T1B

Softball Bat wrote:Thomas Friedman has come up with a genius solution to the Trump problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/opin ... crats.html

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, suggested Monday that the President should hire a new lawyer if his current one is telling him that he can pardon himself.

"If I were President of the United States and I had a lawyer that told me I could pardon myself, I think I would hire a new lawyer," Grassley told CNN when asked if he agrees that President Donald Trump could pardon himself.

Trump tweeted Monday that he had the "absolute right to pardon myself" but would not do so because he'd done nothing wrong.

"As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong? In the meantime, the never ending Witch Hunt, led by 13 very Angry and Conflicted Democrats (& others) continues into the mid-terms!" the President tweeted.

Trump's comments echo the stance that his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has taken. Giuliani said Sunday on ABC's "This Week" that Trump "probably does" have such power to pardon himself, but won't.

In addition, Giuliani told HuffPost in an interview that the President's power extends so far that "in no case can he be subpoenaed or indicted."

"I don't know how you can indict while he's in office. No matter what it is," Giuliani said. "If he shot James Comey, he'd be impeached the next day," Giuliani said to HuffPost. "Impeach him, and then you can do whatever you want to do to him."

A decision by Trump to pardon himself — or even his close allies like former campaign chairman Paul Manafort — could raise constitutional questions for Congress, as some Democrats have said that such pardons or the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller could be grounds for impeachment.

Goober McTuber wrote: "Impeach him, and then you can do whatever you want to do to him."

Papa Willie wrote:He's too brainwashed to see the left spin.

It's okay, Goobs - I'm going to make sure to keep using YOUR MEDIA SITE to grade your stories. Don't you kind of wish you'd never posted that link? :doh:

mediabiasfactcheck.com wrote:Factual Reporting: HIGH

88 wrote:Anyone who claims to know whether the Constitution permits the President to pardon himself/herself is full of shit. The issue has never been to the SCOTUS. As with everything political, there are two opposing opinions on the subject. The majority opinion appears to be that the President's pardon power under the Constitution is unlimited except in cases of impeachment, and that it thus permits the President to pardon himself/herself. But who knows or cares?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary ... mself-yes/

Papa Willie wrote:

Goober McTuber wrote:

Papa Willie wrote:He's too brainwashed to see the left spin.

It's okay, Goobs - I'm going to make sure to keep using YOUR MEDIA SITE to grade your stories. Don't you kind of wish you'd never posted that link? :doh:

Go ahead and point out any spin in that article. You can't because there isn't any. The only people quoted in the article are all Republicans. You are a right wing knee-jerk retard.

mediabiasfactcheck.com wrote:Factual Reporting: HIGH

Why even read it? I'm merely pointing out that you're using links from left-biased SHIT, and I'm rubbing your little nose in the fact that YOU provided the site that rates your shit links. You won't stick the links up to your articles, because you KNOW you're getting your stories from biased shit.

You should NEVER have posted the link to that site, Goobs. Now you're just pissed off & melting - which is funny. :)

Joe in PB wrote:I see Mikey has another dick in his mouth.

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

Diego in Seattle wrote:Phucking autocorrect strikes again.

More than a year after President Donald Trump won the election, there are still some questions about what drove him to victory: Was it genuine anxiety about the state of the economy? Or was it racism and racial resentment?

Over at the Washington Post, researchers Matthew Fowler, Vladimir Medenica, and Cathy Cohen have published the results of a new survey on these questions, with a focus on the 41 percent of white millennials who voted for Trump and the sense of “white vulnerability” that motivated them. The conclusion is very clear:

Contrary to what some have suggested, white millennial Trump voters were not in more economically precarious situations than non-Trump voters. Fully 86 percent of them reported being employed, a rate similar to non-Trump voters; and they were 14 percent less likely to be low income than white voters who did not support Trump. Employment and income were not significantly related to that sense of white vulnerability.

So what was? Racial resentment.

Even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, region and a host of other factors, white millennials fit Michael Tesler’s analysis, explored here. As he put it, economic anxiety isn’t driving racial resentment; rather, racial resentment is driving economic anxiety. We found, as he has in a larger population, that racial resentment is the biggest predictor of white vulnerability among white millennials. Economic variables like education, income and employment made a negligible difference.

The survey looked at millennials because they will be the largest share of the voting-eligible population in 2018, so they’re an important bellwether for future trends. (At the same time, most millennials backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, not Trump.)

To anyone who’s been following the research on this, the findings should come as little surprise. There have now been numerous studies that found support for Trump is closely linked to racial resentment, defined by Fowler, Medenica, and Cohen as “a moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance.”

This is crucial to understanding both Trump’s rise and how to overcome Trump. As a presidential candidate, Trump made all sorts of racist comments — suggesting that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the US, saying a US judge should recuse himself from a case simply because of his Mexican heritage, and deploying dog whistles about “law and order.”

As president, Trump equated a group of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and white nationalists who descended onto Charlottesville, Virginia, with the anti-racism protesters who stood against bigotry. His administration has also pursued policies that will disproportionately hurt minority groups, including his travel ban, immigration restrictions, “tough on crime” policies, and potential voting restrictions.

The studies suggest that these kinds of comments and actions are not just incidental to Trump; they are at the core of his political success. If Democrats want to defeat him, they will need to overcome that racial resentment.

This is not a one-off finding. At this point, the evidence that Trump’s rise was driven by racism and racial resentment is fairly stacked.

One paper, published in January by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, found that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology.

Another study, conducted by researchers Brenda Major, Alison Blodorn, and Gregory Major Blascovich shortly before the election, found that if people who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump.

And a study, published in November by researchers Matthew Luttig, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine, found that Trump supporters were much more likely to change their views on housing policy based on race. In this study, respondents were randomly assigned “a subtle image of either a black or a white man.” Then, they were asked about views on housing policy.

The researchers found that Trump supporters were much more likely to be impacted by the image of a black man. After the exposure, they were not only less supportive of housing assistance programs, but they also expressed higher levels of anger that some people receive government assistance and were more likely to say that individuals who receive assistance are to blame for their situation.

In contrast, favorability toward Hillary Clinton did not significantly change respondents’ views on any of these issues when primed with racial cues.

“These findings indicate that responses to the racial cue varied as a function of feelings about Donald Trump — but not feelings about Hillary Clinton — during the 2016 presidential election,” the researchers concluded.

There is also a lot of other research showing that people’s racial attitudes can change their views on politics and policy, as my colleague Dylan Matthews as well as researchers Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel previously explained for Vox.

Simply put, racial attitudes were a big driver behind Trump’s election — just as they long have been for general beliefs about politics and policy.

At some point, you might start to wonder why journalists keep writing about the link between Trump’s support and bigoted beliefs. The election is over. Do we really need to analyze what happened over and over again?

The point, at least for me, is not to demonize Trump voters. The point is to understand them in order to better grasp what motivated them to vote for someone who ran a clearly bigoted campaign and who most voters agreed is unqualified for the nation’s highest office.

As Schaffner, MacWilliams, and Nteta wrote in their paper, there’s growing evidence that 2016 was unique — in that racism and sexism played a more powerful role than in recent presidential elections. “Specifically, we find no statistically significant relationship between either the racism or sexism scales and favorability ratings of either [previous Republican candidates] John McCain or Mitt Romney,” they wrote. “However, the pattern is quite strong for favorability ratings of Donald Trump.”

The concern, then, is that this is the beginning of a modern trend in which politicians like Trump directly and explicitly play to people’s prejudices to win elections — and it works. This is in many ways an outgrowth of the Southern Strategy and tactics that play into people’s racism, like dog whistles — only it’s more explicit in its bigotry.

If that’s really what’s happening, it’s important for anyone interested in limiting the power of bigotry in US politics to know and demonstrate what’s going on. Studies like this put a bigger imperative on getting to the root of the problem and figuring out ways to reduce people’s racial biases.

To this end, the research also shows it’s possible to reach out to Trump voters — even those who are racist today — in an empathetic way without condoning their prejudice. The evidence suggests, in fact, that the best way to weaken people’s racial or other biases is through frank, empathetic dialogue. (Much more on that in my in-depth piece on the research.) Given that, the strongest approach to really combating racism and racial resentment may be empathy.

One study, for example, found that canvassing people’s homes and having a 10-minute, nonconfrontational conversation about transgender rights — in which people’s lived experiences were relayed so they could understand how prejudice feels personally — managed to reduce voters’ anti-trans attitudes for at least three months. Perhaps a similar model could be adapted to reach out to people with racist, sexist, or other deplorable views, although this possibility needs more study.

But all of this involves a lot of legwork, outreach, and a kind of empathy that people may not be comfortable with in an era of highly polarized politics. Knowing what caused Trump’s win is crucial to gauging whether all of this work and effort is worth doing — and the growing body of evidence suggests that it truly is.

Papa Willie wrote:Washington Post:

Factual Reporting: HIGH

Papa Willie wrote:

Mikey wrote:You're repeating yourself.
Come up with something new, or don't come up at all.

Mikey wrote:You're repeating yourself.
Come up with something new, or don't come up at all.

In particular, the president said Tuesday to several advisers that he fears attending the Group of Seven summit in rural Charlevoix, Quebec, may not be a good use of his time because he is diametrically opposed on many key issues with his counterparts — and does not want to be lectured by them.

Screw_Michigan wrote:legitimately elected heads of state from real democracies.

Praise for Kim Jong Un reflects Trump’s growing regard for totalitarian leaders

No U.S. president has been as free in his admiration of authoritarians and absolute power as the 45th, historians say. And President Trump’s interest in them seems to be increasing as he becomes better acquainted with leaders such as Kim, Xi Jinping and Vladi­mir Putin.

Joe in PB wrote:Governments are only as good as the people who run them. Take a good hard look at our own, corruption is rampant. instead of being governed by the people for the people, we now have government by the elite for corporations, and corporations care only about themselves. I've used China as an example before, 40-50 years ago they were viewed much like NK is today. Now they are the largest exporter to the US. Not an ideal government, but the situation is much better than it was. Ignoring Kim basically throws kindling on the fire, a fire that has may NK's starving. The NK people are for whatever Kim can do to alleviate the situation, including nuclear and missile testing, since most probably feel the West has abandoned them. The US in the past hoped that economic pressure (staving citizens) would generate civil war and a regime change. Unfortunately that very rarely happens.

Negotiations and or open channels of communication with foreign adversaries are never a bad thing.

Softball Bat wrote: If you don't, now would be a good time to have your -----> epiphany.

Screw_Michigan wrote:

Softball Bat wrote: If you don't, now would be a good time to have your -----> epiphany.

They're in complete denial over in my Manafort thread. They think he's bulletproof, it's insanity.

Softball Bat wrote:Derron, the FBI raided M. Cohen's office (which they would not have done if they didn't know that he has committed a crime(s)) and now have a treasure trove of fun information regarding Donald's sordid past.

Have you ever heard of the Sword of Damocles?

Google.


Have fun!

88 wrote:What information do you think Cohen has to give to Mueller? Seriously. Just go ahead and explain what specific information you expect Cohen to provide to Mueller.

Joe in PB wrote:Based on how the FBI leaks everything they have on Trump, and we haven't heard anything, I'd say they don't have much yet.

Joe in PB wrote:Based on how the FBI leaks everything they have on Trump, and we haven't heard anything, I'd say they don't have much yet.

88 wrote:What information do you think Cohen has to give to Mueller? Seriously. Just go ahead and explain what specific information you expect Cohen to provide to Mueller.

88 wrote:Tax evasion? I’d call that a lock. But not through Cohen. He’s not a tax guy. He’s a real estate/contract/celebrity fixer.