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U.S. Politics 2017 (split fm US Election: 2016)

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I love it when people go after Sessions for this like it's the greatest story ever told. Yet many Canadians get all wrapped around the axle about a minor blip in the US, but say nothing about their own PM who hasn't told the truth in over two years.
 
recceguy said:
I love it when people go after Sessions for this like it's the greatest story ever told. Yet many Canadians get all wrapped around the axle about a minor blip in the US, but say nothing about their own PM who hasn't told the truth in over two years.

I think the whole Sessions issue is being blown out of proportion. No evidence has been provided that would indicate his meetings with the Ambassador had anything to do with the campaign, or anything nefarious purposes.

The other campaign people who are being investigated because of Russian contacts may well have done things that border on criminal actions. And I wouldn't be surprised if this became the full blown scandle it's been made out to be. Some of the more left leaning media outlets are working on building a case that is heading to some pretty damaging territory for Trump himself, and the Family businesses and the Trump organization. It's verging on criminal activities, such as violating sanctions with Iran, money laundering and things of that nature.

Donald Trump's Worst Deal - The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal

Why did a Russian pay $95M to buy Trump’s Palm Beach mansion?
http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/why-did-a-russian-pay-95m-to-buy-trumps-palm-beach-mansion/
 
This article by Megan McArdle (at Bloomberg.com) explains why the "case" against Sessions is weak.

Franken didn't ask a pure question about any kind of communication; he posed his question after establishing context - "there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government."  Clearly Franken wasn't fishing for evidence of above-board, day-to-day business-of-the-nation exchanges with Russians.  Most opinion journalists who have commented on the matter have acknowledged the difference.

If Sessions didn't have that kind of communication with the Russian government, then in the context of Franken's question, "I did not" is a reasonable answer.

 
Economic performance will be what either cements or kills this Administration. The current picture looks like cementing the Administration's future is a good prospect. The numbers of Americans who are re entering the job market is encouraging both on the economic front, and also provides a pool of potential new voters for the Administration in 2018, 2020 and beyond:

https://amgreatness.com/2017/03/11/democrats-fume-trump-becomes-jobs-president/

While Democrats Fume, Trump Becomes the Jobs President
March 11, 2017 by Chris Buskirk —218 Comments

It’s the economy, stupid. We’ve heard the phrase so many times over the past 25 years that it has descended into cliché if not outright parody. But it’s been repeated so often because it highlights a basic truth about politics: jobs matter. And since the election, the job growth has been extraordinary.

It’s been so strong that it prompted Jamie Dimon, president and CEO of Chase, the nation’s largest bank, a registered Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter, to back President Trump’s economic agenda. Dimon declared it has “woken up the animal spirits” in the United States. His comments came in the midst of a spate of good economic news released this week.

Trump himself tweeted, “Great Again: +235,000” after the Labor Department reported a higher than expected 235,000 new jobs were created in February. This came on the heels of a report earlier in the week from ADP and Moody’s Analytics showing 298,000 new private sector jobs in the same month. Better yet, the Labor Department report showed strong wage growth and that 340,000 workers who sensed better prospects came off the sidelines and re-entered the workforce. This addresses a key critique of the weak Obama era recovery after the 2008 financial panic: namely, that the low reported unemployment rate was misleading because of the large number of working age Americans who stopped looking for work and were therefore not counted in official government unemployment statistics.

This is all good news for the country and for a president who has promised to put wage and job growth front and center in his administration. Trump’s plans on immigration, infrastructure, taxes, regulation, and trade all aim at improving the lives and prosperity of ordinary American citizens If they continue, the results of the past few months will be considered the downpayment on a broader resurgence of American economic might and the reinvigoration of the middle class.

Against the new administration’s ambitious goals, Democrats are stuck with increasingly transparent attempts to undermine the president with phony narratives endlessly repeated by their media surrogates. The stranglehold the mainstream media had on American opinion was broken long ago and Americans understand the game played by the Progressive Left-Democrat-Media opinion complex. And they either look for other sources of news and opinion or they discount for the expected collusion when they hear Democrat talking points repeated as objective fact.

Forget the nakedly partisan attempts to create a media narrative about Russian hacking and so undermine the legitimacy and effectiveness of President Trump and his administration. Forget too “the Resistance” which exists more as a social media meme than a real life phenomena—progressive street violence notwithstanding. What matters is jobs, not phony outrage cooked up by professional agitators.

The complaints of D.C. Democrats and their Millennial storm troopers don’t have much purchase with middle America when the economy is growing and people are working. As Loretta Lynn sang in her 1971 classic “One’s On The Way”: “The White House social season should be glitterin’ an’ gay but here in Topeka the rainis a fallin’, the faucet is a drippin’ and the kids are a bawlin’.” In other words, no matter what the powerful and connected think, ordinary people have bills to pay and families to raise and they can only do it with a job. And the fact that there are a lot more jobs than there were a few months ago has significant implications for Democrats who think they can win elections based on stoking resentments based on niche grievances and so-called microaggressions.

This week’s economic reports were so uniformly positive that even financial news titan Bloomberg, a reliable defender of Davos class perquisites, was forced to admit that “America’s labor market is getting better by almost any measure.” They were hard-pressed to give the president any credit, but that hardly matters.

With revelations that the Obama Administration may have taken the unprecedented step of using the nation’s intelligence apparatus to spy on the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign and news that Russia’s largest bank has hired Clinton crony Tony Podesta (John’s older brother) to lobby the U.S. government to end sanctions that Democrats’ Russian hacking narrative is destined to collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions.

Democrats long ago gave up on ideas that improve the lives of ordinary Americans focusing instead on identity politics that pits citizen against citizen in a cynical play for short-term electoral success. Barack Obama did it with skill. Hillary Clinton did not. Obama won the presidency twice even as his policies and rhetoric made the Democrats a regional party with electoral strength on the coasts, in the inner cities, and in college towns where they run political monopolies with predictably baleful consequences. Detroit anyone?

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is forging a new electoral coalition that could reshape American politics. Trump’s collaboration with Dimon looks a bit unusual, but his budding alliance with private sector union leaders is a tectonic shift. It would cement the Republican Party of the middle class not the Davos class, of the bowling alley rather than the country club.

Gone are the days of reflexive Republican union bashing. Conservatives had valid criticisms of compulsory unionism and the sort of managerial capitalism championed by people like Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith a few generations ago. That was the era when intellectuals thought that big government plus big labor plus big business added up to eternal prosperity. But that time has passed. Now AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka says, “Will we partner with him (Trump) to try to rewrite the immigration rules of the country? Absolutely, because those will help workers, it will decrease the imbalance between corporate America and workers.” Elected politicians—especially Republicans—should take notice because this may represent the promise of a generational realignment.

Democrats have abandoned kitchen table issues for identity politics. That’s thin gruel for someone who stopped looking for work during the Obama years because of dismal prospects. Trump is the first Republican in a generation to speak effectively about the issues that matter to middle America. More important, he is acting on his rhetoric.

What Steve Bannon calls economic nationalism is nothing more than jobs, infrastructure, and pro-worker, pro-growth trade and economic policies. That makes sense to most people.

Let the Democrats have their identity politics. Donald Trump is making good on his promise to be the jobs president.
 
Jarnhamar said:
Trumps taxes were released. Get ready for an impeachment  ;D

In 2005 he paid $38m in taxes on 150m,a 25% tax rate higher than Obama,Sanders and NBC.The Rachel Maddow stunt seems to have backfired.
 
Jarnhamar said:
Trumps taxes were released. Get ready for an impeachment  ;D

tomahawk6 said:
In 2005 he paid $38m in taxes on 150m,a 25% tax rate higher than Obama,Sanders and NBC.The Rachel Maddow stunt seems to have backfired.

Actually, if legal action is to be taken, it is against Maddow for releasing private documents from the IRS (President Trump was a private citizen in 2005), and a good long prison sentence to her and everyone involved (including the bureaucrat from the IRS who leaked it) would go a long way to restoring the idea of the Rule of Law in the US.
 
Agree, except "DCReport.org reporter David Cay Johnston revealed 2005 Trump tax documents to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow." so it would be Johnson who would face charges. Maddow just crowed about it.

In another matter (excerpt):

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/03/15/tucker-carlson-its-nbc-who-was-real-meddler-in-2016-election-not-russia.html

Tucker Carlson: It's NBC who was the real meddler in the 2016 election, not Russia

Consider the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape.  Now, if you are living in America last fall, you certainly remember it.  The shocking and vulgar remarks. The immediate and disastrous effect that tape had on the candidate Trump's poll numbers.  It was a political bomb detonated in the final days of the most intense political race of our lifetimes.

The fallout was so overwhelming that few paused to consider where that tape came from.

So, let's consider that now.  That tape belonged to NBC, it was shot by NBC cameramen for an NBC show on NBC property.

So, how did it wind up in the hands of "The Washington Post" which broke the story?  How, in other words, did valuable intellectual property from one news organization end up benefitting a competitor.

Intentionally. That is the short answer.

According to sources at NBC, "The Access Hollywood" tape was leaked to "The Washington Post" with the full knowledge of NBC brass.  That would include news edition head Andrew Lack.

NBC's motive?  To derail the Trump campaign two days before a presidential debate. Now, keep in mind that the "Access Hollywood" tape had been sitting in an archive since it was shot 11 years before.

NBC executives had known about its existence at least last summer -- months before it aired.  Concerned about being accused of partisanships and perhaps worried about California's strict wiretapping law, which prohibits the recording of subjects without their knowledge, the network sat on it.

But as November approached, the temptation to shut down the Trump campaign became too much.

And so NBC rose to the defense of Hillary Clinton and leaked that tape. And then they lied about it.

Now, if you’re a news organization and someone stole the story of the year out of your office, wouldn't you want know how that happened?  You'd think you would.  And yet, as far as we can tell, NBC News has never conducted a meaningful internal investigation into how that tape wound up at "The Washington Post."  That’s because they already knew the identity of the leaker.  It was them!

Now, all of this is more or less common knowledge or at least commonly suspected in the tiny world of the TV news business. As we said Andrew Lack, [Chairman of NBC News and MSNBC] knew about it.  So apparently did "Today" show anchor Matt Lauer.  And yet until now, nobody bothered to tell the public.

We are doing that now.  By the way, we asked Lauer and Lack and the NBC PR Department for a response to all of this earlier today, they declined comment.

Still the obvious question hangs in the air since we've been talking so much lately about election tampering and it's this.

What do you think played a bigger role in the 2016 race?  The “Access Hollywood” tape or the Russian government?  That’s an obvious one.
 
Jarnhamar said:
Trumps taxes were released. Get ready for an impeachment  ;D

Why would Trump get impeached for releasing his own 1040?
 
Why would Mr Trump get impeached for a return he filed 11 years ago?
 
I'm making fun of people who are screaming he should get impeached for what seems like pretty much everything.

Guess I won't get a big return on that joke  ;D
 
VDH on the difference between the Message and the Messenger. I'm fairly certain that President Trump, a veteran of decades of NCY press, has the ability to play the media like a violin (which he has largely done since the nomination process), and that the message, backed by real results of new jobs and rising standards of living, will take based on the observable evidence Americans will see around them (much like they could see the seven "Recovery Summers" in a row and the low unemployment numbers were disconnected from what they saw around them).

https://amgreatness.com/2017/03/13/trump-message-messenger/

The Trump Message and Messenger
March 13, 2017 by Victor Davis Hanson 85 Comments

Every president has both a personality and an agenda. Sometimes they work in tandem, sometimes they don’t.

Bill Clinton’s charm enhanced his platform—until his sexual appetites nearly wrecked it. Barack Obama was both charismatic and snarky, sometimes turning off and sometimes wooing his opponents. Richard Nixon’s neuroses finally empowered his enemies and ruined his foreign policy initiatives. Ronald Reagan’s upbeat persona helped convince the public to “stay the course” with his bitter anti-inflationary medicine.

The outsider Donald Trump faces the same dilemma but in a fashion rarely seen before. For now there are two manifestations of Trump. First is Trump’s message: that of the populist counterrevolutionary determined to recalibrate the last half-century of liberal and therapeutic government and its affiliated culture. Second is Trump the messenger: the ex-reality TV star who tweets nonstop in the early morning hours often to the outrage of his enemies, to the delight of his supporters, and to the embarrassment of the undecided.

The media focuses on Trump the messenger, either because they are  not interested in his message or because they see the personal destruction of Trump as essential to the implosion of his agenda.

As a  result, we know all about Trump’s alleged intrigue with Russia, his defense of his daughter’s businesses, his attacks on movie stars and celebrities, his 4 a.m. tweets and loud accusations, but very little about what is otherwise going on policy-wise.

Even as Trump tweets, quietly he is also attempting—both through executive orders and anticipated congressional action—landmark deregulation, tax reform, and health care reformulations. If successful, he will remake the economy, tilt the Supreme Court rightward, and prune the deep state. He has green lighted energy production, including coal, natural gas and oil, whose consequence could prove an increasing bonanza for the United States and its allies.

His cabinet contradicts conventional opinion; Trump has brought in experts and reformers from the private sector and the military to reformulate education, environmental, energy, immigration, defense spending, and fiscal policy. Academics, think-tankers, and career bureaucrats in most cases have been passed over.

Trump may well remake the Republican Party, by bringing in many millions of the working class, at the expense of alienating hundreds of thousands of conservative elites.

The supposedly vindictive Trump is proving unusually magnanimous for a politician, welcoming in former rivals and critics including Rick Perry, Ben Carson, and Jon Huntsman. His foreign policy team of Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, and H.R. McMaster is non-ideological and centrist, wedded largely to the successful traditions of bipartisan postwar policies, albeit with a realist rather than neoconservative bent.

The stock market and employers, even if prematurely so, apparently have reacted to both Trump’s reformist rhetoric, and his executive orders, as stocks soar and job growth improves. For all the talk of Trump’s impulsiveness and unsteady leadership, allies are not in fear as the media alleges.

Privately, friends in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea are less worried than they were a year ago about the assurance of the American defense umbrella. Europe’s voters are moving more toward Trumpism than Obamism. It is likely that Israel and the Gulf States are more confident—and Iran more worried. China and Russia are more likely to assume the United States will be unpredictable rather than characteristically compliant as it has been over the past eight years. And that it is largely a good thing in a dangerous world.

The point is not that after two months Trump has achieved radical reform or has won over skeptics, only that he embraced a conservative correction of progressivism beyond what most past Republican presidents have envisioned or what congressional conservatives believed was possible after 2008. Because he has rhetorical gifts and personal charm, Trump could prove to be a dynamic president if his own excesses do not eventually empower his enemies.

For all of Trump’s blasts, so far he has survived the press assaults and faux-scandals. We have reached a point of progressive exasperation in which New York Times columnists compare him to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor or have asked the IRS (apparently on the theory that the agency was long ago prone to political corruption in the Obama era of Lois Lerner) to commit a felony by leaking Donald Trump’s tax returns.

The Trump-Russia story has largely boomeranged: intelligence organizations’ overreach and illegal leaks did not result in proof of Trump’s illegal behavior. But such media disclosures did reopen inquiries into felonious behavior of government bureaucracies and the press. Note how each day the media will incrementally back out of their own self-created cul-de-sac. Watch how the paradox unfolds as it becomes clear that Trump is channeling their own prior disclosures and admitted leaks to prove their original point that he was tapped, thereby confirming his own point that nothing came of these “investigations” except proof of bureaucratic illegality.

In trying to destroy Trump rhetorically, the media has instead committed veritable suicide, and it will never restore the patina that it is fair, disinterested and competent. The tumor of Obama-era obsequiousness has terminally metastasized into Trump Derangement Syndrome.

So far everything his critics have thrown at him has bounced off: the boilerplate accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, nativism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, America-Firstism, fascism, Nazism, Hitlerism, and garden-variety authoritarianism. These –isms and –phobias eventually and cumulatively may bleed him from a thousand nicks, but so far the currency of hysteria is not worth much.

Prominent opinion makers, columnists, and reporters have variously called for the president’s murder, his impeachment, his resignation, and his removal for psychological infirmity. He has been formally accused in mainstream media of suffering from neurosyphilis, sexual depravity, and urophilia with Russian prostitutes. It would take a Havelock Ellis to explain the media’s smears to the public.

Trump’s wife, Melania, was libeled in the media with everything from immigration fraud to prostitution; his daughter Ivanka has been physically confronted on planes, had her businesses boycotted, and derided as either dishonest or dumb or both. Most of the NeverTrump conservatives have doubled-down; they seem angrier than ever that Trump is pursuing and thus polluting most of their own agendas, as if his personal failure would be more redeeming to their careers and sense of selves than would his policy successes.

Yet so far in a Nietzschean sense all that has not destroyed him seems to have made him stronger.

So we are in a three-way race for the life of the Trump presidency. Will his policies take effect in time to achieve enough prosperity and security to render his opponents irrelevant? Will the media hysteria boomerang and thus discredit his unhinged critics before they wound Trump? And will Trump’s personal magnetism and persuasiveness trump his own nocturnal propensity to lash out and undermine his own agenda?

For now, only one thing remains certain: the candidate whom the Republican establishment most disliked has the greatest potential in a generation to stop the progressive project and enact the agendas that the Republican establishment most wants. And that paradox has become a source of both great wonderment—and fear.
 
It turns out that an illegal op called Operation Dragnet targeted Trump in 2010. This bombshell will be topic #1 on Capitol Hill in the AM. I wouldnt doubt that this surveillance continued into the campaign.

https://www.infowars.com/nsa-documents-prove-surveillance-on-donald-trump-and-alex-jones/

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Infowars.com have obtained credible information from law enforcement sources regarding individual records of U.S. citizens under National Security Agency (NSA) electronic surveillance in the years 2004 through 2010 – a database that suggests both Donald J. Trump and Alex Jones were under illegal, unauthorized government monitoring during those years.
 
tomahawk6 said:
https://www.infowars.com/nsa-documents-prove-surveillance-on-donald-trump-and-alex-jones/

I'm not familiar with some of the political blogs posted on here. I find this post from Lumber a useful reference.

Lumber said:
But hell I'll take Sean Hannity over Breitbart or InfoWars (and I did vomit in my mouth a little typing that).
kP4Yax1.jpg
 
The only use that graph has is conveniently grouping the main purveyors of fake news in the gray circle occupying the centre.  Anyone who still believes the WaPo or the NYT (let alone MSNBC, ABC or AP) meet high journalistic standards has utterly failed to pay attention to recent events.
 
tomahawk6 said:
It turns out that an illegal op called Operation Dragnet targeted Trump in 2010. This bombshell will be topic #1 on Capitol Hill in the AM. I wouldnt doubt that this surveillance continued into the campaign.

https://www.infowars.com/nsa-documents-prove-surveillance-on-donald-trump-and-alex-jones/

And I predict this will be the only time or place I ever hear about this story.

Let's touch base again in the morning!
 
cavalryman said:
The only use that graph has is conveniently grouping the main purveyors of fake news in the gray red circles occupying the centre corners.

You misspelled "red" and "corners", and you forgot to pluralise "circles". Fixed that for you.
 
cavalryman said:
Anyone who still believes the WaPo or the NYT (let alone MSNBC, ABC or AP) meet high journalistic standards has utterly failed to pay attention to recent events.

"Meet high journalistic standards" like infowars? Reply #691

milnews.ca said:
To pass along some sage advice, "we have to remember to check if we are in RADIO CHATTER before we want to "seriously" comment on a less than "serious" thread" ;)

That is why I read Radio Chatter for entertainment only:)

 
:)
 

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