Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Winstonm]

The firing of Comey makes sense when his agency stonewalls the discovery of evidence regarding the clandestine meeting on the Phoenix tarmac between Clinton and Lynch AND THE VERY strange announcement by Comey that he is reopening the email investigation a week before the Presidential election.

 

The media presented Comey's firing as if it was just a disloyalty matter and that was simply misleading and irresponsible.

 

Both actions taken as a whole demonstrate Comey's inability to lead the FBI in a prudent, unbiased, and disciplined manner. Comey consistently failed to follow protocol in dealing with the email scandal and demonstrated that his judgment was compromised.

 

Trump used the wrong reasoning for Comey's firing. But know this, Comey knew he had fu#$ed up big time and started taking extra contemporaneous notes of conversations with Trump on FBI letterhead to help a wrongful termination lawsuit should he get fired because the knucklehead knew his days were numbered and rightfully so.

 

Comey is a lawyer so he was covering his behind because he unintentionally left FBI $hit stains all over the federal election. Plus Comey was going to take Trump down with him if Trump fired him. That's a game recognize game move in the D.C. swamp.

 

Comey is no saint or victim in this matter.

 

Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/james-comey-firing-justified-trump-should-explain-timing/

 

 

I notice you didn't mention this, that the Observer first published the account that raised doubts - offered by an anonymous source - about the tarmac meeting.: http://www.newsweek.com/loretta-lynch-bill-clinton-tarmac-meeting-details-comey-749995

 

But after Observer published an article containing additional details about the encounter, citing an anonymous “security source” who had been present, the FBI and Justice Department moved from damage control to discussions about identifying the source and punishing that person, the emails show. At the time, the publisher of Observer was Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and one of his senior advisers.

 

And yet you find no problem with the source?

 

Still, I agree with the first line of the National Review article you posted: Comey made himself eminently fireable - but fireable for Obama. By the time Comey was fired, the tarmac meeting was no longer an issue.

[jjbrr]

redspawn is approaching pizzagate levels of stupid now. it's only a matter of time before infowars, 4chan, and t_d get posted in this thread.

[Winstonm]

I certainly will feel safer here in the good ol' U.S.S.A. with military checkpoints on the borders:

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he planned to use U.S. military forces to protect the nation’s southern border with Mexico until there is a border wall and “proper security.”

 

“We are going to be doing things militarily,” Trump told reporters at the White House, adding that he had discussed the idea with U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

[jjbrr]

I certainly will feel safer here in the good ol' U.S.S.A. with military checkpoints on the borders:

Yeah?

 

The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385, original at 20 Stat. 152) signed on June 18, 1878 by President Rutherford B. Hayes. The purpose of the act – in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807 – is to limit the powers of the federal government in using federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States. It was passed as an amendment to an army appropriation bill following the end of Reconstruction, and was subsequently updated in 1956 and 1981.

[ldrews]

Yeah?

 

As I understand it, the Posse Comitatus law does not apply to the Marines, Coast Guard, or National Guard, only the Army and Air Force.

[Winstonm]

And they are certainly doing a great job as I haven't seen a Mexican battleship north of San Antonio in years.

[Winstonm]

Oh, look, another Trump accomplishment. From Yahoo:

 

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Rebecca Dallet won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court Tuesday, a victory for Democrats that gives more momentum for a potential blue wave in the November midterm elections.

 

State Supreme Court races rarely merit national attention. The Wisconsin election ― which gives justices a 10-year term ― was officially nonpartisan, but it was crystal clear where the partisan lines formed.

 

It’s the first time in more than a decade that a liberal candidate won an open Supreme Court seat in the state. Dallet was winning by double digits when the race was officially called in her favor.

 

Daily Beast confirms this great accomplishment:

 

 

The Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, has warned that a “blue wave” may be coming for the midterm elections in November after a Democratic-backed candidate won a seat Tuesday on Wisconsin’s supreme court.

[Winstonm]

Vox does a good job explaining the options a president has for using the military at the border.

Like Obama and Bush, he could call on the National Guard to go down to the border. But if that directive comes from the federal government, the guards legally can’t act as law enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act forbids using the military in civilian law enforcement. It leaves Trump two options: have states send down their guards, which means states would have to foot the bill, or have guards on the border in non-law enforcement roles.

[y66]

From Fear Lurks Behind Trump's Amazon Vendetta by Timothy O'Brien:

 

Trump loathes Amazon because he conflates the company with the Washington Post. Bezos owns the Post and founded Amazon, but Amazon doesn't own the Post; Bezos purchased it himself for $250 million in 2013. Amazon is just a useful straw man for a president ticked off by the stellar reporting the Post has done over the last few years on the White House, public policy and Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Trump's ties to Russia. As the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing people close to Trump, "critical articles in the Post often trigger his public musings about Amazon."

Michelle Goldberg made the same point in her April 2 op-ed titled The Autocrats’ Playbook

 

In 2009, Turkey’s tax ministry imposed a $2.5 billion fine for alleged tax evasion on Dogan Yayin, a media conglomerate whose newspapers and television stations were critical of the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Under financial and political pressure, the company began unloading some assets and closing others. Last month, the billionaire Aydin Dogan sold his remaining media properties, including the influential Hurriyet newspaper and CNN Turk, to a group of Erdogan loyalists.

 

Modern authoritarians rarely seize critical newspapers or TV stations outright. Instead, they use state power to pressure critics and reward friends. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors at Harvard, wrote in their recent book “How Democracies Die,” President Vladimir Putin of Russia turned the tax authorities on Vladimir Gusinsky, owner of an independent television network, NTV, which was considered bothersome. Gusinsky eventually signed NTV over to a government-controlled company. Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan authorities accused Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of Globovisión, a TV station frequently critical of the government, of illegal profiteering. In 2013, Zuloaga sold Globovisión to allies of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro.

 

Now Donald Trump is going after Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post.

 

...Meanwhile, Trump uses his platform to praise obsequious outlets like Sinclair Broadcast Group, which ordered news anchors on its nearly 200 local television stations to record Trump-style warnings about fake news: “Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think.’” After Deadspin produced a creepy viral video of Sinclair anchors reading their script in totalitarian unison, Trump came to the company’s defense, tweeting, “Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.”

 

Sinclair’s regime-friendly propaganda, which seems meant to erode trust in competing sources of information, is also familiar from other nations that have slid into authoritarianism.

 

“When you look at many of these countries, it’s been a two-pronged attack on the media,” Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-born M.I.T. economist and a co-author of “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty,” told me. “Even before the attacks against the Dogan group started in Turkey, or even before the attacks against a few remaining independent TV stations and newspapers had started under Putin, you had these troll-like media outlets that were flooding the market with what we are now calling fake news.”

 

By the time those regimes moved against unsympathetic media companies, much of the population had been disoriented by disinformation. Under Trump, America has started down the same road. There are many reasons to be terrified of Amazon’s power, but Trump’s ability to undermine it with a tweet is far scarier.

Trump is a mere apprentice compared to Putin when it comes to mastering the autocrat's playbook. But you have to give him credit for aptitude.

[y66]

Quote of the day from We Must Reckon with the Terrible Realities Hidden in Plain Sight by Anjali Dayal, an international relations professor at Fordham University (via Amanda Taub and Max Fisher at NYT):

 

I teach international relations classes. The first thing I teach most students is Max Weber’s definition of the state — the disciplinary way of understanding what in casual speech we call countries. The state, they learn, is defined by violence — it guards for itself the means of violence; it deems what violence is and isn’t legitimate. The young black men in my classrooms have, in large part, found this concept intuitive; what could I really say to them that would shake the understanding that the state polices, the state kills, and the state finds its agents acted appropriately in taking lives? Students from authoritarian states, or whose families fled civil war, similarly require little convincing.

 

For students from more comfortable backgrounds, the concept can prove harder to grasp. How could a social order founded on violence inspire such deep affinity? So we turn to Thomas Hobbes, and we talk about the Leviathan — the biblical sea monster that Hobbes uses as his metaphor for the state. The world is violent, Hobbes tells us — so we surrender our rights to a sovereign, and in exchange the sovereign protects us, and even if some sovereigns devolve some of our rights back to us in the bargain, they might reclaim them if the security of the whole requires it.

 

Teaching the state this way is a process of denaturalization: You reach into the placid waters, you grasp a tentacle, and you drag out a horror that from the surface appeared to be nothing more than weeds. And once the Leviathan rises from the sea for us — once the state has exposed the implicit promise of violence that lies at its heart — how can we forget what it is?

 

So it is for me as a woman today.

 

...

 

Being constantly reminded of the violence that undergirds social order — having to look at it again and again — may never become easier for those who experience it — but making it ever-clearer for those who simply could not see it is a vital task of the moment. Tell the tide we won’t move.

And so it is for all of us here in the water cooler. Hey, it's just water.

[Winstonm]

From Fear Lurks Behind Trump's Amazon Vendetta by Timothy O'Brien:

 

 

Michelle Goldberg made the same point in her April 2 op-ed titled The Autocrats’ Playbook

 

 

Trump is a mere apprentice compared to Putin when it comes to mastering the autocrat's playbook. But you have to give him credit for aptitude.

 

Sinclair? I think they meant RT (Real Trump).

[barmar]

Quote of the day from We Must Reckon with the Terrible Realities Hidden in Plain Sight by Anjali Dayal, an international relations professor at Fordham University (via Amanda Taub and Max Fisher at NYT):

 

 

And so it is for all of us here in the water cooler. Hey, it's just water.

This is historically true, but that's because of the nature of societies of the past. Read Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" and "Enlightenment Now", and you'll learn how much society has progressed in the past few centuries: more tolerant and inclusive, less violent. We don't have to define ourselves by where we've come from.

 

We still need armed police and military forces to provide the thread of force as deterrents, because things aren't perfect and never will be. But we can be hopeful that progress will continue.

[RedSpawn]

Quote of the day from We Must Reckon with the Terrible Realities Hidden in Plain Sight by Anjali Dayal, an international relations professor at Fordham University (via Amanda Taub and Max Fisher at NYT):

 

 

And so it is for all of us here in the water cooler. Hey, it's just water.

Teaching the state this way is a process of denaturalization: You reach into the placid waters, you grasp a tentacle, and you drag out a horror that from the surface appeared to be nothing more than weeds. And once the Leviathan rises from the sea for us — once the state has exposed the implicit promise of violence that lies at its heart — how can we forget what it is?

When the oppression, injustice, and violence is against minorities and women—who are classes of citizens whose rights weren't so inalienable upon the birth of this nation—the white male citizenry can forget what occurred. The white male citizenry can remain cocooned in the false reality that they are immune from this type of violence and aggression from the state. The larger public assumes that "those other people's problems" are not our own and the recipients of such violence probably deserved the heavy-handed punishment the state imposed. However, if our government becomes tyrannical and turns against us (white men) by denying our inalienable rights, wrecking havoc, and using violence in a wholesale fashion, we have the 2nd Amendment and 300,000,000 guns in our possession to bust a cap in our government's ass. Source: https://www.nraila.org/articles/20130118/65-see-gun-rights-as-protection-against-tyranny

 

People ignore the terrible realities inflicted upon others by the state because they believe they are protected from such treatment and that these realities don't apply to them. It's a cultural mindset.

Glorifying and defending the sovereignty of the Leviathan state is more comforting than defending the personhood of your fellow man when you believe the Leviathan can protect you better.

 

[jjbrr]

“Remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower when I opened? Everybody said, ‘Oh, he was so tough.' I used the word rape,” the president said. “And yesterday it came out where this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before.”

 

“In many places like California the same person votes many times. You’ve probably heard of that,” Trump said. “They always like to say, ‘Oh, that’s like a conspiracy theory.’ Not a conspiracy theory folks. Millions and millions of people. And it’s very hard because the state guards their records. They don’t want to see it.”

 

Completely off his rocker, but I have no doubt his base is loving it all over again.

[Winstonm]

“Remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower when I opened? Everybody said, ‘Oh, he was so tough.' I used the word rape,” the president said. “And yesterday it came out where this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before.”

 

“In many places like California the same person votes many times. You’ve probably heard of that,” Trump said. “They always like to say, ‘Oh, that’s like a conspiracy theory.’ Not a conspiracy theory folks. Millions and millions of people. And it’s very hard because the state guards their records. They don’t want to see it.”

 

Completely off his rocker, but I have no doubt his base is loving it all over again.

 

His base can love it all it wants - what is important is that independents and disenfranchised Democrats are no longer falling for his schtick. And, of course, Bob Mueller is into his shorts. Tick-tock, tick-tock...

[cherdano]

Quite a few posters here wrote a lot of words about their concern that Clinton did not comply with State department email protocols.

Of the 26 domains [managed by the Executive Office of the President], 18 are not in compliance with a Department of Homeland Security directive to implement that protocol.

https://www.axios.com/outgoing-white-house-emails-not-protected-by-verification-system-deafc584-759b-4c8f-969a-3ced8a8059f8.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

 

I am sure that adds a LOT of worry about the current White House for all of you.

Oh, it doesn't? Then, perhaps, just maybe, your attention to Clinton's email management decisions was a tiny bit overblown? Just a tiny bit?

[ldrews]

Quite a few posters here wrote a lot of words about their concern that Clinton did not comply with State department email protocols.

https://www.axios.com/outgoing-white-house-emails-not-protected-by-verification-system-deafc584-759b-4c8f-969a-3ced8a8059f8.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

 

I am sure that adds a LOT of worry about the current White House for all of you.

Oh, it doesn't? Then, perhaps, just maybe, your attention to Clinton's email management decisions was a tiny bit overblown? Just a tiny bit?

 

Wow! You equate not following a DHS directive with exposing Top Secret info to the world. I guess spitting on the sidewalk is in the same class as homicide to you.

[cherdano]

Wow! You equate not following a DHS directive with exposing Top Secret info to the world.

No. Try again little Larry.

[y66]

This is historically true, but that's because of the nature of societies of the past. Read Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" and "Enlightenment Now", and you'll learn how much society has progressed in the past few centuries: more tolerant and inclusive, less violent. We don't have to define ourselves by where we've come from.

 

We still need armed police and military forces to provide the thread of force as deterrents, because things aren't perfect and never will be. But we can be hopeful that progress will continue.

From reviews I just read of "The Better Angels of Our Nature", it looks like Pinker has done his homework and that no one disagrees with his main assertion which is that the era we live in is less violent than every other era in which humans have existed.

 

I'd be surprised if Ms. Dayal disagrees either or if Pinker disagrees with her assertion (and Weber's) that states are defined by violence for which they claim monopoly power within their borders and that while states may evolve in ways that the capacity for violence which is at the core of their existence becomes less necessary to deploy from day to day and thus less visible, especially after they succeed in wiping out less desirable inhabitants (their Indians for example), it behooves those who still find themselves on the bottom of the totem pole to reckon mindfully with what is keeping them there if they want to change their state which is risky.

 

Some of us may not get to see how Pinker's thesis holds up in the decades ahead as the world's population increases and the planet becomes more toast-like. If Trump is the preview, it will be a good test.

[Winstonm]

ABC News is reporting that:

 

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has obtained evidence that calls into question Congressional testimony given by Trump supporter and Blackwater founder Erik Prince last year, when he described a meeting in Seychelles with a Russian financier close to Vladimir Putin as a casual chance encounter “over a beer,” sources tell ABC News.

 

Oops there goes another rubber tree plant.

[kenberg]

From reviews I just read of "The Better Angels of Our Nature", it looks like Pinker has done his homework and that no one disagrees with his main assertion which is that the era we live in is less violent than every other era in which humans have existed.

 

I'd be surprised if Ms. Dayal disagrees either or if Pinker disagrees with her assertion (and Weber's) that states are defined by violence for which they claim monopoly power within their borders and that while states may evolve in ways that the capacity for violence which is at the core of their existence becomes less necessary to deploy from day to day and thus less visible, especially after they succeed in wiping out less desirable inhabitants (their Indians for example), it behooves those who still find themselves on the bottom of the totem pole to reckon mindfully with what is keeping them there if they want to change their state which is risky.

 

Some of us may not get to see how Pinker's thesis holds up in the decades ahead as the world's population increases and the planet becomes more toast-like. If Trump is the preview, it will be a good test.

 

I think I read a bit of Max Weber and a bit of Thomas Hobbes when I was an undergraduate in the 50s. I hope there will not be a snap quiz. Dayal gives a link to a Weber paper, I might read it. As to Hobbes, I'll dig out some of his joint work with Calvin.

 

Now to Dayal's article: She begins by introducing herself as a prof in international relations and then says "The first thing I teach most students is Max Weber's definition of the state — the disciplinary way of understanding what in casual speech we call countries.". Clearly she views this definition as the starting point for learning. I don't think I am overstating her view here. So what is the definition she advances? "The state, they learn, is defined by violence — it guards for itself the means of violence; it deems what violence is and isn't legitimate." This is her starting point for discussion. The students are to learn this. They are not to learn that this is Weber's view and that there are other views, they are to learn that this is " the disciplinary way of understanding what in casual speech we call countries". I guess if you have any doubts about this assertion it is best that you drop her class, she does not sound like someone open to alternative views. I took a philosophy course from a strict logical positivist. You could agree with him or you could drop the course. Me being me, I did neither but...

 

I doubt that she and I would get along very well. But it could be interesting and perhaps, for a student at least, that's good. "Interesting course" and "good grade" do not always go together. The gap is sometimes extreme.

[jjbrr]

Quite a few posters here wrote a lot of words about their concern that Clinton did not comply with State department email protocols.

https://www.axios.com/outgoing-white-house-emails-not-protected-by-verification-system-deafc584-759b-4c8f-969a-3ced8a8059f8.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

 

I am sure that adds a LOT of worry about the current White House for all of you.

Oh, it doesn't? Then, perhaps, just maybe, your attention to Clinton's email management decisions was a tiny bit overblown? Just a tiny bit?

 

It's all very concerning (especially since Donnie Moscow reportedly doesn't even know how to use emails)

 

The Good Morning Britain presenter let slip that the leader of the free world “doesn’t use email himself, so I email his office and they print it out for him”.

 

And he explained “then he will write a handwritten reply on the email and his office will scan it for him and email it back.”

 

"I think the computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole, you know, age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what's going on. We have speed and we have a lot of other things, but I'm not sure you have the kind of security you need," Trump told reporters Thursday evening.

 

Given that it seems very likely that his cohorts used self-destructing, encrypted emails (which supports Hope Hicks' testimony that she 'no longer has access to the emails'), I strongly suspect that is what formed his opinion of computer security. His lackeys showed him how to beat the system and he boasted about beating the system, as he is wont to do. What do State protocols say about that?

[barmar]

It's all very concerning (especially since Donnie Moscow reportedly doesn't even know how to use emails)

He's in his 70's, lots of old people don't use email. And I'll bet there are many corporate executives who have their secretaries transcribe email for them.

 

The Donald has lots of serious problems, I don't count this among them. In fact, it would be better if he used Twitter the same way; if nothing else, the secretary would fix all his spelling mistakes, so he wouldn't look so illiterate. Of course, if he did that, she would probably act as a gatekeeper, preventing most of his stupid tweets from seeing daylight.

[barmar]

2nd Grader Explains Trade Deficits to Donald Trump

 

https://youtu.be/SmpfavT-9zI

[kenberg]

He's in his 70's, lots of old people don't use email. And I'll bet there are many corporate executives who have their secretaries transcribe email for them.

 

The Donald has lots of serious problems, I don't count this among them. In fact, it would be better if he used Twitter the same way; if nothing else, the secretary would fix all his spelling mistakes, so he wouldn't look so illiterate. Of course, if he did that, she would probably act as a gatekeeper, preventing most of his stupid tweets from seeing daylight.

 

I wanted to upvote this five times at least. I'm 79. Email is very useful. I do not tweet, I am not entirely sure what many of the various apps out there actually do, I don't see that I need them. But email is a great help in life.

 

Apparently tweeting is an addiction for him, and for others. It seems to be along the following lines: Tweets are not considered to actually be serious. So DT tweets something, people read it and say "What the hell is he thinking?" and then his crew of explainers go to work assuring us that we can safely (?) ignore what he said. The world once paid considerable attention to the exact choice of words used by the President of the US. Not now, why would anyone do so? Now it is just seen as whatever he is thinking about at the moment, badly spelled, badly expressed, not at all thought out. This is seriously not good. I guess the only way it could be worse if he actually meant all of the idiocy that he tweets.