I don’t see Bill Barr as a legitimate candidate in this instance. He didn’t back Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen, and Trump has expressed disdain for him after that.
True, Barr did endorse Trump in this past election, but Trump still mocked him after that.
Reality has no bearing on the messaging. I mean I get what you’re saying, but I’m very sure whoever replaces him will be worse. But then again my mood lately is probably too dark to process reality accurately.
MSNBC is reporting Pam Bondi is the new choice for AG.
You could knock me over with a feather. For those unfamiliar…
No bueno. MAGA to the core.
MAGA to the core is going to describe everyone in this administration, at least she hasn’t raped anyone. Frankly Gaetz is not even the most dangerous nomination, Tulsi Gabbard is the one that should have been stopped.
Yes, but we have to look at what little bright sides there are. Of course she’s a MAGA cultist – that’s a non-negotiable job requirement. But Paxton is just about as odious as Gaetz – very far right, corrupt to the core, and smarter than Gaetz and therefore more dangerous.
I think the reason Paxton wasn’t nominated is that he’s got so much baggage in terms of corruption, indictments, impeachments, and other sordid elements in his background that there was a good chance he’d be shot down just like Gaetz, which would be a major embarrassment to Trump. Bondi is MAGA, but appears to be less virulently toxic than those other two.
Well, she hasn’t withdrawn, but after Gaetz she was generally considered the second most likely to not be confirmed. I guess we’ll find out if Republican senators are more loyal to Trump than to their own country.
Back on the original topic, I think Gaetz withdrawing from the nomination is a good move on his part. If he doesn’t try to regain his seat in the next term, there will probably be a general loss of interest in the Ethics Committee report, giving him the best chance under the circumstances of slinking off into private life. Not sure what the best job for him would be, though. Maybe teacher at a prestigious private school for girls? 
Damn good thing that Trump doesn’t run any such schools, because the literally incredible other-worldly standards being applied to these appointees suggest that Trump would consider him an excellent candidate for that position.
Yeah that’s the one that chills me to the bone.
I don’t think the public will ever lose interest in the report so long as it is kept secret. His best bet would have been to release it so everyone could move on to the next outrage which I am sure won’t be long in coming. But he chose the Streisand effect instead and this report is going to haunt him for the rest of his life.
This is your expectation for a public that has the attention span of a goldfish? 
If the perv is (a) no longer in the news, and (b) not doing anything important, I’m pretty sure the public won’t really care about him any more.
Mileage varies of course but I am certainly still interested in finding out who and what is in those Epstein files and that dude has been dead for years.
Meanwhile, Gaetz texted his girlfriend to let her know he’d be able to attend her quincenera after all.
(Shamelessly stolen from Twitter)
It is so hard to say which one is the worst. Here is the case for Pete Hegseth:
The Atlantic: Donald Trump’s Most Dangerous Cabinet Pick
I can see a situation where Pam Bondi arrests no more than a half dozen big names – say, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Anthony Fauci – but the rest of the Justice Department goes on pretty much like it did during Trump 45. Then the AG was guilty not of fascism, but just of prosecutorial misconduct. In this scenario, the mass arrests, causing food shortages, would have come from Homeland Security, with Kristi Noem looking, to most of us, the worst.
Or it could go the other way, with the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico newsrooms emptied by phony arrests for publishing classified information, while migrant workers go untouched due to Trump’s fellow oligarchs needing their labor. Until we know what the Trump administration will actually prioritize, you can’t know who will be the worst.
Tulsi Gabbard would not be working for the Trump administration.
Ouch, probably true but ouch.
There’s a persistent belief in the entertainment industry that certain writers load their stories/scripts with objectionable things, just to have the editor or producer battle them to cut out the objectionable material. Then after the fight, the writer concedes one or two points (that they never expected to win in the first place) and the censor leaves the rest of the material untouched.
I have the deep suspicion that Trump front-loaded so many unacceptable characters because he knew one or two would be lightning rods, and with them out of the way, the Senate would be too exhausted and too nervous to push back on the rest.
Trump sacrifices Gaetz, replaces him with an equally loyal Bondi, and still gets Gabbard and Kennedy… It’s all the art of the deal.
That suggests Trump is planning these things in some devious fashion; I’m skeptical.
No grand jury in the country is going to issue that indictment.
We are talking about the same Donald Trump who thinks Hannibal Lecter is a real person who endorsed his campaign, that Apple is run by a man named “Tim Apple”, who decided to stop his own rally 15 minutes in and listen to music onstage while swaying back and forth for an hour, who can’t even handle stepping into the passenger seat of a truck without nearly killing himself and needing the door opened for him, who’s clearly having trouble expressing coherent thoughts out loud, and who thinks Elon Musk is a scientist who spends his days in a laboratory and who’s “the best there is at computer”, right?
There’s no master plan here. There’s no 4D chess. It’s just a tired old dementia patient picking people because he saw them say something nice about him on TV earlier that day.
I don’t think Trump (or anyone in his orbit) is smart enough to come up with this.
Nobody stupid enough to nominate these clowns has enough brains to play 4-D chess like you’re implying. Or regular chess (or even checkers) for that matter.
The guy grew up in the New York City real estate business. Each side trying to wear the other down enough over a penny per square foot or a better grade of carpet is pretty standard.
It’s not a question of brains, just who can outlast who.
Perhaps decades ago he was capable of deviousness but the present-day Trump? I doubt it.