The investigation exists because the two top officers in the organization have each accused the other of embezzlement.

Heaven only knows why they would choose to draw attention to their internecine struggle. If they just stay under the radar, there are plenty of rubles to go around!

NY Governor Andrew Cuomo showed great sympathy for the organization’s troubles: “As for the NRA, we’ll remember them in our thoughts and prayers.”

Eureka! I just had a great epiphany that explains Trump completely. Everything he says and does makes complete sense once you realize that he doesn’t understand what the words “legally” and “illegally” mean. He probably thinks they are synonyms, like “flammable” and “inflammable.”

Trump tweets many Judge Napolitano opinions. This was an exception.

Here’s how the President actually responded:

I’m not sure I agree with the article.

The article says that any algorithm designed to ban domestic terrorists would end up banning too many Republican politicians. I’m not buyin’ that. It’s easy enough to build robotic filters with artificial intelligence systems which would ban some accounts (let’s say for using the “n” word as an example) but only screen other accounts, leaving the final decision up to human review. That process, if created properly, would allow the artificial intelligence to improve its own algorithms based upon which of its original screening selections were overridden, thus gradually reducing the human role in the process as the “bots” learn what the humans want.

As I see it, the real reason is this:

Twitter is a for-profit enterprise which bases its decisions on the health of its business model. They don’t want to ban anyone unless one of two things is true: (1) the user commits or conspires to commit a crime for which Twitter could be held responsible; (2) Twitter would make more profit by banning the user than by allowing him or her to stay.

Continue reading ““There’s A Simple Reason Twitter Won’t Ban All The Nazis””

Trump is a real Orlando Bloom! Just ask him

Trump is 72, Biden 76. Biden is probably younger in terms of life expectancy, given that Trump is obese and loves greasy fast food. I did a quick down-and-dirty calculation, and it indicates that Trump’s life expectancy is about 14 more years, while Biden’s is about 16. Of course Trump could change that dramatically by losing about 60 pounds.

Continue reading “Trump: “I am a young, vibrant man””

Donald Trump said the United States did not pay any money to North Korea as it sought the release of Otto Warmbier, a day after WaPo reported that Trump had approved a $2 million bill from Pyongyang for the American student’s care.

There is no conflict. The WaPo story claimed that Trump promised North Korea that he would pay. Trump said today he did not pay. If you followed Trump’s business career, you probably believe both.

President Donald Trump on Thursday called the FBI probe into his 2016 campaign and subsequent investigations into Russian election meddling “an attempted overthrow” of his administration.

As always with Trump, you don’t know whether he really is that dumb, or is just playing to his base, or both. If there is an attempted overthrow of Trump, only one man could ultimately be behind it. Stop and think about it. If Trump were removed from office, everything would still be the same for the Democrats, for the Republicans in Congress, for the cabinet. Only one person has anything to gain from Trump’s removal – that, wily ultimate mastermind …

Nation Touched by Joe Biden

Funny line!

We are now looking at these as the most likely scenarios:

Trump vs Biden
Trump vs Sanders

  • Sanders was born in September 1941 in Brooklyn (obviously).
  • Biden was born in November of 1942 in Scranton (presumably on a train).
  • Trump was born in June of 1946 in Kenya (which is just as accurate as his claim that his dad was born in Germany).

Trump, the youngest of the three, is actually slightly older than Bill Clinton and G.W. Bush. VERY slightly. It’s just about a three-way tie.

Among Biden, Sanders and Trump, will all three of them actually make it to the end of the next Presidential term in January of 2025? Will any of them? Bernie will be 83, Biden 82, and Trump will be 78 and obese with a fast-food addiction, which means he is probably the oldest of the three if you measure it in terms of life expectancy. (You don’t see a lot of old fat guys.) Even Elizabeth Warren will be 75 then. There’s not a lot of fresh young blood coursing through our system.

SIDEBAR: in a sense, those three guys come from three different cultural generations. Trump is an early baby boomer. Biden is a war baby. Bernie was born before Pearl Harbor.

Hell, Bernie was probably born before the invention of harbors.

Or pearls.

Cohen says he pleaded guilty to some things he did not do in order to stop the Feds from pursuing his wife.

(He did admit to the campaign finance violations on behalf of Trump.)

Tom Arnold is a twitchy, half-witted little creep whose brain has probably been permanently damaged by years of drug abuse, but every once in a while he produces something interesting. For example? Howard Stern would not turn over all the years of Trump interviews, so Arnold went over to the dark side, obtained them through the back door, and got them published. Sirius XM filed a copyright claim to get the audio removed, but all the transcripts are still online, and of course there is still all the audio evidence available to support the transcripts, should anyone dispute them.

And, well, if you know how to use that whole zany interweb thing, you can probably figure out someplace where all the tapes are still available.

We all knew he was running, of course, and he may well get the nomination, but nobody is passionate about him. Bernie and Warren and Beto and Mayor Pete all have enthusiastic supporters, but Biden? He’s just good old Joe. In a race against Trump, his only strong advantage is that he’s a decent human being and Trump is not.

That has never been enough.

In the early days of our republic, John Quincy Adams, one of the men responsible for the idealism of our early republic, lost an election to Andrew Jackson, who was arguably the worst human being ever to attain our presidency, even to this day.

About a century and a half later, Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern in a landslide, despite (to quote the gonzo legend Dr. Hunter Thompson), “The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about ‘new polities’ and ‘honesty in government’ is one of the few men who’ve run for president of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.”

Thompson continued, “McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose… Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”

Well, Doc, I am sorry you have to hear this from across the endless expanse of the ethereal plane, but we haven’t hit rock bottom yet.

Donald Trump’s net approval rating of -12.5 seems terrible.

But when you look at it in context, it tends to show that people hate Washington, and they don’t hate Trump much more or less than the Democratic leaders, whose net approval ratings are almost identical to Trump’s

Nancy Pelosi -13.3
Chuck Schumer -12.4

There is one person people hate more than Trump – Mitch McConnell at -23. Hating him is the one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree on. Yet McConnell may wield the most power of any of them.

So proclaimed our leader, using the same New Math he used to calculate his inauguration crowd.

Ya gotta love that guy! By the way, the population of Sri Lanka is between 20 and 25 million.

I have a theory about this. A lot of people think Trump is just careless or intellectually challenged. I disagree. I think he’s just manipulating us. I think he deliberately says “crazy shit” (to quote his former White House counsel) so the media, social media, pundits, late-night comics, and douchebags like me will concentrate on chasing micro-developments in these storylines, while ignoring all of his malignant schemes and his major failures in the realm of substantive policy issues. I think his theory is that everyone who discusses “covfefe” or “138 million” is someone who is not discussing his obstruction of justice, his lack of control over his subordinates, his lack of a coherent foreign policy, or his failure to work with lawmakers on either health care or immigration.

I may be giving him too much credit by thinking he’s cagey enough to use chaos as a strategy. Perhaps he’s just what he appears to be, a pathological liar and narcissist who has no control over his impulses, but I think it is dangerous to underestimate him. He was in the construction business in New York and New Jersey, sometimes underpaid his contractors, and is still alive, so you know he must have outstanding survival instincts.

The report read: “The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

Instead of denying it, Trump should instead thank God they did. He probably in office now only because Chris Christie, Don McGahn, Dan Coats, Rob Porter and others failed to carry out his improper or illegal orders (“crazy shit,” as McGahn called it).

Polls, as of today (April 22)

New Hampshire: Sanders 30, Biden 18, Buttigieg 15

Iowa: Biden 19, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 14

That kinda makes Buittigieg the favorite, in that the other two are about 50/50 to still be alive come primary time. Beto O’Rourke seems to have run out of steam, having fallen to 6th in both states. I’m guessing that the Beto crowd has embraced Mayor Pete as their new savior.

The oddsmakers differ in one respect: they still place Kamala Harris above Buttigieg and Biden, and barely beneath Bernie. The polls show Harris barely making a blip on the radar (Iowa 6%, New Hampshire 4%).

Elizabeth Warren is foundering in both the polls and the odds, but she made a bold move today. She hopes to differentiate herself by being the only candidate calling for a Trump impeachment. Given that many Democrats agree with that stance, she hopes that might breathe new life into her campaign. Remains to be seen.

Here is the redacted Mueller report, all 448 pages of it.

“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

My quick summary, with comments, follows after the jump. It will probably upset you guys on both sides of the political spectrum …

Continue reading ““Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.””