The Next President is...

[nsplayr]

President Trump announced he's naming Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster to be the next National Security Advisor. 

Two thumbs up from one of the board's token liberals...McMaster would have been an excellent choice for any President to have made. To me, this is a significant upgrade from Flynn and I sincerely hope the national security apparatus of the country works well going forward. 

[M2]

On 2/9/2017 at 11:54 PM, sqwatch said:

You guys write so many words. The art of brevity is lost on all millennials.

And nsplayr actually has the nerve to say "So long story short..."

[17D_guy]

Rather slow week for the Prez on the "outrage" front.  New NSA's a good choice.  Interesting to see Sec of Ed basically saying she disagreed with the transgendered bathroom revocation.  Kinda the same with Mattis on torture & NATO.  Has there been a cabinet with this much leeway before?  Rumsfeld was pretty...wild, but I don't remember him publicly disagreeing with Dubya.

Only thing I found particularly distasteful was this - 

https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/politics/doj-walks-back-guidance-discouraging-use-of-private-prisons/index.html
 

[tac airlifter]

TRIGGER WARNING:

below is an opinion piece from foxnews, please no one shit their pants.  Or do so, you're not in my house so IDGAF.  Seriously though, its the best piece I've seen on the subject of leaks in this WH, and possibly an area where liberals and conservatives can find some common philosophical ground.  I like that the blame for our current situation is shared equally between past administrations, and the real culprit isn't R or D ideology, it is the nature of mankind.  Those are all ideas I agree with, and think he makes a compelling case for our collective concern.

 

Andrew Napolitano: The chickens have come home to roost

By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano   Published February 23, 2017 

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/02/23/andrew-napolitano-chickens-have-come-home-to-roost.html

Napolitano: A warning to President Trump

Last week, The Wall Street Journal revealed that members of the intelligence community -- part of the deep state, the unseen government within the government that does not change with elections -- now have acquired so much data on everyone in America that they can selectively reveal it to reward their friends and harm their foes. Their principal foe today is the president of the United States.

Liberty is rarely lost overnight. The wall of tyranny often begins with benign building blocks of safety -- each one lying on top of a predecessor -- eventually collectively constituting an impediment to the exercise of free choices by free people, often not even recognized until it is too late.

Here is the back story.

In the pre-Revolutionary era, British courts in London secretly issued general warrants to British government agents in America. The warrants were not based on any probable cause of crime or individual articulable suspicion; they did not name the person or thing to be seized or identify the place to be searched. They authorized agents to search where they wished and seize what they found.

The use of general warrants was so offensive to our Colonial ancestors that it whipped up more serious opposition to British rule and support for the revolutionaries than the "no taxation without representation" argument did. And when it came time for Americans to write the Constitution, they prohibited general warrants in the Fourth Amendment, the whole purpose of which was to guarantee the right to be left alone by forcing the government to focus on bad guys and prohibit it from engaging in fishing expeditions. But the fishing expeditions would come.

In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was intended to rein in the government spying on Americans that had been unleashed by the Nixon administration. FISA established a secret court and permitted it to issue warrants authorizing spying on agents of foreign governments when physically present in the United States.

People born in foreign countries who are here for benevolent or benign or even evil purposes have the same constitutional protections as those of us born here. That’s because the critical parts of the Constitution that insulate human freedom from the government’s reach protect “persons,” not just citizens. But FISA ignored that.

And FISA was easy for the government to justify. It was a pullback from Richard Nixon’s lawlessness. It required the feds to seek a warrant from federal judges. The targets were not Americans. Never mind, the argument went, that FISA has no requirement of showing any probable cause of crime or even articulable suspicion on the part of the foreign target; this will keep us safe. Besides, the government insisted, it can’t be used against Americans.

That argument was bought by presidents, members of Congress and nearly all federal courts that examined it. We don’t know whether the authors of this scheme really wanted federal spies to be able to spy on anyone at will, but that is where we are today. Through secret courts whose judges cannot keep records of their own decisions and secret permissions by select committees of Congress whose members cannot tell their constituents or other members of Congress what they have learned in secret, FISA has morphed so as to authorize spying down a slippery slope of targets, from foreign agents to all foreigners to anyone who communicates with foreigners to anyone capable of communicating with them.

The surveillance state regime today permits America’s 60,000 military and civilian domestic spies to access in real time all the landline and mobile telephone calls and all the desktop and mobile device keystrokes and all the digital data created and used by anyone in the United States. The targets today are not just ordinary Americans; they are justices on the Supreme Court, military brass in the Pentagon, agents in the FBI, local police in cities and towns, and the man in the Oval Office.

The British system that arguably impelled our secession in 1776 is now here on steroids.

Enter the outsider as president. Donald Trump has condemned the spying and leaking, as he is a victim of it. While he was president-elect, the spies told him they knew of his alleged misbehaviors -- vehemently denied -- in a Moscow hotel room. Last week, his White House staff was shaken by what the spies did with what they learned from a former Trump aide.

Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, himself a former military spy, spoke to the Russian ambassador to the United States in December via telephone in Trump Tower. It was a benign conversation. He knew it was being monitored, as he is a former monitor of such communications. But he mistakenly thought that those who were monitoring him were patriots as he is. They were not.

They violated federal law by revealing in part what Flynn had said, and they did so in a manner to embarrass and infuriate Trump.

Why would they do this? Perhaps because they feared Flynn's being in the White House, since he knows the power and depth of the deep state. Perhaps to send a message to Trump because he once compared American spies to Nazis. Perhaps because they believe that their judgment of the foreign dangers America faces is superior to the president’s. Perhaps because they hate and fear the outsider in the White House.

The chickens have come home to roost. In our misguided efforts to keep the country safe, we have neglected to keep it free. We have enabled a deep state to become powerful enough to control a powerful president. We have placed so much data and so much power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable, opaque spies that they can use it as they see fit -- even to the point of committing federal felonies. Now some have boasted that they can manipulate and thus control the president of the United States by selectively revealing and concealing what they know about anyone, including the president himself.

This is a perilous state of affairs, brought about by the maniacal passion for surveillance spawned under George W. Bush and perfected under Barack Obama -- all with utter indifference to the widespread constitutional violations and permanent destruction of personal liberties. This is not the government the Framers gave us. But it is one far more dangerous to human freedom than the one from which they seceded in 1776.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. 

[17D_guy]

It's an ok piece.  Still an attempted white-wash of the Flynn situation.  "It was a benign conversation" -- then why lie?  Trumps rode down some amazingly politically difficult releases.

Also, can we stop calling it deep-state.  It's the bureaucracy, not some shadow government keeping the anointed one down.

[tac airlifter]

What exactly did Flynn do?  I've been too busy to read anything in depth about it.  

[magnetfreezer]

Did Flynn have a clearance at the time? If so unreported foreign contacts are probably a bad thing regardless of what is/isn't monitored.

[nsplayr]

5 hours ago, tac airlifter said:

What exactly did Flynn do?  I've been too busy to read anything in depth about it.  

On the day that Former President Obama announced retaliation measures against Russia for their interference in the 2016 election, Flynn called the Russian ambassador to the US several times. In recounting the content of these conversations, he told VP Pence and other senior officials that he did not discuss sanctions.

Come to find out, those conversations were monitored by US intelligence, and it was made known that in fact the topic of sanctions was in fact discussed. The President (but apparently not the VP in particular) was aware of these inconsistencies in Flynn's story re: the calls for several weeks, but when stories broke that Flynn had essentially lied to the VP (and possibly also the FBI), he resigned. 

Pick your favorite outlet, but here's an example story: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/us/politics/donald-trump-national-security-adviser-michael-flynn.html

[tk1313]

Just gonna put this here... 

[hispeed7721]

Real life proof of Trump's involvement with the Russians...




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[tk1313]

55 minutes ago, hispeed7721 said:

Real life proof of Trump's involvement with the Russians...




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Holy sh!t, my favorite James Bond now looks like a Bond Villain.

[brickhistory]

I am not amused by the GOP's Obamacare-lite shenanigans.

 

[Guardian]

Was way less amused by obamas shenanigans. Saw the other day that a committee determined he was the 12th best president in history. Guessing it was the same committee that determines the oscars.


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[tk1313]

36 minutes ago, brickhistory said:

I am not amused by the GOP's Obamacare-lite shenanigans.

 

Well at least we don't "have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it... away from the fog of the controversy *insert menacing smile*" -Pelosi

Now she's saying "The American people and Members have a right to know the full impact of this legislation before any vote in Committee or by the whole House."

At least she's figured out that if you contradict yourself all the time, you're right at least half of the time! Big win.

[brickhistory]

Part of Trump's 2005 tax return gets revealed.

And it shows....

he paid taxes.

 

Leaking tax returns is a federal crime.  It's all fun and political shenanigans until it's yours or the IRS is used a political weapon.

Gold, guns, and ammo...

[brickhistory]

2 minutes ago, Kiloalpha said:

No, didn't you hear Rachel Maddow? The first Amendment clearly says they can publish whatever they want. 

 

And she/he/it is relatively correct.  MSNBC (with it's own cast of tax scofflaws - I'm looking at you Al Sharpton, to name just one) can publish nearly whatever they want.

But somebody leaked the partial return which wound up in the bearded never gets laid reporter who gave them to Madcow.

That person or persons committed a felon.

Which is my point - if next time it's yours or mine, will the rest of you be fine with that?  To have the IRS continue to work for one ideology and/or party as part of it did in the Lois Lerner fiasco?

This is out in the street ugly not just, in my mind, the usual political shenanigans. 

[nsplayr]

There is a theory that the President himself leaked this. The documents were stamped "Client Copy." Gaming it out:

Pros: this return shows nothing really nefarious, shows that he paid taxes at some point (unlike the 1995 return that was leaked), and makes the left look like a bunch of raving lunatics

Cons: none noted

Just a thought...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/15/did-trump-have-his-own-tax-return-leaked-that-was-the-big-question-after-maddow/?utm_term=.0af0184bf126

Edit to add: link

Edited March 15, 2017 by nsplayr

[tk1313]

1 hour ago, nsplayr said:

There is a theory that the President himself leaked this. The documents were stamped "Client Copy." Gaming it out:

Pros: this return shows nothing really nefarious, shows that he paid taxes at some point (unlike the 1995 return that was leaked), and makes the left look like a bunch of raving lunatics

Cons: none noted

Just a thought...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/15/did-trump-have-his-own-tax-return-leaked-that-was-the-big-question-after-maddow/?utm_term=.0af0184bf126

Edit to add: link

If that's the truth, he gets more respect from me than he would if he made another Twitter statement. In all honesty, I thought the whole '100,000 National Guard members to help detain illegal immigrants' fiasco was self-leaked. It was 100% positive for Trump. It would allow him to (1) see what the public reaction of such a bold move would be, (2) prove that the MSM whines first and rarely fact-checks, and finally (3) come out and simply say "nope, didn't ever propose that" and watch as the MSM is publicly humiliated.

But regardless, I don't think that this was a leak by Trump, although most of the media seems to be already falling back into their old habits -- complaining about Trump paying more taxes in one year than most people will make in their entire lives... And also, revealing the big scandal that he, like everyone else, does not want to pay taxes that he's not legally required to pay... *gasp* The outrage of such a notion!

[Vertigo]

2 hours ago, nsplayr said:

There is a theory that the President himself leaked this. The documents were stamped "Client Copy." Gaming it out:

Pros: this return shows nothing really nefarious, shows that he paid taxes at some point (unlike the 1995 return that was leaked), and makes the left look like a bunch of raving lunatics

Cons: none noted

Just a thought...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/15/did-trump-have-his-own-tax-return-leaked-that-was-the-big-question-after-maddow/?utm_term=.0af0184bf126

Edit to add: link

It also, curiously, leaves out the pages that contains WHERE his income came from.

Control the narrative by leaking only the sections that make you look good, and do it anonymously.

[tk1313]

I also would've accepted "Don't be genetically weak"

[nsplayr]

Good move by the President to (again) reorganize the NSC and remove his senior political advisor Steve Bannon. Appears Lt. Gen. McMaster is throwing his weight around the WH more and I am a fan of his. Having Bannon there was a big deal and I'm glad that decision was reversed. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/04/05/steven-bannon-no-longer-a-member-of-national-security-council/

Also a refreshingly tough statement aimed at Russia today by Amb. Haley at the UN over the Assad regimes chemical weapons attack on civilians. Not sure people are taking her words super seriously if not backed by additional action by our government, but it's a good start.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/04/05/haley-slams-russia-over-syrian-chemical-attack-warns-us-may-take-our-own-action.html

Lastly, President Trump claims ownership of the Syrian conflict and strongly reacts to the use of chemical weapons on civilians. I agree with him that the current situation in Syria is unacceptable, but it's a devilish problem with no real winning solutions. Good to see him condemning the obviously horrible attack and vowing action despite the Russian lie that the attack was carried out by anti-Assad rebels.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/at-un-trump-administration-assails-russia-for-protecting-assad/2017/04/05/28179558-1a0c-11e7-bcc2-7d1a0973e7b2_story.html

And that's all from your irregular update on the politics of foreign policy! Tune in next time...

Edited April 5, 2017 by nsplayr

[brickhistory]

Bannon is out, certainly.  Some reports he accomplished what he set out to do regarding the bloated NSC.  Others that McMaster booted him.  I suspect the latter.

But Bannon retains his clearances and ability to attend NSC principals' meetings.  Just not as one of them.  He still, apparently, has ready access to the Boss which is all that really counts in DC (or really anywhere...).

I also note that Susan Rice just cannot help herself from going full retard.  The frag pattern from "the Russia thing" is going to get some Obama people.

Good.  The DC leviathan is a threat to all of us, especially a partisan IC which in my experience, it is.

I hope there are lots of political casualties on both sides.  I hope some real oversight of the IC and individual privacy checks resumes and isn't pencil-whipped like it largely has been.

Because the temptation to peek is too strong for nearly any political type, regardless of rank/position.

People gonna be corrupted absolutely.

My Georgia accent version of the famous quote...

[matmacwc]

Whatevs, keep rolling back Obamas stupid shit and things will get better, at least in everyone's pocketbook. 

[Guest No2bonus]

I don't know why, but I tuned to CNN and I almost lost my marbles. I said to myself how do they stay in business? Through some research I learned we fund them. Yes, if you pay for cable, satellite, or streaming subscriptions you are funding CNN. You do not have to even watch CNN to  keep them in business. The lineup packages we are sold which forces CNN upon us help keep their media outlet in business. If we could pick our own news channels would mean CNN would have to survive on customers paying for their news channel and ad revenue. Advertisers would bolt if CNN had to rely on viewership.

Anderson Cooper said the POTUS son in law has no political experience, shouldn't be going to Iraq, and received a job because of his rich father in law. Last time I checked most people in government lack experience and Anderson Cooper's mama is rich. Cooper didn't climb a mountain to get to CNN. His mama was the reason why. Does the media think we are stupid?

Edited April 6, 2017 by No2bonus

[Duck]

We live in the Misinformation Age, and yes 95% of this nation is stupid.


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