Kash-ed Out?

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Today’s Senate grilling of Kash Patel might not be his final curtain call but his reputation certainly got a stress test.

Here, we run our own Mystery Science Theater for live events — with heckling, side-eye and mandatory sarcasm. (But first we do a quick tribute to Robert Redford).

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37 thoughts on “Kash-ed Out?”

  2. jamie, thanks for the heads up on last night’s rachel. here’s a taste for those who missed it:


    Rachel Maddow points out that Donald Trump is following the “strongman” playbook so closely, and with such a lack of originality, that his behavior in his second term has become entirely predictable. And yet, for all of his aspirations to be a strongman, his leadership suffers from some profound weaknesses, from the economy to healthcare to criminal justice to immigration.

  3. obviously, he met required qualifications and is just doing his job
    Attribution: Trump’s Choice for FBI by Jeff Danziger

  4. BTW Danziger the cartoonist also is a writer. here’s amazon on one of his works published in 2021 “Lt. Dangerous: A Vietnam War Memoir”

    A conversation with a group of today’s military age men and women about America’s involvement in Vietnam inspired Jeff Danziger to write about his own wartime experiences: “War is interesting,” he reveals, “if you can avoid getting killed, and don’t mind loud noises.”
    Fans of his cartooning will recognize his mordant humor applied to his own wartime training and combat experiences: “I learned, and I think most veterans learn, that making people or nations do something by bombing or sending in armed troops usually fails.”
    Near the end of his telling, Danziger invites his audience—in particular the young friends who inspired him to write this informative and rollicking memoir—to ponder: “What would you do? . . . Could you summon the bravery—or the internal resistance—to simply refuse to be part of the whole idiotic theater of the war? . . . Or would you be like me?”

  5. Vance, Bondi, Miller, Patel all vowing to seek and destroy anybody posting negative mentions of Trump, Incorporated. “Call their employers and get them fired!”, bellowed Vance.
    Bondi has no idea at all what guaranteed free speech means.
    The Nazis are here. What we gonna do about it?
    We can cripple these bastards next election, in 14 months.

  7. another day, another specious lawsuit
    https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/16/donald-trump-sues-new-york-times-15-billion-dollars-00565191

    President Donald Trump announced late Monday he was launching a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times in his latest attack on a major media company over its reporting and commentary on him.
    The suit, filed in a Florida court, accuses the Times of being “a fullthroated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party” and cites a series of articles, including the paper’s front-page endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
    Trump said in a post on Truth Social the “degenerate” Times had “engaged in a decades long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole.”
    “The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long, and that stops, NOW!” he added.
    Trump’s suit names The New York Times Company, four of the publication’s reporters — Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker and Michael S. Schmidt — and Penguin Random House, which published a book titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” written by Craig and Buettner, that the legal filing calls “false, malicious, and defamatory.”
    The suit alleges the reporting had harmed Trump’s “unique brand” and business interests, including his media company’s stock value, causing “reputational injury” worth “billions of dollars.”
    Trump threatened only last week to sue the Times for reporting allegations he authored a sexually suggestive note in 2003 to disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York jail cell in 2019. Trump has vigorously denied he wrote the note.
    The Republican leader has launched a flurry of lawsuits against publications and media companies he has accused of being unfriendly and defamatory, including The Wall Street Journal, ABC and Paramount, the parent of CBS News.
    In July, Paramount agreed to settle a $20 billion lawsuit filed by Trump over an interview with former Vice President Harris on CBS news program “60 Minutes” that the president said was deceptively edited, paying him $16 million.

  12. Kash aside for the moment, BiD put her finger on it yesterday.

    Orange Adolf is clear cutting the WH garden and grounds to build a golden ballroom, while jobless numbers grow.

    …the economy moves toward recession, the President sues newspapers for reporting about his birthday card to his buddy Jeff, war rages in Gaza, and…

  13. My circadian rhythms are off with the impending change of season, but woke up to read the wrong obituary.

    Robert Redford’s loss is more sad and real to me than that other guy’s despite the still wrongly lowered flags. Even if he somehow takes away my freedom of speech, Dodo cannot force me to feel feelings I do not feel. He cannot tell me who or how to mourn.

  14. So sorry to hear that Robert Redford is dead.

    BTW, Lindsey is an idiot. There is no reconciling his call to action against social media sites with the First Amendment right to free speech, and making false equivalence between online bullying and shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater to restrict speech because the medium is different.

  15. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

    US Senate candidate Bill McKay goes off the script for his closing statement, in the debate against the incumbent Crocker Jarman. From the 1972 film The Candidate, starring Robert Redford.

  21. Jamie, absolutely. I don’t buy for a second that the Park Service doesn’t have responsibility to review and approve construction projects in the White House complex.

  23. Under the new congressional map here in Missouri it looks like the Democrats will lose a seat but Kansas City as a region will gain 2 congressmen who will be eager to bring as many federal dollars to the city as they can. The voting power in these newly created districts will flow from the sparsely populated rural regions to Urban/Suburban KC. Kansas City itself has nonpartisan elections so it is well situated to take advantage of the new situation and trust me the movers and shakers behind the scenes know how to play the game.
    So it looks like Missouri Republicans have screwed rural Missouri, *again*.
    The state Democratic party should be able to take advantage of this, but they won’t, *again*

    Jack

  27. Ivy, only if someone with standing to sue files the lawsuit and You can bet the NPS ain’t going to file that. Not sure whether any of the other, similar groups whose boards or members are not appointed by the President and aren’t subject to firing by him have standing, but I say bring it on. Make the courts say whether they do or not.

  31. It’s funny to watch the right and left try to ascribe some sort of cohesive ideology to the shooter. He’s just this new generation of a loser video-gamer who believes in nothing besides edgelording, i’ve known plenty of young adults like that, none of them deserved guns

    cultural offshoot of 4chan

    that i have to say it shows how out of touch your media and most politicians are, or they’re deliberately misrepresenting

    lol the Spiers piece is as inflammatory as i predicted, being used as pretext as for ideological crackdown, great job 👍

  32. Many on the left said and posted a lot of eloquently composed stuff last week, but that’s not what the right amplified of course

    Everyone, from indie media on down to people like me, is going to have to start posting value statements so that random nutjobs can’t usurp our voices

  33. I’ll be cranking up our chat room again tomorrow morning before this…
    Kash Patel House Testimony
    WED, Sept 17, 10:00 a.m. ET — House Judiciary oversight hearing, Rayburn 2141.

  34. i’m pretty sure antifa never was nor is a real organization. In fact, I believe the ethos is deliberate disorganization, it is a Trumpco-contrived bogeyman

    You may know that already but it bears repeating

  35. “woke” started among online black communities as a descriptor for someone who is educated in the racial dynamics of the history of this country, then it was appropriated by white liberals because that’s what white people do, it never really had anything to do with the LGBT community until conservatives used it as a catch-all pejorative

    clearing things up here

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