medical evacuation company eventually agreed to pay for the flight cost to Carolinas Medical Center.

So even though an American woman's arm was bitten off in another country, Customs wouldn't let her back in until they...what? Made sure sure she was an American?

And:

"I’m just so thankful. I'm thankful to be here," Johnson said after the attack. "I'm thankful to be able to share this story and I hope, and I know, that it’s going to change people's lives because you can't hear this story and not see God in it."

What?? See God in it how? If God was there, you silly twit, why didn't he stop the shark before it bit your stupid arm off?

Bet she voted for Trump, even though she has a black husband.

What is the corruption in Melania and Barron costing NYC $21 million in security costs? There's a difference between corruption and waste.

Corruption not the right word, should have just used general ****tiness. I could have sworn though that jmakin posted something a while ago complaining about the backlash to Trump's trips to Mar A Lago, so I was responding to his current post with that one mind as well. But looking through his recent history now, I can't find it, so maybe I'm just confusing him with somebody else. If so, my bad.

Holy crap, what spineless ****s. Astonishing. I hope you guys get rid of this cult before they do real damage to democracy.

If God stopped the shark, there would have been no lesson to be learned.

I have no ****ing idea what the lesson here is but I believe that's the way of thinking.

Doesn't the Secret Service pay rent to the Trump Organization for space in the building? If it's fair market rates, maybe that not necessarily "corruption", but it just feels so gross to know that Trump has a vested financial interest in running around to all of his properties.

Maybe, I didn't know if security costs benefited Trump at all. I would consider the constant Mar-a-Lago/golf course visits to be corruption for that reason.

Nietzsche used to say "what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." Problem is Nietzsche had syphilis, which didn't kill him, but it didn't make him stronger either.

God is the shark who bit off her arm as a warning to her for marrying interracially, expect her to file for divorce before he takes a boob or something useful.

Don't put your arm in a shark's mouth?

Can someone smarter than me (most of you) explain this to me? I vaguely remember the uproar about something Pelosi(?) said about the bill, but don't remember what actually happened.

The shark had to bite off her arm so she would have something to testify about, duh. He was a shark missionary

Today's televised cabinet meeting was absolutely bat**** insane. I would like to think I would resign from a Cabinet position before participated in that sort of farce.

Someone like you never would have taken the job in the first place. These are (mostly) very smart people. If they weren't true believers already they never would have been in that position in the first place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq5UiAdOAYc

Edit: At 2:05 hilarious joke about treating Mississippi like a third world country. Somebody could write a good essay on that one.

"While we're bragging about international travel, I just got back from Mississippi."
(whole room laughs)