The president has a line, and you can also be damned sure there is records of its use and what was discussed, even if it's classified. This attempt at a secret back channel appears have to been made deliberately to keep its existence and what might be said away from any kind of oversight.
If Trump is removed, then I think it will be Nixon-style. Pence (or maybe Ryan, if Pence is any further implicated in all of this) will pardon him, and he'll sent off to semi-exile in Florida or New York. The reasons will be the same, to end the "national nightmare" and try to get the Government functioning properly again.
The Republican base is shifting away from Trump. It may take a while yet, but with mid-terms next year, if Trump's support falls much further, Republican lawmakers will take what they have and remove him. In the end, if all he has left supporting him is the Alt-right crowd, that's a pretty puny support base.
Nope, but they're doing a good job of destroying his presidency, which will serve the national, indeed international good. It may piss Putin off, but that's fine, judging by the push back in the last few European elections, Brexit and Trump is likely to be the extent of the damage he has wreaked on the West. It's a pretty impressive accomplishment, but all it's really going to do is either force Trump to adopt an even stronger anti-Russian stance than Clinton would have, or see him removed from office.
If the Republicans hadn't made it their cause célèbre to block every initiative the Obama Administration tried to roll out for six years, Obama might be seen in a lot better light. The Republicans did everything in their power to wreck his presidency.
The irony, of course, is now they're basically being forced to do it to their own man. They're being a lot more polite about it, but no less obstructionist. It was truly astonishing to watch Ryan punt an unpassable health care bill up to the Senate, and declare victory merely because it was no longer the House's problem, with a pile of money stuck in it so maybe somehow McConnell can take the shit sandwich and make a shit casserole out of it.
And before people start mouthing off about Silver, he was the one guy who was actually giving Trump a reasonable chance of winning (1 in 4, as I recall).
This is Trump's real problem. If Republicans going into the mid-terms begin to fear for their own skin because Trump is sufficiently unpopular, they'll run, not walk from Trump. The same thing happened with Nixon, where while the Dems controlled the House and could have him impeached, it was still going to require Republican Senators to actually convict. When it became clear to Nixon that he was losing support among Republican Senators, he had little choice but to resign or face conviction.
I think the Administration is already entering serious crisis mode. Fox is reporting Bannon is going to lead some sort of "A team" of lawyers and spin doctors to battle a possible impeachment. Trump needs to keep enough of the Republican base loyal to scare the GOP into backing off, and if Bannon can't pull that off, then I think Trump is toast. If someone as close to him as Kushner ends up having been compromised, and worse, compromising him, then there really is nowhere left to hide and no one left to blame.
I just simply don't get it. People like Pence, Kushner and Sessions don't seem like idiots, so why in the name of fuck were they trying to pull these stunts? Was it to protect Trump? Did they think the three letter agencies don't keep on eye on everyone who is interacting with Russian officials or other important Russians? The level of arrogance overriding any kind of rationality is mind boggling. Trump I can understand, he's clearly an idiot, probably suffering dementia or some other cognitive decline. But these other guys, whatever you think of them, seem to be reasonably intelligent and thoughtful people.
The problem with "you break it, you fix it" is that companies caught heavily polluting tend to have this habit of going bankrupt, in which case the taxpayer is still on the hook. A carbon tax, as far as GHG emissions goes, is applied universally, and thus no one can "skip out" on the damages.
The big debate to my mind is how the tax is ultimately used. Some have a significant issue with it simply going into a jurisdiction's general revenue account. But that's a side issue, the point is to price carbon to reflect the damage it does. Whether governments use that money to fund other programs, hand it back as some sort of rebate, or use it to fund renewables is a political question.
It's pretty well understood. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere means more energy is trapped in the lower atmosphere and on the surface. In general terms, that means heat, though it also means more energetic storm systems and other atmospheric phenomena as well.
It's been known for over a century what happens if you increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. For anyone to act like somehow it's all still a mystery is to basically ignore the actual, real, verified physical properties of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.
Wealth transfer is a facet of civilization, and has been since the beginning. You act as if it's a bad thing.
And frankly, I think transferring some wealth from those that are profiting from CO2-emitting fuels to those who aren't is a good thing. Technology plays its part, but so long as we are subsidizing fossil fuels, either directly through tax incentives, or indirectly by doing nothing and thus handing it to future generations to pay the costs (and really, we are already paying the costs), looks to me exactly like transferring wealth from those least able to pay for it to those who actually are already making money hand over fist.
Fossil fuels are bad, and we need to abandon them. It's that simple. I think heavy regulation is a mistake. Heavy regulation is expensive and can be fairly unreliable. A flat-out carbon tax, that's what you need. If indeed market forces are the answer, and I believe they are, then slap a tax or tariff on carbon, which everyone that extracts or uses fossil fuels pay for; from the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico right down to the guy gassing up his Honda.
That's pretty bizarre, considering most addictions involve monkeying with or outright replacing neurotransmitters in the brain. In other words, the trigger mechanisms are evolved, and it's pretty likely that addictive behaviors, both caused by drugs, or by some neurological problems native to the brain (ie OCDs) have been around as long as there have been brains.
You accused me of being a partisan, I disproved your point. AT this point you're desperate to make criticism of Trump look like some sort of attack on a particular political ideology. I'm saying that's rubbish, the issues with Trump aren't fundamentally ideological, they are fundamentally issues of competence. I think you know it, which is why you didn't actually respond to what I said, but simply repeated your assertion.
When I consider the actions of previous presidents, whether they be Obama, GWB, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and so on and so forth, no, I don't think it is the least bit partisan to view Trump as being a lesser man in virtually every from even the least of them. I think you have to go back to the 19th century, perhaps Buchanan or Johnson, before you find a man less capable, and at least with Buchanan, you can argue that he was more a prisoner of circumstance than an outright bad president.
You see, partisanship means I dislike Trump because he's a Republican. I don't dislike him because he's a Republican. I dislike him because he's an idiot, and much worse, an idiot who thinks he's a genius. Even the likes of GWB and Reagan seemed sufficiently self-aware to understand their own limitations. Nobody asks for brilliance in a President, and some might argue that that could be hazardous in and of itself, but at least some level of understanding of the powers and limitations of the office, and the importance of each utterance for better and for worse.
Trump isn't one of the worst presidents in history because he's a Republican. He's one of the worst presidents in history because he's vain and stupid. It's my personal opinion that the stupidity is a relatively recent think, and likely a sign of cognitive decline; probably dementia. In all honesty, while I find Pence a pretty damned odious figure, I'd sooner have a sane evil man in the highest of all offices than Donald Trump. Evil can be dealt with, supreme arrogance coupled with jaw-dropping incompetence.
If you think that a President just showing off to the Russians by freely releasing Israeli intelligence is somehow a righteous act, then all I can say is "if the shoe fits..."
The news is a business, and "shocking new details!!!!" is how that business makes money. Blaming the media for publishing the leaked information is essentially trying to pass the buck. The US's allies freely share intelligence with US police and intelligence agencies with the understanding that the information is to remain confidential, and if some fuckwad somewhere who has access to that information decides for profit or kudos to phone up a newspaper and say "Guess what I got!" then that IS a US Government problem.
I think this whole "blame the media" is just starting to get tiresome
I suspect that's the policy going forward. As it stands, the UK has already now decided it will not be doing any free information sharing over the Manchester suicide attack, and so far as I'm aware, that's the first time that such a suspension between these two allies has ever happened, or at least has ever been publicly acknowledged. This is the damage the leaky Trump administration is doing, so my assumption going forward is that the three letter agencies, to maintain critical intelligence links with close allies like Britain and Israel, will now know longer be making such information readily available to the President. In other words, the process of sidelining President Trump has begun. Within a few months, impeachment will likely be irrelevant, as he'll be left with little real power, and he'll be like Ronald Reagan and Woodrow Wilson were in the final years in the presidency; figureheads while subordinates take on the role of the functional presidency.
She lost the election. You can put your hyperbole gun down. No one seriously believes she was going to start WWIII or build death camps. Trump won, and now every moronic thing he does is down to him, so constantly talking about how evil Hillary was is little more than endlessly trying to resuscitate a now extinct red herring.
Trump is a shitty fucking President. Other than his shrinking base, everyone knows it. House Republicans know it. Senate Republicans know it. Government agencies know it. Most voters know it. Foreign leaders know it. For chrissakes, it's pretty likely that the likes of Pence and Tillerson know it. The man is an idiot, and an increasingly destructive idiot whose lack of self-control, self-awareness, or even an understanding of the job he managed to win are already creating dangerous instabilities.
So if it makes you feel better to imagine Hillary Clinton's defeat as some sort of replay of the 1933 German election, except this time the lesser evil one, well all I can say is that in my view, you're a fucking idiot.
Yes there is a hierarchy, and it's a bit stricter among canids, or at lest wolves, where you have a breeding pair and everyone else is subordinate. But the same applies to most Hominoids (orangutans are a bit different as they are a more solitary member of the family), where you do have a hierarchy, but it's not as if every moment of every day for a chimpanzee or a gorilla is taking up with trying to beat the shit out of each other for dominance. The Spencerian notion of nature, which is so often adopted by those trying to justify various forms of authoritarianism is false, at least as it applies to most social species of mammals. Even the dominant chimp, if he's too much of an arsehole, can end up driven out of the tribe... or worse.
But how much longer is that going to last? Once cable viewership falls below a certain threshold the sports leagues are going to jump ship in a hurry, and either find a new middle man to broadcast games online, or simply make their own. The whole business model only works so long as the cable companies can guarantee the leagues and advertisers sufficient viewers. That's why I think cord cutting, when it reaches a critical mass, is simply going to see cable TV collapse. There's a point at which it isn't sustainable anymore.
I think up until recently most people in the intelligence agencies still assumed they were working for a rational human being capable of reflection, reason and self-control. Now that everyone both in the US intelligence services and overseas understands that they're dealing with an arrogant halfwit, they will simply route everything around him. And that's the irony of it all, that Trump's attempt to look like the Big Man, the ultimate Alpha Male, is actually going to render him impotent. Congress, the three letter agencies, foreign allies, everyone is basically going to do what they can to either get around him or undermine him. He is going to become one of the most useless and isolated Presidents in US history. It wouldn't surprise me that even without impeachment and removal, the US will end up with a Pence presidency in all but name; a sort of replay of the last couple of years of the Wilson Administration.
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It wasn't a hit. Get over it. DC is a dangerous goddamned place. The Rich story is fabrication and even Fox has walked away from it.
The president has a line, and you can also be damned sure there is records of its use and what was discussed, even if it's classified. This attempt at a secret back channel appears have to been made deliberately to keep its existence and what might be said away from any kind of oversight.
Do you think this is better?
If Trump is removed, then I think it will be Nixon-style. Pence (or maybe Ryan, if Pence is any further implicated in all of this) will pardon him, and he'll sent off to semi-exile in Florida or New York. The reasons will be the same, to end the "national nightmare" and try to get the Government functioning properly again.
It's not only not normal, to my mind it looks a lot like treason.
The Republican base is shifting away from Trump. It may take a while yet, but with mid-terms next year, if Trump's support falls much further, Republican lawmakers will take what they have and remove him. In the end, if all he has left supporting him is the Alt-right crowd, that's a pretty puny support base.
Nope, but they're doing a good job of destroying his presidency, which will serve the national, indeed international good. It may piss Putin off, but that's fine, judging by the push back in the last few European elections, Brexit and Trump is likely to be the extent of the damage he has wreaked on the West. It's a pretty impressive accomplishment, but all it's really going to do is either force Trump to adopt an even stronger anti-Russian stance than Clinton would have, or see him removed from office.
If the Republicans hadn't made it their cause célèbre to block every initiative the Obama Administration tried to roll out for six years, Obama might be seen in a lot better light. The Republicans did everything in their power to wreck his presidency.
The irony, of course, is now they're basically being forced to do it to their own man. They're being a lot more polite about it, but no less obstructionist. It was truly astonishing to watch Ryan punt an unpassable health care bill up to the Senate, and declare victory merely because it was no longer the House's problem, with a pile of money stuck in it so maybe somehow McConnell can take the shit sandwich and make a shit casserole out of it.
FiveThirtyEight had an article a few days ago suggesting that Trump support is even weakening with the Republican base.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...
And before people start mouthing off about Silver, he was the one guy who was actually giving Trump a reasonable chance of winning (1 in 4, as I recall).
This is Trump's real problem. If Republicans going into the mid-terms begin to fear for their own skin because Trump is sufficiently unpopular, they'll run, not walk from Trump. The same thing happened with Nixon, where while the Dems controlled the House and could have him impeached, it was still going to require Republican Senators to actually convict. When it became clear to Nixon that he was losing support among Republican Senators, he had little choice but to resign or face conviction.
I think the Administration is already entering serious crisis mode. Fox is reporting Bannon is going to lead some sort of "A team" of lawyers and spin doctors to battle a possible impeachment. Trump needs to keep enough of the Republican base loyal to scare the GOP into backing off, and if Bannon can't pull that off, then I think Trump is toast. If someone as close to him as Kushner ends up having been compromised, and worse, compromising him, then there really is nowhere left to hide and no one left to blame.
I just simply don't get it. People like Pence, Kushner and Sessions don't seem like idiots, so why in the name of fuck were they trying to pull these stunts? Was it to protect Trump? Did they think the three letter agencies don't keep on eye on everyone who is interacting with Russian officials or other important Russians? The level of arrogance overriding any kind of rationality is mind boggling. Trump I can understand, he's clearly an idiot, probably suffering dementia or some other cognitive decline. But these other guys, whatever you think of them, seem to be reasonably intelligent and thoughtful people.
The problem with "you break it, you fix it" is that companies caught heavily polluting tend to have this habit of going bankrupt, in which case the taxpayer is still on the hook. A carbon tax, as far as GHG emissions goes, is applied universally, and thus no one can "skip out" on the damages.
The big debate to my mind is how the tax is ultimately used. Some have a significant issue with it simply going into a jurisdiction's general revenue account. But that's a side issue, the point is to price carbon to reflect the damage it does. Whether governments use that money to fund other programs, hand it back as some sort of rebate, or use it to fund renewables is a political question.
Considering it is poor peoplewho will suffer the worst from climate change, I could ask you the same.
It's pretty well understood. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere means more energy is trapped in the lower atmosphere and on the surface. In general terms, that means heat, though it also means more energetic storm systems and other atmospheric phenomena as well.
It's been known for over a century what happens if you increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. For anyone to act like somehow it's all still a mystery is to basically ignore the actual, real, verified physical properties of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.
Wealth transfer is a facet of civilization, and has been since the beginning. You act as if it's a bad thing.
And frankly, I think transferring some wealth from those that are profiting from CO2-emitting fuels to those who aren't is a good thing. Technology plays its part, but so long as we are subsidizing fossil fuels, either directly through tax incentives, or indirectly by doing nothing and thus handing it to future generations to pay the costs (and really, we are already paying the costs), looks to me exactly like transferring wealth from those least able to pay for it to those who actually are already making money hand over fist.
Fossil fuels are bad, and we need to abandon them. It's that simple. I think heavy regulation is a mistake. Heavy regulation is expensive and can be fairly unreliable. A flat-out carbon tax, that's what you need. If indeed market forces are the answer, and I believe they are, then slap a tax or tariff on carbon, which everyone that extracts or uses fossil fuels pay for; from the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico right down to the guy gassing up his Honda.
That's pretty bizarre, considering most addictions involve monkeying with or outright replacing neurotransmitters in the brain. In other words, the trigger mechanisms are evolved, and it's pretty likely that addictive behaviors, both caused by drugs, or by some neurological problems native to the brain (ie OCDs) have been around as long as there have been brains.
You accused me of being a partisan, I disproved your point. AT this point you're desperate to make criticism of Trump look like some sort of attack on a particular political ideology. I'm saying that's rubbish, the issues with Trump aren't fundamentally ideological, they are fundamentally issues of competence. I think you know it, which is why you didn't actually respond to what I said, but simply repeated your assertion.
When I consider the actions of previous presidents, whether they be Obama, GWB, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and so on and so forth, no, I don't think it is the least bit partisan to view Trump as being a lesser man in virtually every from even the least of them. I think you have to go back to the 19th century, perhaps Buchanan or Johnson, before you find a man less capable, and at least with Buchanan, you can argue that he was more a prisoner of circumstance than an outright bad president.
You see, partisanship means I dislike Trump because he's a Republican. I don't dislike him because he's a Republican. I dislike him because he's an idiot, and much worse, an idiot who thinks he's a genius. Even the likes of GWB and Reagan seemed sufficiently self-aware to understand their own limitations. Nobody asks for brilliance in a President, and some might argue that that could be hazardous in and of itself, but at least some level of understanding of the powers and limitations of the office, and the importance of each utterance for better and for worse.
Trump isn't one of the worst presidents in history because he's a Republican. He's one of the worst presidents in history because he's vain and stupid. It's my personal opinion that the stupidity is a relatively recent think, and likely a sign of cognitive decline; probably dementia. In all honesty, while I find Pence a pretty damned odious figure, I'd sooner have a sane evil man in the highest of all offices than Donald Trump. Evil can be dealt with, supreme arrogance coupled with jaw-dropping incompetence.
He is simply inadequate to the tasks at hand.
No, my view that the current office holder is an inept bigmouthed moron is intact.
Let's talk about the nuclear subs that Duterte now knows the location to...
Just how many times are you going to be willing to forgive that inept buffoon occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
If you think that a President just showing off to the Russians by freely releasing Israeli intelligence is somehow a righteous act, then all I can say is "if the shoe fits..."
The news is a business, and "shocking new details!!!!" is how that business makes money. Blaming the media for publishing the leaked information is essentially trying to pass the buck. The US's allies freely share intelligence with US police and intelligence agencies with the understanding that the information is to remain confidential, and if some fuckwad somewhere who has access to that information decides for profit or kudos to phone up a newspaper and say "Guess what I got!" then that IS a US Government problem.
I think this whole "blame the media" is just starting to get tiresome
I suspect that's the policy going forward. As it stands, the UK has already now decided it will not be doing any free information sharing over the Manchester suicide attack, and so far as I'm aware, that's the first time that such a suspension between these two allies has ever happened, or at least has ever been publicly acknowledged. This is the damage the leaky Trump administration is doing, so my assumption going forward is that the three letter agencies, to maintain critical intelligence links with close allies like Britain and Israel, will now know longer be making such information readily available to the President. In other words, the process of sidelining President Trump has begun. Within a few months, impeachment will likely be irrelevant, as he'll be left with little real power, and he'll be like Ronald Reagan and Woodrow Wilson were in the final years in the presidency; figureheads while subordinates take on the role of the functional presidency.
She lost the election. You can put your hyperbole gun down. No one seriously believes she was going to start WWIII or build death camps. Trump won, and now every moronic thing he does is down to him, so constantly talking about how evil Hillary was is little more than endlessly trying to resuscitate a now extinct red herring.
Trump is a shitty fucking President. Other than his shrinking base, everyone knows it. House Republicans know it. Senate Republicans know it. Government agencies know it. Most voters know it. Foreign leaders know it. For chrissakes, it's pretty likely that the likes of Pence and Tillerson know it. The man is an idiot, and an increasingly destructive idiot whose lack of self-control, self-awareness, or even an understanding of the job he managed to win are already creating dangerous instabilities.
So if it makes you feel better to imagine Hillary Clinton's defeat as some sort of replay of the 1933 German election, except this time the lesser evil one, well all I can say is that in my view, you're a fucking idiot.
Yes there is a hierarchy, and it's a bit stricter among canids, or at lest wolves, where you have a breeding pair and everyone else is subordinate. But the same applies to most Hominoids (orangutans are a bit different as they are a more solitary member of the family), where you do have a hierarchy, but it's not as if every moment of every day for a chimpanzee or a gorilla is taking up with trying to beat the shit out of each other for dominance. The Spencerian notion of nature, which is so often adopted by those trying to justify various forms of authoritarianism is false, at least as it applies to most social species of mammals. Even the dominant chimp, if he's too much of an arsehole, can end up driven out of the tribe... or worse.
But how much longer is that going to last? Once cable viewership falls below a certain threshold the sports leagues are going to jump ship in a hurry, and either find a new middle man to broadcast games online, or simply make their own. The whole business model only works so long as the cable companies can guarantee the leagues and advertisers sufficient viewers. That's why I think cord cutting, when it reaches a critical mass, is simply going to see cable TV collapse. There's a point at which it isn't sustainable anymore.
I think up until recently most people in the intelligence agencies still assumed they were working for a rational human being capable of reflection, reason and self-control. Now that everyone both in the US intelligence services and overseas understands that they're dealing with an arrogant halfwit, they will simply route everything around him. And that's the irony of it all, that Trump's attempt to look like the Big Man, the ultimate Alpha Male, is actually going to render him impotent. Congress, the three letter agencies, foreign allies, everyone is basically going to do what they can to either get around him or undermine him. He is going to become one of the most useless and isolated Presidents in US history. It wouldn't surprise me that even without impeachment and removal, the US will end up with a Pence presidency in all but name; a sort of replay of the last couple of years of the Wilson Administration.