Donald Trump 2018

[TornACL 7696]

For such a master negotiator as president, how is it that we are currently in a position of weakness in all of our pending deals and negotiations?

 

[Huckleberry 32830]

I believe it's going to happen, but telling people to calm down is the exact wrong strategy.

[Dropout 355]

I’ll agree with that. Perhaps don’t take your eye off the ball. We know what has to be done as a people so just do it.

[woohorn 1131]

Another American company that was reliant on Chinese manufacturing and driven out of business by Trump's tariffs, I suppose. 

Ivanka was exempted from the tariffs.

[sachick 1189]

1 hour ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

It’s the Saturday after Election Day.

Nov 6 Election Day 

Nov 10 Trump Parade 

 

Wait, this military parade is really happening? It's a real thing? People are letting him do this?

[SmokeyTheBear 5562]

9 minutes ago, TornACL said:

For such a master negotiator as president, how is it that we are currently in a position of weakness in all of our pending deals and negotiations?

 

[Native Horn 3498]

2 minutes ago, sachick said:

Wait, this military parade is really happening? It's a real thing? People are letting him do this?

Yes, "people" are "letting" him do this.  The syncophants in the WH who are too afraid of the dude to tell him about the terrible optics.

[Huckleberry 32830]

4 minutes ago, sachick said:

Wait, this military parade is really happening? It's a real thing? People are letting him do this?

Well he has to ask Congress to appropriate money for it, so there's a chance that the Republican controlled chambers will be able to stand up to him and deny the request and then intelligently explain to their constituents that they don't hate the troops and are in favor of actually helping them with things like dental benefits instead of a dog and pony show.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Edited July 24, 2018 by Huckleberry

[bad_teammate 13183]

 

[ndawg 1242]

1 minute ago, Dropout said:

We are frothing at the mouth and have never been more motivated. But Trump won’t win again or become some dictator. Democracy will prevail. I have my money on not getting beat at the ballot box by these obvious traitors. I can only hope this is correct. Get back to me if it doesn’t happen.

Something to think about: our electronic voting machines rolled out in the last few decades have never been particularly secure. There was heaps of evidence that Diebold was a money sucking, incompetent shitshow of an organization that couldn't deploy a secure system if their lives depended on it. (To be fair, I'm not sure how many of our voting machines today were deployed by Diebold). At any rate, we've never experienced a significant security breach in our voting machines that materially impacted voting counts or altered election outcomes. I suspect the reason for this is the most obvious one that comes to mind: what stops foreign actors from hacking our voting system has never been the technical challenge, but rather a really low likelihood of being able to get away with it. For instance, I've got no doubt that Putin's hackers could seriously change voting counts, but I really doubt they've ever tried.

But all bets are off if Trump establishes a political climate that would allow a foreign actor like Putin to get away with actually hacking our voting systems. Trump seems to be setting Putin up to be able to get away with it in broad daylight.

[sachick 1189]

We should all vote using scantrons.

[Dropout 355]

4 minutes ago, ndawg said:

Something to think about: our electronic voting machines rolled out in the last few decades have never been particularly secure. There was heaps of evidence that Diebold was a money sucking, incompetent shitshow of an organization that couldn't deploy a secure system if their lives depended on it. (To be fair, I'm not sure how many of our voting machines today were deployed by Diebold). At any rate, we've never experienced a significant security breach in our voting machines that materially impacted voting counts or altered election outcomes. I suspect the reason for this is the most obvious one that comes to mind: what stops foreign actors from hacking our voting system has never been the technical challenge, but rather a really low likelihood of being able to get away with it. For instance, I've got no doubt that Putin's hackers could seriously change voting counts, but I really doubt they've ever tried.

But all bets are off if Trump establishes a political climate that would allow a foreign actor like Putin to get away with actually hacking our voting systems. Trump seems to be setting Putin up to be able to get away with it in broad daylight.

It’s the optimist in me. I can’t concede what hasn’t happened yet even recognizing all the possibilities. I can’t fathom people sitting by quietly if something like above were to happen. The way it plays out in my head isn’t Trump rules the world. The exact opposite. I still think America has what it takes. Just needed a wake up call.

[Tuco 5076]

39 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

It has to be somewhere that he can benefit financially.

So Mar-a-Lago it is.

I think you're pretty close on this.  He's a developer.  He's not going to miss out on a project.  It will be a stand-alone, for profit, theme-park-like museum tourist trap in Florida with hotels and a golf course. It will be built on the investment dollars of many of his ardent supporters, and go bankrupt in less than ten years.  I can't think of a more fitting monument.

[Chad Fuck 17631]

1 minute ago, Tuco said:

I think you're pretty close on this.  He's a developer.  He's not going to miss out on a project.  It will be a stand-alone, for profit, theme-park-like museum tourist trap in Florida with hotels and a golf course. It will be built on the investment dollars of many of his ardent supporters, and go bankrupt in less than ten years.  I can't think of a more fitting monument.

He'll find a way to use taxpayer money to keep it going.  For sure.

 

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13562]

And it worked.

JFC

[pyrohornIII 4814]

49 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

It has to be somewhere that he can benefit financially.

So Mar-a-Lago it is.

I agree with this and will go further to expect the bigger part of it to be a casino.  All his tweets loaded into slot machines. 

[jimmyjazz 45836]

16 minutes ago, ndawg said:

Something to think about: our electronic voting machines rolled out in the last few decades have never been particularly secure. There was heaps of evidence that Diebold was a money sucking, incompetent shitshow of an organization that couldn't deploy a secure system if their lives depended on it. (To be fair, I'm not sure how many of our voting machines today were deployed by Diebold). At any rate, we've never experienced a significant security breach in our voting machines that materially impacted voting counts or altered election outcomes. I suspect the reason for this is the most obvious one that comes to mind: what stops foreign actors from hacking our voting system has never been the technical challenge, but rather a really low likelihood of being able to get away with it. For instance, I've got no doubt that Putin's hackers could seriously change voting counts, but I really doubt they've ever tried.

But all bets are off if Trump establishes a political climate that would allow a foreign actor like Putin to get away with actually hacking our voting systems. Trump seems to be setting Putin up to be able to get away with it in broad daylight.

I don't understand this point of view.  What we know:

1.  Putin wanted Trump to win the election

2.  Russia meddled in the election

3.  our voting machine technology is not secure

BUT

4.  nobody likely tried to change vote counts

 

 

I don't think 1 + 2 + 3 = 4

[bad_teammate 13183]

But ! But! But! Represenative Hurd furrowed his brow so hard recently! SUCH A FURROWING!

(All GOP are scum.)

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

43 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

Americans are lazy because our lives are too easy. If the opposition calms down they will get beat at the ballot box. It's just a further degeneration of our government but it's true. You have to get your supporters frothing at the mouth and at least partially insane if you want to win an election.

We went through a long period where there wasn’t significant ideological differences between major party candidates.  Both party candidates embraced traditional American values and democracy (for the most part).  

There was a ton of common ground shared between Clinton/Bush, Clinton/Dole, Gore/Bush, Kerry/Bush, Obama/McCain, Obama/Romney.  

It had a demoralization effect on a lot people presupposing everything would be fine as long as a major party candidate won.  There’s no way we’d get an overt traitor to American values on the ballot among the major parties.  Not only did we get one but people didn’t even notice his anti-American positions and authoritarian tendencies when they were on display, repeatedly.

People gravitated to Trump’s energy because it was so new and different from anything we’ve seen before.  His messaging was very seductive and everyone was already familiar with the media personality Donald Trump.  

Despite the desperation for something new and different, I think most Americans had strong enough faith in our institutions to check the president should anything go terribly wrong. They rolled the dice with Trump because Hillary was the epitome of “same old same old”.  Unfortunately, most Trump voters didn’t appreciate just how fragile democracy is and were unable to recognize the threats when they showed up. 

Edited July 24, 2018 by Hugo Stiglitz

[DDD Dad 14313]

1 hour ago, Anastasis said:

Using the specter of Russian interference to delegitimize an election.  Wonder where he learned that from.

 

*ducks*

You mean just like he was trying to do before the last one?

[TornACL 7696]

4 minutes ago, pyrohornIII said:

I agree with this and will go further to expect the bigger part of it to be a casino.  All his tweets loaded into slot machines. 

Maybe the museum will have a replica of the Moscow bed where those Russian prostitutes urinated on each other.

[Dropout 355]

3 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

We went through a long period where there wasn’t significant ideological differences between major party candidates.  Both party candidates embraced traditional American values and democracy (for the most part).  

There was a ton of common ground shared between Clinton/Bush, Clinton/Dole, Gore/Bush, Kerry/Bush, Obama/McCain, Obama/Romney.  

It had a demoralization effect on a lot people presupposing everything would be fine as long as a major party candidate won.  There’s no way we’d get an overt traitor to American values on the ballot among the major parties.  Not only did we get one but people didn’t even notice his anti-American positions and authoritarian tendencies when they were on display, repeatedly.

People gravitated to Trump’s energy because it was so new and different from anything we’ve seen before.  His messaging was very seductive and everyone was already familiar with the media personality Donald Trump.  

Despite the desperation for something new and different, I think most Americans had strong enough faith in our institutions to check the president should anything go terribly wrong. They rolled the dice with Trump because Hillary was the epitome of “same old same old”.  Unfortunately, most Trump voters didn’t appreciate just how fragile democracy is and were unable to recognize the threats when they showed up.  This was mostly due to the ideological common ground among the parties over the last few generations.

So what happens next? Whether people agree w you or not it’s obvious you’re well informed...

[Lurch 5922]

When you’re such a raging piece of shit the dalai lama trolls you

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

2 minutes ago, Dropout said:

So what happens next? Whether people agree w you or not it’s obvious you’re well informed...

I have no idea other than it’s going to suck in the short term. Trump is a weapon against everything good about America from objective truth to common decency. 

Getting him out of office is a good first step but some of the damage he’s been a part of will take generations to repair.  

[ndawg 1242]

Just now, jimmyjazz said:

I don't understand this point of view.  What we know:

1.  Putin wanted Trump to win the election

2.  Russia meddled in the election

3.  our voting machine technology is not secure

BUT

4.  nobody likely tried to change vote counts

 

 

I don't think 1 + 2 + 3 = 4

If a malicious external actor attempted to hack our voting counts, our intelligence agencies would at the very least notify the commander-in-chief and likely the press, if they didn't thwart the intrusion outright. There's no way any American president, right or left, would downplay such an incident or deflect blame from the guilty party. Retribution would be swift, and it wouldn't just be the US -- the whole Western World would retaliate. Like I said, this rationale was my best attempt to explain why no one has so far directly altered our election counts.

Ultimately, abusing social media proved pretty damned effective without putting the Russians in any real risk. The worst possible outcome for them was being told to stop -- after all, the election *still* faithfully represented the will of the people. Where Trump is taking us, though, is a political climate where there's no consequences for severe and direct attacks on our elections.

I'm intending to argue two things: first, without a political climate that would impose consequences on actual election hacking, the odds of our elections being targeted go up dramatically. Second, Trump is steering us toward precisely such a political climate.

[Brisketexan 104939]

In all seriousness, I'm fairly certain that if something like this were to occur, shit would get real violent across the country.  

As it should. Not sure where the line of “yep, violent revolt is called for,” but it’s probably on the other side of a despot suspending elections.

It's just going to be hilarious for the optics. Trump enjoying a bigly awesome parade that will truly be all about him, days after his party gets thumped in midterm elections.

Lord willing.

You see, this doesn’t matter much.  All he has to do is tweet out that he’s calling for the suspension or some other bullshit and the damage will be done.  
Confusion and misinformation surrounding the election will be in the bloodstream.

This. His declaration won’t have any real legal effect, but the damage will be done.

I don't disagree with that. He will attempt to delegitimize the election.  The question is whether the current GOP will go along.  To date, if the the choice is between winning and democracy, they will chuck democracy over the side.

Well, that’s because the GOP has become open enemies of the country, so....

Meanwhile, Ivanka is shutting down her clothing line.  Which indicates that not everything is sunshine and rainbows in the Trump business orbit.

What will her slaves do now?

[Zonahorn 8079]

56 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

Wow, that is scary, we'd better set up that joint US/Russia cyber security task force pronto, if we wanna stop it.

Baron on the cyber right?

[pyrohornIII 4814]

6 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

We went through a long period where there wasn’t significant ideological differences between major party candidates.  Both party candidates embraced traditional American values and democracy (for the most part).  

There was a ton of common ground shared between Clinton/Bush, Clinton/Dole, Gore/Bush, Kerry/Bush, Obama/McCain, Obama/Romney.  

It had a demoralization effect on a lot people presupposing everything would be fine as long as a major party candidate won.  There’s no way we’d get an overt traitor to American values on the ballot among the major parties.  Not only did we get one but people didn’t even notice his anti-American positions and authoritarian tendencies when they were on display, repeatedly.

People gravitated to Trump’s energy because it was so new and different from anything we’ve seen before.  His messaging was very seductive and everyone was already familiar with the media personality Donald Trump.  

Despite the desperation for something new and different, I think most Americans had strong enough faith in our institutions to check the president should anything go terribly wrong. They rolled the dice with Trump because Hillary was the epitome of “same old same old”.  Unfortunately, most Trump voters didn’t appreciate just how fragile democracy is and were unable to recognize the threats when they showed up.  This was mostly due to the ideological common ground among the parties over the last few generations.

That's a good theory of why we got here.  And once here, we as Americans are getting a lot of hard lessons.  Like I had no idea there was only one company manufacturing flatware in the US.  Same for nails.   For a country that made its place in the world in manufacturing this seems unfathomable.  What do we make besides some autos and ton of military stuff? 

And just like our democracy, we are beginning to see the fragility of other areas, like environment, energy, immigration, education, healthcare and infrastructure to name a few.  Trump is causing us to look at ourselves with new consciousness.  And like Dropout said, his base is getting smaller with each new con he runs.   I would hope that as that base diminishes, then more republicans stand up to him, or get replaced by those who will. 

But Huckleberry was right too, we have to stay vigilant or we become complacent and lazy.  We start to think others will rectify it, my vote doesn't really count. 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

3 minutes ago, ndawg said:

If a malicious external actor attempted to hack our voting counts, our intelligence agencies would at the very least notify the commander-in-chief and likely the press, if they didn't thwart the intrusion outright. There's no way any American president, right or left, would downplay such an incident or deflect blame from the guilty party. Retribution would be swift, and it wouldn't just be the US -- the whole Western World would retaliate. Like I said, this rationale was my best attempt to explain why no one has so far directly altered our election counts.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-election-hacking.amp.html

^Worth a read.

 

Let’s say the Russians really did rig the election and Obama came out and said they did.  What would the consequences have been to America and democracy in general?  Our whole democratic system would be undermined. 

Would it have been Obama’s fault if the Russians hacked the vote under his watch?  

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/obama-administration-rushed-to-preserve-intelligence-of-russian-election-hacking/

also worth a read.

 

[Message Board User 12394]

 

[ndawg 1242]

10 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-election-hacking.amp.html

^Worth a read.

 

Let’s say the Russians really did rig the election and Obama came out and said they did.  What would the consequences have been to America and democracy in general?  Our whole democratic system would be undermined. 

Would it have been Obama’s fault if the Russians hacked the vote under his watch?  

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/obama-administration-rushed-to-preserve-intelligence-of-russian-election-hacking/

also worth a read.

 

To be fair to Obama, his response was already hamstrung by Trump's victory. If it were Romney that won with Putin's help, not Trump, transparency might have been a more viable option.

And now large scale amounts of Russian meddling and small scale amounts of actual hacking have been normalized, so we can guarantee an escalation of severity and scope in the future.

It was well known in tech circles twenty years ago that voting machines were insecure pieces of shit, and that the only thing stopping anyone from hacking them was the legitimate fear of reprisal from our IC. The root of this particular problem was when the government awarded a lucrative contract for building and deploying election machines. That should have never, _ever_ been entrusted to a private corporation.

Edited July 24, 2018 by ndawg

[Hiphopopotamos 20868]

 

 

[Bozo_Casanova 26412]

55 minutes ago, sachick said:

We should all vote using scantrons.

This is 100% true. It's the gold standard. 

[BrickHorn 18208]

12 minutes ago, Hiphopopotamos said:

 

 

Wait a minute.  75% of American voters believe Russian meddling is a problem?  That can’t be!  I was assured just yesterday on this very board that pollsters could not even assign a number to such a small percentage of the population.  But unless I’m mistaken, 75 is a number.  

I call shenanigans!

[MissingInAction 24979]

This lunatic is taking the entire country into the mouth of madness.

[Huckleberry 32830]

5 minutes ago, BrickHorn said:

Wait a minute.  75% of American voters believe Russian meddling is a problem?  That can’t be!  I was assured just yesterday on this very board that pollsters could not even assign a number to such a small percentage of the population.  But unless I’m mistaken, 75 is a number.  

I call shenanigans!

That was the great and brilliant GRHorn.

On 7/22/2018 at 9:34 PM, GRHorn said:

Hey guys, I was out on vacation. Did I miss anything?  

Everybody here still in a tizzy about Russia?   I guess we’re the exception here.

https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/07/19/lunatic-politics-part-2-its-becoming-impossible-to-have-a-conversation/

“When Gallup recently asked Americans what the most important (non-economic) problem facing the country today is, the amount of people saying Russia was so low they couldn’t even attribute a number to it.

Think about that. We’re being divided into two camps of increasingly insane and angry people because of hysteria surrounding an issue nobody even cares about. As usual, we can thank mass media for turning this topic into its singular obsession as well as promoting an environment of cultural insanity and stupidity.”

[Mojo Hand 4580]

No doubt GRHorn will come back, acknowledge that he was wrong, and — because the real facts underlying his opinion turned out to support the exact opposite conclusion — will now forcefully support the investigation into the important issue of Russian meddling in our election. 

Edited July 24, 2018 by Mojo Hand

[jimmyjazz 45836]

47 minutes ago, ndawg said:

If a malicious external actor attempted to hack our voting counts, our intelligence agencies would at the very least notify the commander-in-chief and likely the press, if they didn't thwart the intrusion outright.

Why are you so confident that vote manipulation would be detected?

[atomheartbevo 89603]

58 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

But ! But! But! Represenative Hurd furrowed his brow so hard recently! SUCH A FURROWING!

(All GOP are scum.)

Don’t know if it’s this one or another, but somebody wanted to question Coats behind closed doors.  Behind closed doors does nothing for the American people, but it allows Republicans to leak cherry-picked info to defend Trump/themselves.  If this was it, Hurd did the right thing.

[jimmyjazz 45836]

5 minutes ago, Mojo Hand said:

No doubt GRHorn will come back, acknowledge that he was wrong, and — because the real facts underlying his opinion turned out to support the exact opposite conclusion — will now forcefully support the investigation into the important issue of Russian meddling in our election. 

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

For the record, I’m convinced the Russians absolutely swung the election for Trump. Trump’s own KT McFarlene says as much in an email after the election.

But there are a few points about this that get overlooked.  The Russians were going to do what they were going to with or without Trump.  They would have interfered on behalf of the Republican regardless of the candidate or cooperation.  They basically admit this in their emails (Butina/Erickson) and Putin was already hell bent on destroying Hillary.

The Russians just invited the Trump campaign along for the ride and they were more than happy to accept the help in order to defeat the evil Hillary.

[jimmyjazz 45836]

So what the fuck does that matter?  Your determination to be Anastasis Jr. is quite infuriating at times.  There is no "BUT" here.  Swinging an election is swinging an election.

You are basically saying the results were fraudulent, but "oh well, it would have happened anyway".  Ridiculous.  This shit is going to undermine efforts to (partially) rectify the situation in November.

[triplehorn 2664]

1 minute ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

For the record, I’m convinced the Russians absolutely swung the election for Trump. Trump’s own KT McFarlene says as much in an email after the election.

But there are a few points about this that get overlooked.  The Russians were going to do what they were going to with or without Trump.  They would have interfered on behalf of the Republican regardless of the candidate or cooperation.  They basically admit this in their emails (Butina/Erickson) and Putin was already hell bent on destroying Hillary.

The Russians just invited the Trump campaign along for the ride and they were more than happy to accept the help in order to defeat the evil Hillary.

I believe you are significantly underestimating a massive helping hand Russia/GRU was given by US persons/corps  and Trump affiliated folks in their attack in the form of targeted American voter data.

[Red Five 40777]

The President said today that our upcoming electrons might be rigged. This makes me so mad because it reminds me of that son of a bitch Obama enjoying arugula.

[ndawg 1242]

18 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Why are you so confident that vote manipulation would be detected?

I'm putting faith in our IC's intrusion detection efforts. It's public knowledge that our digital voting systems are insecure. If you're robbing a bank, and they left the front door unlocked, you may be more likely to avoid getting caught in the act, but you're still going to have to survive a thorough investigation. It's very hard to even know just what the US Government is capable of when it comes to detecting and thwarting cyber crimes, but suffice it to say, they're no slouches.

Edited July 24, 2018 by ndawg

[Message Board User 12394]

 

[atomheartbevo 89603]

Looks like Trump is worried the farmers will turn on him.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

1 minute ago, jimmyjazz said:

So what the fuck does that matter?  Your determination to be Anastasis Jr. is quite infuriating at times.  There is no "BUT" here.  Swinging an election is swinging an election.

You are basically saying the results were fraudulent, but "oh well, it would have happened anyway".  Ridiculous.  This shit is going to undermine efforts to (partially) rectify the situation in November.

I think you’re missing my points. This speculation if the Russians changed votes in machines is important but not a criteria needed to conclude the Kremlin attack worked to elect Trump.

 Everyone looks at this scandal as Trump and Putin masterminding some elaborate conspiracy five years ago.

When it was more the Russians working within the Republican networks over a long period of time and the more spontaneous Trump plan worked a lot better than expected.  

It’s all just as horrible and treacherous as before,  just a little different perspective.

[Huckleberry 32830]

The people who should feel even worse based on that are Republicans. They could have won the election with any candidate and we could have any Republican POTUS right now and they threw in with Donald Trump.

Well I suppose feeling bad presumes there are Republicans with a spine and guiding principles beyond GET MINE, so scratch that.

[Chooky 13307]

2 minutes ago, Message Board User said:

 

Sean Spicer did a literary version of blowing Trump in his book and got nothing for it.  That little albino fucker must be so confused.