Category Archives: Down the drain

January 11, 2017

I have not been posting many diaries to Dailykos in part because the readership has turned increasingly petty and gossip-prone. However, I think it is time to start comparing what was promised and what was produced by the Dude in the White House.

Two things here are, I think, particularly noteworthy. First is his admission that during the transition period he had already been trying to make “deals” with foreign entities. Since Nixon and Reagan got away with it in the run-up to their elections, this may be a fundamental Republican flaw, the failure to be cognizant that there is a time and place for everything and civilians meddling in foreign affairs is not in the cards.

The second thing is the Dude’s apparent misunderstanding of the injunction against having conflicting interests. He seems to have registered a prohibition as inapplicable because of the dispensation of the position he had won. No wonder he now hears “impeachment” as a “terrible, dirty word.”
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No Confidence

From the Mueller Report:
“In late July 2016, soon after WikiLeaks’s first release of stolen documents, a foreign government contacted the FBI about a May 2016 encounter with Trump Campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos had suggested to a representative of that foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. That information prompted the FBI on July 31, 2016, to open an investigation into whether individuals associated with the Trump Campaign were coordinating with the Russian government in its interference activities.”
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Glynn County Rudes

What kinds of public servants start off a public meeting with an assertion that everyone is to be heard and then instructs that “OTHERS” are to speak and a lack of “courtesy” will result in eviction?
ANSWER: Public servants who are unsure of themselves, do not value their employers and need to climb down off their high horses.

There Goes the Canopy

Plumbroke on Saint Simons Island–where the tree canopy disappears under the direction of the former chair of the Planning Commission.
No need to blame the utility. A proper sewer is not even planned. Instead, each McMansion will rely on a grinder pump that shuts down whenever the electricity fails.
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Kisor vs. Wilkie

This is the case before the SCOTUS which promises to rein in the administrative state—i.e. rule by hired “professionals” who tell citizens what to do. For some reason, people who call themselves conservatives have decided the administrative surge has been engineered by people they consider liberal. That the administrative cadre has been aiming for agency autonomy ever since the technocrats were touted as America’s saviors has escaped the perception of people who were content to be represented by non-governmental corporations (eleemosynary, commercial, industrial, educational). That the authoritarians had captured all those entities to the detriment of natural persons escaped their notice as long as only select natural persons were disempowered.