US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6710

On January 31 2017 11:42 biology]major wrote:


Yeah but the way she went about it was beneath the DOJ.

On January 31 2017 11:42 biology]major wrote:


Yeah but the way she went about it was beneath the DOJ.

On January 31 2017 11:44 zlefin wrote:

yeah, it was beneath the DOJ.
sadly, when what the president does is beneath the presidency, stuff gets kinda weird.
hope trump gets removed soon so the gov't can get back to being at least semi-functional.

On January 31 2017 11:42 biology]major wrote:


Yeah but the way she went about it was beneath the DOJ.

On January 31 2017 05:22 oneofthem wrote:

okay i was trying to bait you out of your bunker but i didn't expect this post to do the trick.

i'm a compatibilist by temperament. when i see two positions that can be bought together, i tend to do that and avoid unnecessary conflict, and in turn maximally preserve the positives of both positions. this conflict of the far left and center left is just unnecessary, built on misunderstandings with roots in the worldview of the far left.

as things stand, it's the far left that's being unfair. if the table is turned and it is the establishment that is being unfair, i'd be critical of them instead, as i have done in plenty of places.

i did say i have a low expectation of investment incentives based policy wrt to tackling very large problems of dysfunction seen throughout america. but i also don't see much of any good solutions. it's basically an unfortunate situation that will have to run itself through the cycles of despair and moving on, preferably to a city. it's not so much that i think capitalism has to be preserved, but there exist collective action problems that necessarily constrain options, even with full political will. in the very long run there may be alternatives, but not right now.

On January 31 2017 11:45 biology]major wrote:


DOJ is supposed to be full of professionals. President can be anyone, simply has to be elected in by the people.

On January 31 2017 11:43 Toadesstern wrote:
I was 100% thinking the same. That one line if nothing else is from him for sure

On January 31 2017 11:47 Nyxisto wrote:... I feel like we've ended up in a Civ game.

On January 31 2017 11:47 Nyxisto wrote:


The weird thing is this use of language seems to be spreading

https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/825371795972825089

It's like a disease. I feel like we've ended up in a Civ game.

On January 31 2017 11:45 biology]major wrote:


DOJ is supposed to be full of professionals. President can be anyone, simply has to be elected in.

On January 31 2017 11:51 Introvert wrote:
I wonder where this Yates lady will be running for Congress. She could have just, I don't know, resigned. She just wanted to score some hero points first. As far as I can tell or am reading, Trump was fully within his rights to remove her. Let's all calm down.



HA. That's great.

On January 31 2017 11:54 Djzapz wrote:

Removing her is fine. Calling it a betrayal is extremely strange language in a democracy.

On January 31 2017 11:50 Aquanim wrote:

That was my first thought when "invade other countries and take their oil" came up.

On January 31 2017 11:57 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
So anyone in government who doesn't comply is a betrayer. Any journalist that doesn't write what they like is the enemy, the opposition party, fake news.

Top aides to Donald Trump quietly worked with senior staffers on the House Judiciary Committee to draft the executive order curbing immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations, but the Republican committee chairman and party leadership were not informed, according to multiple sources involved in the process.

The work of the aides began during the transition period after the election and before Trump was sworn in.

It’s not clear why the committee aides did not alert the committee chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), or Republican leaders about their work.

Kathryn Rexrode, the House Judiciary Committee’s communications director, declined comment about the aides’ work. A Judiciary Committee aide said Goodlatte was not “consulted by the administration on the executive order.”

Their work on the executive order meant the small group of staffers — conservative immigration hard-liners who, sources say, are close with attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) — were among the only people on Capitol Hill who knew of the looming controversial policy.

It’s extremely rare for administration officials to circumvent Republican leadership and work directly with congressional committee aides. But the House Judiciary Committee has some of the most experienced staffers when it comes to immigration policy.

GOP leaders, however, received no advance warning or briefings from the White House or Judiciary staff on what the executive order would do or how it would be implemented — briefings they still had not received as of Sunday night. Leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), saw the final language only when reporters received it Friday night, according to multiple Hill sources.

A man who President Donald Trump has promoted as an authority on voter fraud was registered to vote in multiple states during the 2016 presidential election, the Associated Press has learned.

Gregg Phillips, whose unsubstantiated claim that the election was marred by 3 million illegal votes was tweeted by the president, was listed on the rolls in Alabama, Texas and Mississippi, according to voting records and election officials in those states. He voted only in Alabama in November, records show.

In a post earlier this month, Phillips described “an amazing effort” by volunteers tied to True the Vote, an organization whose board he sits on, who he said found “thousands of duplicate records and registrations of dead people.”
Trump has made an issue of people who are registered to vote in more than one state, using it as one of the bedrocks of his overall contention that voter fraud is rampant in the U.S. and that voting by 3 to 5 million immigrants illegally in the country cost him the popular vote in November.

The AP found that Phillips was registered in Alabama and Texas under the name Gregg Allen Phillips, with the identical Social Security number. Mississippi records list him under the name Gregg A. Phillips, and that record includes the final four digits of Phillips’ Social Security number, his correct date of birth and a prior address matching one once attached to Gregg Allen Phillips. He has lived in all three states.

At the time of November’s presidential election, Phillips’ status was “inactive” in Mississippi and suspended in Texas. Officials in both states told the AP that Phillips could have voted, however, by producing identification and updating his address at the polls.

Citing concerns about voters registered in several states, the president last week called for a major investigation into his claim of voter fraud, despite his campaign lawyer’s conclusion that the 2016 election was “not tainted.”

“When you look at the people that are registered, dead, illegal and two states, and some cases maybe three states, we have a lot to look into,” Trump said in an ABC interview.

Reached by telephone Monday, Phillips said he was unaware of his multiple registrations but asked, “Why would I know or care?”

“Doesn’t that just demonstrate how broken the system is?” he asked. “That is not fraud — that is a broken system. We need a national ID that travels with people.”

Phillips has been in the national spotlight since Nov. 11, when he tweeted without evidence that his completed analysis of voter registrations concluded the “number of non-citizen votes exceeded 3 million.”

Thousands of people liked and retweeted the claim, which led to a viral article three days later on InfoWars.com, a site known to traffic in conspiracy theories.

Phillips also has previously tweeted about the dangers of “inactive voters” being able to vote in U.S. elections. “There is already law that compels states to remove inactive voters. Many don’t,” Phillips tweeted Nov. 29.

According to media reports, five Trump family members or top administration officials also were registered to vote in two states during the 2016 election — chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon; Press Secretary Sean Spicer; Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin; Tiffany Trump, the president’s youngest daughter; and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser.

The Houston-based True the Vote has challenged the validity of voter rolls in numerous states. On Friday, Phillips tweeted that the conservative group “will lead the analysis” of widespread voter fraud, and suggested in a CNN interview that it might release the underlying data in a few months.

Shortly after Phillips appeared on CNN on Friday, Trump tweeted: “Look forward to seeing the final results of VoteStand. Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal. We must do better!”

This article was written by Garance Burke with the Associated Press.