The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: No smocking guns. - Page 1724 - Politics and Economics

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The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: No smocking guns.

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06-30-2017 , 09:45 PM

#43076

markksman

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Oct 2007 Posts: 20,921

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chips Ahoy

The supreme court seat is not a big deal.

1. not-gop wins 50% senate, presidency.
2. kill filibuster because norms are dead, prisoners dilemma you can't cooperate after defection.
3. appoint 10 new SC justices. Snap confirm.
4. re-litigate everything. Stare decisis is a fake word.

the rules have changed. time to play by the new rules.

if you can do step 1 it's not a problem and if you can't do step 1 it's hopeless.

a return to coloring inside the lines should be a negotiated outcome, not given away on day 1.

In fifty years we might have 800 sc justices.

06-30-2017 , 09:55 PM

#43077

pyatnitski

grinder

Join Date: Sep 2013 Posts: 423

Quote:

Originally Posted by microbet

Well, it's absolutely impossible to call our democracy legitimate before 1920, pretty much impossible before 1964, and probably still impossible. It's probably a fair point to make though that it's been getting less legitimate for the last 8 years or so.

There's many competing claims for the honour, and in these days of Trump etc. it may well have lost top spot, but I've long thought the worst aspect of modern western politics is the idea that democracy is a monolith that has been achieved.

Up to the early 20th century there was often a history of electoral reform in the west, as more and more people had more and more power to affect the way the countries they lived in were directed. However, since roughly the point at which women got the vote on the same terms as men, the general idea seems to have become that democracy is unlocked. Further meaningful reform is not a serious issue.

As a British person, one of, if not the, most depressing episodes of my lifetime was the referendum on a form of proportional representation. Not that I thought it was an astonishing advance, just the utter indifference with which it was received means the question of serious voting reform is probably done for a very long time.

I can understand how, given current issues, such structural reforms are not at the top of people's minds, but if there was a constant idea that democracy was an ideal to be always moving towards rather than a status attained long ago, debates about voter registration and gerrymandering etc. might be able to be more easily situated in a progressive context. Democracy is a process whose sensible goals evolve over time with societal and technological advances. Maybe this is already a consensus on the left. Hope so.

06-30-2017 , 09:55 PM

#43078

uDevil

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jul 2003 Posts: 6,941

Saw this on Maddow. Awesome.

https://twitter.com/BraddJaffy/statu...97729152638977

06-30-2017 , 09:59 PM

#43079

ScreaminAsian

For President

Join Date: Oct 2008 Posts: 33,333

GOP Activist Who Sought Clinton Emails Cited Trump Campaign Officials

Peter W. Smith listed Bannon, Conway and Clovis, besides Flynn, in a recruiting document; his purpose isn’t clear and there’s no indication he asked for or received any coordination with them

Last edited by ScreaminAsian; 06-30-2017 at 10:05 PM.

06-30-2017 , 10:06 PM

#43080

microbet

Solar Powered

Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 57,092

The Federal Government is now worse than the State of Mississippi government.

06-30-2017 , 10:13 PM

#43081

Trolly McTrollson

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Oct 2010 Posts: 37,834

Mark Hamill Reads Trump's Tweets on Mika Brzezinski as the Joker

06-30-2017 , 10:19 PM

#43082

campfirewest

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Sep 2006 Posts: 10,178

Quote:

Originally Posted by uDevil

Saw this on Maddow. Awesome.

https://twitter.com/BraddJaffy/statu...97729152638977

Quote:

Originally Posted by microbet

The Federal Government is now worse than the State of Mississippi government.

Good thing we have state's rights!

06-30-2017 , 10:20 PM

#43083

zikzak

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jul 2009 Posts: 22,198

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rococo

I agree with awval on virtually nothing, but I confess that I also don't really understand what einbert wants people to do.

He wants you to be mad and be willing to fight back. The #resistance spluttered to a halt. People are outraged and aghast and whatever the **** else, but there is only a very small number of people who are genuinely angry and willing to do something about it.

The Trump administration is theater for most people, including those who claim to be outraged and aghast. We're all John McCain.

06-30-2017 , 10:21 PM

#43084

lycosid

veteran

Join Date: Oct 2010 Posts: 2,806

Quote:

Originally Posted by awval999

Democrats have willingly segregated themselves (for lack of a better term) into urban areas. This leads to even non-gerrymandered HoR district borders to tightly pack the Democratic vote.

I can help you out with some better terms. One of them is white flight. Another is terrorism.

06-30-2017 , 10:33 PM

#43085

awval999

Election Monitor.

Join Date: Mar 2005 Posts: 6,269

Quote:

Originally Posted by lycosid

I can help you out with some better terms. One of them is white flight. Another is terrorism.

It doesn't matter what caused it.

It's simply that urban areas are vote sinks. It doesn't help the Democrats to win cities 80/20 but lose the 'burbs 60/40. It's "wasted" votes in a first past the post system.

06-30-2017 , 10:47 PM

#43086

Melkerson

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Nov 2008 Posts: 11,205

Quote:

Originally Posted by uDevil

Saw this on Maddow. Awesome.

https://twitter.com/BraddJaffy/statu...97729152638977

Of all the things they could have chosen to actually pick principles over Trump/racism, they picked this. Color me shocked.

06-30-2017 , 11:17 PM

#43087

Double Eagle

Health Care Thread Czar

Join Date: Dec 2003 Posts: 8,323

That time I got contacted to collude with the Russians

Quote:

Although it wasn’t initially clear to me how independent Smith’s operation was from Flynn or the Trump campaign, it was immediately apparent that Smith was both well connected within the top echelons of the campaign and he seemed to know both Lt. Gen. Flynn and his son well. Smith routinely talked about the goings on at the top of the Trump team, offering deep insights into the bizarre world at the top of the Trump campaign. Smith told of Flynn’s deep dislike of DNI Clapper, whom Flynn blamed for his dismissal by President Obama. Smith told of Flynn’s moves to position himself to become CIA Director under Trump, but also that Flynn had been persuaded that the Senate confirmation process would be prohibitively difficult. He would instead therefore become National Security Advisor should Trump win the election, Smith said. He also told of a deep sense of angst even among Trump loyalists in the campaign, saying “Trump often just repeats whatever he’s heard from the last person who spoke to him,” and expressing the view that this was especially dangerous when Trump was away.

Over the course of a few phone calls, initially with Smith and later with Smith and one of his associates—a man named John Szobocsan—I was asked about my observations on technical details buried in the State Department’s release of Secretary Clinton’s emails (such as noting a hack attempt in 2011, or how Clinton’s emails might have been intercepted by Russia due to lack of encryption). I was also asked about aspects of the DNC hack, such as why I thought the “Guccifer 2” persona really was in all likelihood operated by the Russian government, and how it wasn’t necessary to rely on CrowdStrike’s attribution as blind faith; noting that I had come to the same conclusion independently based on entirely public evidence, having been initially doubtful of CrowdStrike’s conclusions.

Towards the end of one of our conversations, Smith made his pitch. He said that his team had been contacted by someone on the “dark web”; that this person had the emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server (which she had subsequently deleted), and that Smith wanted to establish if the emails were genuine. If so, he wanted to ensure that they became public prior to the election. What he wanted from me was to determine if the emails were genuine or not.

It is no overstatement to say that my conversations with Smith shocked me. Given the amount of media attention given at the time to the likely involvement of the Russian government in the DNC hack, it seemed mind-boggling for the Trump campaign—or for this offshoot of it—to be actively seeking those emails. To me this felt really wrong.

In my conversations with Smith and his colleague, I tried to stress this point: if this dark web contact is a front for the Russian government, you really don’t want to play this game. But they were not discouraged. They appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out. Indeed, they made it quite clear to me that it made no difference to them who hacked the emails or why they did so, only that the emails be found and made public before the election.

This is bananas.

06-30-2017 , 11:48 PM

#43088

LFS

emo gaylord

Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 21,867

Quote:

Originally Posted by zikzak

there is only a very small number of people who are genuinely angry and willing to do something about it.

What is the something we're supposed to be doing?

06-30-2017 , 11:49 PM

#43089

Rex Ingram

journeyman

Join Date: Sep 2013 Posts: 339

Quote:

Originally Posted by Double Eagle

That time I got contacted to collude with the Russians

This is bananas.

1. I assume a lot of people got a lawyer after reading that
2. Why the did this guy wait for so long to come forward? Flynn has been implicated months ago

06-30-2017 , 11:52 PM

#43090

Trolly McTrollson

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Oct 2010 Posts: 37,834

Quote:

Originally Posted by lycosid

I can help you out with some better terms. One of them is white flight. Another is terrorism.

Generations of domestic terrorism, segregated schools, redlining, sundown towns, white flight, etc. etc. But yeah, def the fault of the Democratic constituency that they aren't represented in the suburbs. They must have voluntarily self-segregated, no other way to put it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by zikzak

einbert is a bit emotional, but people *should* be outraged over this ****. Congressional Republicans deliberately shirked their responsibility and refused to consider any qualified justices if the president is a black guy. We can quibble about whether this is technically illegal or just an angleshoot, but at the very least it's a complete violation of the spirit of the law.

07-01-2017 , 12:01 AM

#43091

zikzak

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jul 2009 Posts: 22,198

Quote:

Originally Posted by LFS

What is the something we're supposed to be doing?

idk, maybe not sitting around waiting for somebody to tell you what to do? I think I have a pretty good idea of what populist anger looks like, and I'm not really seeing it. I see something else, something that is weak and complacent and passive.

07-01-2017 , 12:06 AM

#43092

Chips Ahoy

help me help you

Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 28,869

Quote:

Originally Posted by LFS

What is the something we're supposed to be doing?

A million people marching in DC weekly would change the outcomes.

07-01-2017 , 12:15 AM

#43093

gobbo

Trust the fat man.

Join Date: Jun 2005 Posts: 15,623

Quote:

Originally Posted by markksman

No conflict of interest with the VP having the final say on such a thing.

Lolfounders

Remember, the founders originally had the guy who got 2nd in the election as VP. That's like 1000x worse in terms of conflict of interest.

07-01-2017 , 12:20 AM

#43094

einbert

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 14,911

Quote:

Originally Posted by awval999 View Post
Democrats have willingly segregated themselves (for lack of a better term) into urban areas. This leads to even non-gerrymandered HoR district borders to tightly pack the Democratic vote.

No.

Redlining: Still a thing
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.05148489a096

Quote:

"Redlining" just sounds like an an old-timey term, a practice that exists only in history and our re-tellings of it. The word has particular roots in the 1930s, when the government-sponsored Home Owner's Loan Corporation first drafted maps of American communities to sort through which ones were worthy of mortgage lending. Neighborhoods were ranked and color-coded, and the D-rated ones — shunned for their "inharmonious" racial groups — were typically outlined in red.

This government practice was swiftly adopted by private banks, too, during an era of massive homeownership expansion in the U.S. And the visual language of the maps became a verb: To redline a community was to cut it off from essential capital. To be redlined was something even worse.

The federal government eventually retreated from the practice, and it was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act in 1968. But black communities have warned that it still exists in subtler and changed forms, in bank tactics that have targeted these same neighborhoods for predatory lending, or in new patterns like "retail redlining." Some of the persistent redlining, though, still looks an awful lot like the original.
Case in point: This week the Department of Housing and Urban Development settled with the largest bank headquartered in Wisconsin over claims that it discriminated from 2008-2010 against black and Hispanic borrowers in Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota. The bank, Associated Bank, denies wrongdoing in the settlement, but HUD itself is declaring victory in "one of the largest redlining complaints" ever brought by the federal government against a mortgage lender.

https://twitter.com/HopeInTheUSA/sta...63189428256768

https://twitter.com/krash63/status/879200206604050432

Ethnic Cleansing, American Style
The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...040502306.html

White flight is creating a separate and unequal system of higher education
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.9ee0377bd2f4

07-01-2017 , 12:24 AM

#43095

einbert

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 14,911

In many cases, African American land was stolen or destroyed and the owners were forced to flee the area or even killed:

https://twitter.com/shadowandact/sta...99516239605760

07-01-2017 , 12:26 AM

#43096

einbert

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 14,911

To assume that Democrats "segregated themselves" is to assume that their ancestors were free to live and prosper wherever they pleased in America. This is just simply not the case. All the way up until the 1970s this still wasn't the case in large parts of the country, and redlining persists to this day.

07-01-2017 , 12:43 AM

#43097

MrWookie

Don't Call Me Meredith

Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 94,159

Quote:

Originally Posted by markksman

No conflict of interest with the VP having the final say on such a thing.

Lolfounders

Ghana go out on a limb and suggest that it is not the founders who are deserving of your lolz for the 25th Amendment.

07-01-2017 , 01:27 AM

#43098

einbert

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 14,911

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chips Ahoy

A million people marching in DC weekly would change the outcomes.

From November 2016:
Thousands protest South Korean president as older conservatives grumble
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-so...-idUSKBN13E0DT

I can't tell you how happy it would make me to see that headline in Monday's newspapers here, but about the U.S. President.

Quote:

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Seoul on Saturday in the fourth straight weekend of protest against embattled President Park Geun-hye.

Park is resisting calls to step down amid an ongoing political crisis in which she is alleged to have let an old friend meddle in state affairs.

The scandal has rocked Park's presidency and united Koreans in disapproval, culminating in a protest last weekend that saw a million people march on Seoul by some estimates.

Saturday's protest was smaller as protest groups also organized demonstrations in regional capitals. Police said at least 155,000 people had packed into a central Seoul square early on Saturday evening for a candle-lit rally. Organizers said the number was 500,000.

Park has pledged to cooperate in an investigation into the scandal. Prosecutors are expected to bring indictments against Choi Soon-sil, Park's friend at the center of the crisis, and two former presidential aides tomorrow.

07-01-2017 , 01:34 AM

#43099

goofyballer

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jun 2005 Posts: 70,719

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rex Ingram

1. I assume a lot of people got a lawyer after reading that
2. Why the did this guy wait for so long to come forward? Flynn has been implicated months ago

Re: #2, did you get to the end of the article? I don't blame you if you didn't, it was long, but he addressed it there:

Quote:

I’m sure readers are wondering: why did I keep quiet at the time? Actually, I didn’t. In the fall, prior to the election, I discussed the events of the story first with a friend, and secondly with a journalist. The trouble was that neither I nor the reporter in question knew what to make of the whole operation. It was certainly clear that the events were bizarre, and deeply unsettling. But it wasn’t reportable.

After all, Clinton’s private emails never materialized. We couldn’t show that Smith had been in contact with actual Russians. And while I believed—as I still do—that he was operating with some degree of coordination with the campaign, that was at least a little murky too. The story just didn’t make much sense—that is, until the Journal yesterday published the critical fact that U.S. intelligence has reported that Russian hackers were looking to get emails to Flynn through a cut-out during the Summer of 2016, and this was no idle speculation on my part.

Suddenly, my story seemed important—and ominous.