February 5, 2019

Your Guide to Tonight's Trumpian Word Vomit by Rick Wilson

At this very moment, a small army of White House aides is scrambling, circled around a computer in an office in the West Wing pecking out a State of the Shitshow speech they hope will “capture the voice” of a president more given to grunts and verbal excrescences than the lofty rhetoric of presidents. Here’s a spoiler; their work won’t matter.

That’s not merely because when the Trump administration sends us their speechwriters, they’re not sending their best. They are sending the indifferently educated, culturally buffoonish, shiftier dregs of authoritarian nationalist fanboys Donald Trump manages to recruit from random bus stations, hobo squats, and TPUSA Trump Young Pioneers camps. Some, I assume are good people, but I’m almost certainly wrong.

All this feverish labor on draft after draft of the president’s remarks tonight is, like all White House activity, utterly irrelevant and contingent on the president’s mood at game time. Trump could easily whisper to himself, “Fuck it, we’ll do it live!” and shred the entire thing. He could rely on his famous gut instinct and yodel on for an hour about the imagined glories of his gracious reign.

You’ll spot several styles and tells in the speech tonight. Here’s what to look for in tonight’s river of Trumpian word vomit, a guide to what’s real, what’s fake, what’s there for base-voter management, and what’s there just to play the news media.

https://thebulwark.com/your-guide-to-tonights-trumpian-word-vomit/

February 1, 2019

Statement from Northam apologizing for yearbook

https://twitter.com/MikevWUSA/status/1091474249620033536

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Say hello to Justin Fairfax, Virginia's possible soon-to-be new Governor



Justin was elected Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia on November 7, 2017. Justin is only the second African-American in history, and the first in nearly 30 years since the tenure of Governor L. Douglas Wilder, to be elected to statewide office in Virginia. His Inauguration took place on January 13, 2018. https://www.ltgov.virginia.gov/


https://twitter.com/kathrynw5/status/1091485251258466304

To add to the shock, a page from Northam's yearbook at the Virginia Military Institute listed one of his nicknames as "Coonman," a racial slur. Story from @Grace_Segers https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ralph-northams-yearbook-page-shows-man-in-kkk-costume-and-another-apparently-in-blackface/ …
https://archive.org/details/bomb1981virg/page/90 …

February 1, 2019

Steve King provided a link to hate site VDare on his house.gov page

https://twitter.com/letsgomathias/status/1091135670679158785


@RepTimRyan has alerted the House Ethics Committee that @SteveKingIA is using “government resources” to promote a white nationalist blog, raising possibility that effort to censure or expel King is still alive