Trump connection aside, is the threat specific enough to warrant an investigation?
Trump connection aside, is the threat specific enough to warrant an investigation?
Hope is the denial of reality
If you read between the lines of the announcement that he's planning to apologize, it actually says, "I was drunk."
Coincidentally, another Trump-affiliated idiot, Betsy DeVos, also seems to have said crazy things while drunk recently. I see a pattern.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Not usually, no. "I know where you live" in a reply to an email? If he'd actually included the location it might have merited looking into (though that's not really difficult information to get, having bothered to do so betokens the possibility there may be genuine intent) but as it is? Tough-guy hot air.Originally Posted by Loki
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
I doubt it. Seems unethical for a lawyer though, but I have no clue if behaviour like that can get you in trouble with the bar.
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
President Trump contradicts son, indicates he knew about meeting with Russian lawyer
A reversal from what he said hours earlier.
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-cont...g-a73c7d9420b1
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
Rare official statement from Jared Kushner: "Oops! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
How do any of these people still have access to sensitive information?
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
It can if they're already aggravated with you and looking for an excuse but the response in most places/times is going to be either to dismiss a complaint as a private communication not relevant to professional matters or courtesy, an advisory to behave more professionally, or a minor official reprimand (i.e "bad lawyer! Go forth and sin no more")
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
You mean for its claims about Trump himself directly? No. But as I said, "where there's smoke there's fire." I don't believe he was unaware of things like Manafort's ties and I think the Trump team exploited them and sought more.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
It took almost 2 decades of Jack Thompson attacking various entertainment genres and the Bar itself before he was finally disbarred.
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
When the sky above us fell
We descended into hell
Into kingdom come
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...integrity-doxx
#transparency
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Geez time for another round of conspiracy theories.
The problem is that the observed behaviour from Trump's team and Russia doesn't really make a whole lot of sense without some form of conspiracy between Trump and Russia. Occam's Razor, right?
Consider the sequence of events:
1) Russia makes contact with Trump's team offering dirt on Hillary Clinton
2) Trump's team expresses and interest, offers to set up a meeting
3) ????? - we don't know what happened at the meeting
4) A month later, a load of DNC e-mails are released via Wikileaks. We learn later that these e-mails came from Russian hackers.
I put it to you, wiggin, that you do not need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce what happened at that meeting.
That has already happened.But precisely because that's my natural inclination, I wish to be scrupulously careful in what conclusions I draw or statements I make. No one will take the opposition seriously if they fulminate over circumstantial evidence... and if there is real evidence to be had in the future, the sides might have already been chosen on the basis of identity and not facts.
We do have more than that.I strongly disagree. I don't need 'cast iron proof', but I do need more than 'Trump likes Russia and Russia tried to influence the election in favor of Trump' as evidence.
People can tell what is the difference between made up nonsense and what is a legitimate scandal. Better politicians than him have resigned over far less serious scandals with far less damning evidenceAnd I think if we go after people without good evidence of guilt, we risk poisoning political discourse even further, and encouraging partisan attempts to remove people from office on the basis of flimsy evidence. Rarely does a presidency go by where there isn't some legitimate concern about POTUS overreaching his power in one way or another; I think it would be very challenging to govern if every controversy brought credible calls for impeachment. It is a tool that should be used sparingly and with the utmost caution.
When the sky above us fell
We descended into hell
Into kingdom come
See, this is something that, if substantiated, would be jail-time impeachment serious. As for the rest:
I have no idea what happened at the meeting - certainly it's deeply concerning. But I would want to see a lot more concrete evidence of collusion - say, coordination of the sort I linked above, or coordination of Trump messaging with forthcoming Russian data, or whatever. A single half hour meeting is not much to hang an entire collusion story on. It's just as possible that the story they're telling is essentially correct - the lawyer, known for her opposition to the Magnitsky Law, used dirt on Clinton as a way to leverage a meeting to lobby the campaign on the law. It doesn't detract from the broader Russian attempt to help Trump get elected - we all acknowledge this to be true - but it does mean that collusion does not necessarily have to have happened.
The biggest issue with this whole news story isn't that this single meeting is evidence of collusion - it's that Trump and his campaign/advisers have spent the last year swearing up and down that they had no contact with the Russians when they clearly did, and clearly in a context where they thought they'd be getting help against Clinton. That's very troubling and indeed may be the start of evidence of outright collusion. But it isn't there yet. (And it sure as hell isn't treason.)
Well count me as one opponent of Trump who is trying to follow the evidence, not my opinions. And you don't really need to look far to find Republicans who are aghast at this whole Trump mess - read the National Review, or the token conservative columnists at a variety of publications - and are far from defending his every move.That has already happened.
Not Presidents of the United States.People can tell what is the difference between made up nonsense and what is a legitimate scandal. Better politicians than him have resigned over far less serious scandals with far less damning evidence
Last edited by wiggin; 07-17-2017 at 03:10 PM.
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
All right, show of hands: who thinks Junior will be prosecuted over this?
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
In light of recent events, this is hilarious:
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...709-story.html
Is Blackwell the most transparent US politician in history?
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
What crime do you think Junior himself committed? He's a private citizen, holds no formal office in the US government, and so he can collude with the Russians all he likes. There might be a minor crime in knowingly receiving stolen property but there isn't one in in failing to do so. And while there'd definitely be a crime in conspiring to hack DNC servers, that had already happened and he was just trying to get the information they managed to grab after hacking independently. The wrongful action was by the Trump campaign (and if Trump knew about it by Trump himself) but that doesn't necessarily mean criminal action by various individuals involved.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
Most of the commentary on the legal aspects of Jr's emails seems to have focused on his role in the Trump campaign and on whether or not any statutes pertaining to campaign contributions and the solicitation of help of from foreign powers were violated. There is a series of posts on Just Security exploring these ideas, eg: https://www.justsecurity.org/43111/l...mp-jr-meeting/
Similar discussions on electionlawblog.org (where there's a growing list of references clarifying the concept of "anything of value") and in a number of articles compiling brief opinions from legal scholars. I haven't yet seen much attention given to the question of whether or not both Jr and his dad are somehow protected by Jr's distance (such as it was) from the campaign. The testimony from the Russian lobbyist suggests that he not only knowingly attempted to obtain an illegal contribution (in the form of harmful information about an opponent) from a foreign agent on behalf of the campaign but also that he received that information. I'm not yet sure where the jury currently stands on Jr's or anyone else's individual culpability.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Opposing views have also been argued persuasively, eg. here : https://www.justsecurity.org/43116/t...n-finance-law/ (as well as a host of other takes focusing on first amendment rights)
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
(and, just to be clear, I do not believe jr will be prosecuted over this)
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Prosecution would be criminal charges. If we're talking about civil violations, that doesn't apply, those would be levied on the campaign and not on Jr. himself. And as I said, if he'd received stolen material, that could be criminal but did not happen. If he'd conspired to hack the DNC that would definitely be criminal but also did not happen. There might be a minor charge for soliciting stolen materials as well, according to further research I've done, but Trump Jr. and his people aren't the ones who reached out but instead are the responding party. So solicitation is also out. 1st amendment is a load of crap as an objection and yeah, this would have violated the rules on material from foreign powers. . . IF that material had been received. To get Jr. personally it's not enough. Not until/unless a communication trail can be found discussing arrangements for the public release of the information obtained via the hacking, through Wikileaks or another organization.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
It starts with T and rhymes with 'reason'.
There's a list of stories about Trump campaign contacts or links with Russia as long as your arm, he already like two key people over it. Each has an potentially innocent or less serious explanation, but all of them together? Either he's a traitor, or there's been a series of very unlikely, suspicious coincidences.But I would want to see a lot more concrete evidence of collusion - say, coordination of the sort I liked above, or coordination of Trump messaging with forthcoming Russian data, or whatever.
Are you, though? Or are you so concerned about appearing, quote unquote, 'partisan' that you're simply refraining from stating out loud what you actually know perfectly well to be true?Well count me as one opponent of Trump who is trying to follow the evidence, not my opinions.
Honestly, if one party is just ridiculously corrupt and unprincipled, it's not """partisan""" to just go ahead and call them what they are. I was thinking about this the other day, about how we don't have this problem over here - this inability to call and spade a spade in case Fox News gets upset. I don't want to get into the whole 'our political system is better than yours, so nerrrrr' thing (we already had that in another thread, and I proved - yes, proved - that ours was better), but I concluded that it was because in the UK we do not necessarily view the two main parties as avatars of the principles they claim to embody, so when there's a scandal involving one party or the other, both the right and left wing press will typically go after the person responsible: if Minister So-And-So, a minor Tory cabinet member with portfolio for paper clips and broom cupboards was shown to be fiddling their expenses, this is not held to be a refutation of All of Torism, so the entire right doesn't feel the need to circle the wagons.
The papers get a story, the person in question resigns, politicans are held to account and everyone gets on with things.
The Republicans are a garbage party full of garbage people with an extra-double super garbage president, they have no principles, no sincerely held philosophical underpinning, they're racist, misogynist, vindictive scum, they indulge in widespread voter suppression and gerrymandering, are a blight on America generally and they just generally need to get in the fucking sea at the next available opportunity and make way for a proper right leaning party. And it's not "partisan" to say that without also dream up some equivalent critique of the Democrats. It doesn't refute conservatism to point out how fucking bad the Republican Party has gotten.
That's how they get away with it.
Yes, Trump will one day just straight up say on TV or something that he worked with Russia to beat Clinton, McCain will tweet that he's 'concerned' about Trump admitted he's working with the Russians but continue to vote with him, Paul Ryan will say he's cool with it so long as it somehow harms pool people and Mitch McConnel will say it's a distraction from their important efforts to strip healthcare from millions to get a tax cut for a few rich people.And you don't really need to look far to find Republicans who are aghast at this whole Trump mess - read the National Review, or the token conservative columnists at a variety of publications - and are far from defending his every move.
That's a problem.Not Presidents of the United States.
When the sky above us fell
We descended into hell
Into kingdom come
It is fun quotes like these that keep the Republicans in office.
It was kind of silly but of all the things Hillary did that were stupid and incompetent it was the basket of deplorables that played the worst.
Comment from 08/05/2015. Gotta give credit where credit is due...
That's snowflakes for you.It is fun quotes like these that keep the Republicans in office.
It was kind of silly but of all the things Hillary did that were stupid and incompetent it was the basket of deplorables that played the worst.
When the sky above us fell
We descended into hell
Into kingdom come
No, it's people like you who care more about making "liberals cry" than about the well-being of your country.It is fun quotes like these that keep the Republicans in office.
It was kind of silly but of all the things Hillary did that were stupid and incompetent it was the basket of deplorables that played the worst.
Hope is the denial of reality
This is an honest IANAL question: does this mean that individuals in a campaign are not criminally liable for violations of the law carried out by the campaign? As in, let us imagine that we do have proof that Trump Jr knowingly received opp research on HRC from a foreign power; it certainly appears that this would violate the law. Are you suggesting that:
a) We don't have proof he received said information yet so he can't be prosecuted.
or
b) Even if we did have proof he couldn't be prosecuted because of legal argy-bargy.
I'm ignoring the question of involvement in hacking and collusion etc. because right now we have no evidence that it happened. But we certainly have evidence that Trump Jr wanted to break the law (based on his 'I love it!' email), and some evidence that he may in fact have done so. Can't he theoretically be prosecuted on that, irrespective of other issues?
You really need to stop using that word. It has a very tightly defined meaning in American law and this isn't it. Even if you went with a somewhat more colloquial meaning, the currently known behavior, while probably illegal and certainly unethical and unwise, does not rise to even that standard.
Every major presidential campaign in the US likely has associates or operatives who have some sort of Russian connection. They're one of the largest and most powerful countries in the world with an important (albeit contentious) relationship with the US. Certainly Manafort's Russia-boosting is unusual for a campaign manager (as was nearly everything about the Trump campaign), but merely having Russian contacts - or even being positively inclined toward Russia - does not make you a traitor. This is not the McCarthy era.There's a list of stories about Trump campaign contacts or links with Russia as long as your arm, he already like two key people over it. Each has an potentially innocent or less serious explanation, but all of them together? Either he's a traitor, or there's been a series of very unlikely, suspicious coincidences.
I am not concerned with appearing partisan. Though I have no particular love towards or affinity for the Democratic Party, I will freely admit that the majority of my votes go for Democrats for a variety of reasons, often due to my living in areas where the GOP doesn't bother seriously contesting most elections. Furthermore, I have been unstinting in my criticism of Donald Trump's behavior, demeanor, the vast majority of his proposed policies, and his inept governance. I am aghast and embarrassed that this man is the President. This is not a Trump love fest. But the accusations you are throwing around are exceedingly serious, and just because I abhor nearly everything to do with DJT doesn't mean I should grasp at every scrap of circumstantial evidence and hold it up as proof of treason. It's absolutely appropriate to investigate it vigorously - both through a select committee or the like in a political process as well as through a law enforcement probe (e.g. a special prosecutor). And if the evidence points to illegality - some of which it already has - it should be prosecuted or punished accordingly. But the key point here is that we can't let our antipathy for the bozo running the US to cause us to eschew appropriate procedures and standards of proof.Are you, though? Or are you so concerned about appearing, quote unquote, 'partisan' that you're simply refraining from stating out loud what you actually know perfectly well to be true?
Steely, I appreciate where you're coming from, and I sympathize with your deep concern about the direction of our politics and the Republican Party in particular. But I wonder if you realize the cognitive dissonance that must exist to write this (emphasis added):
And then immediately follow it with this:Honestly, if one party is just ridiculously corrupt and unprincipled, it's not """partisan""" to just go ahead and call them what they are. I was thinking about this the other day, about how we don't have this problem over here - this inability to call and spade a spade in case Fox News gets upset. I don't want to get into the whole 'our political system is better than yours, so nerrrrr' thing (we already had that in another thread, and I proved - yes, proved - that ours was better), but I concluded that it was because in the UK we do not necessarily view the two main parties as avatars of the principles they claim to embody, so when there's a scandal involving one party or the other, both the right and left wing press will typically go after the person responsible: if Minister So-And-So, a minor Tory cabinet member with portfolio for paper clips and broom cupboards was shown to be fiddling their expenses, this is not held to be a refutation of All of Torism, so the entire right doesn't feel the need to circle the wagons.
The papers get a story, the person in question resigns, politicans are held to account and everyone gets on with things.
Do you not realize that in one breath you're saying that the foibles of one politician are not representative of a general failing of a party or its policy prescriptions and then turn around and tar the entire Republican party and their supporters with one giant brush?The Republicans are a garbage party full of garbage people with an extra-double super garbage president, they have no principles, no sincerely held philosophical underpinning, they're racist, misogynist, vindictive scum, they indulge in widespread voter suppression and gerrymandering, are a blight on America generally and they just generally need to get in the fucking sea at the next available opportunity and make way for a proper right leaning party. And it's not "partisan" to say that without also dream up some equivalent critique of the Democrats. It doesn't refute conservatism to point out how fucking bad the Republican Party has gotten.
Yes, I'm deeply concerned with the direction of the Republican Party as a whole - its rhetoric has descended into identity politics, it has ugly elements, it is often needlessly obstructionist, etc. I won't bother drawing comparisons to the Democratic Party because two wrongs don't make a right here, and it's perfectly reasonable to be repelled by much of what has gone on in the GOP in recent years. But this does not mean that I think that everyone who voted for Trump was a 'deplorable', or that supporters and politicians of the GOP are necessarily racist, misogynist scumbags. They might be, but membership/support for the GOP does not equate with that. To use the latest election as an example, most of the people I know who voted for Trump were dismayed by his rhetoric but voted for him anyway, despite his ugliness as a candidate and person. They had all sorts of reasons - policy preferences, distaste for HRC, etc. This isn't to say that you didn't get white male racists who also voted for Trump because he's an asshole, but it does mean that you can't lump them all into a single category.
IMO one of the most pernicious trends in politics today - on both the left and right - is to question the motives of one's political opponents. Democrats must not care about little people, they just are in the pockets of big unions and buy votes with handouts and race/gender based identity politics. Republicans don't care about smaller government or libertarian ideals, they are in the pockets of big banks and corporations. Etc. It's possible to have a disagreement over policy that is either based on different weighting of conflicting priorities or by disagreements about the effects of said policies. It doesn't make everyone who disagrees with you a bad person - they might be wrong, still, but their motives are not suspect. When we instead paint our political opponents as caricatures of evil and corruption, we poison the well of rational public discourse - there's no point in arguing with someone about policy if they don't have the welfare of the country at stake, is there?
I'm not trying to say that there aren't venal politicians more interested in their own power and self-aggrandizement than thoughtful governing. I'm just saying that we can't assume that all of our opponents (or even most) fall into this category while, naturally, assuming that our own side has only the purest of motives. We can't just write off an entire party because you don't like some things about them. This is as true for you as it is for the Lewks of the world. And if being committed to seeing one's political opponents as being at least slightly decent-minded people means that I require solid evidence before bandying about words like treason, then that is what I will do.
Obviously hyperbole, but you realize that the level of criticism and party rebellion Trump has faced - even measured and lukewarm as it has been - is pretty unprecedented in modern American history. A President in his honeymoon period controlling both houses of Congress should generally get a lot of traction on nominees, policy proposals, and party unity over political attacks and scandals (IIRC the only two recent times POTUS started his term with both houses of Congress were Obama and Clinton, and much before that Eisenhower; before that you'd have to go to FDR). Yet lots of Republicans - both before and after the election - have broken ranks in one way or another. There's an entire chunk of the party and its supporters who define themselves as 'Never Trumpers', for crying out loud! It's not crazy for Congressional Republicans to be a bit mealy-mouthed in their criticism of Trump, given the political realities and their desire to enact policy, but even the amount of rebellion we've seen is pretty substantial. And when you look at people who aren't beholden to the President - e.g. the Republican intelligentsia - nearly no one supports him.Yes, Trump will one day just straight up say on TV or something that he worked with Russia to beat Clinton, McCain will tweet that he's 'concerned' about Trump admitted he's working with the Russians but continue to vote with him, Paul Ryan will say he's cool with it so long as it somehow harms pool people and Mitch McConnel will say it's a distraction from their important efforts to strip healthcare from millions to get a tax cut for a few rich people.
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
Wig, while it's unfair to tar a whole party because of a few rotten apples, the GOP is itself a rotten tree. The party itself supports voter suppression as a matter of policy. The party itself promotes fake news and has poisoned the minds of its voters to the point 89% hate the media, 53% hate universities, and 86% think Trump is doing a good job. This is the party that normalized every single one of Trump's norm-breaking behaviors. And this is the party that tolerates and occasionally openly supports white supremacists (Rep. King) and Islamophobes (anti-Sharia people).
Hope is the denial of reality
Since when is anti-Sharia "Islamophobic"? It's pro-Constitution, Sharia is a violation of the First Amendment.
I'm not convinced. On, say, voter suppression, I suspect that a lot of GOP supporters are genuinely worried about voter fraud and don't even think about how things like voter ID requirements affect certain populations (GOP strategists think differently, of course, and it is indeed a policy I disagree with). I'm not sure it's functionally worse than gerrymandering, which is a happily bipartisan endeavor. And I'm betting that if Dems could figure out a way to disenfranchise GOP voters with a wheeze like Voter ID, they would. This isn't to say it's appropriate - just because Dems would do it too doesn't make it right - but it does suggest that it's not as norm-breaking as you suggest.
As for the media, I hate most of the media - 95+% of it is garbage. Pretty much all broadcast/cable news and all of radio news with the exception of a portion of NPR is trash. In terms of written media, there are a handful of papers that do a reasonable job, at least part of the time, and a few magazines that are palatable. But at the very least by readership/viewership, the media consumed by the majority of Americans - GOP or otherwise - is awful.
On universities, I saw an interesting piece on it. I don't agree with a lot of it, but what's interesting is that conservatives have had a pretty testy relationship with universities for decades, and it's not entirely undeserved. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/artic...blame-colleges
On approval ratings for Trump, I'm not really surprised. I'd love to see comparisons to similar points in the Bush and Reagan administrations, though, to see if his numbers even there are weaker than expected. There's also self-selection (people may have stopped self-reporting as Republicans because they don't like Trump), selective blindness (say, they like his SCOTUS pick and his push for healthcare reform and on the balance are willing to overlook his BS), etc. Doesn't mean they're all terrible people.
While I'd prefer some louder and more principled resistance to Trump among rank and file GOP politicians, I think it's a bit of an unfair metric to hold them to at this point in his term.
edit for RB cross-post: I believe Loki is referring to people who are convinced sharia law is creeping into the US legal despite the widespread evidence it is not and the ample Constitutional bulwarks against precisely such an event. They use this fear to justify other proposed anti-Muslim policies and rhetoric that are themselves at the very least unAmerican and often unconstitutional.
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
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