Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[RedSpawn]

It's a real shame we don't have presidential recall elections or a Congress with balls.

If the electoral college can't serve as an adequate checks and balances against a fickle, uninformed nation voting for an allegedly incompetent President why do you expect Congress to be able to fix this?

[Winstonm]

If the electoral college can't serve as an adequate checks and balances against a fickle, uninformed nation voting for an allegedly incompetent President why do you expect Congress to be able to fix this?

 

I didn't say I expected this Congress to do anything - but Congress has the authority to end this disaster.

[ldrews]

Trump's accomplishments

[Winstonm]

Decision

[RedSpawn]

https://www.vox.com/today-explained/2018/3/20/17143982/stormy-daniels-trump-porn-star-affair-today-explained-podcast

 

Lady and the Trump

The Stormy Daniels saga, explained in a podcast.

By Julie Bogenjulie.bogen@vox.com Mar 20, 2018, 6:50pm EDT

 

Over the past few weeks, the name Stormy Daniels has made constant appearances in the news. Daniels, an adult film star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, claims to have had a year-long affair with Donald Trump beginning shortly after his wife, Melania, gave birth to their son Barron in 2006. The White House has denied the affair ever happened — despite mounting evidence of a nondisclosure agreement and a $130,000 payout — but the story has snowballed into an investigation of potential misuse of campaign funds.

 

“The coverage of this story has been very focused on this as a sex scandal,” explains Laura McGann, Vox’s politics editor. “But it’s a story about campaign finance, corruption, and how our politics are changing under Donald Trump. Yes, the main character is an adult film actress, but it’s bigger than that.”

 

Of course it's important even though the swamp of corruption in campaign funds existed in Washington D.C. way before Trump claimed the Executive Office. Again, President Trump changed the political landscape on how you can win the Executive Office through national retail politics and brand marketing. That NEW reality is more disturbing to these game rigging codgers than the run-of-the-mill misuse of campaign funds.

 

Stormy Daniels is just a means to an end. We ALL know Trump is a chauvinist pig who lies at the drop of a dime. So what is exactly NEW in D.C. politics?

[RedSpawn]

Trump's accomplishments

ABOUT DAYUM TIME! Thank you President Trump for having the RESOLVE TO DEMAND THIS!!!!

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/08/569394885/pentagon-announces-first-ever-audit-of-the-department-of-defense

 

Pentagon Announces First-Ever Audit Of The Department Of Defense

"The Defense Department is starting the first agency-wide financial audit in its history," the Pentagon's news service says, announcing that it's undertaking an immense task that has been sought, promised and delayed for years.

 

Of the tally that is starting this week, chief Pentagon spokesperson Dana W. White said, "It demonstrates our commitment to fiscal responsibility and maximizing the value of every taxpayer dollar that is entrusted to us."

 

"Beginning in 2018, our audits will occur annually, with reports issued Nov. 15," the Defense Department's comptroller, David L. Norquist, said.

 

The Defense Department has famously never been audited, despite receiving hundreds of billions of dollars annually and having more than $2.2 trillion in assets.

 

For the Pentagon to get to this point, it has been, as they say, a process. The U.S. government established requirements for each agency to present financial statements back in the 1990s. But for more than 20 years, the Department of Defense has lagged other agencies that were following modern accounting standards, reporting what they received and spent.

 

In 2010, Congress included a requirement in the National Defense Authorization Act that gave the military "an extra seven years to clean up the books and get ready," as Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa said last year. That set a new deadline to be ready for an audit by September 2017.

 

In late 2016, reports emerged that Pentagon officials had "buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, as The Washington Post reported.

 

In January, the Government Accountability Office said, "serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DOD) that have prevented its financial statements from being auditable." The agency listed the Defense Department as its prime example of major impediments to attempts to render an opinion on the U.S. government's financial statements.

 

To carry out the audit, the Pentagon says it will deploy 2,400 auditors to go over records and examine bases, property and weapons of a federal department that had a budget of $590 billion last year.

 

As for how the audit would work, Jim Garamone of the official DoD News agency reports that the department's Office of the Inspector General has "hired independent public accounting firms to conduct audits of individual components — the Army, Navy, Air Force, agencies, activities and more — as well as a departmentwide consolidated audit to summarize all results and conclusions."

 

The Defense Department's lack of a financial reckoning hasn't hurt its funding. Last month, Congress approved nearly $700 billion for the department — some $100 billion more than last year's budget and billions more than the $639.1 billion that had been initially requested by President Trump.

 

The Pentagon audit would deliver on a campaign pledge by Trump. He was one of several candidates, including Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, to make that promise — perhaps in the knowledge that the audit had already been federally mandated.

 

After taking office, Trump later nominated Norquist, a former Department of the Army employee whose experience includes stints on the staff of the House Appropriations Committee and as the chief financial officer of the Department of Homeland Security, as the Pentagon's comptroller.

 

This summer, Norquist was asked by Defense News if the looming audit was "the biggest bugaboo of the job."

 

Norquist replied, "I don't think of it as a bugaboo. I think of it as a great opportunity."

 

An audit would allow his office to find errors more easily, Norquist said, and to analyze the Pentagon's data to look for patterns and trends that could help make it more efficient.

 

"It is important that the Congress and the American people have confidence in DoD's management of every taxpayer dollar," Norquist said this week.

[y66]

Guest post from Australian comedian Jim Jefferies:

 

I understand that to Americans, your constitution is very important. I respect it, but please understand that every country has one as well. It’s no more special than any other constitution. We have one in Australia. I don’t know what it says. I’ve never seen it. If there’s a problem, we’ll check it, but everything’s going fine. And don’t get me wrong. I get that the constitution is important to you. I’ve had people come up to me in my face and scream at me in car parks as I’m leaving the theater, going, [in American accent] “You cannot change the Second Amendment!” And I’m like, “Yes, you can. It’s called an ‘amendment.'” If you can’t change something that’s called an “amendment”, see, many of you need a thesaurus more than you need a constitution. And if you don’t know what a thesaurus is, get a dictionary and work your way forward. Don’t think your constitution is set in stone. You’ve changed things before. You used to have prohibition in there, right? And then people were like, “Hey, who likes [drinking]? Yeah, I like [drinking] too. Let’s get that one out. Let’s get that one out.

[jjbrr]

ABOUT DAYUM TIME! Thank you President Trump for having the RESOLVE TO DEMAND THIS!!!!

 

? That article is several months old. The part you highlighted is Jan 17

[Winstonm]

? That article is several months old. The part you highlighted is Jan 17

 

Propaganda knows no dates. B-)

[Al_U_Card]

ABOUT DAYUM TIME! Thank you President Trump for having the RESOLVE TO DEMAND THIS!!!!

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/08/569394885/pentagon-announces-first-ever-audit-of-the-department-of-defense

As Scott Adams opined, "A year in and his opponents will agree with what he is doing, but they will still hate him (for it)." (One year in, almost to the day and the hatred keeps coming...)

Since the Federal Reserve is anything but (of the people, by the people or for the people) perhaps Trump could just abolish it instead of auditing? ;)

[Winstonm]

From Vox:

 

The ire at Trump poured in from across the internet, particularly from conservatives who have long argued that Trumpism was a real political ideology — one that this omnibus bill would violate. Unfortunately, the fans of Trumpism keep getting confronted with the realities of the man himself.

 

This is the humbling reality that all victims of a con man must eventually face - I've been flimflammed.

[Winstonm]

ABOUT DAYUM TIME! Thank you President Trump for having the RESOLVE TO DEMAND THIS!!!!

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/08/569394885/pentagon-announces-first-ever-audit-of-the-department-of-defense

 

Why thank this president - he had nothing to do with it.

 

From your own article:

 

In 2010, Congress included a requirement in the National Defense Authorization Act that gave the military "an extra seven years to clean up the books and get ready," as Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa said last year. That set a new deadline to be ready for an audit by September 2017.

 

The Pentagon audit would deliver on a campaign pledge by Trump. He was one of several candidates, including Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, to make that promise — perhaps in the knowledge that the audit had already been federally mandated.

 

I don't know why people continue to allow themselves to be swindled by the people who sell propaganda as conspiracy.

[ldrews]

 

I don't know why people continue to allow themselves to be swindled by the people who sell propaganda as conspiracy.

 

It is what keeps you in business.

[RedSpawn]

? That article is several months old. The part you highlighted is Jan 17

It was in response to the list of accomplishments Trump made per Winston. I can't believe it took this long to get a Department of Defense financial audit. UNREAL....

[RedSpawn]

Why thank this president - he had nothing to do with it.

 

From your own article:

 

I don't know why people continue to allow themselves to be swindled by the people who sell propaganda as conspiracy.

 

Winston, the actual financial audit of the Department of Defense will occur on Trump's watch so he and Congress can get the credit. And if I were you, I would take a chill pill about propaganda versus conspiracy. You don't hold federal agencies as accountable for their negligence, stonewalling, and corruption when the President in office is left-leaning.

 

This bias is disturbing.

[johnu]

If the electoral college can't serve as an adequate checks and balances against a fickle, uninformed nation voting for an allegedly incompetent President why do you expect Congress to be able to fix this?

 

While the Electoral College is probably a more intellectual place than Trump University, it's also not a real college :rolleyes: :lol: and there is no expectation or requirement for it to be part of a system of checks and balances. It is a rubberstamp for the election results.

 

Each political party chooses electors to vote for their candidate if they win their state vote.

[Winstonm]

So much for the ignorance of the law excuse. Bannon, Nix, Mercer..meet Mr. Mueller.

[Winstonm]

Politico has this guy nailed:

 

“The final key to the way I promote is bravado,” Donald Trump wrote in his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal.” “I play to people’s fantasies.”

 

What was true of Trump the flamboyant Manhattan real estate magnate is now true of Trump the president of the United States. From big, beautiful border walls to “total and complete” Muslim bans, Trump has made a habit of sweeping promises that net headlines, only to deliver more modest results.

[Al_U_Card]

Politico has this guy nailed:

Yes, "modest results" really nails it indeed. Well, in this era of political log-jam, no matter the panache, modest will have to do. :)

[RedSpawn]

Politico has this guy nailed:

I believe Trump played to voters' F.E.A.R.S. more so than their fantasies. FEAR is a very powerful tool and will make otherwise sane people do batcrazy $hit.

[y66]

From William Davies at London Review of Books (March 23):

 

The second aspect of the recent scandal is grubbier but ultimately less significant. If its own sales pitch is to be believed (an ‘if’ that grows larger by the day), Cambridge Analytica likes to play dirty. Nix and his colleague Mark Turnbull were caught by Channel 4 discussing techniques of honey-trapping, blackmail and counter-intelligence in a manner that owed more to James Bond plots than to psychometrics. Throwaway remarks, that the candidate is just a ‘puppet’ to the campaign team and that ‘facts’ are less important than ‘emotion’, look shady when caught on a hidden camera, but they’re not categorically different from the early ruthlessness of New Labour operators such as Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson. Nor is there any reason to assume that New Labour’s 1990 analogue methods of data analysis – focus group and polling – are less informative or useful than automated psychometrics. As for Nix’s boast that they ‘operate in the shadows’, and his parting shot to the ‘client’ (‘I look forward to building a very long-term and secretive relationship with you’), it’s a wonder the Channel 4 investigator managed to keep a straight face.

 

So we have a misuse of data, which has rightly attracted the attention of the Information Commissioner’s Office, and some excitable marketing patter, which slips into Mafia fantasy before being swiftly retracted at the first sign of actual danger. The former issue isn’t exactly news: in 2010 the Wall Street Journal found that Facebook apps (such as the one built by Kogan) were routinely collecting information for the benefit of advertisers and internet tracking companies, without users’ consent. Given Facebook’s command of the world’s attention (more than two billion monthly active users, who spend an average of fifty minutes on the site every day), it is inevitable that attention merchants flock to the site in search of the scraps, just as major sporting events attract ticket touts.

 

Why so much outrage? The Observer should be congratulated for its tenacity on the topic, and this story may, with luck, push us towards a tipping point on the issue of data privacy. But the fascination and shock that Cambridge Analytica is attracting suggests a displacement of horror that really stems from something deeper. Part of that must lie with Trump and Trumpism. A terrible event must surely have been delivered by equally terrible means. Passionate Remainers no doubt feel similarly about Brexit. It is clear that various secretive and underhand forces did intervene in the US election campaign. Thanks to Robert Mueller’s investigation, we know that Facebook sold $100,000-worth of advertising space to Russian ‘troll farms’, and that 126 million Americans may have been exposed to Russian ‘fake news’ over the course of 2015 and 2016. Then there is the FBI’s resurrection of the matter of Clinton’s emails at a critical moment in the election campaign. Whether any of this gets us closer to explaining or understanding Trump’s victory is moot.

 

Cambridge Analytica looks conveniently like a smoking gun, primarily because it has repeatedly bragged that it is one. Nix and Turnbull do for the events of 2016 what ‘Fabulous’ Fab Tourre, former Goldman Sachs banker, and Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, former boss of RBS, did for the banking crisis of 2008, providing grotesque personalities on which to focus anger and alarm. To hear such men proudly declaring their lack of moral conscience is paradoxically reassuring to the degree that it helps explain the world’s loss of moral direction. But as with the financial crisis, the circus risks distracting from the real institutional and political questions, in this case concerning companies such as Facebook and the model of capitalism that tolerates, facilitates and even celebrates their extensive and sophisticated forms of data harvesting and analysis.

 

It is telling that two of the greatest ethical scandals to have hit Facebook in recent years both involved academics, the previous one being the ‘emotional contagion’ experiment, in which it transpired that Facebook had altered newsfeeds without consent, as part of a scientific study. Engaging with external researchers means surrendering a tiny modicum of control. Facebook’s willingness to co-operate with academics is already slight, and these scandals will make Mark Zuckerberg wonder if it could ever be worth the bother. Keep all the data in-house and the question of ethics doesn’t arise. The increasing size and scope of these giant platforms gradually eliminates the need ever to share valuable data with anyone else.

 

It’s sometimes said that data is the ‘oil’ of the digital economy, the resource that fuels everything else. A more helpful analogy is between oil and privacy, a concealed natural resource that is progressively plundered for private profit, with increasingly harmful consequences for society at large. If this analogy is correct, privacy and data protection laws won’t be enough to fight the tech giants with. Destroying privacy in ever more adventurous ways is what Facebook does.

 

Just as environmentalists demand that the fossil fuel industry ‘leave it in the ground,’ the ultimate demand to be levelled at Silicon Valley should be ‘leave it in our heads.’ The real villain here is an expansionary economic logic that insists on inspecting ever more of our thoughts, feelings and relationships. The best way to thwart this is the one Silicon Valley fears the most: anti-trust laws. Broken into smaller pieces, these companies would still be able to monitor us, but from disparate perspectives that couldn’t easily (or secretly) be joined up. Better a world full of snake-oil merchants like Cambridge Analytica, who eventually get caught out by their own bullshit, than a world of vast corporate monopolies such as Amazon and Facebook, gradually taking on the functions of government, while remaining eerily quiet about what they’re doing.

[Winstonm]

The deconstruction of anti-trust laws can be traced back to the last libertarian-leaning misguided soul to reside in the White House, Ronald Reagan

[kenberg]

From William Davies at London Review of Books (March 23):

 

 

 

I really like that article. It's not a solution, not even close, but for one thing he seems to share my view of what's important. Also he is trying to get at what it is exactly that really bothers us about the FB problem. Hugeness is a problem. Really we have known this since the monopolies of the nineteenth century. It's not that they didn't do something good, they did. Railroads got built. But they become a law onto themselves. I mentioned earlier about the girl I dated using her courthouse job to look up my IQ. But some teenage girl looking up my IQ is different from huge corporations gathering and selling data about me, and national political groups using that data to send us selected information of doubtful accuracy to get us fired up. It's just different. Again going back to my high school days, there was to be a special ballot to increase funding for the schools. We were given supportive propaganda to take home to our parents. As a prank, some friends and I wrote up some counter-propaganda, broke into the school and put fliers in the teacher's mailboxes with a note to distribute this to the students. Of course they did so. Ok, not good. But again the difference in scale and sophistication, and even the difference in intent, we were just having teenage fun, matters.

[Al_U_Card]

I believe Trump played to voters' F.E.A.R.S. more so than their fantasies. FEAR is a very powerful tool and will make otherwise sane people do batcrazy $hit.

His populist rhetoric was somewhat muddled but no more polarizing than Hil's basket of deplorables shtick. Seems it was mostly the outraged left that went batshit crazy with Trump's election...

[Al_U_Card]

The deconstruction of anti-trust laws can be traced back to the last libertarian-leaning misguided soul to reside in the White House, Ronald Reagan

Wasn't it Slick Willy's treasury sec Ron Rubin and Larry Sommers that gutted Glass-Steigel?