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 whembly wrote:
Just wanted to say about thehill... they're turning into a bombastic Breibart/TPM brand of politics.

Yes, how bombastic of The Hill to publish a widely reported story about Rosenstein's personal beliefs about Trump's actions. A story that The Hill wasn't even the first run with, and which Rosenstein has not disputed in anyway. I mean, sure, that's absolutely normal reporting in any time and age, but whembly doesn't like hearing the story, so it must be bombastic.


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 whembly wrote:
You mean like this IRS investigating political opponents?

This is repeated a long disproven lie. While the IRS process was poor and caused hardship to a number of activist groups, we now know that both conservative and liberal groups were picked up in the sweeps because both conservative and liberal keywords were tagged for further investigation.

And this is a matter I've been over with in some depth with whembly in private messages. I gave him the final IRS review of the subject that finally addressed the number of both liberal and conservative groups identified, which found while the ratio was about 60:40 conservative/liberal, this was easily explained by the much larger number of conservative groups being established during that period - the rise of the Tea Party. whembly gave weak denials at the time and the conversation went nowhere, and now a few months later comes back here to repeat the original lie all over again.


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 Vaktathi wrote:
and will be, if anything, what sinks Trump I imagine. Theyll never find a "i liek you xoxoxo -Putin" note, it'll be Trump's tantrums that will get him sunk.

Yeah, reality is you hardly ever get to the bottom of the conspiracy. You never get a neat moment where a key player flips and explains the whole of the of the conspiracy, and there's almost never a smoking gun. The actual core of these conspiracies is like a blackhole, and you never actually get to see the center, you can only try and estimate it by its impact by looking at its effect on the things surrounding it. We never did find out if Nixon ordered or even knew of the Watergate break-in beforehand, or if he learned of it later and begun to try covering it up.

You prosecute each lie and each abuse of power made to protect the conspiracy, but in terms of actually figuring out the conspiracy itself you don't often ever find out for real. You piece together what you can, mostly through inference, trying as best you can to figure out why x lied to z about y.

I mean, maybe this one will come unraveled, these guys do appear to be a particularly stupid set of conspirators. But we should probably also ready ourselves for the reality that we might one day have a proven case of obstruction against the president which may or may not lead to resignation/impeachment, but we will never know for certain what the original crime was.

 sebster wrote:
whembly gave weak denials at the time and the conversation went nowhere, and now a few months later comes back here to repeat the original lie all over again.

Once everyone gets tired of debunking it, it will be true by default, though!

 Ouze wrote:
Because he probably didn't really commit any serious crimes or collusion, but he almost certainly obstructed justice for those who did.

Here's what I think is the full list of Trump people who had secret meetings with Russians;
Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Wilbur Ross, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Roger Stone, Donald Trump Jr., Michael Cohen & Erik Prince.

There's a few cases of pre-existing relationships there, for instance Flynn, Manafort & Gates, in fact you could break them in to the little factions, the family group, the Manafort group, upstarts (Papadopoulous & Page) etc. Each group is connected to Trump, but they only connect to each other through Trump. So either Trump oversaw each group's contacts with Russia, or each group went off individually and made their own contacts with Russia, or they decided to ignore how little they knew each other and started coordinating contact with Russia between themselves and never letting Trump in on it.

I think the latter two options are really hard to believe, so it becomes very likely Trump knew. Proving any of that is something else entirely.


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 thekingofkings wrote:
liberals who will exult over the fall of Trump will be weeping fresh tears when they realize how much more evil Pence is.

There's a chance that Pence will go as well. Remember the VP slot was meant to be for Christie, until Manafort came in hard arguing for Pence. Maybe it was astute politics (Pence bringing in the evangelical vote was another of those things that decided the election), but maybe it was something else. And then note that Pence has been the #1 go to guy for responding to accusations against Trump with denials that always turn out to be total bs. It was Pence who denied anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with wikileaks. It was Pence who denied any knowledge that Flynn was under investigation, a denial that turned out to be a total lie, as Pence knew weeks before. Pence was a key player in planning the justification to fire Comey, and it was Pence who went to congress and claimed it had nothing to do with the Russia investigation.

I'm not aware of anything that directly places Pence in any legal trouble. But given how much we don't know, and given how willing Pence has lied so far, it's entirely plausible that he'll end up being part of this as well.

All of which means... time it right and there might be a President Pelosi.


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Ash87 wrote:
So, My understanding of things, was that Trump was the Peaceful option we could of elected in 2016. No way he was going to start bombing people who weren't directly effecting the US... Nope.

Yeah, that was a thing people argued during 2016. It was an incredible argument, built largely off blind optimism and Trump somehow getting away with the lie that he opposed the Iraq war.


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 cuda1179 wrote:
Well, if there was multiple "private" fire stations that were all clamoring to put out fires faster and cheaper than the government ones, yes I would be saying just that. Let's also drop the pretenses that the PO can't be criticized. They have A LOT of waste that only exists because of their lack of accountability. Everything from locations that shouldn't exist to employees that are nearly immune to firing, to job performance that would make even a layman efficiency expert cringe.

USPS has problems like any large organisation, public or private, but focusing on them as a cause of its profitability issues is just looking for factoids to suit your ideology. Here's the actual story of the post office, in one image;


The post office still has to run the same freight, the same vans, across all that same routes, but it now does it with letter quantities at about half of their 2002 peak. Letter delivery has turned from a modest earner to an enormous white elephant. Meanwhile the package delivery service that competes with FedEx and the rest turns a tidy profit.

If you want to look at USPS as a private business, you need to seperate out the letter delivery service that they operate under Federal mandate, charging the price set by government.


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 cuda1179 wrote:
No, Obama's was worse.

There is a literal count of Trump having now told more than 1,000 lies in office. Trump simply refuses to hold press conferences. His press secretary routinely lies and refuses to answer questions, and otherwise blathers through press meetings with the express aim of communicating nothing to the greater public.

The list of visitor records to the Whitehouse suddenly stopped, so we have no public record of who is actually communicating with the administration. From very early in his administration we started seeing a wide range of previously available data just start disappearing from government websites, such as records of workplace violations and energy efficiency targets.

We have no idea what conflicts of interest Trump actually has, because he refuses to make public his finances. At the same time Trump signed secret ethics waivers for his appointees, allowing them to keep secret investments that are directly impacted by their policy decisions.

And in the face of all this, cuda1179 tries to claim Obama was worse, despite nothing like the above occurring during Obama's administration. Whether he's chosen to be ignorant of all these issues, or whether he knows and chooses to ignore this reality because his partisanship means he always has to claim 'Obama worse', it doesn't matter. Either way it is rejecting reality for fantasy, and is the very heart of the problem.


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 Co'tor Shas wrote:
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/383256-ryan-trillion-dollar-deficits-were-inevitable?amp

I love how we blames it on medicare/caid and SS. Because feth the poor amirght guys! But absolutely nothing to do with the massive taxcut you pushed through that mostly beinifts the rich.

This is Republican standard operating procedure. They call it 'starve the beast'.

Normally they wait until a Democrat wins office and inherits the fiscal mess caused by the latest round of tax cuts before they start pretending they're super concerned about deficits. But these Republicans seem a lot more brazen than in the past. Maybe a product of now just existing within the conservative propaganda machine, and not really trying to sell this nonsense on any station that might call them on it?


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 Ouze wrote:
Once everyone gets tired of debunking it, it will be true by default, though!

I've heard it called zombie arguments. You can put it down every time, but it always gets back up and comes again.

I think from now on I think the best approach is to show its false, make it clear the argument was made dishonestly, and then move on.

 sebster wrote:
I mean, maybe this one will come unraveled, these guys do appear to be a particularly stupid set of conspirators. But we should probably also ready ourselves for the reality that we might one day have a proven case of obstruction against the president which may or may not lead to resignation/impeachment, but we will never know for certain what the original crime was.

The people around Trump weren't a particularly bright bunch, but I also think they simply believed that Hillary would win anyway. And in that event, none of the shenanigans would have been pursued like they're being pursued now.

I agree that we'll never get any certainty about the whole thing. Which doesn't mean there's some X-files-level conspiracy at work. I just don't think there will ever be that perfect smoking gun, or that movie moment where some arch-villain spills the beans about every facet of his plan. For another example of this, see the Jerry Sandusky-Penn State scandal. There was almost certainly more to that whole story and more people involved at Sandusky's Second Mile charity, but with Paterno burning in hell and those particular crimes being so heinous, no one's going to come forward and offer any new details.

 Ouze wrote:

 sebster wrote:
whembly gave weak denials at the time and the conversation went nowhere, and now a few months later comes back here to repeat the original lie all over again.

Once everyone gets tired of debunking it, it will be true by default, though!

He didn't debunk gak... multiple IG reports stated that the conservative groups where unfairly targeted and that there were obvious institutional bias. Just because some of the liberal groups ended up on that same list didn't mean they were treated as harshly. I was trying to explain to seb these, but he'll keep ignoring it as it destroys his premise.

Don't forget, the IRS finally admitted to it and actually settled lawsuits. But, instead of taking that into consideration, seb argues that because Trump won, someone told them to settle it to move on... here's the thing: The Government loathes to admit things they *DID* do... what makes you think they'll roll over for any actions that they *DIDN'T* do?

Because it's cheaper to settle and move on?

it's what Trump would do!

I guess people giving credit to Nixon for getting out of Vietnam don't know that he actively sabotaged LBJ's peace talks to gain an advantage in the upcoming election. He literally tried to gain votes with American (and Vietnamese) blood.

So... we now know Michael Cohen's sooper seekret 3rd client...

 whembly wrote:
So... we now know Michael Cohen's sooper seekret 3rd client...

Spoiler:

Sean Hannity!

I was literally about to post that, no wonder Hannity was acting more shilly than usual

Whats even more amusing is that there isn't a single mention of Fox's home page of the Hannity thing, lots about Comey and Daniels, but not a blip about Hannity.


Meanwhile..its a front and center story at ABC, NBC, CNN, CBS, BBC, etc...

 Vaktathi wrote:
Whats even more amusing is that there isn't a single mention of Fox's home page of the Hannity thing, lots about Comey and Daniels, but not a blip about Hannity.


Meanwhile..its a front and center story at ABC, NBC, CNN, CBS, BBC, etc...

I mean they even posted a statistic that they are the least trusted news source in the country compared to the other big ones (granted they took it down not much later)

 Vaktathi wrote:
Whats even more amusing is that there isn't a single mention of Fox's home page of the Hannity thing, lots about Comey and Daniels, but not a blip about Hannity.


Meanwhile..its a front and center story at ABC, NBC, CNN, CBS, BBC, etc...

"Fair and balanced" right?

This is too good, I can't wait to see what he hired Cohen for.

 Wolfblade wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Whats even more amusing is that there isn't a single mention of Fox's home page of the Hannity thing, lots about Comey and Daniels, but not a blip about Hannity.


Meanwhile..its a front and center story at ABC, NBC, CNN, CBS, BBC, etc...

"Fair and balanced" right?

This is too good, I can't wait to see what he hired Cohen for.

To basically quote:

"I never hired him to be my lawyer, but everything we talked about should be protected by lawyer-client privilege."

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
When there will be like maybe 600 votes you have to verify, I think we can set up a system that can work.

Yeah, you'd think that. However, when the US government and technology collide, Murphy is King.

It's pretty easy for a congressman to stand up and say 'no, that wasn't my vote' and undo the whole thing with Russia spending a ton of money and getting a ton of heat for little to no results. It's a really, really nonsensical idea.

A few thoughts on the Sean Hannity thing;

1) Media figures are supposed to disclose when they have a personal connection to the subject of their reporting. Even if the connection is quite distant and the report is just a summary of facts, failure to do so merits sanction. Hannity went miles beyond that, he gave repeated, strong opinions defending Cohen, but never once mentioned he had a direct legal relationship with Cohen. Any news station with any standards at all would fire Hannity immediately. Any person who had any self-respect would refuse to ever consider any reporting from a station that failed to fire him. But of course, we know FOX News and we know its viewers.

2) Anyhow, Michael Cohen had three clients. For Trump he arranged NDAs and hidden payments to women he'd had affairs with. For Elliot Brody he arranged a $1.6 million payment to get a woman to have an abortion. This sort of fixer work is exactly the kind of thing Cohen has said he arranges for clients. Hannity, who has multiple lawyers already on retainer, suddenly went to a lawyer with minimal legal qualifications but a history of making affairs go quiet, just to get some legal advice. Hannity's defense is obviously a lie, and the immediate assumption is that Hannity also paid Cohen to cover up an affair. But FOX News has shown it covered up affairs for other employees, so there's no reason for Hannity to go outside the firm and pay for the cover up out of his own pocket. But if it wasn't that, and with Hannity refusing to waive attorney/client privilege and show us what Cohen and Hannity actually did together, then whatever it was must have been at least as bad as everyone assuming he paid to have an affair covered up. My speculation is that Hannity was likely also involved in the Trump Moscow hotel deal that Cohen was setting up, but that is just speculation.

3) Seth Rich's parent's lawsuit against FOX News and Hannity just got stronger.

 gorgon wrote:
The people around Trump weren't a particularly bright bunch, but I also think they simply believed that Hillary would win anyway. And in that event, none of the shenanigans would have been pursued like they're being pursued now.

I'm pretty sure it was Flynn who privately commented that the stuff they were doing is okay because Trump is going to lose. Which on the one hand explains why so much of the stuff they did was so brazen, but on the other hand it makes it really hard to figure out what they were trying to do and why? What were all these people conspiring for if not to help Trump win?

This whole thing is so damn weird.


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 whembly wrote:
He didn't debunk gak... multiple IG reports stated that the conservative groups where unfairly targeted and that there were obvious institutional bias.

Whether that claim is made through dishonesty or ignorance it really doesn't matter at this point, either way it is the same basic rejection of reality to repeat time and again. Anyhow, I've linked to the IG report, everyone should read it for themselves. The report concluded, as I already said, that the process used by the IRS was flawed and that processing delays were far too long, but did not find any record of partisan bias, either intentional or unintentional.

Note by the way you won't find any specific statement saying 'the IRS didn't have any partisan bias'. That's not how these reports work - they list the issues confirmed, they don't list the things that are fine. But this is the final report, from September last year, and makes a point of the faulty criteria and considerable inconvenience caused to applicants, but notably does not mention a single case of political bias.

https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2017reports/201710054fr.pdf

And of course, now everyone watch is amazement as whembly completely fails to provide any IG report that says there was any partisan bias in the IRS handling of this case.

Just because some of the liberal groups ended up on that same list didn't mean they were treated as harshly. I was trying to explain to seb these, but he'll keep ignoring it as it destroys his premise.

I didn't ignore that claim. I directly rejected it as completely false. And now I will tell you quite clearly that by continuing to repeat it in the face of all evidence, and without ever providing a single report that stated conservative groups were treated more harshly, it is clear you are engaging in this debate in a plainly dishonest fashion.

Don't forget, the IRS finally admitted to it and actually settled lawsuits.

There is no dispute that the IRS mishandled the process, caused needless difficulty and should be held to account and be liable to pay compensation in some cases. The IRS recognition of that doesn't in any way prove partisan bias. Claiming otherwise is a straight up lie.


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 NinthMusketeer wrote:
It's pretty easy for a congressman to stand up and say 'no, that wasn't my vote' and undo the whole thing with Russia spending a ton of money and getting a ton of heat for little to no results. It's a really, really nonsensical idea.

None of those things are the issue with the problem. The vote would still be public, the member would press a button and he would see his vote appear on the 'yay' or 'nay' tally. There would be no doubt that member voted as he did.

The actual problem is that politics is a lot more than just voting. Bills are worked on over periods of time, different elements are suggested, debated, given legal review and costing, refined then added or scrubbed. This takes place over long stretches of time, in both formal working groups and in conversations and deal making in the corridors.

Anyone who's ever had someone added by conference call to a meeting knows how poorly that works. The idea of trying to run a country with most of its government literally phoning it in is entirely broken.

Supposedly Cohen helped Hannity with a real estate transaction with no third party listed. The speculation I've heard is that Trump gifted some real estate to Hannity in exchange for favorable coverage.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Supposedly Cohen helped Hannity with a real estate transaction with no third party listed. The speculation I've heard is that Trump gifted some real estate to Hannity in exchange for favorable coverage.

Yeah, often with these lies they're actually based on a small bit of truth, used to cover up a whole lot of crap. So it may well be that Hannity's deal with Cohen was about some real estate. But the thing is, he could prove it was just a real estate deal just by waiving his attorney client privilege and publishing the communications and legal records himself. But he doesn't.

Trump gifting some real estate to Hannity is a little too blunt force, though, it leaves a lot of obvious records. Land transferred for peppercorn rates attracts a lot of attention, it'd even get noticed by banks and local governments who aren't even actively looking at your dealings. Instead it's probably more like Carter Page's reported payment - he was to get cut for a broker's share of the Rosneft sale despite doing nothing to actually make the deal happen. That's why I suspect Hannity probably got set up to take a share of the Trump hotel in Moscow, done right it would even look kind of clean in most circumstances, or at least be defendable. Hannity might commit to make some media appearances and meet with some investors, get listed as a manager and take half a percent of the final asset, or something like that. Hard to discover, especially if Hannity's share was hidden through a Delaware special that Cohen is so fond of setting up.

Of course, it's all speculation. But with Hannity doing nothing to actually show what the deal was, then all we know is the actual deal was at least as bad as having everyone believe you paid to have an affair covered up.

*edit* nvm...

 feeder wrote:
I guess people giving credit to Nixon for getting out of Vietnam don't know that he actively sabotaged LBJ's peace talks to gain an advantage in the upcoming election. He literally tried to gain votes with American (and Vietnamese) blood.

I definitely didn't know that. Thank you for posting it.

 Ouze wrote:
I definitely didn't know that. Thank you for posting it.

This is the thing. You can't separate Watergate from the rest of Nixon's presidency, because Watergate was more than just a hotel break-in and subsequent cover up. It was the discovery of widespread, constant ethical and legal breaches, a generally lawless approach to governing.

Everything Nixon did, the good and the bad, was done with that approach. It'd be like saying you like soccer except for the rule about not being able to use your hands. It's ignoring the very method by which everything else is done.

 sebster wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
I definitely didn't know that. Thank you for posting it.

This is the thing. You can't separate Watergate from the rest of Nixon's presidency, because Watergate was more than just a hotel break-in and subsequent cover up. It was the discovery of widespread, constant ethical and legal breaches, a generally lawless approach to governing.

Everything Nixon did, the good and the bad, was done with that approach. It'd be like saying you like soccer except for the rule about not being able to use your hands. It's ignoring the very method by which everything else is done.

You mean American Football?

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
You mean American Football?

It'd be Gaelic football, if anything.

So what I'm understanding is:
-Take the Democrat & Republican leadership to make two American Football teams
-Have them face off in the Super Bowl
-???
-Russia can't hack us!

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
So what I'm understanding is:
-Take the Democrat & Republican leadership to make two American Football teams
-Have them face off in the Super Bowl
-???
-Russia can't hack us!

Close, but they wouldn't play American football, they'd play a version of soccer where everything is the same except everyone can pick up the ball and run around with it.

I'm not saying it'd stop the Syrian crisis, but I am saying it's worth trying.

 sebster wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
So what I'm understanding is:
-Take the Democrat & Republican leadership to make two American Football teams
-Have them face off in the Super Bowl
-???
-Russia can't hack us!

Close, but they wouldn't play American football, they'd play a version of soccer where everything is the same except everyone can pick up the ball and run around with it.

I'm not saying it'd stop the Syrian crisis, but I am saying it's worth trying.

Probably more effective than what the GOP is producing for actual policy these days. At least it couldn't hurt (anyone but them).

A new NBC/WSJ poll shows the tax cuts are reversing their modest popularity gains, and now just 27% like the bill. I'm guessing, but I wonder if the recent shift to discussion of the deficit and Republican plans for health and social security cuts might have driven the slide. While people could pretend it was just free money it didn't matter that most of benefit went to the rich, because they all got free money. But now that the conversation has turned to discussion of how to reign in the deficit they're wising up a little.

Whatever the cause, as the sole piece of major legislation passed by Republicans, with a president 15 to 20 points underwater in approval polls, that's a really grim place for Republicans to be. What's interesting in the polls, to me, is that the Democratic edge in the generic poll is still only about 7 points. That's barely enough to overcome the gerrymander and predicts a close result in the mid-terms. However, +7 doesn't align with the special elections results we've seen. Sure, those elections favour the minority party even more than mid-terms, but we've seen an average shift to Democrats of +17 (per 538). And note that +17 is excluding the incredible +80 outlier (where that one Republican was accused of assaulting a 17 year old, so his wife ran in his place on a 'it was all a liberal lie' platform and got slaughtered)

I suspect the generic poll is understating the strength of the Democratic position, because these polls typically base their likely voter adjustments on past turnout, and those don't work that well when enthusiasm has shifted considerably from the last election. This is why in the swing heavy period from 2006 to 2014 the polls each time called the movement from one party to the other correctly, but understated the scale of that movement. I expect the same thing this year, so accepting that mid-terms are still a long ways off and a lot could happen, I would expect the final result to beat the generic poll by a few points. If the current +7 actually means +10, that's a huge result.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Probably more effective than what the GOP is producing for actual policy these days. At least it couldn't hurt (anyone but them).

It's probably more effective than what anyone has to offer when it comes to Syria

Slight change from what s being talked about but once again Ajit Pai proves what a PoS he is.

Edit: while not him committing fraud, it does not reflect well on him.

 sebster wrote:
Of course, it's all speculation. But with Hannity doing nothing to actually show what the deal was, then all we know is the actual deal was at least as bad as having everyone believe you paid to have an affair covered up.

Or that other case where Cohen paid the woman to have an abortion! That wouldn't fly even as far as an affair! Is there anything Hannity's fanboys despise even more than (getting caught) having an affair and abortion? Being gay?

Spetulhu wrote:

 sebster wrote:
Of course, it's all speculation. But with Hannity doing nothing to actually show what the deal was, then all we know is the actual deal was at least as bad as having everyone believe you paid to have an affair covered up.

Or that other case where Cohen paid the woman to have an abortion! That wouldn't fly even as far as an affair! Is there anything Hannity's fanboys despise even more than (getting caught) having an affair and abortion? Being gay?

Maybe he was caught in an compromising situation involving a male horse, a plastic bag, two elastic bands, the director of planned parenthood, a copy of the complete works of Karl Marx and a stash of crack cocaine.

And I think we all know how bad that can be.


...........Right?