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Rex Tillerson has been fired as Secretary of State; CIA director Mike Pompeo has been nominated to replace him. Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Pompeo at the CIA is Gina Haspel, who had been the agency’s deputy director.

In 2002, Haspel was present, in a supervising role, at a “black site” in Thailand where an individual named Abu Zubaydah—believed to be a top al-Qaida official—was tortured. Zubaydah was waterboarded, slammed against a wall, and confined in a “coffin-like” box. As ProPublica reported in 2017, though, “CIA analysts were wrong when they had identified Zubaydah as the number three or four in al-Qaida after Osama bin Laden. The waterboarding failed to elicit valuable intelligence not because he was holding back, but because he was not a member of al-Qaida, and had no knowledge of any plots against the United States.”

He remains imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay and, as the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins has noted, lost his left eye at some point after being captured under circumstances that remain unclear.

When questions began to swirl about the Bush administration’s use of the “black sites,” and program of “enhanced interrogation,” [Haspel] began pushing to have the tapes destroyed. She accomplished her mission years later when she rose to a senior position at CIA headquarters and drafted an order to destroy the evidence, which was still locked in a CIA safe at the American embassy in Thailand. Her boss, the head of the agency’s counterterrorism center, signed the order to feed the 92 tapes into a giant shredder.

Trump’s Nominee to Lead CIA Supervised Torture of Mistakenly Identified Subject, Then Destroyed Evidence

Holy crap, can you even imagine the response if Obama had proposed extrajudicial confiscation of guns?!

Trump: 'Take the guns first, go through due process second'

As of the latest reporting by the Treasury Department, the US gross national debt rose by $41.5 billion on Thursday, February 22, to a grand total of $20.8 trillion.

Here's the thing: On September 7, 2017, five-and-a-half months ago, just before Congress suspended the debt ceiling, the gross national debt stood at $19.8 trillion.

At that time, I was holding my breath waiting for the gross national debt to take a huge leap in a single day - as it always does after the debt ceiling gets lifted or suspended - and jump to the next ignominious level. It sure did the next day, when it jumped $318 billion.

And it continued. Over a period of 8 weeks, the gross national debt jumped by $640 billion. Four weeks after that, it had ballooned by $723 billion, at which point Fed Chair Yellen - whose cheap-money policies had enabled Congress to do this for years - said that she was "very worried about the sustainability of the US debt trajectory."

Then Congress served up another debt ceiling.

That debt ceiling was suspended on February 8, at which point the gross national debt began to surge again, adding $1 trillion ($960.4 billion rounded to the nearest 100 million), a 5% jump in the gross national debt in just 5.5 months

The US's national debt spiked $1 trillion in less than 6 months

Appearing in court today, former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates pled guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of making false statements to the FBI and to the Special Counsel at a meeting last month. In preparation for the guilty plea, Robert Mueller filed superseding criminal information earlier today which alleged Gates and Manafort laundered tens of millions of dollars that they earned through their work for the Ukrainian government.

So that puts the Mueller Score at 5 guilty pleas and 19 indictments.

Rick Gates pleads guilty to conspiracy, lying to investigators

For those of you playing along at home that brings Mueller's score up to 4 guilty pleas and 15 indictments.

Mueller probe: London-based son-in-law of Russian businessman to plead guilty to false statements

The original 43

Plus, turns out the shithead who murdered 17 kids yesterday was a white supremacist.

But yeah...both sides are totally the same.

One of Trump’s first acts as president made it easier for the mentally ill to buy guns

...Instead He’ll Run A $1 Trillion One.

  Fourteen months before he was elected president, Donald Trump vowed to make sure the country would never again run a $400 billion budget deficit.

“Well, he’s right about that,” laughed Capitol Hill budget veteran Stan Collender on Monday.

Because, as it turns out, Trump kept his promise ― only not in the way his supporters might have hoped.

In the first budget cycle fully under their control, Trump and the Republican-run Congress are likely to run a deficit that will top $1 trillion, some two-and-a-half times as big as the one Trump had complained about at his Sept. 30, 2015, rally in Keene, New Hampshire.

A neo-Nazi Holocaust denier is set to become the Republican nominee for a congressional seat in Illinois, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on Sunday.

An Illinois-Nazi too. I hate Illinois Nazis!

Holocaust denier to become Republican nominee for Illinois congressional seat.

Jones’s Nazi costume and celebrations of Hitler’s birthday, his protest against a local Holocaust museum and his presence at neo-Nazi and white supremacist events have long been documented.

It seems like if you're going to spend the time writing a partisan hack-job memo you'd at least make sure the publicly-verifiable parts are true. Not our boy Nunes! Stupid Watergate continues.

Amid all the excitement over the Devin Nunes #TheMemo, it is important to remember that it is a partisan summary of FISA warrant applications that we the People have not been allowed to see. And in determining whether you trust Nunes’s summary, it might be relevant that it inaccurately summarizes something that is public record: James Comey’s testimony in 2017 regarding whether the allegations in the memo had been verified.

A Significant Inaccuracy In #TheMemo Calls Its Credibility Into Question

UPDATE: A second publicly-verifiable statement of fact has been proven false.

@realDonaldTrump
Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!

Meanwhile, back in reality:

But it was smaller than the 48 million who watched Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress last year and smaller than several speeches delivered by recent predecessors. Barack Obama's joint session speech in 2009 drew 52 million viewers; George W. Bush's State of the Union address in 2003 drew 62 million viewers; and Bill Clinton's joint session speech in 1993 drew 67 million viewers. (A newly elected president's first address to a joint session of Congress is not considered a State of the Union speech.)

Trump says his State of the Union viewership was the highest ever. The ratings say otherwise.

Remember when the President of the United States lying was considered a bad thing?