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Muda69

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I'm assuming we won't be seeing any tweets from Trump or announcements from Kris Kobach about election fraud in North Carolina ... other than to try to pretend that the election was "stolen" from Harris.

https://news.yahoo.com/north-carolina-board-votes-to-hold-new-house-election-over-absentee-ballot-fraud-213703280.html

FTA:

The North Carolina Board of Elections voted unanimously to hold a new election in the state’s Ninth District after overwhelming evidence of vote tampering.

...

After hearing testimony all week, the board — which consists of three Democrats and two Republicans — ruled that absentee ballots were illegally collected by Harris staffers. A spokesperson for state Republican Party told Yahoo News that candidates would file to run in a new primary prior to the special election.

Republicans initially objected that Democrats were trying to “steal” the election with claims of fraud, but over the last several months evidence accumulated that a Harris consultant had sent workers to collect absentee ballots and destroy them or fill them in for the Republican.

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8 hours ago, gonzoron said:

I miss Obomber 44.

Image result for Bomber jacket 44

Looks like he's got less grey hair now.  Does he or doesn't he?  Only his hairdresser knows for sure.  

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And the lying on the wall starts/continues.

This segment of the wall in New Mexico was completed in September of 2018.  And it's not new wall, it's a replacement segment.  Trump does realize that he was given 1.3 billion last year that he never really got around to spending and, his recent power grab "national emergency" has resulted in no dollars at this point and may never depending on whether Congress has the spine when they vote this week to put up enough votes to override a veto by Trump.

This posting is fairly telling about the President ... if he's JUST NOW finding out about this, since it was "finished" three weeks ago, then he really could care less about the wall as he's not at all tracking his pet project.  If he actually knew about it and believed it to be new wall, then again he's being disingenuous in that he held off talking about the "January 30 completion" while the end of the shutdown was basically a week old.  He didn't need folks riled up over him shutting down the government if indeed part of the wall was "being built" and he also needed to make it seem like an emergency and seeing building on a wall would have dampened the urgency of said "emergency."  If he knew when he tweeted this that it was replacement wall, then the info in the tweet is deceptive in at least two different ways ... again, bringing us back to the fact that the President is lying.  I guess folks can take their picks, but I'm not sure that any of the alternates works for the President ... [edit: except purely with his base.]

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http://reason.com/blog/2019/02/26/house-votes-to-terminate-trumps-national

Quote

The House of Representatives voted today to terminate President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency, in a rare but welcome rebuke of executive overreach.

H.J. Res 46, which reads simply "the national emergency declared by the finding of the President on February 15, 2019…is hereby terminated" passed on an 245-to-182 vote. The resolution commanded the support of all House Democrats, as well as 13 Republicans, including Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.), the resolution's one GOP co-sponsor, and Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.).

"This isn't about the border. This is about the Constitution," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) to CNN before the vote. Amash echoed these sentiments, while throwing some shade at his fellow Republicans who opposed the resolution, tweeting, "if your faithfulness to the Constitution depends on which party controls the White House, then you are not faithful to it."

....

The resolution now goes to the Republican-controlled Senate, where it needs to secure at least four GOP votes in order to pass. So far only three GOP senators, Susan Collins (R–Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska) and Thom Tillis (R–N.C.) have said they'd vote to terminate Trump's national emergency.

"There is no intellectual honesty in now turning around and arguing that there's an imaginary asterisk attached to executive overreach — that it's acceptable for my party but not thy party," said Tillis in a Monday night Washington Postop-ed.

That Tillis, Amash, and others are willing to buck their party to oppose Trump's national emergency declaration is a positive development. Less encouraging are the reactions of their fellow GOP lawmakers.

...

It will likely be a few more weeks until the Senate votes on the resolution passed by the House today. Trump has already promised to veto the measure. According to CNN, it's unlikely that Congress would be able to summon the two-thirds majority necessary to override the president's veto.

So, while it's welcome that Congress is at least attempting to grab back some of its powers from the executive with today's vote, it's quite likely that it will have minimal practical effect.

 

 

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23 minutes ago, gonzoron said:

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Seth Meyers had a similar line regarding Trump, Vietnam, and Cohen's testimony ... “It’s so ironic. Trump finally went to Vietnam and is getting killed back home”

The best shot in the segment was Un's face when a reporter asked Trump about Cohen's testimony:

 

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Looks like Roger's going to have some more splainin' to do.  We'll get a chance to see just how patient Berman may or may not be with the political trickster.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/roger-stone-judge-wants-know-013040005.html

FTA:

In a brief court order Friday, the judge overseeing Stone’s criminal case asked lawyers for the longtime adviser to President Donald Trump why she wasn’t told about the “imminent general release” of a book Stone appears to be involved with. Just eight days ago, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson reprimanded Stone for violating a gag order and threatened to jail him if he continued to talk to the media.

Stone must explain by March 4 “why this matter -- which was known to the defendant -- was not brought to the court’s attention,” Jackson said in her order.

 

I'm sure that GOP Congressional members will be equally interested in Stone's profiting from a real book as they were in Cohen's hypothetical one.

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59 minutes ago, gonzoron said:

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Agent Orange ineffective 45 years later, but still just as dangerous to Americans.

 

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Trump Just Might Have Won the 2020 Election Today

The president's speech at CPAC was a bedazzling mix of bravado, B.S., humor, and positive vision no Democrat will be able to top.: http://reason.com/blog/2019/03/02/trump-just-might-have-won-the-2020-elect

Quote

It's way too early to be thinking this, much less saying it, but what the hell: If Donald Trump is able to deliver the sort of performance he gave today at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual meeting of right-wingers held near Washington, D.C., his reelection is a foregone conclusion.

There is simply no potential candidate in the Democratic Party who wouldn't be absolutely blown off the stage by him. I say this as someone who is neither a Trump fanboy nor a Never Trumper. But he was not simply good, he was Prince-at-the-Super-Bowl great, deftly flinging juvenile taunts at everyone who has ever crossed him, tossing red meat to the Republican faithful, and going sotto voce serious to talk about justice being done for working-class Americans screwed over by global corporations.

In a heavily improvised speech that lasted over two hours, the 72-year-old former (future?) reality TV star hit every greatest hit in his repertoire ("Crooked Hillary," "build the wall," "America is winning again," and more all made appearances) while riffing on everything from the Green New Deal to his own advanced age and weird hair to the wisdom of soldiers over generals. At times, it was like listening to Robin Williams' genie in the Disney movie Aladdin, Howard Stern in his peak years as a radio shock jock, or Don Rickles as an insult comic. When he started making asides, Trump observed, "This is how I got elected, by going off script." Two years into his presidency and he's just getting warmed up.

 

First and foremost, Trump was frequently funny and outre in the casually mean way that New Yorkers exude like nobody else in America. "You put the wrong people in a couple of positions," he said, lamenting the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor, "and all of a sudden they're trying to take you out with bullshit." He voiced Jeff Sessions in a mock-Southern accent, recusing "muhself" and asked the adoring crowd why the former attorney generally hadn't told him he was going to do that before he was appointed.

Democrats backing the Green New Deal (GND) "are talking about trains to Hawaii," he said. "They haven't figured out how to get to Europe yet." He begged the Democrats not to abandon the GND because he recognizes that the more its details and costs are discussed, the more absurd it will become. "When the wind stops blowing, that's the end of your energy," he said at one point. "Did the wind stop blowing, I'd like to watch television today, guys?" "We'll go back to boats," he said, drawing huge laughs when he added, "I don't want to talk [the Democrats] out of [the GND], I just want to be the Republican who runs against it."

He railed against Never-Trump Republicans: "They're on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation," he said, adding "they're basically dishonest people" that no one cares about. He joked about being in the White House all alone on New Year's because of the government shutdown. "I was in the White House and I was lonely, so I went to Iraq," he said, recounting that when his plane was approaching the U.S. airstrip in Iraq, all lights had to be extinguished for landing. "We spend trillions of dollars in the Middle East and we can't land planes [in Iraq] with the lights on," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "We gotta get out." He then riffed on the generals he met there who, contrary to the Pentagon brass he dealt with, said they could vanquish ISIS in a week. He claimed to have talked with a general named "Raising Cane," which might be Brigadier Gen. J. Daniel Caine, but Trump is the farthest thing from a details guy, right? "Sometimes I learn more from soldiers than I do generals," he said, deftly moving from jokes to more-substantive discussions of policies or issues.

 

In all seriousness, this is quite a performance from Trump: he is just about two hours into this speech and shows no signs of flagging. And far as I can tell, the CPAC crowd is still with him.

 
 
 
 

You can cover a huge amount of material in two-hours-plus, and Trump certainly did that. After speaking sympathetically of immigrants who want to come to the United States and saying that we need more people because the economy (well, his economy, as he takes credit for it) is doing so well, he immediately dismissed the Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans traveling north in caravans across Mexico. In a bizarre display of simultaneous empathy and contempt, he talked at length about how female migrants are being systematically "raped" but also how the caravans were filled with criminals and drug dealers. It was "sad to see how stupid we've become" to think that the caravans are filled with good people. As he has been doing since his State of the Union address, he has been laying out a partial, inchoate case for a skills-based immigration program. He explained walking away from the table with North Korea even as he noted yet again that he has a great relationship with the dictator Kim Jong Un. In a long riff on trade policy, he invoked the "Great Tariff Debate of 1888" and how China "and everyone else" had been taking advantage of us until he started pushing back. He took time to talk about how no, really, the crowd at his inauguration was in fact historically large despite all publicly available evidence.

All in all, it was, in the words of Daniel Dale, the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, "one of the least-hinged speeches Trump has given in a long time." It was indeed all over the place but like the weirdly wide-ranging and digressive speech in which he declared a national emergency, it was also an absolute tour de force, laying out every major point of disagreement between Republicans and Democrats (abortion, the Second Amendment, and taxes, among other things) while tagging the latter aggressively as socialists who will not only end the private provision of health care but take over the energy sector too. Those charges take on new life in the wake of the announcement of the GND and comments, however short-lived, by Democrats such as Kamala Harris, who at one point recently called for an end to private health care. And over 100 House Democrats have signed on to a plan that would end private health insurance in two years. For all the biting criticism and dark humor in today's speech, Trump has mostly ditched the "American Carnage" rhetoric that marked his first Inaugural Address, pushing onto liberals and Democrats all the negativity and anger that used to surround him like the dust cloud surrounds Pigpen in the old Peanuts cartoons. "We have people in Congress right now who hate our country," he said. "We can name every one of them. Sad, very, very sad."

At moments, he seemed to be workshopping his themes and slogans for 2020. "We believe in the American Dream, not the socialist nightmare," he averred at one point. "Now you have a president who finally standing up for America." The future, he said "does not belong to those who believe in socialism. The future belongs to those who believe in freedom. I've said it before and will say it again: America will never be a socialist country." That's a line that may not work forever, but it will almost certainly get the job done in 2020.

None of this is to suggest that this speech wasn't as fact-challenged as almost every utterance Trump has given since announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination (go to Daniel Dale's Twitter thread for a running count of misstatements of fact). He hammered trade deficits in a way that will remind anyone with an undergrad economics course under their belt that he fundamentally doesn't know what he's talking about. He misrepresented both NAFTA and the new trade bill he crafted with Mexico and Canada, and at the exact moment that hundreds of wearied listeners started leaving the ballroom at The Gaylord Resort and Convention Center, he claimed that not a single person had left their seat.

But the 2020 presidential race is not going to be decided based on which candidate is more tightly moored to reality. It's going to be decided, like these things always are, by the relative health of the economy and the large vision of the future the different candidates put forward. As the economy continues to expand (however anemically compared to historical averages) and he continues to avoid credible charges of impeachable offenses, Trump is becoming sunnier and sunnier while the Democrats are painting contemporary America as a late-capitalist hellhole riven by growing racial, ethnic, and other tensions.

Trump isn't the creator of post-factual politics in America, he is merely currently its most-gifted practitioner (oddly, his ideological and demographic counterpart and fellow New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may become a challenger to him on precisely this score). Trump may have next to no credibility in profoundly disturbing ways, but American politics has been drifting away from reality for the entire 21st century, when the 2000 election was essentially decided by a coin flip, the United States entered the Iraq War under false premises, and Barack Obama took home Politifact's 2013 "Lie of the Year" award and dissembled unconvincingly in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations.

That Trump didn't invent the current situation doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about it, but if he can continue to perform the way he did today at CPAC, it remains to be seen what Democratic rival can rise to that challenge.

Mr. Trump will never have get my vote, but I tend to agree with Mr. Gillespie here.  Mr. Trump is doing a masterful job at solidifying his base, a base that took him to victory in 2016. And unless the other side of the uni-party finds a way to sway that conservative base or bring independents into it's fold I'm afraid 2020 is a foregone conclusion.

 

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5 hours ago, Muda69 said:

Trump Just Might Have Won the 2020 Election Today

The president's speech at CPAC was a bedazzling mix of bravado, B.S., humor, and positive vision no Democrat will be able to top.: http://reason.com/blog/2019/03/02/trump-just-might-have-won-the-2020-elect

Mr. Trump will never have get my vote, but I tend to agree with Mr. Gillespie here.  Mr. Trump is doing a masterful job at solidifying his base, a base that took him to victory in 2016. And unless the other side of the uni-party finds a way to sway that conservative base or bring independents into it's fold I'm afraid 2020 is a foregone conclusion.

 

Agreed...I would say the only question for 2020 is will Trump's health allow him to run? I still do not believe he is healthy and do think he has some issues; maybe dementia?

 

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2 hours ago, Irishman said:

Agreed...I would say the only question for 2020 is will Trump's health allow him to run? I still do not believe he is healthy and do think he has some issues; maybe dementia?

 

Possibly.  Probably not that much different as when Mr. Reagan ran for his second term.

 

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6 hours ago, Muda69 said:

Trump Just Might Have Won the 2020 Election Today

The president's speech at CPAC was a bedazzling mix of bravado, B.S., humor, and positive vision no Democrat will be able to top.: http://reason.com/blog/2019/03/02/trump-just-might-have-won-the-2020-elect

Mr. Trump will never have get my vote, but I tend to agree with Mr. Gillespie here.  Mr. Trump is doing a masterful job at solidifying his base, a base that took him to victory in 2016. And unless the other side of the uni-party finds a way to sway that conservative base or bring independents into it's fold I'm afraid 2020 is a foregone conclusion.

 

 

1 hour ago, Irishman said:

Agreed...I would say the only question for 2020 is will Trump's health allow him to run? I still do not believe he is healthy and do think he has some issues; maybe dementia?

 

I'm not so sure I'm in agreement with an article based on reception and performance at a CPAC event.  Trump's base took him to a victory that relied on several items that won't likely be in play come 2020.  He won't be running against Clinton which I would contend deserves more credit for his 2016 win than his base.  As a matter of fact, without Clinton as a foil, Trump is likely to become Clinton with independents this time around.  He most likely won't be able to run against a perception or reality of illegal items by Clinton and, may well be running from those in his own ranks.  Trump was still 3 million short on the popular vote and won three states, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, by less than 77,000.  Lose those three and it goes 278-260 with Trump playing the roll of Clinton this time around. 

image.png.9953eabf634a7af40e94448980de5e35.png

 

image.png.c953c6e19a9bd48da747e242f079dd17.png

Net swings in those three states are -16 in Wisconsin, -17 in Michigan, and -15 in Pennsylvania from inauguration to November of last year ... and nets in all three of those not only had negative decrease, but are now negative in absolute.  Note that in 2017, there are states in there that Trump had favorable nets, yet still lost ... like Minnesota, Illinois, and Colorado.  As such, net favorables weren't enough to guarantee a win in a state and net negatives go a long way to potentially losing a state depending on the degree.  Also, looking at those three states, the past two years have not played well for Trump and/or the GOP brand.  Pennsylvania saw Connor Lamb snatch a special election from the GOP in an R+11.  Wisconsin saw two-term governor Walker unseated as well as the incumbent GOP AG.  Michigan saw governor flip, SOS flip, and AG flip and also saw a Senate pickup of five seats.  AZ is another state to watch in flux too ... it had a net drop of 22 for Trump which also took him into negative ratings too.  Toss in a loss of a Senate seat in the mid-terms and what promises to be a tight Senatorial race again in 2020.  Of interest is a February poll of Trump vs. potential Democratic candidates.  Texas has dropped 13 points, although Trump still has a net favorable there of +7.  Trump beat Biden by 2 points, O'Rourke by 1 point, and Sanders by 2 points.

Trump's in his element in front of his own crowd, but if Trump needs at least neutral or positive nets to pick up a state, since he won't have the luxury of running against someone with equally bad nets, the second map above puts Trump at a 296-241 disadvantage ... putting Ohio in the Trump column.  To get the benefit of the base that he had in 2016 plus either the apathy or disdain influence that Clinton brought, he'd probably need to pull someone like AOC ... and that's unlikely to happen.  I think 2016 is probably not a good foundation to assume will be in play in a similar fashion in 2020.

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2 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Are you 100% sure about that?

 

Don't know about 100%, but I think statistically close.  I think she either won't run or, should she run, I think she may well have the problem that enough other women will be running to blunt that "appeal" and enough people will be concerned about giving Trump an easy cushion that she'll end up with the 2016 general fatigue possibly showing up in the 2020 primaries.

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The ONLY way Hillary runs is if the Mueller investigation drops some bombshell that shows that Trump literally stole the election from her, through colluding with the Russians to hack voting machines in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania. I rate that to be as likely to occur as Swordfish quitting his job to volunteer for Greenpeace to fight climate change. 

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-suggests-cohen-hearing-contributed-failure-north-korea-015206778.html

FTA:

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that the Democrats' decision to interview his longtime fixer, lawyer Michael Cohen, on the same day as a meeting with Kim Jong Un may have led to the North Korea summit ending with no deal.

 

Translation: Trump walking away apparently didn't poll as high as he thought the explanation would, Kim's story doesn't mess with Trump's, and for the first time in history the world seems to be weighing whether or not to believe a North Korean dictator or a US president.  Time to blame anyone else but himself.

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24 minutes ago, Wabash82 said:

Foxbat, there was a sudden gust of wind and the sun was in his eyes.

And he didn't really want to catch that ball, anyway....

9c335b0bda9b0e04bf5ed668dfe5aa1f--dan-marino-ace-ventura-pet-detective.jpg

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No Magic Bullet for Trump/Russia Investigation: http://reason.com/archives/2019/03/02/no-magic-bullet-for-trumprussia-investig#comment

Quote

Holster the toy cannons, people. Cancel those refresher courses on the 25th Amendment.

For all the fireworks, grubby details and rageaholic outbursts at Michael Cohen's Capitol Hill public testimony Wednesday, it took just 11 short words from the felonious fixer's opening statement to ensure that our long national nightmare will not, in fact, soon end: "Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress."

So concludes last month's momentarily tantalizing notion — originally reported by BuzzFeed, unprecedentedly disputed by the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III — that President Trump "personally instructed" his thuggish capo to perjure himself. Some in Mueller's carol-singing fan club had convinced themselves that his legalistic rebuttal of the story still left plenty of room for Cohen to deliver a knockout blow if he was ever allowed to testify in public.

Though you would go broke betting on the moral principles of congressional Republicans, if Cohen had the goods on the president suborning perjury it would have put even the most craven of GOP senators in a pickle in the event of an impeachment trial. Crudely coloring outside the lines during a campaign is one thing, knowingly committing a real crime as president would probably trigger a House vote.

Well, so much for that trigger. Like every previous "huge, if true" magic bullet that seemed like a promising derailer for the Trump presidency — former campaign chair Paul Manafort's reported visit to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Cohen's elusive meeting with Russkies in Prague — the suborning fantasy, too, failed to materialize. Implicit, wink-nudge encouragement of lies on top of lies about real estate negotiations with dodgy Russians amounts to tawdry behavior from a sitting president, but its damnably difficult to upgrade into the criminally explicit.

Although Trump had a lousy Wednesday — it came out that he allegedly asked his lawyer to threaten people on 500 separate occasions; reportedly got Melania on speakerphone to hear lies about Stormy Daniels; and we hear him impel members of Congress to serially say the word "shithole" — Cohen's testimony also smacked down some of the more lurid anti-Trump fevers: The pee tape, a secret love child, domestic violence in an elevator.

So Americans are left, once more, in a position we seem to find uncomfortable: We will have to take charge of deciding how the president will be punished for his misdeeds. We cannot passively wait for some exogenous, without-a-doubt mega-revelation to do the deciding for us.

Such pining for a shortcut is hardly unique to Trump haters. His grossest apologists, several of whom were in midseason form barking about Cohen's once and future book deals Wednesday, have spent the last 21 months overselling every fabulist Devin Nunes memo and FBI "secret society" rumor that comes across their desks, only to see those investigations scuttled.

I suspect there's more to the daydreaming on both sides than mere partisan convenience. Imagining that some capital-F Fact can be irrefutably persuasive to either the criminal justice system or the public is an almost touching expression of rose-colored nostalgia for an agreed-upon set of national mores. Those who watched more than about 30 minutes of Wednesday's spectacle can testify to the wishfulness of such thinking. With the exception of odd legislative ducks such as the libertarian Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Democrats and Republicans delivered telegrams from hermetically separated universes of fact, logic and interpretation.

But the real lure of a magic bullet is that it would let politician and voter wriggle off the hook. If our bizarre situation is all just a Deep State plot, or a criminal conspiracy involving a foreign adversary methodically exposed by an expert prosecutor, then we don't have to do any heavy thinking about how we got here in the first place.

America has suffered — is suffering — a collective political trauma, in the midst of a globe-straddling mini-revolt against the post-World War II consensus governing how real democracies behave. Things are getting topsy-turvy: Republicans hate trade, Democrats love the CIA and pretty much everyone agrees that self-identified independents (see Howard Schultz) are the worst.

The easy way out intellectually is to just chalk up whatever the opposition is doing to a pathology: Democrats (and the #NeverTrump club) see a blob of racists and Russians; Republicans seethe at socialists, globalists and (ugh) journalists. If you can wipe out the bad guys with a single revelation of Fact, no need to recalibrate either your collectivist demonization of the "other," or your own team's role in paving the way for Trump.

The logic of extreme polarization militates against self-reflection. After all, there's always a new social media ruckus, foiled North Korea peace pact or Trump tweetstorm to scream at each other about.

That's too bad. Because the elites of both parties, and of the politically adjacent professions (including — yes — journalism), actively helped create the unhappy conditions that made fit-throwing look like an attractive option to millions of voters, and not just those who chose Trump.

A magic bullet is extremely unlikely to take out either Trump or Mueller. Even if it could, the maladies that made them antagonists would still be with us. We've got a whole lot of work to do.

 

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21 hours ago, Irishman said:

Agreed...I would say the only question for 2020 is will Trump's health allow him to run? I still do not believe he is healthy and do think he has some issues; maybe dementia?

 

Bernie is 77, Biden is 76.  Both are nuttier than fruitcakes already ...

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