Jump to content

bolverk

Certifiably Surly
  • Posts

    11784
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    2

Posts posted by bolverk

  1. 1 minute ago, TahoeHorn said:

    Leaders like me are in charge of deciding whether the phone bank volunteers show up at 2 or at 3, whether Susie should bring soft drinks and whether the candidate's campaign  will supply them.  We  do not give instructions to Congressmen.  Now maybe I can be one of 2,000 that talk to the Congressman this month but he doesn't take orders from me, or even Trump.

    You are confused about how this works.

    Now I agree that Trump can energize the crazies.  It's like when Obama got elected and people were telling police that they couldn't arrest them because Obama ...  Trump can even get the Senate to introduce different bills.

     Trump brought some new people to the GOP.   These people didn't show up and take over the Alabama State Legislature or the Madison County GOP. 

     I don't even know what a Trumpist is.  It's more of a cult following than any coherent policy position.  Trumpism is about noise and theater not a change in governance.

     I was looking at brochures for the GOP primary.  For my curiosity I wondered if I could find any position that an opponent would not support.  So if a candidate says he supports family values and his opponent says he does too he gets no credit.  If he says he supports higher tariffs on steel and his opponent says he wants lower tariffs I give credit.  Nobody got any credit.  There is no Trumpist platform.

     Can you identify any positions that legislators have that they didn't have before Trump?  I can't.  Trump is like a new cult leader, not like a new religion.  I have no idea what his positions really are.  It's just today's reality TV episode.  It doesn't even make sense.  It is NOT the basis for a new GOP. 

     The GOP is the same people with the same positions.  What you are seeing is the shiny coin the magician has you watching.  You are seeing Billy Bob and the reality TV show that Trump is directing.  That is neither governance nor the GOP.  It is just TV.

    The change is more than style or theater. Look no further than what happened to Joe Straus here in Texas. Republican primary voters no longer support the Eisenhower wing (right-of-center moderates and chamber of commerce or country club conservatives). They're more enthralled by the clown car wing (Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Danny Goeb, Rick Perry).

    Trumpism isn't about being more conservative; it's a philosophy based on magical thinking with a bad attitude: intentional ignorance, brash bullying, fantastical nostalgia, anti-intellectualism, and rabid populism. Those are the traits sought after and supported by the Republican primary electorate. And until that scourge is scrubbed from the body-politic, it is now the base of the Party. Unfortunately, Trump is the perfect avatar for that movement and is now the face of your party, and he owns y'all now.
     

    Quote

     

    GOP Primaries Focus On Candidates' Loyalty To President Trump

    The final Indiana Senate Republican debate ahead of Tuesday's primary election was not exactly a battle of ideas because, as the moderator noted at the top, there isn't much ideological diversity between the three candidates in the race.

    "They agree that when it comes to immigration that a wall should be built along the border with Mexico. They also agree that the Russia investigation is quote a 'witch hunt' and must end now," said moderator Abdul Hakim-Shabazz. "And they're also strong supporters of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, and they support arming teachers in the classroom. So we will not spend any time on those issues in the questioning."

    The number one question from Hoosiers was about the candidates' support for President Trump, and they wanted specifics on where they disagreed with him. Much like job candidates asked by a prospective employer what their weaknesses are, they couldn't identify any.

    Rep. Todd Rokita touted his support for Trump during the 2016 campaign. "The president knows that I had his back when he needed it most: against crooked Hillary Clinton," he said. Rival Rep. Luke Messer praised Trump's North Korea strategy. "President Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize," he said. While businessman Mike Braun highlighted his parallel to Trump as the political outsider in the race. "I'm on record saying President Trump was the inspiration for why I ran and he needs more reinforcements like me," he said.

    Rokita, Messer and Braun are locked in a tight battle for the GOP nomination to face off against incumbent Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly in November.

    Echoes of this primary dynamic are playing out in GOP primaries in congressional and gubernatorial races all over the country right now, where Republican candidates are in lockstep with Trump's agenda and waging campaigns over the more nuanced question of which candidate voters believe will be the most loyal fighter for President Trump.

    Despite low national approval ratings, a steady stream of administration controversies and the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election led by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller, nothing has shaken President Trump's enduring popularity among Republicans, where his approval ratings hover around 90 percent.

    Veteran House and Senate campaign strategist Andrea Bozek says in 2018 Republicans are less concerned with the old, familiar metrics that used to drive primary campaigns, like conservative vote ratings, or whether candidates had signed an anti-tax pledge. "I think now it's how much support have you given the president in the past, and what can you do to support his agenda going forward?" she said. 

    The conservative groups that used to drive those wedges in primary campaign debates, like the anti-tax Club for Growth, agree that the politics of Trump's personality are a more decisive factor in this political environment. The group's president, David McIntosh, says Republicans primary voters see a president under siege, by Democrats and the media, and they are motivated above all else to vote for the candidate who will fight on his behalf.

    "Republican primary voters think we need to send people to Washington who will back him up because he's under attack, and so I think the urgency of that phenomena has created the personality test to be larger than the ideology or the issue test," he said.

    Club for Growth is engaged in more than a dozen House and Senate primaries, and even where the attack ads involve policy issues like health care, the message is centered on where the candidate is in relation to the president. For instance, in an open Ohio House race, the Club's latest attack ad hits their opponent as someone who is "Not on Trump's side—or yours."

    Ohio also holds primary elections on Tuesday, May 8. In the gubernatorial race, Republicans Mike DeWine and Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor are engaged in another contentious primary in which their campaign attack ads highlight the others' lack of support for Trump. "She claims she's conservative but Taylor refused to endorse Donald Trump for president over Hillary Clinton," states one DeWine line of attack.

    Democrats also face an open gubernatorial primary, with former Ohio Attorney General and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head Richard Cordray and former Rep. Dennis Kucinich competing for the nomination.

    In West Virginia's three-way Republican Senate primary, also taking place Tuesday, Rep. Evan Jenkins is hoping the fact that he was the first to endorse Trump back in the 2016 campaign will help him edge out rivals, state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and former coal executive and convicted felon Don Blankenship. It's a line of attack he used a Fox News debate this week.

    "Who did you vote for in the May primary in West Virginia, I endorsed and voted for Donald Trump. Who did you vote for?" Jenkins said to Morrisey during this week's Fox News debate. "I support the president," Morrisey responded.

    The winner of Tuesday's primary will take on incumbent Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in November.

    This entire GOP strategy of aligning tightly with Trump on his agenda and mirroring his rhetoric is bucking the conventional wisdom of midterm elections, where the president's party historically loses seats in Congress and candidates traditionally look to keep their distance from the White House. 

    GOP pollster John McLaughlin, who worked on Trump's 2016 campaign, says if Republican candidates want to get the Trump voter to turn out this year, it makes sense to run as close to Trump as possible. "The Democrats organically are getting out their anti-Trump vote, and the Republicans need to get out that pro-Trump voter who didn't vote in 2014, but came out in 2016 because of Donald Trump."

    That strategy is not without risks. Republicans running as mini-Trumps in primaries could be making themselves more vulnerable in the November general election where a more competitive and diverse electorate will decide the winner.

    Operatives like McIntosh say Republicans have made a different calculation about 2018. "I think the old formula is that you want the purple-y candidate or the squishy candidate so he can appeal to both sides in the general election is a recipe for failure for Republicans this year," he said.[/spoiler]

     

    3

    • Like 2
  2. NRA Touts Oliver North’s Expertise At Avoiding Jail Time For Colluding With Hostile Foreign Powers

    FAIRFAX, VA—Saying that he had just the qualifications needed to help guide their organization, the NRA announced Monday that Oliver North would be its new president, touting the retired Lt. Colonel’s expertise at avoiding jail time for colluding with hostile foreign powers. “Oliver North brings a wealth of experience in setting up back channels and illicitly exchanging funds with foreign adversaries, all while escaping any time in prison, which is exactly what the NRA is looking for in its leadership,” said NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, telling reporters that North’s prowess at escaping felony charges for conspiring with rival countries in an effort to get even more firearms into people’s hands made the former FOX News host by far the best candidate they had considered. “As we looked to fill the position, we were immediately impressed by Lt. North’s proven ability to not only survive criminal conviction for illegally channeling foreign money, but also actively thrive in its aftermath. This is exactly the sort of innovation and resourcefulness that the NRA is going to need as it heads into the future.” LaPierre added that North’s skill set was complemented by his terrific attitude of contempt towards the rule of law.

  3. Quebec Mosque Shooter Was Consumed by Refugees, Trump and Far Right

    QUEBEC — When Alexandre Bissonnette learned of Justin Trudeau’s now-famous tweet welcoming refugees to Canada, the waif-like 28-year-old political science student told police that he snapped.

    Just hours after watching a television report suggesting Canada would accept immigrants spurned by President Trump, Mr. Bissonnette packed his Glock handgun and rifle, picked up a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, and trudged the snow-covered streets of Quebec to a nearby Islamic Cultural Center.

    As 53 men were finishing evening prayers, he unloaded 48 rounds. Six people were killed — several of them by shots to the head — and 19 were injured, one paralyzed for life.

    These details surfaced during a three-week sentencing hearing that ended late last month. Mr. Bissonnette faces up to 150 years in prison after pleading guilty to six counts of first-degree murder and is expected to be sentenced in the coming months.

     

    The hearing was a grim reminder that more than a year after the Jan. 29, 2017, rampage, Canada is still grappling with Mr. Bissonnette’s crime. It shocked the nation and underlined the perils of Islamophobia and the far right in a country that prides itself on its multiculturalism and tolerance.

    Herman Deparice-Okomba, director of the Montreal-based Center for The Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, said the sheer obscenity of someone gunning people down in a place of worship in peace-loving Canada had convulsed the country because it shattered Canadians’ image of themselves as the ultimate humanistic, open nation.

    “Canada sees itself as a nation of immigrants, and people thought that such a thing was impossible here,” Mr. Deparice-Okomba said. “Bissonnette’s crime wasn’t just against a community. It was against Canada’s collective vision of itself. We are all wounded.”

    During the often chilling hearing, prosecutors, survivors, prison psychologists and people who knew Mr. Bissonnette painted a portrait of a socially isolated but intelligent young man who developed an obsession with the far right, mass killers, Donald Trump and Muslims.

    Sometimes it felt as if Islamophobia was on trial. Mr. Bissonnette was not charged with terrorism, prompting outcries from Muslim groups that, if his name had been Muhammad, the charges would have been different.

    Under the Canadian Criminal Code, the burden of proving terrorist intent is high, and legal experts said prosecutors likely concluded that securing a first-degree murder conviction would be less risky.

    Some survivors testified they were too afraid to return to the mosque. In a strictly secular province that recently passed a law banning people wearing face-coverings from giving or receiving public services, the court allowed Muslim witnesses to swear on a Quran.

    Acting alone, Mr. Bissonnette also raised a difficult question: How did a mousy and soft-spoken chess-obsessed student from a middle class family become a killer?

    In the month before his rampage, he trawled the internet 819 times for posts related to Mr. Trump, reading his Twitter feed daily and homing in on the American president’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. He kept a cache of guns underneath his bed at his parents’ house. Among his only friends was his twin brother, Mathieu.

    Mr. Bissonnette told investigators he wished he had killed more people, and had wanted to protect his family from Islamic terrorists.

    “I was, like, sure that they were going to come and kill my parents also, and my family,” he said in a video of a prison interrogation played in court.

    During the hearing, Mr. Bissonnette was handcuffed and his tiny frame was covered in a baggy sweatshirt. He fluctuated between stony silence and tears from inside a glass enclosure, flanked by two police officers.

    He was impassive while Megda Belkacemi, the 29-year-old daughter of one of the victims, the university professor Khaled Belkacemi, testified about seeing her father with a hole where one of his eyes should have been.

    But when the judge called his parents “collateral victims” of the attack, he sobbed.

    Mr. Bissonnette’s erratic personality was also revealed in a haunting 50-minute 911 call — played in court — in which he turned himself in. He repeatedly told the operator he was going to shoot himself.

    “I’m sick of this,” he said, adding: “I’ve never hurt anyone.”

    Throughout the proceedings, Mr. Bissonnette’s parents, Manon Marchand and Raymond Bissonnette, a public sector worker and a lawyer, sat stoically in the front of the courtroom’s public stalls, overflowing with families of the victims. At one point, the couple comforted a woman in a head scarf.

    Experts on radicalization said that in Quebec, a French-speaking province surrounded by an English-speaking majority, the anti-immigrant far right offered fertile and perilous ground for psychologically unstable youths like Mr. Bissonnette seeking a sense of identity and a scapegoat.

    Mr. Deparice-Okomba said Mr. Bissonnette was part of a growing number of educated, middle-class youths in Quebec drawn to far-right ideas, fueled by the election of Mr. Trump and fanned by fears that immigrants threatened Quebec’s identity.

    When he started the center in 2015, he said it dealt with 17 cases of youths in the province radicalized by the far right. Last year, the center had 154 such cases, he noted, compared with 126 cases of youths radicalized by Muslim extremism.

    Nevertheless, he stressed that far-right groups in Quebec like La Meute, or Wolfpack, which castigate Islam, remained marginal.

    “Youths here typically don’t get radicalized because they feel discriminated against since Canada is such an inclusive society,” he said. “Rather, they get radicalized due to ideological convictions. They feel they must do something to prevent catastrophe.”

    The internet also appears to have provided Mr. Bissonnette with both a forum and a pretext to vent his rage.

    François Deschamps, who ran a web page raising money for Syrian refugees, said Mr. Bissonnette had spent months trolling the group’s Facebook page.

    “He liked to express views that were ultraconservative, racist and anti-Muslim,” he said, “He would also go to event pages of feminist groups and write ‘FemiNazis.’ ”

    Like last month’s Toronto attacker, Alek Minassian, a 25-year-old who fatally ran over 10 pedestrians with a rental van, Mr. Bissonnette was preoccupied by Elliot Rodger, the man who killed six people in Isla Vista, Calif., in May 2014 after railing about his failures with women.

    Mr. Bissonnette also browsed websites linked to the white nationalist Richard Spencer, the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine African-Americans at a South Carolina church.

    The hearing raised the thorny question of whether bullying — and society’s failure to prevent it — had pushed Mr. Bissonnette on his deadly course.

    Lucie Côté, a French teacher who taught Mr. Bissonnette in high school, told the court that he was mercilessly picked on by students, laughed at and shoved against the wall.

    “Alexandre developed nervous reflexes, reflexes of fear,” she said. “Alexandre was not a monster.”

    Acquaintances who knew Mr. Bissonnette at Université Laval said he was “that student nobody notices.” He joined a chess club, hunted and sought refuge on a shooting range. In the weeks before the attack, he became withdrawn, friends said.

    Éric Debroise, who led a political discussion group at the left-leaning Université Laval, recalled that Mr. Bissonnette arrived for the first get-together at a bar wearing a shirt and tie when everyone else was in T-shirts and jeans.

    When he immediately brought up the National Front and Marine Le Pen’s immigration policies, Mr. Debroise said he cut him off, and he sulked in silence.

    Consumed by anxiety and depression, Mr. Bissonnette told police he contemplated suicide at 16. He developed an alcohol problem. He wanted to become a pilot but got a job at a call center instead.

    After Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a Muslim, attacked the Canadian Parliament in October 2014, Mr. Bissonnette bought his first gun. It was one of several he would purchase legally, omitting his psychological problems from application forms, according to Marc-André Lamontagne, a psychologist who interviewed him in prison.

    Six weeks before the mosque attack, Mr. Bissonnette told Mr. Lamontagne he went to a Quebec City shopping center to kill people and himself, but couldn’t go through with it.

    “He had fantasies to do something big so that people would not laugh at him after his death, so that people would remember him,” Mr. Lamontagne said.

    At the Quebec mosque, its windows still pocked with bullet holes, the Muslim community is still struggling to come to terms with the attack and their fear and grief.

    The mosque’s president, Mohamed Labidi, said anti-Muslim incidents intensified before and after the attack. Before the killing, a severed pig’s head was left on the mosque’s doorstep. When he announced plans to build a Muslim cemetery on city land six months after the attack, his car was set on fire.

    He blamed far-right groups and anti-immigrant “trash radio” hosts for creating a “toxic climate.”

    Amir Belkacemi, the son of Khaled Belkacemi, said his father had come to Canada from Algeria in the 1990s to escape terrorism, only to become ensnared by violence here. Still, he said he had no intention of leaving the place he calls home.

    “Quebec didn’t create the monster Alexandre Bissonnette,” he said. “But the Islamophobia here gave him his motive.”

  4. Giuliani Says Trump Would Not Have to Comply With Mueller Subpoena

    WASHINGTON — Rudolph W. Giuliani, who recently joined President Trump’s legal team, said on Sunday that Mr. Trump would not have to cooperate with a subpoena if one were issued by the special counsel investigating Russian interference into the presidential election, adding that the president could invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

    “We don’t have to” comply, Mr. Giuliani said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “He’s the President of the United States. We can assert the same privileges other presidents have.”

    Mr. Giuliani, who was hired by Mr. Trump to help manage communication between the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and the White House, met with the special counsel’s office late last month shortly after being hired. He said that he and Jay Sekulow, another lawyer for Mr. Trump, were in agreement that the president should avoid speaking with Mr. Mueller.

    “Not after the way they’ve acted,” he said, referring to a list of questions that the special counsel would like to ask Mr. Trump. Those questions were reported by The New York Times.

    But he said he did not know whether Mr. Trump would invoke the Fifth Amendment.

    “How can I ever be confident of that?” Mr. Giuliani said. “When I’m facing a situation with the president and all the other lawyers are, in which every lawyer in America thinks he would be a fool to testify, I’ve got a client who wants to testify.”

    Mr. Giuliani’s television interview on Sunday was his first extended appearance since being criticized by Mr. Trump for not having his “facts straight” about payments made to a pornographic actress, Stephanie Clifford. Mr. Giuliani said on Sunday it was possible Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, made additional payments to other women on the president’s behalf.

    “I have no knowledge of that, but I would think if it was necessary, yes,” Mr. Giuliani said.

    Mr. Cohen “made payments for the president, or he conducted business for the president, which means he had legal fees, moneys laid out and expenditures,” Mr. Giuliani said, giving his explanation for why Mr. Cohen would have made payments to Ms. Clifford, who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels.

    On Wednesday, Mr. Giuliani contradicted the president when he said on Fox News that Mr. Trump reimbursed Mr. Cohen for a $130,000 payment that Mr. Cohen has said he made to keep Ms. Clifford from making public a story about an affair she claims she had with Mr. Trump. When asked in April by reporters traveling on Air Force One whether he knew about the payment, Mr. Trump said he did not.

    The Wednesday admission, which caught Mr. Trump’s White House staff off guard, caused an uproar, and prompted Mr. Trump to attempt to clarify the nature of payments he made to Mr. Cohen. The morning after Mr. Giuliani’s comments, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that Mr. Cohen “received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA.”

    But just 24 hours later, he told reporters gathered outside the White House that Mr. Giuliani did not in fact know the particulars of the case, even after Mr. Giuliani told The New York Times Wednesday night that he had spoken with the president before and after his interview on Fox News, and that Mr. Trump and other lawyers on the team were aware of what he would say.

    “Virtually everything said has been said incorrectly, and it’s been said wrong, or it’s been covered wrong by the press,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “He’ll get his facts straight.”

    Seeming to chastise Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump added: “You know what? Learn before you speak. It’s a lot easier.”

    Some of Mr. Trump’s legal and political advisers believe Mr. Giuliani’s comments could put the president in legal jeopardy, since federal officials are required to report liabilities of more than $10,000 during the preceding year. Mr. Trump’s last disclosure, which he signed last June, does not mention any debt to Mr. Cohen.

    On Sunday, Mr. Giuliani tried to clarify what Mr. Trump called a “retainer.”

    “The retainer agreement was to repay expenses, which turns out to have included this one,” Mr. Giuliani said on ABC.

    Mr. Giuliani also referred to the sum Ms. Clifford received as a “nuisance” payment.

    “I never thought $130,000 was a real payment,” Mr. Giuliani said. “People don’t go away for $130,000.”

    On the same show Sunday morning, Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, called Mr. Giuliani’s interview an “absolute, unmitigated disaster” and “one of the worst TV appearances by any attorney on behalf of a client in modern times.”

    “He now expects the American people to believe that he doesn’t really know the facts,” Mr. Avenatti added. “I think it is obvious to the American people that this is a cover-up, that they are making it up as they go along.”

    giphy.gif

    • Haha 1
  5. For background from the house intelligence committee's minority report on who Baker is:

    Quote


    One of the most important revelations is that the FBI General Counsel and FBI Director’s chief of staff listened in on James Comey’s side of at least some phone conversations with the president, in which Mr. Trump reportedly engaged in efforts to alter the course of the Russia investigation. As the Minority report states, “(Jim) Rybicki and Baker also heard Comey’s side of phone conversations with the President, in real time.” It is, however, not clear which particular phone conversations with the president they were able to hear in this manner. Comey testified to Congress that he had six separate phone conversations with Trump.

    Both the FBI Director and Deputy Director interpreted one of the president’s phone calls as threatening Comey if he did not lift the cloud of the Russia investigation. In a phone conversation on April 11, Trump said he wanted Comey to lift the cloud, “because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing you know,” according to Comey’s written testimony and contemporaneous memo. But why would the president refer to his loyalty to Comey rather than Comey’s “honest loyalty” to the president?

    McCabe testified that the FBI Director and he “weren’t 100 percent sure what that was” but interpreted it as “a veiled threat.” 

     

     

  6. 4 hours ago, Judge Roybeanbag said:

    What happened around 2001 that wrecked the trend?  

    It looks like the two big declines in teenage labor force participation and employment coincided with our last two recessions. You can only speculate, but I'd hazard a guess that employers preferred older workers as they became available (i.e. unemployed) to teenagers. The graph, however, does show that the hiring of teenagers has gradually picked back up over the last few years.

  7. WTF?

    Quote

    The six eruptions, the latest of which started just five minutes after the large quake, are threatening entire sections of the subdivision. Dramatic images from the subdivision show lava bubbling up from the ground and soaring more than 100 feet in the air. Residents described the sound of the eruptions as haunting — "hissing" and "like a freight train." 

    Quote

    Resident Ikaika Marzo said he could feel several quakes shake the area in the early morning hours before the second eruption in the community around 1:30 a.m. The new eruptions Friday come in the wake of the volcano's first fissure in the community on Thursday afternoon.

    The first eruption in the subdivision started Thursday afternoon and had ended by about 6:30 p.m., after creating a fissure that sent lava soaring as high as 125 feet into the air. About 10:30 p.m., geologists confirmed the fissure (whose length was not immediately clear) was no longer erupting.

    They stressed, however, that new lava outbreaks remain a possibility. 

    "The opening phases of fissure eruptions are dynamic and uncertain. It is not possible at this time to say when and where new vents may occur," the observatory said, in its latest update. "Areas downslope of an erupting fissure or vent are at risk of lava inundation. At this time, the general area of the Leilani subdivision appears at greatest risk."

     

    Quote

    Some residents seemed in disbelief at what they were seeing in their own backyards. In social media posts, they documented lava sputtering up from cracks in the roadway and then angrily boiling up higher and higher.

    Marzo was among the first people in Leilani Estates to spot the active lava. And as soon as he did, he started notifying anyone he could find.

    "When we drove on that road, we heard a noise in the forest and it was like a little thump," he said. "Next thing, like three to five seconds after that, we smelled sulfur. After that, that's when there was tons of sulfur. Then we saw some lava popping out."

     

  8. 4 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

    I think they are colluding on strategy 

    It's been reported Trump is now mostly using his personal cell for phone calls. Maybe he thinks that since it's not a government phone, they can't listen.

  9. 16 hours ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

    Oh noes now the Ruskies done and meddled in the Brits elections ??  The blind faith ignorance of some people to believe a myth is staggering here.

    It's no "myth" that Putin has supported populist-nationalist parties and candidates across the West: Front National, Alternative fur Deutschland, UKIP, and Teh Donal amongst others.

  10. It's hilarious what these fools are willing to admit once they get together. It's like the sentiments many have about aggy: "Alone, he might pass as normalish, but get more than one together and they start sucking each other's dicks in black face with red asses and riding boots."

    • Like 1
  11. 46 minutes ago, seven said:

    Don't forget that literally every person that handwaves away obstruction also cites "respect for rule of law" as a positive quality of Trump 

    In fairness to Tahoe, what I think he's trying to say (in his typical Grandpa Simpson manner) is that since impeachment is a political process and not a strictly legal one, then we have to keep the optics, or politics, in mind for building pressure on the Senate to actually do the right thing and oust the orange, pink, and yellow motherfucker.

    • Like 1
  12. NYTimes analysis of the questions Mueller sent to Trump:

    Why Answering Mueller’s Questions Could Be a Minefield for Trump

    WASHINGTON — President Trump has insisted he is eager to make the case to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that he has done nothing wrong. But the questions that Mr. Mueller wants to ask show why the president’s lawyers have countered that an interview would be a minefield for Mr. Trump.

    It is not just that the president has a history of telling demonstrable falsehoods, while the special counsel has already won four guilty pleas for the crime of lying to investigators. The questions would pose additional challenges for Mr. Trump, legal experts said.

    Many of Mr. Mueller’s questions, obtained and published by The New York Times, are so broad that Mr. Trump would need a detailed command of a range of issues. And, complicating efforts to try to adequately prepare him for such an encounter, the president’s lawyers do not know everything that the special counsel has learned.

    “This list reinforces the notion that the president should not go in for an interview with Mueller,” said Sol Wisenberg, a white-collar defense lawyer who was a deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation. “Mueller knows all kinds of things — we don’t know exactly what he knows — and these are both broad and detailed questions, making real land mines.”

    On Tuesday, Mr. Trump denounced the publication of the questions in a pair of Twitter posts. He called it “disgraceful” and again pronounced Mr. Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt.” He also incorrectly declared both that none of the questions were about “collusion” — in fact, many centered on his campaign’s ties to Russia — and that it would be “hard to obstruct justice for a crime that never happened.” (Efforts to obstruct an investigation can be prosecuted even if no underlying crime is found.)

    Most of the dozens of questions are about now well-known events, like the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between top Trump campaign officials and Russians promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton. While a few touch on Mr. Trump’s business dealings — in particular, campaign-era talks about a proposed real estate project in Moscow — they do not signal that Mr. Mueller is examining Trump Organization finances more broadly or contain other major surprises.

    In many instances, Mr. Mueller wants Mr. Trump to explain his knowledge of, reactions to or communications about private events where there were other witnesses, such as his campaign’s internal discussions of Russia-related matters and his conversations as president with and about James B. Comey, whom he fired as F.B.I. director.

    The questions were drawn up in March and reflect no events since then, leaving open the possibility that they may have changed as the president’s lawyers and the special counsel continued to negotiate over an interview.

    The handover to the president’s lawyers grew out of a tense moment early that month between Mr. Mueller and Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer at the time, John Dowd. Mr. Dowd had argued that Mr. Trump was too busy running the country to sit for an interview, especially if he was not a target of the investigation, according to a person briefed on the encounter.

    Mr. Mueller replied that he had to question Mr. Trump to determine whether he had criminal intent when he took actions like firing Mr. Comey and raised the possibility of subpoenaing Mr. Trump to appear before a grand jury, the person said. News of Mr. Mueller mentioning the subpoena was first reported by The Washington Post.

    A few days later, a lawyer working for Mr. Mueller called Mr. Dowd to arrange a second meeting, in the hopes of persuading Mr. Dowd to allow Mr. Trump to sit for an interview. At that meeting, investigators for Mr. Mueller provided Mr. Dowd with the list of questions they had for the president. After reviewing the list, Mr. Dowd become even more convinced, the person said, that allowing the president to be interviewed would be a problem.

    One major threat to Mr. Trump posed by such open-ended questions is that, as his Twitter diatribe showed, he has a history of saying things that are not true — especially when he rambles off the cuff. It is a felony to lie to law enforcement officials or to conceal a material fact during a proceeding like a formal interview.

    Mr. Dowd quit in March after he advised Mr. Trump that sitting down with investigators would put him in too much jeopardy, but Mr. Trump signaled that he was prepared to ignore Mr. Dowd’s advice.

    Moreover, the list of questions is most likely a starting point for follow-ups as investigators try to iron out ambiguities. Paul Rosenzweig, another former Whitewater prosecutor and a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a conservative and libertarian research organization, said they could be seeking such details as: What was the source of your knowledge? When did you find out? Who told you and what exactly did they say?

    “You don’t just ask, ‘What did you know about the Trump Tower meeting?’ and he tells you the answer,” Mr. Rosenzweig said. “With 48 questions like that, that’s honestly a two-day interview. That’s 12 hours of questioning.”

    And in part because former Trump associates who have pleaded guilty are cooperating with the inquiry, the White House does not know what evidence the special counsel has obtained that could contradict Mr. Trump, Mr. Wisenberg said. Because of that, he said, the president’s lawyers were in a worse position to prepare their client for an interview than President Bill Clinton’s team was in the Whitewater investigation.

    “It’s totally different than when President Clinton came into the grand jury room to talk to us,” he said. “He pretty much knew everything we knew. It was far less risky.”

    Even so, Mr. Clinton perjured himself by falsely denying that he had had a sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky. That became part of the referral to Congress by Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel, that led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment.

    As part of those proceedings, the videotape of Mr. Clinton’s false testimony became public, taking its place in his legacy. It is far from clear, however, that any transcript or recording of Mr. Trump’s interview — if he gives one — would similarly become public. Mr. Rosenzweig said the interview would be covered by investigative secrecy rules, and there was no clear mechanism for it to be disclosed under Mr. Mueller, who has less power than Mr. Starr enjoyed.

    Mr. Mueller’s authorities remain uncertain; it is not clear that he could charge Mr. Trump with a crime or send an impeachment referral report directly to Congress. That has left his potential endgame unclear if he does conclude the president committed some kind of wrongdoing.

    But the list of questions indicates that the investigation remains a significant threat to Mr. Trump even if he were to be honest about everything in any interview.

    The questions zero in on Mr. Trump’s possible liability — and little else, noted Samuel W. Buell, a Duke University criminal law professor and a former federal prosecutor who helped lead the Enron investigation.

    “‘What did you know and think?’ and ‘When did you know it and think it?’ are not questions you ask someone to determine whether they have information about someone else’s commission of a crime,” Mr. Buell said. “They are questions you ask to determine whether the person you are questioning had the guilty mind required to break the law.”

    Mr. Wisenberg said he was struck by Mr. Mueller’s focus on establishing the president’s mind-set when he weighed whether to fire Mr. Comey, and potential steps like whether to oust Attorney General Jeff Sessions, pardon people charged by Mr. Mueller or force the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel.

    No Supreme Court precedent exists to guide Mr. Mueller on whether obstruction of justice can occur if a president exercises a constitutional power with a bad motive, like firing a subordinate to cover up a crime; Mr. Wisenberg counted himself among those who do not think it can. But Mr. Mueller’s questions, he said, suggest the special counsel has adopted a broader interpretation of the law.

    Some of the questions may present an opportunity for Mr. Trump, however. Asking him to explain what he meant when he told NBC News that he was thinking about the Russia investigation when he decided to fire Mr. Comey, for example, would permit Mr. Trump to backpedal on the remark or explain it away, perhaps by saying he did not really mean it.

    Alan M. Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School criminal law professor who has frequently defended Mr. Trump on television and is informally consulting with him, told CNN  on Monday that he thought Mr. Trump could invoke executive privilege to refuse to answer questions about his thinking when he decided to exercise constitutional powers.

    But the problem for Mr. Trump is that those questions, Mr. Dershowitz said, were the “easy” ones. By contrast, Mr. Trump could not invoke the privilege about events that took place before he became president, like his business dealings.

    Several legal experts said it was unusual for prosecutors to give Mr. Trump a preview of the questions, speculating that Mr. Mueller was bending over backward to defang any accusations of overreach. Mr. Buell said the move might also be aimed at uncovering any disputes over executive privilege now so they do not disrupt an interview.

    But he predicted that despite all the “posturing,” Mr. Trump would allow his lawyers to talk him out of sitting down with Mr. Mueller.

    “The game,” he said, “is to appear to be interested and cooperating without doing so.”

  13. 6 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

    You think Khomeini wasn’t authoritarian?  You think he tolerated dissent?

    The Shah kept a lot of asshole religious zealots in line by oppressing them.  

    Women were much better off

    I didn't say - or mean - to imply any such thing. I'm only saying the average Mo was seemingly more unhappy back then.

  14. 9 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

    I know more than a few Iranians here in Houston. They all preferred the Shah era over the Khomeini era.  The women especially. None were alive in 53 to offer that comparison.  

    I believe the Shah era was much better than the post Revolution era. I guess you guys disagree. 

    Pretty sure it was the elite who got out of Dodge after the Shah was deposed. Of course, they preferred it when he was in power because they benefitted most from his system. Of course, looking at the photos above, I'm guessing those were the 1%ers of their day. The average Iranian was pretty fucking pissed at the Shah due to perceived corruption and political oppression/brutality. It's pretty much the same story in every authoritarian regime that we (the West) propped up during the Cold War - most of them ended badly. 

×
×
  • Create New...