ChiGoose

I would just as soon give a grifter like D’Souza money to watch his film as I would expect others to give money to Occupy Democrats. Grifters gonna grift.

Generally? The GOP electeds. They hide in their “thoughts and prayers” but if they actually wanted people not to die they would do some fairly popular things like mandated background checks, and common sense gun laws. Instead, they will say how awful it is while deflecting and saying it’s all mental illness despite the fact that every country has people with mental illness but no other rich country has these problems.

If they claim to not to be ok with it but oppose anything that would potentially prevent it, then I wouldn’t say they were actually not ok with it. If the ongoing indiscriminate killing of children isn’t enough for someone to actually want to stop it, then they are actually ok with it.

I’m actually glad to talk about suicides because pro-gun people often focus the conversation on mass shootings and/or mental health when more gun deaths are due to suicide or accident. People who survive suicide attempts generally do not die by suicide. And aside from guns, most suicide attempts fail. So people who cut themselves or take a bunch of pills generally survive and end up not taking their own lives. But suicide attempts with guns are far more likely to be fatal. While some methods may have completion rates of 5-20%, suicide attempts by gun are 85%+ effective. Meaning that, in most cases, the person would survive and end up not killing themselves but because they had a gun, they did not survive and did not get that second chance. When I look at the actual facts, what I hear you saying is my brother’s death doesn’t count or matter. Because he had a diagnosed mental condition but there were no laws that prevented him from buying a gun and blowing his brains out, that he doesn’t matter to you. And there are things I want to say about that but would probably get me kicked from the board. And in terms of my point about Chicago, I would suggest you consult a map and see where the most populous state in the city is versus the state lines. This isn’t hard. We are just making excuses to be ok with people dying.

Here ya go: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/ The more guns, the more people die by guns. Who could have possibly guessed? Also, as someone who current lives in Chicago, the trope about gun laws here is very misinformed. ~60% of guns involved in gun crimes in Chicago come from out of state. Which means that Illinois and Chicago have somewhat effective gun laws but neighboring states do not. If we had a nationwide standard that kept guns out of the hands of criminals, Chicago would have fewer gun crimes. Source: https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/chicago-gun-trace-report-2017/27140/?amp Anyone who uses Chicago as an example of why gun control doesn’t work is actually accidentally arguing for a national gun control law.

If competent people with guns prevented shootings, that would be easy to prove. Just make a chart: one axis is gun ownership per capita, and the other is gun deaths per capita. If your assertion is correct, then the more guns in a location, the fewer gun deaths. Because everybody knows that people have guns and so they don't commit crimes. Except, when you do this, you see that the more guns in an area, the more guns deaths in that area. The presence of guns has a positive correlation with the number of people who are killed by guns. There are ways to mitigate this, but we are an unserious society who are happy to have kids killed in school because it fits our narrative.

I don't think @BillStime is being fair to the GOP. Check out all of the helpful policies the party advocated for on its last party platform that would greatly improve the lives of Americans across the country: Oh wait...

Cool story, except this would result in more gun deaths, not fewer.

Quantity =/= Quality

All countries have people with mental illness. Only America makes it easy to get guns. Only America has astronomical rates of death by guns. There is a line between banning all guns (which I oppose) and what we are doing today (basically nothing) that will save thousands of lives but we just do not care about human life in this country enough to do anything.

I think it's always helpful to see what people say when there is actually a penalty for lying. As we saw in the election lawsuits, the moment that Trump's lawyers were sworn in at a courtroom, they generally refused to claim there was election fraud, even going so far as to explicitly state that they are not alleging fraud. Why? Because lying under oath is a crime and they could be fined or jailed for it. They will lie outside of court in order to gin up the masses and, crucially, get donations to line their pockets. But when they have to face a penalty for lying, they suddenly hesitate. They know they are lying. They are doing it for money and fame but the minute they personally could face consequences for lying, they shut their mouths. 2,000 Mules has been debunked. I will list some of the sources of the debunking, but I doubt it will make any difference for anyone who finds a grifter like D'Souza to be credible as they wouldn't read the articles or change their minds. But the thing I want to ask is, if D'Souza actually believes what he is saying is true, why has he not filed police reports for the individuals he identified in 2,000 Mules? If he has geolocation data, he can tell where they live, if he knows that, he can identify the mules. At the very least, if he cannot name the specific individual, he can give information that one of the people are a particular residence is a mule and the police can take it from there. He can tell the police, they can investigate, the mules will get arrested and this whole thing will be exposed to the public as truly real. Libs will cry. Trump will rejoice. D'Souza will be hailed as a hero. He doesn't do that because there would be a consequence to lying to police. He could get in trouble for filing a false report. If he went to the FBI, he would be facing the same problem Sussman is facing now. Instead, he would much rather have people pay him $20-30 to watch his video because it makes him money he can rub all over his MyPillow pajamas that you can buy with his promo code (so he can get a cut). Which is what this has always been about: money. Why else would someone claim they have definitive proof that an election was stolen but make people pay to see it? There are few people who have more disdain for Republican voters than Republican officials and pundits. People like D'Souza think that Republican voters are rubes that are ripe to hand over their money to a snake oil salesman. They will say everything and anything to get that money and support, unless it will cause them to face consequences personally. Some helpful reading on 2,000 Mules: WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/17/discussing-gaps-2000-mules-with-dinesh-dsouza/ Bulwark: https://www.thebulwark.com/dinesh-dsouzas-2000-mules-is-a-hilarious-mockumentary/

From a former GOP oppo researcher: https://www.thebulwark.com/the-alfa-bank-hoax-hoax/ Conclusion: One would think that if the FBI and mainstream media were working to make up stuff to hurt Trump, the FBI would not have told the NYT to sit on the Alfa Bank story until after the election.

Gerrymandering congressional districts means that we elect more extreme candidates because they don't even bother to pretend representing people in their district from the other political party. Cable news has replaced the nightly newscast with infotainment designed not to educate or provoke thought but instead to garner an emotional reaction that keeps eyes on the TV for the ad breaks. Similarly with the internet: outrage generates clicks, so information must generate outrage. Easiest to do this by posting extreme stuff about "the other side." A "first past the post" election system that puts us into two boxes combines with the other factors to generate an "us versus them" zero-sum mentality. If it's good for the other side, it must be bad for my side. This leads the other side to be seen as the enemy and you cannot compromise with the enemy. And frankly, probably some laziness or entitlement from the electorate. We want the juicy red meat of sensationalism instead of well-thought-out working through of policy issues. So we reward that bad behavior.

Joe Biden was the first Democrat I've ever voted for President.

This is long and I'm quoting @DRsGhost here but I also am going to try to respond to other things that have been raised that I haven't had a chance to respond to. 1. It's 2022. You must fall in line with your elected leaders and media or else.... I was a Republican in 2016. I've only considered myself a Democrat for a couple of years, after spending a bit of time in the wilderness as an independent. I don't take orders from politicians, nor do I blindly follow them. They are people, they are fallible and just because I vote for someone doesn't mean I agree with everything they do. I don't idolize them. I also try to read and listen to a variety of credible media sources to ensure I am getting multiple perspectives. Joe Biden was the first Democrat I've ever voted for President. 2. If the shoe were on the other foot in 2020 with Biden leading late in night, states announce pause in counting, and we wake up the next morning to Trump in the lead we'd have howling and like you've never seen from the other side. And rightly so. This is missing a crucial piece of information: we KNEW the vote totals would shift. There were a myriad of articles about it BEFORE the election. With the pandemic, millions of Americans were going to vote by mail, far more than in most elections. We also expected that Democrats would be more likely to vote by mail than Republicans because of GOP messaging about mail in votes. Some states had laws that said those votes could be counted as they came in. For those states, you would expect to see a heavier Democratic lean when the numbers first came out, and then a shift towards the Republican candidates as the election day totals were counted. Many states were prohibited from counting the mail in vote until election day or after. For those states, you would expect to see a stronger Republican showing when the polls closed and then a shift towards the Democrats as the piles of mail in ballots were counted. Here are some sources on this from before the election: September 1st: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/politics/2020-election-count-red-mirage-blue-shift/index.html October 29th: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-pennsylvanias-vote-count-could-change-after-election-night/ October 31st: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing/ And here's an explainer after the election: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-we-saw-red-and-blue-mirages-on-election-night/ It wasn't a surprise. It wasn't nefarious. It was standard election infrastructure working as designed and anticipated. 3. You simply cannot have another election like 2020 where some 15 million unsolicited ballots are sent out with mostly unmonitored drop boxes everywhere. In what universe does the above recipe, that never happened before in US history, and had bipartisan agreement as a huge invitation for fraud, equal the most secure election in US history? The idea of proactively mailing out ballots for mail-in voting actually has happened before in US history. In fact, it happens in every election in several states. Those states all send out ballots to all voters who can then send them in by mail or deposit them in drop boxes / sites. If your assertion were true, we would expect to see rampant voter fraud in these states every election. But we don't. Also, these claims just assume that every ballot sent in is automatically counted. But states have verification procedures to ensure the ballot was submitted by a valid citizen. You can even sign up as an election judge to observe / help with that process. I did it for a recount in a local election years ago. I watched as they counted the ballots and people could challenge ballots if they suspected an issue. To be able to perpetrate the fraud being alleged here, I would need to be able to steal the ballots from someone's mailbox or home, know enough about them to beat the verification procedure (whether it is their SSN, signature, whatever), complete the ballot and drop it off. I would then need to do that or have a network of people do that millions of times. And everyone would need to be so onboard that nobody ever leaks about it, comes clean, or provides hard evidence of our group of thousands(?) of people stealing ballots and personal information in order to change the election. A conspiracy that size is essentially impossible to keep secret. In fact, a much smaller effort at the same thing was uncovered in North Carolina several years back. Something at the scale being alleged here would have been discovered quickly and people would have been prosecuted. 4. But thats just me....and tens of millions of other Americans. This is worrying to me. Tens of millions of people believe a lie because a complicated conspiracy of shadowy powerful people controlling everything is more palatable than the fact that people were just tired of Trump's crap, tired of the pandemic, and found Biden to be a return to a sense of normalcy. There's a whole cottage industry of Never Trump Republicans out there with enough support to launch financially viable products. Also, Trump underperformed down-ballot Republicans. Meaning that millions of voters voted for Biden and then for the other Republican candidates. If there was a grand conspiracy that could control the elections, down-ballot Republicans would not have done as well as they did. 5. Biden enthusiasm / rallies For some reason, the lack of crowds at Biden's rallies is seen as a sign that nobody wanted to vote for him. In actuality, Biden's campaign was prefaced on a return to normalcy and ending the pandemic. People who took the pandemic seriously would be more likely to support Biden and LESS likely to want to go to giant in-person events (especially since this was pre-vaccines). 6. Changes in election laws People allege that states, election bodies and other officials trying to make voting safer during a pandemic was nefarious. Thankfully, we have a public record of those changes being vetted due to significant litigation on the changes. Time and time again, courts (including Trump appointed judges) found the changes to be fine. I would agree to the sentiment that *permanent* changes to election laws need to go through state legislatures. But temporary emergency changes to keep voters safe made by those with authority (as confirmed by the courts) also seems reasonable. People are looking for evidence of nefarious actions by a shadowy cabal when the truth is staring them in the face: Trump was incredibly unpopular, the pandemic was upending everyone's lives and Biden provided a promise of an opportunity for people to try to return to a less chaotic time.

Ok, so I need to understand the 2020 argument because it seems clear that some people here actually believe that Trump won in 2020. Is the issue that the majority of Americans voted for Trump but a cabal of democrats and deep state actors flipped the election to Biden? Or is the problem that, given the pandemic, officials tried to make it safer to vote and therefore more people voted and they voted for Biden? I’m gonna be honest here, the idea that there was a vast conspiracy to defeat the GOP and also have the Dems lose seats in the House, need an improbable double win in a later senate election in Georgia to tie the senate with a margin that ensured they would never pass their agenda, and generally getting stomped in state and local elections seems… improbable. If the election was rigged, the Dems would have faired much better than they did. Trump generally trailed other GOP candidates. If there was a plot to rig the elections, those down-ballot candidates would have lost too. For this to make sense, the Dems would need to be so competent to rig a nationwide federalized election but so dumb as to only do it for one race on the ballot. Seems… unlikely.

So you think making it easier for citizens to vote constitutes rigging? Or that trying to have a way to hold an election safely during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic constitutes rigging? What, specifically, in that TIME article alleges fraud or a crime to change the votes? I'm trying to understand your argument here because "making it so that people can vote easily or safely is cheating" is less than convincing. Votes were not changed. There was not widespread voter fraud. The election was audited time and time again and found to be secure and valid. The majority of Americans who came out to vote wanted to voted for Joe Biden and he won the Electoral College. This is not a debate. If someone is telling you otherwise, I would question their judgement or motives. Trying to influence who people vote for: Not fraud Making it easier for people to vote: Not fraud Making it safe for people to vote in a pandemic: Not fraud Trying to change votes and/or certifications after the ballots have been cast: Fraud Also, let's try to avoid the mudslinging / attacks on posters themselves instead of the argument at hand.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/politics/state-legislators-election-denialhtml.html?referringSource=articleShare&referringSource=articleShare There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election and those that push the lie that there was are a clear danger to American democracy. The 2016 election was not rigged. The 2020 election was not rigged. But these people want to make sure they can decide the winner of the 2024 election no matter how the people vote.

I appreciate your candor and I do my best to argue in good faith. I spent most of my adult life as a Republican, only leaving the party when it was clear it had sold its soul. We know for a fact that the FBI was not taking every single tip as gospel. In the Sussman case, he provided information to the FBI that there was a secret connection between Trump tower servers and Alfa Bank. The FBI took that, looked into it, and determined it was not true. That is good! That’s how it’s supposed to work! Someone comes across a possible issue or crime, they call it in, the professionals investigate it and it goes from there. So yes, if someone brings something to the FBI and the FBI finds it credible enough to start talking to the people allegedly involved (i.e. the Trump campaign), they should absolutely cooperate. Instead, Trump blatantly flaunted the law and committed multiple acts of obstruction. He absolutely should have been prosecuted. What did Mueller say that was a lie?

I don’t think that interfering with an election constitutes an act of war. If we had that on the books, the US would be plenty guilty too. I also don’t think Russia viewed this as a way to install a puppet president in the US. Trump was not Putin’s puppet no matter what some people on the left claimed. From what I can tell, Russia, like many people, assumed Clinton was going to win. Supporting Trump was likely more about damaging her so that her administration is hobbled from day one than it was actually electing Trump. In the eyes of the Kremlin, Trump was a useful idiot. Someone who had similar aims (hurt Clinton) and could provide a benefit to Russia’s goals. This is also why Mueller was unable to find a tacit agreement between the campaign and Russia: there was no need to affirmatively reach a conspiracy when everyone is headed in the same direction anyway.

1. Did Mueller ever say that any Russian in contact with the Trump campaign was working for the Russian Government? Yes. The Mueller report actually starts with about 60 pages on what the Russians were doing to hurt Clinton and benefit Trump, which then moves into their connections with the Trump campaign. 2. Steele dossier / Clinton campaign Here's where I have some trouble understanding the argument. The Clinton campaign hires Fusion GPS to do oppo research (possibly because Fusion GPS was already doing it on behalf of Republican actors during the primary, Clinton wanted that work to continue). Fusion GPS then hires an ex-spy to find information on Trump. Steele talks to his contacts and gets back information that, though unverified, would be alarming if true. Given his concern, he tips off the FBI. Absolutely none of that is crime. Nor is it underhanded. Nor is it even a problem. Like I've said, we want people to report suspicious things to authorities, don't we? Given the sheer number of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, there were a lot of things the FBI was tipped off about, even outside the Steele dossier. Some of it was debunked, other claims turned out to be credible. But just because someone brought a claim that was ultimately debunked does not mean they were part of some grand plot. I know people want to make this into some big conspiracy and Clinton pulling all the strings and the FBI was in the tank for her. But she lost the election, in a big part because the head of the FBI came out right before the election and said he was reopening an investigation into her. Why would that happen if there was some big deep state effort to get her elected? The idea that Clinton is so powerful and cunning that she can manipulate all of these people but still lose an election to someone who had been considered a joke for most of the election is really hard to square. 3. At the beginning of your post, you said the Trump Campaign did bad, possibly criminal, things. But Trump may not have. You won't say the same thing for the Clinton Campaign. Trump clearly illegally obstructed justice in the Mueller investigation. The evidence is overwhelming and it's really not much of a question at this point. If you don't agree, I suggest reading Volume II of the report. As to the Clinton campaign, I think there is a big misunderstanding on how oppo research works and when it is right and proper to notify authorities. If an oppo researcher finds potential crimes and reports it to the FBI, then that's a good thing.

1. do you think Trump did anything wrong in 2016? Do you think the House should have impeached Trump for his alleged misdeeds in the 2016 campaign? I think that the Trump campaign certainly did bad things, some even criminal. A foreign power was trying to influence the election and the campaign was happy to receive their help, even soliciting it at times. How much of this is Trump versus his associates is up for debate, especially as Trump himself does not leave much of a paper trail. I think that the House should have impeached Trump for obstruction of justice into the Mueller investigation. They had him dead to rights on more than one count and could persuasively argue several others. Despite this, the senate would absolutely not convict in any scenario. Still, it was their duty to at least try to hold him accountable for his actions and they failed to do so. 2a. the dossier was handed to the the press and the FBI simultaneously in order to create a feedback loop of reporting and investigation I do not believe this is true. Steele claims to have handed the dossier to the FBI in July 2016: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/09/politics/feinstein-releases-glenn-simpson-transcript/index.html From what I've seen, the first mentions of the dossier in the media weren't until September 2016 and BuzzFeed did not release the entire text until January 2017, after the election. 2b. an investigation into Trump that revealed nothing of substance I would disagree that a presidential campaign working with a foreign adversary to influence an election is "nothing of substance" 3. I think Sussman has a plausible defense. Whether he really was acting as a concerned citizen is plausible. I would agree that this is plausible but by no means assured. If Sussman discovered the Alfa Bank connection and was truly alarmed and went to the FBI with it, then that is not a crime nor even a problem. We should encourage that sort of behavior. But if he went there on the orders of the campaign and lied about his purposes, then that is a serious problem and even a crime if that lie is deemed material. 4. So what you have with the 2016 campaigns (both of them) are allegations and nothing "provable". / You might say that the Trump campaign allegedly worked with foreign actors to influence the 2016 campaign. For Trump's campaign I would. Mueller did. The evidence lays it out pretty clearly. The Trump campaign actively engaged with agents of the Russian government in order to help them win the 2016 election. That is undisputable fact. 5. A better case might be made that the Clinton campaign allegedly worked with foreign actors and our own Government to influence the 2016 campaign. Not at all. That would be a much worse case to make. Which is why it hasn't been made by an investigated body. Steele was not working on behalf of the British government. He was not part of a concerted effort by the UK to elect Clinton. He was a contractor doing oppo research. In that research, he was given information that may amount to crimes or compromise if they were true so he provided that information to the FBI. That is exactly what he should have done and what anybody should do in that situation. Ultimately, the FBI can investigate and determine the truth. With the Alfa Bank thing, they quickly decided it was not true. Once again, if you come across something that might be a crime and you report it to the FBI, that does not constitute a conspiracy to influence an election. And it does not constitute a conspiracy with a foreign government if one of the people you worked with wasn't from America.

I am not speculating: Mueller stated explicitly in the report that he was not making a charging decision because he could not indict the president even if the evidence warranted it. He did, however, state that he had the ability to clearly state that the president did not commit any crimes if the evidence supported that statement, but that the evidence in the report did not support that determination. I'm saying that congress is political, and often spineless. Instead of doing a proper wide-ranging investigation, they were mostly content to let Mueller do it, hoping he would come out and say the president should be indicted (something he wouldn't even consider even if it was warranted). They wanted someone else to do the work so they could keep their hands clean and avoid political problems. When the political winds didn't blow their way, they decided not to act and justified it by saying a conviction in a partisan senate was impossible anyway. In short: they were cowards. Barr's summary of the report did not accurately reflect the details and context within the report, something that frustrated Mueller. As for the Trump family, Mueller did investigate Don Jr. for the Trump Tower meeting. Mueller concluded that, while the actions that Don Jr. took may have violated federal election law, that law has a mens rea component: the individual has to know that what they are doing is illegal. Mueller was skeptical they could prove that Don Jr. knew what he was doing wrong and so they declined to charge him. He was too dumb to crime. There isn't much on Ivanka as it doesn't appear she was involved much with the Russia related activities within the campaign. I don't recall much of anything about Eric, though I'm not sure how involved he was in the campaign. In regards to the claim that this was all cooked up by the Clinton campaign, the article you cite includes the following: The Steele Dossier took on a life of its own in the media because it was truly scandalous. But I think it often gets misconstrued as to what it was and what it was not. It was a raw intelligence document provided by an ex-spy on behalf of a client (Fusion GPS / Clinton Campaign / Whichever GOP campaign originally requested the document). Essentially, Steele talked to his contacts who gave him information and he documented it. It is not an analysis document that assesses the validity of the information, just that information he was told that may or may not be true. It also wasn't what started the Russia investigation. It definitely should have been handed to the FBI to investigate but it was problematic when it was leaked to the media (*cough* John McCain *cough*) because it was then stripped of context and blown out to be either a 100% fact based document that showed that Trump likes watersports in Moscow or 100% fake that shows a grand conspiracy to hurt Trump. It was neither of those things. At the time that Russia was working to help get Trump elected, several members of the campaign welcomed the help from Russians and met with them for those purposes. That is very well documented. It seems unlikely to me that Clinton somehow manipulated the Russians and the Trump campaign into working together so that she could tarnish Trump. I've never met a Democrat who is that competent. I think it's not only reasonable, but expected, that if you believe someone is committing crimes, that you report them to the authorities. If a campaign is doing oppo research and they find members of their opposition campaign doing shady things or possibly committing crimes, they absolutely should report that to the FBI. As for Sussman, I have no strong opinion on his guilt or innocence. I would not be outraged if he was found guilty, nor would I celebrate should he be acquitted. While I find the case itself interesting, I have a hard time bringing myself to care very much about Sussman himself, one way or the other. I laid out the arguments being presented by both sides earlier in this thread and I think both are believable. It'll come down to the facts and what convinces the jury. Where I disagree with many on this thread is that the Sussman case is anything other than a single case of a guy lying to the FBI. I do not expect this to snowball into some big thing that takes down a bunch of people.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/house-approves-bill-to-combat-gasoline-price-gouging It's not going to be a silver bullet to fix the gas price issue, but it should help. If gas prices were only raising at the rate of increased costs, the companies would be posting record profits. That being said, seems unlikely this passes the Senate.

Yes, leaking oppo to the media is very standard. It's why Madison Cawthorn just lost his primary. It happens in every campaign all of the time, constantly. It would be completely within standard practice for the Clinton campaign to tip off the media about the alleged Alfa Bank connection. Where it becomes problematic is if they tried to get the FBI to act in a particular manner by concealing that it came from a campaign. That's what the Sussman trial is about.