monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I'm not sure if I'm on the right. I'm more of a moderate. But I for one attack falsehoods.

Thanks for the laugh, best since tRump announced he was running for President (of the USA mine you).

Unfortunately, he will never succeed in the job, much less, in life!

You think Trump will ever release his past tax returns?

What's he fraid of?

The more we learn the more noxious the stink

You’ve seen the on-going pseudo-controversy about two FBI employees who sent texts to each other trashing now-President Trump. The two were having an affair at the time and Special Agent Peter Strzok was reassigned off the Mueller probe and in essence demoted over the texts. Public employees are allowed to have political opinions. Indeed, there are laws specifically protecting government employees from being disciplined or having their work affected by their political views. The only real infraction here seems to be that the two used government devices to discuss their private political opinions when they should have reserved those for their personal devices – hardly a major infraction.

Nonetheless, defenders of the President have leaped from these emails to saying the entire Clinton emails probe – Strzok was involved in both probes – and the Mueller investigation are irreparably tainted. Others are going so far as to say the DOJ and the FBI need to undergo a political purge. The head of one prominent right-wing legal advocacy group went as far as to say the FBI should be shut down. It is a stark reminder of how many will go so far so quickly to prevent the enforcement of the law and lawful investigations when it comes to Donald Trump.

This is all nonsensical. Despite Strzok’s high-ranking role, he wasn’t in charge of either investigation. And no probes like this get decided on one person’s whim. It was probably right – as a matter of optics and prudence – for Mueller to reassign Strzok. But there is zero evidence he did anything wrong or tainted the investigation in any way. The entire controversy is an effort to discredit the Mueller probe and give President Trump and his associates legal impunity. It’s fine to have an investigation. I can’t prove the negative that Strzok did nothing wrong. So fine, investigate.

They've been trained to accept character smears and ad hominems as the most dependable language of truth-finding.

Personally, I would think a lot more favorably of someone who sells his or her sexual favors to win an election ...

...than the sort of political whore who would sell the lives of young American men and women to achieve the same gain.

See, there's no real content here. It's just a set up to call Gillibrand a whore and insult people who are accused of being "liberals". Very few of the resident rightists here actually defend Trump. They spend way more time criticizing the media, raking over the dying embers of Team Clinton, and insulting other people who post on this thread. I haven't seen a substantive defense of the tax bill, for instance. Or a rationale for hollowing out the State Department. Or a good reason for ending net neutrality.

On their own, these texts might not be a big deal, even if the two are career government employees. Everyone is entitled to their opinions.

But Strzok and Page weren't just a couple of bureaucrats crunching numbers in a windowless office at the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Strzok was a key player in the FBI's investigation into whether Clinton had broken the law by using a private, unsecured email server to handle highly classified documents. He interviewed several of the people involved, including Clinton herself.

He was also the person who watered down the language in the statement used by Comey to exonerate Clinton, changing it from "gross negligence" to "extremely careless," which as we noted in this space was critical to Comey's claim that Clinton didn't break any laws.

Remember, too, that when Strzok was busy airbrushing Clinton's email crimes, he would have known that, had the FBI done the right thing and indicted her for putting national security at risk, it would have crushed her campaign, and helped elect the man Strzok clearly felt should never be president.

In other words, Strzok had motive, means and opportunity to sabotage that investigation.

Quote:

See, there's no real content here. It's just a set up to call Gillibrand a whore and insult people who are accused of being "liberals". Very few of the resident rightists here actually defend Trump. They spend way more time criticizing the media, raking over the dying embers of Team Clinton, and insulting other people who post on this thread. I haven't seen a substantive defense of the tax bill, for instance. Or a rationale for hollowing out the State Department. Or a good reason for ending net neutrality.

Yes. And I think we can say that all of this bears a fairly direct relationship to how the modern GOP are far more in their element when out of power and protesting policy than when they are in power and have to craft it. The chances they'll get an infrastructure bill done looks pretty close to zero. And that would be a very bad bill indeed.

“Part of the problem is we’ve trained our base to only respond to very specific messaging. We’ve fine-tuned what these people need to hear.”

Trump has never convened a Cabinet-level meeting on Russian interference or what to do about it, administration officials said.
.....
His position has alienated close American allies and often undercut members of his Cabinet — all against the backdrop of a criminal probe into possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
.....
U.S. officials said that a stream of intelligence from sources inside the Russian government indicates that Putin and his lieutenants regard the 2016 “active measures” campaign — as the Russians describe such covert propaganda operations — as a resounding, if incomplete, success.
.....
U.S. officials declined to discuss whether the stream of recent intelligence on Russia has been shared with Trump. Current and former officials said that his daily intelligence update — known as the president’s daily brief, or PDB — is often structured to avoid upsetting him.

Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter. In other cases, Trump’s main briefer — a veteran CIA analyst — adjusts the order of his presentation and text, aiming to soften the impact.

“If you talk about Russia, meddling, interference — that takes the PDB off the rails,” said a second former senior U.S. intelligence official.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/national-security/donald-trump-pursues-vladimir-putin-russian-election-hacking/?utm_term=.c34e49542d33

I'm more of a moderate.