2017

Friday is here! Nothing happens on a Friday.

Oh, what was that?

BANNON IS OUT AS WHITE HOUSE CHIEF STRATEGIST!

Steve Bannon is one evil fuck. And a traitor to the Republic. He was, and is going back to, Breitbart, a Right Wing Media outlet that pushes a nationalistic and white supremacist agenda. They are one of the largest and most influential voices of the Alt-Right.

And now he’s officially out of the White House. At least officially. It’s kind of weird how things are working out, and how the chips are falling, but anyone who’s watched the past 2 years with Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, and everyone else Trump has separated himself from, there’s still some contact.

This puts Steve Bannon in a dangerous position. He’s back at Breitbart, with Mercer money, and Trump fame, to spread his message of hate. Assuming that’s what he wants to do.

That assumes he’s interested in it. He might just want to attack Trump for leaving him twist in the wind.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this falls. Bannon’s past is one gigantic pile of pain. Nothing good comes from him. He’s been accused of domestic abuse, committed voter fraud, used a meth den as a permanent address, and no one really knows why he had a bathtub full of acid. He’s had a hand in many evil practices, from Gamergate to Russia, and that doesn’t even include the racist or sexist stuff.

I’ll go into more detail on Bannon later, since that sick bastard deserves several write-ups, and I need to get to a couple other things today.

Everyone’s most hated Vulture Capitalist, Carl Icahn, quit as Trump’s special economic advisor. Moments later, the New Yorker released This Story about whether he was in the position to improve the country, or line his pockets. My guess, based on past behavior, was that his actions were as American as Vodka in the morning. I think he used Trump’s racist behavior as a cover to escape when he did.

Several other groups and people resigned today. Kal Penn, along with 15 others resigned from the President’s Committee on Arts and the Humanities. One of the best trolling moments of this mass resignation, is that the paragraph’s starting letters spell RESIST. The White House’s response was childish at best. Trump’s answer: I was going to terminate the council anyway. This is three times in as many days that councils disbanded, and he pulled the “You can’t quit because I’m firing you” routine. The Unemployment Board must love him.

There was a big pow-wow at Camp David today, where Eric Prince was supposed to pitch to the Joint Chiefs a proposal for having him run the Afghan war for $10 Billion a year using a private army, reporting to him as a Viceroy of Afghanistan. Fortunately, with Bannon’s firing, H.R. McMaster prevented Prince from entering the meeting. Eric Prince is the human excrement behind Blackwater in Iraq and the mercenary armies in Libya. He’s also Betsy DeVos’s brother, and was the go-between in the Seychelles Islands backchannel meeting in December 2016. Not only would his plan make him a very wealthy man, but would essentially set him up as a…, well, a Prince.

On the Mueller front, rumor has it that he’s looking to interview a bunch of people in the West Wing, current and former staffers. This could explain some of the erratic behavior. He’s close to Trump.

I’m not sure what the next week will hold. Hell, I’m not sure what tonight holds. Bannon’s firing puts a lot of things in motion. The Mercer’s, SCA, and Breitbart on the playing field, but we don’t know what side they’re on. If they’re even on a side in the first place. Trump’s support is very low, and the official poll numbers won’t come out until early next week. Impeachment talk is becoming louder from the Democrats and Independents, and even the Republicans are using the word.

We’ll just have to keep our mind in the middle while our butt spins round and round. Cause there sure as hell ain’t no clown on this bull ride.

Daily Check-In 8/17/2017

Thursday, Thursday. I’ll try to make this shorter today, as I just finished up an article about Fox & Friends – 10 Minutes Is Enough

Donald Trump took to Twitter this morning and… Does this sentence ever end well? If I make this a multiple choice question, can you guess at this point?

Donald Trump took to Twitter this morning and…

Talked about how beautiful the statues to Traitors to the United States are.
Directly compared Robert E. Lee and George Washington.
Attacked the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee for not standing by him as he defended Nazis in public.
Advised our military leaders to perform war crimes and crimes against humanity, based on a debunked story.
Engaged in secessionist rhetoric with his base, hoping to scare anyone looking to remove him from office.
ALL OF THE ABOVE

Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Having a hard time with today’s question? I’ll give you a hint. It’s Donald Fucking Trump.

That’s rigth, 6. All of the above.

After studying Trump for the last couple years, when Orange Julius goes off like this, shit’s about to hit the fan.

What could that be?

First, Congressman Steve Cohen promises to introduce Articles of Impeachment. He doesn’t say what charges specifically, but at this point, there’s enough to go around.

Steve Bannon had this interview where he proposed a trade war with China, smeared Trump on North Korea, proposed raising taxes on the rich, and about some of the infighting. Here’s a summary on Axios.

Speaking of Bannon, over the last few days, a couple rumors have been floating around about Bannon’s connections to Gamergate, World of Warcraft, and Russia. I need to find more details on it, but the short version is that Bannon and the Alt-Right stoke the hate that occurred in Gamergate, especially the Anti-Feminism, Anti-Women stuff, to a bunch of men that have been getting real good at doing some low-level coding to mine in WoW and other games. With a little bit of proper encouragement, these men were pushed to some hacker forums on the dark web, where they were likely frequenting anyway, and urged a few of them to take on work outside of gaming, making malware and other stuff. Eventually, they were radicalized, and started working with state-sponsored hacking groups like Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear.

Speaking of Fancy Bear, they’re still at work. Remember when Diaper Donny released his mails to the world showing that he wasn’t colluding with the Russians when the email chain said flat out he was? Well, around that time, the White House started pushing a story about the “Real Collusion Story” between HRC and Ukraine? The White House started talking about this on July 10. Fox News picked it up on July 12, referencing a website from some group called Cyber Berkut. Who are they? Fancy Bear. That site went up on July 12, claiming to have emails between HRC and Ukraine.

Yesterday, Chuck Todd and Shepard Smith both reached out to any and all Republicans they could, looking for anyone to defend Donald Trump. No one agreed to come on their shows.

Newt Gingrich said that there are no very fine people that are Nazis on Fox News.

The Dow Jones fell 150 points today over fears that as long as Trump is in office, Republicans won’t get their tax cuts.

Republicans across the country are doing the slow dance away from Donald Trump, but not fast enough or hard enough. When more than a couple openly ask for him to step down, call it a game for Donald Trump.

That’s it for today’s update, unless something big happens between 18:20 and 22:00. I’m going to work on a couple of the GTKYG series, starting with the Federal System, The Branches, Impeachment, and Pardons. I’ve got a feeling they’re going to be in the news quite a bit coming up.

Fox & Friends – 10 Minutes Is Enough

This morning I had to watch Fox News for a few minutes while getting the car repaired, and I think I understand where the one third support for Trump comes from. Fox News was straight up propaganda. It was Fox & Friends in the morning, which is ostensibly a news show, but it was full-blown, Dear Leader levels of propaganda. In the ten minutes, there were four stories.

A truck full of “illegals” was pulled over somewhere down South. Not illegal immigrants, but “illegals.” Dropping immigrant humanizes them.

An Australian PM wore a burka into session. The PM (think Aussie Congresswoman) was buried, and the story opened with “A WOMAN wearing a Burka walked in, and no one knew who she was.” Here, we have inciting fear in the unknown.

Jeff Sessions scores a win against Sanctuary Cities. YAY LAW AND ORDER! There was no discussion about what Sanctuary Cities are, or whether the actions of the government are just, or legal, or even necessary, but the only defense they had was “they were breaking the law.” This is called an Appeal to the Law.

Final story, before I felt that I’d seen enough, was a ham-fisted attempt at trying to draw a comparison between Donald Trump’s support of the Nazis and Ronald Regan once being called a racist. They pulled some whataboutism and false equivalency out of their collective asses, blamed the “Main Stream Media”, as if Fox News isn’t one of the largest News Cable Channels in existence, while also completely avoiding what Trump did to draw everyone’s ire.

So, they avoided the problem, reframed the problem as something different, gave a comparison to something that wasn’t a big deal, the managed to blame everyone else for overreacting to the problem they designed, not the actual problem at hand.

Let me give an example. Let’s say back when the Jerry Sandusky mess took place, that one of the news channels decided that, instead of airing the story as it happened (arrested for child rape), it was described as a simple misunderstanding about how Jerry was caught rough housing with a kid on campus, and the coach who caught him had some problems of his own, and then it was compared to some famous person being accused of regular child abuse. If delivered the right way, that story would sound like Jerry was being set up.

That’s what Fox News does for Donald Trump. They’re setting him up as the “good guy” in the story.

Don’t be fooled. This is Not News. This is Propaganda. This is how propaganda works.

In marketing, there’s this term called Spin. Spinning a story to make is just right for a client. Sometimes it’s called “crafting a narrative.” When it’s done for politics, it’s called propaganda.

But what makes Fox News so scary is that they portray themselves as an actual source of news.

They have journalists with name recognition. They have sets and graphics. They have a lower third scrolling all the time. They have all of the appearances of a news organization, but none of the intent to be one.

They say that only they can be trusted to deliver your news. They then attack anyone who disagrees with them, creating the mentality that if it doesn’t come from Fox News, it isn’t real news. The viewers of Fox News have been trained to attack the source of the story, especially those from “liberal” sources, like the Washington Post or the New York Times, or even the Wall Street Journal, which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch.

I reported recently on a report about Sean Hannity being some serious trouble with the FBI over the Seth Rich Story, and also his role in disseminating Russian propaganda. That’s still unfolding, from what I hear. I’ll keep this blog updated when I hear more.

Fox News wants to be the kingmaker. They claim to be the only one that can be trusted. That’s like Littlefinger telling Sansa that only he can be trusted. But what happens when Fox News can taste the throne for themselves, or realizes they can get their agenda passed with someone else in command? Or, what if Donald Trump becomes so vile, even they can’t save him?

I’ve said before that the Right Wing Media helped get Trump elected. They also keep in him office. If Fox News decides to abandon Trump, it’s game over for the Orange One. But what would it take for them to give up support? Would they still carry his water if the worst rumors of the pee tape were true? What about the allegations surrounding Trump Modeling? If Trump were facing human trafficking charges, would Fox News still defend him?

Daily Check-In 8/16/2017

Holy Shit, It’s Only Wednesday!

Fallout from the most racist political speech of the 21st century continues. The Joint Chiefs of Staff all repudiated Trump’s comments about Nazis, as did almost everyone with a pulse, except the Republicans in the House of Representatives. Some did, but not many.

That list of repudiations included more CEO’s from Trump’s two business councils. This afternoon, both councils voted to disband. As the manufacturing council was wrapping up their conference call, Trump announced on Twitter he was disbanding them.

Trump rage quit his own ceremonial advisory councils. I guess the tutorial level of POTUS 45 was too hard.

Vice President Mike Pence cut his European trip short and is heading home. Not sure why, but it could be that Trump is circling the wagons. Talk about 25th’ing Trump has intensified.

Of course Pence “stands by Trump.” Closer to put the knife in his back.

Everyone clamorous for Pence, realize he is straight up evil AND competent. And complicit.

Yesterday I reported about a rumor about Mueller issuing two subpoenas to Trump, one as an individual, the other as the CEO of Trump Org. I’m still vetting that source, but supposedly he’s ex-Secret Service. If I hear more, I’ll say more.

One weird story from an hour ago, FBI Agent Peter Strzok was reassigned from Mueller’s team to the HR department. That’s a weird move. It’s not uncommon for people under investigation, awaiting a new assignment, or on someone’s shit list to get assigned this way, but this move sounds a little too peculiar. Especially since a move this high profile would require sign-off from the new FBI Director, Chris Wray. Let’s see what happens.

A big story broke from the NYT from Ukraine. There is a witness that ties the Russians to the DNC hacking. Who is this witness?

Profexor. The hacker who wrote the tools that did the job.

He sold the scripting tool to a hacker associated with Fancy Bear, one of the main GRU teams, along with Cozy Bear. They used the tool to hack the DNC.

When Profexor heard that his tool was used to hack the United States, he turned himself in to Ukraine Police back in January. They made him available to the FBI for interviews. At the same time, an FBI Special Agent who is an expert on Cyber Security. I’m sure it was a complete coincidence …

Russia’s favorite Representative, Dana Rohrbacher, has met with Julian Assange. No Russian collusion there. Just a random politician with a Pro-Russian stance meeting in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London with the head of Wikileaks, a supposed front for releasing intelligence gathered by the Russians through illicit means. Nothing to see here…

According to Claude, Deutchebank and their connections with Trump are under investigation by Mueller.

How in the fuck does a President have their worst week ever while on vacation?