U.S. Politics: Are You Threadening Me Master Jedi?

[Martell Spy]

1 hour ago, Inigima said:

 

 

Trump Ordered Mueller Fired, but Backed Off When White House Counsel Threatened to Quit https://nyti.ms/2FkhQqF

Wow, Trump is an obstruction of justice machine. 

[Jace, Extat]

11 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

Wow, Trump is an obstruction of justice machine. 

This is like go to prison shit right?

[Martell Spy]

4 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

This is like go to prison shit right?

For anyone who isn't President with a Congress lead by sycophants, yes. He tried to fire the cop investigating him. Not very supportive of the police, to say the least.

Why Is Burger King Weighing In on the Net Neutrality Debate?

https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/burger-king-made-a-viral-ad-explaining-net-neutrality-with-whoppers.html?via=recirc_recent

Quote

 

Burger King’s new ad for the Whopper, which doubles as an explainer on net neutrality, is going viral. Released on Wednesday, the “Whopper Neutrality” commercial has already amassed more than 1.5 million views on YouTube and is second on the site’s trending list as of Thursday afternoon.

The commercial makes use of an extended metaphor to explain the “fast lane, slow lane” principle at the core of the net neutrality debate

 

 

[Martell Spy]

Republicans love their goofy conspiracy theories. It is known.

Schumer knocks Johnson as ‘delusional’ over FBI ‘secret society’ flap

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/25/fbi-secret-society-chuck-schumer-369446

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"Republican members of this body, I am ashamed to say, picked up on casual texts sent between FBI agents to say that there is a ‘secret society’ at the Department of Justice — without a shred of evidence," Schumer said on the Senate floor.

"I saw the senator ... propagating this on television this morning," he said of Johnson. "It looked delusional. It looked paranoid. What began as an attempt to discredit the investigator has now devolved into delusional, self-serving paranoia."

 

 

[Martell Spy]

I had forgotten, it is possible Trump could be indicted, rather than referred for impeachment. However, it seems unlikely.

Quote

 

Still, there’s an even bigger problem: It’s not clear if prosecutors even can indict a sitting president. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has long taken the position that they can’t. Some legal experts argue otherwise, and the matter has never been tested in court. Still, this means that any indictment of Trump would be legally dubious and enormously controversial — likely involving a Supreme Court battle.

For that reason, many observers have long thought that if Mueller and his boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, conclude Trump committed illegal acts, they’ll likely submit a report on their conclusions to Congress — putting the ball in their court and letting them decide whether they think censure or impeachment is justified.

This would skirt the legal difficulties of relying on the federal obstruction of justice statute, because impeachment isn’t a legal process at all — it’s a political one. Yet in other ways, this would make Mueller’s task harder. The Republican-controlled Congress has an obvious partisan incentive to give Trump the benefit of the doubt on any accusation that’s less than rock-solid (and probably even some that are rock-solid).

 

3 potential problems for an obstruction of justice case against Trump
Why some experts think Mueller would need a lot more to make a case.

https://www.vox.com/2018/1/25/16868268/trump-obstruction-of-justice-mueller

[Mexal]

Sean Hannity in a single clip.

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

14 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I was a staffer for a State Senator who was at one point the chair on the Education Committee. We had multiple examples of textbooks for junior and senior high students that yes, completely omitted slavery’s role in the Civil War. Some textbooks explained that slaves had good lives, or at least better lives than they’d have in Africa. Others omitted that the founding fathers had slaves, and that some of them were for slavery. You’re correct in saying that there aren’t any textbooks that completely omit slavery, as far as I’ve seen, but there are a ton that completely whitewash America’s history with regards to slavery, and that plays a large role in why we still have terrible race relations in this country. The point is that most Americans don’t know much about the dark side of their country’s history. I think A People’s History of the United States should be a mandatory reading for every high school student in this country. We need to stop lying to ourselves about our history, else we’re doomed to repeat our atrocities.

Bravo! I completely agree and I bought a copy of "The Peoples History of the U.S. (Zinn) for my son because of the very similar experiences I noticed with shitty HS/Middle School history  that gets peddled in the U.S.

[Which Tyler]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42829555

Trump is prepared to apologise for retweeting those racist lies from Britain First a few weeks ago.
He hasn't, but he is prepared to... If Piers Morgan tells him that Britain First are bad people... which he already has, along with just about everyone else in Britain.

He absolutely refuses though, to go beyond being prepared to apologisse

[Martell Spy]

Report: Dutch Intel Services Saw Russian Hackers Break Into DNC in 2014

https://www.thedailybeast.com/report-dutch-intel-services-saw-russian-hackers-break-into-dnc-in-2014?ref=home

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In “a space in a university office building near Red Square,” the AIVD agents penetrated the computer networks of Cozy Bear, also known as APT29, and even managed to infiltrate their security camera to capture images of the elusive Russian team that has frustrated U.S., British, and Israeli intel services for years, according to the report. The details of the operation, said to be confirmed by six U.S. and Dutch sources familiar with the material, is apparently the basis for U.S. intel services’ “high confidence” that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

 

[Inigima]

That's fascinating but it seems like revealing that is bad news for continued surveillance

[Mexal]

38 minutes ago, Inigima said:

That's fascinating but it seems like revealing that is bad news for continued surveillance

They're no longer in their system so it doesn't matter. The original article is here. History will not be kind to the Obama administration for doing nothing while this was happening.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

11 hours ago, lokisnow said:

Three years for environmental reviews and studies.

1 year for bids, then Two years for design, then two years for property acquisition. Six years of legal challenges (to environmental reviews, State jurisdictional lawsuits, and challenges to eminent domain property acquisition)

Then once you have ceremonial groundbreaking in 2026 or so:

four years building infrastructural construction access roads and staging areas.

four years of actual wall construction, (twelve plus if the construction is more sequential rather than simultaneous, for instance if there’s only 50 simultaneous construction sites instead of 500 simultaneous construction sites it could be decades to finish).

Four years of clearing out staging areas and temporary access roads and building permanent access infrastructure.

2 years of testing 

Finally ribbon cutting ceremony in 2040 with the wall officially opened.

 

by the way. A wall that costs 25 billion and takes twenty two years to be built is certainly impressive.

but any good drug czar knows that a six meter diameter tunnel boring machine only costs about 6-8 million for the machine, and only needs about twenty people to operate the machinery creating the tunnel. you could buy dozens of them and have lots of long, high quality tunnels ready long before the wall ever is finished.

Are these numbers accurate or are you just having a bit of fun? Because if it’s the former there’s no reason not to let him have his short term win. Dems can just undo everything if they win in 2020 and Trump will long be dead before it would be completed.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

What a hilarious coincidence. Just as Trump said the stock market would be down by 50% if Clinton had won, news broke that 4th quarter growth dropped.

[OldGimletEye]

On 1/26/2018 at 9:33 AM, Tywin et al. said:

What a hilarious coincidence. Just as Trump said the stock market would be down by 50% if Clinton had won, news broke that 4th quarter growth dropped to 2.3%.

As opposed to Trump's plan of having the stock market appreciate several times over any sane reasonable value, then bursting, putting us back into a liquidity trap, and then having the Republican spew out flamin' nonsense for 10 more years.
What a clown

[James Arryn]

11 hours ago, Mexal said:

Sean Hannity in a single clip.

 

The thing I always try and keep in mind when seeing stuff like this is that for many right-wingers in the US, ALL media s biased towards the left and that Fox is just the ‘least extreme’ in that regard. So if/when they think Fox is betraying a bias, it’s NOT in the way that seems so obvious to the rest of us. It blows my mind, but it’s a reality.

[Martell Spy]

31 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

The thing I always try and keep in mind when seeing stuff like this is that for many right-wingers in the US, ALL media s biased towards the left and that Fox is just the ‘least extreme’ in that regard. So if/when they think Fox is betraying a bias, it’s NOT in the way that seems so obvious to the rest of us. It blows my mind, but it’s a reality.

Yes, but there are now calls for FBI purges on Fox news. That is new and quite alarming.

[OldGimletEye]

Why can't conservatives admit they where wrong about inflation?

Why can't they admit they were wrong about "structural unemployment"?

Cause they are clowns?

More support for my theory if you need a bomb defused, don't call a conservative.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/01/26/why-cant-conservatives-just-admit-they-were-wrong-about-inflation/

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We know that economist Marvin Goodfriend, one of President Trump's picks for the Federal Reserve, would have been terrible at the job over the past 10 years. What we don't know is whether he'll be any better at it now.

The early signs, though, are not encouraging.

Now, the easiest way to think about the Fed's job is that it's trying to keep the economy in the Goldilocks zone — where it's not growing so fast that inflation gets out of control, but not so slowly that unemployment shoots up, either. Which is to say that it's about deciding which of them — inflation or unemployment — is a bigger threat to economic stability at any given moment.

 

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In 2010, when unemployment was at 9.4 percent, Goodfriend said it was “premature” for the Fed to do more to encourage job growth because markets didn't think inflation was going to fall that much the next five years. In 2011, when unemployment was at 9 percent, he worried that the “high unemployment rate” would make “it hard for the Fed to move preemptively against inflation,” which it needed to do “fairly soon.” And in 2012, when unemployment was at 8.2 percent, Goodfriend argued that it was “really doubtful” that the Fed's stimulus efforts would even be able to decrease joblessness to 7 percent, although that was almost just as well. If the stimulus did succeed in reducing unemployment, he said, it might only "give rise to a rising inflation rate in the next few years, which would just be disastrous for the economy."

 

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The first mistake Goodfriend made was the same one made by a lot of conservatives: He didn't realize the 1970s were over. That decade was too formative an experience for him to let go of. He worried that 9 percent unemployment might lull the Fed into taking its eye off inflation long enough for us to get into a situation where higher prices caused higher wages and higher wages caused even higher prices, like what happened back when disco was still a thing.

He probably has a hard time giving up his Starsky & Hutch collection and eight track player too.

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 or people just don't have the right skills, or whatever other interesting -- but wrong -

Beloved by the WSJ and CEO Business Clowntable crowd.

[James Arryn]

8 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

Yes, but there are now calls for FBI purges on Fox news. That is new and quite alarming.

I’m not really talking about FOX and what it is/does, but rather how conservatives perceive what it is/does. And that’s often in complete contrast with how you and I do, ie more along the lines of taking a Fox-GOP talking point and saying ‘even the media is admitting some of this, that’s how bad it is.’

[BigFatCoward]

You really did elect the biggest pussy ever.  I normally hate working demo's but i really hope that i'm on duty for this one if and when it happens. 

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/donald-trump-tells-theresa-may-he-wont-visit-uk-unless-she-bans-protests-1656638

[James Arryn]

On 2018-01-25 at 9:45 AM, Tywin et al. said:

I’m sure that’s the case in most countries, but I fear it’s worse here than in most other places. Hell, my history textbook tried to downplay how bad the Trail of Tears was. And in the last few years I’ve seen stories were some textbooks in the South omit slavery. SLAVERY! Nothing in Kiwi land can be that bad.

To me it’s clearly more extreme in the US, and the bi-product of a few factors, most closely associated with America’s also extreme degree of egocentricity. I’ll try and summarize as briefly as I can:

1) All mercantile-based cultures have strong emphasis on stability and complacency as the alternative disrupts commerce, or at leasts concentrates it into the fields which profit from conflict. Likewise all commerce-based societies develop pretty clear materialistic priorities/ideologies. 

2) These natural points of emphasis are balanced out by the fact that historically speaking, those same states also became by necessity pretty exocentric and outward-looking...or at least having that be a pretty big chunk of the population offsetting the more parochial elements. In order to conduct business ‘over there’, you either become colonial and therefore fuse cultures to some degree, or you have a lot of people spending huge chunks of time elsewhere, either of which necessarily means exposure to alternate views, beliefs, etc. This then becomes part of th perspective of the mercantile state itself. So in this way the historically mercantile societies, from your Phoenicians and Hellenes to your Italian Republics and even the British Empire were a combination of pretty materialistic cultures which had significant and pretty constant inclusive/outward-looking elements.

3) America’s ‘over there’ was over here, and the Native cultures were so decimated and then systematically eradicated that frontier-fusions were pretty ephemeral and isolated. So what you get is the usual materialistic outlook of commerce based societies, which will foster concepts like cultural competitiveness and a belief in idealogical rubrics without the normalizing effect of outside perspectives. 

4) Add to that the timing of rising in concurrence with the Industrial Revolution, the fact that to what degree America did go out into the wider world it usually just appropriated the superstructures already put in place by the European colonial powers who had already done the cultural heavy-lifting (and thereby spent time there as non-dominant folk thereby adapting and absorbing alternate perspectives) or just to go to war, and America pretty much side-stepped the need to become culturally outward-looking while at the same time becoming globally dominant, especially when their colonial predecessors exhausted each other with devastating wars in their respective backyards. 

5) Finally, while also true of places like ANZ, Canada, South America, etc. America became a focal point for immigration. Now people emigrate for various reasons, but few of them do so because they’re completely in love with their native land, and they will usually try and choose a new home that more reflects their own priorities (in this case materialism, for example) so that necessarily means that people who immigrate to a new country are going to come predisposed to look favourably on their new land in contrast with their old. In more outward looking places like Canada, ANZ or w/e that’s absorbed in context, but when fed into an inward-looking nation like the US, and one which as a result actually buys into the idea that some priorities (say materialism again) are better than others, and by extension therefore cultures states can be viewed as objectively ‘better’ than other countries by virtue of how/whether they reflect that country’s chosen priorities.

What this all means is confirmation bias fed into a cultural echo chamber, and that’s how you get a country filled with hundreds of millions of people who have little knowledge, interest or indeed respect for the world outside of the US, and/or it’s alternate views. The final factor is American dominance in popular culture which is like the reflective lid being put on the cultural chamber of mirrors. Americans don’t see much of the outside world, aren’t terribly interested in the outside world, and the vast majority of people from the outside world they encounter are the ones who chose to leave that world for the US because they had sympathetic priorities. 

So, while every nation has always had stay-at-Home, damn-foreigners, Rule Brittania parochial types, those nations either did stay at home (say Tokugawa Japan) and therefore didn’t become materially abundant and therefore globally dominant, or they had to incorporate significant chunks of people by necessity outward-looking and thereby absorb outside views, however reluctantly, into their own consciousness. America could have that ride without paying that price. So it didn’t, and the result is stuff like a country that actually believes there is such a thing as an objectively determined rank of better/worse countries rather than different courses for different horses.

So, while every country had it’s own bullshit and contains people who are very willing to buy and sell it, both the need for and ability to make that happen in the US is substantially boosted. That’s how ‘they hate us for our freedom’ becomes an actual thing rather than a line out of satire as it would be almost anywhere else. That’s why Freedom Fries and ‘America went to war with Hitler to save Europe’ and all the other elements of Fuck Yeah are so pervasive, robust and reinforced in America relative to other states.