Is Donald Trump Done for?

[rah]

Damn, I'm getting old, for a sec I thought you were being serious. DOH. Time for me to retire.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

It got me for a second too. It was well written.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

@Gori the Grey dropped his clever satirical nonsense into a space prepared by @onejayhawk with his totally accidental absurd nonsense. That made it easier to be fooled. Excellent work Gori!

 

[rah]

Yes, I bow to my better.

 

[onejayhawk]

He has filed his report, which means that his investigation is finished. There has been no indictment of Trump announced, which means that Trump is in the clear. QED. In fact, J didn't go far enough. Trump has been not just exonerated of guilt, but proven innocent by a full legal process. And not only that, he can't be tried for any crime he should ever commit in the future, because that would be double jeopardy. Indeed, he has been cleared henceforth to openly conspire with hostile foreign powers to corrupt the American electoral process. More, he is explicitly charged with doing so--by a new amendment to the Constitution clarifying previously obscure executive powers and responsibilities. He has been placed under a positive legal obligation to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. In any games of Monopoly he might play, he starts the game with the "Get out of jail free" card, and it returns to him when played. Furthermore, he has been granted a plenary indulgence. Parking tickets he may have been issued are now to be paid by the officer who issued the citation; if deceased, by that officer's heirs. The color symbolizing innocence will no longer be white, but will henceforward be orange. William Blake's "Songs of Innocence" are to be retitled "Songs of Trump" in any editions published in the United States of America.

It's all in Mueller's report, if you'd just take some time to read it.

You were doing fine when you said he was in the clear and that there was more. No one else was recommended for prosecution which is also a big deal. Since Mueller's team has leaked like a sieve since day #1, this is the expected outcome. Still, it's nice to get confirmation.

The rest of that is drivel but entertaining drivel.

J

 

[Timsup2nothin]

You were doing fine when you said he was in the clear and that there was more. No one else was recommended for prosecution which is also a big deal. Since Mueller's team has leaked like a sieve since day #1, this is the expected outcome. Still, it's nice to get confirmation.

The rest of that is drivel but entertaining drivel.

J

He was doing fine the whole time because he was mocking the idiotic nonsense you brought in and barfed on the rug. "No one else was recommended for prosecution" may actually include one "solid case but can't be indicted since he is the president." Rah immediately pointed out that unless you are actually Barr, and frankly you lack a whole lot of qualifications for the position, you have no way of knowing, but since he wasn't nearly as rude about it as you deserve you just keep blithely on with your idiotic posts. Go away J. The right wing echo chamber where this crap comes from is where you, and it, should stay.

 

[FriendlyFire]

The Dumb [censored] are getting it good and hard
Army Corp of Engineers are at the border errecting bardwire

A punch in the gut’: Farmers hit by tariffs see crops swept away by flood
Although the water has yet to recede enough for a true examination, Sheldon says more than $350,000 of his corn and soybeans is in jeopardy, and he worries he may lose the farm that’s been in his family for generations.
“Essentially, it’s two years of negative; these farmers lost what was stored in the bins and won’t be able to plant next year’s crop. So it’s going to be really tough for a lot of people.”
“We like what the president’s doing,” Sheldon said. “As the farmer sees it, we’ve had times a lot worse for grain prices as we’ve got right now. We know China’s been screwing us for years
The farmers said they were more concerned with the way the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was handling the management of the river.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...ory.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2d258e6f0547

 

[Birdjaguar]

The Boomers had EVERYTHING handed to them! This is what just totally slays me every time some Boomer jerkwad goes on about how subsequent generations are so selfish and entitled. You got EVERYTHING, and then turned around and decided us future generations were not deserving of all those things that you got at little or no personal cost - and not only did you take it all for granted, you had the nerve to convince yourselves that you actually earned it!

We can't get rid of you, because you entrenched your positions in society to the point we're stuck with you until you're good and goddamned ready to step aside. Not when you stepping aside is good for anyone else other than you.

So we got everything at little or no cost and then decided that those following us were not deserving enough for the same treatment? Interesting. What did we get? Please post a list of things, benefits, opportunities etc. that we got free or at low cost that you don't or can't benefit from or participate in. I'll help you start: Vietnam war and all of its veterans. Smoking in public.

I'm serious and do want to know what you think we got and then took away from you.

 

[Estebonrober]

The Dumb [censored] are getting it good and hard
Army Corp of Engineers are at the border errecting bardwire

It's sad when beliefs "trump" reality. If only there were more markets for them to sell their crops on while hammering out this trade dispute with China. If only we had some leverage in the area that could bring China to heel faster. hmm.

 

[rah]

So we got everything at little or no cost and then decided that those following us were not deserving enough for the same treatment? Interesting. What did we get? Please post a list of things, benefits, opportunities etc. that we got free or at low cost that you don't or can't benefit from or participate in. I'll help you start: Vietnam war and all of its veterans. Smoking in public.

I'm serious and do want to know what you think we got and then took away from you.

Hmm, isn't this younger generation proposing free college, health care for all, and UBI but at the same time saying we got things for free that they aren't getting.

 

[Tristan_C]

it's nice to get confirmation.

What chance did the combined might of Obama's CIA, DOJ, and FBI, even with compliant news outlets at heel, ever stand against George Papadoppoulopudous, age 28? We all saw the slaughter coming.

 

[Traitorfish]

We can't get rid of [Boomers], because you entrenched your positions in society to the point we're stuck with you until you're good and goddamned ready to step aside.

VOTE US OUT OF POWER. Stop complaining and do.

A tenner that Rah unironically uses the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps".

 

[rah]

We're only entrenched because the next generation doesn't vote. Next generation confirmed lazy and uncommitted.

 

[Lexicus]

So we got everything at little or no cost and then decided that those following us were not deserving enough for the same treatment? Interesting. What did we get? Please post a list of things, benefits, opportunities etc. that we got free or at low cost that you don't or can't benefit from or participate in. I'll help you start: Vietnam war and all of its veterans. Smoking in public.

I'm serious and do want to know what you think we got and then took away from you.

Your generation started at a time when the US accounted for half of world economic output. You created a full employment economy which included plenty of family-supporting jobs for people with no high school degrees, went to college for a fraction of the real costs to students today, made it easy and affordable for anyone white to buy a house. You then systematically destroyed all these things when the time came for subsequent generations to benefit from them.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Your generation started at a time when the US accounted for half of world economic output. You created a full employment economy which included plenty of family-supporting jobs for people with no high school degrees, went to college for a fraction of the real costs to students today, made it easy and affordable for anyone white to buy a house. You then systematically destroyed all these things when the time came for subsequent generations to benefit from them.

What Rah and Birdjaguar did? I thought it was Thatcher, Reagan etc who did so (neither of whom were Babyboomers) elected in by electorates who were not exclusively Babyboomers.

 

[innonimatu]

Mueller exonerated Trump. Cut him some slack.

And as far as I can see, this us just the truth, a truth that most here persist in denying.

Matt Tabibi's take on all thisis, as usual, good:

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD

The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it

Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

As has long been rumored, the former FBI chief’s independent probe will result in multiple indictments and convictions, but no “presidency-wrecking” conspiracy charges, or anything that would meet the layman’s definition of “collusion” with Russia.

The Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. Nobody even pretended it was supposed to be a fact-finding mission, instead of an act of faith.

The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing “All I Want for Christmas is You” to him featuring the rhymey line: “Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup.”

[...]

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”

Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

Openly using such language has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.

[...]

The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election.

The betrayal narrative was not reported at first as metaphor. It was not “Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as well be a spy for them.” It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing – crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump “will die in jail.”

In the early months of this scandal, the New York Times said Trump’s campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence; the Wall Street Journal told us our spy agencies were withholding intelligence from the new President out of fear he was compromised; news leaked out our spy chiefs had even told other countries like Israel not to share their intel with us, because the Russians might have “leverages of pressure” on Trump.

CNN told us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians known to U.S. intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA, who’d helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said the President was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing acts “nothing short of treasonous.”

Hillary Clinton insisted Russians “could not have known how to weaponize” political ads unless they’d been “guided” by Americans. Asked if she meant Trump, she said, “It’s pretty hard not to.” Harry Reid similarly said he had “no doubt” that the Trump campaign was “in on the deal” to help Russians with the leak.

None of this has been walked back. To be clear, if Trump were being blackmailed by Russian agencies like the FSB or the GRU, if he had any kind of relationship with Russian intelligence, that would soar over the “overwhelming and bipartisan” standard, and Nancy Pelosi would be damning torpedoes for impeachment right now.

There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.”

Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.

[...]

The Steele report occupies the same role in #Russiagate the tales spun by Ahmed Chalabi occupied in the WMD screwup. Once again, a narrative became turbo-charged when Officials With Motives pulled the press corps by its nose to a swamp of unconfirmable private assertions.

Some early stories, like a July 4, 2016 piece by Franklin Foer in Slate called “Putin’s Puppet,” outlined future Steele themes in “circumstantial” form. But the actual dossier, while it influenced a number of pre-election Trump-Russia news stories (notably one by Michael Isiskoff of Yahoo! that would be used in a FISA warrant application), didn’t make it into print for a while.

Though it was shopped to at least nine news organizations during the summer and fall of 2016, no one bit, for the good reason that news organizations couldn’t verify its “revelations.”

[...]

A bigger pretext was needed to get the other details out. This took place just after the election, when four intelligence officials presented copies of the dossier to both President-Elect Trump and outgoing President Obama.

From his own memos, we know FBI Director James Comey, ostensibly evincing concern for Trump’s welfare, told the new President he was just warning him about what was out there, as possible blackmail material:

I wasn’t saying [the Steele report] was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were keeping it very close-hold [sic].

Comey’s generous warning to Trump about not providing a “news hook,” along with a promise to keep it all “close-held,” took place on January 6, 2017. Within four days, basically the entire Washington news media somehow knew all about this top-secret meeting and had the very hook they needed to go public. Nobody in the mainstream press thought this was weird or warranted comment.

Even Donald Trump was probably smart enough to catch the hint when, of all outlets, it was CNN that first broke the story of “Classified documents presented last week to Trump” on January 10.

At the same time, Buzzfeed made the historic decision to publish the entire Steele dossier, bringing years of pee into our lives. This move birthed the Russiagate phenomenon as a never-ending, minute-to-minute factor in American news coverage.

Comey was right. We couldn’t have reported this story without a “hook.” Therefore the reports surrounding Steele technically weren’t about the allegations themselves, but rather the journey of those allegations, from one set of official hands to another. Handing the report to Trump created a perfect pretext.

This trick has been used before, both in Washington and on Wall Street, to publicize unconfirmed private research. A short seller might hire a consulting firm to prepare a report on a company he or she has bet against. When the report is completed, the investor then tries to get the SEC or the FBI to take possession. If they do, news leaks the company is “under investigation,” the stock dives, and everyone wins.

This same trick is found in politics. A similar trajectory drove negative headlines in the scandal surrounding New Jersey’s Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who was said to be under investigation by the FBI for underage sex crimes (although some were skeptical). The initial story didn’t hold up, but led to other investigations.

[...]

The Steele report was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of news stories to come, yet no journalist was ever able to confirm its most salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail, the bribe from Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc. In metaphorical terms, we were unable to independently produce Steele’s results in the lab. Failure to reckon with this corrupted the narrative from the start.

Washington Post reporter Greg Miller went to Prague and led a team looking for evidence Cohen had been there. Post reporters, Miller said, “literally spent weeks and months trying to run down” the Cohen story.

“We sent reporters through every hotel in Prague, through all over the place, just to try to figure out if he was ever there,” he said, “and came away empty.”

[...]

Perhaps worst of all was the episode involving Yahoo! reporter Michael Isikoff. He had already been part of one strange tale: the FBI double-dipping when it sought a FISA warrant to conduct secret surveillance of Carter Page, the would-be mastermind who was supposed to have brokered a deal with oligarch Sechin.

In its FISA application, the FBI included both the unconfirmed Steele report and Isikoff’s September 23, 2016 Yahoo! story, “U.S. Intel Officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” The Isikoff story, which claimed Page had met with “high ranking sanctioned officials” in Russia, had relied upon Steele as an unnamed source.

This was similar to a laundering technique used in the WMD episode called “stove-piping,” i.e. officials using the press to “confirm” information the officials themselves fed the reporter.

But there was virtually no non-conservative press about this problem apart from a Washington Post story pooh-poohing the issue.

[...]

Isikoff was perhaps the reporter most familiar with Steele. He and Corn of Mother Jones, who also dealt with the ex-spy, wrote a bestselling book that relied upon theories from Steele, Russian Roulette, including a rumination on the “pee” episode. Yet Isikoff in late 2018 suddenly said he believed the Steele report would turn out to be “mostly false.”

Once again, this only came out via a podcast, John Ziegler’s “Free Speech Broadcasting” show. Here’s a transcript of the relevant section:

Isikoff: When you actually get into the details of the Steele dossier, the specific allegations, you know, we have not seen the evidence to support them. And in fact there is good grounds to think some of the more sensational allegations will never be proven, and are likely false.

[...]

Ziegler: That’s interesting to hear you say that, Michael because as I’m sure you know, your book was kind of used to validate the pee tape, for lack of a better term.

Isikoff: Yeah. I think we had some evidence in there of an event that may have inspired the pee tape and that was the visit that Trump made with a number of characters who later showed up in Moscow, specifically Emin Agalarov and Rob Goldstone to this raunchy Las Vegas nightclub where one of the regular acts was a skit called “Hot For Teacher” in which dancers posing as college Co-Ed’s urinated – or simulated urinating on their professor. Which struck me as an odd coincidence at best. I think, you know, it is not implausible that event may have inspired...

Ziegler: An urban legend?

Isikoff: ...allegations that appeared in the Steele dossier.

Recapping: the reporter who introduced Steele to the world (his September 23, 2016 story was the first to reference him as a source), who wrote a book that even he concedes was seen as “validating” the pee tape story, suddenly backtracks and says the whole thing may have been based on a Las Vegas strip act, but it doesn’t matter because Stormy Daniels, etc.
Another story of this type involved a court case in which Webzilla and parent company XBT sued Steele and Buzzfeed over the mention their firm in one of the memos. It came out in court testimony that Steele had culled information about XBT/Webzilla from a 2009 post on CNN’s "iReports” page.
Asked if he understood these posts came from random users and not CNN journalists who’d been fact-checked, Steele replied, “I do not.”
This comical detail was similar to news that the second British Mi6 dossier released just before the Iraq invasion had been plagiarized in part from a thirteen year-old student thesis from California State University, not even by intelligence people, but by mid-level functionaries in Tony Blair’s press office.

This has been a consistent pattern throughout #Russiagate. Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or weeks later: news emerges the story is shakier than first believed. Step three (in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the same publication.

That’s been rare. More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development, leaving the “retraction” process to conservative outlets that don’t reach the original audiences.

So you here have (almost) all been religiously, feverishly wishing to believe an assortment of lies concocted from urban legends...

Do read the whole piece. I've tried to get the point across that the allegations of this russiagate thing just didn't make any sense, and that if there was any truth to them we've had seen evidence of it a long time ago by now. Most Washington insiders hated Trump and would not hesitate to use anything real they had against him. Resorting to lies was an alternative that only hampered him, not something they'd choose if they actually had what was necessary to remove him.

Now that saint Mueller has delivered the holy report, perhaps the religious followers of russiagate will get over it? And start caring about actually important things?

 

[rah]

Based on 2017 census numbers
https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk

Hmm a quick look at demos. The boomers = less than 100 million. Those over 18 that aren't boomers = over 150 million

Do the math, we shouldn't be in charge. Yes, we have more of the money and have rigged it some, but the percentage of voters from each group is the main cause for our being in power. Go out and vote and change this. Then you can vote yourself all those freebies you keep claiming you deserve.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

So we got everything at little or no cost and then decided that those following us were not deserving enough for the same treatment? Interesting. What did we get? Please post a list of things, benefits, opportunities etc. that we got free or at low cost that you don't or can't benefit from or participate in. I'll help you start: Vietnam war and all of its veterans. Smoking in public.

I'm serious and do want to know what you think we got and then took away from you.

• Single income families
• Living wages for unskilled labor
  • Min wage is worth 64% less now than it was in 1969
    
  • And there were less truly minimum wage jobs as a proportion of the job market back then
• Non-family roommates have climbed as people can no longer afford independence
• Delayed age of first childbirth and less children being born
• Delayed age of first marriage (probably for the best though!)
  
• Union participation used to be much higher; now we have laws restricting labor and a culture of hatred of unions
  
• Tenured positions at universities have been turned into low-wage adjunct jobs
• Teachers can no longer afford to live in the cities they teach in
  • Meaningful pay increases stopped for many teachers 10-20 years ago
• College access has risen but the entirety of the costs have been pushed to students who are overwhelmingly young
  • Demand is also much higher now than it was in the 60's-90's so the improved access is as much a function of natural increases with demand as any access-focused efforts.
• Healthcare costs have risen far faster than inflation while conservatives spend political capital attacking social programs
  • Social security and Medicaid are perpetually under attack
• Home ownership has declined for the young significantly
• A refusal to endorse legislative solutions to social problems
  • Gay marriage was forced by the courts
• A refusal to do anything about climate change
• Increases in restrictive voting laws and practices
• A refusal to confront mass shootings
• The number of American veterans of Iraq is beginning to rival Vietnam's draft population
  • PTSD is actually worse in Iraq/Afghanistan vets due to the number of and length of deployments soldiers served relative to their Vietnam counterparts
  • Meanwhile the VA is broken and underfunded but all our money went to tax cuts for the rich (and mostly older) instead
• Welfare benefits were massively restricted started in the 90's
• More single parent households
• Kids stay longer with their parents before moving out due to housing costs and low wages

This is all off the top of my head so I don't have sources. I proactively retract anything I got wrong here.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Based on 2017 census numbers
https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk

Hmm a quick look at demos. The boomers = less than 100 million. Those over 18 that aren't boomers = over 150 million

Do the math, we shouldn't be in charge. Yes, we have more of the money and have rigged it some, but the percentage of voters from each group is the main cause for our being in power. Go out and vote and change this. Then you can vote yourself all those freebies you keep claiming you deserve.

You shouldn't but you've also gerrymandered the country to keep conservatives in power. Conservatives trend old. Conservatives have rolled back voting access and placed new restrictions that disproportionally affect the poor and people of color which trend young. It's not just the economy that's been rigged, the political process has as well. Absolutely young people should vote more but old people in government work to make voting harder for the young and make their vote count for less so even on this front the young can't be held fully accountable for not showing up.

Shoot, we already would be in charge given the last two election cycles if the House wasn't so gerrymandered and the EC wasn't a thing. But don't worry, conservatives are actively stuffing the court system to ensure their legislative perogatives far outlast their stay in government.

 

[rah]

If your generation voted to the same percentage as ours, that advantage would be minimized. Would Trump be president if the youth in the midwest had gone to the polls in the same numbers as the older voters?
Just get your generation out to vote. And then you can vote yourselves the freebies you claim we did. Vote for free college, ubi and universal health care. Which actually sounds a tad hypocritical.