The 45th POTUS - Donald J. Trump

[McParadigm]

Isnt Ivanka in Japan?

Maybe we'll get lucky and they just won't come back.

If Kushner went o Russia to troll people, it would be glorious.

A competent, provably innocent person could indeed have a lot of fun at a time like this.

[Bi_3]

Isnt Ivanka in Japan?

Maybe we'll get lucky and they just won't come back.

If Kushner went o Russia to troll people, it would be glorious.

A competent, provably innocent person could indeed have a lot of fun at a time like this.

True, but uhh... people, even these scumbags, don't have to prove they are innocent.

[Bi_3]

Please elaborate.

This sounds like something Hitler or Stalin did.

It's depends on what you believe happened. If you believe that Hillary paid for the "dossier" and that the dossier was the basis for the FBI's investigation into Trump's campaign last year, much of the evidence from which is being used against Trump now that he is president, then it makes sense to scream 'conspiracy' between H-dawg and Obama's DOJ. There is no evidence that this is reality, but it's a very compelling and increasingly widespread narrative for people looking to rationalize their psychological need to defend the president.

[jwfocker]

Please elaborate.

This sounds like something Hitler or Stalin did.

It's depends on what you believe happened. If you believe that Hillary paid for the "dossier" and that the dossier was the basis for the FBI's investigation into Trump's campaign last year, much of the evidence from which is being used against Trump now that he is president, then it makes sense to scream 'conspiracy' between H-dawg and Obama's DOJ. There is no evidence that this is reality, but it's a very compelling and increasingly widespread narrative for people looking to rationalize their psychological need to defend the president.

Even if it happened how is it a conspiracy? It doesn't discount what occurred between Russia.

[digster]

I think the issue Frum is presumably talking about is Trump's inability or unwillingness to understand why he should not be involved in the Justice Department.

"The saddest thing is that because I'm the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department," Trump said. "I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI."

Trump's comments on the radio program "The Larry O'Connor Show" about the Justice Department and FBI came the same week the Justice Department's special counsel investigation handed down indictments to his former campaign hands.

The President responded to a suggestion from the host that his listeners want the Justice Department to go after Clinton by saying that he'd like those entities to focus on his 2016 opponent as well.

"I look at what's happening with the Justice Department. Well, why aren't they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails and with her, the dossier?" Trump said, referring to the law firm Perkins Coie saying it had paid Fusion GPS to compile a dossier of information on Trump and Russia on behalf of Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Even more than this obsession with his former opponents (Obama and Clinton), which I think is as much political calculus on the part of Republicans that they're more popular with their base when attacking them than when making their own attempts to govern, there is the disquieting feeling that all of these things are going to go by unscathed. Whereas in the past, there may have been a bit of a come to Jesus moment of the country acknowledging the President should not be doing this, now there is a reflexive "but the dossier!" Party trumps everything.

I think that's probably over-idealizing the past to some degree, but not entirely. I think the country will be fine in broad strokes; it can take four years of Trump. But there are tons of corrosive and probably irreversible effects that come with having a President who doesn't really understand why he can't just be the Dear Leader. We'll probably never come back from that all the way, and we made our own bed on Nov. 8 last year.

[McParadigm]

The question of conspiracy is irrelevant to the problem, which is the president of the United States attempting to direct the actions of the justice department in a manner that exerts authority over its decisions.

[McParadigm]

It's not that far removed from saying "It makes sense that the president is demanding the Central Park five be given the death penalty if you believe the narrative that he believes, which I don't."

It really doesn't, either time. It circumvents the rule and process of law in favor of authorized, decreed retributions.

[Superblood Wolfmoon]

I believe at this point that this administration's days are numbered. It's going to get very ugly as the facts come out. Good news is new a WaPo/ABC poll shows 58% approval for Mueller's handling of the probe, and 49% believing Trump is guilty of a crime. As much as they've tried to steer the narrative on this, it's not working and will become even more insignificant once more of the truth starts to come out. I think that will come with the next indictment.

I hope that after all of this, the country takes a good look in the mirror and adjusts accordingly. Maybe this will end up shining the light on just how manipulated we are by the media, other countries, our own politicians, etc. and effect some sort of change. They've been successful at making us hate each other and it really has to not just stop, but begin to repair itself.

[Superblood Wolfmoon]

It circumvents the rule and process of law in favor of authorized, decreed retributions.

What!? Donald J. Trump doing such a thing?!

He's going to say far crazier shit as they close in. Hell, he may even do a crazy thing or two (let's hope not). But these are mostly the rantings of a pathetic, scared old man who's trying so hard to keep his shit together as the truth tightens around him.

[McParadigm]

I'm not sure what to expect from the next 12 days, but it sure has seemed like a lot of ramped up rhetoric and character attacks by surrogates and right media just before Trump is away and can claim distance from...whatever happens.

[wease]

What if Trump fires Mueller?

[Bi_3]

It's not that far removed from saying "It makes sense that the president is demanding the Central Park five be given the death penalty if you believe the narrative that he believes, which I don't."

It's not a judgement on the legality or moral righteousness of his view, simply an acknowledgement that some elements of a human being's thought processes are both socially constructed and influenced by our need to rationalize the decisions we subconsciously make.

It really doesn't, either time. It circumvents the rule and process of law in favor of authorized, decreed retributions.

This is the conspiracy he alleges.

[McParadigm]

It really doesn't, either time. It circumvents the rule and process of law in favor of authorized, decreed retributions.

This is the conspiracy he alleges.

No, it's the conspiracy in which he is engaged.

The conspiracy he is using to try and fling the justice department against his former political opponent is that the Democratic Party has a damaged and manipulatible primarying process, which is ugly and true but not criminal.

[Bi_3]

It really doesn't, either time. It circumvents the rule and process of law in favor of authorized, decreed retributions.

This is the conspiracy he alleges.

No, it's the conspiracy in which he is engaged.

The conspiracy he is using to try and fling the justice department against his former political opponent is that the Democratic Party has a damaged and manipulatible primarying process, which is ugly and true but not criminal.

That's just the piece of it he's focused on right now, but the broader claim is roughly outlined here:

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/10/ ... ussia.html

"The infamous dossier – which suggested Trump himself was compromised and open to financial blackmail by the Kremlin, resulting in collusion between the two – was a collaboration between former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele; Fusion GPS, a Clinton-linked strategic think tank firm out of D.C.; and, as revealed in the Washington Post story, party funded and researched by the Clinton campaign.

This all possibly could be written off as opposition research, but the dossier was also used, in part, as justification by a FISA court to obtain a surveillance warrant on members of the Trump campaign, and is part of an ongoing investigation into Russia’s involvement in the election by special prosecutor Robert Mueller.

Even more revealing, though, is that the FBI continued to employ and pay Steele as a source – even after the Trump dossier became public and the information it contained remained unverifiable. They did cut him loose shortly after the Buzzfeed report, but questions remain as to how this dossier played into former FBI Director James Comey’s decision-making in regards to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and revelations that Comey himself drafted a June letter clearing Clinton of any and all possible charges, months before she was to be interviewed by investigators."


This is the bullshit that Trump believes; that Obama's DOJ conspired with Hillary to paint this Russia collusion narrative.

[McParadigm]

I understand the place it holds in the fabric of fantasy that is being sold by some personalities and media groups.

However, he didn't say anything like that here. He said "Pocahontas just stated that the Democrats, lead by the legendary Crooked Hillary Clinton, rigged the Primaries! Lets go FBI & Justice Dept."

[Superblood Wolfmoon]

Working with Steele is not the same as working with Russia. What don't people understand about this?

[digster]

I'm not sure if there's really much disagreement here. The thing about Trump's assertions is that he just doesn't seem to understand or care why he doesn't get to punish people by fiat. That remains the point regardless of his reasoning as to why his Justice Department is unsatisfactory.

This isn't really anything new; he was the same way during the campaign. He'd want to give himself broad, unencumbered powers because he's The Leader. Whether it's because he wants to torture or wants to pin Hillary Clinton for "the dossier" that instinct hasn't changed.

[digster]

I don't know if this works here (and the headline simplifies the article slightly; there's more going on here than just Trump), but it's still an important thing to consider in the many ways he's going to impact things we can't fully see yet.


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trum ... SKBN1D14G0

What many experts call false hopes for a coal resurgence have mired economic development efforts here in a catch-22: Coal miners are resisting retraining without ready jobs from new industries, but new companies are unlikely to move here without a trained workforce. The stalled diversification push leaves some of the nation’s poorest areas with no clear path to prosperity.

Federal retraining programs have fared better, with some approaching full participation, in the parts of Appalachia where mining has been crushed in a way that leaves little hope for a comeback, according to county officials and recruiters. They include West Virginia and Kentucky, where coal resources have been depleted.

But in southern Pennsylvania, where the industry still has ample reserves and is showing flickers of life, federal jobs retraining programs see sign-up rates below 20 percent, the officials and recruiters said. In southern Virginia’s coal country, participation rates run about 50 percent, they said.

[Bi_3]

Working with Steele is not the same as working with Russia. What don't people understand about this?

No, for sure it's not and this is Fox News, so logical coherence is not gonna really be there anyway. The question is, and this is a fair question, were the sources for Steele's information echoing things based on direction from Russia or were they really Steele's assets telling him secrets? Either answer in no way delegitimizes what Mueller has discovered or his methods or indictments, in my mind at least, but if Steele was intentionally fed false information, his inclusion of the information may have impacts on the public's perception of his and the prosecution's motives.

[jwfocker]

Considering Steele's past (MI6 stationed in Moscow) and the people/organizations he's gone up against he doesn't come off as a patsy or someone who would ride with false information.