ChiGoose

I think this "us vs them" talk is not only problematic in that it does not facilitate actual discussion, but it's also dangerous because it drives us to our own sides and leads to demonizing anyone who doesn't agree with us as "them." It also allows for us to take any member of the "them" group and ascribe their belief to everyone in that group even if the group as a whole does not agree. A good example of this is the mask mandate claim here. I have not seen anyone in a position of authority advocating that we require everyone be masked forever. I am sure there are some people somewhere who have expressed that belief, but it is not a mainstream position of the Left. However, by making this claim, we can simply smear anyone on the other side as being unreasonable and dismiss anything they have to say. It would be like taking the words of an extremist on the Right and saying everyone on the Right is a neo-nazi white supremacist ("They want to disadvantage minorities. They believe being white is superior..." etc). It's not true. There are some that may express that view but that's not the actual policy of the Right. But I could make that claim, point to someone who fits that profile and feel like I've made my point that my group is superior to their group. Not only does it not get us anywhere, but it actually pushes us apart and makes things worse. Let's be better than this.

Do those factors correlate with firearm deaths? Do we have data on that? Just a quick look shows we have only a slightly higher rate of single parent household than the UK (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/12/12/religion-and-living-arrangements-around-the-world/ ), but the UK does not have a similar rate of firearm deaths.

If this was true, we would see the same rate of gun deaths in peer countries, but we don't. So, it's either: The availability / accessibility of guns; or Americans are inherently inferior to people like Canadians and the British I really don't think it's the latter...

The NRA used to actually propose gun control legislation because as the experts on guns, they knew what laws would be effective for preventing guns from getting in the wrong hands while maintaining the ability for upstanding citizens to safely own firearms. Now that the NRA exists solely as the lobbying arm of gun manufacturers, we no longer have a large organization of firearm experts lobbying for safe gun laws. Which means that if we ever get to a boiling point and the country actually decides to do *something* about the insane number of gun deaths, those laws will likely be written by people who lack the expertise to make them as effective as they can be. I'm not convinced banning the AR-15 will do a whole lot since there are plenty of other semi-automatic rifles out there, but if we get to a point where Congress actually passes something, I'd bet an AR-15 ban would be part of that. The fact that most gun deaths are suicides I think underscores even more that we need effective firearm legislation. Most people who survive a suicide attempt do not end up dying of suicide. They end up moving on and leading a normal life. And most methods of suicide attempts (pills, cutting, etc) are far more likely to fail than succeed. But somebody who attempts suicide with a gun is about 90% certain to die. If they did not have access to that weapon in that brief moment, they more likely than not would not have died. Better laws around simple things like gun storage and red flag laws would likely go a long way here. And I completely agree that we should focus more on handguns. We talk more about rifles because they are used in the kinds of shootings that make the headlines, but the overwhelming majority of gun deaths are by handgun. I would be in favor of handguns being far more regulated / restricted than rifles.

I find it interesting that your comparing specifically to AR-15s and rifles instead of guns in general. I'm not entirely sure what your point is. Personally, I think ~45,000 people dying from guns in the US every year to be bad and would like us to do something about it. Since other countries don't have the same rate of firearm deaths, it should be possible to reduce the deaths here.

So about 1% of the people who die by guns in the US each year?

There are anecdotes and there is data. How many people are killed by hammers every year? How lethal are hammers? As in, if someone decides to kill someone with a hammer, how likely are they to succeed?

If it was true that legislation could not reduce gun violence, we would see these problems in other peer countries. But we don’t. They have the same problems we do with mental health, schools having doors, etc. But they don’t have the shootings we do. Not even close. So it’s clear that *something* can be done to reduce gun deaths but some people would rather pretend otherwise.

They promote themselves as reformed GOP activists who have seen the error of their ways and are truly working to defeat Trumpism. So there’s like a 10% chance that’s actually true.

If they’re not careful, they might give a patient the wrong shot…

FYI: there’s like a 90% chance that The Lincoln Project is just a giant grift. They occasionally do some cool stuff but most of their work is targeted at Lefty Twitter so that people will give them money for more cool ads that won’t do much.

I will be there. Section 524, Row 5. I balked a bit at the price, but my wife (a Bears fan) talked me into it.

It is truly amazing that Hillary Clinton is so powerful that she controls all of Washington DC, the Democratic Party, the FBI, the Deep State, and other governments agencies to be named later. And she used that power to her advantage by coming up with a master plan to lose an election to a game show host who somehow managed to bankrupt multiple casinos.

Hi. Democrat here. I would like to keep the guns out of the hands of the criminals and the insane. I would also be in favor of spending more money on mental health. I'm fine with upstanding citizens owning guns. Most of my family are gun owners.

1. More funding to help people with mental illness would be great 2. Mental illness is not the root cause of these shootings. Other rich countries have people with mental illness but they don't have the rate of mass shootings that we do.

At the request of @DRsGhost, I read the executive summary of the IG's report on Crossfire Hurricane. Here are my main takeaways: 1. The IG confirms that the FBI investigation into Russia was started when a friendly foreign government informed the FBI that Trump advisor George Papadopoulos told them that Russia had contacted him claiming to have damaging information on Clinton. Mueller stated that this is how it all started and the IG confirmed it. The FBI was not made aware of the Steele Dossier until weeks after the investigation started. The IG confirmed that the opening of the investigation was properly predicated and in compliance with FBI policies and guidelines. So can we finally stop with these claims that it was started by Clinton or the Steele Dossier? 2. The Carter Page FISA applications were incredibly flawed While the IG found that the applications for FISA surveillance on Carter Page were not politically motivated, it also found that they omitted relevant information that should have been disclosed to the judge. FBI policy requires that the factual claims in a warrant are vetted by investigators but the Crossfire Hurricane team did not run them by Steele's handler before submitting the application. The handler told the IG that they would not have agreed to some of the statements on the applications. Between the first application and the subsequent renewals, the IG found 17 separate issues with the applications. 3. Bruce Ohr's actions likely did not violate FBI policy, but those policies should be updated. Ohr was not required to inform senior staff or his supervisors that he was communicating with Steele but he probably should have anyway. Ohr was also not required to disclose that his wife had previously done contracting work with FusionGPS, but it would have been better if he did disclose this. In both instances, the IG suggests the FBI update its policies to close these potential gaps. 4. Bottom Line: Why do people think this vindicates Trump? After reading the report summary, I'm struggling to understand why Trump supporters find this to be some smoking gun that disproves the Mueller investigation. It actually confirms that the Steele Dossier was not the cause of the FBI's Russia investigation. The problems with Page's FISA applications are certainly serious but they do not invalidate what was discovered and most of the Mueller report deals with issues with the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia that do not involve Page. If you go so far as to throw out all of the Carter Page information, the Mueller report is still a damning document. It also makes me confused why we have this long thread about the Sussman trial as if it was going to unravel a big conspiracy. The IG confirms that the Russia investigation was ongoing prior to Sussman meeting with the FBI. So even if Sussman had been found guilty and even if everything in the Steele Dossier had been thrown into the garbage immediately when it was handed over to the FBI, we would still have heaps of evidence of Russian contact with the Trump campaign from the already ongoing investigation. From what I can tell, the IG report may lead to reforms with the FISA process, which would be great, but this report does almost nothing to invalidate the overall findings of the Russia investigation.

Sounds good. I’ve got a bit on my plate at the moment but should be able to get back to you in a day or two. Every Democrat I know wishes the party was as clever as you claim they are.

I have not. It's fairly long, but I'll read it if you read the Mueller Report. I'll even do a book report if you'd like.

O Brother Where Art Thou is an excellent movie. Though I suppose it's more Coen Brothers than it is a typical Clooney movie despite him playing the lead. I've answered this several times: the Democratic Party and its leadership is profoundly incompetent.

I would love to take up the issue with Barr for misleading the country with his summary. If you know how to get in touch with him, let me know. In the meantime, I would suggest reading the actual report, or even the executive summaries of the actual report written by the guy who wrote the report. The further away you get from the actual text, the easier it is for pundits and political actors to mislead.

I'm just a man, typing on a message board, asking people to please read primary sources

That is a blatant and intentional misreading of the facts that leads to the sowing of seeds of distrust. Collusions isn't a crime and Mueller was not investigating collusion. Mueller found ample evidence of obstruction but could not charge a sitting president.

I think these are important questions and I will do my best to answer them. I will note that political news coverage is often of poor quality and legal news coverage is almost certainly to be of extremely poor quality. Therefore, coverage of a legal investigation with political implications is generally going to be terrible. Therefore, I want to stick to the facts of the investigation and not how it was covered or received by different camps. We can all pull hysterical coverage from various sources over the last several years to try to prove a point but that would just devolve into talking past each other instead of having a real, fact-based conversation. 1. [W]hy hasn't anyone been indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced for any crime or campaign violation if the investigation produced evidence of illegal activities such as conspiring with a foreign entity against the government? The biggest thing that differs in the Mueller report versus how it was covered in the public was the scope. Mueller notes that his remit from from the Department of Justice (DoJ) was to "investigate 'the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,' including any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign." (Mueller Report, p1) In accordance with this instruction, Mueller made the determination that, since "collude" is not a crime under federal law, he would apply the framework of conspiracy. Under federal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between to or more people to commit an illegal act, along with an intent to achieve the agreement's goal. (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/conspiracy) So if you're reading through this, you can probably start to see where the problem for the Left is going to be. Mueller saw his scope as limited to what the Russians were doing and whether or not the Trump campaign had an actual agreement with them to commit crimes. He did not believe he had authority to look into Trump's potential business crimes or essentially any crimes that weren't a conspiracy with the Russians unless he happened to stumble upon them when looking into a potential conspiracy with the Russians. As we know, Mueller was unable to establish that the Trump Campaign had an actual agreement with the Russians to interfere in the campaign. Which should not have been surprising because they did not need a formal agreement to coordinate with and benefit from the Russians. So even though Mueller found ample evidence of the Trump Campaign meeting with Russians, soliciting help from them, benefitting from them, and providing them with information, if there was no actual agreement to a specific end (interfering in an election), Mueller did not feel he could charge a conspiracy. Despite this, Mueller did secure 8 guilty pleas and a trial conviction based on crimes he did encounter during the investigation. Additionally, he spends over 100 pages documenting the connections between the Trump Campaign and the Russians. Importantly, Mueller documented in Volume II that Trump himself had almost certainly broken the law by obstructing justice on several occasions. However, given that he felt he could not charge a sitting president, he declined to formally accuse Trump. This clearly reads as a roadmap to impeachment, especially since he cites to the Constitution's impeachment clause when explaining his rationale. Yet, it seems that the Dems, knowing that they could never secure a win in the Senate no matter the facts, declined to take Mueller up on this and let Trump skate because they felt it wouldn't help their political position to get bogged down in a losing fight. 2. How can something that goes on for over a year and spends millions of dollars on legal fees and lawyers and interviews that produced tons of evidence just get a readout and then gets dropped? Lots of reasons, but mostly: politics. Democratic leadership was happy to hand off most of the investigative responsibilities to Mueller. While the Senate did have a serious intelligence investigation going on, the House was controlled by Republicans who did not want a real investigation so they let Devin Nunes just mess around to distract people. When Pelosi took the gavel in 2018, she likely had a mistaken idea of what Mueller was up to, assumed he had the goods and was happy to not launch a serious investigation into other potential crimes herself because it would be seen as partisan and cause her problems. When the report finally came out in 2019, it was preceded by a misleading summary by Attorney General Bill Barr, allowing Trump and his team to claim total vindication before the actual text was available to refute that claim. There were days of Trump's team being elated and Dems being dejected. By the time we had the actual facts, the narrative was already set. The Senate's bipartisan investigation actually did note that the Trump campaign had regular contact with Russians, expected to benefit from them and posed a threat to US national security. But the full report came out in late 2020, too late to make any major noise. 3. My read of the summary was Mueller's conclusion that they might be innocent but we can't prove it. A conclusion that defies the basic premise of the entire legal system. A presumption of innocence and the need to prove guilt, not disprove it. Mueller essentially concludes that, even though the Trump campaign was in constant contact with the Russians and benefitting from them, the elements of a conspiracy were not met since they did not have an actual agreement to interfere in the election. He also mentions that he had the power to say if he felt that Trump was innocent of obstruction of justice, but that the evidence did not support such a statement. Still, he declines to formally accuse Trump of a crime because he believes he cannot indict Trump as a sitting president, and therefore Trump would not have a chance to clear his name at trial. Instead, he points out all of the areas that Trump met the elements of obstruction of justice and noted that the Constitutional remedy at hand was impeachment (this was important in his eventual Congressional testimony as he stated that a president can be indicted after they leave office). Then, the Democratic Party did its most favorite thing in the whole world: shoot itself in the foot. With the exception of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Dems misplayed this entire thing from day one. Instead of having their own investigations into things that may be on the outskirts of Mueller's scope or other potential crimes (like Trump's business dealings), laying the groundwork for establishing (through their investigations and Mueller's) that Trump is corrupt and dangerous while building the case for impeachment, they sat on their hands and were shocked when they realized that Mueller wasn't going to do their work for them. At that point, they had failed to prep the country for an impeachment trial (even if they knew they would lose in the Senate), the winds had shifted against them and they were left standing there with no idea what to do next. The bottom line is that the Trump campaign worked with, and benefitted from the Russians for years but because they did not meet all of the elements of a conspiracy, Mueller did not charge them. Mueller clearly felt that Trump should have been impeached at least for the obstruction but the Dems blew that opportunity because their leadership is generally incompetent.

The jury in the Manafort trial had MAGA people on it but they still convicted him. The idea that because someone donated to a specific campaign that they cannot be impartial in a jury trial is something people claim because they're grasping at straws. Do we have transcripts of the jury selection process? I would much rather look at primary sources than accuse someone of bias because it furthers a particular political angle. If Durham was concerned about particular members of the jury, he could have moved to strike them before the onset of the trial. Jury trials routinely have guardrails put on them in terms of what evidence is allowed and what is not. It is part of the procedure for the attorneys to file motions in limine to argue that certain evidence should or should not be made available for the jury. Are you alleging that the judge made a material error in one of his rulings? And if so, which one and why? In any case, if that's true, Durham should appeal the case. We also know that Clinton did not start the Russia investigation. This is spelled out pretty clearly in the Mueller report. I know I've mentioned this before, but I seriously recommend reading the Mueller report for yourself if you are interested in this topic. It has tons of evidence and primary sources but it is frequently taken out of context and straight up lied about by political actors to further their own agendas.

So what's next for the Durham investigation? If Susman was supposed to be the first block in unraveling some big conspiracy and bring it all down, what comes next after Sussman is acquitted? Really seems like the special counsel investigation into the special counsel is turning into a real nothingburger. Maybe they need a special counsel to investigate the special counsel that investigated the special counsel so we'll finally know what really happened.