The Right Side of the News

il Donald is not as open or honest as an eight year old; far more an example of Chniby.

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Chunibyo ( Chniby) is a Japanese colloquial term that translates to "middle-school second-year syndrome" or "eighth-grader syndrome", typically used to describe early teens who have delusions of grandeur, who so desperately want to stand out that they have convinced themselves they have hidden knowledge or secret powers.

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One thing Trump is is transparent. Another thing we Deplorables appreciate in him.

No, he hates America and conveyed it in his disgusting apologies to other nations. He should go run for office in Saudi Arabia.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) vowed to help Democrats impeach President Trump just hours after being sworn into Congress on Thursday.

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We’re gonna go in there and impeach the motherfucker! Tlaib said during a Thursday night rally in Washington, D.C. organized by MoveOn.

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Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democratic Congresswoman, Vows to Help Impeach Trump | National Review"Hours after being sworn into Congress..." - what professionalism!Now hats and tee shirts are being sold with that phrase on them. When Trump came down the escalator in 2015 and made his presidential announcement, he was already the author of "over 15 best selling books". "The Art of the Deal, is considered a business classic and one of the most successful business books of all time." (Amazon)When he made his presidential announcement, he was blunt and direct, and undoubtedly injured some fragile feelings in politics and the news media, but he wasn't crude and uncivil. Those things STARTED from reactions to what he said. Not from Democrats and the news media, they have much more dignified ways of looking down their noses at someone they consider to not be in their lofty positions of intelligence. The late-night comedians were pretty much the ones who started it off, and it escalated from there. I'm going to have a busy week in this economy, doubt I'll have time. There are things going on in politics that are more important than insults. That's an easy one, because those past presidents weren't crudely and bluntly attacked by people who knew very little about them at the start of their campaigns yet, like Trump was. The Bush's and Reagan were reported with plenty of bias in the news during their administrations, but they remained "presidential" and just tried to ignore it. They didn't meet it head-on like Trump does, and their silence could have been to their detriment. Unlike them, Trump has the Twitter option, and has decided to use it. It gets him a lot of emotional put-downs, (which could be to his advantage, somewhat) and it also gives him an opportunity to often set the tone for news, something that could help him with everyone, except his haters of course. That was all I needed, to show actual quotes of employees at CNN, who clearly showed Zucker's objectives. I know you poisoned my well of Project Veritas, but the source doesn't matter if it contains actual, in context quotes. I know you'll say that the same is true when CNN and ABC only repeat Trumps mean tweets, but the difference is, many people don't care about the tone of his remarks, considering who he's dealing with. They only care about the point of the message. Many do (and should) care about CNN's president's bias and hate. It's a worthy news story, ABC World News Tonight viewers should know about it. But of course it's not reported. Already did. With CNN employees actual words about Zucker. That's understandable, different people's familiarity with different news casters are going to vary in every way possible. In the same way, those 3 people are the ONLY news people that a lot of busy evening news viewers are going to know. Some of them vote, and they're not very well informed. Well, the best way to do that would be to compare it to their news story of testimony from a National Security guy concerning Hillary Clinton's funding of the Steel Dossier. Let me know when you've found it, I'm not having much luck. It looks like that is ALL it's focused on, CNN seems to be focused on practically nothing but impeachment, just like some of its employees have said. Of course, wicked weather and fires caused by nothing but climate change are important too. But other things like low unemployment and an on-fire economy, not so much. The possibility that Trump's bringing those troops home was part of his strategy to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - also not near as important to report on as impeachment. But they did have a little to say about it;

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He [Trump] relished the demise of ISIS found Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, playing the role of a ruthless commander-in-chief to silence critics of his impulsive foreign policy leadership.

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Triumph over top terrorist interrupts impeachment crisis engulfing Trump - CNNPoliticsWhat an unbiased statement from CNN!

No. Here's what I said about them in the very message you replied to where it was right before your eyes: Moving on: Poor impulse control? He was tweeting long before he ran for office. The volume of Trump attacks far exceeds those of any other source. I offer the same challenge to you that I did to Marc: I'll go one-for-one with you on Trump/Fox News attack/insult comments versus those from Congressional Democrats/mainstream media (opinion pieces excluded). Here's a Trump tweet from last night: No one has to make a case that Trump is the one on the attack. He states publicly that his response is to always hit back hard against any offense, whether real or imagined, fair or unfair. One only has to listen to what Trump says and tweets to see this is so. You need a mirror. By "get away with it completely" you mean holding Trump accountable for his crimes. And since he can't tell the difference between right and wrong in most things, he commits many of his crimes out in the open, such as releasing the incriminating Ukraine phone call reconstructed transcript and inviting China to join the Ukraine in investigating a political rival.--Percy

Trump is blocking subpoenas for documents and witnesses as we speak. Trump is the only president in modern times that has refused to release his tax returns. Want to try that again?

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No, he hates America and conveyed it in his disgusting apologies to other nations. He should go run for office in Saudi Arabia.

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Well there’s a perfect example of the crap that Obama had to put up with.But I bet you didn’t get upset when Trump defended Putin by saying that America was as bad. When O’Reilly said that Putin was a killer, Trump said that America had killers and wasn’t innocent.

Haven't you already cited this Tlaib quote? A couple of times? Is that all you can do, cite the same thing over and over again?Here's my take on it. I object to Tlaib's use of crude language in a public forum, and I object to her advocacy of impeachment at a time when sufficient evidence of wrongdoing was not yet public. That quote's not from Amazon. That's from his publisher, Simon and Schuster, the company making money off the sale of his books (as is Amazon). The Art of the Deal is just Trump lying about one failed business deal after another. As we saw after he took office, he has no negotiating skills whatsoever. His negotiating style is clumsy, bullying, heavy-handed, extortive, manipulative.But what has the success of this book to do with the fact that he's crude and uncivil? Really? How about this:

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When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best...They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.
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How stupid are our leaders? How stupid are these politicians to allow this to happen? How stupid are they?
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Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people, but we have people that are stupid. We have people that aren’t smart.
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We have losers. We have losers. We have people that don’t have it. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain.
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And we won’t be using a man like Secretary Kerry that has absolutely no concept of negotiation, who’s making a horrible and laughable deal, who’s just being tapped along as they make weapons right now, and then goes into a bicycle race at 72 years old, and falls and breaks his leg.

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Trump was blatantly uncivil in his presidential announcement, not to mention boastful to the point of telling tall tales, and committing to many things he hasn't followed through on, like improving infrastructure and putting Social Security and Medicare on a sound financial basis. In other words, once again you can't back up what you say. Can you say nothing true? Trump was easily the most known Republican candidate in 2016. He wrote The Art of the Deal. He had his name on real estate in prime locations. He was the star of The Apprentice that ran for years. He had a long public history derived from giving interviews to newspapers and on radio, taking out full page ads in newspapers, and tweeting. You've just reinforced my point. Unlike Trump, other recent presidents possessed presidential demeanor. You claim he behaves this way because he's forced into it, but everyone else knows that that's just who he is, a rude, crude and dishonest real estate developer who's gone bankrupt multiple times, and who for these reasons is secretive in the extreme. He's even reluctant to pay his bills, even as president. He still hasn't paid bills for campaign and presidential visits to many cities, such as Burlington (VT), Lebanon (OH), Mesa (AZ), Erie (PA), Green Bay (WI), Spokane (WA), and on and on. Trump just skips town and ignores the bills, just as he always has. The only way you could know if these employees' beliefs are correct is to check the news at CNN, which you haven't done, but I have, twice now. Neither time did the list of CNN headlines focus on impeachment to an inappropriate degree. Let's look at the CNN headlines this morning, which are mostly about impeachment, which is at the top of the news today, including Fox News. Here's CNN top headlines:

• Trump signals alarm as Democrats dig in
  
• ANALYSIS: Democrats are primed to pivot to a critical new phase of the impeachment inquiry to keep up the momentum
  
• LIVE UPDATES: Two of the White House officials refusing to testify today have been subpoenaed
  
• Trump makes four arguments about his Ukraine call in 74 words
  
• Trump calls on whistleblower to testify
  
• Was there a quid pro quo? Conway says she doesn't know
  
• Ukrainians fear they will be impeachment losers
  
• Giuliani involved in legal controversy in Romania

Is this focused on impeachment to an inappropriate degree? It doesn't look like it. And if you look down the list of other stories at CNN you can tell they don't have as great significance, such as a potential dam failure in California, the Microsoft work-week length in Japan, a stray puppy, Apple spending $2.5 billion on California's housing crisis, the murder of a Brazilian environmentalist, etc. CNN appears to have placed the top news stories at the top, right where they belong. Project Veritas poisoned their own well by their own behavior. People describing their behavior are only passing on accurate information. No one doubts that the people in the video actually said the things they said. The question is whether the things they said have any validity. How is this relevant? Even if it were true that people don't care about "the tone of his remarks," that doesn't change the fact that his remarks are frequently rude and crude, not to mention often exaggerated and fictional. I would care deeply if the head of any news organization were biased and hateful. When will you be demonstrating that your claims are actually true? You want ABC World News Tonight to report that Mark Zucker is unfairly biased and hateful toward Trump based on a video produced by an organization with a reputation for producing blatantly misleading videos? The employees of any large organization have a variety of opinions about their leadership. Your evidence of Zucker's bias and hateful directive that coverage should be all impeachment all the time is a video produced by a disreputable organization. The CNN website itself doesn't support the claim. Nothing else supports that claim. When you say, "they're not very well informed," do you mean Muir, Vega and Karl? That's just your bald claim. Can you back it up? In other words, once again you can't back up your claim. Can you not read? Here's the top CNN stores that day again:

• The notes obtained by CNN give the first publicly available behind-the-scenes look at Mueller's investigative work
  
  • Mueller addresses Trump's 2016 praise of Wikileaks
    
  • Analysis: The totally debunked conspiracy theory Donald Trump pushed in the Ukraine call
    
  • What is CrowdStrike and why is it part of the Trump whistleblower complaint?
    
  • State Department finds no 'deliberate mishandling of classified information' related to Clinton email server
• WashPost: Border agents say smugglers in Mexico are sawing through parts of Trump's border wall

The stories are about CNN obtaining notes from Mueller's investigation and about border agent comments about smugglers sawing through Trump's wall. The substories to the first story relate to Wikileaks, the Ukraine phone call, Crowdstrike, and the Clinton email server. So only two of the six stories relate to impeachment. How do you conclude that impeachment "is ALL it's focused on?" Again, can you not read? So far, after 3 days of citing CNN's top stories, all we can see is that CNN's top stories are focused on whatever the top news is at the time. Your quote has a typo that isn't in the original ("found" instead of "founder"). Did you really type that quote in from scratch instead of just cut-n-pasting? We're talking news and you're citing an opinion piece, but in any case, didn't you watch the video of Trump's announcement that Baghdadi had been killed? If you watch this I think you have to agree with the characterization: --Percy

Trump didn’t write The Art of the Deal (shocker! I know :-)The guy who did is not a fanAnd Trump knew it Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

As noted by PaulK in his response to this your message, that book was ghostwritten for Trump, though it was based on Trump's liies about his business failures, not unlike Trump (albeit through his father no doubt) having his doctor liie about bone spurs or having his accountant sign tax documents that had been filled by somebody else. And as you point out, marc9000's "point" has nothing to do with your point about Trump being crude and uncivil.On the matter of Trump's negotiation skills, he is truly a Legend in His Own Mind. Most all his business negotiations were with subcontractors who wanted to do business with him, so Trump automatically had the upper hand. As we have seen during his administration, when up against an equal opponent Trump just folds completely and gives everything away from free. He gave Kim Jung Un everything he wanted and got nothing in return. He just gave Northern Syria away to Turkish President Erdogan after one phone call and then sent his top negotiating team (Pence and Pompeo) to Turkey out of which Turkey proudly proclaimed that they got everything they wanted. Trump threatened devastating economic sanctions against Turkey for their ethnic cleansing, and then immediately lifted all those sanctions. They got everything and we (Trump) go nothing. That is the clear sign of the level and extent of Trump's skill in negotiation, in his actual "Art of the Deal".But for me the pice de resistance of Trump's expertise in deal-making was when Shumer and Pelosi had agreed to funding for his Wall and, deal already made, Trump seized defeat from the Jaws of Victory and rejected that funding and started that over-a-month-long government shutdown which he personally owned (from the start at least, but then tried to blame everybody else for). Like they say, "You can't make this stuff up, folks!" To borrow Mel Brooks' recurring line in To Be or Not To Be (1983) about the Bronskis being "world famous, in Poland", Trump was world famous in New York City -- BTW, Mel Brooks' remake of the 1942 Ernst Lubitsch film with Jack Benny was one of his most brilliant and underappreciated works.Everybody who grew up in New York City grew up knowing about Trump and what a crook he was, which is evidenced by how few votes he got from there. The rest of the country only knew Trump from his game show, The Apprentice (which needed to build a fake boardroom since Trump's actual offices were rather threadbare -- on Netflix see the Trump episode of Dirty Money which also starts to get into his ties with Russian oligarchs).The pro-Trump rubes in the rest of the country only ever saw "The Apprentice" and never had the benefit of the knowledge bitterly acquired by those in the New York City area, the ones who knew Trump the best. His long record of not paying his bills is all too well known. He would routinely refuse to pay his subcontractors in which case they would sue in which case Trump would employ his army of lawyers (just like he's doing now to block and delay the release of his financials). How many hundreds of thousands of dollars are you willing to spend in legal fees spread out over decades of litigation for a few tens of thousands of dollars that you need right now to keep your business alive? Of course, most if not all of his subcontractors would settle for pennies on the dollar and Trump could get away with it yet again.What you point out is yet another instance of Trump not paying his bills. Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple and direct. It's a bit more complicated in the details, but shouldn't be in principle (which is what is appealing to you and which is what really should count). Legally, the security of a president's political events are the responsibility of the Secret Service. In those rallies, the extra security measures required from local law enforcement are the responsibility of the Secret Service and must be paid by the Secret Service, whose funding comes from Congress (albeit managed by whichever civil servents). But Congress sets each agency's annual budget ... er ... annually, such that any possible future Therefore technically all those unpaid bills are the responsibility of the Secret Service, but at the same time all these unexpected extra expense could not have been planned for and could not have been accounted for and covered in this year's projected expenses.I am also assuming that financial responsibilities are different for an incumbent versus another candidate. In which case a non-incumbent candidate's campaign would automatically need to pony up for the expense of all additional security measures, something that an incumbent would not need to do.So, technically and legalistically the Trump Campaign should be not be liable for additional expenses incurred by local law enforcement for its purely political events. Yet those expenses must eventually be paid for lest local services suffer soley because of a federal-level event completely outside of their control.The next question would be to look to history. Trump is not the only president to ever seek reelection. Nor would he have ever been the only incumbent president seeking reelection to have ever held any political rally or some such event that would have required local support for security.The question is how those past campaigns had handled the matter. I suspect that the others had acted far more honorably and responsibly than Trump, but conclusions require more research.

This is from Inside the Impeachment Testimony: Dry Questions and Flares of Drama, which provides an overview of the content of the transcripts released Monday. Two more transcripts will be released today:

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The transcripts indicate that, despite repeated claims that they have been prevented from taking part in the impeachment inquiry, Republican members have spent many hours questioning witnesses. In some cases, the Republican members pressed the diplomats on detailed points of inquiry. In others, they used their time behind closed doors to criticize the impeachment process or to challenge the integrity of the witnesses.

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This reveals the storming of the secure impeachment inquiry room by a mob of Republican Congressmen claiming exclusion and lack of transparency to be a stunt, and the many other times Republicans have repeated these complaints to be lies. Closed door hearings with bipartisan participation, which is all this is, is how many Congressional investigations begin. It's normal.Of course those who follow Washington even a little know this, but now the rest of the country knows it, too. Their reaction will be predictable: they'll move on to the next lie or false accusation.--Percy

More accurately, the businesses that made their living by providing services within the farm community have declined simultaneously with the industrialization of farming, corporations taking over small farms, combining them, and running them with many fewer people. More and more farming is being done by fewer and fewer people due to increasing mechanization and corporate involvement. Family farms that are still successful often find the children aren't interested in following their parents in a farm life. Fewer people farming means less of a need for businesses in town. How does current rural America being better off than past rural America justify abandoning them to live an impoverished life? They're not unhappy because they're comparing themselves with the wealthy but with people just like themselves who happen to live in more prosperous regions, mostly urban and suburban areas. I don't think preaching at the dissatisfied and disenfranchised is the answer. Internationally the approach has been to get nations to voluntarily commit to certain emissions/pollutant targets by a certain date. It seems unlikely to be successful. A number of cities will sink beneath the waves in the next 20 or 30 years, for example Alexandria, Egypt, and Miami Beach, Florida. Keep telling yourself that. Sure, but not this time. We know there can be emissions/pollutants target goals because they already exist. And there can of course be accountability/enforcement, for example, by UN organized trade boycotts. Sunspots follow a roughly 11-year solar cycle. Is there anyone over the age of 10 who doesn't know that already? You're just repeating a fake argument Trump made up. California has been experiencing longer, hotter fire seasons, diminishing snowpack, and longer droughts, and that's why the trend has been more fires and more dangerous fires. Really? And you know this how? Climate change isn't a Democrat/Republican issue or a left/right issue. It's a significant and worsening problem backed by a great deal of scientific data and analysis. You don't have to guess. The actions that are within our power to take have already been identified: a) reduce our reliance on power generation that produces greenhouse gases; b) increase the fuel efficiency of the motor vehicle fleet; c) provide incentives for renewable sources of power. Antique cars are a negligible proportion of the national motor vehicle fleet, its rare that they're driven many miles, and they'll continue to be grandfathered. First you say these "disparaging attitudes have been traditional in the history of the U.S.," and now you're dismissing them as just labels? A rose by any other name. Choose whatever labels you like, it's still anti-intellectualism, racism, bigotry and parochialism. I can only guess that you're trying to say something about not taking our country for granted. So when people exhibit racism, calling them racist is name calling? What if managers at a Buffalo Wings restaurant ask a large party that includes black patrons to move because one of the other patrons sitting nearby is racist? Is calling their actions racist is just name calling? (Buffalo Wild Wings Managers Fired After Reportedly Asking Black Diners to Move) Hearkening back to an even earlier time only reinforces how out of step you are with modern views on equality. Again, this isn't a Democrat/Republican issue or a left/right issue. Racism is wrong. Fortunately we're a less racist nation than a hundred years ago, but not as much as we could wish. And the further you go from the cities into the country the more you encounter racism. Them's just facts. Now you're referring to Trump's narcissism. You've lost the plot. What you originally said in Message 2969 was that economic appeals will not sway any Trump voters, and I pointed out that Trump has often stated that the strong economy is why he'll be reelected. In other words, to make this painfully obvious, even Trump believes that Trump voters are particularly receptive to economic appeals. Well now you're just talking through your hat. Economic opportunities in cities have exceeded those in the country since the beginning of cities. That reality has nothing to do with current trends in urban debt but with more people and opportunities being concentrated in a small area. Adding healthcare for everyone to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid doesn't make a lot of sense to everyone? Who? Why? By socialism we're only talking about social programs, not the public ownership of business and industry or the nationalization of major industries. Social programs have not killed millions. They have provided a better and longer life for millions, hundreds of millions at least. Some kind of universal healthcare, whether it's Medicare-for-all or something else, student loan forgiveness, free college, these are all programs we should be highly motivated to figure out how to pay for.Just to keep tracking CNN headlines that you accused of being all impeachment all the time, today, for the first time since I started tracking this, this is an accurate characterization. Nearly all the headlines are about impeachment, which seems appropriate given yesterday's events:

• US begins formal withdrawal from Paris climate accord
  
• Impeachment bombshells highlight Trump's power grabs
  
• ANALYSIS: A common thread is emerging from the testimony, scandals and court fights coming to a head this week
  
• LIVE UPDATES: The latest on the Trump impeachment inquiry
  
• National Security Council official set to testify
  
• Senate beginning preparations for an impeachment trial
  
• Cooper makes sense of key inquiry witness testimonies
  
• Giuliani associate in talks with impeachment investigators
  
• Voters in this key swing state are split on impeachment
  
• Analysis: 11 new details revealed in the impeachment transcripts

In a week as this is likely to be, I think most news outlets are going to put impeachment-related headlines at the top of the news. Except Fox News, of course. Their top headlines are about the murder of a Mormon family in Mexico, the Michael Flynn trial, Trump and social media, the Tulsi Gabbard workout video, and a black cat on a football field. To Fox News it's as if there's no impeachment activity in Washington. I challenge you to find an impeachment story at Fox News right now (if you don't see this pretty quickly after I write this then it isn't valid as news websites update their webpages many times during the day).--Percy

Al Capone, Charles Manson and Harvey Weinstein share these same qualities - it doesn't mean they should be president. This is an expression of extreme gullibility. You're ignoring reality. Obama had many critics, and Trump is boosted by a huge conservative media force who, helped by Fox News's nighttime ratings and social media's impact, might reach more people than all other media sources combined. PaulK and name calling is not the topic. Keep your focus on the topic.--Percy

Faith and Marc kept complaining about how insulting the Democrats and mainstream media were, so I suggested we measure Trump and conservative media against Democratic Congresspeople and the mainstream media (no opinion pieces, please) insult-for-insult by taking turns posting them. They haven't offered anything yet, so they lose their turn and here's my offering for today, a Trump tweet: He calls Schiff a corrupt politician and is still overtly, blatantly and illegally trying to identify the whistleblower. I say add this last to the list of impeachable offenses under the heading Abuse of Power. He tells a blatant lie when he says the whistleblower gave false information. Everything the whistleblower said is backed up by both the White House provided transcript and by the testimony of individuals more directly involved.Trump does ask a good question about what happened to the second whistleblower. I'm curious about that, too. There's no recent news about him. My guess is that the rapid action by the House to gather the testimony of so many with direct knowledge of the Ukraine scandal quickly made it obvious that another whistleblower complaint was unnecessary. I doubt he'll file a complaint now.--Percy

I guess law and order is only important to Republicans when it advances their own agenda. When law and order hurts their agenda then they're against it, as illustrated by Rand Paul's recent call at a Trump rally for the media to out the whistleblower.An attorney for the whistleblower has commented on Republican efforts to "expose our client's identity which could jeopardize their safety, as well as that of their family," which is why whistleblower laws are designed to protect identities.Paul also likely lied when he said, "We also now know the name of the whistleblower." If he knew the name he wouldn't be asking the media to find it.He also repeated unsubstantiated accusations of wrongdoing by the Bidens.For Republicans under the spell of Trump, truth is a casualty of their political expediency.Source: Rand Paul issues fiery demand for media to reveal whistleblower's identity--Percy