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@sebster

What do I think? I think it's the worst corrupted mess to strike the USA since General Grant was President.

And if the American people have any sense, Trump will get run out of Washington next POTUS election.

At least Grant won a civil war. Trump however, has no claim of helping the nation on such a grand scale...

sebster: I felt uncomfortable reading that, because as you say it is verging into conspiracy theory territory. However, I would not be surprised to have something like that confirmed as things unfold. Seems Cohen was pretty stupid in how he handled everything so it's likely the prosecution will have a lot of information to work with.

 sebster wrote:
What do you guys make of the story floating around about Donald Trump and Elliot Broidy, casting doubt about who's child it was that got aborted?

Probably true and completely meaningless. It's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect Trump to have done, but that's kind of the problem. It's all been done before. Trump's rich friends will continue to ignore the corruption, the religious right will find a way to excuse the abortion with "we're all sinners" or whatever other nonsense is required, and the people who will care about it already hate Trump anyway. We're so far into scandal fatigue with Trump that a mere dispute over paying off his mistress is probably going to be forgotten by the end of the week when the next scandal is announced.

And the award for premature gold coins featuring your likeness goes to Trump.

He even got his doctor... I mean mom.. argh I mean himself to write a nice cancellation note. At least he managed to save face from being led by the nose right!

aaaaaaaaand it's dead.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/389158-trump-says-summit-with-north-korea-will-not-happen


Also...here's Trump's letter to Kim, The tone and language reads like a mix between "Mean Girls" and "Sarcastic South Park Comcast Employee" drowned in passive-aggressiveness

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/389163-read-trumps-letter-to-kim-jong-un


wonder what they're gonna do with those challenge coins...

He still gets the peace prize though, right? It's not like the Republicans who nominated him would have been jumping the gun?

Or the alternative is Trump has to start chanting "no nobel" next rally.

I like* how the letter suggests that it's entirely NK's fault, and that NK is welcome to come crawling back for forgiveness at any time.

*I mean that sarcastically.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I am betting they will instead start using the raised fist salute (or other salute) either during or right after the anthem....Jesse Owens style.

That's. . . . . not Jesse Owens (no. . Jesse Owens was the one who single-handedly whipped the gak out of the 'superior' Nazis in 1936)

Pictured there is Tommie Smith (Gold), Peter Norman (silver, and an Aussie who, in talking with the American counterparts agreed with, and apparently campaigned in similar fashion for other groups in Australia), and John Carlos (Bronze)

Thanks. I had a feeling I would get the names wrong.

Heh. So first i read today how trump said he expects them still meet and now this.

Well. With trump's creditibility worse than zero meeting would have been waste of time for nk anywav

At least this can stop the ridiculous song and dance about Trump making historic progress with NK when nothing had happened yet and now won't.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
At least this can stop the ridiculous song and dance about Trump making historic progress with NK when nothing had happened yet and now won't.

That's not what's going to happen now. The conservative propaganda machine will spew out stories about how this is "normal" and just Trump's standard business model of being a hard deal maker, and how he did so much better than any President before because he got NK's and SK's leaders to hold hands at the border and almost got Kim to the table. And some regular media outlets will likely do the same. Just look at Axios' take: "Beyond the very serious geopolitical stakes, this move is pure Trump. A theatrical withdrawal from a potential “deal," and reminder to Americans that he milked his adversary and gave them nothing in return."

What exactly did Trump manage to "milk" from NK?

 infinite_array wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
At least this can stop the ridiculous song and dance about Trump making historic progress with NK when nothing had happened yet and now won't.

That's not what's going to happen now. The conservative propaganda machine will spew out stories about how this is "normal" and just Trump's standard business model of being a hard deal maker, and how he did so much better than any President before because he got NK's and SK's leaders to hold hands at the border and almost got Kim to the table. And some regular media outlets will likely do the same. Just look at Axios' take: "Beyond the very serious geopolitical stakes, this move is pure Trump. A theatrical withdrawal from a potential “deal," and reminder to Americans that he milked his adversary and gave them nothing in return."

What exactly did Trump manage to "milk" from NK?

Sadly this is probably the spin on it. He managed to milk NK 'giving up' their test site, that is what is going to get milked in the feel good stories. Meanwhile Bush's (and others) admin actually got NK to the table to no long term avail but when have facts ever gotten in the way of a good rally amiright.

That's really something. He got the chance to claim (rightfully or not) a major diplomatic accomplishment basically gift-wrapped and handed to him, and he still went and did the wrong thing. Yeah, you can say it might / would have failed anyway. But we didn't get to SEE that.

I don't like him, but I'll downplay a lot of the hyperbolic stuff people say about him because the world really needs less hyperbole. This is pretty fethed up though.

All we need now to make his failure complete is a huge economic crash............ I really, really, really hope that does not happen.


Also, at the last all-company meeting of my Mega-corporation, I was really excited to hear all about how they were going to use the Tax Reform windfalls to do stock buybacks and pay dividends to investors! I was so surprised to hear that!

As someone who's currently buying a house, I wouldn't mind a little housing bubble burst at the moment.

 infinite_array wrote:
As someone who's currently buying a house, I wouldn't mind a little housing bubble burst at the moment.

Lol, as someone trying to sell one. . . I don't.

Thing is, those who know, know that he's already an economic failure. On the other hand, his tax plans and economic "stuff" has done exactly what he's wanted it to: made people like him even richer. The majority of people who are claiming anything he's done as a success are his typical voter base: uneducated as feth, and brainwashed by the right-wing propaganda circuit

Trump signs rollback of Dodd-Frank, having learned nothing from 2008

This may work out for me, I'd love to see a new housing bubble crash personally, maybe then I could afford a condo

 Vaktathi wrote:



wonder what they're gonna do with those challenge coins...

Disclaimer, on White House Gift Shop website, for those who ordered $24.95 Trump-Kim summit coins.



dd way of trying to say that “Real Americans Won’t Request a Refund” but such is the age we live in.

-- NB -- seems -- my end anyway -- the website is down due to over use at the time of typing

Unreliable Trump becomes even more unreliable. Quelle surprise.

Trump cancelling that summit is really bad for the US' negotiating power in sensitive international issues, not to mention it ruins an opportunity for real progress to be made on the issue. A real shame, especially since North Korea for the first time in forever actually seemed somewhat willing to make big compromises.

Why would you want an heirloom of that time there was some talk of peace and reconciliation, but was then derailed by idiocy and bluster?

 skyth wrote:
Kneeling IS respecting the flag/anthem.

But the point is that blacks are seen as less human than whites, especially by police. Until that is fixed there is a problem.

I think the problem is that police perceive blacks as more of a threat than whites even when a black person hasn't done anything to demonstrate being an imminent threat and responding with an escalation of force in the name of officer safety that isn't warranted. I think police enter into otherwise routine encounters with blacks with an expectation that it will escalate into the use of force that isn't present in their minds when they have routine interactions with whites or other ethnic groups that are perceived to be less threatening than blacks. There's also frequently found evidence of racist selective enforcement of laws. Ferguson, for example, showed that when the police department needed to bring in more revenue they wrote more tickets in the black neighborhoods because the people they were squeezing revenue out of in those neighborhoods weren't likely to also be golfing buddies of the mayor or be similarly connected like the people in the more affluent neighborhoods where the cops didn't write tickets. These kinds of perceptions and procedures become unwritten standards of operation in police departments over the years and get passed on to new officers as they come into the force creating bias in the officers regardless of their own ethnicities or pre-existing attitudes.

 Easy E wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
It can be argued that telling people what they have to do in order to respect the flag is actually more disrespectful to the flag as a whole.

I would argue that demanding people respect the flag is probably one of the most unfree things anyone can say.

No one has any obligation to respect a piece of fabric, especially when they don't feel that all the things that fabric supposedly represents don't apply to them.

This is why free speech is a right. Now the NFL can of course as a private organization set whatever rules it wants for it's players, but honestly an entire team sitting out on a game sounds a lot worse than a few players kneeling so to me this just feels like doubling down on the stupidity. So a few players knelt during the national anthem because they want something to change. This entire issue has drawn far more attention than it ever warranted.

Making the "Kneeling" the story rather than the"Black Lives Matter movement" the story is a pretty amazing piece of Co-opting the intent. I really have to hand it to the Right-wingers on this one. They completely changed and controlled the narrative almost from day 1 on this.

Pretty terrifying really.

Kaepernick started his protest by sitting on the bench during the anthem but after speaking with a retired Green Beret from Texas and being told that sitting was disrespectful but kneeling would get his point across without being disrespectful. This fact was largely ignored in the media narrative that proclaimed his kneeling protest was somehow horribly disrespectful.

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/heres-how-nate-boyer-got-colin-kaepernick-to-go-from-sitting-to-kneeling/

In the 49ers' final preseason game, backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to kneel for the national anthem instead of taking a seat on the bench.
Turns out it was former Seahawks player and Green Beret Nate Boyer who talked Kap into making the change. Boyer wrote an open letter to Kaepernick earlier this season, and it caused the two to meet up and discuss America and honoring the anthem.
On the upcoming episode of HBO's "Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel" (airing Tuesday night at 10 p.m. ET), Boyer reveals what happened in the discussion between the two men.
"We sorta came to a middle ground where he would take a knee alongside his teammates," Boyer says. "Soldiers take a knee in front of a fallen brother's grave, you know, to show respect.

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 Vaktathi wrote:
Trump signs rollback of Dodd-Frank, having learned nothing from 2008

This may work out for me, I'd love to see a new housing bubble crash personally, maybe then I could afford a condo

I would really like to see Congress pass revisions to laws that show that they've spent time reviewing the intent of the law, how it was put into practice and how it could be improved instead of just deciding if a law is good or bad depending on which party sponsored the original bill. I think there's plenty of room for improvement with Dodd Frank but that's true with everything Congress passes because the process of passing it usually mangles the original intent of the bill. There's a lot of laws and regulations that could be improved or removed but just throwing the baby out with the bathwater every time is stupid. We keep sending the same people back to Congress no matter how much incompetence they show or how often they abdicate their responsibilities.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 sebster wrote:

Prestor Jon wrote:
It's got nothing to do with free speech rights. The players are current employees of the team, fulfilling job duties in their place of business therefore their employer, the team ownership group, can dictate standards of behavior for their employees while they're on the job. I can be fired or disciplined for speech or actions at work that violate my employer's code of conduct. Now, simply because the team ownership groups have the ability to enact this policy doesn't make it good policy but it's not un-American or a violation of free speech rights.

Close but not quite. There is more to free speech than making sure you stick just to its legal requirements. A country where all media is owned by friends of the president and they all deny any media time to his critics wouldn't be illegal, because free speech doesn't require you to give a platform, but we all know how stifling that would be to public debate.

No-platforming is a major element of free speech, and while companies are entitled to control the speech of their employees, things pretty clearly get very murky very quickly when those companies restrict some speech but not other speech. Imagine if athletes were taking a knee to protest the poor state of care for wounded veterans. Does anyone want to pretend the fan reaction would have been the same, and the NFL's eventual policy the same?

The plain reality is that despite the legal protections of the first amendment, speech will be denied certain platforms if it makes sufficiently powerful people uncomfortable. Claiming there's nothing wrong with that because it doesn't cross the first amendment is not the point.

Nobody is entitled to use the media platforms of private businesses for their personal speech. The company I work for has our own corporate email system and if I wanted to I could send out an email to the entire department I work in, about 1000 people promoting whatever cause/issue/protest I chose. This would be a violation of company policy and I would be disciplined. Now, the exact content of my policy violating email blast would likely factor into whether I was disciplined with a written reprimand in my file or fired but no matter how virtuous my email may have been it would not be condoned by my employer and if i persisted in doing it, again regardless of the content, I'd be fired.

I didn't object to the player protests but the NFL exercising their authority to try to eliminate them isn't unreasonable or unjust.

The NFL's policy is clearly a PR move. The policy governs the teams not the players because the pregame activity isn't something that is included in the collective bargaining agreement between the owners and players and owners didn't bargain with the players' union to set this policy. The NFL set the rule that everyone on the field has to stand for the anthem or the team will fined. The NFL doesn't have the authority to fine the individual players so they'll fine the team. Some owners have already publicly said they'd pay the fine and wouldn't discipline players who didn't stand. This policy allows the NFL to pass the blame from the League to the Team to try to limit any controversy and negativity. It's a bad policy because it really doesn't address the issue it just creates the procedure for the League to fine a time for not having compliant players. The NFL is really bad at handling controversies, all they do is keep playing games knowing that they're popular enough for people to keep watching while they muddle through creating ham fisted poorly thought out policies to deal with the issue. It's like how the IOC is a hot mess but people still love the Olympics so the IOC being horrid doesn't stop the games from being popular and generating attendance and ratings.

Prestor Jon wrote:
[I didn't object to the player protests but the NFL exercising their authority to try to eliminate them isn't unreasonable or unjust..

Actually, it is unreasonable and unjust. it may not be illegal, but it definitely is unreasonable and unjust.

Rosebuddy wrote:

Prestor Jon wrote:
[I didn't object to the player protests but the NFL exercising their authority to try to eliminate them isn't unreasonable or unjust..

Actually, it is unreasonable and unjust. it may not be illegal, but it definitely is unreasonable and unjust.

NFL players get paid game checks, every week during the season they get a check for the game they played. Being in uniform, on the field on game day puts them on company time, in company uniform, doing the work the company hired them to do so it is not unreasonable or unjust for the company that employs them and pays them to be on the field for the game to impose standards of behavior they have to follow during that time.

NFL players enjoy a much greater access to the media, politicians and authorities due to the fame inherent to their job and they are free to make use of that access however they want on their own personal time. Postgame there is media in the locker room that will listen to the players say whatever they want about whatever they want. When the players aren't on the clock working they are free to speak about whatever social issues they want to whomever they want via whatever platform they want and they won't be disciplined by the league or the team.

 feeder wrote:
Why would you want an heirloom of that time there was some talk of peace and reconciliation, but was then derailed by idiocy and bluster?

Reminder there's no limit in human stupidity?

 Iron_Captain wrote:
A real shame, especially since North Korea for the first time in forever actually seemed somewhat willing to make big compromises.

I'm not sure that's true at all (well, the real shame is true). They functionally have finished their nuclear program, and the only reason they are closing their biggest site is because it already collapsed under them. And do the nuclear weapons really matter? Not at all. Their real danger is the not-going-anywhere artillery that holds SK hostage.

I still hold out hope that while this was a false start and ultimately there will be a peaceful end to the Korean war in my lifetime, there isn't any reason to think this wasn't another NK fakeout. Words are wind.


Some positive Trump news for a change:

Trump pardoned Jack Johnson.

Trump awarded the Medal of Honor to a Navy Seal.

Its a travesty that it took that long for Johnson to get his post-humus pardon. Slight *head nod* towards Trump.

I haven't caught up on the news on NK... but, at first glance it should at least quiet down fears that Trump would accept *any* deal from NK. At least they know he's willing to walk away...

The US: NK better negotiate or it will be very bad for them. And cooperating with us and having your body dragged through the street after being murdered is always an option. But we will make NK comply or they will regret it.

NK: Your leaders are idiots, and we will fight if needed.

The US: well, that kind of language is just not very productive. We are out of here.

Prestor Jon wrote:

Rosebuddy wrote:

Prestor Jon wrote:
[I didn't object to the player protests but the NFL exercising their authority to try to eliminate them isn't unreasonable or unjust..

Actually, it is unreasonable and unjust. it may not be illegal, but it definitely is unreasonable and unjust.

NFL players get paid game checks, every week during the season they get a check for the game they played. Being in uniform, on the field on game day puts them on company time, in company uniform, doing the work the company hired them to do so it is not unreasonable or unjust for the company that employs them and pays them to be on the field for the game to impose standards of behavior they have to follow during that time.

NFL players enjoy a much greater access to the media, politicians and authorities due to the fame inherent to their job and they are free to make use of that access however they want on their own personal time. Postgame there is media in the locker room that will listen to the players say whatever they want about whatever they want. When the players aren't on the clock working they are free to speak about whatever social issues they want to whomever they want via whatever platform they want and they won't be disciplined by the league or the team.

Protesting against police brutality is more important than racists not having to see protests against police brutality. So it's unreasonable and unjust to ban NFL players from doing so before the game starts, considering that they still actually play the game.