TARTUS & FLATUS

Merry Superstitions from the [Worst Family] - Spit > .  

Laura Benanti confides escape plan to Stephen Colbert > .

Counterfactual Political Manipulation

Science under Trump LIAR-in-Cheat: Four key moments - Nature > .

Why Nature needs to cover politics now more than ever: Science and politics are inseparable — and Nature will be publishing more politics news, comment and primary research in the coming weeks and months.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02797-1 .

RepuGNican Women Endangered = GOOD!

Republican RepuGNican Women Are in Crisis: In the past 10 years, they have become an endangered species on the political stage.

Witness Intimidation AGAIN

Is there a crime he won't gladly commit? A depth of depravity to which he will not sink?

Trump DUHnocchio impeachment inquiry: Envoy 'intimidated' by tweets during testimony:

US UNpresident Crook-in-Chief has attacked the former US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, on Twitter, in the middle of her testimony to the impeachment inquiry.

Asked for her response, Ms Yovanovitch called it "very intimidating".

Mr Schiff, the Democratic Chairman of the Intelligence Committee overseeing the impeachment inquiry, suggested the UNpresident's tweets could be classed as witness intimidation.

Transatlantic Relationship after RepuGNican DUHism?

Transatlantic Relationship after RepuGNican DUHism? > .

Cyberstrike -- inexorable escalation

"United States Cyber Command on Thursday conducted online attacks against an Iranian intelligence group that American officials believe helped plan the attacks against oil tankers in recent weeks, according to people briefed on the operation.

The intrusion occurred the same day UNpresident Bully-in-Chief [reportedly had a humanitarian -- woops, the polls -- moment and] called off a strike on Iranian targets like radar and missile batteries. But the online operation was allowed to go forward because it was intended to be below the threshold of armed conflict — using the same shadow tactics that Iran has deployed.

The online attacks, which had been planned for several weeks, were ultimately meant to be a direct response to both the tanker attacks this month and the downing of an American drone this week, according to the people briefed on the operations.

Multiple computer systems were targeted, according to people briefed on the operations, including those believed to have been used by an Iranian intelligence group that helped plan the tanker attacks."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/politics/us-iran-cyber-attacks.html .
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48735097 .


Susan Rice: How [DUHnocchio] Can Avoid War With Iran: His process of ordering and then canceling military strikes was a mess. But he now has an opening to restart talks on Iran’s nuclear program.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/opinion/trump-iran-nuclear-weapons.html .

What a war with Iran could look like > .

Preventing Narcissists and Psychopaths [like DUHnocchio] from Taking Power

Throughout history, people who have gained positions of power tend to be precisely the kind of people who should not be entrusted with it. A desire for power often correlates with negative personality traits: selfishness, greed and a lack of empathy. And the people who have the strongest desire for power tend to be the most ruthless and lacking in compassion.

Often those who attain power show traits of psychopathy and narcissism [almost identical]. In recent times, psychopathic leaders have been mostly found in less economically developed countries with poor infrastructures and insecure political and social institutions. People such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Charles Taylor in Liberia.

But modern psychopaths generally don’t become leaders in affluent countries (where they are perhaps more likely to join multinational corporations). In these countries, as can be seen in the US and Russia, there has been a movement away from psychopathic to narcissistic leaders.

After all, what profession could be more suited to a narcissistic personality than politics, where the spotlight of attention is constant? Narcissists feel entitled to gain power because of their sense of superiority and self-importance.

Those with narcissistic personalities tend to crave attention and admiration and feel it is right that other people should be subservient to them. Their lack of empathy means they have no qualms about exploiting other people to attain or maintain their power.

Meanwhile, the kind of people who we might think are ideally suited to take on positions of power – people who are empathetic, fair minded, responsible and wise – are naturally disinclined to seek it. Empathetic people like to remain grounded and interact with others, rather than elevating themselves. They don’t desire control or authority, but connection, leaving those leadership roles vacant for those with more narcissistic and psychopathic character traits.

http://theconversation.com/narcissists-and-psychopaths-how-some-societies-ensure-these-dangerous-people-never-wield-power-118854 .

Bye Bye, Democracy

Why DUHnocchio did not dare to speak with Mueller = his "truths" are damning > .
Needless to say, he has moonwalked on this admission of conspiratorial guilt. "Russher, if you're listening." "About that Russher thing ... I decided to fire Comey."

Jeering, not cheering

World's most despised buffoon > .

TRMS: DUHnocchio suffers series of snubs, insults on UK state/family trip .

FLATUS insults more Brits

Baby DUHnocchio Visits The Queen > .

INDICT him!

After all, DUHnocchio does only harm in office, and "don't indict a sitting UNpresident" was mere legal opinion, not Constitutional law. Besides, the impeachment "jury" is rigged and, thanks to FAUX News and inadequate education, 40% of well-armed American are consumed by their counterfactual hatreds.

JUST IMPEACH HIM - Randy Rainbow Song Parody > .

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Mueller Report & Impeaching DUHnocchio > .

Hundreds of thousands watch the short videos he produces every 10 days or so, featuring show tunes and pop songs he has refashioned with biting new lyrics. These DIY productions are funny and oh-so-topical and include clever video manipulation of news footage to create sassy mock interviews with prominent political players — mostly of the Trumpian variety — topped off with costumes ordered online.

It’s no secret that in 21st-century America, power over public opinion doesn’t reside exclusively with editorialists or news anchors. We are now Entertainment Nation, and society’s jesters — Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Bill Maher, etc. — have become as influential as the Walter Cronkites and David Brinkleys of yore. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/05/28/feature/randy-rainbows-witty-world/ .

Exposing Barr's complicity in obstructing justice and misleading the dim among Americans

WATCH: Sen. Kamala Harris, Showing Off Prosecutorial Prowess, Puts AG Barr On His Heels | MSNBC > .

Lowering the Barr: 

In an interview in Alaska for “CBS This Morning,” Jan Crawford asked Barr — who was doing his best Cheneyesque dour-jowly-outdoorsman under the Big Sky routine — if he was worried about his reputation.

Barr came into the job, Crawford said, with a good reputation on the right and the left and now he stands “accused of protecting the president, enabling the president, lying to Congress.”

....

Barr is not so much the attorney general as the minister of [DIS]information. His interview with Crawford was tactically brilliant. Barr once more deftly took advantage of the fact that Mueller, with his impenetrable legalese and double negatives, has handcuffed himself.

Even when the reclusive and mute Mueller finally stepped up to the lectern on Wednesday, he was still hiding.

“If we had had confidence that the [UN]president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” said Mueller, sounding like Odysseus struggling to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. “We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.”

Mueller is as elliptical as Barr is diabolical. The special counsel is clearly frustrated that we don’t understand his reasoning. But his reasoning is nonsensical. [Barr needn't worry, DUHnocchio's dupees are morally- and cognitively-challenged.]
....
But talking to Crawford, Barr took the knife he had already stuck in his old friend and twisted it, using St. Mueller’s prestige against him. He said Mueller, in fact, was not barred from reaching a conclusion, and this is why a “surprised” Barr and his former deputy, Rod Rosenstein, had to step in and reach a conclusion on obstruction, one ending up favoring Obstructive-Collusionist-in-Chief.

After indicating that Mueller was derelict and misguided, Barr went ahead and belittled him and his dream team as inept.

Dismissively noting he and Rosenstein did not agree with a lot of the legal analysis in the Mueller report, Barr said he applied what he considered to be “the right law,” though he confusingly said he didn’t rely on that when pronouncing Mueller’s evidence “deficient” on the 11 instances of potential obstruction laid out in the report.

When Barr moved on to his investigation of the investigators who worked on the case of possible collusion between Russia and the Puppet-in-Chief campaign, he really bared his claws.

If DUHnocchio were UNpresident in South Korea, he would be incarcerated by now

Neal Katyal: Why Barr Can’t Whitewash the Mueller Report: We have a system in place for our government to uncover evidence against a sitting president. And it’s working.

"Many who watched Attorney General William Barr’s testimony on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which followed the revelation that the special counsel Robert Mueller had expressed misgivings about Mr. Barr’s characterization of his report, are despairing about the rule of law. I am not among them. I think the system is working, and inching, however slowly, toward justice.

When it comes to investigating a president, the special counsel regulations I had the privilege of drafting in 1998-99 say that such inquiries have one ultimate destination: Congress. That is where this process is going, and has to go. We are in the fifth inning, and we should celebrate a system in which our own government can uncover so much evidence against a sitting president.

Some commentators have attacked the special counsel regulations as giving the attorney general the power to close a case against the president, as Mr. Barr did with the obstruction of justice investigation into Conspirator-in-Chief. But the critics’ complaint here is not with the regulations but with the Constitution itself. Article II gives the executive branch control over prosecutions, so there isn’t an easy way to remove the attorney general from the process."

.......

"Mr. Barr’s deeply evasive testimony on Wednesday necessitates and tees up a full investigation in Congress. Those who say Congress shouldn’t do so because surveys show that the American public is not in favor of an impeachment inquiry must take into account the fact that the American people have been misled by Attorney General Barr’s characterizations of the report and its conclusions. These surveys are therefore not surprising. But there is no more sacred duty for Congress than getting to the bottom of whether our president has taken care that the laws of this country have been faithfully executed."

Maybe so, but those of us fortunate enough to live in functional Western nations guffaw at the "again" in "MAGA".

Dimbo outmaneuvered again

"I gotta say, it was very clever of Nancy Pelosi to steal Dimbo's strawberries, pushing him over the edge into self-evident lunacy.

As everyone knows, Infant-in-Chief stormed out of a meeting on infrastructure, apparently out of uncontrollable rage over Pelosi’s remarks pointing out that the administration’s stonewalling on all fronts, including raw defiance of the law requiring that it provide the UNpresident’s [crime-revealing] tax returns, obviously amount to a coverup of something (and maybe multiple things.) And Democrats should be grateful.

And I don’t just mean that they should be grateful to see Idiot-in-Chief displaying his unfitness for office, which has long been clear to close observers, in such a dramatically unhinged way that only cultists can fail to see it. He’s also helped them with a political dilemma.

You see, a major infrastructure push is a very good idea, one that Democrats would find it hard to oppose in good conscience. Yet it would also be politically good for Incompetent-in-Chief, helping the economy, giving the public a sense of progress, and also making him seem more like a normal president.
......
Let’s not try to pretend that there was any clever political strategy in Puppet-in-Chief’s walkout; it was just his immaturity and insecurity, but even more obvious than usual. And the attempt to portray Pelosi as out of control is so ludicrous that only totally deluded people – i.e., around a third of the country – could possibly believe it."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/opinion/trump-tantrums-dems-out-of-a-trap.html .

Current Trump Troll LIES: denying unconstitutionality of executive ban on refugees

"Yes, illegal aliens have constitutional rights"

"These words, from Section One of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution rank along with the Constitution's Bill of Rights as — in these precincts — the most important in world and American history:

"No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.""

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/255281-yes-illegal-aliens-have-constitutional-rights

Current Trump Troll LIES: Alternative facts tactics

Typical, poorly-written, wrong wing approach:
http://shannonpetry.blogspot.ca/2016/11/how-to-correct-anti-american-protesters.html .

Unsurprisingly, Trump trolls and Trump shills have been armed with falsehoods

Unsurprisingly, Trump trolls and Trump shills have been armed with falsehoods and sent forth to attempt to whitewash the nefarious activities of Trump and his Swamp cronies:

Wrong side of the fence
Current Trump Troll LIES: Alternative facts tactics .

Wrong wing LIES — fact-checked

Current Trump Troll LIES: refugees .

Current Trump Troll LIES: denying unconstitutionality of executive ban on refugees .

Current Trump Troll LIES

Unsurprisingly, Trump trolls and Trump shills have been armed with falsehoods and sent forth to attempt to whitewash the nefarious activities of Trump and his Swamp cronies:

Wrong side of the fence
Current Trump Troll LIES: Alternative facts tactics .

Wrong wing LIES — fact-checked

Current Trump Troll LIES: refugees .

Current Trump Troll LIES: denying unconstitutionality of executive ban on refugees .

Current Trump Troll LIES: refugees

Troll: ""Liberals are exposing themselves again as the hypocrites they are... Obama (a democrat) banned refugees for 6 months from Iraq...Years ago, Jimmy Carter (a democrat) banned Iranians... No problems with that though... No protesters...""

Nope. All LIES. "The only news report that we could find that referred to a six-month ban was a 2013 ABC News article that included this line: “As a result of the Kentucky case, the State Department stopped processing Iraq refugees for six months in 2011, federal officials told ABC News — even for many who had heroically helped U.S. forces as interpreters and intelligence assets.”

The “Kentucky case” refers to two Iraqis in Kentucky who in May, 2011 were arrested and faced federal terrorism charges after officials discovered from an informant that Waad Ramadan Alwan, before he had been granted asylum in the United States, had constructed improvised roadside bombs in Iraq. The FBI, after examining fragments from thousands of bomb parts, found Alwan’s fingerprints on a cordless phone that had been wired to detonate an improvised bomb in 2005.

The arrests caused an uproar in Congress and the Obama administration pledged to re-examine the records of 58,000 Iraqis who had been settled in the United States. The administration also imposed new, more extensive background checks on Iraqi refugees. Media reports at the time focused on how the new screening procedures had delayed visa approvals, even as the United States was preparing to end its involvement in the Iraq war."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/29/trumps-facile-claim-that-his-refugee-policy-is-similar-to-obama-in-2011/

Did President Jimmy Carter ban Iranian nationals from entering the U.S. in a manner similar to Donald Trump's proposed ban on Muslims?

WHAT'S TRUE: President Jimmy Carter announced sanctions against Iran in 1980, including the cancellation of visas for Iranian citizens.

WHAT'S FALSE: Carter's sanctions were equivalent to Donald Trump's suggestion that Muslims be banned from entering or immigrating to the U.S.

http://www.snopes.com/jimmy-carter-banned-iranian-immigrants/

FACT: the Trump troll's claim is misleading. 
The "alternative truth" probably originated in a swamp.

Articles:
"Why Trump Keeps Making Up Lies About His Refugee Ban"

"This defense suffers from two enormous flaws. First, it assumes that allowing agencies tasked with security to have input on a policy would be tantamount to publicizing the policy. The president is supposed to be able to discuss plans in confidence without assuming they will be leaked immediately. That is how the federal government works. If the only way to announce a foreign-policy move was to keep new policies a closely guarded secret within the administration, then this kind of amateurism would be standard. There is a long record of American presidents announcing surprise foreign policy decisions that were planned in advance by officials other than a speechwriter in his early 30s and a Breitbart lunatic.

The second problem with this defense is that it assumes terrorists were sitting around the world, planning to enter the United States to launch an attack, and able to enter at any time, but lacking any special urgency. (Perhaps they were waiting for the fares to drop.) An announcement of one week’s notice would have given them just the motivation they needed to hop on a plane.

This bears no relation to reality. People from the countries banned by Trump already face an extensive, 20-step vetting process that can take up to two years. None of them could have legally made it through within a week, or anything close.

And once you realize this, it becomes clear that Trump’s policy was not only bungled in its implementation but conceptually flawed. Trump originally proposed a “Muslim ban.” But he had to back away from this policy given that it is both unconstitutional and transparently unenforceable (how do you prevent a terrorist from lying about his religion?). This forced Trump to relabel his policy “extreme vetting.” But the reality is that vetting is already extreme. Trump has not identified any weak points in the vetting procedure. Indeed, there is no connection whatsoever between his policy and any terror incidents in the United States. Radicalized domestic American terrorists have all come from countries not on Trump’s list. His policy grows out of a need to take some kind of action.

In a way, it makes perfect sense that he would skip the normal interagency review — input from security experts would only reveal that Trump’s plan has no relationship to any security objective. The purpose of this policy is to retroactively justify Trump’s campaign fearmongering."
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/why-trump-keeps-making-up-lies-about-his-refugee-ban.html .