Donald Trump Presidency discussion thread II

White house are using fox news and right wing talk radio to discredit Mueller over the past week or so. The talking heads there have been using words and phrases like 'soft coup underway against the president'.

It's basically laying the ground-work for his firing.

Great piece of investigative reporting by the Dallas news showing exactly what Russian money was pumped into the Republican party and presidential campaign in 2016. If anyone was wondering why the GOP are behaving as they are read this. It also adds to doubts that this congress would ever imperach Trump and that the 2018 elections will be fair. If Trump goes down, he pulls the stage with him:

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/12/15/putins-proxies-helped-funnel-millions-gop-campaigns

So this actually happened. Promote that journalist.

Link to video: https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/942861557083623424

For Forks Sake wrote: »

So this actually happened. Promote that journalist.

Link to video: https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/942861557083623424

Why promote them? They ran away from their question. I want him to be forced to say yes or no. It is a simple question and he should be hounded till he answers the simple question.

Manic Moran wrote: »

In a more practical commercial service, consumer internet usage varies by time and hour. You can imagine that a whole bunch of us get home after work, have dinner, and at about 8pm, we're all watching Netflix or Youtube or whatever high-bandwidth thing we are doing. Customers would like their service to be smooth without that dreaded "Buffering" wait symbol, which means that data transfer is time-sensitive. Non-time-sensitive information such as email, under NN, must be given an equal priority. In most cases, it doesn't matter so much if an email is delayed a minute or two, so why not allow an ISP to jiggle the data transmission so that the materials which must be given priority in order to have a better customer experience are? Is Hotmail or Yahoo News going to suffer significant harm if their pages take an extra moment or two to load, as opposed to the intermittent Netflix or Youtube experience? This is not a factor of paid priority for certain services, this is looking at it simply a matter of efficient optimization of a finite resource: Bandwidth. Instead of spending tons of cash upgrading lines, the same lines can be better utilised. A win for all concerned.

I can't say that this seems like a particularly pressing issue. We have a neutral net here in Ireland, and even on the relatively slow connection I work with in a high-population density area, I never see those buffering symbols at any time of day. By all accounts, if you pay for 25Mb, you get 25Mb. In general, low-throughput applications like email are not choking the lines, because they simply take much less time to transmit. They can have the same priority, the email will be done in a fraction of a second, which is not substantially taking away from my video streaming. The only thing that will choke it out is other things that use large amounts of bandwidth.

Manic Moran wrote: »

Of course it's for profiteering. Comcast (my ISP) is going to want me to love its service and pay them lots and lots of money. And be so happy with my service (my wife and I tend to use our bandwidth for movies and gaming) that I will tell all my friends how happy I am with them, so they will also go pay Comcast lots of money. All without their having to spend metric tons of money in upgrading infrastructure. That's not to say that I cannot benefit from it at the same time, though. There is such a thing as a win-win. Why do I pay anyone money for a service, but because I believe I get value or enjoyment out of it?

This makes sense in a perfect free market, but a perfect free market absolutely does not exist for American ISPs, which are, in almost all cases, either an oligopoly or a total monopoly. According to Sprint Mobile, two-thirds of Americans have two or fewer choices when it comes to ISPs. 28% have just one. This is the problem. You can make some kind of argument that the market would self-correct when there is a large amount of competition, but you are in the minority for having a wide range of choices of who to pick. For many millions of people, if Comcast (or whomever) provides poor service, it's TS.

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

For all the folks worrying that Mueller will be fired, I think there is a more likely outcome which is even worse.

Mueller will present proof that Trump colluded illegally, and the Republicans in Congress will simply dismiss it. The stories trying to discredit Mueller don't have to be softening him up for firing, they could be groundwork for just tossing his report in the wastepaper basket unread.

I don't know if you've listened to the latest Pod Save America but this was basically the point being made in that episode. That the goal of discrediting the investigation is not to have Trump fire Mueller, but to simply set the stage for Republicans in Congress to, when they get the report, say "oh, that's interesting, we'll take that into consideration" before filing it away and doing nothing with it.

It would be extremely unlikely that Mueller would ever find some silver bullet piece of evidence to show Trump colluding with Putin, but if he were to present a strong case for obstruction of justice, Republicans would try to treat that with the same contempt as most of us treat the Bill Clinton perjury impeachment. That they started looking for one thing, and then settled for some kind of "gotcha" which is technically illegal, but not actually particularly important.

Rjd2 wrote: »

Has there any been any creditable sources saying he would fire him or is it pure speculation?.

I don't believe so, although it's not completely outlandish. Trump is influenced heavily by what he watches on things like Fox, and if they're telling him it's a no-brainer to fire Mueller for long enough, it wouldn't be that unusual for him to actually just go ahead and do it. He was specifically asked whether he intended to do it by a reporter recently and gave a very short "no", but Trump has been known to change his mind and wanting to move past the question so quickly doesn't indicate that he is deeply tied to this stance.

[QUOTE=C14N;105607480

This makes sense in a perfect free market, but a perfect free market absolutely does not exist for American ISPs, which are, in almost all cases, either an oligopoly or a total monopoly. According to Sprint Mobile, two-thirds of Americans have two or fewer choices when it comes to ISPs. 28% have just one. This is the problem. You can make some kind of argument that the market would self-correct when there is a large amount of competition, but you are in the minority for having a wide range of choices of who to pick. For many millions of people, if Comcast (or whomever) provides poor service, it's TS.
[/QUOTE]

When poorer Republican voters discover that their youtube starts to buffer heavily in comparison to what they are used to then they will flock to vote against their party. Because that's when the masses will really feel the effect of their choices.

It would be extremely unlikely that Mueller would ever find some silver bullet piece of evidence to show Trump colluding with Putin, but if he were to present a strong case for obstruction of justice, Republicans would try to treat that with the same contempt as most of us treat the Bill Clinton perjury impeachment. That they started looking for one thing, and then settled for some kind of "gotcha" which is technically illegal, but not actually particularly important.

The Mueller thing won't go anywhere no matter what evidence gets presented. It'll be branded as #fakewhatever.

jimmycrackcorm wrote:

When poorer Republican voters discover that their youtube starts to buffer heavily in comparison to what they are used to then they will flock to vote against their party. Because that's when the masses will really feel the effect of their choices.

They won't really because the Republicans will tell them they're going to improve broadband speeds if you vote for them.
Anyone saying that it was the republicans that affected broadband speeds will be accused of lying or being fake news and so the cycle continues.

Do not underestimate the capacity of some (seemingly most) people to buy the sane pig in a bag several times from the same gangster.

Evidence if this? Look at attitudes to healthcare and governance of this in US.

If something really conclusive about Don Trump being aware of collusion with Russian interference and directly complicit in obstruction of the investigation to a criminal extent came out due to the investigtion after he left office, the question is would it be worth Mike Pence's while to give Don a presidential pardon if it looked like the better option was to throw Don under a bus was in the best interests of the GOP [supposing Mike Pence got to be president]. Unless Don's team and the GOP have been busy shredding and deleting, there has to be a mountain of office work in drawers and hard-drives to provide further grounds for investigation.

When the Mueller investigation got the Trump Election team's emails, they also took possession of it's laptops.

Leroy42 wrote: »

Mueller has kept everything really airtight until the charges are brought so why would Team Trump deem it appropriate to 'leak' this story?

Who knows why those lunatics do anything, really. But their pals on Fox News and the deranged alt-right sites like Breitbart have been screaming all week about how this is somehow a "coup" and Mueller's "partisan witch-hunt" is designed to "overthrow the democratically elected President".

It could have started as just another desperate clutching at straws, but has now ballooned into a full-fledged conspiraloon Belief by his devoted cultists. No matter what happens, the base are being conditioned to never accept the outcome of any investigation that is critical of Trump, they'll always Believe he was a great (and innocent) man cruelly brought down by leftloon libtard feminazi probort virtue-signalling social justice warriors.

Given how insane and extreme half the base already are, this of course is an exceptionally dangerous and destabilising and potentially violent path to take, but Trump is simply too narcissistic and stupid to care, and Bannon actually wants a Civil War 2!

aloyisious wrote: »

If something really conclusive about Don Trump being aware of collusion with Russian interference and directly complicit in obstruction of the investigation to a criminal extent came out due to the investigtion after he left office, the question is would it be worth Mike Pence's while to give Don a presidential pardon if it looked like the better option was to throw Don under a bus was in the best interests of the GOP [supposing Mike Pence got to be president].

It kind of depends on whether Mike Pence would want to be president himself. Gerald Ford infamously pardoned Nixon and suffered from pretty poor approval for the rest of his term because of it (roughly as poor as Trump's thus far), but Gerald Ford never really particularly wanted to be president. He was only really in the role of VP because he was filling in for Agnew, who was put away for tax evasion and money laundering. So re-election was not really a priority for him. If Pence were to be sworn in before 2020 and wanted to make a real go at being president, he probably would not pardon him.

Yeah, I don' think the point of this media campaign against Mueller is to soften people up for his eventual sacking, it's to have people demanding his immediate sacking.

That way the executive is just doing what the people demand. The fact that it might have been what the executive wanted before it was fed to the people through the propaganda machine is irrelevant.

Billy86 wrote: »

Short of Trump stepping down or some successful attempt to outright shut it down, there's absolutely zero chance the investigation is wrapped up before January 20th, 2019 I'd reckon.

That seems like a very credible time frame. There seems to be a constant shift in the time span expected by those close to the administration. First it was thanksgiving, then the end of the year and now into the new year. Seems to be wishful thinking on their part.

There's a feeling of "too big to fail" starting to emerge here I think - that if Mueller is allowed to complete his investigation, that it will bring down not just Trump, but perhaps a big chunk of the GOP. When Trump first got elected I thought the GOP would dump him the first chance they got. Now though it's starting to look like he could take quite a few of them down with him, and his behaviour has given the FBI a reason to investigate not just Trump but anything to do with Russia. Who knows how far the investigation has spread? I won't be surprised if Mueller's investigation is shut down somehow. There are just too many corrupt people in positions of power, with too much to hide. Given a choice of going down with Trump and ending up in prison, or brazening it out and looking the other way while Mueller gets shut down, I suspect they will go down the route of self-preservation.

I really hope I'm wrong though.