US Politics, February 2018: Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots

not that kind of joke

The punchline was something like “a lot of Trump administration officials are going. I wonder who they're going to hang out with?...”

admittedly not a very good joke

The joke was that Trump was not expected to pay any of them to pee on anything.

I'm in stitches over here

lol

Big news for voting rights in Washington state: Automatic voter registration easily passes after Democrats regained their Senate majority last November. Likely to become law with the House & Gov. Inslee's approval https://t.co/SlxoOauFGH

— Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) February 10, 2018

If someone not compromised by a foreign power were in office enacting the same ghoulish foreign and domestic policies (since that is GOP orthodoxy), would you really sleep much easier?

If someone were in office who wasn't openly devoted to the idea that the unrestrained law enforcement power of the United States government was properly to be used as a tool to punish political enemies, yes, to be honest, I would sleep easier. I truly do not see this as "the same thing" as what other lousy Presidents would do, or in recent history have done.

Bush II certainly did. Doesn't get much more recent than that for lousy Presidents.

I was gonna say, wtf. also obama was pretty good at punishing whistleblowers iirc

but I guess it's mostly an issue of decorum for many

Yes, I would sleep easier if I felt the abuses of power now being contemplated, licensed, and executed were no worse than those under Bush II.

Cool.

IDGI do you guys not see a qualitative difference btw off-the-rack Goldman Sachs-purchased presidency and blackmail-vulnerable to a foreign interest?

Goldman Sachs received $10b in government aid for its role in the 2008 banking crisis, which destabilized countries around the world. Iceland nearly went bankrupt, causing the government to collapse in January 2009. the idea that powerful multinational corporations are different from foreign interests or somehow loyal to the interests of their "home" country is absurd.

In 2016, Goldman Sachs's compliance department barred the firm's 450 partners (its most senior employees) from making donations to state or local officials as well as "any federal candidate who is a sitting state or local official." One effect of this rule was to bar Goldman partners from directly donating to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, since Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, was the sitting governor of Indiana. Donations to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign were not barred by the policy, since neither Clinton nor her running mate Tim Kaine were sitting state or local officials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Controversies_and_legal_issues

lol this kinda funny

whistleblowers should be punished, and are not the same as political enemies

Goldman Sachs received $10b in government aid

true

for its role in the 2008 banking crisis

not true

you guys are like the john birch society for people who hate banks instead of the UN

Precedent: i hate fucking banks

banks are like every other huge corporations in the capitalist economy; they seek to break every rule of good social conduct and to evade or undermine every form of government regulation, imposing the highest social costs they can get away with, if it makes them more money. this is not an endearing quality.

If someone were in office who wasn't openly devoted to the idea that the unrestrained law enforcement power of the United States government was properly to be used as a tool to punish political enemies, yes, to be honest, I would sleep easier. I truly do not see this as "the same thing" as what other lousy Presidents would do, or in recent history have done.

whistleblowers should be punished, and are not the same as political enemies

What are examples of Trump using unrestrained federal law enforcement power to punish political enemies in this way, as distinct from what other Presidents have done? (Honest question)

the mass J20 prosecution is similar to what other lousy presidents have done, but worse.

And less effective, it turns out.

from Defend J20 Resistance: On January 20th, 230 people were mass arrested during demonstrations against Donald Trump's Inauguration. The arrests were made by use of a "kettle" technique on the corners of 12th and L Streets, after no orders to disperse. 214 of these arrestees were charged under the Federal Riot Statute. On April 27th, multiple additional felony charges were added. One trial group was acquitted of all charges, and the Attorney's Office dropped charges against an additional 129 defendants on January 18, 2018. There are still 59 people who are being prosecuted with multiple felonies and face up to 60 years in prison.

i mean given that the purpose of this abuse of law enforcement powers is to punish protesters by massively disrupting their lives for months or years on end, it's an enormous success even if every single one of them ends up getting charges dropped or not-guilty verdicts. more generally it discourages other potential protesters and continues the long normalization of kettling, mass arrests, and guilt-by-association.

the J20 prosecutions are obviously awful but I'm not really convinced they mark a significant ramping up from horrible shit that's gone down under other administrations' watch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Republican_National_Convention_protest_activity

yeah it's tough to articulate. i feel like the tone/context is different; these actions are effectively more of an assault on free speech because the admin doesn't even pay lip service to free speech, because the president thinks of the press as an enemy of the state, etc. so even the exact same abuse of law enforcement powers would align with these other things to create a different authoritarian formation. but then again that was the era of the hot fresh patriot act and with-us-or-against-us/terrorists-have-already-won-ism. so maybe that doesn't hold any water at all.

the muslim ban rollout, and the way denials of entry continued well after the court orders came down, might also be worth looking at here.

discussed last month, the trump official who said that a strike on north korea could help in the midterms. the WSJ journalist who tweeted the korean report has since deleted it, and it turns out to have been a interesting example of mistranslation/difference of journalistic norms in south korea.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=36673

don't get me wrong, we're definitely all still going to die. just thought this was interesting.

thanks for tracking and following up on that. i'm a bit embarrassed that i posted that story here, but probably a lot less so than the WSJ reporter and other journalists who get paid to be more responsible about such things.

it also makes me think of how trump's various ranting and ravings are translated into other languages. they barely make sense in english, and they often include implied sarcasm and colloquialisms that i'm sure are incredibly confusing and misleading in a different language.

i have just the article 4 u

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/01/12/countries-that-are-dirty-like-toilets-and-other-ways-trumps-profanity-was-translated-abroad/?utm_term=.edad77adfde6

I would sleep easier if I felt the abuses of power now being contemplated, licensed, and executed were no worse than those under Bush II.

maybe you should feel that way cuz things were rotten then, maybe as bad or worse

caek = clutch

possible march thread titles:

Reached by a reporter early Friday, House, the linguist in Hamburg, said she hadn’t read Trump’s original words in English yet — only the translation in a German daily.

“Is it dirthole?” she asked.

Close, but not quite.

https://i.imgur.com/0qi99MO.jpg

is it right to call what happened (or didn't happen) between pence and kim yo-jong a diplomatic failure? pence didn't say a word and instead deployed his trademark empty soul stare. talking to kim, or at least making eye contact and saying hello, should have been possible because pence wouldn't be tempted to have sex with kim with his wife in the same room, so we can rule out that explanation. what a strange, tense moment that was.

Pence is a dead-eyed moron who thinks he's a Norman Rockwell painting hero, he'd be hilarious if he wasn't a terrible human being.

it's just...

it's a fools errand to imagine how the history of today will be written. but regardless of whether the intro to the passage is "shortly before the first global nuclear war" or "in the years leading up to the thawing of tensions between south korea and north korea" or "just days before everyone in the NRA accidentally shot their genitalia off and could no longer reproduce, saving humanity", the key point is going to be "mike pence had an extraordinarily rare diplomatic opportunity with the sister of kim jong-un, and he chose to not say a single word." i guess i could see how it wasn't the worst outcome, because who knows what he would have said had he opened his mouth. but it really highlights the terrible leadership we have at the moment. even george fucking w bush would have said or done something. pence didn't know what to do because it's not in the bible

Pence must have been thinking of the old adage: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and prove it."

Pence striking a very Johnny Iselin from ManchCandidate pose

i never knew much about him other than just the Christ-bitten, garden variety evil GOP gov of IN, but he really is Rick Perry-level dim isn't he

have you seen his speech in Congress about evolution?

lol no! gotta check that out

i do know that he was questioning whether tobacco causes lung cancer as late as the early 00s though. which, jfc.

is it too late to call out the complete misuse / gross misunderstanding of "whistleblower" upthread? unless the late great really thinks the WPA should be abolished and the office of special counsel is a waste of money

though tbf the industry was publicly "questioning" as late as '99 when the the AGs of 40-odd states more or less said "fuck you stop it rn"

man. the poor tobacco industry. if they'd been able to hold on just a little longer they would've had a whole political party and the most-watched cable "news" network carrying their water.

So, uh, Nunes keeps on Nunesing

Devin Nunes created and is paying for a fake news site that, among other things, attacks me. So I am going to do the same thing.

Aw, just kidding. I don't need to spend money peddling fake news. I've learned there is an easier way to inform the American people: tell the truth. https://t.co/EF2tGe9ORZ

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) February 11, 2018

Jesus fucking Christ

Anthony Ratekin, Nunes’ chief of staff, declined to provide comment on Nunes’ involvement with the news site. “Until Politico retracts its multitude of fake stories on Congressman Nunes, we will not go on the record,” he was quoted as saying.

“I talk to Flynn virtually everyday, if not multiple times a day,” @DevinNunes said in December 2016. “Seldom there's a day that goes by that I don't talk to Flynn, and especially right after the campaign, directly.” https://t.co/Xjy0DsGBFj

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) February 11, 2018

This guy

https://www.axios.com/twisted-trump-says-porter-sick-guilty-defends-him-publicly-1518385468-1e643a55-5ef4-43fe-90f4-fdba5fc7eadb.html

would love to see Nunes roped in on obstruction charges, what a despicable human being

yeah, he really does represent several layers of what's especially wrong about modern politics in the u.s.

http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a9278165/devin-nunes-winery/