In other news about people who were at one time relevant in American politics, the War of 1812 was caused by a sex scandal involving Thomas Jefferson and Dolley Madison.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/way-more-americans-may-be-atheists-than-we-thought/
That’s interesting. In spite of the Protestant idea that everyone discovers their own religion, it usually passes down through families, and so religion usually has an ethnicity component. Denying religion can mean, in part, denying your ancestry.
I know lots of people who don’t believe in God. But, if asked, what religion are they? Catholic. Jewish. Southern Baptist. One’s even a minister. Because, to them, religion is more than just a belief in God. It’s an identity, it’s a community. And it’s a set of values and beliefs that are perhaps surprisingly unrelated to the existence of any deity. They see no reason to abandon all that just because they don’t believe in God. And, if they did, which community would they be trading their friends and family for? Dawkins? Yeah, thanks but no thanks.
I can see why the phrasing and format of the questionnaire could lead to wildly different conclusions.
Here’s a headline I’m sure most of you will love, even I giggled a bit.
“FBI Uncovers Evidence That 62 Million Trump Voters are All Russian Agents!” I guess this means you guys woke up in Russia the day after the election.
😃
Oops! Since you didn’t provide any attribution, I Googled it, and here’s the very first thing that came up.
A satirical story that said every American who voted for Donald Trump works for the Russian government appeared to have started as a parody on a neo-Nazi website.
“FBI uncovers evidence that 62 million Trump voters are all Russian agents!” read the headline on a May 15, 2017, post on USPoliticsInfo.com. The post was flagged by Facebook users as possibly being fake, as part of the social media site’s efforts to crack down on fake news.
The story is full of absurd details that make it obvious it’s a joke. It said that anonymous FBI sources had revealed the 62 million voters were employed by Russian intelligence (Trump garnered more than 62.9 million votes in the presidential election, almost 2.9 million less than Hillary Clinton).
The story also said Wikileaks was run by Vladimir Putin and conservative media personality Alex Jones’ real name was Alexi Jonesov. An unnamed FBI agent further said in the article that “it is highly possible that the Russians used a space-beam from a satellite to control their brains from a facility in St. Petersburg, and moved their bodies like puppets to the polls to check the Trump box” during the election.
The same story or portions of it also appeared on several other websites.
Most of the time, these fake news sites share the story without any attribution at all. But after some digging, we found that the original fake post came from the white supremacist website DailyStormer.com.
I’m not laughing yet.
When asked for comment about why neo-Nazis are promoting the idea that the Trump-Russia connection is “fake news”, a DailyStormer member said “I know nothing! Nothing!”. A second member added “Hogaaan!”
(if true) Hillary should go to jail.
Amazing.
See that down there? That’s the bar for evidence against Hillary, right there under the sewer line. And if you look up and squint, you can just make out the bar for evidence against Trump, right behind that satellite.
Even Jason Chaffetz says
Hm.
Also, the Democrats didn’t ultimately decide we needed a Special Counsel. The DOJ made that determination.
Why is there always a trail of ick?
Mueller’s law firm is WilmerHale, who represent people like… Manafort, Kushner, etc. I’m personally willing to take it as the coincidence of big law firms attracting the wealthy and powerful, as well as talented lawyers. But jeeze, I’m sure there’ll be a twitterstorm somewhere about this.
Yesterday? What did I miss?
Likely this:
DOJ has appointed a Special Counsel in the Russia probe.
Wow, nice pick. It will be tough to criticize him as a torch-wielding liberal. Not that it won’t happen anyway. DOJ Special Counsel is still a little hamstrung, but it’s the best we can hope for in this political climate.
I think so. He still answers to the AG, but it could be worse.
To elaborate for the benefit of the thread: we’re pretty much back to Nixon rules, as all the relevant post-Watergate reforms have expired. Nixon famously fired a series of people (the Saturday Night Massacre) who refused to fire the Special Counsel investigating him, until he found his hatchet man in Robert Bork, who complied. Theoretically, Trump could do the exact same thing. And he can still stonewall and resource-starve the Special Counsel and all sorts of other things too.
But, and this is important, Mueller will have some degree of autonomy and authority, if not outright independence. That puts him head and shoulders above the hand-waving-nothing-to-see-here exercises going on in the House and Senate.
Nixon’s (effective) firing of the Special Counsel led pretty much directly to his resignation. But that required a Congress that was willing to act when evidence was clearly laid out for everyone to see. That’s really the weak link this time around, IMO.
DOJ has appointed a Special Counsel in the Russia probe.
Wow, nice pick. It will be tough to criticize him as a torch-wielding liberal. Not that it won’t happen anyway. DOJ Special Counsel is still a little hamstrung, but it’s the best we can hope for in this political climate.
Nice segue!
I’ve seen a few Republicans trying to claim that Trump made his Flynn comments to Comey as a joke or exaggeration or friendly banter. But if that’s the case…why did he tell Pence and Sessions to leave the room first?
It’s a variation on the “he’s too much of an idiot to have really known the full import of what he was doing” defense. And it’s proven shockingly effective in the past. I expect it to be used a lot more as things come out.
It basically boils down to intent. Firing Comey was obstruction… depending on intent. And so on. The argument is that idiots have no intent in anything they do, so if they seem to commit a crime where intent is relevant, then they’re simply not guilty by reason of being an idiot.
I really disagree with that analysis. During Watergate, 2/3 of the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee voted against all impeachment charges. And that’s after there was an actual audio recording of the President committing the crimes he was charged with. Direct evidence like that is very rare, even in normal criminal cases–usually convictions hinge upon a pile-up of circumstantial evidence that can’t be explained away by any other plausible scenario (i.e. “beyond reasonable doubt”). That’s much more likely to be the case here.
So if the case against Trump never gets as bulletproof as the case against Nixon, I’d say well over 2/3 of the Republican members of the relevant committees will avoid taking any action at all. Which is more than enough to ensure nothing happens. And Republicans won’t see any blowback regardless of how big the scandal becomes. As long as Trump’s approval stays above ~32%, they keep the Senate–with no real risk of losing it until 2022. The House is theirs until 2022 even if voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats–and it’ll likely remain theirs after 2022 if they keep control of the redistricting process. What other changes may happen to our election system before 2022 is also worth considering.
If the scandals keep going at their current rate (major scandal every 12 hours or so, no actual video footage of Trump eating the puppy, just twelve witnesses), I think we’re looking at a second Trump term. That’s not doomed.
I think there are some additional factors to take into consideration here. One of them is that Trump has already made quite a few enemies in Congress, and he’s proving to be an embarrassment in terms of policy. Nixon was at least a savvy politician. There is also the matter of the crime. The Russia collusion has the potential to be much bigger than Watergate, if any hard evidence surfaces. Of course, there has been an erosion of values in Congress leading them to look the other way even when faced with wrongdoing, so perhaps these factors cancel out. But I don’t think that he is in a better position than Nixon at this point in his presidency.
Sure, there’s never a 100% perfect analog. That’s the perennial problem with using historical precedents to predict current events. But I think that it’s pretty clear (to me, at least) that if Republicans ran both houses of Congress, Nixon would never have been forced to resign, in spite of direct evidence of criminal wrongdoing. That doesn’t bode well.
I really disagree with that analysis. During Watergate, 2/3 of the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee voted against all impeachment charges. And that’s after there was an actual audio recording of the President committing the crimes he was charged with. Direct evidence like that is very rare, even in normal criminal cases–usually convictions hinge upon a pile-up of circumstantial evidence that can’t be explained away by any other plausible scenario (i.e. “beyond reasonable doubt”). That’s much more likely to be the case here.
So if the case against Trump never gets as bulletproof as the case against Nixon, I’d say well over 2/3 of the Republican members of the relevant committees will avoid taking any action at all. Which is more than enough to ensure nothing happens. And Republicans won’t see any blowback regardless of how big the scandal becomes. As long as Trump’s approval stays above ~32%, they keep the Senate–with no real risk of losing it until 2022. The House is theirs until 2022 even if voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats–and it’ll likely remain theirs after 2022 if they keep control of the redistricting process. What other changes may happen to our election system before 2022 is also worth considering.
If the scandals keep going at their current rate (major scandal every 12 hours or so, no actual video footage of Trump eating the puppy, just twelve witnesses), I think we’re looking at a second Trump term. That’s not doomed.
The Israelis don’t like being pissed on by the Russians
You lie down with Trump, you wake up wet.
One could argue that legalizing gay marriage and marijuana are conservative standpoints as that means less government limitations on your personal life.
You would think.
It’s a libertarian standpoint. Liberals can love it because civil rights and conservatives can love it because government bad.
And technically the libertarian POV would be that the government doesn’t recognize any marriages at all, which I can sympathize with but it leads to a huge rat’s nest of legal issues, so government recognition of family units in some capacity seems warranted to keep that side of things simpler. But I don’t see any reason why that can’t be extended to unmarried multi-generational family units, etc.
Just so I’m clear on how to present a logical argument in this thread:
Step 1: make a claim
Step 2: have said claim refuted
Step 3: throw personal insults
Step 4: get called out on said insults
Step 5: deny insults were made
Step 6: get asked to rationalize my comments
Step 7: avoid answering
Step 8: 😃Am I doing it right?
You can also skip straight from Step 1 to Step 8 by placing the smiley on your claim, which means you’re just joking around and you don’t actually believe what you’re posting. It does have the benefit of skipping Steps 2-7, which can be tedious. But overuse on the same type of content over & over could lead to accusations of being disingenuous.
you’d have no idea what they really think.
But isn’t that already the case?
Or is not understanding and not knowing two different things?
Snark tag fail. I’ll report it to Markdown-it.
What Trump supporters in this thread?
The Trump supporters in this thread have opted not to identify themselves.
Does claiming you aren’t one when you clearly are one count as not identifying yourself?
Yep.
But just because someone posts nothing but right-wing spin, conspiracy theories, and outright propaganda doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a Trump supporter. For example, they could post a disclaimer, say they’re a big Angela Davis fan, and then you’d have no idea what they really think.
later,
team trumpsupporter
What Trump supporters in this thread?
The Trump supporters in this thread have opted not to identify themselves. Some don’t post very frequently.
In a serious reply to darth_ender, I think my gripe with the Republican Party prior to the rise of Trump was not that Republicans were badly-educated, it was that there was an anti-intellectual bent even among some undeniably well-educated Republicans (there’s always been that element in American politics, it’s moved back and forth between parties, and it’s not exclusively Republican even today). Lack of expertise/knowledge/experience was seen as a net positive. That is simply a problem. It leads to… well, it leads to now.
I miss Bush I, really I do. Not that I really agreed with the man on very much, but he didn’t see ignorance as a virtue, and that’s the basis of a decent political system. I feel similarly about Romney (and it gives me something resembling hope that he outpolled Trump, even if he lost).
EDIT: To be clear, I also have problems with Republicans post-Trump, but I didn’t elaborate on that because I think we’re clearly in agreement.
The good news about this whole Mensch/Taylor thing is that either they found something huge or we’ll never hear any more predictions from them again. Their entire credibility is riding on this call.
What/who?
Don’t go there. Louise Mensch is to Bernie fans as Zerohedge is to Trump fans. Storylines their audience wants to believe so much they ignore the shoddy “journalism” behind them. It’s speculative fiction at best. And if one of her “scoops” turns out by sheer coincidence to be true, she’ll be vindicated–rather than just having proved the stopped clock twice a day metaphor.
It’d be nice to think the right had a monopoly on this sort of thing, but they don’t. We have our share of cranks on the left too, they’re just not as well-funded.
The good news about this whole Mensch/Taylor thing is that either they found something huge or we’ll never hear any more predictions from them again. Their entire credibility is riding on this call.
Yeah, we have enough fact-free sources in this thread without bringing Mensch into the mix. The less we hear from that front, the better.
Nobody’s replied to you, Mike, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t heard you. There’s just not much we can offer to help, at least me. But we are listening.
People, and by that I suppose I mean nearly everyone, just don’t understand mental illness at a fundamental level. People suffering from it, living with those suffering from it, and pretty much everyone they encounter in their daily lives. They wish for magic wands that can make it go away–medications that are “cures” rather than “managers”, psychotropic drugs without any side-effects, drugs that always work the same way for everyone at every time, unicorn and rainbow stuff. And why shouldn’t they wish for that? Mental illness really is scary. Your mom wants to wave a wand and have her smiling son back, no medicines, no side-effects. And shit, man, it sounds like you’d like that too. You’re just a little closer to the truth of the daily struggle than she is.
I wouldn’t begrudge people for wishing for things that are never going to happen–it’s a coping mechanism. Not a great one, I agree, but that’s what it is. Explaining the experience of having mental illness to someone else is a Herculean task. But it’s your family. Even if you don’t get it across, it’s worth repeated attempts.
Do your best. It’s the most any of us can hope to do. I can also say if it helps that cracked faith still manages to work pretty well sometimes, although it works differently than the pre-cracked variety.
So I know Rome is burning and all, but does it make me a bad person if I giggle a little bit every time I see a headline that says something about Trump taking on the leakers? I guess he’s concerned they may show people who Number One works for.
