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Tibalt posted:The 25th amendment is not intended for a situation like Trump. If Trump is grossly incompetent and nefarious, the solution is impeachment. If the president has a stroke and is comatose, but hasn't committed an impeachable offense, then that's what the 25th should entail. I hope this doesn't sound like the biggest "Well, actually" possible, but one of the cases that they were thinking of when the 25th Amendment was the Woodrow Wilson case. After his stroke, Woodrow Wilson was not able to perform as he was before, he was half-paralyzed, had problems speaking, but he was apparently mostly cognitively the same. The 25th Amendment doesn't specify the degree of medical impairment, it just puts such a high bar on it that it is very unlikely to pass unless there is something very obviously wrong. Like, there isn't a single line where something like a stroke makes someone incapacitated. Someone can have a stroke with no overt symptoms, someone can have a stroke with minor aphasia and movement problems, someone can have a stroke with major aphasia and movement problems, or someone can have a stroke and be "shut in", unable to communicate. The 25th Amendment doesn't describe where that medical bar is, just that it has to be so that they can't discharge the powers of their office. Just like Impeachment is a political process, not a criminal process, the 25th Amendment is a political process, not a medical process. But in practical terms, there would have to be much more obvious signs of dementia before it would be discussed realistically.
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Grape posted:They don't have to be that bad to be something that should make your eyes pop. This might be a derail, and it might seem inflammatory, but take it as a good faith comment. I live in South America, I have lived in South America for over two years. It is confusing for me when I read about people in the United States treating "Hispanic" as a racial group with certain features. Some people in South America have indigenous ancestry, but some people in South America are from Europe (not just Spain, but Italy, Germany, France, Poland, Yugoslavia, etc). There are also people from East Asia and the Middle East. You can find people here with names like Helen Middlethorp or Claudio Schmidt or Eduardo Wang. To me, Hispanic or Latino only means "Spanish speaker" or "From a Spanish/Portuguese speaking country" (Okay: obvious problematic area: there are some indigenous groups where people do not speak Spanish, but they are still Hispanic because they are from a Spanish-speaking country, I will let others figure that one out). As far as physical appearance, social customs, religion, politics, food, and even "culture" there isn't a core attribute that defines what is Hispanic. The only definition that makes sense to me is the functional one, people who speak that language.
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Jan 4, 2019 05:24
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Grape posted:Yeah we know this, but for all intents and purposes in the US that is the way it comes across socially and for the most part racially. The vast majority of latinx immigrants to the US are on the darker side of things, and this *cough* colors the way it gets framed and placed in our society. Okay, yes, I agree, I didn't mean to "well actually" there. Just kind of sharing my own process of discovery when I moved to a foreign country and found out that the US categories I was familiar with didn't make sense here. I don't now about "always" be socially grouped as white. The fault lines of who has been "in" and "out" of "White" America has changed many times, and it will probably change again, very rapidly. South America is very complicated. Just different complications. This probably isn't too on-topic, but recently, in Chile, a Mapuche Indian, Camilo Catrillanco, was killed by a police officer (who was actually arrested for it!). And so there is some obvious racism going on there, but if you looked at the pictures side by side, they don't look noticeably different. Like, a pretty normal part of my life is worrying that people, who, in the United States, would be clearly "non-white" are going to be neo-nazis. And that is obviously a little weird for me!
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Jan 4, 2019 06:12
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CascadeBeta posted:OH went something like +20 to GOP in 2018 so I don't think that's a possible flip. The Republican candidate won the governor's race in Ohio by less than 4 percentage points, 50.4%-46.7% The Democratic candidate won the senator's race in Ohio by a little more than 6 percentage points, 53.4%-46.6% In 2016, Donald Trump won Ohio by 8 percentage points, 51.3%-43.2% I think that Ohio has been overnarratized relative to its actual voting patterns.
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Jan 4, 2019 17:04
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https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/ One of the most interesting things about the recent Trump approval numbers is that they have become fairly static, and also that they have had a larger increase in "Disapprove" than a decrease in "Approve". Around about December 13th, a little bit before the Mattis resignation and the largest stock market losses, the 538 tracker had him at 42.5 approve, 51.6 disapprove. Currently it is at 41.4 approve, and 53.5 disapprove. It has been pretty solid like that for a week or so. Trump's shutdown isn't dropping his approval numbers much, because he is doing something his base likes. But it is causing people who somehow, magically, manage to be in the middle, to change from "No Opinion" to "Disapprove". If Trump does give up on the wall, there is a good chance that both numbers will go down: people sick of the shutdown will no longer disapprove, but his base will no longer "approve" because he caved on one of his promises. Yeah, that is a scary thought: at least some of the disapprove numbers are people who don't like him because he isn't crazy enough. Although I imagine that most people who are more extreme than Trump still say they approve, rather than disapprove.
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Jan 7, 2019 19:21
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mcmagic posted:There is basically nothing he can do to go below 40% heh. Donald Trump's approval rating was below 40%, reaching as low as 36.4%, for almost nine months, from May of 2017 to February of 2018. That might seem like a pedantic point, if the overall point is "Trump does have a floor he can't drop below", but it has already been demonstrated that that floor is below 40%. We just don't know how low.
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Jan 7, 2019 19:55
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Groovelord Neato posted:i never understood why trump's approval went up from 36. he's been worse and worse as time's gone on. Normalization. People have just accepted that having weird stuff like this happening is the new normal, and in contrast to any immediate big consequences (a large recession, a war, or a severe environmental disaster with a flubbed response), there isn't a lot to push people into revealing how weird it is. Its the oldest of cliches, but it is true: boil a frog slowly, and they never know. It is also possible that at least some of the changes in approval ratings are due to artifacts in polling. Maybe young people, who are more likely to Disapprove, are also becoming less likely to pick up a call from a strange number. This number is usually accounted for by places like fivethirtyeight, but it only takes a 1 or 2% change in response rates to look like a real change in the polls. 
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Jan 7, 2019 20:22
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 I know the mid-term election was a long time ago. but I put together a graph showing how it fits into some historical patterns in the senate vote, and why it represents a change. The senatorial vote goes on a 12-year pattern. That is because there is three different senate classes, with one third-of them up for election every two years, and then with the added cycle of whether it was a presidential election. Class 1, who had a mid-term election in 2018, were up during a general election in 2012, and last had mid-term elections in 2006. Of the Senatorial classes, one of them, Class 2, by chance is mostly from states with smaller populations, which also tends to be more conservative. Mid-term elections have lower turnouts. The years with Class 2 senators lining up with mid-terms are the troughs on the chart: 1990, 2002, and 2014. The most active years are years where Senatorial Class 1 and 3 coincides with a presidential election. Mid-terms with 1 and 3, as well as Presidential elections with 2, tend to be in between. Which is why you can see Bat-Man's cowl on this, twice, separated by the 2002 mid-terms. Two things to remember: first, the Republican "Wave" years showed very small advantages in numbers. Look at 1994 and 2010: its just a little bump, but because they occurred in mid-terms, that small advantage in numbers translated to a big gain in seats. And another thing to look at: before about 2004, those numbers were pretty close together. The senate was less partisan, and senators had a good chance of keeping their head above water when political changes came. Since that year, notice that the gaps between the parties have been growing wider.
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Jan 8, 2019 17:00
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cr0y posted:https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1082664478704062464?s=19 Apparently, the Russia thread was gassed overnight. It was, at times, a good resource at keeping track of what was going on. I believe that an involved, massive legal investigation into the President of the United States that has led to the convictions and guilty pleadings of his closest advisors, and that is continuing to expand, is more important than covering the latest Sick Twitter Burns, but I appear to be in the minority as far as that goes.
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Jan 8, 2019 17:16
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mdemone posted:Wait, how the gently caress did Mueller get access to contemporary emails from Veselnitskaya to Russian contacts? There are at least four ways he could have done so: 1. Through a normal warrant, where he showed a judge probable cause that she committed a crime. Since she is a lawyer, this is going to be a little bit harder, and some of the communications might have had to go through a cleaning team, but its exactly what happened to Cohen 2. Through a FISA warrant, because he showed to a FISA judge evidence that she was acting as a foreign agent. 3. Through a cooperating recipient of some of those e-Mails, who is acting as a witness to the investigation. Someone like Rick Gates. He also could have used those e-Mails as a basis for either 1) or 2) 4. Through a non-domestic service. If the recipient of the e-Mails is someone in Russia, there is (as I understand it), no legal requirement for surveiling them or bribing or whatever someone to turn them over. This could have been done by the CIA, or, for all we know, Dutch Intelligence. Also, I think in this particular instance, Veselnitskaya is being charged in the SDNY, who at this point might be doing more of the investigation than Mueller, but we can probably assume that Mueller has them as well. These are the type of questions that were dealt with in the Investigations Thread. This investigation is very complex, and involves a lot of legal matters that can get pretty technical, so it was helpful to have one place to go to keep it all straight. Here, answers like this are going to be diluted by musings on how Jon Arbuckle could get pregnant by drinking dog semen. An interesting question, but one that I find less relevant than questions about how gigantic federal investigations run.
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Jan 8, 2019 20:42
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cr0y posted:Heard this before but maybe something is moving today? There are a number of people in legal trouble for things relating to the Russian investigation, and it seems probable that Donald Trump, Jr. is one of them. However, absent of other evidence, an unsourced quote on Twitter means almost nothing. The arrests and indictments in this case have tended to be much less theatrical than people guessed they would be, and hardly appeared on schedule. There were many people who thought that Roger Stone was going to be indicted the week of the mid-terms, it is two months later, and Stone seems to be in the same legal state as he was at the time.
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Jan 8, 2019 20:52
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FlamingLiberal posted:Has this happened previously where SCOTUS has taken up a case completely under seal including the defendant? Seems odd. The Supreme Court has never done so. In this case, they did not take the case, although they discussed taking it, and decided not to. Even the step of deciding whether to review it is an unusual step. The steps taken to keep the case secret, including clearing an entire floor of a federal courthouse, are all very unusual.
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Jan 8, 2019 22:52
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The Glumslinger posted:https://twitter.com/charlesarthur/status/1082760079152173057 Although it might seem like  , there is a possibility, on the outside, that this was done on purpose to communicate facts to other parties. Manafort has now managed to communicate to other witnesses what he said, or might have said, to the OSC, and the other witnesses now have a way to guide where their stories are.It seems far-fetched, but it also seems far-fetched that professional lawyers do not know how to redact documents. In case anyone needs a reminder, everything about this case is fractally weird. You zoom in on the details, and it is more weird, and there doesn't seem to any limit to how many steps of association the miasma of incompetency covers.
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Jan 8, 2019 23:28
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Solaris 2.0 posted:This is an excellent post, and Trump's approval ratings are something I've been thinking a lot about recently. Mostly, why were they dipping into the low 30s in his first year, but relatively consistent at 42% in 2018? According to the fivethirtyeight tracker, his aggregate approval rating was usually between 37-39 between the Comey firing and the end of the year, and for most of this year, it has been between 40-42. There were some polls with him lower than 35, but they were a minority in the first year. There is a couple of explanations for this. First, it could be "normalization". People are getting used to this, and the problems haven't really touched them directly, so a few people are shifting towards him. Second, some of it could be polling artifacts. Polling young people, who usually don't approve of Trump, is harder because they often don't have landlines. This is a known. Polling companies have ways to get around this, but, the effect could have changed. It doesn't take that much of an artifact to throw off averages. Third, a lot of it is in the way we perceive it, especially with how the first number changes. A year ago today, his polling average was 38.7, and today it is 41.1, a difference of 2.4% But the first is in the low 30s, the second is in the high 40s, and so we read that as a bigger change than it is. If that was the difference between, say, 40.5 and 42.9, it might not seem like as big of a difference. Those are my thoughts on the matter.
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Jan 10, 2019 00:05
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cr0y posted:I saw a tweet mentioning Trunp just hired a new 17 lawyer legal team to defend against Mueller. Anyone else hear this? I have not heard of this, and it seems highly suspect. Even interviewing for a single lawyer takes time in any case. Previous times that Trump has fired or acquired lawyers have usually had a lot of lead up to them. In addition, 17 is a lot of lawyers, especially considering that Trump has had problems finding even a few lawyers. It is things like this that we could keep track of in the Trump/Russia thread, one of its main purposes was winnowing out rumors. One of the problems of the Trump Administration is that there is such a flood of bullshit, that it is hard to keep track of what is normal and what is not, what is real and what is illusion. So now, things like this just kind of float around and get overwhelmed with a discussion of Donald Duck not wearing pants, which you want to know something interesting? Scrooge doesn't wear pants wither, EXCEPT when he is wearing a bathing suit to go money swimming. Like imagining only wearing pants when you are swimming. That does not make sense. And neither does Trump hiring 17 lawyers, overnight, with no signs of it happening before-hand, and no mention of it in media that is not a tweet.
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Jan 10, 2019 17:18
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Wylie posted:The 17 new lawyers is A Real Thing, there was a WaPo article about it and Maddow talked about it on last night's show. Ah, okay. That is still very surprising, but there is the important point that Trump did not hire the lawyers, the White House did. These are not Trump's personal lawyers, but White House lawyers. And they are also not specifically hired to defend against the Mueller investigation.
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Jan 10, 2019 17:38
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Important thing to keep in mind: Of the charged against Manafort in the badly-redacted document, there seems to be no denial of their factuality by Manafort, his lawyers, or anyone else in Trump's orbit. In fact, most of the charges in the Russia investigation (with the exception of specific times and places, like whether Cohen went to Prague) have not been denied factually. It is just that the campaign, and its supporters, and its detractors, have kept on targeting whether they are relevant, or whether they broke the law. "Yes, Manafort gave polling data to Russia intelligence, who we know were actively trying to support Trump, but is that really a crime?" Also, I doubt Trump parses his words that closely, but notice the phrasing: "Didn't know". Not "Don't know". If a lawyer was saying that, be careful, because it could mean he didn't know at the time, but has found out since. "Yes, I have the garbage top on my neck, but it could have been anyone eating that garbage." 
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Jan 10, 2019 18:25
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There is certainly a lot going on in those redacted documents, but trying to fit text into the black boxes seems to be open to all sorts of misleading conclusions and basically trying to solve sudoku games. The thing about this investigation is, there is enough information openly available, in indictments, pleas, sentencing documents, and other clear sources of information, that going to the trouble of trying to find hidden clues is extraneous. The Southern District of New York, in its indictment of Michael Cohen, that he pled guilty to, has already implicated Donald Trump in a felony, which if he wasn't president, he would probably already be indicted for, and which he has not factually debated. There is no reason to try to seek hidden clues when this is publicly available information with almost no ambiguity.
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Jan 13, 2019 00:25
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Jealous Cow posted:Re: the interpreter that Trump told not to speak about his meetings with Putin— This has already been established, as much as anything has been established in this often secretive court case. It is known that this was a state owned enterprise from a foreign country, doing "substantial" business in the United States, who argued that complying with the subpeona would be against the laws of their own country. We don't know what country it is from, the easy choice it is from a Russian business, but it could be from a Saudi Arabian business, or, as much as we know, a business based in Singapore. There was some thought at the beginning that it was a private individual, but subsequent filings showed it was a company. Just a reminder that the Russia thread, which was at times a good source of information about a very complicated and vital set of investigations, is no longer here. And that important things like "The Supreme Court made a rare stay of an anonymous case, this is what it might mean" are now drowned out by digressions of whether or not the Rock is a cool guy. If Donald Trump can be spoken of having any type of strategy at all, it is to erase people's ability to remember what is normal and what is not. It is also to make such a constant blaring that people lose all sense of scale and proportion. And reading this thread, I have to say he has encountered success in both.
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Jan 13, 2019 03:18
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Mr.Tophat posted:Beyond reasonable doubt. The five face-to-face meetings are normal, they were the type of the thing a president does at summits. None of these meetings were some type of secret meetings in the Seychelles: they were meetings at public meetings of international leaders that everyone knew about. Their being no record of these, even in classified files, is the very unusual part. We don't know who was the source for this story, but it seems it has to be someone up at secretary/assistant secretary level in the state department, or a director or assistant director at an intelligence agency. This is very unusual.
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Jan 13, 2019 16:48
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Radish posted:It's kind of hard to care about these hearings. The worthless Senate has basically abdicated its duty to vet people or do anything at all really so if Trump nominated some discarded big mac carton from last night it would get confirmed possibly with Mark Warner or Doug Jones crossing the aisle. Just stepping in here with some perspective on things: traditionally, the Senate has given Presidents pretty wide discretion to appoint their cabinets. For example, here is how the US Senate voted on Bush's cabinet members: https://www.senate.gov/reference/Bush_cabinet.htm Of his cabinet officers, eight were confirmed without taking roll, just with a "voice vote". Four were confirmed 100-0. Only two were contested: John Ashcroft, 58-42. and Gale North, 75-24 And this takes things back further: https://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/cabinettable.pdf For thirty years, from 1976 to 2006, there was not a single dissenting vote against a Secretary of Transportation or Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Even departments like State or Treasury, which might seem to be naturally more contentious, would only have a few dissenting votes. Historically speaking, parties blocking cabinet nominees is very unusual, and so Joe Manchin or Doug Jones or whoever voting in favor of a Republican is not unusual. When Barr was confirmed the first time, he had a voice vote, where the entire Democratic Party voted for him.
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Jan 15, 2019 18:48
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selec posted:A longer term analysis of Obama's legacy will be damning from any perspective that isn't ideological/representative. I clicked on that link, and it seems to hard to see how your narrative fits with the data presented in your own source. The charts in that article can not be linked directly, but the most pertinent is probably Chart #3. The chart shows that the average white household family has historically had a much larger wealth share than a black or hispanic family, and that the wealth peaked in 2007. It then turns down sharply in the recession, before recovering mildly for black families by 2016 (the final full year of Obama's presidency), and showing increases for white families. The chart shows an average household wealth of black families of $156,285 in 2007, and $139,523 in 2016. However, since we don't (in this chart) have a number for the date of Obama's inauguration, we don't have an exact number for whether that household wealth grew or declined. As it is, we can say that there was an 11% decrease in the household wealth of black families between 2007 and 2016. Presumably, since some of the effects of the recession were already in swing, the decline between January 2009 and 2016 was probably a little less. And if that seems to be a minor point, debating the exact percentage of wealth decline, then I think the context around that should also be noted: the real story is that black households have had a share of US household wealth that is between 1/4th and 1/7th of US household wealth, and that trend goes back to 1963. I find your argument to be somewhat glib, especially as it depends on the "numbers don't lie" argument that seems to always come out when people point out facts without consequences. Especially since just in that three sentence post, you manage to make two major statements that inject subjective rhetoric into "the numbers don't lie". You use the phrase "He oversaw...", which can mean either "supervised/instructed" or just "witnessed". So you can insinuate, by saying it was Obama who "oversaw" it, that Obama was somehow responsible, without actually stating that. You then use "loving over", which is certainly a term meant to have an emotional effect. You use a term like "loving over", but also claim that you have objective evidence. To me "Black wealth declined, and then recovered, but recovered to around 5-10% less than it was in its peak, pre-housing crisis value" would be the most objective way to describe that data. Followed by "Black household wealth continues to be much lower than white household wealth, a trend that goes back as far as the data we have are available" I don't think you are lying. I don't even think you are close to lying. I think you are telling a story. But "a 5-10% decline in black household wealth" to me, sounds a lot different than the "largest sustained periods of destruction of black wealth".
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Jan 15, 2019 19:48
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Just a quick reminder that one reason that Corsi and Stone have been such prominent "next targets" of the investigation is both of them have repeatedly talked to the media about the case. Whether they are the next link in the investigation, or just one more piece of corroborating evidence, is something that we don't really know from outside. I think that Mueller also doesn't want just documentary evidence enough to indict Stone and Corsi, which I am guessing he already has. He wants the type of evidence where they will look at it sign a plea deal that day. I do think, that if Mueller is working with 15 or more federal prosecutors, they have not spent the last 12 months trying to ascertain whether Jerome Corsi deleted some e-Mails. From what we can tell, the investigation is still going on in multiple fronts, most of the "leaks" about Stone and Corsi are just two old grifters trying to work the media.
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Jan 15, 2019 22:44
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Phil Moscowitz posted:Is it possible Michael Cohen is the rat that’s going to bring down this entire criminal enterprise? It is hard to keep track of everything going on in the case (actually, the cases), but from following it for almost two years, I would say there is nothing so theatrical as a single informer or witness who will change the entire course of this investigation. The interlocking investigations (campaign collusion, money laundering, obstruction of justice, etc) are mostly white collar criminal cases, which means that the main work is being done by lawyers and accountants going over literally millions of pages of documents, seeing where money came from and where it went. Even in the type of organization where money is being paid out in Wal-Mart bags full of cash (and a mismatched MMA boxing glove), there is going to be a gigantic documentary and e-Mail trail. So I don't think there is a single keystone figure. We also don't know, from what is publicly available, which one of the 4 main cooperating witnesses, Flynn, Cohen, Gates or Manafort(as much as his cooperation helped), gave the most new information, or whether there are other people who have given even more information. While I appreciate the entire idea of Michael Cohen telling Mueller "All the documents can be found in a locked safe in a warehouse in the waterfront", it is more likely it is just forensic accounts in offices looking over papers, page by page.
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Jan 17, 2019 16:11
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luxury handset posted:it's weird to assume poor people only live in cities. rural areas rely more heavily on SNAP than urban ones. remember how people are constantly talking about the death of rural america and the demise of small towns? Yeah, the post you were referring to was kind of veering into dog whistle territory, and outdated dog whistle territory at that. "inner cities" was a code word for minority poor in the 80s and 90s, and even then, wasn't terribly accurate. Like you responded, there are urban poor, rural poor, suburban poor, and (while this wasn't explicit in the post you were referring to), SNAP beneficiaries are not necessarily minorities or Democratic voters. A Venn diagram of poor, urban and minority voters is going to have seven different areas. The idea that the shutdown is mostly going to effect welfare recipients who are "poor people in the inner cities" seems to be a way to restate a "Democratic plantation" talking point. Also, by February, one-third of the country isn't worrying about winter anymore, if they were ever worrying at all.
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Jan 17, 2019 16:47
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SimonCat posted:You guys really think Joni Ernst is vulnerable? I don't see her being that unpopular, but that could just be my impression. In 2014, she was elected with 52.10% of the vote, against her opponent who had 43.76% of the vote. So she won by a little bit more than 8% of the vote, in a mid-term election that was historically bad for Democrats. Obviously, the situation is going to be different in 2020: it is going to be a presidential election, which traditionally helps the Democratic Party, but she is an incumbent, which traditionally helps her. No guarantee she will lose, or that she will win, but by any reasonable metric, she is "Vulnerable". This is one of those times when the facile narratives of "The Heartland" and "Red America". Iowa is a state that Trump won by 10 points in 2016, and that Obama won by 10 points in 2008. A state that, two months ago, voted out two of its incumbent Republican representatives. Iowa is competitive. Iowa has been competitive since the 1970s, and it will probably be competitive next cycle, as well. (For various values of "competitive")
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Jan 17, 2019 19:23
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Impeachment doesn't do jack unless they can bring down Pence as well This is one of those hyperbolic things that is hard to debate because I don't know what it is saying. "doesn't do jack"...in what sense? In the sense that the Republican Party will still have and be able to execute the same policies under Pence? That the Republican Party will have the same electoral success under Pence as with Trump? That the long term social and political trends in the United States (and the rest of the world) would not change after Trump is removed from office? All three of those are different cases to be made, but "doesn't do jack" seems like a pretty ridiculous thing to say about a president being removed from office.
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Jan 17, 2019 22:44
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Just a reminder that this is Not Normal, but I can't tell you how Not Normal it is: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/marci-whitaker-email-matthew-whitaker-attorney-general.html Some of this is a little bit ambiguous, like her saying "the investigation is wrapping up", maybe that is just an opinion from public news, but is the wife of the AAG publicly commenting on an investigation her husband is overseeing? Something tells me that Whittaker and his family are not that bright.
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Jan 17, 2019 23:52
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I think it would be good to remember that while this is a new development, the SDNY charging document against Michael Cohen already implicated Donald Trump in a felony, because Cohen stated that he broke campaign laws at the behest of Trump. This has also not been (AFAIK) factually contested by Trump or his lawyers. If Trump was not the President, there was already evidence to indict him on a felony, (although arguably not enough to convict him). So this is news, but it might not move the status of the case forward too much. But there is a lot more out there. This is going to go on for a while.
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Jan 18, 2019 05:16
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Rinkles posted:Think this allegation is more than a bit more serious. This is from last night and a lot of posts, but I wanted to answer this. I guess my logic is kind of "One in the hand is worth two in the bush" The SDNY having a guilty plea accepted in court that Cohen committed a felony at Trump's direction Is "worth more" than a Buzzfeed story saying that Trump instructed Cohen to lie to congress. If the Buzzfeed article leads to an indictment, or even if it is corroborated indirectly in a charging document, then it is bigger news. My point was also that while some felonies are obviously bigger than others, the felony line has already been crossed, even though there are some people who believe that "nothing has been turned up".
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Jan 18, 2019 18:25
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Unzip and Attack posted:I am not nothingmattersing here, but he won't. I would be very surprised if he falls below 38% https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?ex_cid=rrpromo December 17th, 2017, according to the 538 tracker, his adjusted approval rating was 36.4% There were several other times that year he went below 37%. There were entire months where he was below 38% Some of these might be polling artifacts, but of course, it is just as possible the polling artifacts are going the other way. It might seem pedantic to bring up fractions of a percent, but as long as we get into absolute statements like "It will never reach this mark", then one exception, however slight, means that statement is wrong. Its usually better to couch things in terms of "in the foreseeable future, he won't go below 35%". I think there are a lot of things that could still happen that would fracture the base.
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Jan 18, 2019 19:37
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RasperFat posted:We should know in an hour or two if any Mueller bombs are dropping this week. This seems to be a common opinion, and was a favorite strawman of detractors in the Russia thread. I think it portrays an overly theatrical version of who Mueller is, and what he is doing. There are at least 15 prosecutors working on the case, for Mueller. There are also probably dozens or scores of investigators from different departments (Justice, Treasury, maybe State) who are doing all the leg work of looking through documents, etc. There is also, besides Mueller, different District Attorneys (SDNY, DC, and for that matter, South Dakota), who are working on investigations that have been related to this investigation. This is a pretty wide ranging thing, and Mueller isn't some type of movie cop who is going to just make a decision at the last minute and change everything.
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Jan 18, 2019 22:52
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Unzip and Attack posted:I don't disagree, but I think those things are highly unlikely, almost to the point of not being considered plausible. I don't think there are very many people out there who support Trump now that would ever abandon support for him. His administration has been a freak show of constant criminality and vulgarity that Nixon's absolutely was not. Nixon at least obfuscated most of his evil acts while Trump loudly proclaims them on TV or social media. Nobody is reality proof. His supporters probably won't abandon him out of "optics", there is only one thing that would probably make his base break over optics. But the thing is, there hasn't been a lot of real consequences for his base. Its all been a game used for triggering the libs. Its been all about the symbolism. The economy is very strong, there are no foreign policy problems that directly impact them, so it has all basically been a TV show. How they will react when there are real world consequences remains to be seen. Even a mild uptick in unemployment, or a small recession are going to suddenly make a lot of people realize "oh, this isn't just a game". For Bush Jr, it was kind of the same thing: there was a lot of people who were attracted to the swagger or whatever the gently caress. A war was basically good entertainment and a way to solidify identity. And then, sometime around 2005, it changed, and Bush spent his second term under 50%, and the last two years of it below 35%. Not only that, but it basically fractured the Republican base in regards to militarism (although they kind of learned the wrong lessons, as is often the case). It is just that with Trump, the real life consequences haven't really been felt. When they are, people's minds will change. The thing that could "optically" break his base is that if Fox and/or the national security apparatus challenge him. With the right messaging, Flynn could go up and say "I was just a simple solider who wanted to serve my country, when this fast talking New York City huckster manipulated me into doing some bad things..." But I don't know how probable it is that they are going to stand up against Trump.
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Jan 18, 2019 23:13
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/1086419880025284608 Notice that they didn't deny the substance of the claims, just said that "specific statements" and "documents obtained" "were not accurate". For that matter, it says "documents obtained by this office", not "documents in the possession of this office". So if the information is in a document obtained by the SDNY, and passed on to the SCO, that would be true. I mean, I am cautious about the Buzzfeed news. But the SCO hasn't denied the substance of the claims.
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Jan 19, 2019 02:28
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The Glumslinger posted:Rudy is back on the press tour This was kind of answered later on, but I wanted to add a detail: The lawyer who sat with Mueller for those 20 hours was Don McGahn, who was not Donald Trump's lawyer, he was the White House Counsel. Meaning that he has no legal obligation to confidentiality for anything that Trump did before entering the White House, or anything he does outside of the White House. (Lawyers for an organization have the organization as a client, not the employees, if Bill Gates tells a Microsoft lawyer that he killed a drifter to get an erection, that isn't privileged communication). If Trump blabbed to McGahn about any of this stuff, and the Special Counsel questioned it about him, he wouldn't be able to claim confidentiality. The lawyer that according to Giuliani, discussed the testimony with Cohen was John Dowd, who was Trump's personal attorney. I am not a lawyer, and this is some pretty complicated material, but here is where this gets really, really complicated. Rudy Giuliani, the President's current lawyer, made a statement about whether John Dowd, the president's former lawyer, talked about testimony with Michael Cohen, an even more former lawyer. That is a lot of lawyers. When John Dowd was talking to Michael Cohen, were they two lawyers representing a single client, with privileged legal communication? If Cohen was not at the time Trump's lawyer, and he wasn't Dowd's client, then Dowd can be questioned about whether he instructed Cohen to lie, and he has to either answer or take the fifth. Furthermore, because Giuliani has made public statements about Cohen and Dowd speaking, that might also compromise the privilege. I am really not sure on any of this, though. glowing-fish fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Jan 19, 2019 |
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Jan 19, 2019 02:46
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eke out posted:also today we got confirmation that higher level political people at DOJ started demanding they publicly refute it (the piece is careful to say Mueller's team was TOTALLY going to release a statement about it before their bosses called and it DEFINITELY didn't change anything) It was really unfortunate that a lot of the reaction, in the media, and on here, whiplashed so quickly. From "Finally, the Smoking Gun" to "Buzzfeed made up a story" Especially since the SCO response never denied the story, they just said "specific statements" "were not accurate". But now, even here, I think a lot of people are going to remember it as a snarl, rather than being able to parse out what happened, which was basically "Buzzfeed had a story that might have been wrong on details, but which no one is denying the substance of" One of the reasons for the Russia Investigation thread was to be able to kind of sort out what was well-accepted fact, what was a credible guess, and what was rumor, gossip and speculation. Unfortunately, that is gone for now.
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Jan 20, 2019 03:11
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I should probably put this somewhere to be copy and pasted in here, whenever the subject comes up: People seem to take Mueller as some sort of lone wolf 80s detective, out trolling the streets for information, giving Johnny the Shoeshine boy 20 dollars and asking if he has seen Trump with any Russians. Or, they take other people as saying that, thinking that we believe Mueller is going to bust Donald Trump like the last 15 minutes of a Perry Mason episode. Mueller can better be understood as a bureaucrat, whose main role is supervising a large team. There are over a dozen experienced federal prosecutors working for Mueller, and they might be overseeing a team of hundreds of agents, from multiple departments: Justice, Treasury, probably State, maybe Defense. This investigation is moving with bureaucratic inertia. Its hard to get going, but its hard to stop, and even if Mueller just decided "I am going to kill the investigation, after working on it for 18 months", what is he going to do? Take the filing cabinet with his leads, and sink it in the Potomac? In addition, there are other investigations going on into Trump. The SDNY is the largest, and some people have conjectured that it is even larger than Mueller at this point. There is also the investigation into Butina, which is being carried out in both Washington, DC, and South Dakota. There are State AG investigations. There are going to be more congressional investigations. There are probably foreign intelligence investigations by NATO allies, etc. No one person is in control of what is going on. One of the good things about the Russia Investigation thread is that people could read back into it and see how many times people's "Nothing Matters" takes were wrong. I had my own errors, I thought it would accelerate more quickly. But there were also people who were saying, in December of 2017, "Trump will pardon Manafort and Flynn, the Senate won't do anything, this entire investigation will disappear". And yet it hasn't. This story is still going to develop. In terms of a news cycle, two weeks is an eternity, and we can get diverted into talking about just how thuggish a bunch of bros from Kentucky are for a few days. But the investigation is still going on while new information is not being published.
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Jan 22, 2019 16:51
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sexpig by night posted:What do you want? Like, what's the best case here? If you translated this from smug to English, I would respond. I mean "pinned most of their hopes and dreams to the strong daddy FBI man riding in on a unicorn"... I don't really have a way to respond to that, because its so loaded of language. Do you think you are the only one who can do this. Here, I can do this just as easily. "Leftists believe that once a radical enough leader promises wealth distribution, their co-workers who constantly grumble about minorities buying lobster with food stamps will see the light of socialism, and spontaneous street demonstrations will cause the entire government to change overnight, bringing in an entirely new social and political era" See, I can misrepresent people too!
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Jan 22, 2019 17:03
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CascadeBeta posted:What's stopping Trump from just taking those non structure funds and demanding a border wall be built anyway? It's still the right play but I could see Trump just doing the illegal building just because nobody has the power to stop him. This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impoundment_Control_Act_of_1974 and This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_v._City_of_New_York Basically, under the separation of powers, congress decides how money is spent. The President can't decide not to spend the money, or to spend it on something else.
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Jan 23, 2019 19:14
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DynamicSloth posted:Trump has never had the slightest problem calling existing barriers part of his wall and Foxnews and Rush Limbaugh aren't going to call him on it either. Just a reminder that according to the best tool we have available, Nate Silver's presidential approval rating tracker, the last time that Donald Trump had an approval rating above 45% was January 25th, 2017. He literally did not make it out of his first week above 45%. The last time he was above 44% was March 14th, 2017. He fell below 43% a little bit after that, and then reached 43.1% in October of 2018. Most of his approval ratings were 37-39% in his first year, and 40-42% in his second year. This is assuming that we believe Nate Silver, and whether his "poll averaging" methodology works well, and just how much we should distrust Rasmussen. I think that people in this forum are wondering why Trump has any support at all, which is a really good question, at this point its kind of hard to conjecture what type of hardcore irrationality makes that high-30s percentage of people support him, but we also have to remember that Trump is still historically unpopular. A president who has never had an approval rating above 50% in his term is historically a very odd thing. Even if you look at individual polls, even outlier polls, at favorable times, by conservative leaning pollsters...I don't know the last time one of those even got him over 50%.
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Jan 23, 2019 19:27
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