[mycroft]

Quote

Sessions and spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores have said his statement was truthful because he met with the Russian ambassador in his capacity as a senator, not as a Trump campaign surrogate.

Quote

It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.

30 years later, we're still hearing about how horrible that "lie" was and how it automatically invalidates anything else he (or his wife) did (or has done since).

What's the difference? IOKIYAR.

Rest of the quote (which is actually interesting, I had never heard the reasoning, I just knew the pull quote above. Lawyers, eh? How SB can I be compared to them?}

Quote

If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true."

[jogs]

 kenberg, on 2017-March-06, 13:48, said:

Some time back I related an experience I had helping in buying a house. The ad said wall-to-wall carpeting. I am inside the house, standing on a bare floor, not even a throw rug, and the real estate guy is not acknowledging that the ad is in error. I am prepared to accept "honest mistake" as an explanation. But no, he sees no problem with the ad. He doesn't acknowledge it to be in error, he doesn't exactly claim it is true, he regards the truth as irrelevant. Or something like that. I can't really grasp his way of looking at things. It causes me mental distress to have to speak with such people, and this is the way I react to Trump. It is simply hopeless to attempt a rational discussion regarding what he says. Some find his approach effective and I suppose it is, for a while. I find it repulsive. And I think it is going to be very damaging in the long run.

With the real estate guy you could say that I was standing there seeing the floor, so no harm was done by the ad. But it hurts my brain. I don't want to talk to the guy,.

Typical for a A+ snob. How naive are you? All politicians are constantly lying. The big difference is the left-wing media is 24/7 writing negative stories on Trump, while ignoring the negatives on Obama and Hillary.
Look at all the jobs created since Trump won the presidency. The left claims credit for those jobs. Nonsense. Keystone pipeline are Trump jobs. Hillary would have blocked them. ExxonMobil have announced 45,000 new jobs for offshore drilling in the Gulf. The left claims those projects have been in the planning stages since 2013. But Obama and his EPA wouldn't allow the drilling.
In 2009 Obama said he would start 20 school zones like the Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone. Where are those new school zones?
Trump won only 8% of the Black vote. Minorities need to wake up. The democratic party has done them no favors in the last 50 years. Trump at least talks about improving schools in the inner city. With reduced regulations, it will be easier for small businesses to obtain loans. If part of the Black vote goes Trump, the democrats are in trouble.

[PassedOut]

 jogs, on 2017-March-07, 12:20, said:

Typical for a A+ snob. How naive are you? All politicians are constantly lying.

You are wrong there.

Most politicians try to tell the truth whenever the truth won't be terribly damaging politically. When the truth is damaging, they use evasion to avoid lying. Few politicians of any persuasion care to be caught in a flat-out lie, and when they are caught lying, that's often more damaging than the truth that they were afraid of.

Donald Trump is, of course, an exception to this.

 jogs, on 2017-March-07, 12:20, said:

The big difference is the left-wing media is 24/7 writing negative stories on Trump, while ignoring the negatives on Obama and Hillary.

Over the years, the media has written countless negative pieces on Hillary Clinton. Not so much on Obama, of course, because his ethics are squeaky clean, notwithstanding the mistakes he's made in office.

Trump's problem with the media is the constant rebuttal he faces when he makes foolish and untrue statements. He brings that upon himself. If he'd keep his mouth shut (or his fingers off the keyboard) until he knew what he was talking about, he'd avoid a lot of that -- and would save his staff a lot of unnecessary hassle and eye-rolling.

[Winstonm]

 jogs, on 2017-March-07, 12:20, said:

The big difference is the left-wing media is 24/7 writing negative stories on Trump, while ignoring the negatives on Obama and Hillary.

The big difference is that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama is in a government position. Donald Trump won the election. It is now his turn to govern. He seems incapable of that. He lies. His surrogates lie about Russian contacts. These things are newsworthy, regardless of how much you personally would like to ignore the absolute ineptitude of this administration and keep bashing Hillary and Obama.

[Al_U_Card]

 PassedOut, on 2017-March-07, 13:42, said:

You are wrong there.

Most politicians try to tell the truth whenever the truth won't be terribly damaging politically. When the truth is damaging, they use evasion to avoid lying. Few politicians of any persuasion care to be caught in a flat-out lie, and when they are caught lying, that's often more damaging than the truth that they were afraid of.

Donald Trump is, of course, an exception to this.


Over the years, the media has written countless negative pieces on Hillary Clinton. Not so much on Obama, of course, because his ethics are squeaky clean, notwithstanding the mistakes he's made in office.

Trump's problem with the media is the constant rebuttal he faces when he makes foolish and untrue statements. He brings that upon himself. If he'd keep his mouth shut (or his fingers off the keyboard) until he knew what he was talking about, he'd avoid a lot of that -- and would save his staff a lot of unnecessary hassle and eye-rolling.

Back in the day....we had the evening news (take your pick) or the daily newspaper for information about politics and world affairs. After the sports page and the comics were digested, if the front page didn't have anything lurid ( or the lead-in to the news wasn't a flash) then that days news ended up wrapping fish or whatever. Nowadays we can peruse and decorticate the slightest twitch of everyone and everything. Information overload...or at least abuse. The ability to discern and evaluate is becoming a lost art because we can lock on to whatever meme floats our boat. Time to take a deep breath and get a grip. The big picture is what matters and since human nature has yet to mature significantly, a healthy dose of skepticism is a ready cure for what ails and assaults us all.

[ggwhiz]

https://www.youtube....h?v=lP5Xv7QqXiM

I went home with the waitress
the way I always do
How was I to know
she was with the
Russians too?

[kenberg]

 jogs, on 2017-March-07, 12:20, said:

Typical for a A+ snob. How naive are you? All politicians are constantly lying. The big difference is the left-wing media is 24/7 writing negative stories on Trump, while ignoring the negatives on Obama and Hillary.

I have been called naive (for example I have said that I think Comey did waht he did because he thought it was right, bit because he was playing political games) , I have been called a sexist (for example because I was only vaguely aware of Huma Abedin's role in the Clinton campaign), I have been called uniformed (see Abedin again), also both racist and uninformed for having no idea who TNC is, and many other things. I have been compared to Forrest Gump. To the best of my knowledge this is the first time I have been called a snob, A+ or otherwise. I would have to hire some help if I wanted to respond to everyone who calls me a name.

I'm resting easy.But I just checked the latest John Sandford nook out of the library and I have to get to it. All us snobs follow the adventures of effing Flowers.

[barmar]

 Winstonm, on 2017-March-07, 13:54, said:

The big difference is that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama is in a government position.

I think he's comparing the media's current treatment of Trump to how they treated Clinton and Obama when they were in office.

[cherdano]

 kenberg, on 2017-March-07, 14:53, said:

I have been called naive [...] also both racist and uninformed for having no idea who TNC is,

Wait what?

[Winstonm]

 barmar, on 2017-March-07, 14:56, said:

I think he's comparing the media's current treatment of Trump to how they treated Clinton and Obama when they were in office.

No, I don't think so. (emphasis added)

Quote

The big difference is the left-wing media is 24/7 writing negative stories on Trump, while ignoring the negatives on Obama and Hillary.

The emphasized areas are present tense, indicating that he thinks the press should still be writing negatively about Obama and Hillary, which is exactly what the far right and alt right media is doing.

[barmar]

 Winstonm, on 2017-March-07, 15:30, said:

The emphasized areas are present tense, indicating that he thinks the press should still be writing negatively about Obama and Hillary, which is exactly what the far right and alt right media is doing.

"writing" is both the present tense and also "present continuous", which is used for ongoing activity. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and interpret the "ongoing" period as going back to when Obama and Trump were in the news, so there was something to write about. It's only a few months ago, not ancient history, and it's essentially the same media outlets.

There are enough issues with what the Trump supporters say that we don't need to make new ones based on grammar glitches. Similarly, some of the late night comics have pointed out Trump's misspelling of "tapp" in his tweet -- there's far more to worry about than a typo on a cellphone (I wonder why he turned off auto-correct?).

[PassedOut]

Here's the dumb-ass thing tweeted this morning:

Quote

President Trump
@POTUS

122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!

8:03 AM - 7 Mar 2017

As president of the US, Trump has easy access to any information he wants, and of course only 9 of those 122 were released during Obama's administration, 113 under Bush's administration. And you'd have to be pretty far out of the loop not to realize that the original tweet was way off base. And yet, there it is.

Seems to me that Trump should prefer to avoid making voters decide whether he's a reflexive liar or whether he's merely stupid. Whenever the media points out that what Trump says is completely false, he blames the media instead of taking responsibility for his own actions. Of course he's going to get negative stories when he gives the media no choice.

[kenberg]

 cherdano, on 2017-March-07, 15:16, said:

Wait what?

Well, maybe that one was just that I was uninformed.

Anyway, snobbish me, naive me, bigoted me, and uninformed me all have a book to read.

[jogs]

 Winstonm, on 2017-March-07, 15:30, said:

The emphasized areas are present tense, indicating that he thinks the press should still be writing negatively about Obama and Hillary, which is exactly what the far right and alt right media is doing.

I'm speaking of the last 8 years. Trump isn't really a member of the far right. Trump is truly an independent.
I assure you, FOXNews is NOT non stop praising Trump.

[jogs]

 PassedOut, on 2017-March-07, 16:33, said:

As president of the US, Trump has easy access to any information he wants, and of course only 9 of those 122 were released during Obama's administration, 113 under Bush's administration. And you'd have to be pretty far out of the loop not to realize that the original tweet was way off base. And yet, there it is.

What easy access? All those Obama holdovers hate Trump.

[PassedOut]

 jogs, on 2017-March-07, 17:49, said:

What easy access? All those Obama holdovers hate Trump.

The administration is allowed to use Google.

[Winstonm]

 jogs, on 2017-March-07, 17:47, said:

I'm speaking of the last 8 years. Trump isn't really a member of the far right. Trump is truly an independent.
I assure you, FOXNews is NOT non stop praising Trump.

I said nothing about praise of Trump. I said that the far right and alt right are still trashing Clinton and Obama although neither is in office.

It is you who seems upset that ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and others are not following suit. That seems to me the same as complaining about major media not reporting the alien abductions claims found in the National Inquirer.

[Al_U_Card]

 Winstonm, on 2017-March-07, 20:53, said:

I said nothing about praise of Trump. I said that the far right and alt right are still trashing Clinton and Obama although neither is in office.

It is you who seems upset that ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and others are not following suit. That seems to me the same as complaining about major media not reporting the alien abductions claims found in the National Inquirer.

But it does distract and keep them from having to address Trump's latest flight of fancy. The media cycles are ever faster and Trump is using the "chaff" technique of misdirection. No squirrels in Manhattan I guess....

[Al_U_Card]

 Al_U_Card, on 2017-March-08, 03:04, said:

But it does distract and keep them from having to address Trump's latest flight of fancy. The media cycles are ever faster and Trump is using the "chaff" technique of misdirection. No squirrels in Manhattan I guess....

He may be changing the lexicon and the usage of "to trump" something rather than being superior to will come to mean overwhelm instead.
We were heading for a corporate plutocracy and we have just eliminated the middle management (politicians). Will Trump be able to overwhelm the board of directors? I doubt it.

[jogs]

Repeal of Obamacare.

GOP plan.

DOA.

All politicians seem to think those without health insurance from their employer are wealthy independent contractors.
No, they are mostly poor people with no money. Tax credits won't help them.
There needs to be a non insurance model.

Temp solution. Allow all uninsured to sign up with medicaid with a $10K deductible. Poor people would at least have access to a healthcare network.