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#27 Mar 21 2019 at 2:35 PM Rating: Decent
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Professor stupidmonkey wrote:
You only wish to partially help Americans in need? Is it that you are wary of the definitions of "need" being used, or do you just hate some Americans? Smiley: lol


I'm assuming the former. There does seem to be some significant differences of opinion on what constitutes "need". And what limits we should maybe put on it as well.
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#28 Mar 21 2019 at 2:56 PM Rating: Good
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Friar Bijou wrote:
I think both side should get back to helping Americans in need and rebuilding our crap-tastic infrastructure, but I crazy like that.

Yes. Politics have really gotten in the way of good solid nation building. Also, immigration needs fixing and our workers need to get their rights back.
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#29 Mar 21 2019 at 3:06 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
Professor stupidmonkey wrote:
You only wish to partially help Americans in need? Is it that you are wary of the definitions of "need" being used, or do you just hate some Americans? Smiley: lol


I'm assuming the former. There does seem to be some significant differences of opinion on what constitutes "need". And what limits we should maybe put on it as well.
I know right. Who needs 100 billion dollars!? Smiley: wink

Don't be this guy.
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#30 Mar 24 2019 at 1:24 PM Rating: Excellent
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"People's Champ" by the band Arkells sums it up nice for me.

But I'm Canadian and identify our current leadership with that song, even though it is rather clearly about President Trump.


Ignoring party affiliation entirely, it would be nice to see a crop of political leaders that are "honored to serve" and actually do serve the best big-picture interests of their country in a classy, tactful manner --which would often mean compromise with the other party. Extremely polarized politics with a slice of Jerry Springer on top seems really unproductive to me.

I realize that is a naive and delusional hope.
#31 Mar 25 2019 at 1:43 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
I'm assuming...


Of course you are, sweetheart!

I wasn't asking you what someone else thought, if I want your opinion on what someone else on this forum thinks, I will ask you.
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#32 Mar 25 2019 at 1:45 PM Rating: Good
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Oh, right, I came here to post that if the Mueller report gets released, and if it lines up with the summary from the AG and the AAG, then I will gladly say that Donald Trump is a bad human being, but not a convicted criminal.

Edited, Mar 25th 2019 1:14pm by stupidmonkey
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#33 Mar 25 2019 at 4:52 PM Rating: Decent
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Who just happens to hire and surround himself with some of the biggest scumbags he can find.
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#34 Mar 26 2019 at 7:02 AM Rating: Good
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Since Mueller didn't find cause to indict trump it's like we're supposed to now accept that he's is a competent, empathetic, honest, transparent individual that is qualified to serve this country as president. Hah!

trump is a corrupt dolt, but just another misshaped cog in the bureaucratic machine.

My sister is now flashing Pete Buttigieg stuff all over the families social media. He's seems nice. Experience holds weight for me. He lacks it - specially in comparison to others he'll be running against.

Anyone live in South Bend?
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#35 Mar 26 2019 at 8:14 PM Rating: Decent
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Elinda wrote:
Since Mueller didn't find cause to indict trump it's like we're supposed to now accept that he's is a competent, empathetic, honest, transparent individual that is qualified to serve this country as president. Hah!


The only thing you're supposed to accept is that he didn't do what people accused him off. What you think of him personally is a whole different matter.

It's almost like some of us knew this from the beginning

me almost two years ago wrote:
With this "investigation" (and yeah, I'm putting it in air quotes here), we don't have any known activities from any known person that we suspect may have been criminal as our starting point. What we have is a foreign country hacking into a political party's servers and the data from that server later being released by wikileaks, with the presumption that said foreign country obtained that data and leaked it to wikileaks. Great! That's a crime. We can investigate that. So you should be following the trail of that data, right? Find out who was involved in the hack, find out how the data got to wikileaks and see who was responsible, then figure out if you have any jurisdiction over them, and pursue whatever criminal charges you can.

That's how you investigate, right? You start with the crime and follow it to the criminals. Er... but that's not what's happening here. Here, we have this massive gap. Somehow, via what appears to be some combination of extreme speculation and wishful thinking, we've leaped to a conclusion that someone in the Trump campaign was "involved" somehow. No one seems to know what form that involvement may have taken, nor who might have done it, nor how they could have done it. But let's ignore these pesky facts and "investigate".

What are they actually investigating? What possible evidence could be found that could result in any sort of legal charge involving the original actual crime? As I've pointed out a number of times on this forum, barring finding some recording or email showing a clear conversation between someone connected to the Trump campaign discussing and planning the hack and/or release of the data, and/or promising some sort of quid pro quo in return for said hack and/or release, I'm not sure how you can *ever* obtain a prosecution related to the crime you're actually investigating.

What we have here is an investigation that isn't following a crime or a person, but rather just targeting a group of people and seeing if it can find something they did, not necessarily in any way related to a known crime, which they can be charged with, after the fact. Worse, this is 100% politically targeted. You're choosing to target that group based on its association with a single politician. This sort of thing should send chills down all our spines, and thoughts of authoritarian regimes quashing opposition politicians via abuse and misuse of government power.

A sane legal system cannot allow this form of investigation. It's a fishing expedition. You can't just target a group of people because of their political associations (well, or any reason, this just makes it worse) and just look at everything they've done to see if you can find something. This is scarily reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings. It's not about justice. It's not about following evidence. It is purely about using the investigation itself as a tool to hurt a politician and everyone near him.

I predicted this months ago. I said that the mere fact of someone "being under investigation" would be used as ammunition against them. And what are we seeing right now? Leaks that contain, not evidence of criminal activity, but that "Jared Kuchner is being investigated. OMG! There must be something here!". And "Trump's being investigated. Wow this is really getting serious guys!". Seriously. That's the extent of these leaks. Who's being questioned. Who the investigation is looking at. No context for any of this, just fuel for the speculative fire.

So yeah. It's a witch hunt. I'll ask again: Where is the crime, and how is it connected to anyone currently "under investigation"? There is no connection any of us are aware of that isn't purely speculative. Anyone could be "under investigation" because we could speculate that anyone was involved, right? That's not enough, or should not be enough, to actually investigate people's activities. You have to start with the crime and work to the people. But that's not what's going on here.


And Mueller's very unusual language of "no evidence of collusion" appears to be a sort of backhanded stab at the folks who formed the investigation in the first place. A lot of people are making hay out of how he said that for collusion, but just said "insufficient evidence to indict" with regards to obstruction. But the latter language is the norm. Investigations don't seek to prove innocence. They seek to prove (or find evidence of) guilt, sufficient to at least indict, and perhaps to convict. Innocence is presumed in our system in the absence of those things. So him saying there is insufficient evidence is the normal language that would be involved in such a report.

What's unusual is his language regarding collusion. He didn't just not find sufficient evidence that any given action taken by Trump or any member of his campaign was a violation of the law, but he couldn't find any action which even *could* be collusion. Which is what I was talking about in the quoted post above. It's what has bothered me about this investigation from day one. No one was able to even point to an action taken by someone that they suspected was collusion. So without that, how can Mueller investigate? You can look at say, the firing of Comey and ask "was this obstruction?". But if you don't have an action to ask that question about in terms of collusion, how do you proceed?

You can't. Which is why this investigation was doomed to fail from the start. Well, if the objective was to actually find evidence or proof of collusion with the Russians to affect the election. Now, if your goal was just to put the Trump administration under a microscope for a couple years, hinder their agenda with a constant cloud of "being under investigation", scare off anyone near him with fears of having everything they've ever done in their lives examined to see if there might have been a violation of the law (Manafort's tax filings from over a decade before he ever worked with Trump), and giving the left leaning media tons of raw meat to constantly indoctrinate their audiences into a "Trump colluded with Russia" narrative, then yes... It did exactly what it was supposed to do.

I'll leave it to the reader to noodle out what the actual reason for the investigation was.
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#36 Mar 27 2019 at 7:23 PM Rating: Good
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Biden could have beaten trump in 2016, but I don't think he can now. There is no way Warren, Booker, Sanders can beat him. I doubt Harris can. The best bet in a general election would be Hickenlooper as he is a sane sounding moderate...but sane sounding moderates don't win primaries in the DNC.

I think Trump will replace Pence on the ticket in 2020 to put an electable (probably minority) VP at his side. I would expect Marco Rubio if I had to guess.
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#37 Mar 27 2019 at 8:12 PM Rating: Excellent
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I halfway expect Trump to tap Lindsey Graham as his running mate for 2020.

But I'm pretty sure Graham expects that, too, which means Trump probably won't do it.

I don't know if Harris can beat him but she'd make it interesting.
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#38 Mar 28 2019 at 12:07 AM Rating: Excellent
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The only thing you're supposed to accept is that he didn't do what people accused him off.

Sure were a lot of criminals in his inner circle, though, weren't there? Anything to say about that?

In my country, no politician could survive the scandal of having so many criminals coincidentally working for them. It's interesting that you don't even find it notable.

Wait, no, the opposite of that. Boring.
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#39 Mar 28 2019 at 8:48 AM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
Elinda wrote:
Since Mueller didn't find cause to indict trump it's like we're supposed to now accept that he's is a competent, empathetic, honest, transparent individual that is qualified to serve this country as president. Hah!


The only thing you're supposed to accept is that he didn't do what people accused him off. What you think of him personally is a whole different matter.

No. I think we're supposed to accept that Mueller couldn't find solid enough evidence to prosecute.
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#40 Mar 28 2019 at 5:25 PM Rating: Decent
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Kavekkk wrote:
The only thing you're supposed to accept is that he didn't do what people accused him off.

Sure were a lot of criminals in his inner circle, though, weren't there? Anything to say about that?


Um.. Sure. You're using a pretty broad definition of "a lot", and "inner circle". There were exactly 6 people indicted who were directly associated with Trump. Only three of those people worked on the campaign. Not a single indictment was for anything done during the campaign itself. Well, except perhaps for Cohen, but his charges basically stem from him personally attempting to take advantage of his association with Trump for his own financial benefit by attempting to sell influence he didn't actually have. Well, and being a general jerk off.

There's a reason why we don't allow instant replay to be used to find fouls in football. Because if you look long enough and hard enough, you will always find one (or many). The same applies to investigations. If you put enough people under a microscope and look hard enough at a long enough period of their entire professional lives, you will find a few cases of past behavior that you could decide to charge them with. This is the same no matter what group of people you target.

This is also precisely the reason why our legal system does not normally allow this sort of investigation. You have to start with clear evidence of a specific crime and then investigate that crime. We require that because otherwise, you have a condition where people are not found guilty of crimes because they committed the crime, but because the government chose to target them instead of others who have done the same thing. And when that targeting is done based on political association, this become incredibly problematic.

How about we approach this in another way. Go do some research and write a paper on "why the US has the fourth and fifth amendments to the constitution". Along the way, you might just figure out why this sort of thing is wrong.

Quote:
In my country, no politician could survive the scandal of having so many criminals coincidentally working for them. It's interesting that you don't even find it notable.


Um... Criminals? It's not like these guys were running drug trafficking rings or murdering people. Two of them were found (retroactively) to have failed to properly declare their filing status on past taxes. A "crime" which is normally an administrative issue, managed by re-filing and paying any penalties and fines associated. Three others were indicted for process crimes (crimes that only occurred as a result of the process of being investigated in the first place). This is commonly known as a "perjury trap". The point being that anyone could be indicted for that *and* the only reason they were ever in a position to be caught was because the investigation existed.

The only one you can actually point to as having behaved in a directly criminal manner is Cohen. And his crimes were committed *against* Trump, not for him.

So yeah. Not really seeing the claim you are making.
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#41 Mar 28 2019 at 5:35 PM Rating: Decent
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Elinda wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Elinda wrote:
Since Mueller didn't find cause to indict trump it's like we're supposed to now accept that he's is a competent, empathetic, honest, transparent individual that is qualified to serve this country as president. Hah!


The only thing you're supposed to accept is that he didn't do what people accused him off. What you think of him personally is a whole different matter.

No. I think we're supposed to accept that Mueller couldn't find solid enough evidence to prosecute.


Which is the legal standard for innocence. Right?

There isn't sufficient evidence that you robbed a bank this morning. And if someone was appointed to investigate this alleged bank robbery, that's exactly how they would report it.

It's funny how people suddenly magically feel the need to pretend that they have never heard legal outcomes and how they are worded before. This isn't even a case of being charged and then found not guilt of the charges (which every defense attorney would declare to be his client being innocent, right?). In this case, there wasn't even sufficient evidence to indict in the first place. That's as innocent as anyone who didn't actually do what someone else alleges they did.

Again. Our legal system does not ever "prove innocence". We presume innocence in the absence of proof of guilt. It's not like this is the first time you've been exposed to this very basic concept that runs at the core of our legal system.
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#42 Mar 28 2019 at 7:11 PM Rating: Excellent
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Six is a lot of people, yes. Two would be a lot of criminals to have working for you by coincidence.

Um... Criminals?

Yes. They committed a crime, they are criminals. I'm not interested in your limp wristed hand wringing over it; you're too soft on crime. I'm glad it's Trump in that chair and not you, or America would be buried under gangsters and crooks by Monday.

Edited, Mar 28th 2019 8:16pm by Kavekkk
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#43 Apr 01 2019 at 8:04 AM Rating: Good
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I still can't stomach reading too much gbaji.

Joe Biden's creepy touchy feely-ness is called out. I've never been much of a Biden fan. He's wolfish. While I've never seen his behavior as having sexual innuendo, his backrubs, hair playing and head kisses of women and little girls seems more patronizing and maybe even objectifying.

I'm moving back towards Warren - she's seeming steadfast.

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#44 Apr 01 2019 at 6:40 PM Rating: Decent
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Kavekkk wrote:
Six is a lot of people, yes. Two would be a lot of criminals to have working for you by coincidence.


I think you are grossly overestimating the severity of the crimes we're talking about, and grossly underestimating the commonality of such among any organization made up of several hundred people (or more). I already laid this out, and you more or less ignored what I wrote. I'm reasonably certain that if you dug this thoroughly into the background of any random board of directors for a large corporation, or non-profit, you'd find similar amounts of white collar crimes somewhere as well. Remember, we're talking about tax filing issues.

We just don't normally look that hard. Which is part of the issue here. We don't see this sort of thing going on in the Clinton campaign, for example, not because it didn't, but because we only appointed a special prosecution to look at the Trump campaign. If we'd spent the same amount of effort focused on her campaign, or any previous presidential campaign by any major party, we would find similar rates.

Quote:
Um... Criminals?

Yes. They committed a crime, they are criminals.


Yeah. But we do make a distinction between say armed robbery, and say "creative tax filing", right? I mean, it's not like Trump worked with admitted domestic terrorists who detonated bombs at multiple federal buildings or anything. Or a campaign bundler charged with assault. Or the other bundlers who were associated with Mexican crime boss. Or the numerous folks associated with him who were convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and other issues Oh wait! That was Obama. Funny that the same standards don't seem to apply. Or, well, any standards at all when it comes to looking at the other side of the fence.

A few white collar crimes are nothing. Again. Look closely enough and you'll find them. And the stuff that went on with folks associated with Obama are massively more brazen and problematic than with Trump. There's no evidence Trump (for example) benefited in anyway from the decades old tax filings of Manafort and Gates. Obama did benefit directly from his dealings with Tony Rezko, for example. Obama's rise to prominence is almost a textbook case of a young rising politician willing to (as Danny DeVito would say in Johny Dangerously) "Play Ball!", in order to advance his career. Pretty much every corrupt figure in Chicago politics sits clearly in Obama's past. Yet, these associations were ignored or dismissed by the media as nothing at all

But hiring someone who, after the fact, is discovered to have mis filed some taxes a decade earlier, when that person had no association to the candidate at all? That's so serious we need to look into it? Um... No. It's not. Folks actively engaged in fraudulent and corrupt practices while you are directly working with them, and even in many cases on your behalf, is a problem.

Again. The only crimes which anyone associated with Trump committed during the campaign itself was Cohen, and his crimes were committed *against* Trump, not on his behalf. You're applying a strange set of criteria here IMO.


Quote:
... or America would be buried under gangsters and crooks by Monday.


Um... I've only spoken of Obama. Have you looked at the folks Clinton is associated with? Or Clinton herself? I am by no means a fan of Trump. I am by no means a fan of Clinton. But I can objectively analyze the behaviors of both people and categorically state that Clinton appears to have far far far more dirty stuff going on than Trump. The majority of her money was gained through questionable interactions with government agencies, either through influence peddling, pay for play, or any of a number of other corrupt methodologies. The Clinton foundation appears to have primarily worked as a means for foreign parties to pay into the campaign to get favorable treatment or lobbying from the Clintons themselves. Her husbands fees for speaking in Russia suddenly quadrupled during her tenure as SoS, and then again when she was running for president and appeared likely to win. 3/4ths of all the people outside of the government who ever received a personal meeting with Clinton while she was SoS were donators to the foundation.

Yet, no one seems to want to investigate this. And that's really the sick part of all of this. We have a system that is driven, not by the rule of law, but by public outcry. And that outcry is largely controlled by the media, which overwhelmingly leans left and has no desire to see harm come to prominent Democrats. And so those prominent Democrats just plain get away with this stuff. Over and over.

But you cry about Trump. That's pretty darn biased IMO.

Edited, Apr 1st 2019 4:42pm by gbaji
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#45 Apr 02 2019 at 4:28 AM Rating: Good
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Oh, Shit, REASONABLY CERTAIN!. Damn, son, I am sold!
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#46 Apr 02 2019 at 7:49 PM Rating: Decent
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I miss the good old days when I had so much more time to read and respond to those walls of texts.

If the election were held today, President Trump would probably win. The Democrats went full Bernie-crazy for attention. They won 2018 on healthcare, now everyone wants to undo what everyone fought for the past 10 years instead of just enhancing it.
#47 Apr 03 2019 at 4:06 PM Rating: Decent
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Capone was taken down by "creative tax filing"...
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#48 Apr 05 2019 at 11:55 AM Rating: Good
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Kavekkk wrote:
In my country, no politician could survive the scandal of having so many criminals coincidentally working for them.
In the past, I would've said the same thing for here but I'm not so sure this time around.
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#49 Apr 05 2019 at 11:47 PM Rating: Excellent
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That's right, golden boy Trudeau has been a bit naughty, hasn't he?

I'd still swap, though. Give me a big old scandal instead of three years of political gridlock any day.
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#50 Apr 08 2019 at 11:19 AM Rating: Good
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I drool for the New Zealand boss lady.

I haven't seen any new candidates declare recently. I'm stuck on Warren for the moment.

Edited, Apr 8th 2019 6:20pm by Elinda
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#51 Apr 08 2019 at 5:59 PM Rating: Decent
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Professor stupidmonkey wrote:
Oh, Shit, REASONABLY CERTAIN!. Damn, son, I am sold!


There's far more evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons, the DNC, and high ranking members of the Obama administration during the 2016 election than there was of "Russian collusion" by the Trump campaign, yet we ended up with a special prosecution for the later and not the former. Strange, isn't it?

There is very strong evidence that members of the FBI and State Department worked together to drum up false information in order to get a FISA warrant to spy on Trump's campaign. Let's recall that Watergate was one guy in the campaign using some off the books spooks to just break in to a campaign headquarters of the opposition party to get their playbook, followed by some coverup of the action (which is what screwed Nixon). In this case, the Obama administration used Federal investigative powers to spy directly on the campaign of the opposition party. That's far far worse than Watergate. The powers of the executive branch weren't just used to cover things up, but to commit the original crime.

BTW, the whole "Russian collusion" bit *is* the cover up for this. Seriously. Look at something other than far left media sometime.

Dave
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