U.S. Politics; Who Watches the Watchers?

[TheKitttenGuard]

2 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

As a side note, I'm no handwriting expert, but that signature just screams desperate overcompensation. Are we sure he's actually writing his name, and not scribbling out "I AM A BIG TOUGH POWERFUL MANLY MAN"?

Everything with Trump is a desperate overcompensation.  The sad part is how many people admire it.

 

[DanteGabriel]

Just now, TheKitttenGuard said:

Everything with Trump is a desperate overcompensation.  The sad part is how many people admire it.

 

Scared overprivileged shitheels recognize other scared overprivileged shitheels.

[drawkcabi]

39 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

I'm not sure it's a "majority" of veterans who object. I've seen plenty saying they agree with the protest or have no problem with it or acknowledge their right to do so. Is there any reliable polling on this?

And it's been conveniently left out of most stories on this topic that a Special Forces veteran named Nate Boyer is the one who talked to Kaepernick while he was sitting for the anthem, and convinced him that kneeling would be more respectful.

I was just going with what it felt like, maybe it's a majority but one close to an even split on both sides, maybe it's only a minority that's very loud. I know there are many veterans who do believe defending the right of free speech and free ability to protest is part of what they signed up for, and the tactics like what the NFL is pulling what they were fighting against. I just know I've seen in a lot of places (newspaper articles, TV news, online) the "disrespecting the anthem" argument from veterans, I've seen veterans arguing in defense of protest too, just seems like the other side has more.

[Zorral]

Russia (and Comey) did swing the election, James Clapper believes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/05/24/james-clappers-bombshell-russia-swung-the-election-what-if-hes-right/?

 

Quote

 

Last night, Rachel Maddow called on us to treat this as a “bombshell.” As Maddow put it, “the director of national intelligence for the last seven years” has concluded “that the current president of the United States was only installed in office because of a successful Russian intelligence operation,” raising obvious questions about his legitimacy.

We probably will never know whether Russia’s interference — whose tip we only glimpsed in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals for their sabotage plot — was sufficient to swing the election. The result had many causes. But allow me to point out that journalists regularly suggest, on an even flimsier basis, that this or that Hillary Clinton failing caused the outcome. Yet even asking whether Russian interference — or, say, James B. Comey’s 11th-hour intervention — might have been sufficient to swing a relative handful of votes is regularly greeted with knee-slapping ridicule, even though, as Brian Beutler has noted, every journalist knows that it is absolutely plausible.

But this Clapper claim has relevance well beyond whether Russian interference was decisive. It places the ongoing efforts by Trump and his allies to frustrate an accounting of what happened in a whole new light.

The key point is this. Even if you put aside whatever the Trump campaign did or didn’t do to conspire with Russian sabotage, what’s left is this obvious fact: Trump and his GOP allies don’t want to know the full story of what Russia’s operation entailed in and of itself, because it doesn’t concern them in the least, and indeed they are engaged in an active effort to keep that story suppressed.

It keeps getting lost in the discussion, but one of the charges of both Mueller’s investigation and the probes run out of Congress has been to determine the full truth about the Russian effort separate and irrespective of whether there was any Trump campaign collusion with it. Trump himself has regularly dismissed the whole thing as a hoax. The GOP-run House Intelligence Committee probe laughably airbrushed Russia’s goal of helping Trump win out of its final conclusion, putting it at odds with both the intelligence community and Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans.

 

 

[Martell Spy]

28 minutes ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

Everything with Trump is a desperate overcompensation.  The sad part is how many people admire it.

 

Bolton will not stop until he gets some corpses. What a shitshow. And Pompeo looks like a fool.

[Bonnot OG]

Trump threatened NFL players and their citizenship. 

 

Ive never wanted someone to drop dead so badly.

[IheartIheartTesla]

No thanks to the NFL considering each game to be like a mini-1936 Olympics where (fake) patriotism needs to be on display at a sporting event and dissenters be sent away. I dont watch the Superbowl anyway..

Also I wish cheerleaders would unionize and sue the sh*t out of them.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

With regards to Trump. Let's be clear, what happens on the Korean peninsula won't really be decided in DC.

The important players are South Korea, North Korea and China (and then to a lesser degree possibly Japan). The US is basically there as the military protector of S. Korea and Japan. The important question is really whether the Korea's and China can work out an agreement.

[TheKitttenGuard]

49 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

Bolton will not stop until he gets some corpses. What a shitshow. And Pompeo looks like a fool.

Trump wanted Bolton and this is the result. I do not see this as a major discussion in the media though.

Pompeo looking like a fool is one bright spot. Though really it looks more that a Iran War Hawk was put for he was involved with NK (I am guilty of this) and now we just have the Iran war push which is developing.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Trump is on a roll today. After the cancellation of the Kim meeting and the fascist rhetoric about forced patriotism, Trump now says that abused immigrant children who are here illegally are not innocent and are future criminals, thus furthering his priming efforts to get his base to associate immigration with illegal behavior.

Right step

Left step

Goose step   

[Bonnot OG]

19 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Trump is on a roll today. After the cancellation of the Kim meeting and the fascist rhetoric about forced patriotism, Trump now says that abused immigrant children who are here illegally are not innocent and are future criminals, thus furthering his priming efforts to get his base to associate immigration with illegal behavior.

Right step

Left step

Goose step   

Lets kill the kids before these little animals can become adult animals and cause havoc in our white communities!

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

42 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

No thanks to the NFL considering each game to be like a mini-1936 Olympics where (fake) patriotism needs to be on display at a sporting event and dissenters be sent away. I dont watch the Superbowl anyway..

Also I wish cheerleaders would unionize and sue the sh*t out of them.

Did you see the recent story about what the Washington Racial Slurs did to their cheerleaders?    

[IheartIheartTesla]

No I haven't, but nothing will surprise me (to be clear though, the NFL as an organization is garbage, but I don't know enough about the individual teams to know which ones are better than others)

Also, hopefully this NK debacle will peel off some voters who were raising Trump's approval. He just doesnt have the patience to do due diligence on anything he undertakes.

[Bonnot OG]

Man is Elon Musk a fucking piece of shit.

Him tweeting "the free market solves everything" then "trade unions sow social division among classes" and topping it off with "we need a watchdog to discredit lying journalists" is watching capitalism decay into fascism in real time on twitter. No wonder the piece of shit had no issue with working with Trump.

[polishgenius]

I found it pretty funny that he thought it was a good idea to name his supposed instrument for maintaining the truth of the press fucking Pravda.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

9 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

No I haven't, but nothing will surprise me (to be clear though, the NFL as an organization is garbage, but I don't know enough about the individual teams to know which ones are better than others)

Here's a taste:

Quote

When the Washington Redskins took their cheerleading squad to Costa Rica in 2013 for a calendar photo shoot, the first cause for concern among the cheerleaders came when Redskins officials collected their passports upon arrival at the resort, depriving them of their official identification.

For the photo shoot, at the adults-only Occidental Grand Papagayo resort on Culebra Bay, some of the cheerleaders said they were required to be topless, though the photographs used for the calendar would not show nudity. Others wore nothing but body paint. Given the resort’s secluded setting, such revealing poses would not have been a concern for the women — except that the Redskins had invited spectators.

A contingent of sponsors and FedExField suite holders — all men — were granted up-close access to the photo shoots.

One evening, at the end of a 14-hour day that included posing and dance practices, the squad’s director told nine of the 36 cheerleaders that their work was not done. They had a special assignment for the night. Some of the male sponsors had picked them to be personal escorts at a nightclub.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/sports/redskins-cheerleaders-nfl.html?smid=tw-nytsports&smtyp=cur

 

[Bonnot OG]

8 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I found it pretty funny that he thought it was a good idea to name his supposed instrument for maintaining the truth of the press fucking Pravda.

He's just a South African Trump. That is all he is. He's a medciocre programmer at best and PayPal is still a buggy ass website.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

I know, I will get some flak for that. But isn't the role of cheerleaders to get "pimped out" in some form anyway?

Before the righteous boarders gather with forks and torches. What the Redskins did there, went beyond what I mean getting pimped out as part of the job describtion and what the poor women had to do in Costa Rica is beyond the pale.

But what I meant with cheerleaders getting pimped out is this. The actual job describtion for cheerleaders looks to me something like this. Attractive young women, show a lot of skin to entertain/animate a bunch dudes during the commercial break of a sport event.  So their physical attributes are used to help sell the product.

Maybe some US sports fan will correct me on this and tell me my perception of the cheerleader role is wrong.

[Bonnot OG]

26 minutes ago, Notone said:

I know, I will get some flak for that. But isn't the role of cheerleaders to get "pimped out" in some form anyway?

Before the righteous boarders gather with forks and torches. What the Redskins did there, went beyond what I mean getting pimped out as part of the job describtion and what the poor women had to do in Costa Rica is beyond the pale.

But what I meant with cheerleaders getting pimped out is this. The actual job describtion for cheerleaders looks to me something like this. Attractive young women, show a lot of skin to entertain/animate a bunch dudes during the commercial break of a sport event.  So their physical attributes are used to help sell the product.

Maybe some US sports fan will correct me on this and tell me my perception of the cheerleader role is wrong.

Yea, they are sex objects to get sexist douchebags off during the game. 

That is problematic in itself.

[Larry of the Lawn]

40 minutes ago, Notone said:

I know, I will get some flak for that. But isn't the role of cheerleaders to get "pimped out" in some form anyway?

Before the righteous boarders gather with forks and torches. What the Redskins did there, went beyond what I mean getting pimped out as part of the job describtion and what the poor women had to do in Costa Rica is beyond the pale.

But what I meant with cheerleaders getting pimped out is this. The actual job describtion for cheerleaders looks to me something like this. Attractive young women, show a lot of skin to entertain/animate a bunch dudes during the commercial break of a sport event.  So their physical attributes are used to help sell the product.

Maybe some US sports fan will correct me on this and tell me my perception of the cheerleader role is wrong.

What's your point?  That because they are essentially paid to be athletic models that dance and do tricks.... What exactly?  Where are you going with this?  So because that's their job ...what?