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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM

SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#192701: Jun 10th 2017 at 12:39:54 PM

No, the line seems to be that he's exonerated Trump.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
sgamer82 Since: Jan, 2001
#192702: Jun 10th 2017 at 12:40:50 PM

Didn't he say repeatedly that Trump lied during his testimony?

NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
Jupiterian Local
#192703: Jun 10th 2017 at 12:41:56 PM

[up][up][up]No one besides Trump himself, no. And Trump is basically saying "all the things he said that I like — like me not being under investigation — are true and correct, but everything I don't like — like me asking him for his loyalty or saying I hoped he would drop the Flynn investigation — are wrong and lies".

It's actually rather staggering how no one in the GOP is trying to discredit Comey.

edited 10th Jun '17 12:42:07 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
sgamer82 Since: Jan, 2001
#192704: Jun 10th 2017 at 12:43:10 PM

I remember a story that they were trying to before his testimony

nightwyrm_zero Since: Apr, 2010
#192705: Jun 10th 2017 at 12:44:20 PM

The closest I can get to understanding the Trump defenders' stance on Comey is that he cleared Trump by saying he was not under investigation, lied about the rest, and is a leaker to boot...

edited 10th Jun '17 12:45:11 PM by nightwyrm_zero

tricksterson Never Trust from Behind you with an icepick Since: Apr, 2009 Relationship Status: Above such petty unnecessities
Never Trust
#192706: Jun 10th 2017 at 12:49:23 PM

So, throwing their own feces against the wall and seeing what sticks?

Trump delenda est
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#192707: Jun 10th 2017 at 1:16:35 PM

@unknowing

And in case M84 look this, yes this is another of "trump look is like latin american demagogue", he really tick all the boxes, dosent he?.

I fucking knew it. sad

edited 10th Jun '17 1:17:14 PM by M84

Disgusted, but not surprised
TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#192708: Jun 10th 2017 at 1:57:58 PM

Comey was under oath during his testimony. To put it simply, they can't claim he was lying unless they're willing to pursue that line. Saying Comey lied under oath would amount to accusing him of perjury, which would warrant a federal investigation into the private conversations he had with Trump.

You may recognize this as exactly the opposite of what the GOP wants. Not only would it be another investigation into Trump, but it could very easily turn from an investigation into Comey's accused perjury into an investigation into Trump's obstruction. The two subjects would be easily married to one another.

The GOP wants to bury this line of questioning, not create new angles for Trump's skeletons to come out of the closet. They're effectively obligated to treat Comey's testimony as 100% factual and simply try to interpret his statements in the manner that best suits their claim.

edited 10th Jun '17 2:01:48 PM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
Parable Since: Aug, 2009
#192709: Jun 10th 2017 at 2:45:27 PM

Joe Biden is encouraging Romney to run for the Senate in Utah.

With Orrin Hatch bailing, I wonder if Biden is aiming to bring more moderating influences into the GOP.

Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
#192710: Jun 10th 2017 at 2:49:45 PM

Sounds like it. But even Romney couldn't stop the crazy. He's almost like Arnold, too sane/moderate for the GOP, but still too right leaning to truly fit in with the Democrats. A man without a party.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
megaeliz Since: Mar, 2017
#192711: Jun 10th 2017 at 3:22:24 PM

Apparently Jeff Sessions is appearing between before the senate next week.

https://apnews.com/amp/e82db558916b43a584ec60fc9a16f228

speedyboris Since: Feb, 2010
#192712: Jun 10th 2017 at 3:34:45 PM

This is all so ironic. Trump asked voters (paraphrasing from memory), "Do we really want a president who's probably going to be under investigation and involved in legal battles during their term?"

TheWanderer Student of Story from Somewhere in New England (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Wishfully thinking
Student of Story
#192713: Jun 10th 2017 at 3:59:07 PM

To put it simply, theycan't claim he was lying unless they're willing to pursue that line. Saying Comey lied under oath would amount to accusing him of perjury, which would warrant a federal investigation into the private conversations he had with Trump.

You may recognize this as exactly the opposite of what the GOP wants. Not only would it be another investigation into Trump, but it could very easily turn from an investigation into Comey's accused perjury into an investigation into Trump's obstruction.

It's worth noting that this applies to GOP leadership, but is not the case with right wing media or the everyday Republican voters. The leadership sees the potential pitfall of trying to outright say that Comey lied in his testimony, (unlike Trump, and I half wonder if Comey intended to bait Trump into shooting off at the mouth) and they'd like to let it go and quietly bury it.

The voters walk around in their usual haze, and the right wing media, knowing that, is going straight into fact free spin, where they're proclaiming Comey to be a liar and that he exonerated Trump at the same time. These media sources know that their viewers aren't going to research the truth and don't know the legalities/legal pitfalls at work, so they are hard at work to do just that.

Vox has an article breaking down the right wing headlines, unsurprisingly Breitbart went hardest in terms of pushing pro-Trump headlines.

Regarding Romney becoming a Senator in Utah; in almost anyplace else in the country I'd agree that he's a man without a party to belong to, but in Utah with its' heavy Mormon influence and willingness to sometimes majorly buck national GOP trends, (like a couple of years ago when they solved their homeless problem by just giving those people homes instead of sacrificing them on the altar of supply side Jesus) I'd give Romney a pretty decent shot at winning.

In other news, Kansas may be about to turn its back on radical anti-tax Tea Party policies, but they'll have to be wise to a candidate for governor who is taking pages straight from Trump’s book. And regardless, the national party is likely to fall back on the old line of saying "the only reason it didn't work is because they weren't conservative enough!"

Now, after their policies failed to produce the results GOP politicians promised, the state has become host to another revolution: a resurgence of moderate Republicans.

Moderate Republicans joined with Democrats this week to raise state taxes, overriding GOP Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto and repudiating the conservative governor’s platform of ongoing tax cuts. The vote was a demonstration of the moderates’ newfound clout in the state Republican Party. Brownback was unable to successfully block the bill because many of the die-hard tax cut proponents had either retired or been voted out of office, losing to more centrist candidates in GOP primaries.

“The citizens of Kansas have said ‘It’s not working. We don’t like it.’ And they’ve elected new people.” said Sheila Frahm, a centrist Republican who served as lieutenant governor of Kansas and briefly as a U.S. senator.

...

Kris Kobach, Brownback’s secretary of state who was once thought likely to join the Trump administration, entered the contest this week and is decrying the new tax increase. “It is time to drain the swamp in Topeka,” he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, borrowing a phrase from President Trump.

“This state does not need more money, and the people of Kansas do not need to keep feeding the government monster with year after year of increased taxes,” Kobach told supporters in a speech announcing his candidacy. “Kansas does not have a revenue problem. Kansas has a spending problem.”

Michael Speer, a schools superintendent and business manager in Coffeyville — a town near Kansas’s border with Oklahoma — says he previously voted for Brownback, but is now troubled by the changes forced on his profession.

“We’re trying to make all the money stretch as far as it can,” Speer said. “We made a conscious effort to not impact the classroom. But I can’t continue to cut custodial staff.”

“I can no longer support him,” Speer said of Brownback.

The gubernatorial primary will involve competition for voters like Judith Deedy. A registered Republican who lives in the Kansas City suburb of Mission Hills, Deedy said that she was never very interested in politics until she and parents at their local public school started to notice a shift.

The school increased its class sizes and scaled back gifted education. Teachers, worried about their wages and future, began fleeing the Kansas City, Kansas school system for jobs across the state line in Missouri. Now she is an avid opponent of Brownback’s tax cuts.

“In 2016, enough people woke up and said, ‘We have to fix this. The guys in office are refusing to fix this, and come on, the evidence is plain,’” she said. “I really don’t care if it’s a Democrat or a Republican, I just want someone reasonable.”

...

Trump and Brownback have relied on the same advisers, including the conservative economist Arthur Laffer, who famously laid out the principle of supply side economics on a cocktail napkin. Laffer argued that excessive taxation could slow the economy by discouraging people from working. His signature theory was that the government, by cutting taxes, could encourage people to earn more, maintaining or increasing overall tax revenue. Yet most economists believe that U.S. tax rates are already far too low to benefit from Laffer’s curve.

The tax cuts for the wealthy frequently advocated by Republican politicians are viewed unfavorably by many voters, polls show. The Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that conducts public-opinion surveys, found that 57 percent of Americans nationally, including over a third of Republicans, support increasing taxes on those earning at least $250,000 a year. By contrast, Brownback’s policies reduced them drastically.

Yet Dan Cox, the institute’s research director, said that Brownback’s defeat did not augur more victories for Republicans pursuing more moderate economic policies. He said Republican policymakers and their advisers around the country are likely to view the example of Kansas as a failure of implementation, rather than one of principle, and they will argue that Kansas’s experiment would have succeeded had the legislature reduced spending even more.

Trump and his cabinet still can't get on the same page about foreign policy, including the Afghanistan war.

Let me repeat that in case you missed it: five months into his term, the President of the United States has no policy or plans about an ongoing war in an area that is all but guaranteed to produce extremist anti-American organizations. I suppose that's something else we have to excuse and ignore because he's new at this. [eyeroll]

The Afghanistan strategy review illustrates the problem. The war in Afghanistan has been fought by Americans and their allies for 16 years, with no victory in sight. America’s military believes the war is winnable, if only Presidents Bush and Obama’s limitations on time and troopswere lifted. The secretary of defense is perhaps not surprisingly also of the view that our country should endeavor to win the wars it is fighting. The secretary of state blanches at what would be needed of America’s diplomats and foreign assistance to bring the necessary whole of government approach into being, but evidently alsosupports increasing our country’s effort. The intelligence agencies conclude that 16 of the 22 most dangerous terrorist organizations exist in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and will become major threats to the U.S. homeland if the war in Afghanistan is abandoned. In any normal administration, that would be a consensus. And it evidently was, until the policy crossed West Executive Avenue.

Surmising that opposition among the disputatious political factions closest to the president posed a significant threat of the president deciding to pull out of Afghanistan, the national-security adviserpulled the policy back from consideration. Perhaps he awaits a more propitious time. Perhaps the Cabinet has work to do with the president to immunize him against his political advisers on this crucial national-security issue. Perhaps they await developments within Afghanistan that will make the case for them (as the Bush administration awaited political developments in Iraq on so many occasions).

In any event, the president is now five months in office without having determined his policy on the war. Authority has been ceded to the Pentagon to determine force levels and operational decisions, but no policy is in place to guide the Defense Department’s judgments. President Trump seems contented with this purgatory, whichallows him to take credit for any successes and blame “the generals” for any failures. But it is bad policy, and bad policy making.

And it seems to be business as usual in the Trump administration. Policy processes produce sensible policies that are then upended by the president’s decisions—tweets whipping up sentiment against Qatar as GCC relations approach the precipice, which have to be hurriedly managed by the secretaries of state and defense, or, as yesterday, comments to the press diametrically opposed to the position Secretary Tillerson is simultaneously announcing about the Gulf crisis; advance assurance by U.S. diplomats to European governments that the president would explicitly endorse NATO’s Article 5 made false by West Wing excisions from the speech, leaving the national-security adviser and others holding the president’s coat and insisting that even if the president didn’t say it, he meant it, until the president finally relented two weeks later.

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
BearyScary Since: Sep, 2010 Relationship Status: You spin me right round, baby
#192714: Jun 10th 2017 at 4:09:30 PM

I read a tweet that brought up something that I've been wondering about: Does Trump give his youngest son any attention? Like, at all? And why have the "family values" people been silent on this?

Are Melania and Barron still in New York?

Do not obey in advance.
megaeliz Since: Mar, 2017
#192715: Jun 10th 2017 at 4:12:04 PM

This thread is awesome: the Avengers Initiative going up against the Orange Menace. Biden just misses the whole proceedings.

https://mobile.twitter.com/owillis/status/872257766194372609

edited 10th Jun '17 4:15:37 PM by megaeliz

SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#192716: Jun 10th 2017 at 4:21:58 PM

We talking about Barron? While I've used him in a story of mine, in real life undersge children of presidents aren't generally a topic of politics.

Kris Kobach is one of the masterminds of voter suppression, for the record.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
BearyScary Since: Sep, 2010 Relationship Status: You spin me right round, baby
#192717: Jun 10th 2017 at 4:22:10 PM

[up][up]Oh god, that is hilarious/awesome. [lol]

The part with the Skrull disguise malfunctioning, resulting in an unusual orange color... [lol]

edited 10th Jun '17 4:25:10 PM by BearyScary

Do not obey in advance.
Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
#192718: Jun 10th 2017 at 6:50:37 PM

Barron Trump should be totally off limits. Even though the right went after Chelsea Clinton and the Obama girls...we have to be better. Children are not accountable for their parents' actions.

edited 10th Jun '17 6:52:35 PM by Rationalinsanity

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
TacticalFox88 from USA Since: Nov, 2010 Relationship Status: Dating the Doctor
#192719: Jun 10th 2017 at 6:57:57 PM

Barron and Tiffany are the ONLY ones who are off limits.

Lets not get it twisted.

The rest of Trump's progeny are two steps away from being cartoon villains.

New Survey coming this weekend!
LSBK Since: Sep, 2014
#192720: Jun 10th 2017 at 6:59:41 PM

I assume by children Rational Insanity meant actually children and not adult children.

BearyScary Since: Sep, 2010 Relationship Status: You spin me right round, baby
#192721: Jun 10th 2017 at 7:00:33 PM

[up][up][up]I agree.

Do not obey in advance.
unknowing from somewhere.. Since: Mar, 2014
#192722: Jun 10th 2017 at 7:11:07 PM

[up][up]thst and the one who dosent do much, even ívaka tend to be a sort Tárget since she dosent do as much.

Also let me remenber well, we have invaka, barron and who is the other one?

"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
speedyboris Since: Feb, 2010
#192723: Jun 10th 2017 at 7:15:35 PM

[up]x5 Don't remind me... I remember when the neo-Nazis were out in full force when Malia decided to delay starting college for a year. Really disgusting what was said.

So yeah, let's leave Barron alone.

Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
#192724: Jun 10th 2017 at 7:26:53 PM

Yes, I meant minors. Once kids grow up and start stumping for their parents or run in their own right, they are fair game.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
megaeliz Since: Mar, 2017
#192725: Jun 10th 2017 at 7:42:24 PM

(this thread got buried at the end of the last page.)

They Are:The leaders of the free world,

Their Mission: defeat the great Orange Menace.

Ladies, Gentlemen, I would like to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative.

(Biden just misses the entire proceedings)

https://mobile.twitter.com/owillis/status/872257766194372609

edited 10th Jun '17 7:45:34 PM by megaeliz


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