Let me ask again: How is "apparently jesus done it" politics?
As for the Notre Dame episode, it can definitely be a part of politics. At the very least, because such a monument can affect what people and societies do, eg. feel more togetherness instead of something else.
I believe the image I posted is politics to the same degree as the image you posted. I don't see why it wouldn't be. If you don't agree, obviously it is within your power to move it to the thread you suggested.
I should hope you have a good reason though, lest it seem like moderators are playing favourites.
It made me sad to see that people were so quick to mock or berate others for being upset about the Notre-Dame fire. Notre-Dame is a symbol on so many levels that you can't really narrow it down to say that the strong reaction is just because it's Christian and/or Western. For me, a non-christian, it's been important for all my life because I've found so much inspiration in its art and architecture, as well as in its place in literature and popular culture.
I do think this could lead to some great discussions about how and why we value cultural heritage. But I don't see the point in pitting different tragedies like this against each other. I saw at least two people who called others hypocrites and rhetorically asked why there had been no outrage during ISIL's destruction of Palmyra, or when the National Museum of Iraq was looted back in 2003. Which surprised me, since there was an enormous outrage in both cases. The loss of cultural heritage during the Syria civil war has been discussed for years now.
It's true though that the reactions were different, and not as immediately strong, compared to Notre-Dame. But I don't think the reactions would have been that strong if, say, the equally awesome cathedral in Chartres had gone through the same thing either. There are just few places in the world that have managed to become a symbol on so many levels like Notre-Dame has. At the moment, I can only think of the great pyramid of Giza and perhaps Acropolis.
I am positive there had to have been mass shootings before Columbine, but I honestly can't remember any. It's in it's own way as significant an event as 9/11, because of the modus operandi all later shooters would follow.
Wikipedia has a list, they go back to the the 19th century IIRC. I'll mention some that stick in my mind from my prior reading in the past, and provide links to recall details and for other readers.
How about the University of Texas "clocktower sniper" in 1966? One of my aunts was a UT student at the time, according to my dad. Referenced in "Full Metal Jacket". Charles Whitman had a brain tumor that made him psychotic. An ex-Marine, he bought several guns, killed his mother and wife, then went to the top of the clock tower in the middle of the campus and started shooting random people. Killed well over a dozen and injured dozens more (Wikipedia lists 18 and 31).
"The Luby's shooting". In 1991, guy drove his truck through a Luby's (in Texas) and started shooting people. Killed 23, wounded 27. This sticks in my mind, aside from the imagery of a ramrod attack, because at least one person had a gun, but it was in their car. It was actually the deadliest mass shooting, until the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting.
How THE HELL IS THIS NOT DREDGED UP MORE? Because it's not a shooting? In 1927, School treasurer detonated hundreds of pounds of explosives at a school, killing 36 children.
Anyways, there was one that happened in 1945-1946. Army guy decided that the Germans hadn't suffered enough, so he took over a machine gun mounted in a POW camp in...Iowa I think, and turned it on the prisoners during the middle of the night. Needless to say, he was court martialed and dishonorably discharged after that. For some reason, can't find the wikipedia link any more.
William Barr is an utter disgrace. He is essentially saying that Trump was forced to obstruct justice because the media was mean to him and he was frustrated. But remember, Hillary was too emotional to be President. What an utter sham that was. Trump found his man. Barr is everything I've been saying he is and worse.
Again, Barr himself basically admits in a roundabout way that yes, Trump engaged in activity that could be considered obstruction, but he can't be liable for it because his position is too important. This is no different than a long-winded version of "if the President does it, it's not illegal". And if the investigation was interfered with by the most powerful man in the world, then it by default not completed to the full extent it could have been. Every citizen of the United States should realize that at this moment we don't have an Attorney General, we have Trump's personal attorney acting in that position, which is what he wanted from the beginning. This corruption has to be grabbed by the root and pulled out before it's too late. It may already be too late.
As someone who has no real personal connection to Notre Dame, this news still hurts. Cathedrals in general are beautiful works of art. I can't imagine how painful this must be those who hold it as a source of pride.
Would this still make people sad if it was a Pagan Temple that burned? Or when Christianity build it on top of a Pagan Holy Site? The land was home to a temple to Jupiter (Zeus) prior.
Yes. Though I think it has far more to do with the historical and cultural impact, than whatever religion is tied to it.
As someone who has no real personal connection to Notre Dame, this news still hurts. Cathedrals in general are beautiful works of art. I can't imagine how painful this must be those who hold it as a source of pride.
Would this still make people sad if it was a Pagan Temple that burned? Or when Christianity build it on top of a Pagan Holy Site? The land was home to a temple to Jupiter (Zeus) prior.
Yes. Though I think it has far more to do with the historical and cultural impact, than whatever religion is tied to it.
I agree that the reaction has little or nothing to do with the religion. Instead it's related to the fame and cultural importance of the site and hugely exacerbated by the nature of the incident. We're all guilty of responding to sudden events in a more extreme way than slower ones. I might be vaguely sorry that the Taj Mahal is gently being destroyed by air pollution, but there's no strong emotion associated with that. If, though, it were to burn down tomorrow, I would expect to feel considerable sorrow.
The Russian propaganda reached estimated 129 million people on Facebook.
Twitter was similar. Twitter identified 50,258 automated accounts connected to Russia that tweeted more than a million times in the 10 weeks prior to the election. Lol at citation of Sean Hannity retweeting Russian IRA propaganda (p.28 note 74).
Additionally
"President Trump reacted negatively to the Special Counsel's appointment. He told advisors that it was the end of his presidency, sought to have Attorney General Jeff Sessions unrecuse from the Russia is and to have the Special Counsel removed, and engaged in efforts to curtail the Special Counsel's investigation and prevent the disclosure of evidence to it, including through public and private contacts with potential witnesses." (p. 8)
The report is not only vindicating massive amounts of reporting, but is showing two things. #1 is that under any reasonable interpretation, Trump obstructed justice. He isn't being charged because Mueller CAN'T charge him based on DOJ guidelines and meant this to be a roadmap for Congress. The second is that there was "collusion" (for the 100th time, never a legal term) all over the damn place. Especially with Manafort. And the insinuation seems to be that the only reason Don Jr. wasn't indicted is because he was too stupid to realize what he was doing was possibly illegal. But moreover, we now know EXACTLY why they kept this under wraps for a month to frame the story. This is in no way a "total exoneration". That phrase should now be in the pantheon with "mission accomplished". This, AT BEST for the Trump crew, paints them as willful, cynical participants in a foreign intelligence operation to swing the election, and that Trump blatantly tried to obstruct the investigation at every turn, and the only reason it finished at all was because people continually refused to carry out his illegal orders. Here are some more nuggets:
Good that we're seeing it. I was afraid it was going to remain hidden indefinitely. I'm reading live excerpts from it here.
It seems that the Mueller report is not going to settle every issue. We've got answers on a bunch of different things, but there are some things that aren't yet resolved and even the parts for which Trump isn't going to be prosecuted very clearly don't amount to exoneration.
On the issue of conspiracy with the Russian government, the Mueller report found multiple examples of contacts between the Trump team and the Russian government and found that they acted along similar lines, but it was not sufficient to establish a criminal case. Part of the reasoning was:
An agreement “requires more than the two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to other’s actions or interests.”
That is, the fact that the Trump team and the Russian government were sending out some of the same messages and benefiting each other was not enough to warrant a trial; we would need a more explicit example of intentional conspiracy in order to charge Trump with criminal conspiracy.
Long story short, if Trump committed criminal conspiracy with Russia, we don't have enough evidence to convict him in court. We cannot get to "yes" or "no," so we're probably going to be stuck with "maybe." I think that's more or less the end of that story.
Some, if not all, of those contacts with Russians were found to be innocent. So, we do have a "no" for a few specific events like the Russian Ambassador Kislyak's talks with Trump campaign officials in April 2016.
About the "no new indictments" thing I brought up earlier, and the fact that Trump could not be indicted anyway: the Mueller report said that the president could in fact commit obstruction of justice, and that Congress could determine that. We've got multiple examples of Trump making concrete attempts to hobble or completely shut down the Mueller investigation. The report is pretty explicit that they're not clearing him of obstruction of justice:
The evidence we obtained about the president’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
So that question is unresolved. Part of the problem, according to the report, is that some of the President's actions were uses of typical powers. In that case, the question would be, "Does it count as obstruction if the President could do it for non-corrupt reasons?" That apparently doesn't have a solid legal answer (I'm guessing the question has never come up before). The Mueller report only said they were "not persuaded" that this was the case.
Notably, the obstruction of justice is larger than simply Comey's firing, or even his numerous public attempts to delegitimize it.
In early 2018, the press reported that the president had directed McGahn to have the special counsel removed in June 2017 and that McGahn had threatened to resign rather than carry out the order. The president reacted to the news stories by directing White House officials to tell McGahn to dispute the story and to create a record stating he had not been ordered to have the special counsel removed. McGahn told those officials that the media reports were accurate in stating that the president had directed McGahn to have the special counsel removed. The president then met with McGahn in the Oval Office and again pressured him to deny the reports. In the same meeting, the president also asked McGahn why he had told the special counsel about the president’s effort to remove the special counsel and why McGahn took notes of his conversation with the president.
So he did in fact try to shut down the Mueller investigation completely. Trump's efforts to subvert the investigation were wide-ranging:
The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony. Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.
There are other criminal matters that the Mueller probe uncovered but did not have the jurisdiction to handle itself, and has therefore made referrals. There are 14 other alleged crimes still to be investigated, but we only know about 2 of them, involving Michael Cohen and Gregory B. Craig, an Obama administration counsel.
We do know that Trump viewed the Mueller probe as a serious threat to his entire presidency even early on, and was extremely upset about Sessions' recusal. When Mueller took over the investigation, he apparently thought he would be removed from office by the end of it.
When he learned of Mr. Mueller’s appointment, he slumped in his chair and said, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”
This is about what I expected. This still leaves the question of why he viewed the investigation with so much fear, but the conspiracy issue apparently is settled for the foreseeable future--which means that, if Trump did not conspire with the Russian government, he apparently was afraid that the investigation would uncover some other crime or impeachable offense. But I have no idea what that could possibly be.
Notably, we have, to this day, no indication that the Mueller probe was politically motivated, which means Trump could not have feared the investigation simply because he assumed the investigators would be biased. Again, we're talking about an investigation which began months before Trump was elected, and which was headed by a registered Republican with no anti-Trump history. Note that this paragraph is my opinion; not a finding by the Mueller report.
It seems that Trump's refusal to sit for an interview was not the only reason the special counsel did not interview him. They also believed it unnecessary.
We also assessed that based on the significant body of evidence we had already obtained of the President’s actions and his public and private statements describing or explaining those actions, we had sufficient evidence to understand relevant events and to make certain assessments without the President’s testimony
I suppose this isn't too surprising. I'm not sure how much real information they could have gleaned from Trump. Some folks have speculated that Trump would commit perjury during any such interview, but from the special counsel's perspective, getting false information wouldn't have served any point--their goal was not to get him in trouble, but to collect information.
We have no evidence that, when Cohen lied to Congress, he was under direct instructions from Trump.
The end report appears fairly close to what I've expected. Although I had second thoughts a few months ago, I've long doubted that Trump actively coordinated with the Russian government, and while there's some evidence that this was the case, it was not conclusive. It's slightly more damning than I expected on that point. On the issue of obstruction, it's slightly less damning than I expected; I thought the obstruction of justice question would be more conclusive.
The report has only just come out and people are still reading it, but so far, this is a pretty damn grim spectacle for American politics. I don't believe we've seen a more blatant effort to thwart public scrutiny since Watergate.
As someone who has no real personal connection to Notre Dame, this news still hurts. Cathedrals in general are beautiful works of art. I can't imagine how painful this must be those who hold it as a source of pride.
Would this still make people sad if it was a Pagan Temple that burned? Or when Christianity build it on top of a Pagan Holy Site? The land was home to a temple to Jupiter (Zeus) prior.
I think if something happened to Stonehenge people would still be a bit affected, even though they’ve never visited. Although, that is still Western Culture. I doubt people would be as sadden if it was something like Angkor Wat.
You are making an assumption on how "white europeans" would react to the burning of Angkor Wat? For Reallz? Also, Stonehenge is not Western Culture, it's pre Abrahamic.
I think in general, Europeans would be more upset at the destruction of Stonehenge than the destruction of Angkor Wat--not because of any bias or anything bad like that, but simply because Stonehenge would hit closer to home. That's not a negative judgment about white folks; that applies to most any culture. I have little doubt that a disaster at Mount Rushmore or the Forbidden City would have very different impacts on Americans and Chinese people, and I don't think we'd fault them for it.
The report has only just come out and people are still reading it, but so far, this is a pretty damn grim spectacle for American politics. I don't believe we've seen a more blatant effort to thwart public scrutiny since Watergate.
As John Oliver has repeatedly said "This is a slow moving 'Stupid Watergate''.
The report has only just come out and people are still reading it, but so far, this is a pretty damn grim spectacle for American politics. I don't believe we've seen a more blatant effort to thwart public scrutiny since Watergate.
As John Oliver has repeatedly said "This is a slow moving 'Stupid Watergate''.
It's also concrete proof that Nixon's theory of the Executive has come to fruition thanks to a 45+ year effort to make it so. The ONLY reason Trump hasn't been charged in both SDNY and in the Mueller probe is the nature of his office and this theory of an Executive Branch with unlimited power and no culpability outside of impeachment. As I have said 100 times, Nixon survives in 2019. Without question.
He has three tweets in the last 6 hours that just state “No collusion No Obstruction” and then retweeting Judicial Watch about Hillary’s emails.
I wonder who in the WH has to read the report to him? I wonder if anyone is actually going to read the report to him or just let him believe it still says there was no obstruction.
What disturbs me is that these episodes suggest that a more intelligent man could do the same things as Trump and get away with them if he does not obviously telegraph his motives like Trump has done on Twitter. If a President can fire anyone who won't crush investigations for him and shield him from scrutiny, he can get away with almost anything and hide almost any secret.
He has three tweets in the last 6 hours that just state “No collusion No Obstruction” and then retweeting Judicial Watch about Hillary’s emails.
I wonder who in the WH has to read the report to him? I wonder if anyone is actually going to read the report to him or just let him believe it still says there was no obstruction.
The entire thing is being run as a PR operation, from Barr on down. From the moment this was delivered to Barr, the intent was to manipulate public opinion so they could play it to a draw when it finally came out. Minutes before the report was intially delivered to Barr a month ago, a reporter for WIRED sent out a tweet stating emphatically that her sources said the report was incredibly damaging to the President, but that is not what we would intially see thanks to Barr. This entire month has been nothing but media narrative manipulation. Barr's press conference this morning now seems even more utterly ludicrous than it already did.
As someone who has no real personal connection to Notre Dame, this news still hurts. Cathedrals in general are beautiful works of art. I can't imagine how painful this must be those who hold it as a source of pride.
Would this still make people sad if it was a Pagan Temple that burned? Or when Christianity build it on top of a Pagan Holy Site? The land was home to a temple to Jupiter (Zeus) prior.
I think if something happened to Stonehenge people would still be a bit affected, even though they’ve never visited. Although, that is still Western Culture. I doubt people would be as sadden if it was something like Angkor Wat.
I certainly would. And I believe I speak for all my fellow History Channel adicts. :P
OK. I have now finished reading the Mueller report, although I skim read quite a bit of it. Others have provided plenty of commentary, so I'll only refer to the bits that I was particularly struck by or interested in. Page numbers given below are the PDF page numbers and not those on the face of the report itself.
On page 17 the report refers to the numerous links between the Trump Campaign and Russia
The report goes on to give details of those and make it clear that they had established those links (in the context of the report "establish" means to prove to a criminal standard - see for instance the last paragraph on page 181).
The decision not to prosecute was on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence of criminal conspiracy, not that there were no concerns raised by those links.
Starting on page 41 details are given about the Trump Campaign's promotion of political materials produced by Russia (I find it hard to use IRA, as for older people in the UK that acronym is so firmly established as meaning something else). This is part of the evidence that supports the Mueller report's conclusion that the Campaign were willingly making use of material they knew to have been collected illegally by a foreign power. While that may not reach the standard for criminal conspiracy it certainly merits being placed in the politically undesirable actions category ...
On page 138 (among other places) the report explains why it did not regard the sharing of internal private polling data with Russia as evidence of conspiracy. That was because it was felt Manafort may have acted alone in doing this - as a means of persuading the Russians to end some litigation and pay him money.
Starting on page 193 the report discusses the Trump Tower meeting. As has already been mentioned the report explains the decision not to prosecute here is not because Mueller believes the conduct to be legal, but because of the potentially difficulty in establishing that Trump Jr knew it was illegal.
The first volume of the report about Russian links is heavily redacted. However, the second volume about obstruction, starting on page 213 is relatively complete. The volume starts with an explanation of the decision not to make a prosecutorial judgement about obstruction. That was done on the grounds of:
1) the Department of Justice guidance against indicting a sitting President.
2) the fact that a President can be indicted after leaving office (at which time all the evidence Mueller collected would be available for a decision on prosecution).
3) the potential problem of fairness in a process that concluded the President committed a crime without allowing him to defend himself in court (assuming the DoJ guidance ultimately prevailed).
Volume 2 though goes on to list in detail potential obstruction issues and analyses the legal implications of those. Those analyses vary, but in some cases it is clear that Mueller has in fact concluded that the President did act illegally - so but for the general considerations listed above he would undoubtedly have been prosecuted already.
The report gives Trump's written answers to Mueller's questions (which, as they were clearly written by lawyers, are pretty uninteresting). However, one thing I hadn't appreciated was that the written answers were only provided for the Russian links (after more than a year of being requested). The President refused to even give written answers (let alone be interviewed) in relation to the question of obstruction. An interesting legal position there, with someone being obstructive over a potential charge of obstruction .
Page 288 summarizes various bits of discussion about the President's motives in trying to end the Russia investigation. Even though conspiracy with Russia has not been proven, Mueller concludes that Trump would have been concerned about an FBI investigation uncovering both crimes and politically embarrassing material.
This ties in to a last point, which is less about the report than Barr's summary of it. In his summary Barr said that he was declining to prosecute for obstruction partly because no crime had been committed and there was therefore no nexus as required by law. Multiple legal scholars have already disagreed with that line of reasoning, but what Barr didn't say was that Mueller had also considered the same point in his report and come out very, very clearly saying that a crime did not have to have been proven for obstruction to occur.
I also questioned some time ago the BBC coverage of the Barr summary, which I thought accepted far too much at face value what Barr said it included. Having read the report I think the BBC got their earlier stories (including a rehash I saw yesterday in anticipation of the report's release) badly wrong.
This report is insane. Forget about being underwhelming, this is actually WORSE than I imagined. And the degree to which Barr lied about it's findings right up to the moment it was released is almost hard to fathom. These people truly believe they are untouchable.
This report is insane. Forget about being underwhelming, this is actually WORSE than I imagined. And the degree to which Barr lied about it's findings right up to the moment it was released is almost hard to fathom. These people truly believe they are untouchable.
Yeah. I agree.
My major take away from this whole scenario is that the arguments finding that the media had absolutely botched their reporting on the investigation were oversold, and the knee jerk "exoneration" of Trump that followed it looks pretty weak.
They look as bad as everyone who thought there would be a smoking gun when the investigation wrapped and impeachment was soon to follow.
I simply do not understand why not knowing they were breaking the law was used as an excuse to not prosecute both Jr and Kushner.
“The government would unlikely be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the June 9 meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful,” the report reads but:
ignorantia legis neminem excusat Is something I learnt in a high school law class and I wonder why it was used to pardon them here.
I get the $2000 threshold would be hard to prove, especially since they got nothing from that meeting but once again, IMO, it doesn’t excuse holding it in the first place.
I simply do not understand why not knowing they were breaking the law was used as an excuse to not prosecute both Jr and Kushner.
“The government would unlikely be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the June 9 meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful,” the report reads but:
ignorantia legis neminem excusat Is something I learnt in a high school law class and I wonder why it was used to pardon them here.
I get the $2000 threshold would be hard to prove, especially since they got nothing from that meeting but once again, IMO, it doesn’t excuse holding it in the first place.
It is pretty infuriating. I wonder how many poor people over the years might have wanted to use this defense in regards to whatever they were charged with. In some ways, Mueller's restraint in all this can be seen as almost admirable (frankly, the Trump crew should be thanking their lucky stars they had someone was legally conservative as Mueller heading this thing), but this whole "I'm too stupid to understand what I was doing" has, as far as I know, never worked in any case ever.
The fact is, Mueller, for whatever reason, believed the proper place to have this out is in the US Congress. This is as much a roadmap for impeachment as the Watergate investigation was. Which is exactly what Barr's bullshit was meant to head off at the pass.
As for the media mea culpa, the one they should be having is the fact that so many of them bought into what William Barr was selling for the last month, but ESPECIALLY in the initial days after Mueller submitted his report.
We also know now that Mueller stuck STRICTLY to his mandate. This is not Whitewater turning into a Oval Office blowjob. Mueller and his team did not follow the money (and the money laundering). But someone should, and hopefully someone is. But there is so goddamn much still redacted in this thing, and so many (14) cases have been funneled out to other jurisdictions, who even knows?? Taken in totality, what is truly still stunning to behold after all this time is how unbridled and bottomless the corruption of Trump and those in his orbit is. Watergate?? You have to go back to Teapot Dome or Tammany Hall to find anything like this.
I also now believe, irrespective of the political ramifications of this, that the House Democrats MUST start seriously considering impeachment proceedings, regardless of the inevitable outcome in the Senate. Trump is found to have attempted to obstruct the investigation not once, or twice, but TEN times. If this is allowed to stand without SOME branch of the government pushing back, then we are just descending further into the abyss.
As a side note to all this (in the overall scheme of this) the fact that Sarah Sanders admitted to the Special Counsel she deliberately lied to the press about the Comey firing to avoid perjuring herself is about the most perfect encapsulation of her mendacity and cowardice as I can imagine, and I can't imagine taking any reporter willing to sit in a room and have her answer their questions seriously ever again.
A few crimes do require criminal intent to convict. That was actually a factor in one of the accusations against Clinton. That may or may not relate to ignorantia legis neminem excusat, but dumb mistakes or innocent intentions can mean no charges in some cases.
Comments
I believe the image I posted is politics to the same degree as the image you posted. I don't see why it wouldn't be. If you don't agree, obviously it is within your power to move it to the thread you suggested.
I should hope you have a good reason though, lest it seem like moderators are playing favourites.
I do think this could lead to some great discussions about how and why we value cultural heritage. But I don't see the point in pitting different tragedies like this against each other. I saw at least two people who called others hypocrites and rhetorically asked why there had been no outrage during ISIL's destruction of Palmyra, or when the National Museum of Iraq was looted back in 2003. Which surprised me, since there was an enormous outrage in both cases. The loss of cultural heritage during the Syria civil war has been discussed for years now.
It's true though that the reactions were different, and not as immediately strong, compared to Notre-Dame. But I don't think the reactions would have been that strong if, say, the equally awesome cathedral in Chartres had gone through the same thing either. There are just few places in the world that have managed to become a symbol on so many levels like Notre-Dame has. At the moment, I can only think of the great pyramid of Giza and perhaps Acropolis.
Wikipedia has a list, they go back to the the 19th century IIRC. I'll mention some that stick in my mind from my prior reading in the past, and provide links to recall details and for other readers.
How about the University of Texas "clocktower sniper" in 1966? One of my aunts was a UT student at the time, according to my dad. Referenced in "Full Metal Jacket". Charles Whitman had a brain tumor that made him psychotic. An ex-Marine, he bought several guns, killed his mother and wife, then went to the top of the clock tower in the middle of the campus and started shooting random people. Killed well over a dozen and injured dozens more (Wikipedia lists 18 and 31).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_tower_shooting
"The Luby's shooting". In 1991, guy drove his truck through a Luby's (in Texas) and started shooting people. Killed 23, wounded 27. This sticks in my mind, aside from the imagery of a ramrod attack, because at least one person had a gun, but it was in their car. It was actually the deadliest mass shooting, until the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luby's_shooting
In fact, there's a link JUST for the Texas mass shootings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mass_shootings_in_Texas
How THE HELL IS THIS NOT DREDGED UP MORE? Because it's not a shooting? In 1927, School treasurer detonated hundreds of pounds of explosives at a school, killing 36 children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
Anyways, there was one that happened in 1945-1946. Army guy decided that the Germans hadn't suffered enough, so he took over a machine gun mounted in a POW camp in...Iowa I think, and turned it on the prisoners during the middle of the night. Needless to say, he was court martialed and dishonorably discharged after that. For some reason, can't find the wikipedia link any more.
Again, Barr himself basically admits in a roundabout way that yes, Trump engaged in activity that could be considered obstruction, but he can't be liable for it because his position is too important. This is no different than a long-winded version of "if the President does it, it's not illegal". And if the investigation was interfered with by the most powerful man in the world, then it by default not completed to the full extent it could have been. Every citizen of the United States should realize that at this moment we don't have an Attorney General, we have Trump's personal attorney acting in that position, which is what he wanted from the beginning. This corruption has to be grabbed by the root and pulled out before it's too late. It may already be too late.
Yes. Though I think it has far more to do with the historical and cultural impact, than whatever religion is tied to it.
I agree that the reaction has little or nothing to do with the religion. Instead it's related to the fame and cultural importance of the site and hugely exacerbated by the nature of the incident. We're all guilty of responding to sudden events in a more extreme way than slower ones. I might be vaguely sorry that the Taj Mahal is gently being destroyed by air pollution, but there's no strong emotion associated with that. If, though, it were to burn down tomorrow, I would expect to feel considerable sorrow.
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf
First impression is that so far it's not as redacted as I thought it might have been but I haven't gotten very far yet into it.
Twitter was similar. Twitter identified 50,258 automated accounts connected to Russia that tweeted more than a million times in the 10 weeks prior to the election. Lol at citation of Sean Hannity retweeting Russian IRA propaganda (p.28 note 74).
Additionally
"President Trump reacted negatively to the Special Counsel's appointment. He told advisors that it was the end of his presidency, sought to have Attorney General Jeff Sessions unrecuse from the Russia is and to have the Special Counsel removed, and engaged in efforts to curtail the Special Counsel's investigation and prevent the disclosure of evidence to it, including through public and private contacts with potential witnesses." (p. 8)
Sure sounds like obstruction to me.
It seems that the Mueller report is not going to settle every issue. We've got answers on a bunch of different things, but there are some things that aren't yet resolved and even the parts for which Trump isn't going to be prosecuted very clearly don't amount to exoneration.
On the issue of conspiracy with the Russian government, the Mueller report found multiple examples of contacts between the Trump team and the Russian government and found that they acted along similar lines, but it was not sufficient to establish a criminal case. Part of the reasoning was: That is, the fact that the Trump team and the Russian government were sending out some of the same messages and benefiting each other was not enough to warrant a trial; we would need a more explicit example of intentional conspiracy in order to charge Trump with criminal conspiracy.
Long story short, if Trump committed criminal conspiracy with Russia, we don't have enough evidence to convict him in court. We cannot get to "yes" or "no," so we're probably going to be stuck with "maybe." I think that's more or less the end of that story.
Some, if not all, of those contacts with Russians were found to be innocent. So, we do have a "no" for a few specific events like the Russian Ambassador Kislyak's talks with Trump campaign officials in April 2016.
About the "no new indictments" thing I brought up earlier, and the fact that Trump could not be indicted anyway: the Mueller report said that the president could in fact commit obstruction of justice, and that Congress could determine that. We've got multiple examples of Trump making concrete attempts to hobble or completely shut down the Mueller investigation. The report is pretty explicit that they're not clearing him of obstruction of justice: So that question is unresolved. Part of the problem, according to the report, is that some of the President's actions were uses of typical powers. In that case, the question would be, "Does it count as obstruction if the President could do it for non-corrupt reasons?" That apparently doesn't have a solid legal answer (I'm guessing the question has never come up before). The Mueller report only said they were "not persuaded" that this was the case.
Notably, the obstruction of justice is larger than simply Comey's firing, or even his numerous public attempts to delegitimize it. So he did in fact try to shut down the Mueller investigation completely. Trump's efforts to subvert the investigation were wide-ranging:
There are other criminal matters that the Mueller probe uncovered but did not have the jurisdiction to handle itself, and has therefore made referrals. There are 14 other alleged crimes still to be investigated, but we only know about 2 of them, involving Michael Cohen and Gregory B. Craig, an Obama administration counsel.
We do know that Trump viewed the Mueller probe as a serious threat to his entire presidency even early on, and was extremely upset about Sessions' recusal. When Mueller took over the investigation, he apparently thought he would be removed from office by the end of it. This is about what I expected. This still leaves the question of why he viewed the investigation with so much fear, but the conspiracy issue apparently is settled for the foreseeable future--which means that, if Trump did not conspire with the Russian government, he apparently was afraid that the investigation would uncover some other crime or impeachable offense. But I have no idea what that could possibly be.
Notably, we have, to this day, no indication that the Mueller probe was politically motivated, which means Trump could not have feared the investigation simply because he assumed the investigators would be biased. Again, we're talking about an investigation which began months before Trump was elected, and which was headed by a registered Republican with no anti-Trump history. Note that this paragraph is my opinion; not a finding by the Mueller report.
It seems that Trump's refusal to sit for an interview was not the only reason the special counsel did not interview him. They also believed it unnecessary. I suppose this isn't too surprising. I'm not sure how much real information they could have gleaned from Trump. Some folks have speculated that Trump would commit perjury during any such interview, but from the special counsel's perspective, getting false information wouldn't have served any point--their goal was not to get him in trouble, but to collect information.
We have no evidence that, when Cohen lied to Congress, he was under direct instructions from Trump.
The end report appears fairly close to what I've expected. Although I had second thoughts a few months ago, I've long doubted that Trump actively coordinated with the Russian government, and while there's some evidence that this was the case, it was not conclusive. It's slightly more damning than I expected on that point. On the issue of obstruction, it's slightly less damning than I expected; I thought the obstruction of justice question would be more conclusive.
The report has only just come out and people are still reading it, but so far, this is a pretty damn grim spectacle for American politics. I don't believe we've seen a more blatant effort to thwart public scrutiny since Watergate.
You are making an assumption on how "white europeans" would react to the burning of Angkor Wat? For Reallz? Also, Stonehenge is not Western Culture, it's pre Abrahamic.
As John Oliver has repeatedly said "This is a slow moving 'Stupid Watergate''.
It's also concrete proof that Nixon's theory of the Executive has come to fruition thanks to a 45+ year effort to make it so. The ONLY reason Trump hasn't been charged in both SDNY and in the Mueller probe is the nature of his office and this theory of an Executive Branch with unlimited power and no culpability outside of impeachment. As I have said 100 times, Nixon survives in 2019. Without question.
He has three tweets in the last 6 hours that just state “No collusion No Obstruction” and then retweeting Judicial Watch about Hillary’s emails.
I wonder who in the WH has to read the report to him? I wonder if anyone is actually going to read the report to him or just let him believe it still says there was no obstruction.
The entire thing is being run as a PR operation, from Barr on down. From the moment this was delivered to Barr, the intent was to manipulate public opinion so they could play it to a draw when it finally came out. Minutes before the report was intially delivered to Barr a month ago, a reporter for WIRED sent out a tweet stating emphatically that her sources said the report was incredibly damaging to the President, but that is not what we would intially see thanks to Barr. This entire month has been nothing but media narrative manipulation. Barr's press conference this morning now seems even more utterly ludicrous than it already did.
I certainly would. And I believe I speak for all my fellow History Channel adicts. :P
Then it’s up to Mitch McConnell and the senate to charge him. Good luck with that.
And this:
Apparently, this story has MULTIPLE Rosemary Woods.
On page 17 the report refers to the numerous links between the Trump Campaign and Russia
Starting on page 41 details are given about the Trump Campaign's promotion of political materials produced by Russia (I find it hard to use IRA, as for older people in the UK that acronym is so firmly established as meaning something else). This is part of the evidence that supports the Mueller report's conclusion that the Campaign were willingly making use of material they knew to have been collected illegally by a foreign power. While that may not reach the standard for criminal conspiracy it certainly merits being placed in the politically undesirable actions category ...
On page 138 (among other places) the report explains why it did not regard the sharing of internal private polling data with Russia as evidence of conspiracy. That was because it was felt Manafort may have acted alone in doing this - as a means of persuading the Russians to end some litigation and pay him money.
Starting on page 193 the report discusses the Trump Tower meeting. As has already been mentioned the report explains the decision not to prosecute here is not because Mueller believes the conduct to be legal, but because of the potentially difficulty in establishing that Trump Jr knew it was illegal.
The first volume of the report about Russian links is heavily redacted. However, the second volume about obstruction, starting on page 213 is relatively complete. The volume starts with an explanation of the decision not to make a prosecutorial judgement about obstruction. That was done on the grounds of:
1) the Department of Justice guidance against indicting a sitting President.
2) the fact that a President can be indicted after leaving office (at which time all the evidence Mueller collected would be available for a decision on prosecution).
3) the potential problem of fairness in a process that concluded the President committed a crime without allowing him to defend himself in court (assuming the DoJ guidance ultimately prevailed).
Volume 2 though goes on to list in detail potential obstruction issues and analyses the legal implications of those. Those analyses vary, but in some cases it is clear that Mueller has in fact concluded that the President did act illegally - so but for the general considerations listed above he would undoubtedly have been prosecuted already.
The report gives Trump's written answers to Mueller's questions (which, as they were clearly written by lawyers, are pretty uninteresting). However, one thing I hadn't appreciated was that the written answers were only provided for the Russian links (after more than a year of being requested). The President refused to even give written answers (let alone be interviewed) in relation to the question of obstruction. An interesting legal position there, with someone being obstructive over a potential charge of obstruction
Page 288 summarizes various bits of discussion about the President's motives in trying to end the Russia investigation. Even though conspiracy with Russia has not been proven, Mueller concludes that Trump would have been concerned about an FBI investigation uncovering both crimes and politically embarrassing material.
Yeah. I agree.
My major take away from this whole scenario is that the arguments finding that the media had absolutely botched their reporting on the investigation were oversold, and the knee jerk "exoneration" of Trump that followed it looks pretty weak.
They look as bad as everyone who thought there would be a smoking gun when the investigation wrapped and impeachment was soon to follow.
I simply do not understand why not knowing they were breaking the law was used as an excuse to not prosecute both Jr and Kushner.
“The government would unlikely be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the June 9 meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful,” the report reads but:
ignorantia legis neminem excusat Is something I learnt in a high school law class and I wonder why it was used to pardon them here.
I get the $2000 threshold would be hard to prove, especially since they got nothing from that meeting but once again, IMO, it doesn’t excuse holding it in the first place.
It is pretty infuriating. I wonder how many poor people over the years might have wanted to use this defense in regards to whatever they were charged with. In some ways, Mueller's restraint in all this can be seen as almost admirable (frankly, the Trump crew should be thanking their lucky stars they had someone was legally conservative as Mueller heading this thing), but this whole "I'm too stupid to understand what I was doing" has, as far as I know, never worked in any case ever.
The fact is, Mueller, for whatever reason, believed the proper place to have this out is in the US Congress. This is as much a roadmap for impeachment as the Watergate investigation was. Which is exactly what Barr's bullshit was meant to head off at the pass.
As for the media mea culpa, the one they should be having is the fact that so many of them bought into what William Barr was selling for the last month, but ESPECIALLY in the initial days after Mueller submitted his report.
We also know now that Mueller stuck STRICTLY to his mandate. This is not Whitewater turning into a Oval Office blowjob. Mueller and his team did not follow the money (and the money laundering). But someone should, and hopefully someone is. But there is so goddamn much still redacted in this thing, and so many (14) cases have been funneled out to other jurisdictions, who even knows?? Taken in totality, what is truly still stunning to behold after all this time is how unbridled and bottomless the corruption of Trump and those in his orbit is. Watergate?? You have to go back to Teapot Dome or Tammany Hall to find anything like this.
I also now believe, irrespective of the political ramifications of this, that the House Democrats MUST start seriously considering impeachment proceedings, regardless of the inevitable outcome in the Senate. Trump is found to have attempted to obstruct the investigation not once, or twice, but TEN times. If this is allowed to stand without SOME branch of the government pushing back, then we are just descending further into the abyss.
As a side note to all this (in the overall scheme of this) the fact that Sarah Sanders admitted to the Special Counsel she deliberately lied to the press about the Comey firing to avoid perjuring herself is about the most perfect encapsulation of her mendacity and cowardice as I can imagine, and I can't imagine taking any reporter willing to sit in a room and have her answer their questions seriously ever again.