deskthority

drip, drip, ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/p ... afort.html

How many secret meetings with various Putin cronies did Kushner forgot to include on his security forms? I think we’re up to 3 or 4 by now?

Nice article about Republicans’ ongoing efforts to deny millions of people their right to vote if they happen to live in Democrat-voting areas: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/these-three-lawyers-are-quietly-purging-voter-rolls-across-the-country/ A party that wishes it could return to t...

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/07/05/535029503/in-a-conservative-corner-of-california-a-push-to-preserve-obamacare Here’s everything you need to know about Republican voters: One patient at the Mountain Valleys clinic in Bieber, Kay Roope, 64, knew she had Medi-Cal, and she liked it. ...

Republican tax cuts in South Carolina: failure. Republican tax cuts in Tennessee: failure. Republican tax cuts in Kansas: abject failure. (We might add a dozen other states, but these are the ones in the news right now.) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/02/us/politics/republican-tax-cuts.html?_r=0 Wi...

At least one sometimes-honest republican congressman:

Steve Womack (R-Ark.) “We [Republicans] just simply don’t know how to govern.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pow ... -a-budget/

pro-systematically-racist-treatment-of-schoolchildren party: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/opin ... trump.html

Coward party: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... ealth-care

“Of the 52 Republicans in the Senate, 34 have not held a single town hall this year.”

Traitor party : We learn that, in August, when the Obama administration quietly approached Capitol Hill to seek bipartisan support from congressional leaders about the growing evidence of Russian involvement, CIA Director John Brennan couldn't even get top Republicans to meet with him. We learn tha...

If Trump fires Mueller it will put incredible pressure on Republicans in Congress to act (for instance, by re-appointing Mueller to a similar role under Congressional jurisdiction). But if they don’t, it’s not clear whether there’s anyone else who has any authority to do anything about Trump throwin...

GOP education department: we should look the other way about campus rape and systemic racism at schools https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/us/p ... devos.html

We’re hurtling towards a constitutional crisis. There are now 3 emoluments clause lawsuits. The Mueller investigation is looking into everyone in Trump’s orbit. It seems likely that Trump’s organization has been involved for decades in large-scale money laundering schemes, saving his business from b...

GOP: party of waste, graft, and abuse. Now Trump is trying to go after the (independent, non-partisan) inspectors general within executive agencies. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/opin ... ctors.html

Dana Rohrabacher (R, CA) takes it further, literally saying that the ISIS terror attack killing innocent Iranian civilians in Tehran is a “good thing”: We have recently seen an attack on Iran, and the Iranian government, the mullahs, believe that Sunni forces have attacked them. This may signal a ra...

What an asshole:

“We grieve and pray for the innocent victims of the terrorist attacks in Iran, and for the Iranian people, who are going through such challenging times,” Mr. Trump wrote. “We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.”

House candidate Karen Handel of Georgia: “I do not support a livable wage.”

While we’re at it, Eric Trump: “To me, they’re [Democrats are] not even people. It’s so, so sad. Morality’s just gone, morals have flown out the window and we deserve so much better than this as a country."

Trump apparently used donations to a child cancer charity as a money laundering scheme (or possibly just stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from them, it’s not exactly clear). http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/336564-trump-foundation-funneled-100k-in-donation-into-revenue-for-trump Luck...

Krugman pretty much has it right here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/trump-gratuitously-rejects-the-paris-climate-accord.html ...Why, then, are so many people on the right determined to block climate action, and even trying to sabotage the progress we’ve been making on new energy source...

The White House is giving up on even pretending to “drain the swamp” anymore. http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/3 ... ics-239011

Our new congressman from Montana everyone: tvLkJTFnjK8 That’s right. We shouldn’t have a concept of retirement because Noah was 600 years old when he built the Ark, still working. (This is also the same guy who grabbed a Guardian reporter by the neck, threw him to the ground, and started punching hi...

Jeff Sessions lied on his security clearance form http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/24/politics/ ... -meetings/

That’s a felony. Maybe he can prosecute himself.

webwit was deeply offended by it (or maybe offended by my lack of tears in response to his repeated abusively insulting tirades), and found that the only way to control his impulsive rage about it was to add custom code to the forum software to explicitly hide this thread from various pages around t...

Learning how to use a slide rule and spending some time thinking about the meaning of what you’re doing will be better training for your number sense than just about anything you can do on a graphing calculator.

Get a slide rule. It’s much faster to operate than a handheld calculater, way more fun, and anything you need more precision or flexibility for should be done on a laptop anyway. Handheld graphing calculators (especially Texas Instruments) are a racket, selling anachronistic hardware from the late 1...

Trump’s impeachment is looking more and more likely every day, though it still might require the Democrats winning control in congress for it to happen. He has now clearly violated his oath of office, the constitution, and various criminal statutes, and more importantly has continued to demonstrate ...

Senator Whitehouse:

Apparently what Trump meant by “drain the swamp” was “fill every executive agency with industry insiders who will profit at public expense”.
https://nytimes.com/2017/04/15/us/polit ... licts.html

Better to just let the viewers draw their own conclusions. This is the power of propaganda at work. During that first poll, GOP pundits, lawmakers, and propagandists were shouting about how the scary black president was defying congress to take us to war. During the second poll, GOP propagandists w...