Treason Season??

[DHBirr]

Someone using the handle Mylz22 came up with a marvelous limerick in a comment on the Washington Post site the other day:

Trump thought he could act with impunity
As long as his crew stood in unity.
But the art of the deal
When the feds come is: Squeal! 
While you still have a chance at immunity.

-----
Considering that one dictionary definition of "carry on" is to "behave or speak in a foolish, excited, or improper manner," the designers of that famous poster, "Keep Calm and Carry On," need to make up their flippin' minds!

[Dartz]

Mueller now?


So.

The party that threatened to weaponise false allegations now appearrs to be doing just that.


The aim, not being to discredit Mueller as such, but to discredit all other future allegations. See look, there's a fake allegation - we know it's fake because we made it, so how do we know they're not making fake allegations too. They'rew just doing the exact same thing.

[hazard]

The Republican party must be desperate by now if they think this will work.

I mean, it might. But all that means is that the entire party gets purged. There's no way the FBI will accept this and say what you will, but the judicial system is at the lower levels still too functional not to follow through on the FBI's investigations.

Pay attention to whatever the Special Counsel's office drops in the week following the 6th of November.

[LynnInDenver]

They probably see it as a win-win. Either they manage to sink Mueller with even the implication, or they throw enough doubt around about "paid to accuse of sexual harassment/assault" that they strengthen the whole idea of "file charges, or it never ever happened."

Not really surprised at all by all this. The idea upsets me on several levels, though.

[Labster]

Pay attention to whatever the Special Counsel's office drops in the week following the 6th of November.

I'll have my effigies ready to burn on the 5th, as is traditional.

[hazard]

They probably see it as a win-win. Either they manage to sink Mueller with even the implication, or they throw enough doubt around about "paid to accuse of sexual harassment/assault" that they strengthen the whole idea of "file charges, or it never ever happened."

Not really surprised at all by all this. The idea upsets me on several levels, though.

The problem for them is that the Republican's are going to lose credibility in anything, and IANAL and everything but this is looking like a fairly solid ground for a slander charge. A slander charge that's likely to stick too. Which means that follow up smear campaigns are easier to deal with for opponents of the Republican party by dragging the accusers before a court to demand their sources.


Mind, if it weren't for the fact that the women we know of could've made the complaint immediately went public/to the FBI with the attempt this would have worked a lot better. And I'm sure there's a number of them that quietly didn't respond or saw the media response and decided not to continue. But now? Attempts to hurt any opponents of Trump by accusing them of sexual harassment are likely much less effective, while the Republicans themselves don't benefit nearly as much in the general public's eye because this is a known Republican tactic.

[Dartz]

As for why this may be rearing its head now


It's speculation. But it's speculation that makes a level-headed sort of sense. Is that the noose silently tightening on the neck?

[DHBirr]

Giuliani made a typo in a tweet.  No biggie, lots of people slip up, except it accidentally created a link to a domain without an owner, and that gave a clever fellow the opportunity to make Rudy's tweet convey an anti-Trump message.

Then Giuliani demonstrated he doesn't seem to know how Twitter works.

"Khan ... I'm laughing at the superior intellect."

[robkelk]

Sourcing this one from a news outlet that is not based in the USA.

'He directed me to make the payments': Cohen says Trump's denials aren't believable

In recent weeks, Trump has shifted to asserting it was a private transactions that wasn't illegal.

"I never directed him to do anything wrong," Trump said of Cohen in an interview with Fox News broadcast on Thursday. "Whatever he did, he did on his own."

Cohen scoffed at that assertion in the ABC interview.

"Nothing at the Trump Organization was ever done unless it was run through Mr. Trump," said Cohen.

Given Trump's history of wanting to be in control and in the spotlight all the time, I believe Cohen's statement about Trump having the final say over what happened.

[Rajvik]

The problem with the general argument Rob, is that it is not illegal to pay some one to sign and be beholden to an NDA, not even a politician. If it was you would have to indict anyone that used the congressional slush fund that was used for the same purpose, re: about half of both houses. The only way that campaign finance MIGHT be concerned is that Cohen didn't itemize it in his billing. Quite frankly, the lot of you are grasping at straws.

[hazard]

The problem with the general argument Rob, is that it is not illegal to pay some one to sign and be beholden to an NDA,  not even a politician. If it was you would have to indict anyone that used the congressional slush fund that was used for the same purpose, re: about half of both houses. The only way that campaign finance MIGHT be concerned is that Cohen didn't itemize it in his billing. Quite frankly, the lot of you are grasping at straws.

Except that AFAICT it is illegal to offer a campaign contribution beyond a certain value, even if that contribution is a service rather than money. And it's illegal to lie about it to a federal investigator.

Even if Cohen and Trump and the Trump campaign organization had all their paperwork in order, if any of them at any point lied about it to any federal investigator who was duly pursuing the matter that individual is subject to penalties on that matter on its own.

Remember, they couldn't get Al Capone on his smuggling, on his speakeasies, on his murders or on anything else specific on his criminal enterprises. But they could prove he was screwing around knowingly and deliberately with his private taxes.


As for the congressional slush fund? I would be entirely alright with indicting the half of the US Congress that made use of that and make them suffer through the consequences. They are adults, most of them on the far side of their thirties, and they are collectively the legislative branch of a government serving more than 300 million people. They do not get to hide behind claims of youthful indiscretions, they should stand up, accept what blame is rightly theirs and either do better or resign, so that another can be elected who will do better.

It's part of the responsibility that comes with such a position.

[robkelk]

The problem with the general argument Rob, is that it is not illegal <remainder snipped>

I don't recall mentioning "legal" or "illegal".

What I mentioned was that Trump said he didn't know about the payment, Cohen said Trump authorized the payment before it was made, and Trump's track record makes me believe Cohen in this matter.

Trump is not trustworthy. (That might not be illegal, but it's a poor character trait for a President.)

[Rajvik]

Rob, 99.9% of the politicians and business types out there aren't trustworthy to one degree or another, I honestly feel that Trump, that while not completely trustworthy, isn't going to bend me over a barrel and screw me over like Pelosi, Clinton (either one) Schumer or Obama has. He at least listens to people who understand that our Constitution was written with certain things in mind, things that mean you have the ability to improve your life instead of wallowing in the same miserable shithole that is "equal outcome". People who understand that socialism and communism DO NOT WORK on our scale without forcing the majority of your people into abject poverty and servitude.

Or for that matter actually know the definition of Socialist

[Black Aeronaut]

So, how do you define socialism?

Also, last time I checked, the Nordic Model seems to work pretty damn well.

Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

I challenge you to tell me just how that system is broken.

[Mamorien]

So, how do you define socialism?

As best I've been able to tell, he "defines" it the same way he defines "liberal-progressive-globalist" over on the Irish oddsmaker thread, a way explained by one "vituperative, foul-mouthed blogger" back in 2009 when Andrew Sullivan was insisting that his objections to the Republican Party, as it had come to present itself during the Cheney adsinistration, emphatically did not "make [him] a 'radical leftist' as Michelle Malkin would say":

Yes, Mr. Sullivan, your objections emphatically do make you a "radical leftist", because in the hands of the shitkicker demagogues of the Right like Malkin, phrases like "radical leftist" have long since lost any meaning. They are just the pejorative-du-jour, pulled from a random grab-bag of Limbaugh-words -- socialist, elitist, feminist, Marxist, anti-American, compassionate, cut-and-run, surrender, Liberal, extremist, collectivist, queer, Communist, fascist, atheist, humanist, "New York", "San Francisco", “Chicago”, French, European -- that each used to have discrete and very different meanings, but are now bleated interchangeably by the Pig People and their overlords at anyone with a softer heart than Curtis LeMay and less imperial ambitions than Genghis Khan.

(I'm being specious and unfair, I know. Rajvik may never have listened to Limbaugh. He may instead get all his information from Fox "News", the network that has been scientifically proven to leave its viewers less informed about the world than people who watch literally no news at all. Or both. It wouldn't surprise me either way.)

Also, last time I checked, the Nordic Model seems to work pretty damn well.

Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

I challenge you to tell me just how that system is broken.

I predict that his "answer" will be like a train wreck made of clown cars.

[robkelk]

Rob, 99.9% of the politicians and business types out there aren't trustworthy to one degree or another,

Why do you vote for somebody who you don't feel is trustworthy?

That's a serious question; I'd appreciate a serious answer.

I honestly feel that Trump, that while not completely trustworthy, isn't going to bend me over a barrel and screw me over like Pelosi, Clinton (either one) Schumer or Obama has.

He's already screwed over Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. And that was just last week.

He at least listens to people who understand that our Constitution was written with certain things in mind, things that mean you have the ability to improve your life instead of wallowing in the same miserable shithole that is "equal outcome". People who understand that socialism and communism DO NOT WORK on our scale without forcing the majority of your people into abject poverty and servitude.

Or for that matter actually know the definition of Socialist

Have you read your own country's Constitution? As far as I can see, none of what you attribute to it is anywhere in the text - would you point out which sections of which articles support your statements there, please?

[Dartz]

The communist sends the soldiers to your house, kicks in the door, lines you up against a wall and tells you its 'for the people's good'

The capitalist just sort of looks at you while you starve - he's watching you the whole fucking time and at any moment can do the simplest thing to stop it - but instead assures you it's your own fault, and it'll be for your own good in the end.

I'm not sure which I prefer anymore. Either way you're still fucked.

Neoliberalism needs the risk of poverty to keep working - otherwise it just sort of falls apart. You see those people over there - you loose your job, your livelyhood, your home, your gonna end up like them so just keep going untill you kill yourself with misery. It needs the inherent threat of insecurity to make people accept things they just wouldn't otherwise accept - like being abused to fuck in a workplace environment, run ragged into the ground and spending all the light hours of the day working three fucking jobs.

An ultimately, it thrives on the idea that someone will come to take what little you've been allowed to eke out away. Be it the government, the bank, or them immigrants - the threat is the same.

In practice it doesn't really need to be that way though - does it?

[Labster]

Rob, 99.9% of the politicians and business types out there aren't trustworthy to one degree or another,

Why do you vote for somebody who you don't feel is trustworthy?

That's a serious question; I'd appreciate a serious answer.

I honestly feel that Trump, that while not completely trustworthy, isn't going to bend me over a barrel and screw me over like Pelosi, Clinton (either one) Schumer or Obama has.

He's already screwed over Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. And that was just last week.

He at least listens to people who understand that our Constitution was written with certain things in mind, things that mean you have the ability to improve your life instead of wallowing in the same miserable shithole that is "equal outcome". People who understand that socialism and communism DO NOT WORK on our scale without forcing the majority of your people into abject poverty and servitude.

Or for that matter actually know the definition of Socialist

Have you read your own country's Constitution? As far as I can see, none of what you attribute to it is anywhere in the text - would you point out which sections of which articles support your statements there, please?

Gosh I am now tempted to make a 14th Amendment argument for socialism.


Neoliberalism is basically dead, but nothing has come along to replace it other than the spectre of populist nativism.  This is probably due largely to climate change, which has been spurring the large-scale global migration over the past decade, and both cause and effect will probably only get worse.  The American Left has become something of a grand alliance of socialists, leftover neoliberals, socially-left industrialists, minority interests, environmentalist evangelical Christians, and centrist Republicans.  It's not really a group with much of a common goal, other than defending classical liberalism.  Obviously, we need new ideologies.

[classicdrogn]

Judge Sullivan apparently really laid into Flynn earlier today, before delaying sentencing so he could continue to cooperate with other investigations. Probably also to get his own temper under control to avoid turning it into appeals fodder, I suppose, but it definitely sounds like he's leaning toward actual jail time.

No link to give you at the moment since it was on the radio.

[Mamorien]

Neoliberalism is basically dead, but nothing has come along to replace it other than the spectre of populist nativism.  This is probably due largely to climate change,

I thought it was due to the main alternative having been discredited by the collapse of the USSR, discredited so thoroughly that nearly 30 years later, otherwise well-informed people sincerely believe that "socialism" means always and only what one of its most fervent foes said:

From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

Churchill frequently expressed nostalgia for the Romanovs and a view of Lenin, not as a cure worse than the disease, but as a disease which had infested a healthy nation (because ruled by a king, as any truly civilized country would be). See also Edmund Burke concluding that "the age of chivalry is gone[...] and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever" because Marie Antoinette and her husband found out the hard way that you can only ignore the little folk, or pretend they're too little to love or to hate, for so long. (How they must love what they do!)

[hazard]

Flynn's sentence is still likely to be light. The judge will know well enough that cooperating with the investigation is something that should be rewarded, and Mueller doesn't seem to me the sort of prosecutor who would ask for no jail time in sentencing without a really good reason. Especially for crimes as serious as Flynn's.


As for the whole socialism thing; communism as it was practiced in the USSR was, to the best of my knowledge, not actually socialism. It was a dictatorship by any measure, using the promises of socialism as its bread and games. The power socialism promises to the people to make their own decisions and to influence political matters with their own voices is something that never became a thing.

[Rajvik]

So, how do you define socialism?

sorry, something like this tends to require an actual keyboard and more time than i really have to answer, because it is a many nuanced thing

Socialism is a political/economic philosophy of "From those who have, to those who need" which in philosophy is fine, it takes from those who have excess to their personal need and gives to those who lack. The first problem lies in the human condition of the mechanism to move said largesses. HUMAN BEINGS ARE GREEDY. As George Orwell stated in his novel "Animal Farms" the philosophy becomes "Some pigs are more equal than others." and because of this people will skim from top, from the very best of what is available to make their own lives just a little bit better than anyone else.

The second problem with socialism is, in my mind, a toss up between the identity politics of saying, "HE HAS MORE THAN YOU AND THUS IS EVIL."  and the fact that it forces a social paradigm of totalitarianism just to keep the people from continuing to take from the people who are doing the leveling. Margaret Thatcher said it best here when she said, "Socialism is great, until you run out of other people's money to spend." David Weber has shown us what happens when you have socialism writ large, (Haven), China shows us what a nation is willing to do to maintain the information control necessary to keep the peace in a large area socialist regime, and Venezuela is showing us why this is the case. In short, BA, your socialist utopia is an outlier, not the norm, and i honestly wonder why that is. (note that i wonder why its the outlier)

As best I've been able to tell, he "defines" it the same way he defines "liberal-progressive-globalist" over on the Irish oddsmaker thread, a way explained by one "vituperative, foul-mouthed blogger" back in 2009 when Andrew Sullivan was insisting that his objections to the Republican Party, as it had come to present itself during the Cheney adsinistration, emphatically did not "make [him] a 'radical leftist' as Michelle Malkin would say":

Yes, Mr. Sullivan, your objections emphatically do make you a "radical leftist", because in the hands of the shitkicker demagogues of the Right like Malkin, phrases like "radical leftist" have long since lost any meaning. They are just the pejorative-du-jour, pulled from a random grab-bag of Limbaugh-words -- socialist, elitist, feminist, Marxist, anti-American, compassionate, cut-and-run, surrender, Liberal, extremist, collectivist, queer, Communist, fascist, atheist, humanist, "New York", "San Francisco", “Chicago”, French, European -- that each used to have discrete and very different meanings, but are now bleated interchangeably by the Pig People and their overlords at anyone with a softer heart than Curtis LeMay and less imperial ambitions than Genghis Khan.

(I'm being specious and unfair, I know. Rajvik may never have listened to Limbaugh. He may instead get all his information from Fox "News", the network that has been scientifically proven to leave its viewers less informed about the world than people who watch literally no news at all. Or both. It wouldn't surprise me either way.)

Thank you Mamorien for putting words in my mouth, I do happen to listen to Rush whenever i get the chance, though i lament that it is not as often as i would like due to the only station in the area that carries him being an AM station and the fact that I AM WORKING at a job where i cannot listen to any radio station at all. Now, what this driftglass fails to note is the reason that the phrase "Radical-Leftist" has become a pejorative among the right. It is because in their pursuit of that libertine value of equality, (one i can actually empathize with to a large degree) is that they have decided that socialism/communism is the ONLY method to reach it.

Also Mamorien, Churchill was British, and as Dartz can probably attest, Brits have a thing about monarchy, they think that is the way things should be because thats the way it has been for years. For them is practically mimetic. Do not equate this with a hate of equality, the Russian people WERE better off under the Romanovs than they were under Stalin, at least in the later generations. 

Now, as to this persons comments of "Shit kicker Demagogues" better a shit kicker who will survive on their own as opposed to a elitist basement dwelling city boy who couldn't survive outside suburbia and requires a grocery store to eat. Are those things nice, oh yes, but not necessary to those of us that grew up in the country. Our agrarian ways will long outlive your "bourgeois" city by dint of one simple fact, YOU NEED US, WE DON'T NEED YOU!

Why do you vote for somebody who you don't feel is trustworthy?

That's a serious question; I'd appreciate a serious answer.

The short answer is that no one that is trustworth is running for office. Thats not me being glib, its just a fact of life. when dealing with politicians i have two philosophies, 

first: Politicians are like diapers, they end up dirty, and need to be changed often. 


Second: There is no one who searches for power, who is worthy of power, so pick the lesser evil.

i hope this has answered a good number of questions and appologize for taking as long as i did to answer, i don't sit in front of a keyboard all day.

[Jinx999]

Also Mamorien, Churchill was British, and as Dartz can probably attest, Brits have a thing about monarchy, they think that is the way things should be because thats the way it has been for years. For them is practically mimetic.

That's not precisely true. The Royal Family is an important tradition and the Queen is personally very well respected. However they only maintain the respect by being above the political fray and not publicly getting involved with any actual politics. If the reigning monarch tried to do any actual reigning, it would not last long.

This has the big advantage in that it separates the unifying symbol of the country from the person responsible for the latest political screw up to hit the headlines.

[hazard]

Also relevant; the British royal family actually costs the British public... nothing. In fact, every single British citizen receives an admittedly small but there tax break of something like 5 pounds every year as a result of the royal family.

The reason for this is that the British Royal family has for several hundred years now consigned the management and profits of their own private lands (and they are quite substantial) to Parliament in return for a stipend, which is quite a bit smaller than the profits of those properties and pays for all their needs including things like transportation.

This would basically be equivalent of the US president promising and keeping the promise that for as long as they are in office all their income except the government stipend they get for being president and the associated government benefits like the use of 1600 Pensylvania Avenue and Air Force 1 is going directly to the treasury instead of being run in a blind trust on their behalf. And there have been some very rich presidents indeed, for whom that would've meant losing millions if not billions of dollars worth in income while they were in office and cannot claim afterwards.

[Rajvik]

I would argue different time different context, but I will take what the two of you have said to heart as a correction.