Mostly you see it on the controversial ones. “Here’s literally all the climate scientists in the world, top of their field. Here’s Tim the ME from Ohio who’d like to explain the sun has simply gotten hotter”.
The science says the world is warming. It doesn't say we need to do something about it or life-as-we-know-it-ends. It's expected that "doing something" will be translated into "the Left takes their desired control over the economy".
It's like the politics of gun control. A reasonable interpretation of the Left's position is "no X, at all, and any compromises which restrict X will simply be pocketed along the road to no-X... so you'd better save fall back room for when you lose".
The Right's lack of reasonableness is the mirror image of the Left's lack of reasonableness. I'm not sure which came first (or if that even matters), I'm also not sure if this is a Right/Left thing or just a human thing, or a "this society" thing but whatever.
That the media focuses on the Right's lack of reasonableness and not the Left's is a reflection of where the media's leanings lay. A microscope is put on the Right "denying science" and not the Left's "inflating science".
Nor does the media normally talk about "if they're correct why aren't they screaming for nuclear power" nor "what happens economically if we get rid of global warming gasses" nor "if the Left's plan works then we pay Trillions and delay warming by a few years over the next century, so what would have happened in 2100 will instead happen in 2103."
Those policies are popular among a very wide majority of people...
The intentions of these policies are popular, there's great marketing, the outcomes are a problem.
(From your link) “the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.”
“there are different rules for the well-connected and people with money"
“the wealthy and big corporations are the ones really running this country.”
So let's make a *complex* set of rules enforced with huge federal bureaucracies which result in HRC being able to sell political influence to the tune of $2 Billion.
Let's make it so that no one can truly know what's illegal without a team of legal experts because mom and pop businesses (which historically were responsible for more than half of job creation) will have issues.
Let's talk about taxing the wealthy... with an insanely complex tax code which results in high priced tax lawyers to deal with it and just be *shocked* that the wealthy can afford tax lawyers and normal people can't.
If these policies had resulted in growth, opportunity, and jobs then people would be supporting them. What we've got is excuses, HRC, and claims that growth is impossible and the jobs are gone.
... they’re an essential tool for a modern American human being.
Historically "poverty" is a huge evil because it includes threat of starvation. There are places even now where it means "no clean water", "infected by parasites", "malaria", and so forth and so on.
Claiming that cell phones are just a tool (while correct) obscures just how far we've come and that what we call "poor" has a lifestyle old-style kings couldn't afford and big parts of the rest of the world might call middle class.
For years, poll after poll has revealed that the American electorate is far more liberal than our “representative” government would have you believe.
Sure, liberal policies are absolutely popular (free stuff!), it's the paying for them which isn't. That mismatch is one of the big problems in politics.
RE: Understanding that no one has a right to another's labor must be where the solution starts.
This comment was left behind underneath a story about the Republican Party’s never-ending travails to repeal the ACA. The commenter suggests that dispensing needed medical care to somebody whose life would end or be worse off without it is “labor” to which nobody is “entitled.” There is no way this comment was written by any of the 600,000-plus Americans who are forced to declare bankruptcy each year because they can’t pay their medical bills.
Doctors are going to insist on getting paid, and the argument is that medicine should be "free". He's pointing out we don't have the money to pay doctors for what you want to force them to do, and he expects the left to, at some point, insist on doing it without money.
Further, from the posted link:
...you’d think that Canada would have a lower rate of bankruptcy than the United States... but... bankruptcy rates are statistically the same on both sides of the 49th parallel....
Further, even with a socialized healthcare system, some Canadians go bankrupt because of medical expenses. Approximately 15 percent of bankrupt Canadian seniors — those 55 and older — cited medical reasons, including uninsured expenses, as the main culprit for their insolvency.
(Other parts of that suggest in the US it's only 10 percent).
dozens of other countries whose governments have “gotten involved with” healthcare enjoy far lower prices and far better outcomes.
Other countries are less murderous, less fat, and have cultural factors which greatly affect cost, outcomes, and system usage. There's no way to import those factors.
No country which has gone to the system wanted has seen HC spending drop, as in "go down". The American experience (and Supply/Demand economics) suggest these sorts of systems are expensive, although perhaps better at keeping down prices over the long haul. However the expensive parts of our system are already baked in.
For example it's less expensive and more efficient to have a ward system where a dozen patients are in one room and can be overseen by one nurse. We don't have that, we're not going to be knocking down hospitals so we can build them that way.
If the desired utopian system is actually going to be less expensive, then do it without tax increases. Also write the laws so if *(*when*) costs explode there's a way to deal with it other than breaking the budget.
she also wondered why the seals didn’t capture him alive. Her “reasoning” was that a trial would have less of a chance for repercussions...
I celebrated, then I thought better of it.
We could have captured him and sweated him for intel, that would have been good.
We could have shown the world that OBL the "great hero" (to his followers) was just a guy, and probably a cowardly one because he could have gone down fighting. No paradise afterlife for you.
We are a broken world. Children are starving. Dictators torture and kill the innocent. There is poverty, homeless, addiction, and despair. The horrors of war. We treat human lives in their earliest stages as disposable. We don’t love one another the way we ought to. There are reminders all around us of our own moral failures. And at the same time, what signal are we sending to the next generation?
Over the generations, things are getting better, not worse.
Poverty? World wide the number of people living on a dollar a day has dropped a lot over the last 50 years. If we want to narrow our view to just the USA then "poverty" normally includes cell phones and cable which means we need to use a definition like "the bottom X%" to find anyone.
The big change in war is the front line is on our TV, because everyone has a movie camera in their smart phone. If we use numbers rather than emotion to look at the big picture, the number of deaths per year has gone down trends down over the decades.
This website has lots of graphs and information which plot war deaths over the decades and centuries. https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace/
Professional alarmists (including and especially religious ones) can't admit this because it implies that the urgency for their causes is diminishing. If (and when) we solve all of these problems then the goal posts for measuring how evil the world is will be moved.
And you'll have to signal your virtue a different way.
U.S. Household Financial Health Improved in Recent Years
23% of Adults Didn’t Expect to be Able to Pay All Current Month’s Bills in Full – Survey
I read things like that and I wonder if the bottom stat is being taken out of context. Does it mean I won't pay my credit card debt for tactical reasons, I need gov support for my rent, or I can't pay my heat bill and it's going to be turned off?
Mass comparisons of income can be weird because you're getting people at different life stages and can run into corner cases (my income has been negative which put me at the bottom of low income).
The media has clearly suddenly gotten very good at it... it’s not like Obama is unique in looking cleaner than Trump. As far as I can tell, every POTUS before him has enjoyed that privilege.
Multiple issues. First, the press is unusually hostile to Trump compared to other Presidents (even GOP Presidents), and to be fair he's largely earned that. Trump likes creating outrage and channeling it. I can't think of any other POTUS who gave us unfiltered access to his subconscious.
2nd, Trump really is new at this, and many members of his crew are new, and they're not used to working either together or in the context of the White House.
3rd, As far as I can tell, despite having multiple members of the GOP running on this, Trump is the *first* POTUS to actually try shrinking the gov's role and power. It's *supposed* to cost government workers their jobs and reduce their influence.
I expect the EPA to be staffed with people who view environmentalism as a good thing and probably their life calling. I expect the DC administration to be "statists" and think the power of the State is a force for good, or at a bare minimum like their jobs and authority out of self interest.
Some of what we're seeing is push back by what I'll call "the deep state". Among other things this means various interests leak destructively to the Press, and Trump is a lot less protected by the normal machinery of the POTUS because he's threatening the interests of that machinery.
Are you saying that there was a lack of investigation/coverage on the topic?
Basically. I'm also saying, although it's unlikely Obama was at fault, if he were then we wouldn't know. As a raw newbie it's stunningly unlikely he had no problems.
I think we said something earlier about unremarkable day to day operations being spun as outrageous? This is one of those things.
TCF accepted more than $100 million from people or entities connected with Uranium One, and yes, (excluding 2.3 million or so) the timeline does NOT match up for a quid pro quo deal, so it was legal. Maybe exactly like there was no quid pro quo deal with the pardons so that was legal too.
Which doesn't change that HRC was collecting money with one hand and giving out gov favors with the other. We can't legally prove a connection which would result in her getting jail time, but the donations instantly dried up when she lost influence.
My view is she's found "legal" ways to be corrupt, which is why all these investigations start and ultimately why they fail.
Nobody seems to be able to clearly articulate what the Clinton Foundation was doing to enrich Hillary Clinton.
TCF is used to give jobs to Clinton insiders, fund Clinton causes, and do the various "power and influence" things your typical Billionaire does if they're into that sort of thing. It's a tool for power and influence, and it's funded by power and influence.
Of course, given your definition, Trump could not possibly be involved in any corruption, not having been in government until now. For example, when he paid off a state Attorney General...
Bribery would be a good example of Trump corruption. Up until now he would have had to be giving bribes and not taking them.
...So the good news is that we elected a POTUS with zero history of corruption...
Decades ago, Playboy evaluated every POTUS in terms of sexual morality and concluded the *only* POTUS who'd been above reproach was Nixon. To be guilty of one thing doesn't make you guilty of everything, Or in Trump's case, to be guilty of almost everything doesn't make you guilty of everything.
I would not be shocked if Trump branches out into corruption (his business is absurdly well situated to do this, way more than TCF), but thus far it's been a minor side note compared to his many other flaws.
There’s room for it, but is it the most likely conclusion? Even assuming a heroic effort by the media...
It normally takes a heroic effort to get past the Presidency shielding the President, absent that there's a lot we don't learn. What mistakes did Obama make with classified information, what management mistakes did he make, etc. Were the guns to drug dealers thing Obama's work or someone else's? This was Obama's *first* experience with management/leadership on a job that's both management centered and one of the hardest on the planet.
The expectation should be that the raw newbie did work which reflected that he was a raw newbie. No one picks up a set of clubs for the first time and racks up a professional golf score.
The same logic holds true for Trump but he has different weaknesses. The big difference is we're hearing about Trump's various mis-steps, either because of leaks or because he insists on announcing them.
....you felt that it was more likely that he was receiving special grades reserved for articulate black people
Not so much "more likely" as I don't think it can be used as proof of outstanding intellect... and if we don't have that, we have *nothing*. He worked for more than a decade in a field where proving intellect is expected and trivial. He managed to do nothing which proved intellect. At some point absence of evidence starts looking like evidence of absence.
I suspect we’ll have to agree to disagree about what’s actually most likely to be true.
You made a prediction about Trump so I'll make one about Obama. He's going to not do anything beyond being articulate and charismatic.
Donald Trump literally created a scam university to defraud his fans into maxing out their credit cards in exchange for basically nothing.
HRC gave uranium mining rights to a Russian mobster. To advance HRC's career, her husband sold a Presidential pardon and also pardoned some unreformed cop killing terrorists. She's had to shut down parts of her "charity" because funding instantly dried up after she couldn't hand out political access.
Corruption is defined as misuse of government resources to enrich yourself and HRC easily wins that contest.
As for Trump’s management skills, I think survivorship bias plays a very large role in the ranks of the rich and powerful...
Yes, but at some point you have to wonder if there's skill in flipping that coin. I think he has serious flaws, but those flaws are balanced with strengths and don't represent his totality.
Trump’s actual business track record appears to be one of somebody who is good at exaggerating his successes and sticking his business partners with the costs of his failures.
Trump hits the radar as an extreme version of "the charming sociopath".
It’s not easy to measure a president’s management skills since the management tree is so deep.
Agreed.
I’m confident enough to predict that this was not a fluke and the pattern will continue.
:Sigh:. "President Pence" continues to have a nice ring. Having said that, history suggests it's remarkably easy to underestimate Trump, even repeatedly. I think it's fair to say his current failures are being examined with a microscope while Obama's were ignored or shielded by the office.
Trump is very much the President we have and not the one we want to have... but I'm going to wait another year before speculating on his overall success or failure. We're still in transition. He has a history of successful management and the bigger the item (implying more personal attention), the better the outcome.
He's the President because he beat, fairly, a large number of better financed, more experienced, opponents who were supported by the system. He represents a sizeable amount of the electorate. For the sake of democracy he deserves a fair chance.
I think I agree with most everything you said (and well said btw), but the following is worth a follow up quibble.
But I stop short of believing that he’s actually more competent and less corrupt than his predecessor.
There is a lot of room for his predecessor to be *way* more incompetent than normally presented, especially on management type issues. Reagan looked good for a long time, right up until he got so dysfunctional that it caught up with him. Obama's lack of accomplishments where they could be attributed to him should give us pause.
I agree Obama was less corrupt than Trump, but HRC was the actual choice and Trump (although just as, if not more, money seeking) has had a lot less opportunity to turn political influence into profit.
RE: Trump the buffoon...
This takes us into reality TV territory, and that's a tough spot to be in. Trump managed to keep himself interesting and in the public eye for 50 years, and didn't blow himself up. That's *really* hard and suggestive of a *much* brighter mind than his public persona. You add in the money and the businesses and he presumably has management skills. So... maybe. *Probably*.
On the other hand we may be looking at survivor bias. 1024 people play Russian Roulette with a 50/50 odds, 1 lives 10 times, his odds of an 11th is 50%.
It certainly makes him look bad. There are options other than bragging. Media reports that he told them about laptop bombs (which the airlines have been guarding against since March) and what city they're being made in.
The problem is "what city they're made in" part. Presumably ISIS knows what city they're making them in, and now that they know we know they'll move the factory.
Of course they wouldn't know we know without the leaker who apparently wanted to make Trump look bad.
presumably in anticipation that at some point there’d be one they really didn’t like and wanted to embarrass.
That's too much planning, it's more basic than that. Members of the Press are human and they, as individuals, wanted to see Obama succeed. It was a great moment in history and all that. So they looked for evidence to support that viewpoint and discarded evidence which suggested the guy with no management experience (or leadership, etc) didn't do management or leadership very well.
With Trump, we have the opposite. And in a large, new organization run by a new boss who hasn't done this before, there are going to be issues. There'd absolutely be negative things to report even if everything was going great and if Trump were a normal guy.
Put differently, how many members of the Press are Trump supporters? Are they shamelessly talking about how they get a tingle of excitement when he enters the room (presumably because of his Aura of Greatness)?
“I don’t trust this sort of people, so I’m going to substitute my own intuitions for evidence.”
It's more, I'm going to wait a while and see if this is actually a thing. Explosive news is often wrong in the first day or three and everything about Trump is "explosive".
I especially find leaks from the "deep state" or whatever problematic when they're talking about what might be ignored if any other President were doing it.
Dark Matter: They asked people “are you going to be a racist and vote for Trump” and were shocked when they didn’t get accurate polling.
sounds more like bitter, hyperbolic horseshit than an actual description of anything that happened in the real world.
Hyperbolic and an exaggeration to express a point.
But not in the real world? The polling and predictions were shockingly inaccurate. Multiple people on this site have recently made comments to the effect that America proved it's a racist country by voting in Trump and all Conservatives are racists.
Media bias played a part in the media's lack of predictive accuracy for the election, they were *that* removed from the electorate. That bias didn't go away after the election, it might have gotten worse.
it’s not impossible that the White House just completely mangled everything about this story in a way that makes them look awful. But… it’s kind of their job not to do that...
I do not envy whoever has the job of managing Trump, his public stands, and his mouth.
it’s not immediately clear how much the media can do to compensate.
I think this one looks genuinely bad for Trump even after accounting for the usual bias.
I disagree. At worst, he screwed up (maybe even got people killed)... doing something that is totally within his area of responsibility and authority. The President can, at will, declassify things.
So, learning experience.
I suspect the press wasn't informed (and didn't go public) every time Obama did something like that. A hostile media still has the potential to explain the whole thing as something that just happens.
The firing of the FBI chief has potential to be way worse. There we are potentially into corrupting the system and conflicts of interest and so forth, "it's not the crime, it's the coverup".
Trump is going to have to up his game if he's going to stay in office.
Blurting it out in the middle of a meeting without knowing what he was blurting or where it came from?[1]
But is that what happened? Or is that just what the Press wants to think happened?
As far as I know, we don't actually know what the *it* of it is. What was said. How it was said. What we know is that it was secret, and discussed in a meeting.
The bottom line is this really is part of Trump's job, so assuming it was blurted out in a meeting needs to be strongly justified... and so far I haven't seen it.
Obama wouldn’t have done it (nor would GWB, Clinton, GHWB, et c.).
We're on the same battle theater as the Russians, shooting at the same people, and our troops are *not* killing theirs and vise versa.
So yes, we (starting with Obama) *are* sharing sensitive intel including where we are, who we kill, and when.
As far as I can tell, the media doesn't know what exactly Trump told the Russians, and he probably can't just come out and announce it in the open. For that matter the Dem "experts" who are talking *also* probably don't know since they don't have a need to know.
Politically this is a wonderful move by the Dems, but there's a war going on and the Russians are right next to us on the battlefield to the point where they need advance warning if we blow up one of their ally's air bases.
Sharing intel is expected and necessary, and all we the public know at the moment is that Trump shared intel.
On “I Read the Comments on Breitbart So You Don’t Have To”
Yes, that exactly.
Then we have the Left focus on the "want social programs" aspect of it, and the Right focus on the "not willing to pay for it" aspect of it.
"
The science says the world is warming. It doesn't say we need to do something about it or life-as-we-know-it-ends. It's expected that "doing something" will be translated into "the Left takes their desired control over the economy".
It's like the politics of gun control. A reasonable interpretation of the Left's position is "no X, at all, and any compromises which restrict X will simply be pocketed along the road to no-X... so you'd better save fall back room for when you lose".
The Right's lack of reasonableness is the mirror image of the Left's lack of reasonableness. I'm not sure which came first (or if that even matters), I'm also not sure if this is a Right/Left thing or just a human thing, or a "this society" thing but whatever.
That the media focuses on the Right's lack of reasonableness and not the Left's is a reflection of where the media's leanings lay. A microscope is put on the Right "denying science" and not the Left's "inflating science".
Nor does the media normally talk about "if they're correct why aren't they screaming for nuclear power" nor "what happens economically if we get rid of global warming gasses" nor "if the Left's plan works then we pay Trillions and delay warming by a few years over the next century, so what would have happened in 2100 will instead happen in 2103."
"
The intentions of these policies are popular, there's great marketing, the outcomes are a problem.
(From your link)
“the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.”
“there are different rules for the well-connected and people with money"
“the wealthy and big corporations are the ones really running this country.”
So let's make a *complex* set of rules enforced with huge federal bureaucracies which result in HRC being able to sell political influence to the tune of $2 Billion.
Let's make it so that no one can truly know what's illegal without a team of legal experts because mom and pop businesses (which historically were responsible for more than half of job creation) will have issues.
Let's talk about taxing the wealthy... with an insanely complex tax code which results in high priced tax lawyers to deal with it and just be *shocked* that the wealthy can afford tax lawyers and normal people can't.
If these policies had resulted in growth, opportunity, and jobs then people would be supporting them. What we've got is excuses, HRC, and claims that growth is impossible and the jobs are gone.
On “The Virtue of Signalling”
Historically "poverty" is a huge evil because it includes threat of starvation. There are places even now where it means "no clean water", "infected by parasites", "malaria", and so forth and so on.
Claiming that cell phones are just a tool (while correct) obscures just how far we've come and that what we call "poor" has a lifestyle old-style kings couldn't afford and big parts of the rest of the world might call middle class.
On “I Read the Comments on Breitbart So You Don’t Have To”
Sure, liberal policies are absolutely popular (free stuff!), it's the paying for them which isn't. That mismatch is one of the big problems in politics.
Doctors are going to insist on getting paid, and the argument is that medicine should be "free". He's pointing out we don't have the money to pay doctors for what you want to force them to do, and he expects the left to, at some point, insist on doing it without money.
Further, from the posted link:
...you’d think that Canada would have a lower rate of bankruptcy than the United States... but... bankruptcy rates are statistically the same on both sides of the 49th parallel....
Further, even with a socialized healthcare system, some Canadians go bankrupt because of medical expenses. Approximately 15 percent of bankrupt Canadian seniors — those 55 and older — cited medical reasons, including uninsured expenses, as the main culprit for their insolvency.
(Other parts of that suggest in the US it's only 10 percent).
Other countries are less murderous, less fat, and have cultural factors which greatly affect cost, outcomes, and system usage. There's no way to import those factors.
No country which has gone to the system wanted has seen HC spending drop, as in "go down". The American experience (and Supply/Demand economics) suggest these sorts of systems are expensive, although perhaps better at keeping down prices over the long haul. However the expensive parts of our system are already baked in.
For example it's less expensive and more efficient to have a ward system where a dozen patients are in one room and can be overseen by one nurse. We don't have that, we're not going to be knocking down hospitals so we can build them that way.
If the desired utopian system is actually going to be less expensive, then do it without tax increases. Also write the laws so if *(*when*) costs explode there's a way to deal with it other than breaking the budget.
On “The Virtue of Signalling”
I celebrated, then I thought better of it.
We could have captured him and sweated him for intel, that would have been good.
We could have shown the world that OBL the "great hero" (to his followers) was just a guy, and probably a cowardly one because he could have gone down fighting. No paradise afterlife for you.
That would have been better.
"
Over the generations, things are getting better, not worse.
Poverty? World wide the number of people living on a dollar a day has dropped a lot over the last 50 years. If we want to narrow our view to just the USA then "poverty" normally includes cell phones and cable which means we need to use a definition like "the bottom X%" to find anyone.
The big change in war is the front line is on our TV, because everyone has a movie camera in their smart phone. If we use numbers rather than emotion to look at the big picture, the number of deaths per year has gone down trends down over the decades.
This website has lots of graphs and information which plot war deaths over the decades and centuries. https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace/
Professional alarmists (including and especially religious ones) can't admit this because it implies that the urgency for their causes is diminishing. If (and when) we solve all of these problems then the goal posts for measuring how evil the world is will be moved.
And you'll have to signal your virtue a different way.
On “Linky Friday: Houses of Warship”
I read things like that and I wonder if the bottom stat is being taken out of context. Does it mean I won't pay my credit card debt for tactical reasons, I need gov support for my rent, or I can't pay my heat bill and it's going to be turned off?
Mass comparisons of income can be weird because you're getting people at different life stages and can run into corner cases (my income has been negative which put me at the bottom of low income).
On “Linky Friday: Here, There, Everywhere”
Multiple issues. First, the press is unusually hostile to Trump compared to other Presidents (even GOP Presidents), and to be fair he's largely earned that. Trump likes creating outrage and channeling it. I can't think of any other POTUS who gave us unfiltered access to his subconscious.
2nd, Trump really is new at this, and many members of his crew are new, and they're not used to working either together or in the context of the White House.
3rd, As far as I can tell, despite having multiple members of the GOP running on this, Trump is the *first* POTUS to actually try shrinking the gov's role and power. It's *supposed* to cost government workers their jobs and reduce their influence.
I expect the EPA to be staffed with people who view environmentalism as a good thing and probably their life calling. I expect the DC administration to be "statists" and think the power of the State is a force for good, or at a bare minimum like their jobs and authority out of self interest.
Some of what we're seeing is push back by what I'll call "the deep state". Among other things this means various interests leak destructively to the Press, and Trump is a lot less protected by the normal machinery of the POTUS because he's threatening the interests of that machinery.
Basically. I'm also saying, although it's unlikely Obama was at fault, if he were then we wouldn't know. As a raw newbie it's stunningly unlikely he had no problems.
TCF accepted more than $100 million from people or entities connected with Uranium One, and yes, (excluding 2.3 million or so) the timeline does NOT match up for a quid pro quo deal, so it was legal. Maybe exactly like there was no quid pro quo deal with the pardons so that was legal too.
Which doesn't change that HRC was collecting money with one hand and giving out gov favors with the other. We can't legally prove a connection which would result in her getting jail time, but the donations instantly dried up when she lost influence.
My view is she's found "legal" ways to be corrupt, which is why all these investigations start and ultimately why they fail.
TCF is used to give jobs to Clinton insiders, fund Clinton causes, and do the various "power and influence" things your typical Billionaire does if they're into that sort of thing. It's a tool for power and influence, and it's funded by power and influence.
Bribery would be a good example of Trump corruption. Up until now he would have had to be giving bribes and not taking them.
Decades ago, Playboy evaluated every POTUS in terms of sexual morality and concluded the *only* POTUS who'd been above reproach was Nixon. To be guilty of one thing doesn't make you guilty of everything, Or in Trump's case, to be guilty of almost everything doesn't make you guilty of everything.
I would not be shocked if Trump branches out into corruption (his business is absurdly well situated to do this, way more than TCF), but thus far it's been a minor side note compared to his many other flaws.
"
Perhaps. Or maybe refusing to care more about this than the Israelis (who presumably know more than I) do is the way to go.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/If-Trump-leaked-Israel-secrets-why-doesnt-Israel-seem-to-care-492057
"
It normally takes a heroic effort to get past the Presidency shielding the President, absent that there's a lot we don't learn. What mistakes did Obama make with classified information, what management mistakes did he make, etc. Were the guns to drug dealers thing Obama's work or someone else's? This was Obama's *first* experience with management/leadership on a job that's both management centered and one of the hardest on the planet.
The expectation should be that the raw newbie did work which reflected that he was a raw newbie. No one picks up a set of clubs for the first time and racks up a professional golf score.
The same logic holds true for Trump but he has different weaknesses. The big difference is we're hearing about Trump's various mis-steps, either because of leaks or because he insists on announcing them.
Not so much "more likely" as I don't think it can be used as proof of outstanding intellect... and if we don't have that, we have *nothing*. He worked for more than a decade in a field where proving intellect is expected and trivial. He managed to do nothing which proved intellect. At some point absence of evidence starts looking like evidence of absence.
You made a prediction about Trump so I'll make one about Obama. He's going to not do anything beyond being articulate and charismatic.
HRC gave uranium mining rights to a Russian mobster. To advance HRC's career, her husband sold a Presidential pardon and also pardoned some unreformed cop killing terrorists. She's had to shut down parts of her "charity" because funding instantly dried up after she couldn't hand out political access.
Corruption is defined as misuse of government resources to enrich yourself and HRC easily wins that contest.
Yes, but at some point you have to wonder if there's skill in flipping that coin. I think he has serious flaws, but those flaws are balanced with strengths and don't represent his totality.
Trump hits the radar as an extreme version of "the charming sociopath".
Agreed.
:Sigh:. "President Pence" continues to have a nice ring. Having said that, history suggests it's remarkably easy to underestimate Trump, even repeatedly. I think it's fair to say his current failures are being examined with a microscope while Obama's were ignored or shielded by the office.
Trump is very much the President we have and not the one we want to have... but I'm going to wait another year before speculating on his overall success or failure. We're still in transition. He has a history of successful management and the bigger the item (implying more personal attention), the better the outcome.
He's the President because he beat, fairly, a large number of better financed, more experienced, opponents who were supported by the system. He represents a sizeable amount of the electorate. For the sake of democracy he deserves a fair chance.
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I think you're making *way* too much of this.
We had an Israeli spy hand over thousands of US secrets to Israel.
We had Snowden and wiki-Leaks release tens or hundreds of thousands of US secrets to the world.
Trump can be taught to shut up and his one secret doesn't seem very big compared to either of those other two.
On “Science and Technology Links 5/18 – “Smells like…” Edition”
RE: Fuzzy Black Matter.
Always good to read how I'm still large, able to influence things, and enigmatic.
On “Linky Friday: Here, There, Everywhere”
I think I agree with most everything you said (and well said btw), but the following is worth a follow up quibble.
There is a lot of room for his predecessor to be *way* more incompetent than normally presented, especially on management type issues. Reagan looked good for a long time, right up until he got so dysfunctional that it caught up with him. Obama's lack of accomplishments where they could be attributed to him should give us pause.
I agree Obama was less corrupt than Trump, but HRC was the actual choice and Trump (although just as, if not more, money seeking) has had a lot less opportunity to turn political influence into profit.
RE: Trump the buffoon...
This takes us into reality TV territory, and that's a tough spot to be in. Trump managed to keep himself interesting and in the public eye for 50 years, and didn't blow himself up. That's *really* hard and suggestive of a *much* brighter mind than his public persona. You add in the money and the businesses and he presumably has management skills. So... maybe. *Probably*.
On the other hand we may be looking at survivor bias. 1024 people play Russian Roulette with a 50/50 odds, 1 lives 10 times, his odds of an 11th is 50%.
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It certainly makes him look bad. There are options other than bragging. Media reports that he told them about laptop bombs (which the airlines have been guarding against since March) and what city they're being made in.
The problem is "what city they're made in" part. Presumably ISIS knows what city they're making them in, and now that they know we know they'll move the factory.
Of course they wouldn't know we know without the leaker who apparently wanted to make Trump look bad.
On “An Unfortunate Turn of Events”
Thank you, that's a very good article. Puts things into focus.
On “Linky Friday: Here, There, Everywhere”
That's too much planning, it's more basic than that. Members of the Press are human and they, as individuals, wanted to see Obama succeed. It was a great moment in history and all that. So they looked for evidence to support that viewpoint and discarded evidence which suggested the guy with no management experience (or leadership, etc) didn't do management or leadership very well.
With Trump, we have the opposite. And in a large, new organization run by a new boss who hasn't done this before, there are going to be issues. There'd absolutely be negative things to report even if everything was going great and if Trump were a normal guy.
Put differently, how many members of the Press are Trump supporters? Are they shamelessly talking about how they get a tingle of excitement when he enters the room (presumably because of his Aura of Greatness)?
It's more, I'm going to wait a while and see if this is actually a thing. Explosive news is often wrong in the first day or three and everything about Trump is "explosive".
I especially find leaks from the "deep state" or whatever problematic when they're talking about what might be ignored if any other President were doing it.
Hyperbolic and an exaggeration to express a point.
But not in the real world? The polling and predictions were shockingly inaccurate. Multiple people on this site have recently made comments to the effect that America proved it's a racist country by voting in Trump and all Conservatives are racists.
Media bias played a part in the media's lack of predictive accuracy for the election, they were *that* removed from the electorate. That bias didn't go away after the election, it might have gotten worse.
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I do not envy whoever has the job of managing Trump, his public stands, and his mouth.
I don't think they want to "compensate".
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I disagree. At worst, he screwed up (maybe even got people killed)... doing something that is totally within his area of responsibility and authority. The President can, at will, declassify things.
So, learning experience.
I suspect the press wasn't informed (and didn't go public) every time Obama did something like that. A hostile media still has the potential to explain the whole thing as something that just happens.
The firing of the FBI chief has potential to be way worse. There we are potentially into corrupting the system and conflicts of interest and so forth, "it's not the crime, it's the coverup".
Trump is going to have to up his game if he's going to stay in office.
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There may be lots of that going around.
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If people repeating other people is the standard, then Mike Brown was shot in the back and cannibalism happened during hurricane katrina.
Haven't we seen this before?
On “Morning Ed: Law & Order {2017.05.16.Tu}”
Didn't the Russians already do it? Admit that Jerusalem is the capital and all that.
On “Linky Friday: Here, There, Everywhere”
But is that what happened? Or is that just what the Press wants to think happened?
As far as I know, we don't actually know what the *it* of it is. What was said. How it was said. What we know is that it was secret, and discussed in a meeting.
The bottom line is this really is part of Trump's job, so assuming it was blurted out in a meeting needs to be strongly justified... and so far I haven't seen it.
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We're on the same battle theater as the Russians, shooting at the same people, and our troops are *not* killing theirs and vise versa.
So yes, we (starting with Obama) *are* sharing sensitive intel including where we are, who we kill, and when.
As far as I can tell, the media doesn't know what exactly Trump told the Russians, and he probably can't just come out and announce it in the open. For that matter the Dem "experts" who are talking *also* probably don't know since they don't have a need to know.
Politically this is a wonderful move by the Dems, but there's a war going on and the Russians are right next to us on the battlefield to the point where they need advance warning if we blow up one of their ally's air bases.
Sharing intel is expected and necessary, and all we the public know at the moment is that Trump shared intel.
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Translation: Talking with the Russians is part of his job. No one would lift an eyebrow if it'd been some Prez other than Trump who had done it.
If it's something Obama could do without anyone blinking, then it's Media hysteria.
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