The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

but all of this wouldn't be fumy if he didn't immediately contradict it :

so which side are you on ? good or bad idea? doesn't matter trump disagrees with you.

Spoiler: Links to prove this is legit

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/884016887692234753
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/884018776391503872
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/884020939264073728
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/884211874518192128
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/884012097805406208

those five dots, as stephen colbert well put it, being the five separate opinions he's held on the matter. (and what does asking him more than once do? is it just this "2 is bigger than 1!" thing?)

Seriously Tatsu do you have to post a WALL of more or less funny memes? The first few ones made me grin, but after a while my scrolling finger starts to hurt. Please spoiler such endless walls in future.

Also yeah to be actually on to a real topic again, that stuff happening with Trump and Russia now is pretty ... interesting.

Elodea, what do you make of claims of "Trump Jr. would love some dirt to throw at Hillary provided by the Russians to help Trump win the election" made by ... Mr. Trump Jr.
For some reason.

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/884789839522140166

CNN doesn't seem to be involved in this as far as I can tell

And yeah, according to Mr Trump Jr this led to nothing. But just the intend to try to get support from the Russians to influence the election is ... probably not okay? I mean isn't that just exactly what everybody has been so crazed about for ages? The possibility that Russia might have tried to meddle in the elections? And now Trump Jr decides to go "yeah I tried to get help from them, I really wanted, but it didn't work out" as a defense?

I don't understand these people anymore.
I guess yet again we all really might want this endless Russia here Russia that to end, but the Trumps themselves just don't want to let it go, always coming up with new ways to look needlessly (?) suspicious.

I really rather would see Trump fail with actual policy things.

yeah sorry. didn't realize it would get long. i shoulda sploiled it or trimmed it. this guy's crazy dumb though.

more Don Jr banter :

Probably the most important takeaway is this: The email made it explicit that Russia wanted to help Trump. That's probably the biggest gift Idiot Jr has given us, solid proof of Russia's intention in this. (see spoiler)

Spoiler

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/884789839522140166/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc^tfw&ref_url=https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/11/donald-trump-jr-emails-full-text-russia-rob-goldstone

But yes, somehow his defense is "I tried to commit a crime, but my partner bailed out".

EDIT: everything nicely summed up in 20 seconds by trevor noah: (at 4:18)

some more videos : The far-fetched explanations of the right-wing news :


and trump tweets read out by gollum :


jon oliver explianing the don scandal :


part 2 (some bits about the lawsuit and some about the tump tweets i posted :

Apparently it's either ignore (e.g. Infowars' BS conspiracy theory got debunked HARD, and so they stopped talking about the entire thing), or simply pretend it's no big deal despite endless "it's fake news"/ "CNN conspiracy" despite the clearest proof ever that russia did want Trump elected and did want to collude.

Probably the scariest/funniest parts of that:
"Are they too dumb to realize what's happening? And the answer is not 'definitely no' "
"[stupid watergate] was just supposed to be a self-contained joke but current events are making it more and more relevant"

boy did that end up happening fast.

just went by so fast I think the sonic boom's about to hit.

still waiting on that DNC bit though. right wing has all the three powers in the U.S. should be easy for them. where's that DNC leak ?

Hey there was no collusion. They tried but failed. So no collusion.

I knew it was bullshit from the start. You gotta read this stuff carefully and read a bit widely from different sources. You'll also notice that the MSM have been backed into a corner on the muh russia narrative and thus came out swinging at this. They've also since tried to hide the trump jnr story - there's a reason for that.

If you wanted to believe this was full blooded collusion when it first came out, you were forced to also believe that Clinton was colluding with Russia because the information on offer was Clinton/Russia financial ties. To call this collusion is just as disingenuous as if it was a journalist who met with a Russian lawyer who offered information about Trump/Russia financial ties. Also do remember that it was Clinton who signed an actual Uranium deal with the Russians.

Second, even if it was full blooded, this wasn't election hacking. Oppo research is normal. The reason this whole muh russia thing started was because the election result came as an absolute shock to everyone, probably even Trump himself. You and I know very well that when the very unexpected happens, human nature tends to look at things to blame.

"I would like to find some dirt on the clintons" means just that. Find compromising information on your political opponent and exposing it to the public so that they are more informed at the voting booth. It's a really strange world to live in where people have been duped into thinking this is somehow immoral and undemocratic. Collusion implies conspiracy to deceive others. Collusion does not mean uncovering evidence of a truth which you then leave to others to voluntarily make up their minds about. Trump jnr indicated no intent to coerce people into believing [x].

Finally, the juiciest bit is that it was the Obama administration (AG Loretta Lynch) who exercised discretion in granting special immigration parole to the Russian Lawyer. There is a plausible/credible suspicion of intentional entrapment. The June FISA warants on Trump/Trump tower line up perfectly chronologically. Coincedence - maybe, maybe not. What we do know is that the press is BTFOing this story like a hot potato.

http://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...sian-lawyer-into-us-before-she-met-with-trump

aw this is... just... even funnier than last week tonight! keep going elodea you're on a roll! xD

and BTW you're just churning out the same arguments form the vid i posted earlier where they got DEMOLISHED :

are you SURE about that ? I mean are you really sure ??? x'DDDD

Plus why are you defending them? as jon oliver and stephen colbert well put it this is no longer a right vs left thing. you know? why keep fighting? it's time to start sticking up for america as a whole.

no no no
you don't get to pretend she's not russian nor tied to putin.

zzzzz... you can argue that with strawman elodea.

Did you read what I wrote? I don't even know how to respond to this. Take off the russia beer goggles, go back, and read the post again until you understand it. Take a few cold showers as necessary.

I read the whole thing over again I don't see what you're talking about. is Natalia Veselnitskaya not russian? is she not tied to the russian government?
plus you just pick and choose and ignore my juiciest critiques :

I'm here solely to laugh at the U-turn required to go from "it never happened lol" to "CLINTON IS JUST AS BAD", a.k.a. every hard-right argument progression, ever. Like, by the book there elodea

more on this :

video : collusion: how it fits (just the first couple minutes)

Let me guess a healthy mixture of breitbart and fox news?
You don't need many sources on this. All you need is the email screenshot shared by Trump Jr. himself to see he is at minimum guilty of attempted collusion. He admits to it.

Actually, according to Trump Jr. it turned out he there was no information on offer.
He was tricked into a meeting to talk about topics he doesnt care about by being lured in with non-existent dirt on Clinton. He was send an email by clearly Russian sources, clearly saying "this is the effort of Russia to help Trump win the election" and he said that he "loved" it.
Yes to our current knowledge he was fooled into this, hence no actual dirt on Clinton, but he made very clear that he would've loved to get actual help throwing dirt at Clinton by Russia.
He said that. Quite literally. You can't escape that fact.

There is a difference between a journalist doing research and a politician of a country trying to work together with an enemy country to win an election.

So now you realized you lost the argument, so here goes the "Clinton/Obama is bad smoke bomb".

Sure this particular disclosure by Trump Jr. was only about his own wish to collude with the Russians. There are many Russia-things going on, hard to keep track of them all.

Working together with the authoritarian regime of a geopolitical enemy country to win an election is much more than that. Imagine in Australia somebody would win the election thanks to help from Putin. You'd like that?

I dunno. It is a strange world where throwing dirt at your political opponent is the only argument you have to justify your own actions. The current US government's only justification for being is "we are not Obama and we are not Hillary" and any fault and any mistake is talked away with "but Hillary is the devil". Hillary is out of the picture. Obama is out of the picture. They are gone. You won that battle last year. Stop acting like they still matters.

The US law seems to be pretty strict on this: Help from foreign governments to win an election is illegal.
A reasonable law, unless you want Mr. Putin to meddle with your government you should support that kind of law in Australia as well.

Again a smoke bomb. You can stop those. Clinton could be the devil and it would not matter in this discussion, because this discussion is about the Trumps and their potential connections to Russia.

If your main source of information is /r/The_Donald I guess you do "know" that.
I do not read US press sites, but spiegel.de has in fact front page articles about this "hot potato" right now.
EDIT:
Just for you I opened cnn.com, for the first time ever, and they also have very similar "Trump defends his Son" articles at the top of their news.
You are literally spreading alt right conspiracy theories now...

You know, the tower-of-gif spoiler-tag mod-edit was nice, but how about the 5-stack video at the bottom of same-page? Not trying to backseat mod, but...

Also, Gorbles, would you say he's so bad that YouTube should remove his videos?

Because you're either for, or against, net neutrality and censorship. If you're a liberal/conservative who's up for banning Christianity/Atheism related material, but not LGBT/firearm related material, then you're against it, and this is how both and more get banned and twice as many people on both sides end up fucked by the severely overextending government limits on liberty.

You complain about me derailing a thread over a video, that you derailed the thread over the video about, getting all pissed off over the person by name who's video apparently it was... but you blame it on me. You can't blame it on the source you hate, it's "how dare they share that"... but every single episode of Oliver that came out since November is okay.

You don't see the bias here at all? You're obviously left-leaning. You'd see an extremist-left, and an extremist-right, and you'd say "well it's a shame that the guy had to shoot the republican senator, though it was a white male that did it, yet it's the republican's fault for gun control anyway, and furthermore, he really had it coming with his inflammatory speech and supporting white terrorists and the KKK". Yeah, that's not leaned at all, we can't just agree both sides are pathetic, not for just a single moment.

If there's evidence both could be guilty, can we not raise charges against both? If you do for a male, but not a female, both guilty of the same thing... then isn't this the demographic oppression we protest about?

We're working on the "wage gap" in Oregon (probably for females only, if a store with a female general manager won't hire a guy then the guy's **** outta luck), and personally I could care less about anyone rich playing under the table and it burning them, but would it be so hard to work on the incarceration gap while we're at it?

Really. Rate how hard it would be, on the scale of 1 to 10, to work on the incarceration gap, at the level of effort that Oregon is putting toward the "wage gap"? Anyone?

Also, guess which one's the worse problem of the two? Give you a hint, one's 10%, the other is over four-fold... Here's another, one is over a sum of money amounting to less than 2% of America's total wealth, while the other is over time and/or life.

Again please have all the charges against Hillary you want. But don't bring them up as a defense of somebody else in something completely unrelated.