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35 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

I suspect Trump's bargaining position has been permanently damaged by this turn of events. He's demonstrated that his bluster and threats are mostly bluff and show, and if he's firmly called on them he won't pull the trigger. We all suspected that, of course, but now it's obvious.

 

What I'm waiting for now is the reaction of his base of support. Will this be enough for them to finally start abandoning him?

Out of the 4k lawsuits Trump has gone through, he folded on 90%. He tried to fire his chief of staff with a note instead of just booting him out of the White House. If McConnell says enough, Trump's lost his back brace. 

CES   

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4 hours ago, Pattern Ghost said:

Roger Stone arrested today.

This is actually big news.  Stone is kinda around Trump's "outer circle"of advisors, and this is edging closer to the first direct indictments of Americans for conspiring with the Russians.  The final tranche of indictments, likely to happen by mid-year, will possibly feature people like Don Jr, maybe Jared.  And then Mueller's report will come out.  It's a death by 1000 indictments for 45.

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8 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

My apologies, I never meant to spatter you with the fallout from my Coulter reaction.

 

(Edited in case I draw the Wrath of Simon.) :fear:

It's all right.

Ann Coulter is just another flat earther/bigfoot hunter to me.  I deal with people like her at work all the time. Most of the time, it's low key, but tonight I got this guy telling me they didn't put immigrant kids in dog kennels when news agencies from around the world were covering the story. I saw stories from Japan on this on PBS. Downtown Brown stopped me from going nuclear. I was like thanks Katie for stepping in. She was like you can't argue with the ignorant. People like Coulter are the same way. You can't point out how wrong they are in things because to them it's all fake news, and unproven democratic conspiracies. Some of it is willful, and some of it is what let's me sway the masses with my opinion.

         

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10 hours ago, csyphrett said:

It's all right.

Ann Coulter is just another flat earther/bigfoot hunter to me.  I deal with people like her at work all the time. Most of the time, it's low key, but tonight I got this guy telling me they didn't put immigrant kids in dog kennels when news agencies from around the world were covering the story. I saw stories from Japan on this on PBS. Downtown Brown stopped me from going nuclear. I was like thanks Katie for stepping in. She was like you can't argue with the ignorant. People like Coulter are the same way. You can't point out how wrong they are in things because to them it's all fake news, and unproven democratic conspiracies. Some of it is willful, and some of it is what let's me sway the masses with my opinion.

         

 

I see that sort of thing on my friends' FB posts all the time.  Mostly people being smug about the shutdown being a "negotiating tactic" and "why can't you understand".  I'm not fond of the dogmatic aspect of the back-and-forth, but there's a good subset of people who definitely fall into "flat earther" territory.

 

It's good to see news organizations from other countries are as interested in this as we are.

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My PBS station has been airing a series called "The Dictator's Playbook," comparing the careers of 20th-century dictators and showing their methods for gaining power, keeping power and leading their countries to ruin. A useful reminder that while Trump may have the 'tude, he is nowhere near the depths attained by the likes of Mussolini or Saddam. (Yet.) Like, Trumpists aren't bombing Democratic party offices or kidnapping and murdering Democratic politicians. So, perspective.

 

In view of yesterday's events, I found special interest in the account of Mussolini's rise to become Prime Minister of Italy. His Fascist Party had only a few seats in the Italian parliament when he made his bid for the job. When he sent thousands of Fascist thugs marching on Rome, threatening mass violence, King Victor Emmanuel II still had control of the military and police: They could have crushed the few thousand Fascists, though not without cost. But the king and his government blinked, giving Mussolini the job in hopes of buying civil peace. Wow, did that turn out to be a mistake.

 

Never give in to a bully. Democracies can resist takeover by dictators, if the institutions and the people who lead them hold firm.

 

Dean Shomshak

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On 1/26/2019 at 1:12 PM, Zeropoint said:

They tried, though!

 

Okay, one wacko. But if I'm not letting conservatives screech about "violence pervading the Left" because of that one guy who shot at the Republican congressmen, I'm not willing to accuse the Party of Trump of systematic, Fascist-level political violence because of that guy either. I try to be better than that. (Don't always succeed, but I try.)

 

(The far right does seem to attract a lot more such wackos, though. Link to study available on request.)

 

Dean Shomshak

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I think it is important to remind ourselves what Trump himself as well as his surrogates were saying when this all started. In a news conference he stated that he had not talked to anyone from Russia in years. He also said that no one in his campaign had any contacts with Russia. And now we are here: 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/26/us/politics/trump-contacts-russians-wikileaks.html

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