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[Snake Plissken]

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Yeah, but giving the Russians the stuff direct is better than storing classified emails on a private server, right?

[Amor de Cosmos]

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This is serious shit. If confirmed it's surely enough to remove him from office.

[Ginger Yellow]

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It's not technically illegal, so the Republicans, or enough of them at least will sweep it under the carpet. Again.

My one bit of optimism is that these episodes are escalating at such a pace that I think even the likes of McConnell may eventually act. I'm just not at all convinced it will happen before irreparable damage is done.

[Muukalainen]

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Snake Plissken wrote: Yeah, but giving the Russians the stuff direct is better than storing classified emails on a private server, right?

Christ, yes. If you leave valuable stuff lying around on a server you never know where it'll end up.

[Tubby Isaacs]

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His surrogates denied. He's then admitted it.

[ursus arctos]

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Just as with the Comey sacking

[Flynnie]

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Trump's razor applies every goddamn time.

[Ginger Yellow]

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I'm assuming we've been in the irreparable damage phase since he was elected.

Well, I certainly think society and political norms and discourse have already been corroded. But I'm talking about things like a shooting war, or a truly nutso Supreme Court appointment, or effective Medicaid abolition. So far most of the concrete damage seems reversible, unless you're a deportee.

I don't think McConnell sees it as a game. He sees it as a way to achieve Republican party goals, namely tax cuts for the rich, the dismantling of the New Deal and ensuring a Republican majority through voter disenfranchisement.

[anton pulisov]

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The Democrats could literally clean up in 2018 and 2020 if they offered a 21st century New Deal platform. But they won't. Instead they are hoping that Trump will be so shit that they'll be able to eek out a win with their Republican-lite platform. That's what they thought in 2016 too, and it didn't work.

The Trump administration is incompetent, the Republicans are incompetent and the Democratic opposition is incompetent. It's death of functioning democratic governance by a thousand cuts.

[Ginger Yellow]

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cf the UK.

[Tubby Isaacs]

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We have CNN on. The Democrats look competent enough to me when they come on.

We've got somebody doing this proper left stuff here. He's not doing very well.

[ursus arctos]

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When looking at 2018, one has to keep in mind that gerrymandering has created around 200 GOP seats that are virtually impregnable.

The Democrats could win the popular vote by several percentage points and still not flip any of those seats.

That said, control of the House increasingly looks to be in play.

[Ginger Yellow]

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Oh, look, here's McConnell quoting me.

I read the Washington Post story and I read General McMasters response, which tends to refute the story, rebut the story. I think we could do with a little less drama from the White House on a lot of things so that we can focus on our agenda, which is deregulations, tax reform, repealing and replacing Obamacare

[Flynnie]

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I'd rather blame capitalism for that fact than the Democrats, in so far as capitalism has succeeded in turning voters into incurious self-centered consumers of bullshit.

Celebrity politics is a respectable substitute for material politics, which the Democrats haven't practiced since 1972.

[Incandenza]

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So McMaster said that Trump decided to share the information in a spur of the moment decision, did not deny that the information was classified, but also said that the city in which the information was gathered could be figured out by anyone watching the news, and that what harms national security is the leaking of information to reporters.

Oh, and this kicker: "The President wasn't even aware! (laughs) of where this information came from. He wasn't briefed on the source or method of the information."

[Ginger Yellow]

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No. Nor does it in any way address the point in the WaPo article (which, let's not forget, McMaster called "false" yesterday) that revealing the classified info was a) not authorised by the ally which shared it, and b) inherently compromising the source, for instance by revealing the city where the laptop plot was discovered.

[Tubby Isaacs]

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How are the "troubling, if true" Republicans taking this?

[San Bernardhinault]

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Tubby Isaacs wrote: How are the "troubling, if true" Republicans taking this?

They are saying "It's troubling, if true. We would be very troubled about it. It would be particularly troubling as it distracts from our core mission of cutting taxes to the very rich, and trying to dismantle every part of the apparatus of the state that's designed to help people who actually need help. It would be much less troubling if people stopped talking about Trump's misdemeanors. We would be deeply troubled if this happened to be true and are going to do nothing at all to determine whether it is true, just in case, Because if we found out it was true then we'd be troubled.."

[Incandenza]

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NYT reports that the intelligence came from Israel.

[Lang Spoon]

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Haha! Will they be so quick to demand punishment for the leakers now it's their bezzie mates?

[San Bernardhinault]

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Israel? Fuck me, that's glorious. I mean, terrible too. But glorious.

[ursus arctos]

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I thought everyone had figured that out already.

The only other remotely plausible candidate was Jordan.

I wonder if anyone on the GOP side will say out loud that it is really ok because the Israelis decided immediately after the election that they wouldn't share any especially sensitive intelligence with 45 (which is likely why the version he got didn't reveal the source).

[ursus arctos]

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[Lang Spoon]

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Reginald Christ wrote:

The Democrats look competent enough to me when they come on.

They recently sounded out Julia Louis-Dreyfus to see if she fancied standing for them in a future election. Because people love her character on Veep.

Fuck sake, a Clinton-Benes ticket for 2020. I've never seen Veep, but isn't she just as incompetent (if more loveable) than the pols and idiot spads on The Thick of It?

[Incandenza]

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Lang Spoon wrote:

The Democrats look competent enough to me when they come on.

They recently sounded out Julia Louis-Dreyfus to see if she fancied standing for them in a future election. Because people love her character on Veep.

Fuck sake, a Clinton-Benes ticket for 2020. I've never seen Veep, but isn't she just as incompetent (if more loveable) than the pols and idiot spads on The Thick of It?

Veep is probably watched by about 2 million Americans.