Cont: Mueller Investigation pt3

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LSSBB said:
1/3rd of the government?
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My very, very upper end guess, yes.

Until very, very recently I would have scoffed at this opinion. "The enemy in the halls of power of the USA?", I would have opined, "That's ridiculous, the USA might have it's flaws but it is fiercely proud of it's political system and the checks and balances therein. I know some US politicians aren't the nicest people, but I think nailed on treason would be beyond even them"

In the grand scheme of things, it's not terribly expensive to buy a politician.
 
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3point14 said:
My very, very upper end guess, yes.

Until very, very recently I would have scoffed at this opinion. "The enemy in the halls of power of the USA?", I would have opined, "That's ridiculous, the USA might have it's flaws but it is fiercely proud of it's political system and the checks and balances therein. I know some US politicians aren't the nicest people, but I think nailed on treason would be beyond even them"

In the grand scheme of things, it's not terribly expensive to buy a politician.
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There's an awful lot of government out there. Try to calculate up the numbers. Including all the coverup money.
 
LSSBB said:
There's an awful lot of government out there. Try to calculate up the numbers. Including all the coverup money.
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There seem to be an awful lot of politicians who will sell themselves very cheaply. I suspect an awful lot who would be vulnerable to other methods of being controlled. Blackmail is a whole heap cheaper than bribery.
 
theprestige said:
We seem to be assuming that most of politicians are corrupt and compromised by special interests.
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Sounds about right.

It's not like the system is biased against such individuals. Lobbying, or rather "lobbying" is just a formalised and weirdly allowed variant of bribery. It's a system literally designed to buy policy. For any politician raised on such a system, its a very short step from one to the other.
 
theprestige said:
We seem to be assuming that most of politicians are corrupt and compromised by special interests.
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"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck.

Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: The Public Sucks." - George Carlin
 
JoeMorgue said:
Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools
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(snipped)

But not from all of them. I'd be willing to bet a small amount that (using traditional numbers) 80% of your politicians come from 20% of your schools, homes and families. I bet those numbers change, and not for the better, the higher up the system one gets.
 
LSSBB said:
There's an awful lot of government out there. Try to calculate up the numbers. Including all the coverup money.
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3point14 said:
(snipped)

But not from all of them. I'd be willing to bet a small amount that (using traditional numbers) 80% of your politicians come from 20% of your schools, homes and families. I bet those numbers change, and not for the better, the higher up the system one gets.
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You aren't going to look into any of these numbers, are you?
 
carlitos said:
You aren't going to look into any of these numbers, are you?
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No, that's why it'd be a small bet. I'd be very intrigued by the numbers, but not sufficiently so to actually find out from raw data. Someone might already have done it, which would be handy.

However, no, I'm not going to take the raw data and work it out, I was just idly musing.



Edit:

There is a Washington Post article entitled "Where the Senate went to college — in one map " but it's behind a paywall.
 
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Squeegee Beckenheim said:
The second is that most of the Americans thus far indicted have made a plea bargain and, as a result, ended up with much lighter sentencing than would be expected for such crimes otherwise. From this we can glean that they have provided something of value to Mueller, and from the information we know about them we can say that it's not unlikely that Mueller is not just seeking lenient sentencing on crimes he can prosecute, but is choosing not to prosecute some crimes that he could.

The third is that this is a very sensitive investigation going, as it is, after a sitting president. If Mueller is sensible - and it very much appears that he is - he will want to get all his ducks in a row before starting to pull the trigger on his top-level targets.
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On September 14, NPR reported that Manafort's cooperation does not cover the Trump campaign:

https://twitter.com/nprpolitics/status/1040640794091237376
 
3point14 said:
Sounds about right.

It's not like the system is biased against such individuals. Lobbying, or rather "lobbying" is just a formalised and weirdly allowed variant of bribery. It's a system literally designed to buy policy. For any politician raised on such a system, its a very short step from one to the other.
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I've long held this same opinion. I'm just curious if we're now getting a consensus on it.
 
3point14 said:
(snipped)

But not from all of them. I'd be willing to bet a small amount that (using traditional numbers) 80% of your politicians come from 20% of your schools, homes and families. I bet those numbers change, and not for the better, the higher up the system one gets.
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A lot of our politicians and jurists do seem to have come from Yale or other Ivy League schools, regardless of party. Kavanaugh and his accusers were both products of the same elite prep school culture.

Everybody made fun of Sarah Palin, but I wonder how much of what made her seem funny was the fact that she'd never been anywhere near an Ivy League institution.
 
theprestige said:
Check the link. That's NPR's Twitter account, and Twitter's timestamp really does place the tweet on that date. NPR may be mistaken, but my post is factually correct.
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since you didn't actual make any statement, your post is neither correct nor incorrect.

But the NPR statement is not based on the actual text of the plea deal which makes no such restrictions.
 
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