US Politics Thread 2016-2020

[u crank]

Originally Posted by August

The truth is they knew they’d find nothing because they’d found nothing, at least on the idea of collusion. But they needed to damage the Trump administration, and nothing in politics does that like the whiff of scandal.

I think that sums up this whole affair. It's beginning to appear like people at the very top of the Obama administration not only knew about this but were part of it. That's a disturbing revelation that I hope is not true but evidence says otherwise. If the previous administration were subjected to a full court press type of investigation that Trump has had to endure what would be the result? I think the sky would fall.

[Mr Quatro]

Obama was a fence sitter his entire 8 years

[Torvald Von Mansee]

It's funny how many conservatives seem to want to cut their noses off to spite their faces just to "stick it to the libs."

You know the GOP is robbing YOU and your children to benefit the top .0001%, right? I sincerely doubt ANY of you are in the .0001% or whoever it is that GOP policies primarily benefit.

[Torvald Von Mansee]

Originally Posted by em2nought

Race Bannon as President?

Oh, the "Christian." The guy who cast the tie-breaking vote to protect BANKS from class-action suites. Who totally would have been on the side of the money-changers in the temple and conveniently ignores Matthew 19:24.

[Rockstar]

Damn you Torvald my morning coffee shot out my nose when I read that.

[August]

Originally Posted by Torvald Von Mansee

It's funny how many conservatives seem to want to cut their noses off to spite their faces just to "stick it to the libs."

You know the GOP is robbing YOU and your children to benefit the top .0001%, right? I sincerely doubt ANY of you are in the .0001% or whoever it is that GOP policies primarily benefit.

Yeah right. That's why I just got a huge raise. Damn Republicans!

[Rockstar]

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/tech...4r5?li=BBr5KbJ

Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government.

Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I’m disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders. And I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.

I wonder why he didnt get indicted by Mueller, oh wait.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/rec...563&cycle=2018

Unfortunately the only way to combat this is for people to turn it off or delete it. Unless there's a major CME that wipes out global communications and frys everyone's computers that's just not going to happen.

[August]

The truth continues to emerge.

The FBI’s sworn story to a federal court about its asset, Christopher Steele, is fraying faster than a $5 souvenir T-shirt bought at a tourist trap.Newly unearthed memos show a high-ranking government official who met with Steele in October 2016 determined some of the Donald Trump dirt that Steele was simultaneously digging up for the FBI and for Hillary Clinton’s campaign was inaccurate, and likely leaked to the media.
The concerns were flagged in a typed memo and in handwritten notes taken by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016.
Her observations were recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked collusion theory.
It is important to note that the FBI swore on Oct. 21, 2016, to the FISA judges that Steele’s “reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings” and the FBI has determined him to be “reliable” and was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to their informant, who simultaneously worked for Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign to find Russian dirt on Trump.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-ho...s-were-flagged

[u crank]

Much has been made of the accusation that a so called 'deep state' was in operation and that a 'soft coup' was in progress to remove a duly elected president from office. Both sides of this argument it would now appear were wrong. There was never any possibility that this would happen not legally or by any other means. The final nail in the coffin was the Mueller report.

What was the real agenda?

Legal analyst Andrew C. McCarthy explains it in this article in National Review.

This is an exquisitely planned political campaign.

Russiagate has always been a political narrative masquerading as a federal investigation. Its objective, plain and simple, has been twofold: first, to hamstring Donald Trump’s capacity to press the agenda on which he ran ... and ultimately, to render him unelectable come autumn 2020.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/...isan-politics/

It had to be obvious to Robert Mueller in 2017 that there was no collusion by Trump or his campaign. Why did we have to wait until April 2019 to find this out? Why no leak or better still an announcement by Mueller to that effect? Would the American public have not been better served to know this as soon as posible? The reason is becoming clearer as to why.

It would be perfectly appropriate for all anti-Trump partisans to make the public case that the president should be removed from office.

But the anti-Trump partisans are not going that route. They know they’d lose by a humiliating margin that would strengthen the president.

Instead, they are perverting the criminal-justice process they claim Trump has obstructed. With the transparently eager cooperation of Mueller’s team, they intimate that the president could have been charged and would have been convicted. They suggest that, although not charged, he has not been “exonerated,” effectively imposing on him the burden to establish his innocence.

The suspicion that the out going Obama administration used the power of the Federal government and its law inforcement and intellegence agencies improperly against their political opposites is becoming clear. And we are only beginning to find out the true scope of this operation.

The Russia counterintelligence probe, based on the fraudulent projection of a Trump-Putin conspiracy, was always a pretext to conduct a criminal investigation despite the absence of a predicate crime. The criminal investigation, in turn, was always a pretext for congressional impeachment chatter. And the congressional impeachment chatter is a pretext for the real agenda: Making Trump an ineffective president now, and an un-reelectable president 18 months from now.

They try to make it look like law. It has always been politics.

[u crank]

Since the Trump Presidency the MSM has had some stunning failures but their elevation of lawyer Michael Avenatti has to be one of their most spectacular ones. Just how desperate the left wing media is to get Trump was brought into sharp focus with this guy's rise and fall.

Avenatti appeared on CNN 65 times and MSNBC 43 times between March 7 and May 10. Of course the media needs to sell and he was a big story in connection to Stormy Daniels and her claims about Trump. This video compilation is an embarrasing look at how this guy was drooled over by people who had no interest in finding out anything about him.



Guess they missed a big story.

Embattled attorney Michael Avenatti was charged by federal prosecutors in New York Wednesday with defrauding adult-film star Stormy Daniels, the client who propelled Avenatti into the national spotlight.

Avenatti, 48, faces one count of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft. He faces up to 22 years in prison if convicted of those charges.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/22/polit...ent/index.html

"Michael Avenatti abused and violated the core duty of an attorney -- the duty to his client," US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman said in a statement Wednesday. "Far from zealously representing his client, Avenatti, as alleged, instead engaged in outright deception and theft, victimizing rather than advocating for his client."

Don't hold your breath for any apologies or admissions of failure.

[August]

I'm sure Justice Kavanaugh gets no small degree of satisfaction at seeing Avenattis spectacular downfall.

[vienna]

He's too busy having some beers...







<O>

[em2nought]

Originally Posted by vienna

He's too busy having some beers...
<O>

Meanwhile the liberal elites trying to look like they drink something so mundane as beer fall flat. LMAO

[Platapus]

Straight from our Dear Leader's .....uh... mouth?


"The Democrats have done nothing other than to obstruct. They're obstructing this country," Trump said Thursday.


As for himself, Trump once again proclaimed: "I'm an extremely stable genius."


How many bills have the Senate not even allowed on the floor for debate?


As for Trump, he is 1/3 correct. He is extreme. The rest?

[Platapus]

An interesting article on this.



https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/opini...ian/index.html

In November 2016, the world was shocked by the outcome of the US presidential election. Not only had the chattering classes gotten it wrong, but the data -- the polls that many closely tracked -- were sometimes off, too. Why did several state polls seem so off, especially in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin?


Perhaps Trump voters were less likely to pick up pollsters' phone calls; perhaps people changed their minds; or perhaps even some decided to keep their true intentions a secret. It was this last possibility that intrigued us. The day after the election, my colleagues and I launched a study to explore the phenomenon of keeping a vote secret.



Like many, we assumed that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election, and consequently, we expected that the majority of our participants would be women in traditionally Republican districts secretly supporting Clinton. To our great surprise, we were wrong on both counts.


For our study, we sought to recruit 1,000 individuals, bringing together a pool of voters who admitted to us that while telling someone they would vote for one candidate, they secretly voted for another. To find our participants, we advertised the study online, and within five days we had received 1,000 responses from people who qualified for the study.
Our participants came from Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform used by many academics for research studies. This population tends to skew toward liberal participants. And, yet, of those individuals who kept their vote a secret, about twice as many participants said they voted for Trump than voted for Clinton.



These individuals weren't just keeping their secret from coworkers, strangers or neighbors. Overwhelmingly, people who kept their vote a secret were hiding it from their family, friends and romantic partners, too.
So, what does it all mean? This research does not prove that people lied to pollsters, but it does suggest that people who kept their vote a secret overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Our findings ultimately reveal a deeper, more troubling truth: our political climate has left us so divided that many are unable to meaningfully engage with those who have different political beliefs -- including those with whom we are closest.



According to the research, people were concerned that voicing their political support would create conflicts and arguments with those around them. They also expressed concern that if they revealed who they actually voted for, their reputation would suffer.



It was this second motivation -- concern for one's reputation -- that made people's secret votes particularly burdensome. When people were more concerned for their reputation, they were more likely to ruminate on the secret. In short, they felt disingenuous in their interactions with others.
One participant described the pains of keeping his support for Trump secret from his family: "How could I describe to my family, especially a hardcore, dyed in the wool, black pride woman like my mother, that I voted for Trump?"



Keeping our political beliefs and behaviors secret from those around us -- whether in our workplaces, families or homes -- reduces the opportunity for people to recognize and humanize the people with whom we politically disagree.


Eliminating these conversations not only cuts us off from those who think differently, but it also prevents us from finding common ground and mutual respect.



In another ongoing project, we have been studying people who have changed their mind on a wide variety of political issues, asking: Who changed your mind? According to our preliminary findings, very rarely did people report that a politician or television host had changed their mind.
Frequently, however, their opinion was changed by someone they knew well -- family, friends and romantic partners. The extreme political nature of our new day-to-day has begun to rid us of the ability to speak frankly and honestly with each other, which, ironically, is one of the key ways to change someone's mind.



When people cast their votes in 2016, it seems too often they did so without talking it over with anyone -- and that had negative implications for those individuals and society at large. We are at risk of this happening again in 2020.



Perhaps Trump supporters will feel more comfortable voicing their intentions than they did in 2016. But it's important to remember that the Trump 2016 win was built on "identity politics," where political views and interests center on particular demographic groups, and our research makes clear that people remain concerned about the reputational implications of their political support.



In other words, many people have learned it's safer to say one thing and do another at the ballot box.


At a time when political divides have never been sharper, political polarization has led people to avoid talking to each other, and to give up on engaging in dialogue. While these kinds of conversations can cause discomfort and a potential rift, meaningful dialogue has to start somewhere. Not only is the home often a safe place to start -- it is likely to be the place where we can make the most change.

I know that in my house, there are political topics I have learned not to discuss. And I have learned the strategic wisdom of keeping my big yap shut when any group starts yammering about political issues.



In public, I can accept this. But when families are unwilling to take the risk to discuss political opinions because of any perceived risk, that's a problem.



But the political schizm in this country is only increasing. While people love to point fingers at specific politicians as "the cause", this has been happening for decades. I am sure that the advent of the Internets Tubes has enabled this far more than any one politician.



But if you can't "agree to disagree" within your own family who can you agree to disagree with? And so people are either suppressing their opinion or worse, faking opinions in order to not rock the family boat.