The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

He thinks he's big **** in the political field. Either he isn't ****, and he's a liberal btw, so as a "big liberal political supporter", means liberals aren't ****... Or liberals just aren't **** anyway, idk where I was even going with that... something defending them, forgot it mid-sentence, tatsu or gorbles can make something up for me though. Point is, he was supposed to be "more than a b-list celebrity", he was supposed to be a civil rights activist being from the Japanese internment and the LGBT community, but lately he's just a biased conspiracy theorist and grammar nazi mid-field a political debate. I'll hand the mic to tatsu or gorbles who'll make up something for me supporting the liberals not being **** or something...

cool! I feel like I'm a rapper now

We were discussing Trump, you're the one who brought up Takei.

* mic drop *

Why are we talking about MLK? Religious pastors aren't politicians. *mic drop*

Meh, this pence email thing is pretty weak, hardly a scandal. The story reads more as "politicians are old people who don't understand basic IT security and you can get them with simple phishing attacks". No need for elite state sponsored russian hackers.

Infact, it pisses me off that this is being run so heavily like it's a scandal because all it's doing is educating corrupt politicians that they need to keep any incriminating correspondence more secure from prying eyes. First Hillary and now this, no-one wants to get "caught" and risk being the target of a political witch hunt.

Entirely unhelpful for people who want more transparency and more material passing through to agencies like wikileaks. If you're going to prod the beast, atleast do it with something substantive e.g. PRISM, DNC corruption, pay to play etc. Otherwise all you're doing is vaccinating the system against investigative journalism and hacktivism.

The problems with the Hillary email scandal were

1. Not supposed to use private email for work in the State Dep. Hillary even sent out a memo herself stating such. She only used her private email for work, a practice not adopted by previous secretaries of state.
   
2. Did not publicly disclose her use of a private bathroom server and flat out lied numerous times to congress.
3. Obama lied about his knowledge of it. We have a Podesta email talking about Obama having her emails and the need for a clean up job.
4. Officially withheld 50% of emails or ~30,000 because apparently they had to do with Yoga classes (??). Thousands more undisclosed emails were later found in relation to an investigation into Anthony Weiner.
5. Classified information was improperly handled instead of using already accepted and established secure channels. This is a felony that has, and would have any other person locked up.
   
6. FBI investigation finds that Hard drives and boxes of her emails have mysteriously gone missing from the national record.

Now, let's look at Pence

1. Commonly accepted and legal in Indiana to use both private and official email for work. Previous governors have all done this. "Pence used private email for state business" reads "water makes things wet".
2. The only reason this story exists is because a public records request was made. All of this was already public information. No-one had to hack an email account to expose them as with Hillary.
   
3. No classified information was sent through his private email, nor would he have had access to classified information anyway. Information from the FBI about terrorist arrests were not classified. No one is applying any double standard
   
4. No boxes of emails have mysteriously gone missing.
   
5. Pence has not lied about anything

From the very same publication that broke the story, we have a point of corroboration that there was nothing shady going on with late submission of the emails.
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/...te-13-boxes-emails-amid-controversy/98704308/

Even heavily democrat Washington Post is writing about how the Pence email situation is hardly similar to the Hillary emails.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...count-is-way-different-from-hillary-clintons/

I was actually really hoping that the Pence thing might bring up real dirt on the Trump adminstration but it turned out to be nothing. Would never have been reported if Hillary's private emails had never been discovered by a hacker etc.

Instead it looks like the story of the day is Obama most likely wire tapping Trump near the end of the election. Now that is some serious Nixon watergate ****. Wouldn't surprise me if it's true, they pulled the same stunt with Merkel and got caught. Also quite funny that despite wiretapping Trump for connections to Russia, they seem to have found nothing but continued to perpetuate the Russian narrative regardless.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/...to-share-intercepted-communications.html?_r=0

https://heatst.com/world/exclusive-fbi-granted-fisa-warrant-covering-trump-camps-ties-to-russia/

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443768/obama-fisa-trump-wiretap

Heat Street, lol.

I love that you, as someone who gets offended when people ask if you support Trump, have done the following in two posts:

1. Bigged up concerns around Clinton's emails.
2. Downplayed concerns around Pence's emails when the point here isn't necessarily the content, it's the political integrity of someone doing the same thing as an opponent he castigated for months.
3. Taken something the POTUS tweeted about thirty minutes before tweeting about The Apprentice and Arnold Schwarzenegger as gospel because of course you are.

Should be fun to see this turn out to be hot air, just like the contents of Clinton's emails that basically had no relevance except for discrediting her during the electoral cycle. Eagerly awaiting your next big scoop!

EDIT

You should've quoted the WaPo article less selectively:

You can pretend that phishing isn't a big deal if you want, but the powers that be seem to disagree with you.

Politicians and emails are idiots, and voters/judicials and emails even more so.

By mistake of silly electronic manipulation of mundane email contents, a politician falls in jeopardy, and by throw of the dart, they can be prosecuted, imprisoned, impeached, fired, relieved of duty, or in Hillary's case, none of the above sans losing an election.

It's almost like there was nothing that warranted such a harsh consequence

I mean, if we're going to argue that politicians get protections non-politicians don't get, I absolutely agree. But that goes for Trump, Pence, Clinton, Obama, and generally <any rich person linked to the power structure of the country in question>. It isn't unique to her, and any analysis thereof should deconstruct the flawed system itself, not merely symptomatic cases thereof.

Now you're starting to use pretty much direct Trumps tweets?

Trump didn't provide any proof at all. Those articles you linked are month old. It seems odd to come up with that now and make such connections "tapped my phones" based on old articles.

The new article, actually I was mistaken that is also old stuff from January, seems to be that "nationalreview" site, never heard of them before, but they look fishy to me. Talks of class warfare, "Trumps policy is good so far", "identity politics", how bad people from Muslim countries generally are. Lots of red flags.

No credible new sources I am aware of have given any big value to Trumps tweets about this.

You link a January article from the nytimes, how about a current one about the actual accusations instead:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/us/politics/trump-obama-tap-phones.html

Seems not very convincing to me.
Especially the part where they point at the fact that Breitbart came up with the idea shortly before and people close to Trump believe he picked it up from there is quite revealing. The US really is governed by Breitbart now.

Congratulations.

All this is is Trump trying to push peoples attention away from the investigations in his campaigns/his peoples connections to Russia.

Do you really not consider yourself a Trump supporter? Either way you've just been had by his propaganda machine.

@cola_colin

Shrugs, I specifically quoted news articles for you to make up your own mind about this. Obviously, hard evidence is yet to come, but when a sitting president makes a public claim like that so early, he has everything to lose if he's wrong. These kind of allegations aren't made lightly and it is reasonable to assume that some critical mass of information was reached as he was read into classified surveillance and intel capabilities. Why wasn't this broken earlier?

This isn't even a partisan issue and it's rather disappointing to see you taking it as such. For you to dismiss this because I'm just "a trump supporter" I think shows who the real partisan is. It would have been just as bad if Bush or Cheney had wiretapped Obama under the cover that he was secretly communicating with Islamic Kenyan Terrorists or some crap. All of this is the same deep state NSA crap slowly eroding away privacy and freedom. And that's the funny thing about all this - that Trump at worst is technically correct. The NSA is wiretapping everyone if not specifically Trump, and thanks to Obama they can share that information with intelligence agencies without the protection of privacy laws.

Cool, since now I know NYT is credible to you I can help peel back some of the layers for you. Is 20th Jan 17 recent enough for you?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/public-editor/trump-russia-fbi-liz-spayd-public-editor.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html

It started with this. Suspicious looking DNS lookups between an alleged Trump server and a Russian Alfabank server.
https://gdd53.wordpress.com/

Another blogger called Krypt3ia analyses the claims and corroborates NYT involvement
https://krypt3ia.wordpress.com/2016...mps-email-system-had-ties-to-alfabank-russia/

An NBC reporter gets statement from Trump server host Cendyn stating that another client unrelated to Trump had been using the server.
https://twitter.com/alivitali/status/793253775087702016

The rest is relatively easy to figure out. FBI investigates and finds no case. Obama administration then goes fishing by escalating it into a national security interest and applies for FISA wiretap against Trump in June but gets rejected. They rephrase it, apply again and it goes through in October. There is definitely a paper trail.

Let me get this straight, you think Trump is directing people to investigate wiretaps done on him under suspicion that his administration is in bed with Putin... in order to push peoples attention away from his administration being in bed with Putin. (??)

So, you think that Trump planted a fake server that made fake DNS lookups with a Russian server months before the election. Hoped some computer scientists would find the needle in the haystack, then had the press chase him on it to make it look like a real thing. All so that he could say "Obama wiretapped me" a 2 months into office and have it look credible. That's some 4d chess propaganda alright.

Are we talking about the same President who is known to get away with any number of false claims and accusations since he started his election campaign?

Any normal Person I'd agree, but Trump has been voted in even though he obviously never cared about facts.

Well yes. I agree that is bad. Really bad. But we're talking of the very specific accusation "Trump personally was targeted by wiretapping on his communication devices on order of Obama".

Hey it just got interesting from here. So there were potential signs that Trump had connections to Russia of all places, I find it not hard to understand that some investigation of that then took place.

So yeah Trump had issues in the past with potential connections to Russia being investigated. And then you jump from that, with no proof whatsoever, to "Trump was personally a victim of a directed wiretapping attack". That's the leap that came out of the Breitbart corner that Trump so happily picked up and still has not provided any proof on whatsoever. Going "he would not claim that if he had no proof" is ridiculous. You're giving a trust advancement to a person known as a notorious liar.

I'd guess the server stuff was not faked at all.
I think the most recent interpretation of the events, turning Trump into a victim, is a fabrication by alt-right conspiracy theorists.

He is putting himself into the position of the victim. So instead of the guy potentially accused of being in bed with Putin he wants to be seen as the victim of illegal actions undertaken by his political enemies.

He is trying to a turn "they had so much potential evidence at me that they could launch an investigation" into "they abused their power to spy on me on orders of a political enemy for political gain".

Accusing a former president of doing a watergate and being wrong about it is in impeachable territory. You can't spin this forever.

Jump? I don't think you're reading carefully enough. Democrat biased publications knew and wrote about the FISA warrants before Breitbart put a single word to paper. It's clear beyond reasonable doubt at this point that Trump towers was being wiretapped. And even if in some universe your entire case rested solely on a rather weak "breitbart therefore false", it still wouldn't have much weight since the author was Mark Levin, a known borderline never-trumper.

Unfortunately, you are only left with two conclusions.

1. NYT and others lied about the two FISA warrants in connection with an alleged Trump server
2. NYT and others did not lie about the two FISA warrants and an abuse of power occured under the Obama administration against political opponents.

Balls in your court.

I guess that's why the democrats have released all the juicy evidence they gained from wiretapping already. The FBI dropping their investigation must have just been an alt-right conspiracy I guess. Dahm those alt righters infiltrating the FBI!

Also, that's not how it works bro. Hope you didn't forgot so quickly the democrats screaming about podesta and hillary email hacks being illegal and how they were the victims. Yea, that story didn't run so well did it? When has it ever?

This just keeps getting better and better

https://twitter.com/GovHowardDean/status/838039740016394242
Howard Dean DNC Chair confirms wiretaps occurred


And again from the NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html?_r=0

Meanwhile, Trump reauthorises PRISM
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/04...tell-congress-how-many-americans-it-spies-on/

This is exactly what I mean by this retarded Trump is a Russian agent narrative clouding the landscape of discussion. It's about to fully metastasize into it's most horrible form with a watergate on steroids scandal (and rightfully so), hiding other actually important issues from plain sight. Noobs, you trolled yourselves. Those that perpetuated it beyond all reasonable sense should be ashamed.

That NYTimes article is dated from late January. We've moved a bit since then.

*article is 2 months old*
"Republicans be living in the 1950s and shizz."


Plus, every time Hillary's case escalated, you guys said it was a waste in pursuing it further, it was deemed closed already. This is exactly the same. It was deemed closed 2 months ago. WE'VE moved since then, YOU guys haven't budged from where you were stuck 2 months ago.

Didn't even come close to saying that, but continue with those false equivalences I said you were better off stopping with

I must be a grammar nazi deep down without even knowing it.

What "keeps getting". Nothing has changed. You are referencing old information again and again. That tweet is just a rewrite of old information using slightly different wording to answer to reference Trumps claims.

Yes there was some investigation with good cause done by the police. No that was not a directed attack against Trump, but against a specific single server. No it was not directed by Obama for political gain in any way.

Any further interpretation needs proof. You going "he'd never lie about that" is incredibly naive.
Wait until you see actual proof that is accepted by somebody other than Trump or alt-right media.

No serious "real" media outlet I am reading has given any credibility to any of these claims. Neither US sources, nor German ones.
Which is understandable, as the only "proof" so far is "the FBI was investigating weird things happening on a specific server that happened to be owned by Trump".
Trump going "Obama ordered my phones to be wiretapped" is a completely different thing. Understand that.