Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[kaid]

https://investigatemidwest.org/2019/...ghting-gasbag/

Pretty good piece systematically breaking down Trump (and conservative media's) attempts to gaslight the farming community about issues related to the trade war, and how it may not work.

It's going to be amazing if Trump turns farmers against the Republican party in the matter of a single term.

When the trump admin ag head came to wisconsin to tell small farmers that farming would be fine with the trade war although it would probably require family farmers to sell their farms to bigger ag businesses I am not even sure how much gaslighting is needed. He sent his flunky to tell family farmers to the face they may as well sell what they have now while they can.

[DocSavageFan]

Remember when Nunes had a secret memo that proved the deep state conspiracy against Donald Trump? Yeah, the media ate that up too.

#Releasethememo

The point is that the media likes sensation, and when they get credible reports, they publish them. But they publish them as unsubstantiated, it isn't there fault you can't tell the difference between "We have reports that Mueller is looking into Cohen's trip to Prague", which is true, and "Mueller is looking into Cohen's trip to Prague".

But keep up your victimhood act. I guess it is all you have left at this point.

Stop diverting by switching the subject to Nunes.

The point is that the MSM doesn't really give a shit about credible reporting where Trump is concerned. In this case, the MSM relentlessly advanced the Cohen conspiracy theory narrative that your ilk enthusiastically embraced and propagated.

McClatchy: Mueller Has Evidence Cohen Was in Prague in 2016
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/timoth...-2016-n2470823

If anyone is the victim here it's those who routinely believed this kind of horseshit because they're so fucking desperate to believe in anything that feeds their little alternate reality. Pathetic. And the fact that you casually rationalize this sort MSM behavior makes it doubly pathetic.

[Belize]

I don't think any of them have any self awareness, tbh.

Self awareness requires basic consciousness, and lord knows Jr is empty behind the eyes.

[Draco-Onis]

If anyone is the victim here it's those who routinely believed this kind of horseshit because they're so fucking desperate to believe in anything that feeds their little alternate reality. Pathetic.

Is your cognitive dissonance that bad? really now? and for the record the claim was that Cohen's cell phone was pinged in prague that has not been disproved just that he was not there.

[Dacien]

Describing a 2014 visit to the impoverished city of East St. Louis, Illinois, Williamson compared a black child to a “primate” and a “three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg” before likening his own trip through Illinois to Marlow’s journey up the Congo River in Heart of Darkness, all within the space of a single paragraph. (He later denied, unconvincingly, that the three-fifths reference was a slavery joke.) In a column that same year about Orange Is the New Black actress Laverne Cox, Williamson compared trans people to voodoo doll worshippers. “Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman,” he wrote. He accused Bernie Sanders, a secular Jew, of leading a “nationalist-socialist movement” in a too-cute-by-half bid for rage clicks.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magaz...sidewalk-ends/

This is the article in question, at least for the three-fifths stuff, if anyone was curious. I think it's a racially insensitive invocation to use this kind of language, but there's no deep seed of hatred in Mr. Williamson's ideology. Which is kind of an important distinction.

[Noxx79]

https://investigatemidwest.org/2019/...ghting-gasbag/

Pretty good piece systematically breaking down Trump (and conservative media's) attempts to gaslight the farming community about issues related to the trade war, and how it may not work.

It's going to be amazing if Trump turns farmers against the Republican party in the matter of a single term.

Well at least in Kansas, there’s suddenly a non-zero chance of us getting a blue senator, being as the top two republican possibilities for the republican nomination for the retiring pat roberts are Kris Kobach, who even the republicans hate now, and mike Pompeo, who will probably be radioactive depending on this impeachment investigation.

(Our other senator, Jerry Moran, is clearly sick of this shit, and I wouldn’t be shocked at all if he retires at the end of his term in 2022, but that’s an eternity from now)

[Thekri]

Stop diverting by switching the subject to Nunes.

The point is that the MSM doesn't really give a shit about credible reporting where Trump is concerned. In this case, the MSM relentlessly advanced the Cohen conspiracy theory narrative that your ilk enthusiastically embraced and propagated.

McClatchy: Mueller Has Evidence Cohen Was in Prague in 2016
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/timoth...-2016-n2470823

If anyone is the victim here it's those who routinely believed this kind of horseshit because they're so fucking desperate to believe in anything that feeds their little alternate reality. Pathetic. And the fact that you casually rationalize this sort MSM behavior makes it doubly pathetic.

Wait, how is you bringing up examples of non-Trump friendly news topical, and when I point out the media does the exact same thing to Pro-Trump unconfirmed stories, which is exactly what you are rambling on about, it is "Deflection". When a potentially significant story is gotten from a source, the media will typically run the story as exactly that, unconfirmed. Many times that story is later confirmed, sometimes it is not.

Let's take the story you just linked, since apparently any examples I bring up are "Deflection".

Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy DC report that sources close to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election say that authorities have obtained evidence proving that President Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, did in fact make a trip to Prague after denying he had ever been there.

It says who is reporting the story, it says as best it can where their sources are, it says what is being alleged. It does not anywhere say that it is true, it merely states that sources are saying it is true.

The very next sentence:

If true, this would confirm..

This is what is called responsible journalism, not fake news. The article doesn't confirm anything, it says where it got the information and what the information was. It isn't their fault you can't read qualifiers. The same journalist, five days after that article, did confirm the details here.
Mueller report states Cohen was not in Prague. It is silent on whether a Cohen device pinged there
Namely, McClatchy followed up, updated his reporting with new information that confirmed the previous information was false. There was no attempt to drive a conspiracy theory, the story was simply updated with the latest facts, which contradicted the previous ones.

So nice try. Are there any other exhibits you would like to present in your ongoing case against reality?

[Breccia]

I'll assume @Breccia can answer whether this is anywhere close to reality.

Um...are you asking about median income, or Trump literally tweeting "Impeach the Pres."? Because...what the fuck?

Yes, median household income is up.



2018 was 0.8% higher than 2017. Which means, again, Trump is taking credit for all of Obama's work and adding a worse increase than Obama added his last four years. It's the same as unemployment.

Trump is also forgetting to acknowledge that median household income went up in 2018 by one-half the amount the average American pays in his tariffs.

So, as per usual, it's Trump taking things out of context to put himself in a positive light.

[Bodakane]

Kevin Williamson has never falsified anything or twisted facts in any of the articles I've read, so he's got an A rating in my book.

Cool. Now will you answer the question I asked?

[Tazkar]

I'll assume @Breccia can answer whether this is anywhere close to reality.

While I wouldn't be surprised if this is 'technically' accurate. I'm also pretty sure that Trump doesn't understand statistics at all, nor how if outliers like you know, the wealthy 1% make more money then that will push the median upwards. Even if none of the median numbers before had changed before the outlier increased.
In that scenario the people that were in the median aren't actually making that much more, its just the outliers making it appear so.

Also average income is a lot like the stock market, its always going up to some extent(In terms of decades of trending not the up and down spikes), so technically its always at 'The highest point ever', Trump likes making technically true claims that really mean jack shit. It's like shouting out "The Earth has revolved around the sun more times than it ever has before! EVER, EVER, EVER! We have more orbits around the sun than in the history of our planet! Also, more rotations of the earth today in the solar system than at any time in history! Tough numbers for the comets to beat!"

[Thekri]

While I wouldn't be surprised if this is 'technically' accurate. I'm also pretty sure that Trump doesn't understand statistics at all, nor how if outliers like you know, the wealthy 1% make more money then that will push the median upwards. Even if none of the median numbers before had changed before the outlier increased.
In that scenario the people that were in the median aren't actually making that much more, its just the outliers making it appear so.

Also average income is a lot like the stock market, its always going up to some extent(In terms of decades of trending not the up and down spikes), so technically its always at 'The highest point ever', Trump likes making technically true claims that really mean jack shit. It's like shouting out "The Earth has revolved around the sun more times than it ever has before! EVER, EVER, EVER! We have more orbits around the sun than in the history of our planet! Also, more rotations of the earth today in the solar system than at any time in history! Tough numbers for the comets to beat!"

Well basically every president since WWII could claim the exact same thing, because median household income has been climbing the US since... well since the Revolutionary War actually. Trump might as well claim that since he was President in 2019, which is a bigger number then 2012, that he has years with bigger numbers then Obama! Again, totally true, totally not surprising, and not in any way a reflection on his performance.

[Tazkar]

Well basically every president since WWII could claim the exact same thing, because median household income has been climbing the US since... well since the Revolutionary War actually. Trump might as well claim that since he was President in 2019, which is a bigger number then 2012, that he has years with bigger numbers then Obama! Again, totally true, totally not surprising, and not in any way a reflection on his performance.

Yeah that was kind of what I was trying to point out, that the claim is probably technically true but at the same time really means jack because it's a number that trends upwards no matter what. It would only matter if Median income specifically(With the outliers removed) had increased substantially in his term which it hasn't.

[Breccia]

While I wouldn't be surprised if this is 'technically' accurate. I'm also pretty sure that Trump doesn't understand statistics at all, nor how if outliers like you know, the wealthy 1% make more money then that will push the median upwards.

Actually, one of the reasons so many statisticians use the median is the opposite of what you said. It's actually not affected by outliers much at all.

For the sake of example, let's say there are ten people. One makes $20,000 a year. Eight make $60,000 a year. And one makes $100,000 a year. All four averages are $60,000 from this set.

Now replace the $100,000 with $1,000,000.

The mode is unchanged, because it's the most common value, and still $60,000. Unfortunately the mode isn't highly used in a lot of cases because "most common" doesn't always have useful weight. If, for example, one thousand students compared their GPA, it's quite possible all thousand of them would miss each other because of decimal places. If three or four students just happened to have 2-point-three-identical-decimals-by-chance, they'd have the mode despite it having little meaning here. Or, more likely, they'd be the 4.0 students and the average would have even less use.

The midrange would still be halfway between the lowest and the highest, which would jump from $60,000 to $510,000 and be basically useless here. Nobody uses the midrange by itself, it's too affected by outliers.

The mean would still be "add them all up, and divide by how many there are" which would swap from $60,000 before to $150,000 now. Which, again, doesn't really reflect what's going on very well. If the sample size was a hundred, a thousand, etc. and you moved just one data point, the effect would be lower, but still there.

The median is the item in the halfway spot, or halfway between the two items in the halfway spot if your sample size is even. Moving the ends has no effect on it at all. The end result still has a $60,000 median. Making one guy a millionaire doesn't change that.

Realtors in particular are good about using the median, because Liam Neesen using his Battleship money to buy a five bazillion dollar mansion of shame doesn't affect what Mr. and Mrs. American Dream should expect to pay for a three-bedroom in the suburbs. Using it for salaries is about right, too, although it has a weakness there. True, median income ignores billionaires, but it also ignores the minimum wagers and the unemployed. It also ignores people working two jobs.

Basically, Trump is probably using "median" because that's the word that was on the report waved in front of his tiny hands. It's showing a substandard growth of the middle class, while more data is needed to show how much more his billionaire friends are making, or who is living in poverty.

For more information, consult the best info the US Census seems to have, 2017 to 2018. It includes the line

Median household income was $63,179 in 2018, not statistically different from the 2017 median

which Trump was bragging about.

[Edge-]

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/1...atchdog-046821

And we're starting to hear calls for an audit for Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.

Why?

Well, because she spends quite a lot of time meeting with people from Kentucky. Which isn't surprising as that's her home-state and where her husband, Mitch O'Connel, is represents them in the Senate. But what is surprising is the volume of those meetings, which is suspiciously high and raises questions of whether or not she's using her office to benefit friends and partners of her husband, who just happens to be Majority Leader in the Senate. And deeply unpopular in his state.

- - - Updated - - -

https://whyy.org/articles/british-fa...-of-our-lives/

Cool, so CBP is now harassing and abusing British tourists for taking a wrong turn in Canada and ending up in the US.

The dumbest part?

“They could just come to the United States with a passport,” said attorney Bridget Cambria, who worked on civil rights complaint which has been filed on behalf of the family with the Department of Homeland Security. “The reason it sounds silly is because it is silly.”

[Tazkar]

Actually, one of the reasons so many statisticians use the median is the opposite of what you said. It's actually not affected by outliers much at all.

The mean would still be "add them all up, and divide by how many there are" which would swap from $60,000 before to $150,000 now. Which, again, doesn't really reflect what's going on very well. If the sample size was a hundred, a thousand, etc. and you moved just one data point, the effect would be lower, but still there.

The median is the item in the halfway spot, or halfway between the two items in the halfway spot if your sample size is even. Moving the ends has no effect on it at all. The end result still has a $60,000 median. Making one guy a millionaire doesn't change that.

That would be my bad on that, I confused median for mean. Ironic given I have taken statistics.

Though my overall point was still correct in that the Median has trended upwards for decades and much much longer. Even if the rate it's gone up has changed over the years.

[Breccia]

Though my overall point was still correct in that the Median has trended upwards for decades and much much longer.

Indeed, and it's growing less now. See that graph? We saw that before just before W's recession.

[Shadowferal]

I did mentioned that in making a bargain with Moscow Mitch he'd want two things, Pence and no one scrutinizing either him or his wife's business dealings.
Now they seem to be trying get Moscow Mitch to the bargaining table for impeachment.

[Edge-]

GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, formerly Ronna Romney McDaniel, decided to take a swipe at the Bidens for nepotism.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ronna...b002e33e761288

Yeah...it went about as well as you'd imagine, with people reminding her that her uncle is a former GOP presidential candidate and governor and her grandfather is a former GOP governor.

And reminding her that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are the children of the sitting president and have official positions in the White House that they're using to enrich themselves.

Because of course self-awareness in the modern Republican party is totally dead.

[Shadowferal]

I don’t know if you quite understand what nepotism means, Niece of Mitt Romney.

That's funny.

[cubby]

I did mentioned that in making a bargain with Moscow Mitch he'd want two things, Pence and no one scrutinizing either him or his wife's business dealings.
Now they seem to be trying get Moscow Mitch to the bargaining table for impeachment.

I would not be surprised at all if that came about. While it would be nice to get everyone who is corrupt in Washington right now, we have to take our victories where we can get them. If ignoring McConnell's shenanigans means we get Trump literally out of the White House before the 2020 election, then we make the deal.