US Politics January 2018: "You All Just Got A Lot Richer"

It's just a bad look all around for the media (not just the Times) to propagate the preemptive charm offensive line that the speech will be more nicer and more inclusive, it's even worse to write a preemptive story about hardliners being disappointed it's not meaner. Because in either case, who the fuck cares? He'll tweet something shitty within hours.

yea I'm getting ready for all the shit "is this the Trump we were hoping for?" takes by the likes of Fareed and Cilizza

New York Times is absolutely awful, they don't even try to hide their biases anymore

It's not that they're "biased" -- every paper is. But the editors write headlines and assign stories that want to be clicked on by rural voters (who won't read the NYT anyway).

IDK throwing in some different form of "lets give the white supremacists a platform" every week while virtually ignoring those who dislike the president or are hurt by his policies feels a bit like a bias to me

Whetstones, getcher whetstones here, perfect for sharpening those dull gilly blades, whetstones, getcher whetstones...

They're liberals biased toward people in power, i.e. Clinton types who nevertheless loathe HRC.

People should stop breathlessly reporting on Trump’s communications strategy. For one, it’s just a mess because they don’t know what they’re really doing. And also he fucking lives for this shit and it just draws everyone further into his, like, abusive narcissistic orbit.

He loves jerking everyone around by toning down his rhetoric for a day, eliciting sighs of relief and hope from moderates, and then snapping back with something crazy. Tension and release. It’s all bullshit and he’s doing it just because it’s fun for him.

treeeship II otmfm

The ludic aspect of the Trump presidency

He loves jerking everyone around by toning down his rhetoric for a day, eliciting sighs of relief and hope from moderates, and then snapping back with something crazy. Tension and release. It’s all bullshit and he’s doing it just because it’s fun for him.

so you're saying trump is into edging and breathplay

is that from the dossier?

*check notes*

yeah

They're liberals biased toward people in power, i.e. Clinton types who nevertheless loathe HRC.

Didn't one of you post a link to that reporter who had a story spiked because she profiled Trump supporters in Los Angeles and Staten Island, but the editors wanted another rural diner piece? Her hypothesis is that the editors of these pieces think they know and understand Republican elites. They golf with them, dine with them, vacation with them. But uneducated rural racists? They're weird and strange and unfamiliar and therefore must be explored in greater depth.

There were Trump signs in the norman rockwell-as-fuck affluent new jersey town I grew up in (where Trump nevertheless lost). His base of support was never exotic

'omg are there racists in America? Surely we must send someone out to search for this exotic creature, who without a doubt lives as far away and is as different from me in every way as can possibly be'

dr. m the year's most overrated movie is war for the planet of the apes

xpost

what's stupider, wearing a t-shirt that says "bitcoin millionaire" or paying donald trump money to be on the proscription list of trump's inevitable successor?

also propose we just outright start substituting "end of 'the last jedi'" for "end of 'empire strikes back'" in star wars analogies going forward, thanks

I still haven't seen Last Jedi yet so pls no spoilers

Dumbledore's gay

So I know we're operating in a post-logic world, but I'm just trying, for my own edification, to lay out this 'memo' situation in a way that makes sense. A completely partisan Congressional committee, headed by someone who's all the way up Trump's ass, argues that Mueller's independent investigation is in actuality a partisan witch hunt, and we're supposed to lend their findings more credence than the findings of the entire intelligence community. Is that about right?

it's 2018, all sources are equal. That's democracy!

Oh, and the credence of their findings is based on tin hat deep state rogue FBI conspiracy theory shit. Can't forget that part.

lunatics, asylum etc

Paul Ryan urged the release of the memo but also urged his folks that it should be treated separately from the Mueller probe (underlying message = "we can't use this to shut down the probe").

The whole purpose is simply to provide just enough cover to justify firing whoever needs to be fired in order to derail or end the investigation.

They're setting up something to remove the threat of Mueller's investigation, and have figured out it doesn't need to make any real sense... if the New York Times will still give you the benefit of the doubt when you are transparently full of shit, why try harder?

I only wonder if the intelligence agencies care enough to burn the Republicans for making them the bad guys in this. Democrats and the media are entirely useless as usual.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/even-if-trump-is-found-guilty-mueller-wouldnt-be-the-indictment-decision-maker/551753/

Yam is going to trap Schumer in carbomite at the end of the speech tonight

if only

Funny how this madness will necessitate an actual Deep State to do the job of the imagined one

I only wonder if the intelligence agencies care enough to burn the Republicans for making them the bad guys in this. Democrats and the media are entirely useless as usual.

I have to think eventually the purge and cowing will be complete for intelligence to simply ask “how high”, isnt that how Putin gets it done with FSB? I mean oppo journos or plutos can be merked but i imagine intel lines up.

From that Atlantic article. Why would we draw this conclusion?

”Indeed, in many ways, the sheer numerosity and blatantness of the president’s interventions suggests that he really is sincere in thinking that he did nothing wrong. Were he truly concerned about the criminality of his former actions, he might well have been more cautious in so openly attempting to subvert the investigation.”

pathological liars believe their own lies

^

lazy, lazy

The striking similarity between a newly-released Treasury Department report of Russian oligarchs and a 2017 list of wealthy Russians published in Forbes Magazine is no coincidence. On Tuesday, a Treasury Department spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the unclassified annex of the report was derived from Forbes’ ranking of the “200 richest businessmen in Russia 2017.”

The revelation is likely to invite criticisms of the thoroughness of the Treasury Department’s report and reinforce the notion that the list is primarily a who’s who of Russian elite rather than an official accounting of Kremlin-linked political corruption as some US lawmakers intended. Congress mandated the report in a law President Trump grudgingly signed in August. At the time, the president called the legislation “seriously flawed.”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnhudson/trump-administration-admits-it-cribbed-forbes-magazine-to

xp What incredible bullshit, like this guy hasn't made a career out of going to court. He knows perfectly well what the law is, for Christ's sake he's been surrounded by lawyers telling him as much. What an infuriating narrative, I guess we'll need to get used to it

christ on a crutch does anyone know how to do their fucking jobs xp

I'm catching up from a couple of days ago, but this is really a brilliant idea, I think:

i think it's a shame that they stop doing voter polls on how people will vote on an election after the election ends. seriously, somebody poll people and ask them how they voted in 2016. i'd love to know what the results are.

― Arnold Schoenberg Steals (rushomancy), Sunday, January 28, 2018 4:59 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I honestly think pollsters could leverage the degree to which people lie about their past voting behavior (by comparing actual results to aggregated voter self-reported results) in order to allow for better prediction of future elections. This would be different from exit polls in that it would be conducted on an ongoing basis. Actually, now that I think about it, is this already done but not widely reported?

The idea being not just that self-reported past voting behavior would vary with the current popularity of a politician, but also that people who will vote for some candidates (e.g. Trump) are more likely to lie about their past and future votes than others

“You can tell Trump believes he’s innocent because of all of the stuff he’s trying to hide.”

Interesting quote from Axios:

What I’m hearing: One source, who knows Trump as well as anyone, told me he believes the president would be incapable of avoiding perjuring himself. “Trump doesn’t deal in reality,” the source said. “He creates his own reality and he actually believes it.” (The president’s attorney, Ty Cobb, did not respond to a request for comment.)

xps, the related list of the 'Kremlin elite' or whatever they're calling it is again just a copy and paste job from the Russian government's website with three names (of people they presumably don't mind) taken off. They didn't even change the order of the names.

the endpoint of this Mueller investigation is gonna be

1) Trump & his entire administration all found guilty of obstruction + borderline treason + numerous financial crimes
2) the GOP spends weeks talking about how it's actually fine for a sitting President to do that, and the real story is in fact
3) Hillary Clinton, Uranium, and Unmasking, leading to the formation of a special council which will only disband upon the death of every remaining Clinton, meanwhile
4) Trump drops the N-word during an interview
5) his approval rating finally hits 40%

^^^ yup, I can see all of this happening.

i agree with that except you forgot that time Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch talked in an airplane parking lot.

about what? SEE #3!

thread: "Basically everything inside Russia is already sanctioned"

Unpopular Russia opinion alert: I'm not surprised at all re no defense/intel sanx, and I'm not sure any sanx were appropriate. And it's not like I'm a Kremlin sympathizer; I helped write and push the 2014 sanx, and I wrote last week on deterring Russian hacking w sanx. 1/

— Brian O'Toole (@brianoftoole) January 30, 2018

Yep, that's the key thing. aiui, the sticking point isn't who you sanction in Russia (in the sense of cutting them off from international banks, making it illegal for US companies to work with them, etc - which Obama already did), it's the US hypothetically setting up a unilateral system of penalties for countries buying weapons from Russia - which would include a bunch of major strategic allies.

The US continues to sanction individuals and businesses (and added another 30 to the list recently iirc) but if the people drafting this bill ever intended it to be implemented, it would have probably looked very different. Republicans got bipartisan support on Iran sanctions, Democrats got a stick to beat Trump with when he inevitably failed to implement parts of the Russia ones.

what do you know

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/30/trump-russia-collusion-fbi-cody-shearer-memo?CMP=edit_2221

Among other things, both documents allege Donald Trump was compromised during a 2013 trip to Moscow that involved lewd acts in a five-star hotel.

Shout out to Trump’s speechwriters who are preparing for tonight’s State of the Union by accepting that none of their stuff will be used.

— Mike Lawrence (@TheMikeLawrence) January 30, 2018