Former F.B.I. Director Named Special Counsel for Russia Investigation
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Rabid radical idiots inflame passions, drive engagement, sharing, etc. Rationalism and thoughtfulness simply can't compete. It's too hard and complicated.
I've seen many websites go this way. Some choose to misrepresent issues to rile up their user base. I've stopped patronizing sites that I contributed to for over a decade as a result.
Always remember the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
― Michael Crichton
Curious though, what would you hope to hear discussed? Geopolitical intrigue? Tech industry angle?
Here's one interesting thing I'll say: The vast majority of this kind of "news" consists of non-events. Think about it when you see the next story. So-and-so will have delivered a form to whats-her-face over in the fleem department and their press office will be releasing comments to the newspapers. None of this stuff means anything if you don't know the context. It's pretty funny.
A contractor that I work with has been hit really hard by rapidly increased monthly health care premiums, so he is not in favor of Obama care. On the other hand, my significant other is medically disabled, and the ACA has been a godsend for her. For myself, I'm comfortable with employer provided insurance, don't have family coverage, so that issue doesn't affect me personally either way.
I'd like to hear more specifics issues like this, along with possible solutions that have a good chance of working.
Also, any stories deemed mostly political can just be moved there instead of being censored/shutdown with flagged and reserve flagged for truly nonstories and spam.
It's an opportunity a startup. Think of what Quora did to Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers. A startup that can deliver a higher-level of discussion but for politics and current events.
Because in a truly impartial investigation, this is a possible outcome.
Will these results be accepted, or are we off for another round of whatever the last 6+ months of daily outrage can be called?
Mueller is a partisan who offered to fall on his sword to provide Bush Jr political cover during a scandal.
They needed to appoint someone genuinely neutral instead of someone like that. Lol.
If you're going to accuse him of partisanship, by all means post some citations.
I'm aware. You seem to believe it means something more than Obama didn't have any major scandals to worry about that involved the FBI.
> If you're going to accuse him of partisanship, by all means post some citations.
He is a registered Republican that backed the vast majority of their programs that were later found unconstitutional. He only ever pushed back when it involved Bush trying to get a guy in a hospital bed to sign an order overturning one small portion of it.
There isn't any way to "prove" someone is a partisan to people's satisfaction if the man's career doesn't speak for itself already.
"In May 2011, President Obama asked Director Mueller to continue at the helm of the FBI for two additional years beyond his normal 10-year term, which was expiring on September 4, 2011."
and
"Director Mueller, along with Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey, threatened to resign from office in March 2004 if the White House overruled a Department of Justice finding that domestic wiretapping without a court warrant was unconstitutional. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft denied his consent to attempts by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to waive the Justice Department ruling and permit the domestic warrantless eavesdropping program to proceed. On March 12, 2004, President George W. Bush gave his support to changes in the program sufficient to satisfy the concerns of Mueller, Ashcroft and Comey."
and
"After leaving the FBI in 2013, Mueller served a one-year term as consulting professor and the Arthur and Frank Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University where he focused on issues related to cyber-security. He gave a speech and Q&A on March 8, 2017 at Anderson University, where he stated, "For the bureau, one of the most important things is integrity."
The layman who reads such an account of his career would be well-justified in asking how you have reached your conclusion, because the above would indicate that Mueller is recognized as a man of integrity by Presidents from both political parties. So I say again: if you're going to accuse him of partisanship, by all means post some citations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/us/politics/comey-russia-... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/opinion/donald-trumps-fir...
I'm starting to think there is something to what all those trumpsters have been saying... I simply cannot keep up with the 180 narrative flips going on in the media right now.
It feels like the media is just thrashing right now. One week we are told Trump fired Comey to stop the investigation on his ties to Russia. To be honest, I had a hard time swallowing that a thing like that hinged on 1 person at the FBI. But now if you read all these papers they are saying Trump is in for it because Robert Mueller is named special council in the Trump/Russia investigation. So the investigation goes on, even though last week it wasn't supposed to according to the same sources.
That leads me to the other recent thing regarding the Comey memo. The FBI (Comey) cleared Flynn January 24th but this "memo" says Trump asked Comey in mid-February to let Flynn go. Why would anybody regardless of their intelligence ask for something they've already gotten?
Long story short: I'm having a hard time making any sense of what seems like obvious problems with the reporting. Yet I see no clarifications, redactions, or anybody even trying to clear up the mess that quite frankly feels like targeting. I get why they are targeting Trump after the things Trump said about them. But once everybody stoops to the same level... I don't feel like there is anybody worth listening to.
That doesn't mean that firing him was actually sufficient to stop the investigation. To stop the FBI's investigation, Trump would have to nominate a strong ally as the next FBI director, and Congress would have to confirm them. Getting Congress to confirm a partisan nominee would be tricky to start with, and much harder with the media furor.
Separately from (but complementary to) the FBI investigation, there's the question of a special prosecutor, which can be appointed either by Congress (making them part of the legislative branch and independent from the executive branch), or by the Justice Department (which is nominally under the president's authority, but only in the sense that Trump could fire Rosenstein and cause an even bigger shitstorm). The latter is what just happened.
January 24th is when the FBI interviewed Flynn. On the same day, anonymous sources told the press that they had found "no evidence of impropriety" in the phone calls - but that's different from the FBI formally closing the investigation. Among other things, it leaked much later (around February 16) that Flynn had falsely told his interviewers that he hadn't discussed sanctions in those calls, whereas the recordings showed that he had. This potentially opened the door to charges of lying to law enforcement. The second round of leaks said that the FBI believed he was trying to be "truthful" and wasn't intentionally lying, so was unlikely to be charged, but again, that's different from formally closing an investigation. Even now, the broader investigation into Trump-Russia ties continues, and Flynn remains a part of that investigation.
>I simply cannot keep up with the 180 narrative flips going on in the media right now.
It's almost like the real world is a complicated place where there are many different versions of a story
Personally, I wouldn't trust anyone that partisan to investigate Republicans. Honestly, I fully expect him to come back with a handful of middlemen + Flynn and nothing touches any elected Republicans. Not because its true, but because its his marching orders.