= new reply since forum marked as read
We need a champagne smilie! Seriously, how can we get one?
K&R
I hope the leakers at the White House spill the beans on the chaos going on at the White House right now as they scramble to come up with explanations/excuses. This is too delicious to have to wait for another book to come out. We wanna know now if tRump has pooped his pants yet. 
Or if his head exploded all over the Resolute Desk.
That will haunt my dreams. Or produce nightmares. Gee, thanks.
Mueller has been playing this like a pro. He is a pro!
Also I think he's getting under-the-table cooperation from Sessions.
When this is all over, I only want one thing: I want to see the full, un-redacted Steele dossier.
Is that too much to ask?
a member of the Christian right and a far-right authoritarian conservative whose ideology combines service to god through the monied classes. The latter didn't choose Trump, but if he became president he would almost certainly be succeeded by his vice president.
Pence already had a solid relationship with the Kochs, who already were considering running him for president one of these times.
We've always wondered WHY a governor whose reelection was endangered but far from lost would become Trump's VP when, on the face of it, it promised to leave him humiliated and unemployed, and his reputation destroyed in Trump's dumpster fires.
I think Pence met with people and agreed to run, but what he was promised by whom...?
Except that a how-level hired man, way below Pence's stature btw, didn't choose Trump's VP and make him an offer more attractive than being reelected as Indiana's governor. I break down at that idea. What would Pence do 4 months later after they lost?
Putin making him an offer he too attractive to refuse seems very unlikely also. Pence had people who control half the wealth in America behind him in the Koch alliance. Why commit what is commonly called treason when undoubtedly at least one of his meetings to discuss his future was with his own American patrons?
This is mostly speculation, of course, but great wealth means great power. The Koch alliance had to decide whether to invest in electing Trump, and It seems very likely that their own information sources had discovered early on that Putin was interfering to cause as much trouble as possible for the Democrats who posed a grave threat to his personal and hegemonic plans. Was there any coordination of interests, perhaps through very careful cutouts?
And that's where I leave off speculating. Except to point out that Hillary was right long before about a giant right wing conspiracy. Scalia spoke at Koch etcetera events openly now and then, but it seems very plausible that conspiracy was behind many of those trips Scalia took to secret gatherings like the one he died at also.
Oh, forgot to toss in: Once Trump's initial cabinet was installed, a "designated survivor" event would have very likely left a Koch ally as the survivor, that's how many cabinet members had significant associations with them. #2 Ryan, #3 Hatch, #4 Tillerson, others, and of course #1.
might his chances unravel?
The Republicans have to keep control of the senate to continue stacking the courts.
But of course this is much bigger than just who's in national office now, including Trump.
A huge goal behind the "Article V" constitutional convention movement, being systematically developed by ALEC and other right wing groups, is, of course, to repeal direct election of senators. They would once again be appointed by mostly business-dominated power groups at the state level, a huge shift of power to the few.
It's unclear that any one group would be able to control what came out of such a convention, though. Right-wing billionaires, religious right groups, and white nationalists/social conservatives all intend to prevail. SCOTUS does not have the power, of course, to rule any outcomes of a constitutional convention unconstitutional, no matter how extreme or bizarre. It would be the new constitution.
They claim to have 28 of the 34 states needed to call the convention. On the plus side, just this summer North Carolina rejected joining this "convention of states." They'll try again in 2019.
As said, this threat is from over for the next few decades. Unless it turns out in retrospect that we are leaving the conservative era that began in the late 1970s and entering a new liberal one.
I know I shouldn't laugh at that. I do not approve of violence.
But still.
UNBRIDLED GLEE 
