For a KGB officer, poison or the knife kind of is "natural causes"....

As Sir Terry Pratchett observed of the king who fell down a flight of stairs with his own knife between his shoulder blades.

I myself would posit that working for Putin is rather suicidal on the face of it.

A small epiphany today: Trump himself is the shiny object that distracts us, while his handlers...

....and the GOP are busy busy busy creating things for him to sign.

And he'll sign anything. It looks presidential.

Trump is out front acting as crazy as a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide, throwing off bits of fractured light like a disco ball -- and while he is indeed dangerous in and of himself, he is ALSO the shiny object that keeps us and the media distracted from the real shit that is taking place in Congress and elsewhere as the GOP and white nationalists really disassemble our country.

They'll eventually discard him for Pence, but meanwhile he is just incredibly useful.

Thanks for the link to Stop Breathe and Think. I'll give it a try.

Actually, he was. So were the Communists."Give me a child until he is 5, and I'll have him for life"

Or maybe it was till the age of 7.

Rote learning and indoctrination work like a charm for the masses, if that's what you want.

I was appalled and then outraged when Ralph Nader said it in 2000, & have not changed my opinion...

Here at DU we have a handful of people who are allegedly our allies on the left (plus the ones who join for a time), and they will say that and similar things every time campaign season rolls around. The older I get, the less tolerant I am of that line of barnyard byproduct. I want to just slap them upside the head.

I don't think anyone has any idea. For one thing, he's not acting alone...

There are GOP members of Congress who want these things done. It's not like he signs an Executive Order saying the Earth is flat -- instead, he is giving the GOP and RW their wish-list, which they will be loath to overturn. I think we are stuck.

But as my doctor said last November when I told him I felt gobsmacked and gut-punched: "Just wait two years." Our best hope is to GOTV (starting now)in every corner of the country and elect a new House and a couple more Senators, without doing anything stupid like primarying random Democrats already in office.

Is Pence as clean as he looks? Is there anything on him? I mean Spiro Agnew was....

...a lifelong petty crook who took bribes even after he became veep, so the GOP got rid of him first. That's how Gerald Ford became Vice President, and when Nixon resigned, Ford became Prez.

We've been so focused on the line of succession depending on vacancies that we have not given any thought to having Pence depart first -- if there was anything on him.

I just thought of it this morning.

It wasn't voter fraud, because the voters didn't do it. It was election fraud. OTOH, he did tell us

....that the election was rigged. It turned out like all his other accusations: he pointed the finger at others, but the rest of the fingers were pointing back at him. All the corruption he accused others of was that of himself, his donors, and his Bannon base.

Trump doesn't give a rat's ass if his lies "undermine his ability to govern the country"....

....because governance is foreign to his whole being. Trump's an emperor! He has a YUGE business empire! He can bellow "You're fired!" and it will be done!

Mad King Donald in his Golden Tower doesn't know where he is in reality. He has no idea how elective office works.

I can hardly wait until he gets some members of Congress in the Oval Office and tries to fire them. He'll be beside himself when that fails to work.

What will be really interesting to watch is Benedict Donald firing his Cabinet members and other appointees. He can fire them. It'll make Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre look like a picnic.

You're talking about line of succession due to vacancy. When Agnew was forced to resign, Gerald Ford

....Gerald Ford replaced him (his colleagues, shaken by the scandals roiling around Nixon, reportedly approached Ford and said, "Jerry, search your soul," meaning did he have anything dark lurking in his own closets). With Gerald Ford as Vice President, they were then free to go after Nixon full bore. That's how Ford became President.

I'd be delighted if they could find something on Pence, starting now.