US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6966

On February 25 2017 08:40 radscorpion9 wrote:
Hmm I actually had no idea he had banned so many news organizations from his press briefing. This is the kind of thing that could escalate out of control. Its not as bad as actually declaring them enemies of the state but it is still a really bad sign. Good thing I came to this thread to discover these things.

Also Blisse in case you're generally aiming that criticism to me, I'm not sure I ever made the points you are making so they just don't apply. Anyway what Trump *is* declaring as an actual policy is troubling enough.

On February 25 2017 09:05 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
Pretty hilarious with all the fake news talk today:

The real news Fox completely made up a Swedish Defense and National Security Advisor, Nils Bildt.

Turns out the guy doesn't work for Swedish government at all and emigrated from Sweden in 1994.

http://mobil.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/fake-sweden-expert-on-fox-news-has-criminal-convictions-in-us-no-connection-to-swedish-security/

Oh well just some alternative facts nothing to see here.

On February 25 2017 08:12 Plansix wrote:
"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Media forever. We begin bombing liberating in five minutes."

On February 25 2017 04:58 zlefin wrote:

putin isn't going by what trump says, but by his actions over a long period of time, which are indeed more friendly to russia than hillary.
plus there's the possibility that russia has agents/connection in the trump camp they can make good use of.
also, hillary is a tougher opponent than trump. Your claim is groundless and false, and would need a great deal of substantiation to demonstrate, especially given your history.

On February 25 2017 09:52 RealityIsKing wrote:


No it is not groundless at all, plus I know the bias nature of this site. I've shown plenty of evidence but people like you who are a partisan through and through are just plain hilarious.

Thing with Hillary in power, she have WAY more constraints than Trump.

Trump don't have to owe any favor because he mostly funded the campaign by himself which means less chains on him and plus Republicans still have the house + senate so counter Hillary.

This means that a Trump presidency will be a lot more powerful than with her.

This alone is enough evidence to demonstrate your ignorance on the subject at hand.

On February 25 2017 08:26 Blisse wrote:
Yes, building a wall is just a metaphor for wanting a stricter immigration policy. Except that's not what many of his supporters mean and that's not what Trump plans and then continually flip-flops on. It didn't take radscorpion some killer intellect to diagnose what was wrong, it's right out there in front. And another note to the shitposters out there: you can still oppose Trump and understand why he's President and generally getting away with doing what he's doing. Context:

The seriously vs literally drivel is complete bollocks. You just cherry pick what Trump does and decide if it should be taken seriously or literally to fit whatever position you want because Trump changes his platforms so often that you feel justified in defending any one of all positions he's taken, and all his defenders/supporters choose whichever one of multiple positions he takes that fits their ideas of him. Absurd.

PITTSBURGH—“Running for president is a very important endeavor,” Donald Trump said. “What is more important, right?”

He leaned forward on his chair, separated by a heavy black curtain in a makeshift green room from the crowd waiting to hear him speak at the Shale Insight Conference.

“I am running because, number one, I think I will do a very good job. Number two, it’s really about making American great again.” He paused, as if realizing that repeating his campaign slogan might not seem genuine.

“I mean that; I really do want to make America great again,” he said. “That is what it is all about.”

The 70-year-old Republican nominee took his time walking from the green room toward the stage. He stopped to chat with the waiters, service workers, police officers, and other convention staffers facilitating the event. There were no selfies, no glad-handing for votes, no trailing television cameras. Out of view of the press, Trump warmly greets everyone he sees, asks how they are, and, when he can, asks for their names and what they do.

“I am blown away!” said one worker, an African American man who asked for anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. “The man I just saw there talking to people is nothing like what I’ve seen, day in and day out, in the news.”

Just before he takes the stage, I ask whether there’s one question that reporters never ask but that he wishes they would. He laughs. “Honestly, at this stage, I think they’ve asked them all.”

Then he stops in his tracks before pulling back the curtain and answers, so quietly that is almost a whisper: “You know, I consider myself to be a nice person. And I am not sure they ever like to talk about that.”

On stage, Trump began by addressing the unrest in Charlotte. He praised police, condemned “violent protestors,” and called for unity. “The people who will suffer the most as a result of these riots are law-abiding African American residents who live in these communities,” he said.

Turning to the subject at hand, Trump proceeded to tell shale-industry executives from around the country about his “America First energy plan” that, he vowed, would sideline the Obama administration’s climate-change blueprint, ease regulations, and support the construction of energy-based infrastructure such as oil and gas pipelines.

The plan, he insisted, would revive the slumping shale-oil and -gas industries, beset by low prices for several years, and “unleash massive wealth for American workers and families.”

Troy Roach of Denver, Colorado, has seen how the reversal of fortunes in the shale and natural gas industries affected his own community. The 46-year-old vice president of health, safety and environment at Antero Resources says he was open-minded about voting and thought about Hillary Clinton, but ultimately decided on Trump.

“With her, there is too much uncertainty on how she will work with the industry,” he said. “I look at my company and the impact it has had, not only with jobs but charitable work in the area. Just last week we bought a truck for the local EMS.”

Clinton also was invited to speak at the conference but declined, organizers said. In March, during a town-hall discussion of the transition to “clean energy,” the Democratic nominee declared: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Later, she declared it a “misstatement.” Two weeks ago, she again ignited controversy, describing half of Trump’s supporters as coming from a “basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”

Like Barack Obama’s description of his opponent’s supporters—“they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion”—eight years ago in San Francisco, Hillary’s remarks appalled many voters in this region, many of whom work in the energy sector or are affected by it. [...]

The best way, he says, is to provide good education and good jobs in these areas. “Fifty-eight percent of black youth cannot get a job, cannot work,” he says. “Fifty-eight percent. If you are not going to bring jobs back, it is just going to continue to get worse and worse.”

It’s a claim that drives fact-checkers to distraction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate for blacks between the ages of 16 and 24 at 20.6 percent. Trump prefers to use its employment-population ratio, a figure that shows only 41.5 percent of blacks in that age bracket are working. But that means he includes full time high-school and college students among the jobless.

It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

On February 25 2017 08:45 Blisse wrote:


Oops sorry that was mostly @Danglers but this thread moves so quickly I should've quoted. I just dislike those defenses.

On February 25 2017 10:13 Danglars wrote:
They were worried about government being able to vet refugees from the middle east, when ISIS promised and had snuck terrorists into the streams.

On February 25 2017 10:17 Danglars wrote:

Delivering on campaign promises AND cracking jokes along the way. Let the hand wringing from the outrage machine continue!

On February 25 2017 09:52 RealityIsKing wrote:


No it is not groundless at all, plus I know the bias nature of this site. I've shown plenty of evidence but people like you who are a partisan through and through are just plain hilarious.

Thing with Hillary in power, she have WAY more constraints than Trump.

Trump don't have to owe any favor because he mostly funded the campaign by himself which means less chains on him and plus Republicans still have the house + senate so counter Hillary.

This means that a Trump presidency will be a lot more powerful than with her.

This alone is enough evidence to demonstrate your ignorance on the subject at hand.

On February 25 2017 10:24 Plansix wrote:

Deeply unpopular president does thing that his opponent do not like, also make joke. They express disliking what he is doing. Fan of president says they are whiners because president is doing what he promised, knowing that they would not like it.

In other news, Trump will never willful his promise to fix Obama care, because that is hard. Also those regulations he just formed a task force for, they will remain in place because that is also hard. But he tried and that is all that matters.

On February 25 2017 10:19 KwarK wrote:

We absolutely get that people talk about this shit at the dinner table, especially after having read a facebook forward from their racist uncle. The problem is that there isn't actually a real problem underneath all the fears. It's not that Obama wasn't listening to the fears, it's that he was better informed. The solution to people being afraid isn't to pander harder to ignorance, and yet that's exactly what Trump did. The only positive note was that in his case he probably wasn't pandering, he was the racist uncle on facebook.

It comes back to Newt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I

The real problem is this strange idea that the ivory tower elitists have lost track of the problems facing America because they're lost in all their facts, statistics and real news and won't stop spending all their time listening to experts. Somehow it's become reasonable for an individual who doesn't experience any violent crime to hear about it on his daily fearmongering Fox News segment and decide that he knows that the experts aren't doing enough.

On February 25 2017 10:32 Danglars wrote:

If you'll remember back a few posts ago, I talked about the relationship between Trump and spineless GOP legislators. Obamacare isn't just one executive order away.


Well, we know you subscribe to the racist uncles on FB and But They're Wrong theories. Kind of the reason this stuff had been bubbling up for a while before Trump hit the national scene with a major immigration message. And most of America didn't give a damn about Newt beyond Contract with America and the '94 revolt against Clinton.

Trump’s Ban of Reporters at Press Briefing Isn’t Just Wrong, It’s Unconstitutional
by Rachel Stockman
CNN, The New York Times, and several other news organizations were reportedly banned from the White House press briefing on Friday. Many veteran journalists are understandably outraged by the development because the move seemed to be in retaliation for stories that the Trump administration didn’t like.

The controversial gaggle was held in White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer‘s office. “This is an unacceptable development by the Trump White House,” CNN said in a statement. On top of being unacceptable, the move by the White House may also be illegal and unconstitutional. It is one thing for the Trump campaign or even the DNC to ban certain journalists from rallies or press conferences. But, Trump is now the President, and as a government official, he answers to the taxpayers and the Constitution.

“It’s unconstitutional when President Trump has said he doesn’t like CNN and the New York Times and then excludes them from a press conference. It’s a content-based ban and the government generally cannot enact laws or restrictions that punish speech based or restrict public access based on content. Courts have held that a government press conference is a public forum generally open to the media, and any restrictions must be based on reasons other than content,” First Amendment attorney and LawNewz columnist Susan Seager said.

A White House spokesperson, in an attempt to defend the move, claimed that the White House “had the pool there so everyone would be represented and get an update from us today.” However, CNN reports this is not what happened at all. It was not a “pool situation” which would mean a representative from only one tv station, one radio outlet, one newspaper attended the meeting. Instead, during this incident, NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX News were all allowed in Spicer’s office — and only CNN (of the television networks) was kept out.

“This is not the same as when the government selects one television network camera to serve as a pool camera.. Here, the president has publicly criticized the New York Times and CNN. So it seems pretty clear this is punishment for the content published those news outlets, and President Trump and Sean Spicer cannot reasonably claim that this ban was content-neutral,” Seager continued.

It’s no secret that over the last few days, CNN has been aggressively reporting a story about how Trump’s Chief of Staff Reince Priebus pressured the FBI to release a statement to squash stories about the Trump/Russia ties. As a result, Trump has strongly criticized the network. Just today he called them “fake news” and the “Clinton News Network”

The courts have weighed in on this issue on many occasions before, and it doesn’t bode well for the Trump administration.

In Sherrill v. Knight (D.C. Circuit 1997), The Nation magazine sued after a journalist was denied a White House press pass. In that decision, the Circuit Court and lower court both said that the White House can’t just deny credentials based upon what the journalists say. “..[W]e agree with appellants that arbitrary or content-based criteria for press pass issuance are prohibited under the first amendment,” the D.C. court wrote in the decision.

In another interesting case from 1988, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office didn’t like a story by the Times-Picayune so as retaliation the deputies stopped notifying the newspaper’s reporters of press conferences, and also barred them from attending press conferences if they did find out about them. In Times-Picayune Publishing Corp. v. Lee, the court held that this move by the Sheriff’s office violated the First Amendment. “Discriminatory governmental action aimed at the communicative impact of expression is presumptively at odds with the First Amendment. Above all else, the First Amendment means that the government cannot restrict freedom of expression on the basis of its ideas, message or content,” the federal court found.

Courts have said that it is permitted for government officials to enforce other kinds of restrictions to journalists. For example, it would be okay for Trump to do a million exclusive interviews with Fox News, and never give one to ABC. However, when it comes to press conferences and briefings that are supposed to be open to the media, the rules are different.

CNN and The New York Times have not indicated that they plan to take legal action, but as you can see, if they did they very well may have a winning case

On February 25 2017 10:36 KwarK wrote:

Well, let's examine the claim. You said that the side of America that Trump tapped into was worried about the streams of ISIS terrorists hiding among the Syrian refugees, right? And thought that Obama wasn't doing enough to keep them safe from those. How many Americans killed by ISIS members posing as Syrian refugees would be an acceptable number for you in terms of Obama keeping us safe? Obviously you can never make a perfect system, but there are hundreds of millions of Americans. If, say, he kept the number of people killed by the ISIS refugees under five per year, would that get a passing grade?