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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#6021 User is offline   nige1 

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Posted 2017-May-15, 22:46

View PostWinstonm, on 2017-May-15, 19:41, said:

Thank you. You have just classified yourself as an idiot, and I can now peacefully place you on ignore. Goodbye.

Another person who disagrees with WinstomM? :(
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#6022 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2017-May-16, 04:14

From Trump’s Fraudulent Voter-Fraud Commission by NYT Editorial Board:

Quote

President Trump’s repeated claim that “millions” of noncitizens voted illegally in the 2016 election has always been transparently self-serving — a desperate attempt to soothe his damaged ego and explain how he could have lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost three million votes.

It also lined up nicely with a yearslong crusade by Republican officials to convince Americans that “voter fraud” is an actual problem. As Mr. Trump’s own lawyers have pointed out, it’s not. But that hasn’t stopped the president from trying, as he so often does, to commandeer the machinery of the federal government to justify his own falsehoods. The most recent example was his creation last week of an advisory commission whose ostensible goal is to “enhance the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the voting processes,” with an emphasis on weeding out “improper” or “fraudulent” registration and voting.

To state the obvious, this isn’t a commission. It’s a self-driving vehicle preprogrammed to arrive at only one destination: that strange, fact-free land in which, according to Mr. Trump and many conservatives, hordes of foreigners and people without valid photo identification flood the polls, threatening the nation’s electoral integrity. The right-wing politicians and anti-voter activists who appear to believe this never trouble themselves with the actual data.

So here it is: Voting fraud is extremely rare, and in-person fraud — the only kind that would be caught by voter ID laws — is essentially nonexistent, as study after study has shown. And as for those foreigners, a new survey of local election officials in 42 jurisdictions turned up a total of about 30 cases of suspected noncitizen voting last November — out of more than 23 million votes.

Meanwhile, voter ID and other suppression laws keep losing in court, where judges demand actual evidence in support of claims. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the decision of a federal appeals court last year striking down as unconstitutional North Carolina’s stunningly harsh anti-voter law, which required photo identification at the polls, cut early voting and eliminated same-day registration, among other measures. That decision found Republican state legislators had deliberately targeted “African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” A similarly severe Texas law was struck down by a federal judge, also for intentionally discriminating against minorities.

The purported purpose of Mr. Trump’s commission — to restore confidence in elections — is laughable, not only because Republicans have spent the past decade sowing seeds of doubt with hyped-up tales of fraud. In reality, voters’ confidence is mainly affected by whether their preferred candidate wins, not by the existence of voter ID or other laws.

Robert Bauer, co-chairman of the last presidential commission on elections, said Mr. Trump’s commission “is not intended to bolster confidence, but to undermine it, and on the strength of this program, to advance reforms that are costly, unnecessary and a burden on lawful voting by eligible voters.” Real reforms should include improved technology, more opportunities for early voting, and better-trained poll workers, as a comprehensive 2014 report produced by Mr. Bauer, a Democrat, and his Republican colleague, Benjamin Ginsberg, found.

The report also showed that bipartisanship is central to any credible effort to fix America’s voting systems. In contrast, Mr. Trump has put his commission in the hands of Kris Kobach, a hard-line conservative from Kansas who is the nation’s most aggressive peddler of the voter-fraud myth.

Mr. Kobach — who has managed to obtain just nine convictions for voter fraud since 2015, most for voting in two states — thinks he is standing on the “tip of the iceberg.” He claims he can’t understand why voting-rights advocates resist a deeper inquiry into fraud. “What are they afraid of? Why do they not want to know these numbers?” he asked.

There are also people who believe in the abominable snowman, but the government doesn’t waste millions of taxpayer dollars trying to prove he exists.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#6023 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2017-May-16, 04:18

From How Democrats Can Get Their Mojo Back by David Leonhardt:

Quote

The great new dividing line in American life is the four-year college degree. The line runs through virtually every part of society.

The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else has soared in recent years. The unemployment gap has, too. So have gaps in physical and social health. College graduates are living longer than they used to, getting divorced less and eating better. All of these trends are darker for non-graduates.

Then there is politics. Americans without a college degree are today’s swing voters. White non-graduates shifted sharply to Donald Trump last year, relative to 2012, and black non-graduates affected the result by staying home in larger numbers. Both decisions — voting for Trump or not voting at all — stemmed in part from alienation.

In an alternate universe, Trump would devote his presidency to a conservative agenda that improved the lives of the people who elected him. Remember when he proclaimed, “I love the poorly educated”? In this universe, he sure has a funny way of showing his love. He is trying to take health insurance away from millions of Americans, while lavishing tax cuts on the affluent.

But his real-world disdain for the working class creates an opening for the Democratic Party.

Democrats have to find a way to win more working-class votes. (Yes, I’m using “working class” as a rough synonym for the two-thirds of adults without bachelor’s degrees.) It’s not just Trump. Republicans control the House, the Senate, 33 governor’s offices and the legislature in 32 states.

Democrats need a comeback strategy, and the American working class needs an ally. The solution to both problems can be the same: a muscular agenda to lift up people without four-year college degrees.

It would have two main pillars. The first would be improving the lives of those who will never have those degrees — ensuring they can find meaningful, well-paying work and afford health care, child care and retirement. A stable middle-class life should be possible without a bachelor’s degree.

The second would be helping more people earn degrees and enjoy their benefits. There is something about college — the actual learning, as well as the required discipline and initiative — that seems to prepare people for adult success. Although two-year degrees bring benefits too, four-year degrees bring much larger ones.

On Tuesday, the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal group, is taking a first step toward creating a working-class agenda. It’s calling for a “Marshall Plan for America,” echoing the program that rebuilt postwar Europe. “Progressives have not done enough about job conditions and the dignity of work for people who don’t go to college,” says Neera Tanden, the center’s president, who previously worked for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

The effort is in only its conceptual stages. But it’s worth attention, both because of the center’s history of influence on Democrats (including on much of the Obama agenda) and because this particular idea gets a few big things right.

It avoids some elitist strains in today’s liberal politics. One of those strains dismisses the white working class as irredeemably racist. In truth, many of these voters backed progressive ideas before and are open to doing so again. Anyway, Democrats don’t have much of a choice. “You can’t construct a solid majority coalition for Democrats unless you reach more of those voters,” the political scientist Ruy Teixeira says.

Even as the new effort avoids some excesses of the left, it also steers clear of the fallacy that out-of-power political parties must tack toward mushy moderation. And I say that as a self-identifying mushy moderate on many issues. Sometimes, though, the best policy solution, not to mention the best way to win votes, is on one side of the political spectrum. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan were among the leaders who grasped this.

This new plan is unabashedly left-leaning in its call for the government to help create millions of good-paying jobs. It uses the phrase “jobs guarantee” and would meet the guarantee by taking on many problems the private sector isn’t solving: Crumbling roads and public transit. Patchy digital infrastructure. A shortage of good schools, child care, home health care workers and E.M.T.s. All of this would cost billions — but also far less than Trump’s reverse Robin Hood agenda.

The fact is, the electorate has shown some surprising support lately for an activist, populist government. Minimum-wage increases keep passing, in blue states and red ones, and Trump won the Republican nomination while spouting big-government promises (which he’s now violating).

Americans of all races who have been left behind in today’s globalized, high-technology, high-inequality economy are angry, and they have reason to be. They deserve better. They want tangible solutions. Finding those solutions is the right thing to do, and it’s the path back to power for Democrats.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#6024 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2017-May-16, 06:09

View Postnige1, on 2017-May-15, 22:46, said:

Another person who disagrees with WinstomM? :(


Did you even read the exchange before butting in? 100% blind loyalty to an individual is both stupid and dangerous. There is no point to discussion with zealotry of that magnitude.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#6025 User is offline   PassedOut 

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Posted 2017-May-16, 07:05

Conservative columnist David Brooks has his eye on Donald Trump: When the World Is Led by a Child

Quote

At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif.

First, most adults have learned to sit still. But mentally, Trump is still a 7-year-old boy who is bouncing around the classroom. Trump’s answers in these interviews are not very long — 200 words at the high end — but he will typically flit through four or five topics before ending up with how unfair the press is to him.

His inability to focus his attention makes it hard for him to learn and master facts. He is ill informed about his own policies and tramples his own talking points. It makes it hard to control his mouth. On an impulse, he will promise a tax reform when his staff has done little of the actual work.

Second, most people of drinking age have achieved some accurate sense of themselves, some internal criteria to measure their own merits and demerits. But Trump seems to need perpetual outside approval to stabilize his sense of self, so he is perpetually desperate for approval, telling heroic fabulist tales about himself.

“In a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care,” he told Time. “A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber,” he told The Associated Press, referring to his joint session speech.

By Trump’s own account, he knows more about aircraft carrier technology than the Navy. According to his interview with The Economist, he invented the phrase “priming the pump” (even though it was famous by 1933). Trump is not only trying to deceive others. His falsehoods are attempts to build a world in which he can feel good for an instant and comfortably deceive himself.

He is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence. Trump thought he’d be celebrated for firing James Comey. He thought his press coverage would grow wildly positive once he won the nomination. He is perpetually surprised because reality does not comport with his fantasies.

Third, by adulthood most people can perceive how others are thinking. For example, they learn subtle arts such as false modesty so they won’t be perceived as obnoxious.

But Trump seems to have not yet developed a theory of mind. Other people are black boxes that supply either affirmation or disapproval. As a result, he is weirdly transparent. He wants people to love him, so he is constantly telling interviewers that he is widely loved. In Trump’s telling, every meeting was scheduled for 15 minutes but his guests stayed two hours because they liked him so much.

Yes, but this has always been clear, even to many folks who voted for him. That's why he's such a weak man, and so easy to manipulate by his Russian buddies. We need some stronger folks around him to find ways to make him grow up.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
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#6026 User is offline   ldrews 

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Posted 2017-May-16, 07:50

View PostWinstonm, on 2017-May-15, 21:32, said:

Swing and a miss!


You are right. The actual context for her statement was the Benghazi investigation where she said:

Quote

"Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans," Clinton said. "What difference – at this point, what difference does it make?"

http://www.politifac...ence-does-it-m/
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#6027 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2017-May-16, 09:01

View PostPassedOut, on 2017-May-15, 09:21, said:

Political correctness prevents Trump and his followers from calling out these right-wing extremists as the domestic terrorists they are. But it will be a serious mistake for Trump to divert resources from this threat--more political correctness run amok.

Did you really use Trump and political correctness in the same sentence?

#6028 User is offline   Zelandakh 

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Posted 2017-May-16, 09:22

View Postldrews, on 2017-May-16, 07:50, said:

You are right. The actual context for her statement was the Benghazi investigation where she said:

http://www.politifac...ence-does-it-m/

So the context is that she was interested in bringing the killers to justice more than their specific motives. What does this have to do with being careless with classified information?
(-: Zel :-)
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#6029 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2017-May-16, 12:45

View PostPassedOut, on 2017-May-16, 07:05, said:

Conservative columnist David Brooks has his eye on Donald Trump: When the World Is Led by a Child


Yes, but this has always been clear, even to many folks who voted for him. That's why he's such a weak man, and so easy to manipulate by his Russian buddies. We need some stronger folks around him to find ways to make him grow up.


Too late. 70 somethings don't change.
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#6030 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2017-May-16, 12:47

View Postldrews, on 2017-May-16, 07:50, said:

You are right. The actual context for her statement was the Benghazi investigation where she said:

http://www.politifac...ence-does-it-m/


Again, neither Clinton nor Obama are in office. Trump is. You said watch his actions. I am. He is clueless and clearly dangerous as he completely bamboozled a smart guy like you into voting for him.

Kali Holloway explains:

Quote

You didn’t have to be a political genius—or a genius of any kind, really—to see that Donald Trump was going to be a disaster at being president. He clearly has no interest in politics or policy and doesn't understand, or care to understand, the basics of the job. The Trump platform consists of unbelievable and unconstitutional lies all bound up with racist pipe dreams about how to Make America 1952 Again. To call Trump a con man is to insult hardworking, skilled con men and women the world over. Trump just recognized easy marks when he saw them, and told them what they wanted to hear. And what they wanted to hear was that someone else’s suffering would help them get ahead.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#6031 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2017-May-16, 16:05

This report from the NYT raises genuine concerns about obstruction of justice committed by Trump; at the same time, I know that the chance for impeachment before 2018 is very near zero.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#6032 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2017-May-16, 22:25

From The 25th Amendment Solution to Remove Trump by Ross Douthat:

Quote

It was just three days and a lifetime ago that I wrote a column about Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency that affected a world-weary tone. Nothing about this White House’s chaos was surprising given the style of Trump’s campaign, I argued. None of the breaking scandals necessarily suggested high crimes as opposed to simple omni-incompetence. And given that Republicans made their peace with Trump’s unfitness many months ago, it seemed pointless to expect their leaders to move against him unless something far, far worse came out.

As I said, three days and a lifetime. If the G.O.P.’s surrender to candidate Trump made exhortations about Republican politicians’ duty to their country seem like so much pointless verbiage, now President Trump has managed to make exhortation seem unavoidable again.

He has done so, if several days’ worth of entirely credible leaks and revelations are to be believed, by demonstrating in a particularly egregious fashion why the question of “fitness” matters in the first place.

The presidency is not just another office. It has become, for good reasons and bad ones, a seat of semi-monarchical political power, a fixed place on which unimaginable pressures are daily brought to bear, and the final stopping point for decisions that can lead very swiftly to life or death for people the world over.

One does not need to be a Marvel superhero or Nietzschean Übermensch to rise to this responsibility. But one needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed.

Trump is seemingly deficient in them all. Some he perhaps never had, others have presumably atrophied with age. He certainly has political talent — charisma, a raw cunning, an instinct for the jugular, a form of the common touch, a certain creativity that normal politicians lack. He would not have been elected without these qualities. But they are not enough, they cannot fill the void where other, very normal human gifts should be.

There is, as my colleague David Brooks wrote Tuesday, a basic childishness to the man who now occupies the presidency. That is the simplest way of understanding what has come tumbling into light in the last few days: The presidency now has kinglike qualities, and we have a child upon the throne.

It is a child who blurts out classified information in order to impress distinguished visitors. It is a child who asks the head of the F.B.I. why the rules cannot be suspended for his friend and ally. It is a child who does not understand the obvious consequences of his more vindictive actions — like firing the very same man whom you had asked to potentially obstruct justice on your say-

A child cannot be president. I love my children; they cannot have the nuclear codes.

But a child also cannot really commit “high crimes and misdemeanors” in any usual meaning of the term. There will be more talk of impeachment now, more talk of a special prosecutor for the Russia business; well and good. But ultimately I do not believe that our president sufficiently understands the nature of the office that he holds, the nature of the legal constraints that are supposed to bind him, perhaps even the nature of normal human interactions, to be guilty of obstruction of justice in the Nixonian or even Clintonian sense of the phrase. I do not believe he is really capable of the behind-the-scenes conspiring that the darker Russia theories envision. And it is hard to betray an oath of office whose obligations you evince no sign of really understanding or respecting.

Which is not an argument for allowing him to occupy that office. It is an argument, instead, for using a constitutional mechanism more appropriate to this strange situation than impeachment: the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows for the removal of the president if a majority of the cabinet informs the Congress that he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and (should the president contest his own removal) a two-thirds vote by Congress confirms the cabinet’s judgment.

The Trump situation is not exactly the sort that the amendment’s Cold War-era designers were envisioning. He has not endured an assassination attempt or suffered a stroke or fallen prey to Alzheimer’s. But his incapacity to really govern, to truly execute the serious duties that fall to him to carry out, is nevertheless testified to daily — not by his enemies or external critics, but by precisely the men and women whom the Constitution asks to stand in judgment on him, the men and women who serve around him in the White House and the cabinet.

Read the things that these people, members of his inner circle, his personally selected appointees, say daily through anonymous quotations to the press. (And I assure you they say worse off the record.) They have no respect for him, indeed they seem to palpate with contempt for him, and to regard their mission as equivalent to being stewards for a syphilitic emperor.

It is not squishy New York Times conservatives who regard the president as a child, an intellectual void, a hopeless case, a threat to national security; it is people who are self-selected loyalists, who supported him in the campaign, who daily go to work for him. And all this, in the fourth month of his administration.

This will not get better. It could easily get worse. And as hard and controversial as a 25th Amendment remedy would be, there are ways in which Trump’s removal today should be less painful for conservatives than abandoning him in the campaign would have been — since Hillary Clinton will not be retroactively elected if Trump is removed, nor will Neil Gorsuch be unseated. Any cost to Republicans will be counted in internal divisions and future primary challenges, not in immediate policy defeats.

Meanwhile, from the perspective of the Republican leadership’s duty to their country, and indeed to the world that our imperium bestrides, leaving a man this witless and unmastered in an office with these powers and responsibilities is an act of gross negligence, which no objective on the near-term political horizon seems remotely significant enough to justify.

There will be time to return again to world-weariness and cynicism as this agony drags on. Right now, though, I will be boring in my sincerity: I respectfully ask Mike Pence and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to reconsider their support for a man who never should have had his party’s nomination, never should have been elevated to this office, never should have been endorsed and propped up and defended by people who understood his unfitness all along.

Now is a day for redemption. Now is an acceptable time.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#6033 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2017-May-17, 07:22

Fake news is not benign.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#6034 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2017-May-17, 08:43

View Postnige1, on 2017-May-12, 16:45, said:

Thank you, WinstonM. Your revelations prompt obvious follow-up questions e.g.
  • Was the National Security Advisor blackmailed?
  • Is it a crime for Americans to meet with Russians?
  • Did Trump negotiate too-good-to-be-true deals with Russians?


I don't claim that security departments always lie. I'm sure they tell the truth when it suits their purposes.

Nations spy on each other. The US destabilises elected foreign governments.

The Russians are alleged to have hacked emails showing that the Democratic party deliberately undermined the prospects of one of its own candidates. If this revelation were true, it would be a service to US democracy. But so far, the Russians have been given scant credit.


From the Washington Post:

Quote

Putin offers to provide Congress with details of Trump disclosures to Russian envoys


If you don't understand that this offer is Putin's way of mocking the U.S., I feel sorry for your naivete'.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#6035 User is offline   diana_eva 

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Posted 2017-May-17, 08:46

View PostWinstonm, on 2017-May-17, 08:43, said:

From the Washington Post:


If you don't understand that this offer is Putin's way of mocking the U.S., I feel sorry for your naivete'.


It must be Putin's offer to work on world peace. He should provide the info while playing the piano naked on a horse. And dive in the sea to find a lost artefact at the end.

#6036 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2017-May-17, 09:20

View Posty66, on 2017-May-16, 22:25, said:


I think there's little chance of this. While the people around him might not think he's truly fit, he still seems to support their policies. Who else would put a climate-denier in charge of the EPA, and someone who doesn't believe in public schools as the Education Secretary? He doesn't know what he's doing, so he lets the people around him tell him what to do. He's a figurehead and mouthpiece.

#6037 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2017-May-17, 11:31

View Postbarmar, on 2017-May-17, 09:20, said:

I think there's little chance of this. While the people around him might not think he's truly fit, he still seems to support their policies. Who else would put a climate-denier in charge of the EPA, and someone who doesn't believe in public schools as the Education Secretary? He doesn't know what he's doing, so he lets the people around him tell him what to do. He's a figurehead and mouthpiece.


Trump has been quoted by Michael D'Antonio as saying that "he is the same person now that he was in first grade", and, thusfar, he has given us no reason to doubt him.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#6038 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2017-May-17, 15:17

From Is the Comey memo the beginning of the end for Trump? by David Remnick:

Quote

Over the years, Trump has been the focus of investigations on housing discrimination, bribery, corruption, dealings with the mob, misleading earnings reports, fraud, and improper campaign contributions. (Of his behavior with women we shall not speak.) But that was nothing compared to the hard light that is on him now from the F.B.I., Congress, the press, the public, and various other realms of civil society. Discussion of Trump’s Presidency ending before his four-year term is up is no longer an oppositional fantasy. The events of these recent days­­—the Comey firing; the opera-buffa intel giveaway with the Russian delegation to the Oval Office; and now the news of the Comey memos—just may be the point of no return for a Presidency that has been a kind of emergency of chaos, incompetence, injustice, and deception from its first days.

But it will be a complicated road, legally and politically. To prove obstruction of justice, the subject must know that there is an investigation against him and take an action to obstruct that investigation with corrupt purpose. The next step, clearly, will be for Congress to inspect James Comey’s memos regarding his meetings and conversations with the President, which were written about Tuesday in the Times. Jason Chaffetz, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, has said that he is prepared to subpoena those memos if they exist.

We are likely to learn a great deal more about Trump’s behavior from those documents. Comey might have been grotesquely mistaken in his judgment regarding the Hillary Clinton e-mail case, but he has a reputation for righteousness and honesty. In Comey’s account, as relayed in the Times, the President, over dinner, demanded an oath of loyalty; Comey promised only his honesty. At the Valentine’s Day meeting in the Oval Office, Trump told the Vice-President and the Attorney General to leave the room before asking Comey to end the investigation into Mike Flynn’s relations with the Russian government. Trump even suggested to Comey that he consider prosecuting and jailing journalists for publishing classified material.

Is it conceivable that Trump made these requests with innocent purpose? Or was he attempting to obstruct justice? The same questions apply to the President’s insistence on firing Comey. First, he asked Comey to shut down the investigation, and, when he refused, the President fired him. Can one contrive an innocent motive in that? And if there are, indeed, tapes of White House conversations, what are the odds that Trump’s version is closer to the truth than Comey’s?

The point is that Trump has a long record of lying, shady business practices, public deception, and crossing legal lines. His instructors in this include Roy Cohn and Roger Stone and other base figures. Comey’s memos are far more likely to bury Trump than to exonerate him.

As Evan Osnos has pointed out, Trump will survive until he loses the Republican Party. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are not likely to act out of an attack of moral conscience. But at some point, and it may come soon, they will begin to feel political pressure—pressure from Republican constituents in swing states and districts; pressure on their own reputations—and their patience with Trump will run out.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#6039 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2017-May-17, 16:39

Special counselor has been appointed by Justice Department.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#6040 User is offline   RedSpawn 

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Posted 2017-May-17, 17:04

View PostWinstonm, on 2017-May-12, 12:22, said:

By the same reasoning, improved dialogue with Isis would also be the right direction? Russia attacked the U.S. election system, and by the testimony last week in Congress is still attacking the U.S. and other western countries via cyber warfare. You do not go out for a friendly dinner with the enemy while they are dropping bombs on your house.


I do have a burning question. Please review the following dusty link from the U.S. government from 2001.

See Rumsfeld and the Pentagon Bureaucracy.

If a Republican Defense Secretary suggests that the Pentagon bureaucracy reminds him of the old Soviet Union the day before 09/11/2001--the worst day in US History. . .

What's to stop all of the hacking of the election system (even the Democratic National Committee) from being perpetrated by the same organization that has immensely consolidated power in the federal government, can not account for about 25% of its annual spending, and has a management-leadership structure similar to the old Soviet Union, according to Rumsfeld?

Click the link below Trillions (with a T) missing from Department of Defense This is from FOX news in 2016 which is right-leaning!

SF Gate 2003 Article Missing Military Money ==> from left-leaning newspaper from 2003 (same problem just earlier and cheaper).

The Department of Defense has an accounting system from the 90's and it is missing trillions of $$$ -- The department doesn't exactly know what assets that trillions of dollars purchased. That is with a "T" everyone! Keep in mind, we are not talking millions. We are not talking billions. We are talking trillions. A trillion is like winning a million dollar lottery, one million separate times!

If you gave a cashier a cash register containing $6,500,000,000,000 in cash and at the end of the business day it was gone and he/she couldn't tell you where it went, would you keep him/her on payroll? Hmmmmmm.

When our federal government computer systems are hacked or the Democratic National Committee computer network is hacked, Congress goes to the FBI and the Department of Defense for answers. Now, if the Department of Defense, which has TRILLIONS of dollars missing from its budget, says Russia or China or North Korea did it, who are we to argue? But. . . .if the Department of Defense is implicated in the very hacking we are investigating because it wants a President that will bankroll its budget no questions asked unlike Hillary who won't grant budget increases to the Department of Defense, who do you think the Department of Defense wants elected?

If the Department of Defense did hack into the election system and into the Democratic National Committee computer network to help elect its favored candidate, one of the very first people that that needs to go after the blamestorming session is. . . . the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as he is under the Department of Justice. The Department of Defense doesn't need the FBI or the Department of Justice sniffing around its interference or control of national security affairs until it installs the entire new Trump appointees into the proper positions.

You can say what you want to say, but the enemy isn't ISIS or Syria or Russia or even a laughable, saber-rattling North Korea, the enemy is much closer to home in Washington D.C. and no I am not kidding!

Follow the money trail....
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