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US Politics: The Ides of Mueller


Paladin of Ice

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(CNN)Sen. Lindsey Graham gave a stern warning Sunday to President Donald Trump against firing special counsel Robert Mueller.

"As I said before, if he tried to do that, that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency," the South Carolina Republican said on CNN's "State of the Union."

 

Why does Lindsey's comments make think of this?  Hmmmm, I wonder.

 

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59 minutes ago, GAROVORKIN said:

I wouldn't be the Oak in Aesops fable which broke  because it couldn't bend like the reeds.

Why are you biased on oak trees?  I didn't ask what you wouldn't be. That is pretty concerning....

55 minutes ago, Nasty LongRider said:

That's OK as far as it goes, but I like this variation, if you were a twee, what kind of twee would you be?

There may be other variations as well.     

:D Someone else got the reference!

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Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe would be one of the top two or three key witnesses in any obstruction of justice case against President Donald Trump. On Friday, Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions destroyed McCabe professionally in a way that could ruin his reputation for telling the truth.

These are the most important things to remember after Sessions fired McCabe for an undefined failure to be forthcoming during an investigation of his role in the bureau’s work on the Hillary Clinton email scandal and related inquiries.

 

The Only Relevant Known Fact About McCabe’s Firing Is That He Is a Key Witness Against Trump

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/the-only-relevant-known-fact-about-mccabes-firing-is-that-he-is-a-key-witness-against-trump.html

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7 minutes ago, Nasty LongRider said:

Why does Lindsey's comments make think of this?  Hmmmm, I wonder.

 

Hm , I do have to concede  that this bit is definitely appropriate to the current situation.:P

 

But then there is the sequel 

" They ate Robins Minstrels. There was much rejoicing."  :D

 

 

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Since the firing of James Comey, the staff members around Trump have managed to placate, delay, or contain some of these impulses. But nearly every reporter following the White House now agrees that Trump is moving into a new phase of his presidency. He is aware that he has surrounded himself with people who consider him a moron or are trying to save the country from his madness, and he is relentlessly casting them off.

Trump may not be systematically breaking through the protective ring that has surrounded him, because he is barely capable of doing anything in a systematic fashion. But in fits and starts he is lurching in the same basic direction. He is doing the things his aides told him he could not do, or refused to carry out. Imposing tariffs was a major step in asserting his autonomy. Firing Rex Tillerson in humiliating fashion was another. The case that he would leave Mueller alone relied on the assumption that Trump would stay contained forever. That assumption is crumbling.

It is also notable that Trump’s recent behavior displays a reckless disregard for even his own self-preservation.

 

Trump Is Taking Out His Enemies and Turning Toward Robert Mueller

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/trump-is-taking-out-his-enemies-and-turning-toward-mueller.html

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14 minutes ago, Guy Kilmore said:

Why are you biased on oak trees?  I didn't ask what you wouldn't be. That is pretty concerning....

:D Someone else got the reference!

Because the very inflexible nature of Oak Trees makes it impossible to reason with them .:P

Which is why I put a Tree related Monty Python Reference. :)

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1 hour ago, GAROVORKIN said:

If Mueller actually had something concrete , leaks not withstanding ,  It would have come out by now  in some way shape or form . 

No, it wouldn't.  He would continue the investigation until all leads are exhausted and only then release his findings in a concluding report.

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3 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

No, it wouldn't.  He would continue the investigation until all leads are exhausted and only then release his findings in a concluding report.

Things have come out; indictments, plea deals, subpoenas and the negotiation with Trump for questioning.  No leaks needed.

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7 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

No, it wouldn't.  He would continue the investigation until all leads are exhausted and only then release his findings in a concluding report.

T  If there nothing, then it all goes away, if Mueller has something ,  It will be the biggest political scandal since Watergate , maybe even bigger.  To borrow a well worn Cliche , time will tell.

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1 hour ago, GAROVORKIN said:

Because the very inflexible nature of Oak Trees makes it impossible to reason with them .:P

Which is why I put a Tree related Monty Python Reference. :)

When you say it is impossible to reason with an Oak, doesn't that make you an oak as you are inflexible in your judgements?  Why did you go negative?

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When I queried the authors about the similarity of these analytic approaches, Fishkin agreed. “Our view of the structural differences between the two party coalitions is highly overlapping with the collective view of a number of political scientists, with Grossmann and Hopkins prominent among them,” he said. “Our focus is different in that we are interested in a particular form of political behavior – constitutional hardball – and the incentives and motivations that surround it. Because of our different focus, we end up emphasizing some pieces of the story that a political scientist might not, including the two party coalitions’ rather different views of the Constitution itself."

In many contexts, Pozen said, "it will be a logical fallacy to assume that just because a social or political practice is reciprocal, in the sense that both sides participate, it must also be symmetrical, in the sense that both sides participate in the same way. I get the sense that some observers of constitutional hardball may have noticed Democrats getting into the act and conflated reciprocity with symmetry. Others may not have wanted to touch the symmetry/asymmetry issue because they find it hopelessly ‘political’ or because it is so difficult to measure. For whatever reasons, legal scholarship has been surprisingly quiet on the question of constitutional hardball's partisan dimensions.”

Because the implicit belief in symmetry is so strong — with the added convention of treating both sides equally regardless of evidence — it’s important to grasp the strength of evidence to the contrary. There are four reasons the authors give why an asymmetric account makes sense. First, certain GOP hardball tactics haven’t migrated over to the Democratic side, while Republicans have readily used Democratic tactics when given a change. Specifically:

Democrats have not threatened credibly to default on the national debt.
They have not enacted measures likely to suppress Republican voter turnout in federal elections.
They have not fired their own hand-picked Senate parliamentarian in an effort to overturn rulings that displeased them.
They have not appointed agency heads known to oppose the agencies they will be leading.
And they have not they impeached a President.

 

Tilting the playing field: How Republican “constitutional hardball” has reshaped politics
Stealing a Supreme Court seat is just one example: Republicans have long believed they must play dirty to win

https://www.salon.com/2018/03/18/tilting-the-playing-field-how-republican-constitutional-hardball-has-reshaped-politics/

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1 hour ago, Martell Spy said:

Tilting the playing field: How Republican “constitutional hardball” has reshaped politics
Stealing a Supreme Court seat is just one example: Republicans have long believed they must play dirty to win

https://www.salon.com/2018/03/18/tilting-the-playing-field-how-republican-constitutional-hardball-has-reshaped-politics/

I've been of the general opinion for awhile, that if you give a Republican clown an inch, he'll take a mile.

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56 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

No, it wouldn't.  He would continue the investigation until all leads are exhausted and only then release his findings in a concluding report.

Given the extent this investigation has exhibited thus far, I am not sure it that it can reach a state where all leads are exhausted within a reasonable time (e.g. one decade). This isn't about Trump and Russia anymore, it's about anything and anyone even vaguely related to Trump and there's a whole lot of these entities.

Incidentally, for the people hoping that the US would intervene in Russian elections, this either didn't happen or it had no effect whatsoever: the results are currently being counted and both exit polls and early results show Putin winning with over 70% of the vote.

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1 hour ago, GAROVORKIN said:

But so far, nothing leading to Trump.

 

The top of the food chain is always last in an investigation like this. You build from the bottom up. Every white collar investigation is the same.

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15 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Gowdy and Graham making noises in the right direction on the morning shows, but we'll see what kind of action there is once the massacre happens.

I suppose it is worth pointing out that these people still think they're the good guys.

Even a lot of the Talking Heads have cooled the bootlicking lately, one wonders if the Talking Points memo has been disseminated to begin gaining distance from the dumpster's fire.

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2 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

I suppose it is worth pointing out that these people still think they're the good guys.

Even a lot of the Talking Heads have cooled the bootlicking lately, one wonders if the Talking Points memo has been disseminated to begin gaining distance from the dumpster's fire.

This ain't no party... this ain't no disco... this ain't no foolin' around ...

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3 hours ago, Zorral said:

It is treason is it not -- to collaborate with a foreign entity to destroy the United States's election systems?

I dont see how one could honestly come to any other conclusion at this point. This is high treason were looking at.

And if its allowed to stand, the citizenry may be correct to view the Trump administration as a beligerant occupying regime in our country. We are under seige at this very moment imo.

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