James Comey fired. He found out about it from the television while addressing agents at the FBI field office in Los Angeles. Even some Republican Senators and Congressmen think this was unprofessional.
This makes the third person in a row who was investigating Trump Administration connections to Russia who was fired. To count them up for you:
1) Sally Yates. Investigating Trump administration officials’ Russian connections. Fired.
2) Preet Bharara. Investigating corrupt Russian businessmen in New York City who had offices in Trump Tower. Fired.
3) James Comey. Investigating links between Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. Fired.
The troops in Congress are starting to get nervous. Their muttering is even happening out loud now. Is this Trump’s “Saturday Night Massacre”? I guess we’ll see…
– Badtux the Popcorn-munchin’ Penguin
Boss of a big business upscaling to boss of the world. (Big sharks eat little sharks, y’know.)
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Got my fingers crossed we’ll eventually see the president* trying to fire his prison guards.
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Whatever the reasons for, or the ramifications of, this are (so many angles — the comment thread at Naked Capitalism on this has clued me to many permutations I was unaware of) what it does is adds to the air of CHAOS. Trumpolini’s impulsive actions are like someone jerking the steering wheel from side to side in a car that’s driving down the highway. The passengers get shaken and carsick. They don’t know where they’re going. Conversation stops, or turns to the topic of “How are we going to survive?!?”
This is only a small point about one obscure government agency I mention, but it illustrates a point in my mind. I chatted to my sister’s boss and some of her co-workers a lot over the course of her death and since I’ve been back in the U.S. to organize her memorial service and clean out her house. The U.S. Department of Agriculture bureau my sister worked for controls import and export of live horses, horse semen (stallion sperm is a big business with lots of rules to prevent foreign diseases and genetic flaws from getting in, who knew?) and more exotic animals such as elephants and lions. The ground-level workers are worried that they’e going to lose their jobs, or their working conditions will get worse. There’s a fear that Eric Trump and other powerful people will bring in weird, un-vetted (figuratively and literally, since a lot of these .gov workers are veterinarians) big game critters with unknown African diseases so they can shoot them, and that outside microbes will get loose in the American environment. (Foot and mouth disease is only one problem — there are a lot of other conditions such as equine infectious anemia that I had never heard of.) My sister’s boss is managing her part of the bureaucracy defensively, based on anticipations of what some Trumpmook is going to do to the agency.
Their dread might be off-base. Point is, it’s affecting how their unit runs. Making it less efficient. I have no doubt that the same thing is happening at federal government offices everywhere. Paralysis in the face of a lurching leadership is not a good way to operate. People everywhere must be looking at the Comey thing and thinking “What next? I better not do anything except the mundane, to cover my ass.” In a way, it’s visiting the same dynamic of dysfunction on the government that private-sector workers have when they think their factory might move to Mexico, or when a Mall-Wart moves into town to devastate mon-and-pop shops. When does the lowered function of operations, due to chaotic actions at the top, completely break the machine?
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Nailed it, Bukko. We have senior employees (on all levels) looking around for another line of work or retirement. Junior employees are looking around too, turns out our skill set is more transferable than you might think! They are willing to jump at the first sign of trouble, and a shitload with less than 5 years in have very little vested in this job. If Donnie gets his “good shutdown”, things might get interesting, cause we’re still understaffed and losing ground..
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Somewhere, Nixon can’t believe how stupid Trump is.
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No one ever thought Nixon was stupid. Paranoid, vindictive, criminal, murderous and lots of other not so nice things yes but never stupid.
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Trump is as erratic as a child who has gotten into Mommy’s supply of Peruvian Marching Powder.
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http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-only-numbers-that-matter-in-that.html
The Trumpalos remain in love. He will probably be reelected. No way, given the utter uselessness of the Dim Party, will they make major gains in Congress, either.
And…so be it. This country is right now responsible directly or indirectly for a lot of the murder and chaos in the world. We will get what “we” as a country deserve.
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If this nation were a television show, it would be Monty Python as written by George R.R. Martin. Valar Morghulis. The show runner loves killing people, starting with the 24 million people who got health coverage courtesy of the Affordable Care Act, and going on from there.
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Minor quibble. Firing Sally Yates had an effect, because Trump could bring in a person of his choosing a little sooner. Firing Preet Bharara will almost surely have no effect, because if the new person Trump appoints tries to end any of those investigations I believe there will be a huge outcry and terrible publicity. I don’t believe firing Comey will have any effect at all because Comey demonstrated that he’s an ineffective administrator (couldn’t even control his New York office because they were loyal to Rudy Giuliani) and politically inept. In fact, I wonder if he was compromised by the Russians and directed by them. He certainly was the biggest single cause of Hillary’s loss (not the only cause, but the most dramatic — I think the constant media drumbeat, day after day, about “the emails” was the biggest cause). Perhaps Trump or one of his Borgia-like advisors thought firing Comey would help them divert one or more of the many “investigations,” but it’s really pointless because Mitch McConnell is going to make sure none of them is successful anyway. Comey should have been fired by Obama on July 6, and it’s one of many things Obama should be ashamed of that he was not.
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