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New Donald Trump thread


Muda69

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10 minutes ago, foxbat said:

Or the likes of Rep. Rob Woodall.

https://www.newsweek.com/republican-woodall-read-mueller-report-msnbc-1443125

FTA:

Georgia Republican Rob Woodall offered a boastful explanation for why he has no interest in reading any part of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, even citing his past disinterest in reviewing accusations against Bill Clinton in 1998.

 

I guess he doesn't read anything?

 

 

Why read when he can look at facebook videos and get the true story.  At least he is retiring after this term.

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19 hours ago, BARRYOSAMA said:

Exactly....Louie "Goober" Gohmert and Jim "Meathead" Jordan will completely embarrass Mueller.

The only triple digit IQ in the entire Trump collusion scandal is Mueller.

 

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34 minutes ago, Howe said:

Jim Jordan - Mueller video

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/watch-gop-rep-jim-jordan-quickly-corrects-himself-after-saying-mueller-found-no-obstruction/

FTA:

“I think the one question most Americans want to know, when did you first learn there was no obstruction,” Jordan began, then quickly corrected himself.

“Or excuse me, no collusion?” he continued. “The central charge of Bob Mueller — the central task was to find if there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

It was then Stephanopoulos’ turn to correct Jordan.

“Actually, he says he didn’t look at collusion,” Stephanopoulos said. “That’s not what he said. When he spoke in his report, it says very clearly he didn’t examine that question. What he did say is that he could not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

Undeterred, Jordan continued to insist that Mueller be asked about not establishing “collusion.”

“After 10 months, if they couldn’t establish collusion, how long did it take Bob Mueller?” Jordan asked, and said he thinks “that’s a question I think the whole country has for Bob Mueller.”

Jordan’s slip, while inadvertent, demonstrates the gravity of Mueller’s press conference, which makes it impossible for claims of “no obstruction” to carry any weight, while also putting Democrats on the spot to do something about it.

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16 hours ago, BARRYOSAMA said:

No conspiracy.  Obvious examples of collusion and obstruction litter the report.

Night Hawk, can you please provide highlighted statements, passages, etc. from the report to backup your claim of 'obvious examples'?

 

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https://nypost.com/2019/06/10/jerry-nadlers-trump-bashing-show-is-a-bust/?fbclid=IwAR09rOgRGTWQr_qkRP7ympz6rw95v9TMPf-p-uO2wa8OscjZlVp_7cVodnE

“You’re here as a prop. You’re functionally here as a prop because they can’t impeach Donald Trump”: Hand it to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) for cutting to the heart of John Dean’s testimony Monday before the House Judiciary Committee.

Chairman Jerry Nadler has to put on a show of pursuing President Trump because the party’s left wing demands it. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t let Nadler go to impeachment hearings because she knows the broader public will see it as a partisan outrage.

Pelosi’s bid to appease the extremists runs to quotes about how she wants to see Trump“in prison.” Nadler, meanwhile, must resort to, yes, props.

John Dean was President Richard Nixon’s loyal flunky until the Watergate prosecutors got the goods on him. He then flipped, testifying against other conspirators before heading off to prison for his own crimes.

Since getting out, he’s made a living playing moral paragon: Team Trump’s supposed evils are at least the third time he’s talked of a presidency being “worse than Watergate.”

But he doesn’t actually know anything — he was just there to sound off and maybe get Nadler some headlines, a hit on the network evening news or at least a “Daily Show” clip.

Thing is, it’s not working: Even CNN didn’t carry the hearing live, because it can’t afford to bore its audience.

If Nadler wants to avoid a complete flop, he needs to get not just cynical, but creative. Maybe subpoena Monica Lewinsky?

John Dean?  Really?  

 

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Is Accepting Information About a Political Opponent From a Foreigner 'an Assault on Our Democracy'?: https://reason.com/2019/06/13/is-accepting-information-about-a-political-opponent-from-a-foreigner-an-assault-on-our-democracy/

Quote

One of Donald Trump's redeeming (and entertaining) qualities is that he tends to say exactly what he thinks, without regard to appearances. Yesterday, for instance, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos asked the president what his re-election campaign should do "if foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on an opponent—should they accept it, or should they call the FBI?" Trump responded candidly: "I think maybe you do both. I think you might want to listen. There's nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country—Norway—[and said], 'We have information on your opponent,' oh, I think I'd want to hear it."

That response provoked predictably over-the-top criticism from Trump's opponents. "It's a very sad thing," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters today. "That's an assault on our democracy." Yet Trump's take is a lot closer to the legal, moral, and practical reality of the situation.

While Trump allowed that "if I thought there was something wrong, I'd go maybe to the FBI," he was generally dismissive of the notion that the mere offer of information would qualify. "You're a congressman," he said. "Somebody comes up and says, 'Hey, I have information on your opponent. Do you call the FBI?…You don't call the FBI. You throw somebody out of your office, you do whatever you do….You go and talk honestly to congressmen, they all do it. They always have. And that's the way it is. It's called 'oppo research.'"

The context of this discussion, of course, is Donald Trump Jr.'s June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer claiming to have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The elder Trump was emphasizing that, in his view, his son did nothing illegal or wrong by agreeing to the meeting (during which no useful information materialized, according to Trump Jr.) or by failing to notify the FBI about it.

Some of the president's critics have argued that the Trump Tower meeting violated a federal law that prohibits foreign nationals from contributing "anything of value" to a political campaign. But that interpretation is controversial. As Special Counsel Robert Mueller noted in his report on Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election, "No judicial decision has treated the voluntary provision of uncompensated opposition research or similar information as a thing of value that could amount to a contribution under campaign-finance law." Given that uncertainty, it would be hard to make the case that Trump Jr. knowingly violated the law, which is required for a conviction.

Furthermore, if the law were understood to cover situations like this, it would effectively criminalize constitutionally protected speech. Mueller noted that "such an interpretation could have implications beyond the foreign-source ban," such as limits on campaign contributions by Americans, and "raise First Amendment questions."

Trump, in other words, is on solid ground in arguing that such contacts are legal. Whether you also agree that "there's nothing wrong with listening" will depend on whether you share Pelosi's hysterical view that accepting or using information about a political opponent amounts to "an assault on our democracy" when the source is not a U.S. citizen.

Although Trump obviously does not share that view, he is intermittently aware that other people do. He clearly was worried that the Trump Tower meeting would make him look bad, which is why he tried to conceal the real motivation for it after The New York Times broke the story in July 2017.

From an ethical perspective, however, the relevant question is not the nationality of a source offering "oppo research" but the accuracy and relevance of the information. Another consideration is whether the information was obtained illegally—by hacking emails, for example. While the Supreme Court has said people have a First Amendment right to share illegally obtained information if they were not involved in the lawbreaking (something that news organizations frequently do), you might reasonably argue that they should also report such crimes when they become aware of them, which may be what Trump had in mind when he said he might contact the FBI "if I thought there was something wrong."

When politicians or their minions spread information about their opponents that is irrelevant, misleading, or false, Pelosi seems to think, that is just democracy in action, as long as no foreigners were involved. But when they use information from a foreign source, no matter how accurate or germane it is, our political system is in grave danger. To be fair to Pelosi, that view seems to be widely shared within Congress, the intelligence community, and the mainstream press. That doesn't mean it makes sense.

Nope, it doesn't make sense.

 

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I'm left scratching my head, what was the Steele Dossier, which was paid for by the HRC Campaign?

Does listening to oppo research constitute foreign meddling in an election?

Why would the FBI have any jurisdiction over foreign election meddling?

If you receive the information and report everything to the FBI, is the information still fair game to use against your opponent?

The state of California is wanting to give free healthcare to illegals, shouldn't these illegals' home countries have a say in our elections? I mean it does affect the welfare of their citizens. 

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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/19/donald-trump-raises-record-248-million-one-day-he-/?fbclid=IwAR3U9akLeszhlnEQkQwJDZUK0SiH0Hq-JUZ-tpBbYUOzujZgqDXGhumabYo

President Trump raised a record $24.8 million in less than 24 hours Tuesday as he officially kicked off his reelection campaign, officials said.

The president’s one-day total is more than any Democratic presidential candidate raised in the entire first quarter. It’s also more than the top five polling Democrats raised, combined, in the first 24 hours of their campaign launches....

....Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden received glowing media reports for raising a “record-breaking” $500,000 on Monday night in an event at the Manhattan townhouse of billionaire hedge fund manager Jim Chanos.

 

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As U.S. Steel Slows Production, It's Time To Stop Pretending Tariffs Work: https://reason.com/2019/06/19/as-u-s-steel-slows-production-its-time-to-stop-pretending-tariffs-work/

Quote

The largest American steelmaking company will reduce production at two facilities due to decreased demand, despite a year-old effort by the Trump administration to prop up domestic steelmakers with protective tariffs.

It's time to admit those tariffs have failed to achieve their primary policy aims.

U.S. Steel announced Tuesday that it would idle one blast furnace at its biggest facility in Gary, Indiana, and another at its plant in Ecorse, Michigan. In a statement, the company said the decision to shut down the two furnaces was because "market conditions have softened."

The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. Steel, like other domestic steelmakers including Nucor and Steel Dynamics, has reported weaker-than-expected demand and reduced profit expectations in the second quarter of this year. Although President Trump provided a brief boost to the industry last year when he slapped 25 percent tariffs on foreign steel, that balloon appears to have popped.

Those tariffs "allowed domestic producers to raise prices, but falling demand for steel has blunted the benefit of the tariff in recent months," the Journal reported.

Gee, who could have predicted a relationship between higher prices and slackening demand?

On their own, the idling of two U.S. Steel furnaces would be a rather unremarkable blip on the national economy, but Trump has spent the past year turning the steel industry's successes and failures into a metric for his administration's trade policies.

....

When the tariffs were imposed on June 1, 2018, U.S. Steel stock was trading at nearly $37 per share. On Wednesday afternoon, the price was hovering around $15.25. Other big domestic steel producers have faced similar sell-offs.

Again, this should have been anticipated. The same thing happened in 2002 when President George W. Bush briefly hit imported steel with protectionist tariffs.

Bush ultimately withdrew those tariffs about nine months after they had been imposed. Trump's steel tariffs have been in place for more than a year, though the Trump administration did ease up last month by exempting steel imported from Canada and Mexico.

At this point, it should be abundantly clear that Trump's steel tariffs are working no better than Bush's did. If the tariffs were boosting domestic production—even at terrific cost to consumers, businesses, and shareholders—the administration could at least argue that the trade-off was a necessary one. As it stands, there is no redeeming argument for Trump's steel protectionism. The only question is how much longer it will take for the president to realize that.

 

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Those tariffs "allowed domestic producers to raise prices, but falling demand for steel has blunted the benefit of the tariff in recent months," the Journal reported.

Well - there's your problem right there......."allowed", not forced.......The tariffs didn't force the price increases, the manufacturers just got greedy.....

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23 minutes ago, swordfish said:

Those tariffs "allowed domestic producers to raise prices, but falling demand for steel has blunted the benefit of the tariff in recent months," the Journal reported.

Well - there's your problem right there......."allowed", not forced.......The tariffs didn't force the price increases, the manufacturers just got greedy.....

So you don't believe manufacturers whose products are affected by Mr. Trump's tariffs should be allowed to raise prices on those products?  Mr. Trump caused this problem, not the steel companies.

 

 

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The Right Call on Iran, But It Shouldn’t Be Trump’s Call: https://www.cato.org/blog/right-call-iran-it-shouldnt-be-trumps-call

Quote

It says something about the way we go to war now that one almost feels like thanking President Trump for deciding, at the last minute, not to kill (at least) 150 people—and risk catastrophic conflict with Iran—in order to avenge one unmanned Northrup-Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk drone, downed by an Iranian missile. It wouldn’t be “proportionate,” he said, and he’s right—though that apparently didn’t bother National Security Adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and CIA Director Gina Haspel.

While you’d never call the man cautious, much less squeamish about foreign casualties, it’s not the first time Donald Trump has appeared that way compared to the putative “adults in the room” advising him. There are several such stories in Bob Woodward’s 2018 book Fear: Trump in the White House. In April 2017, for example, after Trump becomes enraged by video of Syrian children dying from a sarin gas attack, the Joint Chiefs present him with a range of airstrike options that includes a 200-missile attack aimed at taking out the bulk of the Syrian Air Force (and almost certainly killing large numbers of Russian advisers) Trump does the smarter thing and bombs an empty runway. The night of the strike, he calls a National Security Council meeting. Woodward writes that Trump was “unusually focused on the details…. What happens if a missile goes off course?” Trump’s so concerned about it, he demands that Mattis get him a secure line to the captains of both guided missile destroyers “are your guys the best at programming the missiles?” Have we got this right? 

True, Woodward recounts scenes that have you wishing someone would steal the nuclear launch codes off Trump’s desk, but more than once, the president appears more restrained and less bloodthirsty than the people advising him, like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who urges Trump to hit North Korea, saying “If a million people are going to die, they’re going to die over there, not here.” “ That’s pretty cold,” was Trump’s response.

And while it’s nice that President Trump periodically steps back from the brink, it’s insane and appalling that we’ve staked so much on the instincts and whims of one eminently fallible human being. That is not the way it was supposed to work: “This system will not hurry us into war,” James Wilson told delegates to the Pennsylvania ratifying convention in 1787, “it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress, for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large.”

From the Cold War through the Forever War on Terror, we’ve watched the emergence of a radically different regime, in which going to war is easy, frequent, and rarely debated. Lately, there are encouraging signs of resistance to that dynamic on Capitol Hill: yesterday’s Senate votes to rescind military assistance to Saudi Arabia’s murderous war on Yemen, Wednesday’s House vote to repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, that the administration seems to think empowers the president to go to war with Iran, nearly 18 years later. But much more needs to be done to restore democratic, constitutional checks on U.S. military power, before it’s too late.

Agreed.  In situations like this the decision to even fire a single missile needs to be removed from the office of the POTUS.  The legacy of the Cold War, where the belief that the POTUS needed the quick and unitary power to respond to a nuclear strike by the USSR could somewhat be justified,  is still with us today.

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Knitting Website Ravelry Bans All Pro-Trump Content: https://reason.com/2019/06/24/ravelry-knitting-trump-ban-website/

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Ravelry, a website and forum for the knitting community, announced Sunday that it would no longer allow users to show support for President Trump and his administration, either by speaking in favor of Trump, or by designing Trump-inspired patterns.

"We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy," wrote Ravelry's site administrators. "Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy."

This is an absurd position to take—no, not everyone who supports Trump is a white supremacist—though the site is free to take it. Ravelry is a privately-owned space, and is within its rights to enforce all kinds of restraints on its users behavior. Anyone who doesn't like this should go find a rival knitting community, or start their own.

Still, it's a sad sign of the these incredibly partisan, increasingly tribal times that Trump supporters and Trump opponents cannot exist side by side, knitting in relative peace.

....

Agreed, a sad sign of the times.  Does anybody here on the GID believe that support for the Trump administration is also support for white supremacy?

 

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Reddit Has 'Quarantined' Popular Pro-Trump Forum Over Violent Threats: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/26/736351237/reddit-has-quarantined-popular-pro-trump-thread-over-violent-threats

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Reddit, the self-proclaimed "front page of the Internet," is restricting a forum that is wildly popular among some of President Trump's core fans.

Officials with Reddit said Wednesday that a community on the message board called The Donald, which has around 750,000 followers and is known for its provocative content, is being "quarantined" over violations of its content policies.

Those violations, the company said, include threats of violence directed toward police and public officials in Oregon, where the Democratic governor has ordered the state police to look for Republican lawmakers who had fled the state in protest of a climate change bill.

The action against the so-called subreddit does not outright ban the forum, but it does warn visitors about the violations before accessing the messages and restricts how content from the community is shared across the site.

...

On Wednesday, moderators of the forum tweeted, in response to the quarantine, that Reddit had "totally suppress" the community "on "the eve of the first Democratic debates."

...

The moderator framed the action as Reddit attempting to muzzle the community's users.

"They already largely censored The_Donald from reaching the front page, but apparently that wasn't enough. So they began looking for any reason to quarantine us," a moderator of the forum tweeted.

Reddit says it has around 330 million active monthly users, making it the fifth most-visited site on the Internet.

Being a private entity Reddit can do whatever it wants.  I do find the timing of the "quarantine" interesting however.

 

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7188687/Widow-Salvadoran-father-drowned-daughter-Rio-Grande-speaks-out.html

Oscar worked at a Papa Johns pizza restaurant, where he was earning $350 a month.  

They lived off his wage, limiting themselves to $10-a-day, because Tania had already quit her job as a cashier in a Chinese restaurant to care for Valeria, their only child. 

The family lived with her mother in a housing complex in Altavista.

They were not fleeing violence, Tania's mother has since said, but were in desperate search of a life where they could earn more. 

Their plan was to spend a few years in America to save up enough money to eventually return to El Salvador and buy or build their own house.  

'I begged them not to go, but he wanted to scrape together money to build a home. 

'They hoped to be there a few years and save up for the house,' Rosa Ramirez, Oscar's mother, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Determined to eventually get to the US, on April 3, they left El Salvador for Mexico.  

SF is trying to be understanding of the people fleeing upheaval, turmoil, and violence in their homelands, but this story, while heartbreaking considering the result, sheds light on my suspicion that there is a pretty large amount of the migrant population (especially those crossing the border illegally) that are misusing the "asylum" story falsely.

This guy didn't need to risk his and his kid's life to escape anything.  I can't blame him for wanting to come to the US to improve his life, but again - come to the front door, knock and wait in line.

 

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In talking to local Mexicans, this seems to be the MO. It takes them about 10 years here to save the money to return to Mexico and basically retire. 

These sorts of stories in my opinion the real tragedy on the border. Forget the ramifications of illegals on the US, what about the untold horror stories like this. Our southern border is a humanitarian crisis, that needs to be stopped. In my opinion there's plenty of blame to go around with our immigration issues. I believe it was greatly exacerbated under the BHO administration with DACA. I'm sure it was mentioned last night in the debate, as I'm sure it will be mentioned tonight. But to the current members of congress who are clamoring for action, what have you done to address the issue? Can you point us to the legislation you've written to deal with this situation? Or is it easier to just say it's Bush's fault, it's BHO's fault, it's Trump's fault?

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