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

07-12-2017 , 04:19 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by campfirewest
If their best defense is to just say "what about Hillary.." I'd say they have a big problem.

Maybe I have a plebeian palate, but I will never abide by pay for play sauce on my murder patty.

Also, burger really needs a sinking Titanic garnish imo.
07-12-2017 , 04:20 PM
Quote:
Ahead of his departure for Paris, Trump spent much of his time watching television and huddled with top advisers, according to two administration officials. He barely left the Oval Office.
Oh, so THAT'S why Trump is tweeting about his television habits.
07-12-2017 , 04:23 PM
Not sure how much of this part is self awareness by CNN and how much is self own:
Quote:
Questions about the origin of the leaks have rippled through Washington, with the suggestion that backstabbing aides may be looking to take down their rivals.
07-12-2017 , 04:33 PM
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Originally Posted by DVaut1

Literally what is the justification for this article and granting literally every single source the opportunity to dish anonymously?
We certainly do like loling at the palace intrigue in this forum
07-12-2017 , 04:35 PM
I mean an astute Trump watcher can guess that article is a Bannon/Preibus joint since the winners are Preibus (under fire, but staying calm and rallying the troops despite being burdened with a bunch of incompetent staffers), Bannon (since the villains are the New York cabal -- Trump's lawyer and Kushner, and Don Jr. is made the hapless victim of bad family decisions) and allusions to the fighting spirit of the outsiders who are in the WH but aren't in the West Wing, which is probably some combination of Conway/Ayers (Pence's chief of staff) reminding everyone that Pence and the hard-scrabble warriors are ready to fight on without Trump.

Whatever. The point is that article is super hot garbage and is precisely the sort of nonsense that is everywhere in political journalism. None of that should be published; it's just anonymous gossip. Titillating no doubt but serves no one but the people advantaged by the gossip.
07-12-2017 , 04:39 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by All-In Flynn
Wow. I mean, I knew James Woods had lost his ****, but I had no idea it was that bad.
Neal Patrick Harris called him out a day or two ago for twitter shaming a transgender kid. Woods is a D-list actor but A-list ****wad now.
07-12-2017 , 04:42 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
I mean an astute Trump watcher can guess that article is a Bannon/Preibus joint since the winners are Preibus (under fire, but staying calm and rallying the troops despite being burdened with a bunch of incompetent staffers), Bannon (since the villains are the New York cabal -- Trump's lawyer and Kushner, and Don Jr. is made the hapless victim of bad family decisions) and allusions to the fighting spirit of the outsiders who are in the WH but aren't in the West Wing, which is probably some combination of Conway/Ayers (Pence's chief of staff) reminding everyone that Pence and the hard-scrabble warriors are ready to fight on without Trump.

Whatever. The point is that article is super hot garbage and is precisely the sort of nonsense that is everywhere in political journalism. None of that should be published; it's just anonymous gossip. Titillating no doubt but serves no one but the people advantaged by the gossip.
You clicked on it. That's perhaps our biggest problem, content sells and that's easy content. We see this in sports too, you're better off being say skip bayless with whatever bull**** than writing good informative articles. Right now what sells is right wing bull****. Many people doing actual journalist work don't get paid ****.

Yes, they need to do a better job editing and going through to make sure mistakes don't get through but that doesn't sell and people don't care about that either. You have to remember it's a business and as such it's primary goal is to make money not to serve people. I wish that weren't the case but more people want bull**** and gossip than the truth. WAAF.

Why do I want to snap believe this?
07-12-2017 , 04:43 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by goofyballer
Oh, so THAT'S why Trump is tweeting about his television habits.
i'm imagining the next president's first day in office, and he or she is like, "should i remove the big screen tv from the oval? nah, it's modern times, information is so quickly exchanged, maybe we should be plugged in", and they keep the news channels on in the background and it totally consumes them and they BECOME trumpish and aides say the ghost of donald trump still haunts the white house
07-12-2017 , 04:43 PM
Almost certainly unworthy of even dollar-menu nothingburger status but here it is anyway



https://twitter.com/ericgarland/stat...33792679641088
07-12-2017 , 04:44 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by All-In Flynn
Wow. I mean, I knew James Woods had lost his ****, but I had no idea it was that bad.
According to Woods, he scored a 1579 on his SAT. Does that mean we have to give this tweet, or Woods's tweet about Anderson Cooper a few months ago (which was wayyyyyyyy over the line), more thoughtful consideration?
07-12-2017 , 04:44 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
Whatever. The point is that article is super hot garbage and is precisely the sort of nonsense that is everywhere in political journalism. None of that should be published; it's just anonymous gossip. Titillating no doubt but serves no one but the people advantaged by the gossip.
I understand your point, but if the reporters' assignment is to find out what's going on inside the white house in the aftermath of junior's e-mail scandal, then what's the alternative? Would you rather see a story featuring nothing but Sarah Huckabee-Sanders' ****-shoveling quotes? Now that would be lazy reporting.
07-12-2017 , 04:45 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
There's no real justification for pulling punches calling Sarah Palin a racist because you might be wrong about her intent in sharing an article with 14 Words in the headlines that might be coded to appeal to white supremacists because Sarah Palin is a right wing propagandist that trades in racism either way.
I advocate not risking being wrong only when there is a decent chance you are wrong AND that your error can be exposed (or that it is obvious that you are making an assertion that might be wrong). It is just tactical advice that prevents a tactic from backfiring.

But I am an immoral person who looks at stuff like this as a game. If I was a moral person I would point out that trying to pin Palin with racist words that really weren't, simply because she IS a racist is similar to cops planting evidence on someone who they know he is guilty of SOME crime even if not this one.
07-12-2017 , 04:51 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rococo
According to Woods, he scored a 1579 on his SAT. Does that mean we have to give this tweet, or Woods's tweet about Anderson Cooper a few months ago (which was wayyyyyyyy over the line), more thoughtful consideration?
Yeah he's a genius the way Rand and Carson are geniuses
07-12-2017 , 04:54 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Namath12
Almost certainly unworthy of even dollar-menu nothingburger status but here it is anyway

<snipped tweet>

https://twitter.com/ericgarland/stat...33792679641088
Seems a little nothingburgery, very lacking in details or significance
07-12-2017 , 04:56 PM
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Jim’s biggest moment in the spotlight was during a high-profile Trump speech in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. Trump explained that Jim “loves the City of Lights, he loves Paris. For years, every year during the summer, he would go to Paris. It was automatic, with his wife and his family.”

Trump one day asked Jim: “How’s Paris doing?”

“’Paris?” Jim replied, as relayed by Trump. “‘I don’t go there anymore. Paris is no longer Paris.’”
Quote:
Whether Jim exists is unclear. Trump has never given his last name. The White House has not responded to a request for comment about who Jim is or whether he will be on the trip.
https://apnews.com/e18f254c4ac84e6ba...his-friend-Jim
07-12-2017 , 04:59 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Money2Burn
Yes, this almost certainly happened. Like, the Trump team analytics consultant Analytica or whatever it was named was ****ing bragging about it toward the end of the campaign.
I hate this facet of the story. Like the Russians are better campaign operatives than US natives who have done it professionally for years? I think this just comes of the BS marketing hype about Cambridge Analytica.

There's a book, Code Monkeys, about a guy who sold his online ad-business to FB for a few million and then started working there. No one really knew what going on and they really had no idea to target adds. The guy was leading some of the projects and could barely get buy-in for simple things--one big issue is that the add metrics they gave customers were misleading at best. Anyway, if you eliminated all regular FB users in WI and PA, I doubt that swings the vote.

It's a distraction--follow the money laundering and Magnizsky Act stuff.
07-12-2017 , 05:03 PM
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Originally Posted by Huehuecoyotl
Obviously Jim = James Comey. He won't answer AP's questions about Jim because they're not on good terms after the firing. At least that's what my friend Mike tells me.
07-12-2017 , 05:07 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by David Sklansky
I advocate not risking being wrong only when there is a decent chance you are wrong AND that your error can be exposed (or that it is obvious that you are making an assertion that might be wrong). It is just tactical advice that prevents a tactic from backfiring.
Right. As I said in the other now locked thread, making claims about Sarah Palin's intent is not falsifiable so you can't ever be embarrassingly wrong.

Quote:
But I am an immoral person who looks at stuff like this as a game. If I was a moral person I would point out that trying to pin Palin with racist words that really weren't, simply because she IS a racist is similar to cops planting evidence on someone who they know he is guilty of SOME crime even if not this one.
Sure. But cops that plant evidence know at least the plant is a dishonest tactic, even if assuming the ends justify the means. The planting of evidence is clearly a lie or treacherous or whatever.

But I'm pretty sure most of us sincerely believe Palin/the Young Cons had some decent probability of being responsible of just what we accused her of.

The better analogy is when a nice young kid dies of an opiate overdose and the cops finger the local known drug dealer with a criminal record that they've already caught hanging around the school yard dealing, and that they wanted to nail anyway, but the cops know deep down that evidence that dealer sold the kid the specific deadly batch of heroin is questionable. I disagree on the margins of the analogy being perfectly comparable, but broadly agree that the leftist position there was something like "she's a scumbag drug dealer anyway so we're not gonna stress ourselves too deeply making the case here, good partisan leftists would toss her in jail and throw away the key" and that it's asinine partisan behavior to send in the forensics squad or conduct too many interviews, or demand Sarah Palin deserves her freedom until we're absolutely sure she didn't sell the kid that specific bad batch of drugs. In keeping with the analogy: A good leftist commits to keep kids away from drugs and if we have to make some hurried assumptions to harass known bad apple drug dealers, don't lose sleep over it.

Last edited by DVaut1; 07-12-2017 at 05:19 PM.
07-12-2017 , 05:10 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by ScreaminAsian
wray was apparently chosen for fbi director because of his passion for prosecuting hate crimes perpetrated against christians (burning churches)
I didn't watch much of the hearing, but I saw this and it raised all kinds of warning flags.
07-12-2017 , 05:19 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by iron81
I recall hearing that CNN'S news gathering operation was something like 10x larger than Fox's. MSNBC seems closet to Fox.
MSNBC is nothing like Fox. However, when you compare it with the BBC, who have reporters all over the world doing legitimate stories about, say, murders of nonbelivers in Bangladesh there's a real difference.

BBC is like an orchestra, CNN and MSNBC are like rock bands (CNN is worse, because it has people like Jeffry Lord in the band), Fox is Milli Vanilli.

Almost everything Murdoch has done in his long profitable career is about making news cheaper, dumber, and more lucrative. He doesn't give a **** about journalism except to the extent he needs some fig leaf to keep pushing his trash out on the public.
07-12-2017 , 05:22 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chippa58
I understand your point, but if the reporters' assignment is to find out what's going on inside the white house in the aftermath of junior's e-mail scandal, then what's the alternative? Would you rather see a story featuring nothing but Sarah Huckabee-Sanders' ****-shoveling quotes? Now that would be lazy reporting.
But you can't be confident you got an accurate picture of what's going on in the White House from that article. With a bunch of unattributed gossip, you almost certainly didn't, but you were given no information to deduce who was trying to influence your opinion to their view of events.

If the choices are reprinting Kellyanne Conway's background dirt and Bannon's gossip given to you off the record, Huckabee propaganda, or nothing, then news outlets should do nothing. There's honestly no real qualitative difference between Conway off the record and Huckabee/Spicer at the podium, it's just bull**** with a different pretense.

OBVIOUSLY if Conway is saying, hey, here's a scoop, off the record, if it comes from me I'll be fired, then perhaps they should print it anonymously sourced. Hard to say. CNN owes it to its readers to justify why they gave anonymity. It's far more likely these people like Conway and Bannon are super powerful highly paid/experienced media spin agents just plying anonymity because it's convenient and more useful for them, and CNN is acquiescing in exchange for access/scoops. That's decidedly a bad journalism practice; that's how the media gets gamed doing the interests and bidding of the powerful and spreading propaganda uncritically.

Last edited by DVaut1; 07-12-2017 at 05:29 PM.
07-12-2017 , 05:27 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rococo
According to Woods, he scored a 1579 on his SAT. Does that mean we have to give this tweet, or Woods's tweet about Anderson Cooper a few months ago (which was wayyyyyyyy over the line), more thoughtful consideration?
Yea he's full of **** after hearing him talk about poker on live tv a few days ago
07-12-2017 , 05:28 PM
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Originally Posted by tomdemaine
I mean sure we attempted murder but that's hardly a crime now is it?
This, they don't give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry
07-12-2017 , 05:35 PM
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Originally Posted by bigt2k4
This, they don't give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry
and that tattoo says "The Hillary, The" in German
07-12-2017 , 05:53 PM
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Originally Posted by FWWM
Trump is more like a gutshot that somehow got there
WOOOOO HOOOOO ONE TIME DEALER!

Quote:
Originally Posted by ScreaminAsian
wow daughter of guitar virtuoso governor mike huckabee acting as official spokesperson for the president responded to questions about don jr with "what about hillary clinton"


also now claiming today that religious leaders normally and regularly visit the president in the oval office to lay hands on him in prayer
Huckabee spanks the bad booty bass bro. You never saw one of his tight band jams? Homie takes off his shirt and struts that ass.

      
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