American Politics

[Tiny 12]

Comey is also an unethical slimeball who corruptly dropped a big nothing burger bomb a week before election day and before Clinton had time to respond. There's a real chance this facilitated voter suppression, decided the outcome of the election, and served us up the unending Trump nightmare. Someone got to him. I'd question any testimony from him that isn't corroborated elsewhere.

I didn't say she was brilliant to have done it. I said she was wise to have done it. Her doing so provided a much higher level of National Security than what was available at the State Department or the Pentagon. Obviously.

What was she supposed to have said or testified to for her reason for setting up her own, much more secure server than the one the State Department was still saddled with? "Hey, everybody! I set up my own server because anybody and everybody can hack into those antiquated ones at the State Department and Pentagon! Aren't I wonderful"?

I am sure the Repubs who interrogated her about it over however many hearings would have loved for her to spill the beans and tip off every enemy of America to that National Security weakness. But Hillary cared more about our National Security than to do that and instead just quietly set up a system far more secure than anything used before or since.

Thanks for the comedic relief Gentlemen! You hate Comey every bit as much as the Republicans Paulie. And I can picture it now Tooms, every Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, and CIA head should set up his own server in his basement, to protect our country from incompetence of Federal Employees encharged with cybersecurity. Or why stop at just them? We could house classified information on thousands of servers owned by politicians and government employees! That would work out well.

[EihTooms]

Tiny, laws are not made to be subject to moral relativism. If you are speeding, you are speeding. Either you prosecute speeding or you don't. Don't buy into it. The DOJ knew Russiagate was bullshit back in 2016 and let it stew. Why? Because they do not like Trump.

You either prosecute Trump, Hiliary, Pence, and Biden, or you prosecute none of them. The moral relativism is just bullshit that excuses what is really going on. Indicting Trump is an attempt by the DOJ once again to rig an election. Period.

The DOJ has sat on the Hunter Biden laptop for years. Why? They want Biden to win. They will also sit on the Joe Biden $5 million bribe for the same reason.

There was outrage when Karl Rove tried to rig elections with the DOJ, and there should have been.

That is what the Democrats do not seem to get. They think it is wrong what Rove did but it is great what the DOJ is doing now. For me, it is not less about voting for Trump. It is more about voting against the DOJ rigging an election.

When so much an an iota of evidence emerges that Hillary, Pence and Biden lied repeatedly to the Feds about what landed in their personal possession, dodged and refused to cooperate in their return for 18 months, bragging and boasting about how they can take and keep anything they want, I would support a prosecution of them equal to that of Trump, who did all of those things.

But there isn't any.

[EihTooms]

...The idea that Hillary was brilliant to keep all that confidential information on her server instead of the State Department's which would be a more obvious target doesn't wash, unless of course you have your view that everything related to Democrats is golden and everything Republican is mierda.

I didn't say she was brilliant to have done it. I said she was wise to have done it. Her doing so provided a much higher level of National Security than what was available at the State Department or the Pentagon. Obviously.

What was she supposed to have said or testified to for her reason for setting up her own, much more secure server than the one the State Department was still saddled with? "Hey, everybody! I set up my own server because anybody and everybody can hack into those antiquated ones at the State Department and Pentagon! Aren't I wonderful"?

I am sure the Repubs who interrogated her about it over however many hearings would have loved for her to spill the beans and tip off every enemy of America to that National Security weakness. But Hillary cared more about our National Security than to do that and instead just quietly set up a system far more secure than anything used before or since.

[Elvis 2008]

LOL. Well then, it's good that Trump had those 200 some odd documents in the bathroom and the storeroom at Mar a Lago. Once the NARA gets hold of them, they'll scan the info and disseminate it to Wikileaks and goodness knows who else.

Hillary displayed an incredible amount of hubris, equal to Trump's, in storing Emails on her personal server. According to Comey, 2,000 contained classified information and some of them indicated the presence of classified information. WTF are they doing passing Email messages back and forth with sensitive information potentially useful to our enemies, regardless of which server they're on?

Comey also said that "given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved", it would have been unlikely for the FBI (or anyone else) to find direct evidence of her server being hacked. We know there were multiple attempts by Russians and other "actors" to hack her server. True, we don't know if they were successful. But 200 documents laying around Trump's storeroom and office aren't nearly as big a risk to national security as 2,000 on the Secretary of State's personal server.

Tiny, laws are not made to be subject to moral relativism. If you are speeding, you are speeding. Either you prosecute speeding or you don't. Don't buy into it. The DOJ knew Russiagate was bullshit back in 2016 and let it stew. Why? Because they do not like Trump.

You either prosecute Trump, Hiliary, Pence, and Biden, or you prosecute none of them. The moral relativism is just bullshit that excuses what is really going on. Indicting Trump is an attempt by the DOJ once again to rig an election. Period.

The DOJ has sat on the Hunter Biden laptop for years. Why? They want Biden to win. They will also sit on the Joe Biden $5 million bribe for the same reason.

There was outrage when Karl Rove tried to rig elections with the DOJ, and there should have been.

That is what the Democrats do not seem to get. They think it is wrong what Rove did but it is great what the DOJ is doing now. For me, it is not less about voting for Trump. It is more about voting against the DOJ rigging an election.

[Elvis 2008]

Despite the polls, I don't think Trump can win a general election in 2024. Democrats and many independents are mad as hell, so they're going to turn out to vote in larger numbers than the polls would indicate. And he's lost people like me (I'll vote for the Libertarian if Trump's the candidate) who would be happy to vote for someone like Tim Scott or Chris Christie in the general election. Actually he lost me before 2016. I've done business with a couple of narcissists created in the Trump mold. I'll never do that again, and I'm damn sure not going to vote for one of them or Trump for president.

I agree that Trump is a narcissist, Tiny, but do you think Biden and Kamala Harris are not?

The shame of it all is the guys who really were not all about themselves like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders were made out to be kooks.

[Paulie97]

Hillary displayed an incredible amount of hubris, equal to Trump's, in storing Emails on her personal server.

This is just irrelevant false equivocation, whataboutism, and deflection that has nothing to do with what Trump is charged with, while there remains no evidence that Clinton's servers were ever hacked. Stick to the subject.

Comey is also an unethical slimeball who corruptly dropped a big nothing burger bomb a week before election day and before Clinton had time to respond. There's a real chance this facilitated voter suppression, decided the outcome of the election, and served us up the unending Trump nightmare. Someone got to him. I'd question any testimony from him that isn't corroborated elsewhere.

[Tiny 12]

The most damning assessment of Hillary's server was it was "probably" hacked with no real evidence that it was. She was wise to have set up one of her own considering it had been since forever the State Department and Pentagon systems had been upgraded. Similar to the Repubs' current resistance to funding and upgrading the IRS computer systems.

Meanwhile, the State Department and Pentagon servers were proven to have been hacked at historic levels. And Trump got busy playing hide and seek with the Fed's repeated requests for him to return those classified documents on nuclear and military capabilities of our allies so he could provide them for casual reading to the Anti-American dictators and their entourage he invited to his money-strapped resorts, Mar-a-Lago or wherever he needed paying tenants.

On the list of America's Biggest and Worst National Security Risks of just those three options with 1 being the Biggest and Worst, classified document info went:

1. Within arm's distance of Donald Trump anywhere at anytime.

2. The State Department and Pentagon servers.

And in a far, far distant 3rd place:

3. Hillary Clinton's server.

LOL. Well then, it's good that Trump had those 200 some odd documents in the bathroom and the storeroom at Mar a Lago. Once the NARA gets hold of them, they'll scan the info and disseminate it to Wikileaks and goodness knows who else.

Hillary displayed an incredible amount of hubris, equal to Trump's, in storing Emails on her personal server. According to Comey, 2,000 contained classified information and some of them indicated the presence of classified information. WTF are they doing passing Email messages back and forth with sensitive information potentially useful to our enemies, regardless of which server they're on?

Comey also said that "given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved", it would have been unlikely for the FBI (or anyone else) to find direct evidence of her server being hacked. We know there were multiple attempts by Russians and other "actors" to hack her server. True, we don't know if they were successful. But 200 documents laying around Trump's storeroom and office aren't nearly as big a risk to national security as 2,000 on the Secretary of State's personal server.

The idea that Hillary was brilliant to keep all that confidential information on her server instead of the State Department's which would be a more obvious target doesn't wash, unless of course you have your view that everything related to Democrats is golden and everything Republican is mierda.

Again, I don't believe Hillary deserves to be prosecuted. The only reason Trump may IMHO is because he was hiding documents from and made false statements to the DOJ. And yeah, Trump's stupidity is about 10X Hillary's, because not only did he fuck up with the confidential records, but he also thumbed his nose at The Man (e.g., the deep state, FBI, DOJ). Like I said, you don't do that, even if you are an ex-president.

Warning: This post contains sarcasm. I'm just including that so you gentlemen don't waste time writing long essays, like you did when I posted about the hundreds of thousands of young American men who died in foreign wars during the reigns of bloodthirsty Democratic presidents.

[EihTooms]

Well, at this point, every prominent Republican has had the opportunity to read the DOJ charging document. It has changed none of their minds. At least as to what they say publicly. The simple facts are they they are probably scared of the OTTIASAFG's base or they are scared of OTTIASAFG himself. Privately, all of them probably want the OTTIASAFG to simply go away.

While Hillary's email server thing was disturbing, especially since she should have known better, the fact that the OTTIASAFG stored classified documents in public areas of a club is unforgiveable. Especially since many of those documents contained nuclear secrets of the US and other countries and descriptions of the weaknesses of the American military. The documents that contained nuclear secrets can not be declassified unilaterally by a president. Foreign government agents have been arrested trying to gain entry into Mar-A-Lardo. I don't recall any agents ever trying to gain access to Hillary's home. Furthermore, the Secret Service, by their own admission, had no clue that the documents were stored in publicly assessible places. Like a ballroom and a bathroom and a shower.

The most damning assessment of Hillary's server was it was "probably" hacked with no real evidence that it was. She was wise to have set up one of her own considering it had been since forever the State Department and Pentagon systems had been upgraded. Similar to the Repubs' current resistance to funding and upgrading the IRS computer systems.

Meanwhile, the State Department and Pentagon servers were proven to have been hacked at historic levels. And Trump got busy playing hide and seek with the Fed's repeated requests for him to return those classified documents on nuclear and military capabilities of our allies so he could provide them for casual reading to the Anti-American dictators and their entourage he invited to his money-strapped resorts, Mar-a-Lago or wherever he needed paying tenants.

On the list of America's Biggest and Worst National Security Risks of just those three options with 1 being the Biggest and Worst, classified document info went:

1. Within arm's distance of Donald Trump anywhere at anytime.

2. The State Department and Pentagon servers.

And in a far, far distant 3rd place:

3. Hillary Clinton's server.

[PVMonger]

Picture it PVMonger. You're attending an event at Mar A Largo. You need to take a dump so you go to the bathroom. You could take a crap and read some top secret document about Kim Jong Un! How cool would that be!

The word on the street is that the OTTIASAFG charged to use the bathroom where classified documents were stored. I recall hearing $50 K.

[Tiny 12]

Here is a link for a Polling Service that is a bit less Winger-Leaning than RealClearPolitics:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/

Since that one shows results more favorable to Biden, they make it unnecessarily difficut to find the pertinent polls on that default link. So you might get to them easier by following a Google Search for "538 polls 2024 presidenial election. ".

Anyway, Biden either beats or ties Trump in 6 out of 8 of the most recent head-to-head match ups since late May. Biden also beats or ties DeSantis in 6 out of 7 of those head-to-head recent polls in that same timeframe. This Polling Service apparently does not do a running consensus on that question and I did not bother to do the math to see if Biden beats Trump and / or DeSantis by 1. 8 points as Trump does over Biden so far in that Winger-Leaning RCP consensus. If you do the math on it, please let us know what the results are since late May.

It's pretty close. CNN this morning was saying Biden / Trump polling indicates it's a dead heat right now. My argument is that close to half of America is fed up enough with the political class and the federal government to support Trump.

Despite the polls, I don't think Trump can win a general election in 2024. Democrats and many independents are mad as hell, so they're going to turn out to vote in larger numbers than the polls would indicate. And he's lost people like me (I'll vote for the Libertarian if Trump's the candidate) who would be happy to vote for someone like Tim Scott or Chris Christie in the general election. Actually he lost me before 2016. I've done business with a couple of narcissists created in the Trump mold. I'll never do that again, and I'm damn sure not going to vote for one of them or Trump for president.

Thanks for the info on RCP. Googling the issue, I do see they did start accepting funding from right of center donors. I have no idea if that affected the particular pollsters they include in their tables. Historically, from what I saw following the site, Republicans outperformed their "averages of polls" up until 2022. I attributed this to Republicans being more likely to actually go to the polls and vote than Democrats. But that changed in 2022, and RCP's poll averages, I believe along with 538 and Nate Silver, overstated the Republicans chances. I attributed that to what I described above, Democrats being more fired up to go out and actually vote, because of Trump's post-election shenanigans.

It would be interesting to compare the polls that 538 and RCP follow to see if there's a difference, but I'm too lazy to do it. I do believe that 538 and Silver, like RCP, overstated the Democrat's chances until 2022. That is, Republicans did better than what the polls predicted. Here's an example. In 2020, the RCP average indicated Biden was ahead by 7.2% in the polls, but he "only" won the popular vote by 4.5%:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ep...iden-6247.html

[Tiny 12]

While Hillary's email server thing was disturbing, especially since she should have known better, the fact that the OTTIASAFG stored classified documents in public areas of a club is unforgiveable. Especially since many of those documents contained nuclear secrets of the US and other countries and descriptions of the weaknesses of the American military. The documents that contained nuclear secrets can not be declassified unilaterally by a president. Foreign government agents have been arrested trying to gain entry into Mar-A-Lardo. I don't recall any agents ever trying to gain access to Hillary's home. Furthermore, the Secret Service, by their own admission, had no clue that the documents were stored in publicly assessible places. Like a ballroom and a bathroom and a shower.

Picture it PVMonger. You're attending an event at Mar A Largo. You need to take a dump so you go to the bathroom. You could take a crap and read some top secret document about Kim Jong Un! How cool would that be!

[Tiny 12]

Tiny, I would vote to indict but the big one is the lead. Here is a link from a NY Post article:

Trump apparently made the admission during a meeting with a group that included his communications aide Margo Martin and were helping to write an autobiography of Mark Meadows, Trump's last White House chief of staff.

The autobiography later recounted that during the meeting, Trump talked about "a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself.

It contained the general's own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency. " (Sources who spoke with CNN disputed that Milley authored the report.).

Trump expressed frustration that Milley refused to take responsibility for the attack plan and added that if he could release the document, it would undermine Milley's account he gave in a July 2021 article in The New Yorker.

In that telling, Milley pushed back against plans by Trump to strike Iran after the 2020 election, telling him at one point: "If you do this, you're going to have a fking war. ".

End of link.

And this is the alarmist article from General Miley, https://www.newyorker.com/news/lette...-striking-iran.

We will see what happens Tiny but my preliminary take is this general is a lying war mongering POS who is hiding behind the top secret classification system so he has not outted as a liar. This is exactly the kind of bullshit CYA swamp shit that I want made public. If a journalist would have gotten his hands on this document and published it a la the Pentagon Papers, he would win a Pulitzer.

And my take as of now is this general is a way bigger threat to our way of life than Trump is. The government will try to limit the extent of the conversation but I do not think this judge who was appointed by Trump is going to place strict limits on testimony.

Best of all if Trump wins in 2024, then the first thing he will do is declassify this document so is it really that big of a deal? I am not buying now that it is, but we will see. Given Russiagate, Ukrainegate, the bullshit about 1-6, and the intelligence agents and Hunter Biden's laptop being classic Russian disinformation, this sure looks a lot more like the swamp protecting its own than a threat to our nation.

It seems to me we have a disgusting swamp full of liars desperate to keep Trump out of office so he cannot expose them, but we will see.

Hey Elvis,

I read a really good article about this not too long ago but don't remember where. Anyway apparently Bolton and another hawk in the White House were really pushing Trump to strike out at Iran, in a way that would have killed Iranians. This would have been a completely disproportionate response to what the Iranians did, shooting down a drone. Instinctively, Trump didn't want to do it. And while he initially looked to be letting Bolton have his way, after ruminating on it, he decided not to proceed. I believe he actually made the decision and it was relayed to the commanders before planes were in the air. I don't remember what role if any Milley played but do remember some of the people in the pentagon, who had actually fought in wars, thought Bolton's plans were nuts. Bolton, a neocon, apparently didn't learn anything from our experience in Iraq.

Now I don't know if it was Trump's intention from the start that the situation play out the way it did. But in hindsight, it looks brilliant. He didn't escalate the situation with the Iranians. He did probably scare the shit out of them. Like Kim Jong Un, they were probably thinking, incorrectly, that Trump's bat shit crazy enough to bomb them.

I did in general like Trump's foreign policy. I thought he did a better job than most would have done. Trying to establish personal relationships with people like Putin, Ji and Kim was a good idea. There might not be a war between Russia and Ukraine right now if Trump were president. My complaints would be that he should have given more respect to some of our allies, like the Australian Prime Minister, and his trade wars were poorly thought out and hurt us more than China. And he probably should at times have given more credence to the experts advice, the people in the State Department and CIA for example.

He didn't get us into any new wars, and he had us on a path to get out of Afghanistan. Those are the big things.

[The Cane]

The documents that contained nuclear secrets can not be declassified unilaterally by a president.

They certainly can't be declassified just by thinking about it. What an incredibly stupid thing to say! Beyond ignorant to just plain dumb! And there are people who want this guy to be President (again). My God (slapping forehead in disbelief)! Well, he's not going to be because the guy is unelectable in a general election contest. Let us not forget that Trump has never won the popular vote, and if he gets the GOP nomination he will lose by an even larger margin than he did the last time. Instead of picking up voters, it will just get worse and worse and worse for him until all he has left is his "basket of deplorables", which won't be enough to win. Independents gave him a chance the first time. And he blew it! Big time. If the GOP is insane enough to make this proven loser their candidate yet again in 2024, it's going to be another loss! You read it right here. His best bet is that somebody else gets the GOP nomination and wins the presidency, and then in a cowardly act pardons Trump of all of his transgressions. Now look at this toad:

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6312698126112

[PVMonger]

It's going to be interesting to see if some prominent Republicans change their view after they read the indictment. It changed mine. Hillary's mistakes potentially were far more damaging to national security than Trump's. But Trump for some crazy reason appears to have intentionally misled the DOJ and FBI, and lied to them.

Here's a link to the indictment, if you're interested.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/re...648653.3.0.pdf

And this is why I believe Hillary's oversights were potentially more damaging.

The personal email account Hillary Clinton used for business purposes during her tenure as secretary of state was almost certainly hacked by countries like Russia or Iran, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates (Secretary of Defense under Bush and Obama) said Thursday.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/60072...re-pretty-high

Michael Hayden, former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency said "I would lose all respect for a whole bunch of foreign intelligence agencies if they weren't sitting back, paging through the emails."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillar...il_controversy

Clinton repeatedly claimed that she did not send or receive any information that was marked classified in her personal emails. Thats false. FBI Director James Comey said more than 2,000 emails contained classified information and some of them bore markings indicating the presence of classified information.

https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/cl...d-information/

I don't think Hillary Clinton deserved to be prosecuted though. Trump, probably, assuming he doesn't end up in jail. All that's my Libertarian side speaking. Maybe home incarceration with an ankle bracelet would be the best punishment for Trump -- enough time to keep him out of the 2024 primaries, so that hopefully a Republican who can beat Biden will be nominated. I might vote for that if I were on a jury.

Well, at this point, every prominent Republican has had the opportunity to read the DOJ charging document. It has changed none of their minds. At least as to what they say publicly. The simple facts are they they are probably scared of the OTTIASAFG's base or they are scared of OTTIASAFG himself. Privately, all of them probably want the OTTIASAFG to simply go away.

While Hillary's email server thing was disturbing, especially since she should have known better, the fact that the OTTIASAFG stored classified documents in public areas of a club is unforgiveable. Especially since many of those documents contained nuclear secrets of the US and other countries and descriptions of the weaknesses of the American military. The documents that contained nuclear secrets can not be declassified unilaterally by a president. Foreign government agents have been arrested trying to gain entry into Mar-A-Lardo. I don't recall any agents ever trying to gain access to Hillary's home. Furthermore, the Secret Service, by their own admission, had no clue that the documents were stored in publicly assessible places. Like a ballroom and a bathroom and a shower.

[EihTooms]

How can Trump be more popular among Republicans than people like Tim Scott, Chris Christie and Chris Sununu, good prospective candidates for president who wouldn't divide the country? Why is it that Trump currently has a slight edge over Biden in the average of nationwide polls?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ep...iden-7383.html

Well, part of the reason is that many Americans are sick and tired of the arrogance and sanctimony of Democratic leaders like Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. They don't like being called stupid, deplorables and dregs of society. By supporting Trump, they're giving a big FU to Democratic politicians, as well as the so called "RINOS. " And Trump gave a big FU to the DOJ and FBI, when he didn't turn over confidential documents and lied to them. I'm going to be surprised if they don't nail him. You don't tell the Man to get fucked and get away with it, even if you're an ex-president. But ironically this may increase Trump's popularity among the faithful.

The belief that members of the opposing party are criminals, anti-American and idiots, which you express above, is emblematic of why we're so divided. It's a sad state we're in.

The dude had to pay a $25 Million fraud case settlement heading into the 2016 election. His record of scams and cons was easily assessible long before anyone voted for him to be the Leader of the Free World.

Do a Google Search on anything related to Trump, fraud cases, criminal convictions of his business associates, election officials, administration advisors, etc. Word it damn near any way you want. There are too many for me to cite and I don't shy away from citing anything at any time.

Yep, the people who still voted for that pathetically obvious corrupt con man and clown for that job easily qualify as the America-hating Idiots of All Time.