The more I think about it, the more I agree that these developments, while satisfyingly salacious, may be counterproductive.

As just one example: suppose the story about people stealing things from his desk so he can't sign them are true. Don't you think those stories will make the moron more careful in the future, and thus more able to inflict damage? Maybe, next time, he puts those papers in a locked drawer every day.

Or maybe, heaven forbid, the stable genius starts a list so he doesn't forget what he's asked.

The odds:

https://nypost.com/2018/09/05/...hite-house-official/

quote:

Originally posted by AdagioM:
“The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.”

No, YOU have sunk low with him and allowed YOUR discourse to be stripped of civility, Mr./Ms. Anonymous. You didn’t have to let him. Don’t include ME in your WE.

+1000

All of this lies squarely at the feet of the spineless, gutless, low life republican congress.

I would happily take the odds on Pence, by betting the other side. Whatever bookie they quoted, the one saying that Pence's use of the word is somehow a tip, is the baby whose candy I'd happily take.

I wonder if this is just about the approaching mid-terms.

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
I would happily take the odds on Pence, by betting the other side. Whatever bookie they quoted, the one saying that Pence's use of the word is somehow a tip, is the baby whose candy I'd happily take.

But you're not wrong.

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
I have not seen anything like this in my over half-century of political awareness.

To my GOP friends who voted this man into power, all I can say is shame on you. To the ones who would happily vote for him again...

Same here, and +1000

quote:

Originally posted by Horace:

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
I have not seen anything like this in my over half-century of political awareness.

To my GOP friends who voted this man into power, all I can say is shame on you. To the ones who would happily vote for him again...

Deliberately keeping the president from doing what he's trying to do as President, which is within his granted powers to do, would be treason. That's probably why this is such a rarity.

Nope. There are checks on any sitting president's ability to "get things done." When things are not in the national insterest, or are unconstitutional or illegal, that is not getting in the way. That is following the law.

Alexandra Petri gets on a roll! ...


... about our noble Trump administration "resistance leader."

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:

quote:

Originally posted by Horace:

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
I have not seen anything like this in my over half-century of political awareness.

To my GOP friends who voted this man into power, all I can say is shame on you. To the ones who would happily vote for him again...

Deliberately keeping the president from doing what he's trying to do as President, which is within his granted powers to do, would be treason. That's probably why this is such a rarity.

Nope. There are checks on any sitting president's ability to "get things done." When things are not in the national insterest, or are unconstitutional or illegal, that is not getting in the way. That is following the law.

Particularly true if it's an independent agency. While the President has the authority (in some cases) to appoint the chairman from among sitting members, he doesn't have the power to tell them what to do.

And he particularly doesn't have the power to tell the Fed what to do.

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:

quote:

Originally posted by Horace:

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
I have not seen anything like this in my over half-century of political awareness.

To my GOP friends who voted this man into power, all I can say is shame on you. To the ones who would happily vote for him again...

Deliberately keeping the president from doing what he's trying to do as President, which is within his granted powers to do, would be treason. That's probably why this is such a rarity.

Nope. There are checks on any sitting president's ability to "get things done." When things are not in the national insterest, or are unconstitutional or illegal, that is not getting in the way. That is following the law.

I chose the words "within his granted powers to do" with some care.

It really is gut check time, and so many people are failing so miserably.

A glimpse behind the scenes at the NYT.

https://www.vanityfair.com/new...?mbid=social_twitter

And a bit of discussion at the CJR:

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_...-anonymous-trump.php

I'm surprised that we're not yet seeing any commentary from the scholars who use computer methods to identify authorship. You know who I mean--the people whose research is supposed to be able to tell whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.

As I understand it, those methods have become pretty powerful, and they don't just use brute force methods like, "Gee, Pence says 'lodestar' a whole lot! Must be him!" They look at patterns that are hard to notice and thus hard to fake, like the frequency of certain prepositions. They consider sentence length and characteristic sentence constructions, then they apply statistical methods to estimate the likelihood of a certain person being the author.

This, of course, would require a good-sized writing sample for each of the suspected authors, but I'm sure that most of the suspects have generated a lot of text over their careers. You would have to take into account that Ivanka assuredly did not write her book and that Pence surely has speechwriters, but I still think the information is publicly available and that it wouldn't take very long to do the analysis once it was assembled.

I also think that the person in question might have been arrogant enough to think he/she could assume someone else's style without being caught, and I'm not sure the current analysis programs are that easy to fool. I also think that if he/she thought that getting a NYT editor to work on it would obscure authorship, there might be a surprise coming. The computer would most likely recognize it as an amalgam of two people's styles and name them both.

I forgot to say that I doubt that the analysis would be enough to prove the issue in court, although they could certainly deploy some expert witnesses and give it a try, but it wouldn't have to be admissible in court to get a whole lot of people talking.