Branch Trumpvidians 2: The Basket of Deplorables

[fraurosena]

Oh, for Rufus' sake! Really? 

 

[47of74]

I don't get it. How can anyone think these people are virtuous  somehow when they're always out there defending Republican criminals https://twitter.com/JerryFalwellJr/status/1045853333007798272?s=19

Actually our side needs to stop electing nice people. We need to elect hard, pipe hitting liberals with full sets of pliers and blowtorches who are going to go to work on all the ol Holmes of the Reich. Our side has been too nice and too accommodating towards the rapists and facists of the Reich.

[AmericanRose]

My mom did text me: "Oh, just got my presidential alert :D"

I was wondering why that was something to grin about... but that makes sense!

[GreyhoundFan]

4 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Actually our side needs to stop electing nice people. We need to elect hard, pipe hitting liberals with full sets of pliers and blowtorches who are going to go to work on all the ol Holmes of the Reich. Our side has been too nice and too accommodating towards the rapists and facists of the Reich.

Last year, Bill Maher did a New Rules about how the Dems need to stop being so nice:

 

[thoughtful]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Oh, for Rufus' sake! Really? 

 

So much for that whole independent, anti-government-control thing, eh? If it's their orange idol, they're fine with a dictatorship, apparently.

[47of74]

So much for that whole independent, anti-government-control thing, eh? If it's their orange idol, they're fine with a dictatorship, apparently.

They became fine with a lot of stuff when the orange turd got in to office. Stuff they would’ve screamed about had President Obama or Mrs. Clinton done it.

Case in point this alert thing. They would have thrown fits. But when the turd and his GOP groupies do it they’re fine with it. No matter how unconstitutional it is.

[47of74]

Then there's this piece of shit

Quote

A Polk County man is behind bars after he allegedly threatened to shoot members of Congress and their families, along with law enforcement and “liberals,” depending on how the Supreme Court confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh played out. 

According to Sheriff Grady Judd, the threats came in a series of public Facebook posts made in late September by James Royal Patrick Jr.  The messages included photos of guns and ammunition and threatened Democrats and “weak Republicans” if Kavanaugh’s confirmation failed.

“I am about to accept an offer on my house just to get more money to fund my plan to kill Democrat office holders and their families. It is all I think about night and day,” he allegedly wrote on September 21.

“Ladies and gentlemen, words matter,” Sheriff Judd stated Thursday afternoon. “These are the words of someone that’s capable of committing mass murder.” 

He should never have a free day for the rest of his worthless life.  Every remaining day he has on this Earth should be spent in prison or a court room. 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is disgusting and I can totally see it happening:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

CNN's Jim Acosta tried to talk sense into BTs. Yeah, smashing his head into the wall over and over would probably have been less painful: "‘I wouldn’t go to your work and flip you off’: CNN’s Jim Acosta engages Trump Nation"

Spoiler

ERIE, Pa. — Not long after Jim Acosta enters the arena, people start calling his name.

“Jim!” shouts Stephanie Boyd, who is standing just beyond the barricades that pen in dozens of reporters. “Jiiiiiiiim!”

Acosta looks over in Boyd’s direction. He isn’t sure whether she wants a selfie or wants to dress him down. Sometimes, it’s both.

CNN’s chief White House correspondent saunters over to Boyd. He smiles, and so does she. “Can I take a picture with you?” she asks, dispelling his wariness.

The encounter is one of dozens Acosta will have with President Trump’s supporters, who have gathered by the thousands in the Erie Insurance Arena for one of his campaign rallies. Acosta has come to town on this Wednesday evening to cover the president.

Ever since he started on the Trump beat, Acosta has known that such events can be fraught. Acosta is both a recognizable face and a walking incitement to members of Trump Nation. He’s something like the star of the opposing team at a home game — a villain, a target.

Shortly before Acosta meets Boyd, Danny Wheeler sidles up to him at the barricade. “Tell the truth, man!” Wheeler, from nearby Fairview, Pa., lectures him. “Just tell the truth.”

“We do, sir,” Acosta replies, his voice level, his demeanor pleasant.

It goes like this for hours in Erie, interrupted only by the main event, Trump’s speech. Throughout the evening, between on-airs “hits,” Acosta politely accommodates perhaps two dozen selfie-seekers and innumerable others who are out to harangue him. Dozens of other journalists go about their business unrecognized and unmolested. Not Acosta.

To each of his critics, Acosta responds with variations of the same answer: I’m just doing my job. I’m reporting the facts. I’m holding the president accountable. Sometimes he asks them, “Isn’t that what a good reporter is supposed to do?”

In the hopped-up atmosphere of a Trump rally, they don’t seem to think so.

Spotting Acosta idling in the press pen, John DeAngelo stops a few feet away, points and then goes into a kind of crude Marcel Marceau routine. His face an angry mask, he raises one middle finger toward the reporter, then the other, and then begins pumping both up and down in rapid succession. Then he points again at Acosta and puts an index finger to his mouth and makes gagging noises.

Acosta apparently doesn’t see the bit. He doesn’t respond.

“He’s horrible,” DeAngelo, a carpenter from western New York, says a few seconds later. “CNN’s horrible. CNN’s not news. It’s more like a tabloid than a news network. It’s so one-sided.”

DeAngelo doesn’t cite anything specific about Acosta’s reporting, as is typical. Among the Trump faithful, Acosta-hate seems to be more of a feeling than a particular set of facts. It’s not something he’s reported; it’s just . . . him.

“I’m a master carpenter with a ninth-grade education, and I know” the difference between good and bad reporting, says DeAngelo, who is wearing a button depicting Hillary Clinton in prison stripes. “I listen to all the news stations and I make up my mind. The most reliable news is Fox. Tucker, Hannity, and — what’s that woman’s name? — Laura [Ingraham], they’re great. I know that’s opinion, not news reporting, but I can tell the difference. You can tell when [Acosta] is asking a question that he’s doing it for the drama, not for the facts. I watch CNN for three or four minutes and I want to poke myself in the eyeball.”

By Trump-rally standards, this is relatively tame.

In late July, Acosta faced a more obstreperous reception, one that he says left him “shocked and saddened.” During one of his periodic TV spots, the crowd turned toward his camera position and began chanting, “CNN sucks!”

Bad enough, but what CNN’s viewers didn’t see at that rally was the scene at the end. A large and surly group of rallygoers gathered around the press pen to hurl more verbal abuse at Acosta. “Stop lying!” one man yells. A rallygoer proudly shows off a T-shirt reading, “F--- the Media.”

Acosta tweeted a video clip of the episode with a comment reading, “Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy.”

Afterward, he and his crew decided not to tempt fate. They raced back to their cars and got out of Tampa as quickly as they could, he said.

Acosta says Tampa was a more “intense” version of what he’s periodically faced since he started covering Trump. “It felt like we weren’t in America,” he says during a break in Erie. “It felt like a different country.”

In fact, Acosta gets a gentler reception when he covers Trump abroad, says Allie Malloy, who produced his reporting from Erie. She notes that the crowds at international events involving Trump are much more polite toward the press than those in the United States.

Trump has certainly done his part to agitate against the news media in general and Acosta in particular. On several occasions, he’s refused to take questions from Acosta, all the while calling him and his network “fake news.”

The criticism carries a bit of irony. Some have suggested that CNN was instrumental in fostering Trump’s rise and ensuring his election by airing extensive coverage of his campaign rallies in 2015 and 2016. It also employed his former campaign manager as an analyst, who promoted him relentlessly.

In any case, Acosta says Trump isn’t the primary source of the heat now. “A lot of people view this through the prism of conservative media,” he said. “If you stay on Fox, Infowars, Breitbart or Daily Caller, you’ll see something [inflammatory] about us. That’s what supercharges everyone.”

He cites a segment on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program last year in which Hannity singled him out. Under a banner reading “Jim Acosta Unhinged,” Hannity opined, “Instead of looking for answers, Acosta, he’s looking for ways to damage the president, [and to] prop himself up.”

Acosta naturally disputes the characterization, and says he looks on the rallies as a way to engage people directly. “I don’t get tired of what happens at the rallies,” he said. “I enjoy talking” to Trump’s supporters. “It gives them a chance to get things off their chests. But I also get an opportunity to let them hear directly from me.”

He adds, “I don’t have any hard evidence that I’ve changed any minds. But I do, from time to time, hear from supporters who tell me they don’t think we’re the enemy of the people. . . . My parents were blue-collar. So I can relate to a lot of these folks.”

Acosta, 47, grew up in Annandale, Va., and attended James Madison University. His father, A.J., an immigrant from Cuba, worked for 40 years as a clerk and cashier at Safeway stores in the Washington area; his mother, Barbara, has worked as a bartender and waitress.

Not that that matters especially to people like Amy Bujnicki, a social worker from Buffalo, who caught Acosta’s attention in Erie by flipping him off with both hands as the rally wound down.

“That’s not very nice,” Acosta told her after bounding down from the elevated TV platform to meet her at the barricade. “I wouldn’t go to your work and flip you off.”

“I don’t understand why you guys are so negative” toward Trump, Bujnicki responded.

A small knot of people began to gather to hear the exchange. One woman commented, “You’re wasting your time. He’s the worst!”

Acosta pressed on. “We’re not,” he said to Bujnicki. “How much airtime do we give to people who support him?”

Bujnicki: “I used to think that everything that came out of a news reporter’s mouth was a fact. And it’s not. On CNN, it’s not.”

Acosta: “I invite you to watch us. When [Trump] says things that are not true, we have to report that. We have to fact-check him.”

Bujnicki: “I don’t trust CNN. I don’t trust you.”

Acosta: “Google my name and ‘Barack Obama.’ There were many days I was tough on him. People have short-term memories. They think we’re only being tough on Trump. That’s just not true. I was covering the campaign in 2016 end to end. There are people who tell me, Republicans who tell me, they wish we hadn’t given as much coverage to Trump as the other Republicans.”

Bujnicki doesn’t seem convinced. Acosta, perhaps having learned his lesson in Tampa, tells her he has to get going.

“Thanks,” he says.

As he turns to leave, a group of three young men in Make America Great Again hats is at his elbow. “Jim, would you mind?” one of the guys says, raising his smartphone for a selfie.

Acosta says sure. Then they all lean in and smile.

 

[Cartmann99]

I hope the single Trumpers start using this in huge numbers:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

49 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

I hope the single Trumpers start using this in huge numbers:

Nooooooooooooo, we don't want them to be fruitful and multiply!

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, Cartmann99 said:

I hope the single Trumpers start using this in huge numbers:

 

Hello my name is Donald. I like money, orange spray tan, grabbing women by the pussy and Diet Coke.  Call me, but only if you aren’t ugly. 

[GreyhoundFan]

I wasn't quite sure where to post this, and figured since he loves the slimy orange turd, this was as good a place as any. It's a long article, worth a read, but I'm just posting a handful of quotes that jumped out at me. "The Man Who Broke Politics: Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump's rise. Now he's reveling in his achievements."

Quote

On this particular afternoon in late March, the former speaker of the House can be found shuffling giddily around a damp, 90‑degree enclosure at the Philadelphia Zoo—a rumpled suit draped over his elephantine frame, plastic booties wrapped around his feet—as he tickles and strokes and paws at the giant shelled reptiles, declaring them “very cool.”

I'd be pretty upset if someone described me as elephantine...

 

Quote

Outside the lion pen, Gingrich treats me to a brief discourse on gender theory: “The male lion procreates, protects the pride, and sleeps. The females hunt, and as soon as they find something, the male knocks them over and takes the best portion. It’s the opposite of every American feminist vision of the world—but it’s a fact!”

If I didn't already want to punch him, the quote in the previous block would have made me want to punch him...

 

Quote

But few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.

When I ask him how he views his legacy, Gingrich takes me on a tour of a Western world gripped by crisis. In Washington, chaos reigns as institutional authority crumbles. Throughout America, right-wing Trumpites and left-wing resisters are treating midterm races like calamitous fronts in a civil war that must be won at all costs. And in Europe, populist revolts are wreaking havoc in capitals across the Continent.

Twenty-five years after engineering the Republican Revolution, Gingrich can draw a direct line from his work in Congress to the upheaval now taking place around the globe. But as he surveys the wreckage of the modern political landscape, he is not regretful. He’s gleeful.

“The old order is dying,” he tells me. “Almost everywhere you have freedom, you have a very deep discontent that the system isn’t working.”

And that’s a good thing? I ask.

“It’s essential,” he says, “if you want Western civilization to survive.”

I truly despise him...

 

Quote

The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those who’d survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a “permanent minority” mind-set. “It was like death,” he recalls of the mood in the caucus. “They were morally and psychologically shattered.”

But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”

Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers—a group of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity Society—and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras. Their emergence was not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate Republican leadership. They were too noisy, too brash, too hostile to the old guard’s cherished sense of decorum. They even looked different—sporting blow-dried pompadours while their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-overs.

Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators. Bob Livingston, a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers. “My idea was to work within the committee structure, take care of my district, and just pay attention to the legislative process,” Livingston told me. “But Newt came in as a revolutionary.”

For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C-span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.

 

Quote

As his profile grew, Gingrich took aim at the moderates in his own party—calling Bob Dole the “tax collector for the welfare state”—and baited Democratic leaders with all manner of epithet and insult: pro-communist, un-American, tyrannical. In 1984, one of his floor speeches prompted a red-faced eruption from Speaker Tip O’Neill, who said of Gingrich’s attacks, “It’s the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress!” The episode landed them both on the nightly news, and Gingrich, knowing the score, declared victory. “I am now a famous person,” he gloated to The Washington Post.

It’s hard to overstate just how radical these actions were at the time. Although Congress had been a volatile place during periods of American history—with fistfights and canings and representatives bellowing violent threats at one another—by the middle of the 20th century, lawmakers had largely coalesced around a stabilizing set of norms and traditions. Entrenched committee chairs may have dabbled in petty corruption, and Democratic leaders may have pushed around the Republican minority when they were in a pinch, but as a rule, comity reigned. “Most members still believed in the idea that the Framers had in mind,” says Thomas Mann, a scholar who studies Congress. “They believed in genuine deliberation and compromise … and they had institutional loyalty.”

This ethos was perhaps best embodied by Republican Minority Leader Bob Michel, an amiable World War II veteran known around Washington for his aversion to swearing—doggone it and by Jiminy were fixtures of his vocabulary—as well as his penchant for carpooling and golfing with Democratic colleagues. Michel was no liberal, but he believed that the best way to serve conservatism, and his country, was by working honestly with Democratic leaders—pulling legislation inch by inch to the right when he could, and protecting the good faith that made aisle-crossing possible.

Gingrich was unimpressed by Michel’s conciliatory approach. “He represented a culture which had been defeated consistently,” he recalls. More important, Gingrich intuited that the old dynamics that had produced public servants like Michel were crumbling. Tectonic shifts in American politics—particularly around issues of race and civil rights—had triggered an ideological sorting between the two parties. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats (two groups that had been well represented in Congress) were beginning to vanish, and with them, the cross-party partnerships that had fostered cooperation.

This polarization didn’t originate with Gingrich, but he took advantage of it, as he set out to circumvent the old power structures and build his own. Rather than letting the party bosses in Washington decide which candidates deserved institutional support, he took control of a group called gopac and used it to recruit and train an army of mini-Newts to run for office.

Gingrich hustled to keep his cause—and himself—in the press. “If you’re not in The Washington Post every day, you might as well not exist,” he told one reporter. His secret to capturing headlines was simple, he explained to supporters: “The No. 1 fact about the news media is they love fights … When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate.”

Effective as these tactics were in the short term, they had a corrosive effect on the way Congress operated. “Gradually, it went from legislating, to the weaponization of legislating, to the permanent campaign, to the permanent war,” Mann says. “It’s like he took a wrecking ball to the most powerful and influential legislature in the world.”

But Gingrich looks back with pride on the transformations he set in motion. “Noise became a proxy for status,” he tells me. And no one was noisier than Newt.

 

 

Quote

By 1988, Gingrich’s plan to conquer Congress via sabotage was well under way. As his national profile had risen, so too had his influence within the Republican caucus—his original quorum of 12 disciples having expanded to dozens of sharp-elbowed House conservatives who looked to him for guidance.

Gingrich encouraged them to go after their enemies with catchy, alliterative nicknames—“Daffy Dukakis,” “the loony left”—and schooled them in the art of partisan blood sport. Through gopac, he sent out cassette tapes and memos to Republican candidates across the country who wanted to “speak like Newt,” providing them with carefully honed attack lines and creating, quite literally, a new vocabulary for a generation of conservatives. One memo, titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” included a list of recommended words to use in describing Democrats: sick, pathetic, lie, anti-flag, traitors, radical, corrupt.

The goal was to reframe the boring policy debates in Washington as a national battle between good and evil, white hats versus black—a fight for the very soul of America. Through this prism, any news story could be turned into a wedge. Woody Allen had an affair with his partner’s adoptive daughter? “It fits the Democratic Party platform perfectly,” Gingrich declared. A deranged South Carolina woman murdered her two children? A symptom of a “sick” society, Gingrich intoned—and “the only way you can get change is to vote Republican.”

Gingrich was not above mining the darkest reaches of the right-wing fever swamps for material. When Vince Foster, a staffer in the Clinton White House, committed suicide, Gingrich publicly flirted with fringe conspiracy theories that suggested he had been assassinated. “He took these things that were confined to the margins of the conservative movement and mainstreamed them,” says David Brock, who worked as a conservative journalist at the time, covering the various Clinton scandals, before later becoming a Democratic operative. “What I think he saw was the potential for using them to throw sand in the gears of Clinton’s ability to govern.”

 

 

Quote

But by then, the poisonous politics Gingrich had injected into Washington’s bloodstream had escaped his control. So when the stories started coming out in early 1998—the ones about the president and the intern, the cigar and the blue dress—and the party faithful were clamoring for Clinton’s head on a pike, and Gingrich’s acolytes in the House were stomping their feet and crying for blood … well, he knew what he had to do.

This is “the most systematic, deliberate obstruction-of-justice cover-up and effort to avoid the truth we have ever seen in American history!” Gingrich declared of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, pledging that he would keep banging the drum until Clinton was impeached. “I will never again, as long as I am speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic.”

Never mind that Republicans had no real chance of getting the impeachment through the Senate. Removing the president wasn’t the point; this was an opportunity to humiliate the Democrats. Politics was a “war for power,” just as Gingrich had prophesied all those years ago—and he wasn’t about to give up the fight.

The rest is immortalized in the history books that line Gingrich’s library. The GOP’s impeachment crusade backfired with voters, Republicans lost seats in the House—and Gingrich was driven out of his job by the same bloodthirsty brigade he’d helped elect. “I’m willing to lead,” he sniffed on his way out the door, “but I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals.”

 

 

Quote

Mickey Edwards, the Oklahoma Republican, who served in the House for 16 years, told me he believes Gingrich is responsible for turning Congress into a place where partisan allegiance is prized above all else. He noted that during Watergate, President Richard Nixon was forced to resign only because leaders of his own party broke ranks to hold him accountable—a dynamic Edwards views as impossible in the post-Gingrich era. “He created a situation where you now stand with your party at all costs and at all times, no matter what,” Edwards said. “Our whole system in America is based on the Madisonian idea of power checking power. Newt has been a big part of eroding that.”

But when I ask Gingrich what he thinks of the notion that he played a part in toxifying Washington, he bristles. “I took everything the Democrats had done brilliantly to dominate and taught Republicans how to do it,” he tells me. “Which made me a bad person because when Republicans dominate, it must be bad.” He adopts a singsong whine to imitate his critics in the political establishment: “ ‘Oh, the mean, nasty Republicans actually got to win, and we hate it, because we’re a Democratic city, our real estate’s based on big government, and the value of my house will go down if they balance the budget.’ That’s the heart of this.”

These days, Gingrich seems to be revising his legacy in real time—shifting the story away from the ideological sea change that his populist disruption was supposed to enable, and toward the act of populist disruption itself. He places his own rise to power and Trump’s in the same grand American narrative. There have been four great political “waves” in the past half century, he tells me: “Goldwater, Reagan, Gingrich, then Trump.” But when I press him to explain what connects those four “waves” philosophically, the best he can do is say they were all “anti-liberal.”

Political scientists who study our era of extreme polarization will tell you that the driving force behind American politics today is not actually partisanship, but negative partisanship—that is, hatred of the other team more than loyalty to one’s own. Gingrich’s speakership was both a symptom and an accelerant of that phenomenon.

On December 19, 1998, Gingrich cast his final vote as a congressman—a vote to impeach Bill Clinton for lying under oath about an affair. By the time it was revealed that the ex-speaker had been secretly carrying on an illicit relationship with a 23-year-old congressional aide named Callista throughout his impeachment crusade, almost no one was surprised. This was, after all, the same man who had famously been accused by his first wife (whom he’d met as a teenager, when she was his geometry teacher) of trying to discuss divorce terms when she was in the hospital recovering from tumor-removal surgery, the same man who had for a time reportedly restricted his extramarital dalliances to oral sex so that he could claim he’d never slept with another woman. (Gingrich declined to comment on these allegations.)

Detractors could call it hypocrisy if they wanted; Gingrich might not even argue. (“It doesn’t matter what I do,” he once rationalized, according to one of his ex-wives. “People need to hear what I have to say.”) But if he had taught America one lesson, it was that any sin could be absolved, any trespass forgiven, as long as you picked the right targets and swung at them hard enough.

 

 

Quote

Once Trump clinched the nomination, he rewarded Gingrich by putting him on the vice-presidential short list. For a while it looked like it might really happen. Gingrich had the support of influential inner-circlers like Sean Hannity, who flew him out on a private jet to meet with Trump on the campaign trail. But alas, a Trump-Gingrich ticket was not to be. There were, it turned out, certain optical issues that would have proved difficult to spin. As Ed Rollins, who ran a pro-Trump super pac, put it at the time, “It’d be a ticket with six former wives, kind of like a Henry VIII thing.”

After Trump was elected, Gingrich’s name was floated for several high-profile administration posts. Eager to affirm his centrality in this hinge-of-history moment, he started publicly implying that he had turned down the job of secretary of state in favor of a sweeping, self-designed role with ambiguous responsibilities—“general planner,” he called it, or “senior planner,” or maybe “chief planner.”

In fact, according to a transition official, Gingrich had little interest in giving up his lucrative private-sector side hustles, and was never really in the running for a Cabinet position. Instead, he had two requests: that Trump’s team leak that he was being considered for high office, and that Callista, a lifelong Catholic, be named ambassador to the Holy See. (Gingrich disputes this account.)

The Vatican gig was widely coveted, and there was some concern that Callista’s public history of adultery would prompt the pope to reject her appointment. But the Gingriches were friendly with a number of American cardinals, and Callista’s nomination sailed through. In Washington, the appointment was seen as a testament to the self-parodic nature of the Trump era—but in Rome, the arrangement has worked surprisingly well. Robert Mickens, a longtime Vatican journalist, told me that Callista is generally viewed as the ceremonial face of the embassy, while Newt—who told me he talks to the White House 10 to 15 times a week—acts as the “shadow ambassador.”

 

 

Quote

By the time Gingrich shuffles offstage, many in the audience seem to have lost patience with him. As we file out of the theater, I catch snippets of grumpy reviews: Waste of time … He didn’t even answer the questions … The last speaker was much better … One man grumbles, “I think that guy’s done more to fuck up our democracy than anyone.”

That may seem like an overly harsh assessment. But tomorrow morning, when these people turn on the news, they will see footage of a reckless president who ascended to the White House on the power of televised politics. In a few months, their airwaves will be polluted with nasty attack ads. They will read stories about partisan impeachment efforts, and looming government shutdowns, and lawmakers more adept at name-calling than passing legislation. And though he won’t be there to say it in person, Gingrich will be somewhere out in the world—at a trattoria along Via Veneto, or perched comfortably in a cable-news greenroom—thinking, You’re welcome.

What a despicable creature.

[Cartmann99]

59 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Nooooooooooooo, we don't want them to be fruitful and multiply!

I was thinking of it as getting all of the Trump fans together in one place to make dating easier for the sane single folks, but you make a good point!

30 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Hello my name is Donald. I like money, orange spray tan, grabbing women by the pussy and Diet Coke.  Call me, but only if you aren’t ugly. 

PS: You also need to be under forty, have big boobs, and not hung up on monogamy.

[47of74]

Ooopsie

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On the day a new dating app for Trump supporters launched, it leaked the entire data base of its users, according a report from TechCrunch.

The app is called “Donald Daters” and aims to connect “lovers, friends, and Trump supporters alike.” When the app launched, it had over 1,600 users and was growing fast. But according to TechCrunch, researchers found vulnerabilities in the app that made it possible to download the entire user base.

Elliot Alderson, a French security researcher, shared the database with TechCrunch, which included users’ names, profile pictures, device type, their private messages — and access tokens, which can be used to take over accounts.

The data was accessible from a public and exposed Firebase data repository, which was hardcoded in the app. Shortly after TechCrunch contacted the app maker, the data was pulled offline.

 

13 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

Hello my name is Donald. I like money, orange spray tan, grabbing women by the pussy and Diet Coke.  Call me, but only if you aren’t ugly. 

And I'm also married but she's on her way out the door with her entire criminal family back to the shithole country they came from.

[AmericanRose]

Every day, Trump seems more like a cult. A dating service based on one's 'belief' in him? Oi.

[GreyhoundFan]

I live near DC and I remember reading an article in a local publication about a year ago where those who work for or support Dumpy were whining that they couldn't find a date because most people in this area don't want to socialize with them. Boo-fucking-hoo. I mean, who would "swipe right" if someone like Stephen Miller popped up on their Tinder? < shudder >

[Howl]

I just saw this on CNN and thought it was important to share with y'all ASAP: 

Spoiler

 

(CNN)Dennis Hof, the Nevada brothel owner and self-proclaimed pimp whose Donald Trump-inspired run for the state legislature drew national attention, has died. He was 72.

Hof was found dead Tuesday, the morning after a birthday celebration attended by conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, controversial former Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio and adult film star Ron Jeremy...

...Hof -- the star of HBO's "Cathouse" series who Republican consultant Roger Stone had called "Trump from Pahrump" -- had ousted a sitting Republican member of Nevada's State Assembly in a primary and was the favorite to win a seat in Carson City in November's election.

 

As I'm fond of saying, you can't make this shit up. 

[47of74]

Tony Perking got told off for his Branch Trumpvidian bullshit.

[GreyhoundFan]

I love George Takei's take on the dating app for Dumpy supporters:

 

[47of74]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I love George Takei's take on the dating app for Dumpy supporters:

 

George is a national treasure. 

[Cartmann99]

I'm putting this here because Heidi voted for the Orange Jackass after he insulted her. The part about her breakdown and the sacrifices she's made for Ted's career was interesting,  but I need to warn you that Heidi thinks Ted looked like a movie star from the 1950s when they met, and they mostly share the same political beliefs.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

47 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

I need to warn you that Heidi thinks Ted looked like a movie star from the 1950s when they met, and they mostly share the same political beliefs.

In other words, she has poor judgement and/or is crazy.

[47of74]

I'm up in the Twin Cities for my on campus week at school.  On the way up I saw signs for Newberger, who said that people need to protect fuck face by voting for him for Senate.  Ugh.

There were these fucks going on this morning while I was stopped about what a great idea it would be to put out that Republicans should be told to vote on Nov 6 and Democrats on Nov 8. 

[Cartmann99]

FFS