Ahh Scott Pruitt. He is from my state. If you lived here as long as I have, you would know that Oklahoma is ****ed. We have the worst government in the history of all states. He needed to be gone from here, but not this way. He is legitimately corrupt and wants to undo every good thing ever done to protect the environment. Unfortunately, our governor makes him look semi-responsible...

I've been supplementing my nightly news site and 2 plus 2 reading with Youtube clips of late night talk shows. Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver have some great Trump stuff every night. Very much worth the watch to keep my blood from boiling over.

Waiting on that ADA repeal anytime now. (not a typo)

Meyers, Colbert, Oliver follow the Jon Stewart approach and I think it's great. It's comedy, but you can tell they put real effort to be factually correct comedy (mostly).

Meanwhile Jimmy Fallon is a ****ing lukewarm chode.

They did and look what happened. Folks fighting for equal treatment from law enforcement officials. They get called a terrorist organization. Equal funding/opportunity in education and businesses gets framed as undeserved because of affirmative action. Seriously, look around I don't think you really understand what is going on. The white collar dude that committed a 'faux pas' is really apart of the problem. Systemic racism doesn't work the way you think that it works. That black/brown kid that doesn't look like you,talk like you or even act like you might not get that job from the white collar dude because of this. It's the same when we apply it to law enforcement. That black dude driving a 82 Cutlass is going to get more attention from LEO than the white dude driving a 2010 Silverado. Throwing money at the problems aren't going to fix them. What you are really calling for is assimilation. In order for people to assimilate there has to be some feeling of inclusion. So I'd argue making it socially unacceptable to call people '******s' and whatnot goes a helluva longer way towards accomplishing this than trying to convince people who would love to call them '******s' to give them money.

Since we are on a poker site, I'll just ask this question. Why should you not berate fish?

Don't worry, not a lot of names to know.

Also, Gaylord is a last name.

@wheatrich: R v. D: Better to be feared than loved.

Because then he'd be a good poster.

After it being state law? Bum rap considering how legitimate it all seems.

Why are they so incompetent?

You must be joking.

Haven't had much time to post in the last few weeks but one danger about this line of thinking is some larger Yuval Harari Sapiens type ideas: namely that fictions are like, THE social capital of the post-modern world. Our fiat money system, our laws, our nationalism, the story we tell ourselves -- they are all fictions. And they are powerful and motivate us to act. bobman recently cited the book Black Earth by Timothy Snyder, which I highly recommend -- about the interplay between the rise of Nazis and these kinds of fictions. He followed up with Bloodlands which builds on the notion and extends it to the Soviet Union: but one oft forgotten element of Weimar/Nazi history is that the German population, particularly the German right, saw themselves on the precipice of a global ecological crisis that would starve them of natural resources and required a Darwinian campaign of expansion and aggression to ensure labensraum for Germans. We scoff at the idea now because it is highly preposterous given the facts about the world, that the carrying capacity of the world's resources have allowed the Germans to prosper well into the 21st century. But consider how powerful that fiction was. Consider how that fiction about the global Jewish conspiracy with designs on sapping Germany of land and industrial capacity, even food -- motivated them to engage in a deadly war of aggression not even 20 years after a holistic disaster of a war had caused immense suffering in Germany. They knew the risks of war and the suffering it portended and willingly moved forward because of how intrinsically frightening and anxious the story made them feel.

And now remember our country is now led by a symbiotic, mutually self-sustaining feedback loop of the Modern American Bloomsbury Group of White Crisis Storytellers -- a right-wing punditry like Fox News and Breitbart whose principle commodity is selling white people fear and anxiety, a President whose main source of information about the world is that brand of serial fiction, who then leads the government and the rest of us into reinforcing those fears if not building the social and cultural political environment that leads to their fruition.

Remember too that there were certainly elements of political crisis throughout Weimar but many of those were precipitated intentionally by Nazis. Or in some cases Communists or others who were enemies of Weimar, of the prevailing small-l liberal order. And then the Wiemar government, made up of actors and people and fraught with all of our frailties -- they weren't able to manage the political crises brought about by in many cases people who sought to destroy the system. That is to say: some of Weimar's problems were essentially not existential or external but entirely caused by people who sought the destruction of the government and upending of the liberal order. Weirmar had crises, sure, but it had domestic enemies. Like your theory in a nutshell is "things are going well right now, we might fade this." But remember Bannon and then by extension Trump et al have a very explicit goal to see to it the prevailing order is destroyed. That is: they have the power to make things not go well. If our hope for the future rests on current prosperity and peace and you are led by people who want to systemically dismantle the status quo, I'm not sure we can comfort ourselves in the realities of the status quo.

So the perception of Weimar as a state in perpetual crisis is one part factual -- no one would argue 1930s Germany was utopia, the fallout from WWI and the Great Depression was real obviously. But some of it was entirely fictional. Perceived crises. And some of it was intentionally wrought -- political mob violence and division intentionally baked into the system by fascists and others.

So of course we are in many ways, empirically -- we are not on the verge of a systemic crisis. But 1933 wasn't exactly Germany's generational low point either. The preceding 15 years from the end of the Great War through the mid 30s were in many ways more traumatic. What spurned he growth of right-wing authoritarianism was as much perception as reality, as much the will and designs and failures of actors as a fait accompli driven by GDP and violent crime rates. And we unfortunately seem to have two of the components in the mix now: reality be damned, we are surrounded by people who are afraid, paranoid, angry, resentful and see the world on the edge of a crisis and cannot be convinced otherwise. And we have plenty of actors at the highest levels of government now who both want to perpetuate that feeling of fear and grievance, and potentially act to erode the system and entertain the risk of a crisis. If not introduce it themselves.

Civilization is inherently frail, so it is perhaps fair enough to say we are always Weimar and in the tumult and mosaic of the human condition forever rests the potential for existential crisis and a lurch to authoritarian solutions. But I do believe you are not factoring in the very real ways we are much closer to crisis than UE6 suggests, if only because so many believe it.

At any rate people who support Trump are as willfully blind and stupid as people who supported Hitler were. It was plain then to anyone who cared to reflect a bit what the man was and what he wanted to do, and the same is true here, even if what he is and what he wants to do are different than what Hitler was and wanted to do.

you fatkid

That would be a good start.

I wouldn't put it past this group of nutjobs in the administration to facilitate a terror act on US soil to use as the push to take all the rights.

Ban on and the people in control of the Republican Party have gotten where they are by treating this as an actual war. Meanwhile, Democrats are still watching reruns of Westwing to find out how to convince MAGA cretins that our country benefits from immigrants and Muslims. waaf

I was walking yesterday and there was a group of octogenarians out on the corner with signs shouting about approving Gorsuch. As I walked by one of the guys wearing a Vietnam hat said something to me directly, and I said that I preferred Merrick Garland. He didn't know who Merrick Garland was.

Here's what happened in Russia when a guy in the opposition's post was deemed insufficiently patriotic

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...sia?CMP=twt_gu

LOL Herr Trump just attacked the FBI. JFC.

its really sad.

It's more sinister than that. They know they can pass this **** now to prevent the damn liberals from organizing, and then if the liberals ever get back into power, they know they will remove such a law from the books because liberals aren't evil ****ing scum.

Spicer confirms that he did, in fact, try to get the FBI to knock the story down.

would be perfect timing for a "You Can't Handle the Truth" leak FBI blow up

Man if All the Presidents Men came out now people would laugh it off as boring.

So Trump is asking the FBI to withhold the truth, and Spicer is asking the FBI to release the truth. Is that it?

If Trump was only president until like May or something, this list of positives might be worth it. We still have over 200 weeks left of this bull****. It's been only 5 weeks so far.

And, unless there's some other FBI story I missed, Trump is once again confirming the **** he's been accused of.