Comey Out, What Now?

so I’m reading this article:

and I’m not paying attention.

“If Hillary Clinton had won, which thank God she didn’t, but if she had, Comey would have been fired immediately and these same Democrats that are criticizing the president’s decision today would be dancing in the streets,” Sanders said.

Sanders also kicked Comey on his way out the door, saying he had “lost the confidence of the rank-and-file within the FBI.”

“He certainly lost the confidence for members of both sides, Republicans and Democrats in the house and the senate and frankly most importantly he lost the confidence of the American people,” Sanders said. “This was a guy who was being questioned day after day after day whether he was capable of leading the FBI.”

And for an embarrassing amount of time, I’m suffering from political whiplash. Wait, what…

I have way too many tabs open

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i keep hearing Guiliani being mentioned for Comey’s spot, as a pat on the head for staying in 45’s good graces and toeing the line. that, along with O’Reilly and Nugent, is a horrifying thought or three.

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I hope Hillary has a flight lined up to Outer Mongolia.
And I hope she won’t be flying United.

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Is he better or worse than Joe Arpaeio and Davide Clarke?

I’m still hoping this is all a dream and I wake up to find Martin Sheen in the White House.

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well, arpaio is an awful awful person, no doubt about it. but guiliani is such a vile, bootlicking toady who despises the clintons. i honestly can’t decide who would be worse. i could totally see guiliani getting the nod just so he could go after hillary clinton (which trump campaigned on!), thereby causing a HUGE distraction for trump, which is what he wants most right now. arpaio would probably be focused on border wall/immigrant stuff. either way, super distracting and horrible.

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The folks at Lawfare in their Emergency Podcast System add another nuance which is that if Trump were the subject of an investigation then this would be (could be more easily construed as) obstruction. They theorize that Trump is highlighting the fact that he’s not the target (in his firing letter to Comey) to make the point that this isn’t obstruction.

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What’s the incentive now for him to remain a good soldier?

But at least Giuliani is a competent, experienced evil bootlicker. With Trump’s record of putting inexperienced, incompetent people in charge of agencies they believe shouldn’t exist, I think there could be far worse choices. And I’m sure we’ll see them soon.

ETA: I think it’s pretty amusing how the Democrats are getting all flustered about whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that Comey got fired. Tim Kane was on NPR this morning defending Comey and saying he has a 10 year term for a reason. Phhht. Also amusing is all this talk about the “timing” being significant with a Russian foreign minister coming to the White House today for a visit. At what point would timing not be significant? Over the last 4 months, at what point was Russia not in the headlines and some new connection to the trump administration not being revealed?

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For some reason I’ve been thinking of the ghost dance a lot lately.

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yeah, at least he’s a KNOWN quantity, rather than someone who has no experience being thrown in there.

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But is he ACTUALLY not the target, or is this the same level of truth as “biggest inauguration crowd in history”?

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You don’t want this Comey thing to overshadow this:

Speaking as a Canadian who had to deal with years of no real census… this is bigger than Comey.

The Harper government got rid of the long form census because it was providing too much data, I mean, why fund programs that help the poor when you can just great rid of the data reports on the poor right? Don’t let them fuck with your data!!

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Motherfuckers.

Doesn’t surprise me at all the GOP is fucking with the census. I mean, what’s one more core institution to the way our democracy works?

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The thing about the census is that for some, it comes across as “the government putting you on a list”. For people with no trust in the government, it feeds paranoia about what is being done with that list. Are they coming to take my guns? Are they coming to take my kids? Are they going to arrest me for being too-liberal/too-conservative/christian/muslim/athiest/poor? Am I going to end up in a FEMA camp or an Arpaio style prison?

That may sound far-fetched to some, but they are real fears that plague real people.

The first time I heard the “won’t give up the presidency” rumor, it was Clinton. When it came back around with Bush, it included FEMA camps. When it came back again with Obama, it was FEMA camps and black helicopters. This rumor is fear-mongering, but the fear is out there. It stems from worries about fascism, even if the people with the fears would never call it that.

How would we all feel about a decaying cheeto in possession of a list of every gay person? How about a list of everyone who had a medical cannabis card? How about people one degree of separation from a person with a gun or a cannabis card or a felony conviction? What about a list of everyone who has been at a protest? Would that make people afraid?

I know many people have no sympathy for sex offenders, but the SORNA list is one that is hugely destructive. It’s gives free reign to any cop who wants to harass someone on the list, whether they are dangerous or not, whether they have done anything truly wrong, or not. It’s the thin edge of the police state, and it started with a list, “to protect the children”.

If it was legitimately a list of dangerous people, and didn’t include any non-dangerous people, I might think about it differently. But it includes people who had to pee outside because they were homeless. It includes Romeo & Juliet people (well, mostly the men), it includes people who pleaded guilty to something minor that was later reclassified as a sex offense. It includes a lot of people who pose zero danger to any person, but the list allows the government to discriminate against the people on the list. In some places, people on the list have no legal place to reside and end up under bridges.

Do you want to be on that list? No, of course not. But, there will be more lists, the more fascist our country becomes. The census might not be THAT list, but I say that because I still have some modicum of trust in the government’s bureaucrats, if not the leadership.

EDIT: Also, I feel that writing this down, in a public place, would place me on the wrong sort of list. I considered pulling it down, but if I do end up on a list, this post won’t be why.

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I just read my other post, and it kind of sounds combative, and I don’t mean that. At all.

My use of “you” isn’t you personally @emo_pinata but I don’t want to go back and reword in passive voice. Your comment just triggered something that’s been simmering in my brain for a while.

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THIS! A THOUSAND TIMES THIS!!
So many of MrPants clients are on the “sex offender registry” - and so many for stuff like being partially dressed in public while homeless & mentally ill. Whatever you do, if you’re homeless and mentally ill never ever let your bits be shown! And that goes double if you happen to have lice or fleas, for gods sake do not “scratch” in public! He’s also got mentally delayed adults who live in group homes that have sex with each other consensually but whose parents don’t like their partners… that happens a heart breakingly amount actually. And they get rearrested a lot because neither they nor their “victims” understand that they’re not “boyfriend/girlfriend” anymore and can’t see each other anymore. Thats who is on these lists, homeless, mentally ill, and people with disabilities.

Regarding the census, the “privacy” is the angle they used up here.

“Our feeling was that the change was to make a reasonable limit on what most Canadians felt was an intrusion into their personal privacy in terms of answering the longer form,” Erik Waddell, spokesman for Industry Minister Tony Clement

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tories-scrap-mandatory-long-form-census/article4323276/

(side note: my brother went to school with Clement, says he was always a knob.)

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A dude from Wisconsin who always, and I mean, always wears a friggin’ cowboy hat.

Perfect tool for the job.

Think you don’t know anybody who owns a gun, and you live in the US? You’d be very wrong. (We all know Mr. 44, right?)

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No one likes to be fired. Especially publicly. But I wonder if Comey is thankful on some level to be done with this dumpster fire?

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She hasn’t been wrong, yet.

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