What are your thoughts on the documentary "The Clinton Chronicles" ? Does it make you view them any different? i feel this documentary really opened up my eyes and changed my view on the clintons and politics in general.
I think you've been duped - that Jerry Fukn Fallwell had *anything* to do with that production, should be telling? It took me less than a minute to find pages for days debunking that pile of bullshit.
This is just WP, there are a ton of references though, and they read exactly like this does:
"The Clinton Chronicles: An Investigation into the Alleged Criminal Activities of Bill Clinton is a 1994 film that accused Bill Clinton of a range of crimes. The video, directed by Patrick Matrisciana, was characterized by The Washington Post as a "bizarre and unsubstantiated documentary."[1]
The New York Times reported that it was a poorly documented "hodgepodge of sometimes-crazed charges."[2] It helped perpetuate a conspiracy theory known as the "Clinton Body Count" about a list of associates Clinton was purported to have had killed.[3] The deaths listed in the film have largely been discredited due to deliberate bias, weak circumstantial evidence, and coincidence.[3]
The film was produced by Citizens for Honest Government, a project of a Westminster, California organization named Creative Ministries Inc., partially funded by Larry Nichols, a long-time Clinton opponent, and distributed with help from the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who also appears in the film.[1] Over 300,000 copies of the film were put into circulation[2] with perhaps half that being sales.[4]
To promote the film, Falwell aired an interview with Matrisciana, who was silhouetted to conceal his identity as he pretended to be a journalist who was afraid for his life.[4] Matrisciana later acknowledged that he was not in any danger, but that the interview was staged for dramatic effect at Falwell's suggestion.[4][/quote]
What i have come to notice is that all media is owned by one entity. Clear channel communications anyone? ANd i have never personally hung out with trump. All my information about him is received through some sort of media source.I often wonder What if its all altered to be against this one individual?
Two days ago Sinclair Media told their networks to read from a script prepared by tRump -- fucking verbatim (!) - if this doesn't creep you the fuck out, you should probably start brushing up on your Russian:
Currently "Sinclair", right now, is making a push to grab an additional %25, on top of the %40 they already own. You're correct that a media-monopoly is a bad thing, but you don't seem aware of who really controls the monopolies? (your beloved GOP)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-real-and-disheartening-danger-of-the-sinclair-story/2018/04/03/f634b696-377f-11e8-8fd2-49fe3c675a89_story.html?utm_term=.27ab3f92d399...
Learn to look beyond what some parrot on faux news randomly pukes out into the air, same for MSNBC or CNN - they *all* have underlying motives -- these motives are very important in regards to the validity of their messages. Seriously - research ideas don't just take shit for granted because someone said so. Learn the power of "peer review." Learn to look at multiple sides of an argument before jumping to conclusions, always remember there are AT LEAST *two* sides to every argument. Learn to be critical of everything, everyone, and never ever get stuck in your beliefs, be gumby, evolve.
There are too many problems in politics to just write it all off as blahblahblah -- these issues affect everyone, directly, whether you know it or not, you can choose to ignore this and hand over control, or you can engage. The trick is to focus on issues you care about, that matter to you. Then do the research and vote.
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The hard truths here are that many people reading this helped elect a dictator to the US presidency.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/trump-presidency-trump-cant-negotiate-his-way-out-of-a-paper-bagVanity Fair 3/30/018 - The Art of the Dunce:
15 Months Into His Presidency, Trump Can’t Negotiate His Way Out of a Paper Bag
Any sort of policy requires some firsthand mastery of details. Trump, as we know, lacks this. So when he goes into meetings with Democrats and gives away the store, only to backpedal hours later and pretend he didn’t, his weakness as a negotiator is only one part of his vulnerability. The other, more brutal fact is that he simply doesn’t know what’s being discussed.
by
T.A. Frank
March 30, 2018 11:46 am
Donald Trump sits in the Roosevelt Room.
Donald Trump sits in the Roosevelt Room.
By JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images.
The power of Donald Trump purely as a cultural mascot—he has become like Che Guevara or Uncle Sam or the San Diego Chicken—means that he'll never go down to zero approval from his fans. Even to his non-fans, the middle finger that he represents to polite society still offers an occasional, if unworthy, pleasure. And I’ll stick to my argument from last week that Trump’s presidency—if only by clearing the bar of not having sent in military forces to unseat a foreign regime—remains comparatively tolerable. If we stay at peace, with a growing economy, then voters will probably forgive Trump’s daily clowning and broken promises.
But that’s about as far as any sane person can go with the positives. Trump’s foreign policy becomes increasingly interventionist and belligerent. His relationship to Wall Street seems to have been warmed by a shared interest in financial predation. And, in the past week alone, Trump offered so many lowlights that only his most maniacal or power-hungry loyalists could pretend all was well. Trump’s new national security adviser, we learned, was going to be the war-mongering and unmannerly John Bolton, one of the era’s greatest reputational threats to the mustache. Then Trump signed off on a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that he’d first threatened to veto and then pretended to disavow, saying he’d “never sign another bill like this again,” having secured almost none of his priorities on infrastructure or immigration.
A Trump worshipper could perhaps make the case that Trump has a good-cop, bad-cop game he’s trying to play by appointing Bolton to his post. But the omnibus bill posed a much stronger test of faith. Not only did it grant Trump barely any funds for border security—$1.6 billion—it also forbade immigration authorities from adding any more beds for detainees and forbade Trump from using any of that money toward constructing a wall from the prototypes he’d just inspected. As Vox’s immigration writer Dara Lind put it in a tweet, “Congress isn’t just not giving Trump what he wants on immigration. They’re kind of smacking him down.” The chatter is no longer about whether Trump is a dictator, but whether he’s so feckless that he’ll start a war to prove he can actually make things happen.
Watch Now: Adam Devine Hijacks a Stranger's Tinder
As a candidate who’d won by defying nearly everyone, Trump the president was theoretically in thrall to almost no one, apart from his voters. He could have told Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell that they’d get their tax cuts and Obamacare repeals when he, Trump, got his wall. He could have worked with Chuck Schumer to craft an infrastructure bill that would make Trump look like a bridger of divides—and put people to work. He could also have told Wall Street to go hang, at least for show.
But, of course, none of this happened. Trump clearly wanted to deliver on immigration and infrastructure, but couldn’t. Why not? Two theories, neither one of which rules out the other, come to mind.
The first is that Trump has always been a bad negotiator. The consensus among observers in the early 1990s—when Trump’s business was insolvent and he was at risk of losing everything—was that Trump had overpaid for countless acquisitions. The Plaza Hotel, and many other buildings and businesses, had failed to generate anything close to the revenues required to cover their costs. If he was making negotiating mistakes like that in a field he knew something about, why wouldn’t he make even bigger negotiating mistakes in a field he knows nothing about?
The second—again, not exclusive—theory is that moving any sort of policy requires some firsthand mastery of details. Trump, as we know, lacks this. So when he goes into meetings with Democrats and gives away the store, only to backpedal hours later and pretend he didn’t, his weakness as a negotiator is only one part of his vulnerability. The other is that he doesn’t know what’s being discussed. When the details are all mysterious, then you really can’t press for what matters or protect what’s essential. You just have to rely on the people around you to guide you through it, and the result is never going to be as good.
Imagine, for instance, that you were given two different, but equally incomprehensible, blueprints for a hydrogen bomb, and you had two bickering designers each trying to explain why one was best. Unless you were a physics genius yourself, you’d be at a complete loss to compare the two or to suggest combinations of ideas. Or imagine you were trying to negotiate a deal between cooks, but you had no idea what happens in a kitchen. When Cook A says he’ll agree to all the menu preferences of the Cook B, as long as butter and eggs are excluded, you say yes, without realizing that you’ve just made Cook B’s menu impossible, because it consists of pound cake.
This is a major reason why Trump’s approach to many issues has been so blundering. Health-care policy is supremely arcane, with all sorts of laws that connect in unexpected ways to other ones. So is immigration policy. When Barack Obama granted Dreamers leave to exit and re-enter the United States under something called “advanced parole,” this apparently opened up a loophole for many thousands to get green cards. Who knows why? (Even I, who try to follow immigration policy, don’t quite understand the mechanics.) If you have an attention span that hovers around the Celsius temperature of ice, you’re never going to get savvy about such things.
By contrast, if you know the details of what you want and what you’re willing to give up, you can play a cool and steady game. Consider the example of George W. Bush, who came into office in 2001 with tax cuts as an immediate priority. For months, Bush pushed stubbornly for a bill to cut taxes by $1.6 trillion, generating a deluge of unfavorable coverage. What Bush finally got was a tax cut for about three quarters of that amount, an outcome that a credulous report in the Los Angeles Times described as “a blow to the cornerstone of President Bush’s domestic agenda.” The White House dutifully played along with the idea that its dreams had been slightly thwarted. Those with a little more guile noticed that the end result was a $1.3 trillion tax cut, a result far grander in scope than anyone had thought politically possible. It was dreadful policy, of course, but the point is that Bush got what he wanted.
To be sure, Trump’s boldness while campaigning did make people wonder if he might have cracked some secret code. In mid-October 2016, right after Trump’s Access Hollywood tape had been revealed and Republicans were trying to distance themselves from their nominee, Trump fired off a tweet calling them “Disloyal R’s” and saying, “They don’t know how to win - I will teach them!” When Trump indeed did win, he started to look like he might have some superhuman grasp of the dynamics of power and influence. But that looks absurd today. Trump’s rebellion is minor, and the Republican Party is in charge, shouting about wonderful tax cuts as voters prepare to give them the boot.
For all that voters dream of a political neophyte who’ll come into the White House or governor’s mansion to save the day, successful examples in real life are few. (Ronald Reagan did reasonably well for himself as governor of California, but he’d been active in politics for many years already.) Donald Trump has made money effectively. He has branded himself effectively. He has campaigned effectively. But the idea that such talents could translate into preternatural control across three branches of government looks increasingly absurd. Trump might have promised to show Republicans how to win. As the midterms approach, however, what they’re likelier to learn is how it feels to lose.
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added 4-6-018
TLDR: Donald Trump is a mouth breather.
Trump’s Wall Will Harm Endangered Species in Texas, Study Says
University of Texas researchers warn about dangers to a wide variety of habitats
President Trump’s proposed border wall would cause significant damage to many ecosystems in Texas and threaten already endangered plants and animals living near the Rio Grande, said University of Texas, Austin scientists who released a peer-reviewed publication on the wall’s environmental impact this week.
In a literature review published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, UT researchers Tim Keitt and Norma Fowler concluded that if the proposed wall were to be erected, Texas would experience severe environmental impacts. Damages to the Rio Grande Valley (Río Bravo it’s called in Mexico) would also compromise the region’s lucrative ecotourism industry. “Most of what’s been published so far has been focused on Arizona, but with the wall now being built in Texas, it seemed important [to publish this review],” Fowler said.
According to Keitt and Fowler’s research, much of the habitat along the border would suffer from degradation or be completely destroyed by the construction of physical barriers and associated roads. “You can’t put something that’s equivalent to a five-lane road on top of a plant and expect it to live,” Fowler said.
Some well-known megafauna would take a hit if the wall were to be built. One example is the black bears living in and around Big Bend National Park, which are the northern tip of a larger population concentrated in Mexico’s Sierra Madre range. If the wall cuts off Big Bend, the bears there will be isolated until they disappear. The ocelot, a kind of dwarf jaguar common in Central and South America, has a small, remnant population in southern Texas that would also be at risk if the wall were constructed.
Fowler said their research was intended to highlight environmental threats beyond these already-publicized concerns. “We’re trying to broaden the discussion from just the mammals, namely cute furry animals, to recognize and consider the damage the barrier will do to all animals and plants,” Fowler said.
One of the ecosystems the scientists are concerned about is the Tamaulipan thornscrub, located on the higher ground that runs along the Rio Grande. It used to be commonly found in South Texas, but is decreasing in size as cities and farms take over the area.
Fowler’s likes to point to the endangered wildflower Zapata bladderpod (Physaria thamnophila) that grows in a select few sites in South Texas. “Most people will just step on them...but I think these little plants are totally cool. If we’re going to preserve biodiversity, the conversation has to be more than just the terminally cute ocelots,” Fowler said. The Zapata bladderpod grows right where the wall could be built, uphill from the Rio Grande.
If engineers building the wall were to find the soil too crumbly and decide to move the wall further inland, they would create a stretch of no-man’s land between the river and the wall. Some species would struggle in such isolation.
According to data Fowler collected from a Department of Homeland Security document, the wall and roads combined would have a total width of 12 to 20 meters, which is about the width of four to five highway lanes. For every kilometer of wall, some 12 to 20 hectares of land could be destroyed. And that doesn’t include the construction sites and additional new roads that will lead up to the wall.
“As far as I know, everything I’d said is accurate,” Fowler said. “And I wish it wasn’t.”