Flynn pleads guilty on Russia, reportedly ready to testify against Trump

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia/flynn-pleads-guilty-on-russia-reportedly-ready-to-testify-against-trump-idUSKBN1DV50N








Interesting story, but I don't think it will amount to much. I'm sure that trump was talking to Russia, and many other countries. But I doubt it was about hacking the election in Trump's favor.




/e Senate intel panel's top Democrat: Lawmakers will want talk to Kushner again

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-panel/senate-intel-panels-top-democrat-lawmakers-will-want-talk-to-kushner-again-idUSKBN1DV5S5

you're copy pasta'ing yourself now?

here i thought your post stock couldn't drop any more.

Yeah he hasn't been great for a Conservative agenda... long way to go though.



Except their "opposition" is crying about a Russian collusion myth that got him elected somehow. There's plenty of actual issues they could be opposing versus crying about nothing. When Obama was in office it was all about opposition to actual bills etc. Republicans were strongly against Obamacare, illegal immigration etc. It was issues. Only a few were doing stupid shit like questioning if he was American or not.

With any luck people will understand after this presidency that experience is necessary for the highest fucking office in the country....

hey genius, they voted to repeal obamacare hundreds of time knowing it wouldn't get past Obummer's desk. they knew they could safely be against obamacare without even having a better idea, they've admitted as much over and over as they've failed to put a replacement on Trump's desk.

whether or not the subject is a policy makes little difference to how much they actually want to govern. the opposite of opposition is governance. Both obamacare repeals and the russian shit have a lot more to do with optics driven opposition politics than they do actual policy.

Can you name one specific instance when Republican opposition resulted in a bill that had any chance of passing?

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Dec 1 2017 03:17pm

Presidents don't normally try to leave turds in the oval office for the incoming administration. The normal routine for transitions is that the outgoing president can accomplish things that would be too politically toxic to approach while he was in power, but which aren't necessarily at odds with the next guy. If an outgoing president enacts a policy that he knows his successor is going to immediately rescind, what has he accomplished? Obama left many such last minute policy changes that he was fully aware would be undone by Trump asap. For example, the federal annexation of Bear Ears- Republicans were openly plotting how they'd undo that before Trump was inaugurated. Or the mandate that said states had to pay Planned Parenthood or lose their federal funding. That particular doozy was plainly unconstitutional as a retroactive condition on already allocated funding (same reason Trump's sanctuary city EOs are just as unconstitutional), but in this situation Obama knew that this PP condition was unconstitutional, that Trump opposed it and would rescind it, and that it would never actually apply for a single budget cycle and thus have zero impact on funding. The only impact was on Trump, basically smearing shit in his face when Trump had to go endure a news cycle of headlines saying "TRUMP DEFUNDS PLANNED PARENTHOOD".

Now I'm just two into that list. The sanctions on Russia and the UN vote on Israeli settlements are just two more out of uh, many. I think there was some regulation with refrigerators or something? I don't think I ever made a copy/pasta list of it. But the basic rub of the UN vote on Israel was that we had spent decades vetoing Europe's attempts to condemn Israel's building of settlements in Palestinian land. They kept pushing that at the UN, we kept vetoing. After Trump won, Obama did a 180 compared to his continued vetos during his presidency, and instead allowed the UN to condemn Israel. At least this was something Trump couldn't exactly undo.

But the nuance worth noting here is that these are things that Obama showed no inclination towards doing when Hillary was anticipated to win the election, and things that went against Obama's own policies, not just his record in office when constrained by politics, but his ideological standing with the Obama Doctrine. Going out and needlessly offending our allies and stirring up geopolitical trouble is antithetical to Obama's own pragmatic diplomacy. This was the "more flexibility after my election" "reset" guy on Russia, who suddenly plunged us into tensions.

And last: Obama was fully aware of why Putin interfered in the election, and that it was a tit-for-tat retaliation against Hillary's own interfering in his domestic affairs. Obama was no fool, he knew Putin's motivation and how Trump wasn't directly involved. And that begs the question of whether its actually "absolutely appropriate" to retaliate to the retaliation. That's precisely the kind of reciprocal escalation that Trump was trying to avert. In terms of geopolitical maneuvers, Obama knew who was in the wrong and the history with Hillary, hell, he was the one who had probably made exactly the same kind of plea to Putin to calm his tits that Trump was ironically doing this time around, back in 2011 when Putin let Hillary's meddling slide and didn't retaliate against the USA or Obama, after Obama and Biden struck a neutral conciliatory tone. Doesn't take much speculation to figure Obama may have pulled the same move as Trump.



Can we safely say that barring such reassurance from Trump, that Putin would not have escalated with reciprocal measures to the sanctions?
He was openly threatening it and was widely reported as furious and itching to descend into the old cold war tit-for-tats

If Obama had carpet bombed Pyongyang on January 19th 2017, I'm not sure Kim Jong Un would be very understanding when it came to Trump

The problem is there were multiple bills and one could not be agreed upon amongst Republicans. Yeah that's definitely a problem but once it's repealed they'd be forced to come up with something and it'd sure as heck be a lot better than Obamacare.

So true they arent realizing how trump is great, i hope things continue like this for 1-2 more years.
Cant wait to see the balance sheet once it's done. They desserve it isnt it ?

It's not just a problem, it shows their "opposition" wasn't genuinely about "issues"

Anybody who paid any level of attention during the Obama administration was aware of this. The Republicans made a point of opposing everything Obama did just because Obama did it, and they even admitted this was their goal several times during his presidency.