It was specifically about Trump accepting the results of the election. It was based entirely on his statements before the election. Saying anything differently is a complete lie.

I really don't know if you are serious with your daily quest for fairness for President Trump or if it's some sort of entertaining mental exercise for you. You're routinely all over the place and wrong. Just in this very thread you "criticized" Trump's wall but last year you were asking everyone who criticized that policy why they didn't believe we should have borders.

I'm certain that you don't give a fuck but your intentional lies and the lack of consistency in your thoughys makes it difficult for me to take any of your political thoughts serious.

There are places in the city that are the same way.

It's wrong but we live in a society that is still quite segregated. This means the suburbs will also have places that follow that trend.

I'm not sure how much time you've spent in NYC but it is just as segregated as any place in terms of where people live. It is hidden on the street because of people taking long rides on public transportation to work.

I completely disagree and reject that line of thought. I'm sure Hillary is sitting up in Chappaqua refusing to accept the results of the election. There is no danger in that. The danger is in half the country refusing to accept the results and taking to the streets. You might disagree with that, but your personal thoughts don't make a factual statement a "lie".



I don't think building a ridiculous and expensive wall is the same as wanting a border. You're all over the place. Or you refuse to have an honest discussion. I think any subject deserves evenhanded treatment by the media. Even Trump.



I haven't told any lies. You're getting used to calling anything you disagree with a "lie".

Of course there are places in cities like that. I never said there weren't.

I completely disagree and reject that line of thought. I'm sure Hillary is sitting up in Chappaqua refusing to accept the results of the election. There is no danger in that. The danger is in half the country refusing to accept the results and taking to the streets. You might disagree with that, but your personal thoughts don't make a factual statement a "lie".



I don't think building a ridiculous and expensive wall is the same as wanting a border. You're all over the place. Or you refuse to have an honest discussion. I think any subject deserves evenhanded treatment by the media. Even Trump.



I haven't told any lies. You're getting used to calling anything you disagree with a "lie".

So why is it a suburban thing?

What's this half the country stuff? Only about 55% of eligible voters voted, which means about 126 million votes with over half of those going to Clinton. And what does "refuse" mean here? Are protests akin to a refusal of the results of the election? I didn't hear anti-Trump voters suggesting they'd get their guns out if Clinton won and start a civil war to save the country from the results of the election. That sort of talk was found all over Alex Jones type websites and comment sections.

So we agree that half the country isn't refusing the results of the election?

Yeah, but can we also agree that the "not my president" sentiment is a little different this time than it was for Clinton, Bush, and Obama?

Yeah, but can we also agree that the "not my president" sentiment is a little different this time than it was for Clinton, Bush, and Obama?

There is not a damned thing wrong with people who are bull shitters.

I'm glad you included a Republican in there too. Two Dems and one Republican. Why is the reaction so different this time? Let's also place Bush I in that list.

Yeah, but can we also agree that the "not my president" sentiment is a little different this time than it was for Clinton, Bush, and Obama?

I'm a big dumb shitlib baby

No. It isn't. You like to say how the liberal elites are ignoring middle America, but that's exactly what you're doing here. Stop sitting in your Rogers Park Utopian ivory tower and visit God's Country. If you did, you'd realize that there was A TON of vitriol for Obama.

You could be right about that. Obviously, I am biased by what I see everyday. But I do read both papers ever day and they cover "God's Country" on about Page 20. I don't remember the anti-Obama sentiment ever being ratcheted up to this degree. Maybe it was in some places though.

I'm a big dumb shitlib baby

I don't really remember it so much with Bush I. Maybe more with Reagan the first time.

They're part of the establishment. The media and the establishment politicians are being very unfair to Trump because they want to keep the status quo.

I don't know if they're being unfair, but they certainly are more comfortable with the status quo. I certainly don't think Republicans trust Trump or even consider him one of them. But Ryan is willing to kiss Trump's ass to pass his agenda.

I don't know if they're being unfair, but they certainly are more comfortable with the status quo. I certainly don't think Republicans trust Trump or even consider him one of them. But Ryan is willing to kiss Trump's ass to pass his agenda.

Well then that just proves it's not just the liberal or liberal-ish media and the left with an agenda against Trump. The criticism cuts across both sides of the aisle. Him and the fringe loons he's surrounded himself with are reviled by establishment dems and republicans alike, in addition to the mainstream media. This is all his doing.

The Washington Establishment hates Trump. I think to a lesser degree they would have hated President Sanders.

There's a lot going on right now and none of it is anything to celebrate- from the guy who is president, the scumbags in his cabinet, the media that is covering them, and the intelligence community that is undermining a sitting president.

http://theweek.com/articles/680068/amer ... y-worrying

The United States is much better off without Michael Flynn serving as national security adviser. But no one should be cheering the way he was brought down.

The whole episode is evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America's democratic institutions — not a sign of their resiliency. Flynn's ouster was a soft coup (or political assassination) engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats. The results might be salutary, but this isn't the way a liberal democracy is supposed to function.

Unelected intelligence analysts work for the president, not the other way around. Far too many Trump critics appear not to care that these intelligence agents leaked highly sensitive information to the press — mostly because Trump critics are pleased with the result. "Finally," they say, "someone took a stand to expose collusion between the Russians and a senior aide to the president!" It is indeed important that someone took such a stand. But it matters greatly who that someone is and how they take their stand. Members of the unelected, unaccountable intelligence community are not the right someone, especially when they target a senior aide to the president by leaking anonymously to newspapers the content of classified phone intercepts, where the unverified, unsubstantiated information can inflict politically fatal damage almost instantaneously.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/sta ... 2318429184

President Trump was roundly mocked among liberals for that tweet. But he is, in many ways, correct. These leaks are an enormous problem. And in a less polarized context, they would be recognized immediately for what they clearly are: an effort to manipulate public opinion for the sake of achieving a desired political outcome. It's weaponized spin.

This doesn't mean the outcome was wrong. I have no interest in defending Flynn, who appears to be an atrocious manager prone to favoring absurd conspiracy theories over more traditional forms of intelligence. He is just about the last person who should be giving the president advice about foreign policy. And for all I know, Flynn did exactly what the anonymous intelligence community leakers allege — promised the Russian ambassador during the transition that the incoming Trump administration would back off on sanctions proposed by the outgoing Obama administration.

But no matter what Flynn did, it is simply not the role of the deep state to target a man working in one of the political branches of the government by dishing to reporters about information it has gathered clandestinely. It is the role of elected members of Congress to conduct public investigations of alleged wrongdoing by public officials.

What if Congress won't act? What if both the Senate and the House of Representatives are held by the same party as the president and members of both chambers are reluctant to cross a newly elected head of the executive branch who enjoys overwhelming approval of his party's voters? In such a situation — our situation — shouldn't we hope the deep state will rise up to act responsibly to take down a member of the administration who may have broken the law?

The answer is an unequivocal no.

In a liberal democracy, how things happen is often as important as what happens. Procedures matter. So do rules and public accountability. The chaotic, dysfunctional Trump White House is placing the entire system under enormous strain. That's bad. But the answer isn't to counter it with equally irregular acts of sabotage — or with a disinformation campaign waged by nameless civil servants toiling away in the surveillance state.

As Eli Lake of Bloomberg News put it in an important article following Flynn's resignation,

Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do. [Bloomberg]

Those cheering the deep state torpedoing of Flynn are saying, in effect, that a police state is perfectly fine so long as it helps to bring down Trump.

It is the role of Congress to investigate the president and those who work for him. If Congress resists doing its duty, out of a mixture of self-interest and cowardice, the American people have no choice but to try and hold the government's feet to the fire, demanding action with phone calls, protests, and, ultimately, votes. That is a democratic response to the failure of democracy.

Sitting back and letting shadowy, unaccountable agents of espionage do the job for us simply isn't an acceptable alternative.

Down that path lies the end of democracy in America.

The Leakers Who Exposed Gen. Flynn’s Lie Committed Serious — and Wholly Justified — Felonies

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S NATIONAL security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications.

In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT — signals intelligence — is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be prosecuted under federal law for disclosing classified information only under the narrowest circumstances; reflecting how serious SIGINT is considered to be, one of those circumstances includes leaking the contents of intercepted communications, as defined this way by 18 § 798 of the U.S. Code:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information … obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

That Flynn lied about what he said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was first revealed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has built his career on repeating what his CIA sources tell him. In his January 12 column, Ignatius wrote: “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.”

That “senior U.S. government official” committed a serious felony by leaking to Ignatius the communication activities of Flynn. Similar and even more extreme crimes were committed by what the Washington Post called “nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls,” who told the paper for its February 9 article that “Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The New York Times, also citing anonymous U.S. officials, provided even more details about the contents of Flynn’s telephone calls.

That all of these officials committed major crimes can hardly be disputed. In January, CNN reported that Flynn’s calls with the Russians “were captured by routine U.S. eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats.” That means that the contents of those calls were “obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of [a] foreign government,” which in turn means that anyone who discloses them — or reports them to the public — is guilty of a felony under the statute.

Yet very few people are calling for a criminal investigation or the prosecution of these leakers, nor demanding the leakers step forward and “face the music” — for very good reason: The officials leaking this information acted justifiably, despite the fact that they violated the law. That’s because the leaks revealed that a high government official, Gen. Flynn, blatantly lied to the public about a material matter — his conversations with Russian diplomats — and the public has the absolute right to know this.

This episode underscores a critical point: The mere fact that an act is illegal does not mean it is unjust or even deserving of punishment. Oftentimes, the most just acts are precisely the ones that the law prohibits.

That’s particularly true of whistleblowers — i.e., those who reveal information the law makes it a crime to reveal, when doing so is the only way to demonstrate to the public that powerful officials are acting wrongfully or deceitfully. In those cases, we should cheer those who do it even though they are undertaking exactly those actions that the criminal law prohibits.

This Flynn episode underscores another critical point: The motives of leakers are irrelevant. It’s very possible — indeed, likely — that the leakers here were not acting with benevolent motives. Nobody with a straight face can claim that lying to the public is regarded in official Washington as some sort of mortal sin; if anything, the contrary is true: It’s seen as a job requirement.

Moreover, Gen. Flynn has many enemies throughout the intelligence and defense community. The same is true, of course, of Donald Trump; recall that just a few weeks ago, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer warned Trump that he was being “really dumb” to criticize the intelligence community because “they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

It’s very possible — I’d say likely — that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble. Whatever else is true, this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries in the Trump White House.

But no matter. What matters is not the motive of the leaker but the effects of the leak. Any leak that results in the exposure of high-level wrongdoing — as this one did — should be praised, not scorned and punished.



IT IS, OF COURSE, bizarre to watch this principle now so widely celebrated. Over the last eight years, President Obama implemented the most vindictive and aggressive war on whistleblowers in all of U.S. history. As Leonard Downie, one of the editors at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation, put it in a special report: “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”


It’s hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people — from both parties, across the ideological spectrum — who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn.

It’s even more surreal to watch Democrats act as though lying to the public is some grave firing offense when President Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, got caught red-handed not only lying to the public but also to Congress — about a domestic surveillance program that courts ruled was illegal. And despite the fact that lying to Congress is a felony, he kept his job until the very last day of the Obama presidency.


But this is how political power and the addled partisan brain in D.C. functions. Those in power always regard leaks as a heinous crime, while those out of power regard them as a noble act. They seamlessly shift sides as their position in D.C. changes.

Indeed, while Democrats have suddenly re-discovered the virtues of illegal leaking, Trump-supporting Republicans are insisting that the only thing that matters is rooting out the criminal leakers. Fox News host Steve Doocey and right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham today both demanded to know why the leakers weren’t being hunted, while congressional Republicans are vowing investigations to find the leakers. And Trump himself today — echoing Obama-era Democrats — said that “the real story” isn’t the lies told by his national security adviser but rather the fact that someone leaked information exposing them:

Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?
9:28 AM - 14 Feb 2017
20,949 20,949 Retweets 84,422 84,422 likes
But this is just the tawdry, craven game of Washington. People with no actual beliefs shamelessly take diametrically opposite views on fundamental political questions based exclusively on whether it helps or hurts their leaders. Thus, the very same Democrats who just three months ago viewed illegal leaking as a grave sin today view it as an act of heroic #Resistance.

What matters far more than this lowly and empty game-playing is the principle that is so vividly apparent here. Given the extreme secrecy powers that have arisen under the war on terror, one of the very few ways that the public has left for learning about what its government officials do is illegal leaking. As Trevor Timm notes, numerous leaks have already achieved great good in the three short weeks that Trump has been president.

Leaks are illegal and hated by those in power (and their followers) precisely because political officials want to hide evidence of their own wrongdoing, and want to be able to lie to the public with impunity and without detection. That’s the same reason the rest of us should celebrate such illegal leaks and protect those who undertake them, often at great risk to their own interests, so that we can be informed about the real actions of those who wield the greatest power. That principle does not change based upon which political party controls the White House.

* * * * *

From the creation of The Intercept during the Obama presidency through to today under Trump, a central principle of The Intercept — a key reason it was created — was to enable whistleblowing and report on leaks in the public interest. As our pinned article on our front page says: “If You See Something, Leak Something,” with instructions on how to do that as safely as possible.

Well there's a counter-narrative to that story from an outlet and author that you've frequently cited during these discussions:



https://theintercept.com/2017/02/14/the ... -felonies/

I think it's important to consider the intention behind such a leak, i.e. is it in the public interest or strictly political in nature. The article I posted acknowledges the public interest, but I don't believe that is what drove the leaker(s).

But Greenwald made the same point as well re political vs public interest. He argues the leaks were likely politically motivated but justifiable nonetheless because the information was definitely in the public's interest to know. If you're okay with the Clinton and Snowden leaks then you've got to be okay with this leak as well.

I don't think they're exactly the same, especially the Snowden stuff. Snowden put himself at great personal risk on principle. This is more similar to the Clinton campaign e-mails in that there are clear political implications and we have no idea who the leakers are. The major difference being that the DNC was supposedly hacked by outside actors and this is apparently coming from within the permanent government.

JORR I recall arguing against groups like Anonymous and WikiLeaks and I recall you celebrating transparency regardless of how damaging it could be to our government or an individual in our government. You went so far as to say that someone exposing your business secrets would be okay. Now it appears that you are upset with leaks because it hurt the Trump administration.

Do you find one type more acceptable than the other?