[Discussion] The Donald Trump Administration

Let's follow and discuss what our newest presidential administration gets up to, the good, the bad, the lawsuits.

Kelly lying to his own staff to save face.

I wonder if one of the people he lied to is going to be drug czar?

Oh and about Porter, apparently there are 30 administration members that can't get real security clearances.

IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/U1G5wwLVPd_C7yZSQCQF1ocxpv3tDRDbfrp29vM7g9aiDnTk8JpcCh8RACHKy5-qhQ=h900)

I'm going to start paying an otter tax if this keeps up. That was one hell of a weekend dump and I didn't even talk about the DoJ departure.

Chaz wrote:

Awesome. Either that was a calculated snub, or the admin is terrible at diplomacy. I'm honestly not sure which it's more likely to be.

Why can’t it be both? I mean, both of your results are certainly possible. Pence is a dedicated sellout. Not surprising he’d sell his values downriver for trump.

In a letter to the committee, White House counsel Donald McGahn said, "although the President is inclined to declassify the February 5th Memorandum, because the Memorandum contains numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages, he is unable to do so at this time."

Ugh. This seems like a pretty shrewd political move to me. The longer things are delayed, the less impact this has to counter the Nunes memo.

But I don't expect it to be released at all to be honest. The administration will basically demand the whole content of the memo be neutered because of these supposedly "sensitive" passages. Democrats can choose to either release a useless memo or refuse, in which case Trump will just blame the Democrats for it not being released. "I wanted to do it, but they wouldn't help us do it the right way."

The average swing voter would not look kindly on him just outright refusing to release the Democrats' response. But this ploy is plausible enough (doesn't take much) for the average swing voter to not get too worked up about it. Soon, they'll have already forgotten the details of what this was all about anyway and just be left with a vague, unopposed sense that maybe the FBI et al is unfairly biased against Trump. A sense that will be reinforced by the next Nunes memo which I'm sure they're just waiting for the right moment to unleash.

Are there any actual swing voters left?

NathanialG wrote:

Are there any actual swing voters left?

I don't know about that. EDIT

oilypenguin wrote:
NathanialG wrote:

Are there any actual swing voters left?

I don't know about that. EDIT

do the gerrymandered voters that vote in a republican primary because the democrat one makes no difference out count?

oops. I posted twice. Just like how the Rs think I voted twice

NathanialG wrote:

Are there any actual swing voters left?

Sort of?

The largest bloc of voters in America are Independents. They make up 39% of the electorate. But they're not actually true independents.

Pew Research has found they ideologically lean, heavily, towards one party or another. Based on responses to Pew's political values survey they discovered there's not much difference between, say, someone who openly calls themselves a Republican and someone who calls themselves an Independent, but expresses consistently conservative views. Ideologically speaking they are largely identical and when push comes to shove the conservative Independent is going to vote Republican.

Independents just don't like to be openly identified with a party. That's because those leaners are frustrated with the leadership of that party (53% for Republican leaners and 28% for Democratic leaners) or have a major policy beef with them (40% Republican leaners and 33% Democratic leaners).

But, most interestingly, the partisan leaners aren't actually leaners. They're being pushed. The largest reason Independents lean towards one party or the other is that the think the other party is bad for the country (55% for Republican leaners and 51% for Democratic leaners). A much smaller percentage of Independents are being pulled towards one party or another and think that the policies of the party they lean towards are good for the country (30% for Republican leaners and 34% of Democratic leaners).

Pew also surveyed a group of voters five separate times from December 2015 to March 2017. They found that about 10% of those people who openly identified as either Republicans or Democrats switched their party affiliation at some point over those 15 months. Pew noted that these voters were "not very engaged politically."

There was more movement among Independents, with 22% changing their leaning throughout the poll (10% breaking towards Republicans and 12% breaking towards Democrats).

So there are voters out there who can be swayed. Unfortunately, they are also the least politically engaged and informed.

Has anyone heard if our omnipotent rulers errrr... I mean... the Russian botnet is quiet with this memo? I'd be curious to see if there's a difference in traffic.

gewy wrote:
In a letter to the committee, White House counsel Donald McGahn said, "although the President is inclined to declassify the February 5th Memorandum, because the Memorandum contains numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages, he is unable to do so at this time."

Ugh. This seems like a pretty shrewd political move to me. The longer things are delayed, the less impact this has to counter the Nunes memo.

But I don't expect it to be released at all to be honest. The administration will basically demand the whole content of the memo be neutered because of these supposedly "sensitive" passages. Democrats can choose to either release a useless memo or refuse, in which case Trump will just blame the Democrats for it not being released. "I wanted to do it, but they wouldn't help us do it the right way."

The average swing voter would not look kindly on him just outright refusing to release the Democrats' response. But this ploy is plausible enough (doesn't take much) for the average swing voter to not get too worked up about it. Soon, they'll have already forgotten the details of what this was all about anyway and just be left with a vague, unopposed sense that maybe the FBI et al is unfairly biased against Trump. A sense that will be reinforced by the next Nunes memo which I'm sure they're just waiting for the right moment to unleash.

I think this all depends on how the Democrats want to play this.

Republicans would market in innuendo and get their base all fired up about what *might* be in the memo rather than pushing too hard for it to be released. And recent history at least shows that it is a winning strategy.

I say hang this around the Republicans necks with the tagline "what is Twitler afraid of?".

We analyzed 17 months of Fox & Friends transcripts. It’s far weirder than state-run media.

The hosts are basically telling Trump what they would do in this situation. They are covering the news by advising him.

It's something the show's hosts and guests have done with far more frequency since Trump has been in office. An analysis of the show's transcripts reveal that about 8 to 9 percent of sentences before Trump's election were imperative sentences, which instruct or advise. In the first few months of his presidency, that number increased more than 50 percent.

Well, they are his cabinet. How else do you expect them to advise the President?

Near as I can tell, they've just been handing classified information out like candy.

Rob Porter Is a National Security Scandal, Too: A morally compromised White House staffer may have had access to America’s top secrets. Chief of Staff John Kelly has some explaining to do.

he allegations against Rob Porter, the recently departed White House staff secretary, are morally disturbing. Multiple ex-wives have accused him of abusive behavior, and while he disputes those accusations, the FBI found them credible enough to deny him a security clearance – and there are pictures of one of his exes with a black eye that she claims was delivered by him.

For White House and the National Security Council staff veterans, the revelation that Porter did not have a full security clearance raises a number of real questions that must be answered. Those questions speak directly to the safety of America’s most sensitive intelligence officers and most dangerous operations.

Having worked at the White House -- including both at the National Security Council and alongside the staff secretary – I believe Porter-gate has all the markings either of a very high security breach or a highly unusual staff structure. It also raises real questions about how Trump White House staff under both Reince Priebus and John Kelly managed sensitive information, and what both of them knew about the allegations against Porter and when they knew it.

One reason why people who are blackmail-able aren't allowed to get security clearance is that someone might blackmail them.

If you are Russian and ever worked for US intelligence, get the hell out of Russia yesterday. Change your name and appearance. Never contact anyone you ever knew again.

You are as good as burned.

Remember how Trump was going to mostly be deporting terrible, murdering criminals? Well, seems like he's deporting an awful lot of non-criminals too.

Washington Post wrote:

But as ICE officers get wider latitude to determine whom they detain, the biggest jump in arrests has been of immigrants with no criminal convictions. The agency made 37,734 “noncriminal” arrests in the government’s 2017 fiscal year, more than twice the number in the previous year. The category includes suspects facing possible charges as well as those without criminal records.

Critics say ICE is increasingly grabbing at the lowest-hanging fruit of deportation-eligible immigrants to meet the president’s unrealistic goals, replacing a targeted system with a scattershot approach aimed at boosting the agency’s enforcement statistics.

I'm sure that if you asked, they'd say they were only deporting criminals. But when you're asking the people who are defining what "criminal" means, it gets real dicey. One more time, if you give a group of people a quota to hit, they're going to figure out how to hit that quota with the least effort possible.

On a positive note we're completely free of all gang related crimes now, clearly.

Paleocon wrote:

If you are Russian and ever worked for US intelligence, get the hell out of Russia yesterday. Change your name and appearance. Never contact anyone you ever knew again.

You are as good as burned.

What do you think the purges a few months ago were?

At long last, the infrastructure plan! They just had to figure out how to get someone else to pay for it, since they already gave away $1.5 trillion to the billionaires.

Time: President Trump to Unveil a $1.5 Trillion Infrastructure Plan

(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Monday will unveil his long-awaited infrastructure plan, a $1.5 trillion proposal that fulfills a number of campaign goals, but relies heavily on state and local governments to produce much of the funding.

The administration’s plan is centered on using $200 billion in federal money to leverage local and state tax dollars to fix America’s infrastructure, such as roads, highways, ports and airports.

Except, wait:

Administration officials previewing the plan said it would feature two key components: an injection of funding for new investments and help speed up repairs of crumbling roads and airports, as well as a streamlined permitting process that would truncate the wait time to get projects underway. Officials said the $200 billion in federal support would come from cuts to existing programs.

Yes, the plan to replace our aging infrastructure is going to be paid for by cutting maintenance on existing infrastructure.

I want to live in the GOP economic world, where $200B in somehow transforms into $1.5T out. We're going to leverage state and local funding? When a lot of states are already coming up short in tax dollars, and you just wrote a tax law that punishes states that have high taxes? I'd love to see how they think state and local governments will come up with $1.3T to fulfill this plan.

What they're probably expecting to happen is the states will just farm it out to private interests, and suddenly the nation's infrastructure is in private hands. Which should work out great.

Chaz wrote:

What they're probably expecting to happen is the states will just farm it out to private interests, and suddenly the nation's infrastructure is in private hands. Which should work out great.

I think that is the GOP plan for almost everything - schools, prisons, medicare, etc. It is their standard playbook and for whatever reason a lot of people buy it and vote to keep them in power so they can do it.

It’s almost as if the reason Russia supported him was to destroy America.

farley3k wrote:
Chaz wrote:

What they're probably expecting to happen is the states will just farm it out to private interests, and suddenly the nation's infrastructure is in private hands. Which should work out great.

I think that is the GOP plan for almost everything - schools, prisons, medicare, etc. It is their standard playbook and for whatever reason a lot of people buy it and vote to keep them in power so they can do it.

It's the culmination of the whole "You can't trust the government to do anything right. Private companies will always do everything better and more efficiently because the market and competition drives them to do that." thing. Except the market has historically done a terrible job of forcing anything other than maximizing shareholder value in the short term, and does even worse when companies are granted monopolies by the government.

You don't need to convince me.

Unfortunately you need to convince rural voters in large middle parts of the US and they are being fed a pretty curated diet from Fox news that keeps them in the dark.

Right, so they’re going to let old infrastructure so they can build parallel private infrastructure that our oligarchs own instead of shared infrastructure we own.

How long until our water is no longer potable across the entire country and we all drink bottled water?

DSGamer wrote:

How long until our water is no longer potable across the entire country and we all drink bottled water?

We're not too far off on that one. Lots of people have been convinced that tap water is unclean and shouldn't be used, and bottled water is the only safe alternative. Which isn't true because tap water is subject to much more stringent filtering requirements than bottled*. And you've got bottled water companies buying water rights from small towns for pennies, sometimes massively depleting the local supply in the process.

*Well, at least until the current administration gets done gutting the EPA's regulatory abilities.

So we found out that Republican Governors won't accept hundreds of billions of dollars of Federal investment in their States from a Democrat. Now we'll see how they feel about a Republican telling them they have to come up with hundreds of billions all by their damn selves.

Chaz wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

How long until our water is no longer potable across the entire country and we all drink bottled water?

We're not too far off on that one. Lots of people have been convinced that tap water is unclean and shouldn't be used, and bottled water is the only safe alternative. Which isn't true because tap water is subject to much more stringent filtering requirements than bottled*. And you've got bottled water companies buying water rights from small towns for pennies, sometimes massively depleting the local supply in the process.

*Well, at least until the current administration gets done gutting the EPA's regulatory abilities.

Tap water may have more stringent filtering requirements, but I don't know if the aging pipes have those same reqs.

garion333 wrote:
Chaz wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

How long until our water is no longer potable across the entire country and we all drink bottled water?

We're not too far off on that one. Lots of people have been convinced that tap water is unclean and shouldn't be used, and bottled water is the only safe alternative. Which isn't true because tap water is subject to much more stringent filtering requirements than bottled*. And you've got bottled water companies buying water rights from small towns for pennies, sometimes massively depleting the local supply in the process.

*Well, at least until the current administration gets done gutting the EPA's regulatory abilities.

Tap water may have more stringent filtering requirements, but I don't know if the aging pipes have those same reqs. ;)

Flint, MI says hi.

JeremyK wrote:
garion333 wrote:
Chaz wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

How long until our water is no longer potable across the entire country and we all drink bottled water?

We're not too far off on that one. Lots of people have been convinced that tap water is unclean and shouldn't be used, and bottled water is the only safe alternative. Which isn't true because tap water is subject to much more stringent filtering requirements than bottled*. And you've got bottled water companies buying water rights from small towns for pennies, sometimes massively depleting the local supply in the process.

*Well, at least until the current administration gets done gutting the EPA's regulatory abilities.

Tap water may have more stringent filtering requirements, but I don't know if the aging pipes have those same reqs. ;)

Flint, MI says hi.

Most of rural KY says hi if Pyro's tweets this morning are any indication.

Trump’s budget suggestions indicate that he is still operating under his basic assumption that he can declare bankruptcy and walk away whole....