As a human being I agree he tops trump in every way, his political ideas and how destructive they would be to America...Originally Posted by sancho
But, since it is unlikely that anyone would have a gun to my head I would vote for neither.
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Just remember that the crazy ideas are impossible, and he becomes more likable. As soon as he goes to implement free college for everyone, he realizes that it ain't happening. He then either starts to think about compromise or he's just a crazy, harmless uncle at the family reunion for 4 years. I see only upside to a Bernie term in office.
- I'd vote for Bernie, just because I wouldn't worry about him declaring martial law and suspending the constitution.
- agree on Matheson, Huntsman. One possibility: Jay Inslett, Gov of Washington state. I've heard him speak - articulate, rational, didn't seem extreme, seemed strong. I personally like Kamala Harris and understand why her stature is on the ascent among liberals, but the nation needs a uniter, not the oscliations we're seeing amplified after having the first African American president.
We're in a precarious time, and though it pains me to say it, I agree with my Indian researcher colleague (who can't vote) that the world needs a strong, healthy America, and America (right now) probably needs a white male to calm the subliminal tribalism that has been raging.
From National Review, not a never-Trumper publication (although some of its writers are):
The Cohen Drama
The president of the United States used a shady New York fixer to help on his most sensitive personal matters and hired a shady Washington fixer to briefly run his presidential campaign. What could go wrong? An awful lot, and on the same day.
Michael Cohen pled guilty Tuesday afternoon to a host of charges, including campaign-finance offenses that he said he committed at the direction of Donald Trump, at nearly the same time a jury in Northern Virginia found Paul Manafort guilty of eight counts of tax and bank fraud.
The Cohen campaign-finance violations involved the payments to a porn performer and a Playboy playmate that Trump allegedly had affairs with. Cohen’s statement in court was, on the one hand, not surprising since Trump’s prior denials that he knew about the payoffs were never credible, and on the other hand, shocking because it makes the president allegedly party to a crime, albeit an offense that is rarely prosecuted and is difficult to prosecute.
Hush payments themselves aren’t illegal. But Cohen pled guilty to exceeding campaign-finance limits, since the government considers the payments in the fall of 2016 to have been de facto campaign contributions, and to violating a ban on corporate contributions.
It’s not necessarily true, as Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis maintains, that if Cohen is guilty, Trump is guilty, too. It might be harder to establish that Trump meets the same stringent standard of criminal intent as his erstwhile lawyer, whose job it was to know the rules, and the president could argue that he wanted to avoid the personal embarrassment of his alleged affairs being revealed. Also, Trump was legally permitted to contribute as much as he liked to his own campaign and maintains he reimbursed the payments from personal funds.
Regardless, the issue for Trump now isn’t so much legal as political — Justice Department guidelines say a sitting president can’t be indicted, meaning impeachment is the only immediate recourse for such misconduct. We don’t believe such an alleged campaign-finance violation — sleazy as it is — rises to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor, but Democrats will almost certainly disagree if they take the House.
The best defense for Trump is the one he’s least likely to make — being completely truthful about what happened, apologizing, and putting his trust in the capacity of the American public to forgive even more embarrassing lapses.
As for the Manafort case, even though the jury couldn’t decide on the other ten counts against him, Robert Mueller scored a victory. He wants to squeeze Manafort and now has him looking at a sentence of 80 years. That’s a lot of incentive to tell all he knows. (The president has reacted not just by commenting on an ongoing criminal proceeding, which is inappropriate enough, but by outrageously arguing that defendants should never decide to “flip” and aid prosecutors.)
Whether Manafort, whose crimes long predate his involvement with the Trump campaign, actually has any information implicating the president is anyone’s guess. What we do know is that Trump is paying the price for his poor judgment, in his associates and his underlying conduct.
Last edited by LA Ute; 08-23-2018 at 03:36 PM.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Alan Dersrhowitz often irritates, but he is a man of principle. (That's why he often irritates.) Having dealt with my share of ego-driven federal prosecutors on behalf of clients, I did like what he has to say here.
Is "The Truth" the Truth When It Comes to Prosecutors?
Summary:
- All the Special Counsel needs, in order to charge a subject of an investigation with lying to a prosecutor, is a single witnesses willing to contradict the subject.
- The witness may not only be "singing," he may also be "composing" -- that is, making up or embellishing a story because he knows that the better his story, the better the deal.
- Under federal law, the testimony of such a "flipped witness" need not be corroborated in order to secure a conviction.
- Even one question that results in an answer that is contradicted by one witness would be enough to spring the perjury trap.
Read the whole thing.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
(The following is satire.)
Horrified Progressive Suddenly Realizes Mike Pence Next In Line For Presidency
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
It's a good point. One the responses is pretty salient, too. "What if there are audio tapes? Not exactly a jailhouse snitch situation".
Insightful and depressing:
Trump’s fame, wealth, and marginal position in the worlds of government, news media, and finance exempted him, in the minds of his supporters, from the informal rules that had conditioned the words and actions of candidates and presidents for years. Such freedom allowed him to bring into the political arena methods and practices from the worlds he knew best: tabloid journalism, professional wrestling, and reality television.
Shocking claims, conspiracy theories, and hints of lurid revelations that never quite pan out are straight from Page Six and the National Enquirer. The tent-pole rally, the braggadocio, posturing, invective, and prowling around stage are drawn from the WWE, and Trump’s long ties, Brioni suits, and unmistakable hair are all part of his “character.” His flair for operatic and unexpected shifts in direction, ambiguity and unpredictability in relationships, Twitter as “confessional,” emphasis on appearance, and love of the cliffhanger made his job-competition game show remarkably successful and durable.
Trump went from star of reality TV to sole practitioner of reality politics. He turned Republican, national, then world politics into a riveting spectacle, a new sort of contest in which the stakes are nothing less than the fate of the United States and the protagonist must face down a staggering number of opponents to win the prize. And Trump had an advantage. He alone was familiar with the contents of the reality politics rulebook. Which meant that his antagonists, from Bob Corker to Robert Mueller, from Chuck Schumer to Elizabeth Warren, from the media to the NFL, from Ayatollah Khamenei to Xi Jinping, were on defense.
This asymmetry ended last month. On July 25, Trump confronted something he had not seen before: An opponent who not just understood reality politics, but who also could practice them wholeheartedly because he was not beholden to elite institutions. Michael Cohen’s announcement that he had secretly taped Trump discussing payments to Stormy Daniels exemplified the new political mode. It was a stunning betrayal by a shameless man who said he had more secrets to spill. And the tapes themselves, surreptitiously recorded, played perfectly in a heated media environment where audio and visual recording is much more important than the gab-gab-gab of punditry.
It cannot be an accident that, in another development fit for sweeps week, Cohen was soon joined by a second Trump protégé. Last week, when Omarosa launched her new book by playing tapes of her own on NBC, she began executing a series of moves familiar to any Trump watcher. She made headlines not only with her charges against the president, but also with her suggestion, without any evidence, that there exists a secret recording in which Trump says the N-word.
What Cohen and Omarosa learned from Trump is that, whether it is true or not, the media will latch on to a hyperbolic statement just for its sensationalistic value.
https://freebeacon.com/columns/reality-tv-reality-politics/
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Introducing "reality politics" into our national discourse is similar to Kennedy vs Nixon introducing the telegenic factor into politics after their TV debate in 1960. (If you have a strong telegenic "presence", you could be a higher level, break through candidate. Examples: Reagan, Clinton, Obama.)
Is there a "good guy" candidate who can aspire to our better selves via the theatrics, ala John Cena? Or is the nature of reality politics going to be to tap into our less appealing emotions?
(I hope it doesn't become a dominant factor, but it's hard to see us going back to politics without some amounts of it.)
Last edited by Ma'ake; 08-26-2018 at 09:08 AM.
Kind of a contrast with the man the GOP nominated 4 years later:
I knew Grant Bennett in middle school and again at the U. He's a remarkably good and decent man.
Last edited by LA Ute; 08-27-2018 at 08:09 AM.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
This tragicomedy with Trump struggling to leave the flag at half-mast for McCain is ridiculous. It shows what a sociopath he truly is.
https://www.healthline.com/health/me...s-and-symptoms
Whatever his mental state, he is a small man who regularly does and says small things.
Last edited by LA Ute; 08-28-2018 at 10:42 AM.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
I've stopped reading Jennifer Rubin. She's become far too shrill and predictable, along with Frum.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Poll: Majority say Brennan, Comey should not have security clearances
http://thehill.com/homenews/administ...learances-poll
Fascinating. I simply can no longer predict (if I ever could) how people will react to what Trump does. Yes, Brennan has acted towards Trump like the south end of a horse headed north, but I thought Trump looked petty in cancelling the guy's security clearance.
Last edited by LA Ute; 08-28-2018 at 05:21 PM.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Devin Nunes travels to London in search of information to buttress his take on the Steele Dossier - leaders of UK Intel apparently had busy schedules. http://thehill.com/homenews/house/40...steele-dossier
Hypothetical: If the House goes to the Dems in 10 weeks, if you're Adam Schiff do you try to get Nunes off the Intel Committee? Compared to the Senate Intel Committee, the House is an unmitigated disaster. Maybe a few years of "separation of powers" remedial training would be in order for Rep Nunes.
For the good of the nation, Pelosi talking about a succession plan to younger members is a good thing, also. Time to change things up.
Right. You should just read those who reinforce your POV. Men of principle, like Alan Dershowitz.
Last edited by concerned; 08-29-2018 at 08:24 AM.
Never underestimate the ignorance of the population.
My guess is if you asked "Should we involve retired security personnel who actively worked for our national security interests against foreign governments in current security affairs" as the very next question, they would enthusiastically say we should. They probably wouldn't understand how the questions are interrelated.
What I like about Dershowitz is that he ticks me off 50% of the time and I agree with him the other 50%. People like Rubin and Frum are nowadays predictable. I get tired of reading screeds.
But I’ll make a deal with you. Give me the name of a leftish pundit and I’ll read him/her for a month. In return you’ll have to read a right of center writer I like.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
I still like Bruni and Dowd at the NYT. I think you probably already read them though. Collins bores me - she tries too hard to be funny all the time. Krugman bores me too; he was an economist.
I don't know Rubin well at all, but concerned's article was good. It's hard to be wrong when criticizing our current president.
I respect and like Bruni’s writing. Dowd I can take in intermittent doses.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Dowd I rarely bother with. She seems to be similar to how you characterize Rubin. Brunei seems too predictable. Krugman is very good when he writes about the economy (although the "I told you so" gets tiring. On non-economic stuff he's generally right but adds nothing to the conversation.
Maybe I'll have to try Bruni again.
I didn't see anything wrong with Rubin's column.
What I like about Bruni is that he regularly seems to acknowledge the good faith behind many opposing viewpoints. Dowd does sometimes.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
I just think they are good writers. Other people care about the content; I care about the writing. Krugman's writing does nothing for me. Oh, and I am 1000% not qualified to judge writing.
The Daily Caller, which was founded by Fox's Tucker Carlson, is pushing a story that the election hacking was actually done by China.
I haven't seen anything that corroborates that, but my dad is all in on that narrative now.
Here's an article about a provocative Harvard study, based on social media data: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily...-media-in-2016
Synopsis - it's mistake to assume the Left & Right in the US have a symmetry in news sources that feed their differing perspectives on reality.
Analyzing the rise of radical news on the left and right via accompanying ripples in social media, the study's investigators find a telling/disturbing trend:
2 examples: Alex Jones' Info Wars started a story about the Clintons operating a pedophilia operation, which got fairly widespread circulation within social media, culminated in the Rocket Pizza shooting. On the left, a reporter picked up on a revived lawsuit against Trump for having sex with a 13 year old. The suit was dismissed and the story had a very muted impact within social media.
There are no comparable idea factories on the left to InfoWars, etc, that create far-fetched stories that occasionally germinate up into more respected left leaning media like happens on the Right.
Maybe the biggest example of this phenomenon occurring on the Right is the Birther movement narrative - that eventually got great traction and had to be addressed by the State of Hawaii releasing Obama's "long form" birth certificate - which lingers on, like the various moon landing conspiracies, etc.
(An obvious response from the Right would be the Steele Dossier, considered a bunch of lies cooked up by the Clintons. The irony is this view was fabricated by Rightists as a "the victim sucked the bullet out of my gun!" kind of explanation/response to the actual Dossier, which seems to be holding up fairly well under investigation, as the explanations for Russian involvement slide from "never been to Russia" to "collusion isn't a crime" to "Hillary was far worse!".)
This study also explains why Trump claims "millions" are being denied free speech by Facebook & Twitter who are clamping down on troll farms and obvious false stories. (What he means is millions of his followers are being denied access to demonstrably false stories that feed their false narratives, forming the basis of their political world views.)
Are you kidding that there is no comparable news source on the left to Infowars as far as spreading disinformation and false reports?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
The notion that the problem is coming solely from the right strains credulity.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
I guess I'd like to know what the data is. Of course, that would require me to read the article.
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