US Politics, March 2018: Why do people leave the White House for good?

Finally read the linked nyt piece on that Nader character and im tryna figure out his planning to visit mara lago in january and not envisioning an absolute swarm of fbi/mueller bees awaiting his deplaning.

cant tell if mara lago is a good drag name or not

I can't figure out why he would fly to Washington to go to Mar-A-Lago.

Prince deserves to die in a lake of fire, don't get me wrong, but that transcript of conversation doesn't seem that damning to me? He could easily have been saying "What hypothetical official is supposedly reading this hypothetical transcript?"

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/07/why-isnt-wall-street-freaking-out-about-trump-217228

as expected, it boils down to this:

If there is a unified field theory for why Trump’s highly unusual presidency doesn’t ruffle Wall Street, it’s this: Beyond all the noise and bluster, he’s mostly a standard-issue Republican. At the agency level, his appointees have championed fewer regulations on every conceivable industry, rolling back or postponing one Barack Obama-era restriction after another. Trump also signed a bill slashing the corporate tax rate nearly in half, fattening corporate profits, and unleashing dividend payments and stock buybacks, all of which help drive share prices higher.

&

Part of the reason markets don’t react much to the North Korea talk, the senior trader said, is that there is really no way to model what an actual conflict would look like, so people just assume it won’t happen. “How can you even analyze a nuclear war?” the senior trader said. “There was a chance a few weeks ago that we were going to enter a nuclear war, and markets didn’t react to that. … And yes, that is pretty crazy.”

on one hand, several dozen of the world's major cities were obliterated in a nuclear war and are now mostly silent except for the occasional irradiated ghoul scavenging for food in the rubble

but on the other, i TOTALLY sold high just before all that happened! buy the dip!!

Mara Large-O would work better

windfallout

i rescreened mystic pizza a while back and mar-a-lago is in it (via lifestyle of the rich & famous)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osIL3M7os_o

Mara Large-O would work better

― jamiesummerz, Wednesday, March 7, 2018 9:04 AM (fifty-six minutes ago)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzolCu-QLw0

should we have a "rolling labor unrest" thread or something? Oklahoma teachers strike is happening, Kentucky may follow

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-06/could-west-virginia-s-wildcat-teachers-strike-spread

Kentucky is the one that would really blow my mind, kinda.

Also, this is probably completely coincidental, but 100s of thousands of Danish workers are probably going on strike next month, and I am wondering a bit if there are any parallels.

Labor specific thread may not be a bad idea, curious what other people think. There’s too much news right now, stuff is easily getting buried.

FWIW the most level-headed piece I've seen about the WVa strike comes from Sarah Jones at The Nation.

https://newrepublic.com/article/147307/cost-west-virginia-teachers-strike

Paging marcos, let's you and me go to this: http://fox8.com/2018/03/07/porn-star-stormy-daniels-to-appear-in-cleveland/

NB: Good work, machine generated news stories: "The porn star claims she had a sex with Trump years ago."

haha phil

one (1) sex

The Prince stuff is old news to Abramson-readers.

He's been under investigation by the Justice Dept since 2016 btw.

Abramson

noooooooope

Ah, the penny drops.

say what?

Someone dropped a penny on Trump from the top of the Empire State.

Gotta start somewhere.

https://frinkiac.com/img/S10E21/642891.jpg

racial polarization in texas:
–state is 39% hispanic, 42% white non-hispanic
–115/181 lawmakers are currently Republican. next session there will be at max 2 hispanic Rs, possibly 1 or 0
–66/181 lawmakers are currently Democratic. five are white non-hispanic

— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) March 7, 2018

Convenient.

Hope Hicks told the House Intelligence Committee last week that one of her email accounts was hacked, @NBCNews reports: https://t.co/lbdOwgQbaz

— Jenna Johnson (@wpjenna) March 7, 2018

BUT HER EM... um, oh, wait.

Fwiw, hacking claims also attended the furors around Anthony Weiner, David Petraeus, and Mark Sanford.

Odd fellow, this president.

NEW - via @nytmike and me, Mueller has learned of two instances where Trump spoke to witnesses about issues related to their appearances w investigators https://t.co/bo7pcLjkQE

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) March 7, 2018

In one episode, the president told an aide that the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, should issue a statement denying a New York Times article in January. The article said Mr. McGahn told investigators that the president once asked him to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. McGahn never released a statement and later had to remind the president that he had indeed asked Mr. McGahn to see that Mr. Mueller was dismissed, the people said.

Full story is even better:

Mr. Trump’s interactions with Mr. McGahn unfolded in the days after the Jan. 25 Times article, which said that Mr. McGahn threatened to quit last June after the president asked him to fire the special counsel. After the article was published, the White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, told Mr. McGahn that the president wanted him to release a statement saying that the story was not true, the people said.

Mr. Porter, who resigned last month amid a domestic abuse scandal, told Mr. McGahn the president had suggested he might “get rid of” Mr. McGahn if he chose not to challenge the article, the people briefed on the conversation said.

Mr. McGahn did not publicly deny the article, and the president later confronted him in the Oval Office in front of the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, according to the people.

The president said he had never ordered Mr. McGahn to fire the special counsel. Mr. McGahn replied that the president was wrong and that he had in fact asked Mr. McGahn in June to call the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to tell him that the special counsel had a series of conflicts that disqualified him for overseeing the investigation and that he had to be dismissed. The president told Mr. McGahn that he did not remember the discussion that way.

Mr. Trump moved on, pointing out that Mr. McGahn had never told him that he was going to resign over the order to fire the special counsel. Mr. McGahn acknowledged that that was true but said that he had told senior White House officials at the time that he was going to quit.

It is not clear how the confrontation was resolved.

i rescreened mystic pizza a while back and mar-a-lago is in it (via lifestyle of the rich & famous)

― It's not delivery, it's Adorno! (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, March 7, 2018 11:29 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hope when this is all over that everyone can come together and agree to George Lucas the shit out of every cultural artifact that contains a non-pejorative mention or depiction of Trump. It's such a fucking bummer every time I hear his name in old tv shows and songs.

it's really disheartening and stressful when you're trying to unwind with some mindless 80s trash and Trump appears out of nowhere in some hitherto harmless idiom like some piece of unexploded cultural ordinance

Yes this...huh?

President Trump’s lawyer secretly obtained a restraining order last week to prevent Stormy Daniels from speaking out about her alleged affair with Trump https://t.co/tvhljhVQEf

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) March 7, 2018

does anyone even care about this (apart from melania)?

Less than 2/3 of Texas' population is eligible to vote. Most of that is due to age, but even among the voting-age population, more than 15% is ineligible due to lack of citizenship or criminal status.

does anyone even care about this (apart from melania)?

Whatever hemming and hawing the likes of Jerry Falwell Jr may do, there is a question of potential misuse of political funds depending on where the $130,000 ultimately came from.

also it shows how susceptible trump is to blackmail etc

i mean it was obvious to some of us for decades that he is a fuckin crook but others need more convincing

I'm amazed that Mueller's phalanx of attorneys can track of this. I imagine Mueller like James Mason in The Verdict, directing the teams.
"Okay, well, cancel all vacations, Smith. We're going to concentrate on obstruction of justice, hmm?"

https://youtu.be/S_o54V6y2bA?t=26m36s

Well I think for him and his team it's the fact that new material -- criminal or not -- keeps *happening,* as evidenced by Trump's muddling the other month mentioned above. And at such a high amount and with a wide profile.

Busy Wednesday here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/b6a5fb8c-224b-11e8-94da-ebf9d112159c_story.html?utm_term=.229ad2d5e183

This builds on the story the other day re the Seychelles, thus:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has gathered evidence that a secret meeting in the Seychelles just before the inauguration of Donald Trump was an effort to establish a back-channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin — apparently contradicting statements made to lawmakers by one of its participants, according to people familiar with the matter....

While Mueller is probing the circumstances of the Seychelles meeting, he is also more broadly examining apparent efforts by the Trump transition team to create a back-channel for secret talks between the new administration and the Kremlin. Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate how Russia interfered in the 2016 election, whether any Americans assisted in such efforts, and any other related matters that arise in the course of his probe.

Investigators now suspect the Seychelles meeting may have been one of the first efforts to establish such a line of communications between the two governments, these people said. Nader’s account is considered key evidence — but not the only evidence — about what transpired in the Seychelles, according to people familiar with the matter.

Something new every day. Every. Single. Day. Almost damning, never exculpatory.

YOU'RE THE PUPPET!

i am ready for the part of the nightmare to be over

https://i.imgflip.com/iiwdr.jpg

He stormy Daniels thing is important because it’s a criminal violation of campaign finance laws on its face.

Also, for all his lies there are still people who believe him, or think his accusers are the liars. In this case, if he denies the contract she is free to tell her story (or whatever she intends to do), which will prove his involvement, and if he fights to enforce it he therefore validates it, which also admits culpability. Then there is the campaign finance stuff. Then there is also the test case effect that if she sues and wins, or evinces either of the aforementioned results, that allows/emboldens all of his other accusers to follow the same legal path and call his bluff.

Or as someone purporting to be a lawyer observed online:

This agreement is not invalid simply because Trump didn't sign it. The terms are clear, and she was paid the money as contemplated by the agreement. The fact that Trump didn't sign it is irrelevant because it was signed by his agent.

However, and this is the good part, all Trump needs to do to soundly beat this lawsuit is adopt the contract. If his lawyer had Trump's authority to execute the agreement, then all Trump has to do is acknowledge and adopt the contract, and it is 100% binding.

Stormy Daniels' lawyer knows this. But they also know that politically Trump cannot acknowledge or adopt this contract. This is win-win-win for them. Either (1) Trump refuses to adopt the contract, in which case she gets out of it and gets to sell her story to the networks, (2) Trump adopts the contract, and that in itself is a news story, or (3) she gets more money from Trump to drop the suit.

Edit: A few people are correctly pointing out that another issue for Trump is that asserting the contract was for his benefit may also have implications for an FEC violation.

trump's crimes only seem to be crimes insofar as congress feels that they are, so it seems odd that paying off stormy is a bigger deal than kellyanne c. violating the hatch act or jared endlessly forgetting to list all of his creditors or various emolumental actions

besides, we all know that money is free speech

The thing is, the Stormy stuff - that is state law, right? It has nothing to do with congress.