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US Politics: Lock Him Up!


Fragile Bird

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1 hour ago, Nasty LongRider said:

Really, trying to construct a case with photos of this type is like the photos and film clips 'prove' Melania is an abused wife.  Trump is a rude mysgoinstic asshole true, but these photos just aren't enough on their own to prove anything.

You don't have to prove anything. We know that those people believe this stuff--Pizzagate comes to mind. They hate women enough that they probably would believe it, with or without proof. There's no need to attach it to "fake news". Just leave it to their imaginations.

A little innuendo goes a long way with these folks. 

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22 minutes ago, denstorebog said:

Doesn't really matter. We could discuss back and forth what the numerous stories, photos and clips of Trump disregarding Melania in public, of Melania doing her damndest to appear happy and failing, of Melania's non-existence in Trump's administration, really mean. And whether her unconventional living arrangement has anything to do with anything. Or we could skip that part and just draw our own conclusions.

See the discussion on the previous page about whether circumstancial photo evidence of something odd going on in a relationship between two people would have any influence on elections. My point is that it doesn't, as evidenced by the First Lady.

Except that a miserable FLOTUS isn't anything new. Melania is "out of sight, out of mind". She's not around enough for anyone to care. 

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58 minutes ago, Mexal said:

The Facebook group put out a statement yesterday defending it. It's as bad as you'd think it is. If I find it again, I'll post it.

Oh god, really? I'll look for it. It's probably a good thing I already ate breakfast. 

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19 minutes ago, denstorebog said:

Doesn't really matter. We could discuss back and forth what the numerous stories, photos and clips of Trump disregarding Melania in public, of Melania doing her damndest to appear happy and failing, of Melania's non-existence in Trump's administration, really mean. And whether her unconventional living arrangement has anything to do with anything. Or we could skip that part and just draw our own conclusions.

See the discussion on the previous page about whether circumstancial photo evidence of something odd going on in a relationship between two people would have any influence on elections. My point is that it doesn't, as evidenced by the First Lady.

I was never under any illusion that they had a happy marriage. I was never under any illusion that they have an unhappy marriage, because I have no clue. The state of one's marriage is pretty meaningless to me. I'm still not sure how photos can be used as credible evidence of anything.

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19 minutes ago, Crazy Cat Lady in Training said:

You don't have to prove anything. We know that those people believe this stuff--Pizzagate comes to mind. They hate women enough that they probably would believe it, with or without proof. There's no need to attach it to "fake news". Just leave it to their imaginations.

A little innuendo goes a long way with these folks. 

Ahem, I'm talking about the memes coming from the liberal side about this abuse stuff.   Memes for liberals and by liberals. 

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2 hours ago, Crazy Cat Lady in Training said:

Ivanka is an enabler of the kind any woman with sense, conservative or liberal, despises. 

She may be around because she's the only one who can keep Daddy in line. 

Someone mentioned pedophilia earlier. Those photos of her with Daddy when she was a teenager are still floating around. It's pretty obvious that he had the hots for his own daughter and she doesn't seem to be squirming away from him, either.

The last line is remarkably insensitive towards the victims of familial sexual abuse, almost victim blaming. Kind of surprised you went there. 

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Just a reminder: If you need some bomb defusal services, please do not call 1- 800 - Republican-Party.

They fuck up about everything they touch.

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/a-plan-set-up-to-fail/

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So now we know what Republicans have to offer as an Obamacare replacement. Let me try to avoid value judgments for a few minutes, and describe what seems to have happened here.

The structure of the Affordable Care Act comes out of a straightforward analysis of the logic of coverage. If you want to make health insurance available and affordable for almost everyone, regardless of income or health status, and you want to do this through private insurers rather than simply have single-payer, you have to do three things.

1.Regulate insurers so they can’t refuse or charge high premiums to people with preexisting conditions
2.Impose some penalty on people who don’t buy insurance, to induce healthy people to sign up and provide a workable risk pool
3.Subsidize premiums so that lower-income households can afford insurance

 

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4 minutes ago, DunderMifflin said:

I was never under any illusion that they had a happy marriage. I was never under any illusion that they have an unhappy marriage, because I have no clue. The state of one's marriage is pretty meaningless to me. I'm still not sure how photos can be used as credible evidence of anything.

You forget who we're dealing with. You don't need evidence of any kind. In fact, the less evidence the better. Too many facts confuse them and they turn a blind eye in denial. 

The Dems have to start taking a page out of the Republican playbook and get down and dirty. They have to play to win here. 

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6 minutes ago, Mexal said:

Wikileaks is releasing over 8,000 documents pertaining to the CIA's hacking abilities and tools, shortly after Trump calls out Obama and the "deep state" for wiretapping him. Russia Today had an article up within 15 minutes of the release. We're so fucked.

And of course the person who made those leaks is a hero.  No investigation needed....

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3 hours ago, Crazy Cat Lady in Training said:

The Dems have to start taking a page out of the Republican playbook and get down and dirty. They have to play to win here. 

I'm not so sure that sinking to their level is the equivalent of playing to win. 

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1 hour ago, Mexal said:

Wikileaks is releasing over 8,000 documents pertaining to the CIA's hacking abilities and tools, shortly after Trump calls out Obama and the "deep state" for wiretapping him. Russia Today had an article up within 15 minutes of the release. We're so fucked.

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And of course the person who made those leaks is a hero.  No investigation needed....

Oh for fucks sake. Calm down John McCain and Lindsay Graham. 

First of all, you have your chronology completely wrong. Trump's baseless accusations came over the weekend. The CIA leaks just came out today and considering it's 8,000+ documents, they've been in the works for several weeks -- at least. Hareetz, the NYT and the BBC also had articles up within 30 minutes of release, since you know -- they're doing their fucking jobs and reporting on national security/privacy issues and not taking their stories from basic American cable news media -- like everyone in this thread seems to be doing with hard hitting analysis on Melania and Ivanka. But hey, I guess Hareetz, the BBC, and the New York Times are also pro-Trump Putin stooge outlets. 

Regardless, this has nothing to do with the idiotic Trump accusations that's detracting from serious media coverage, analysis, and discussion of actual, important issues like the revised travel ban or ACA repeal -- or stories like this on the national surveillance state for that matter.

The CIA leaks -- hacking into people's personal devices to monitor, record them, etc. is incredibly fucking disturbing, although perhaps not as explosive as Snowden's NSA leaks giving the fact that most people already suspected the US intelligence apparatus was already capable of doing this. (Fun aside: The CIA operative who code named the operation to hack Samsung TVs is evidently a Doctor Who fan and named it "weeping angel" -- funny but pretty messed up.)

And if you want to relate it to Trump, given Trump's tendency to take everything to the Nth degree and wildly exploit executive power, coupled with his targeting of minorities, journalists, and activists, you should be absolutely afraid of how Trump could direct the intelligence community to use these methods to hack and spy on the aforementioned groups. The FBI and CIA after all have a long history of doing just that -- particularly during the 60s and 70s. And of course you can thank Obama and his predecessors for laying the groundwork for all this in the first place. So yeah, the person who had the balls to put his or her neck on the line and leak this is actually a hero thank you very much. 

But hey, I guess it's easier to put this all in the "ZOMG the Rooskies!" narrative. It's cute to see presumable "liberals" calling for the investigation of leakers who disclose federal intelligence surveillance abuses to the public. And by cute I mean disgusting. 

On that note, I think ya'll are exactly the type of people who need to read this piece by Masha Gessen, a Russian anti-Putin activist (also anti-Trump of course) who is living in self-imposed exile in the US. I'll just say upfront as a disclaimer that I think she downplays the Trump campaign surrogates' staffers' reported contacts with alleged Russian intelligence agents, but her impulse to do so is understandable given the hysterics on exhibit in the two posts I quoted above, which sadly seem indicative of the larger non-Trump supporting public. That aside, her analysis on the newly-rediscovered Russian conspiracy cottage industry is pretty spot on. 

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I am, of course, merely pretending not to know what makes Russia so special. For more than six months now, Russia has served as a crutch for the American imagination. It is used to explain how Trump could have happened to us, and it is also called upon to give us hope. When the Russian conspiracy behind Trump is finally fully exposed, our national nightmare will be over.

A great many journalists and pundits have been convinced of the Russia conspiracy since December, some since October, a few since July. That conviction helps “connect the dots” as more and more dots seem to appear. Every new story makes the evidence pile up, even if it later turns out to be apparently unrelated—as in the case of the cybersecurity experts who were arrested and charged with treason by Russian authorities in December. In January The New York Times, Rachel Maddow, and a slew of other outlets reported on rumors that the charges of treason stemmed from disclosures about the Russian hacking of the US election. But a month later, when Reuters reported that the arrests were the result of an unrelated seven-year-old case, few other publications followed up on the story. The fact is, the Russian justice system is so opaque and so corrupt that it is virtually impossible to know why these men were arrested—but the arrests have long since taken their place in the narrative.

 
 

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Russia has become the universal rhetorical weapon of American politics. Calls for the release of Trump’s tax returns—which the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hopes to have subpoenaed as a result of its lawsuit alleging the violation of the Emoluments Clause—are now framed in terms of the need to reveal Trump’s financial ties to Russia. And the president himself is recapturing the campaign debate’s “No, you are the puppet” moment on Twitter, trying to smear Democratic politicians Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi with Russia.

The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him. If that happens, it will have resulted largely from a media campaign orchestrated by members of the intelligence community—setting a dangerous political precedent that will have corrupted the public sphere and promoted paranoia. And that is the best-case outcome.

More likely, the Russia allegations will not bring down Trump. He may sacrifice more of his people, as he sacrificed Flynn, as further leaks discredit them. Various investigations may drag on for months, drowning out other, far more urgent issues. In the end, Congressional Republicans will likely conclude that their constituents don’t care enough about Trump’s Russian ties to warrant trying to impeach the Republican president. Meanwhile, while Russia continues to dominate the front pages, Trump will continue waging war on immigrants, cutting funding for everything that’s not the military, assembling his cabinet of deplorables—with six Democrats voting to confirm Ben Carson for Housing, for example, and ten to confirm Rick Perry for Energy. According to the Trump plan, each of these seems intent on destroying the agency he or she is chosen to run—to carry out what Steve Bannon calls the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” As for Sessions, in his first speech as attorney general he promised to cut back civil rights enforcement and he has already abandoned a Justice Department case against a discriminatory Texas voter ID law. But it was his Russia lie that grabbed the big headlines.

The unrelenting focus on Russia has yielded an unexpected positive result, however. Following Flynn’s resignation, Trump designated Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, a thoughtful and highly respected military strategist, as his national security adviser. And Fiona Hill, probably the most knowledgeable American scholar of Putin’s Russia, is expected to take charge of Russia policy at the National Security Council. Hill has been a consistent and perceptive critic of Putin, and a proponent of maintaining sanctions imposed by the United States following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both of these appointments—and the fact that sanctions remain in place six weeks into Trump’s fast-moving presidency—contradict the “Putin’s puppet” narrative (as does the fact that Russian domestic propaganda has already turned against Trump). But such is the nature of conspiracy thinking that facts can do nothing to change it.

Imagine if the same kind of attention could be trained and sustained on other issues—like it has been on the Muslim travel ban. It would not get rid of Trump, but it might mitigate the damage he is causing. Trump is doing nothing less than destroying American democratic institutions and principles by turning the presidency into a profit-making machine for his family, by poisoning political culture with hateful, mendacious, and subliterate rhetoric, by undermining the public sphere with attacks on the press and protesters, and by beginning the real work of dismantling every part of the federal government that exists for any purpose other than waging war. Russiagate is helping him—both by distracting from real, documentable, and documented issues, and by promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.

 

 


 


So TLDR: Can we stop making the US politics thread so fucking basic? It used to be one of the best places to read US political discussions on the internet in my opinion. Now it's kinda shit.  #MakethePoliticsThreadGreatAgain

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The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him. If that happens, it will have resulted largely from a media campaign orchestrated by members of the intelligence community—setting a dangerous political precedent that will have corrupted the public sphere and promoted paranoia. And that is the best-case outcome.

 

Or you know things like multiple Russian officials dying under odd circumstances, the dossier prepared by an ex-British Intelligence member outlining multiple ties between Trump and Russia, multiple members of his cabinet and campaign having long standing ties to the Kremlin, two members of his cabinet lying under oath about contact with Russian officials, Trump constantly praising Putin and asking that the kremlin continue to supply hacked intelligence to Wikileaks publicly. That's not a dream, it's a fucking nightmare.

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Looks like the Republicans took out the individual mandate from the ACA and put back in an individual mandate, except to pay it to the insurance companies, at rates that could be higher than the $695. These clowns have no idea how to govern.

Now I'm no legal expert, but I thought the individual mandate faced all kinds of legal challenges. Making individuals pay fines to private companies through a bill.......how can that not face challenges, it seems more egregious to me.

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33 minutes ago, All-for-Joffrey said:

So TLDR: Can we stop making the US politics thread so fucking basic? It used to be one of the best places to read US political discussions on the internet in my opinion. Now it's kinda shit.  #MakethePoliticsThreadGreatAgain

I think the reason the discussion has become more basic is because the game became more basic on November last year. Or to put it another way: When Trump tries to use the CIA leak within the next 24 hours to promote the narrative that the deep state is against the people, are we then allowed to talk about it here? Or should we generally stay above those topics and pretend that US politics hasn't devolved into a struggle to control the story, moreso than ever?

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