Reddit Politics Summary Friday Jan 5th 18

What is this?

This is a digest of the top posts on reddit/r/politics over the last 24 hours.
Once a day my bot wakes up and summarizes each post and puts this message into steem. If you like it please vote :)

DC bookstore sold out of ‘Fire and Fury’ 20 minutes after midnight release

(43069) (comments)

• "Fire and Fury" made headlines this week as excerpts surfaced in the news media ahead of its official release. Those excerpts painted a picture of a White House in chaos and sparked a feud between Trump and his former chief strategist, Breitbart News head Stephen Bannon, who is quoted speaking critically of the president and his family in the book.

Michael Wolff says Donald Trump is least credible person 'who has ever walked on earth'

(10907) (comments)

• "I will tell you the one description that everyone gave, everyone has in common: They all say he is like a child," Wolff explained. "And what they mean by that is, he has a need for immediate gratification.
• "Whether he realized it was an interview or not, I don’t know, but it certainly was not off the record," Wolff said.
• "Actually there’s a competition to sort of get to the bottom line here of who this man is.

Wolff Book: Trump Privately Rationalized KKK After Charlottesville

(8889) (comments)

Job growth slows to a six-year low in Trump's first year

(5746) (comments)

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that the economy added 148,000 jobs in December, which is down a fair amount from the previous two months, and falls short of expectations.
• The image makes a distinction: red columns point to monthly changes under the Bush and Trump administrations, while blue columns point to monthly job changes under the Obama administration. Above you’ll find the chart I run every month, showing monthly changes in total jobs since the start of the Great Recession.

The psychiatrist who briefed Congress on Trump’s mental state: this is “an emergency”

(5091) (comments)

Kushner directed Flynn to lobby foreign officials over U.N. vote: report

(3436) (comments)

• Last month, it was reported that Trump directed Flynn during the transition to make contacts with Russian officials on topics intended to repair relations between the U.S. and Russia, including the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria terror group.
• It was shortly after the election, that President-elect Trump directed Flynn to contact Russian officials on topics that included working jointly against ISIS," ABC News reported, according to a Flynn confidant.

Schiff: The case that Trump obstructed justice just got stronger

(3244) (comments)

• Schiff noted that these are linked in the sense that they suggest both how badly Trump wanted to shut down the probe and just how far the White House — and, possibly, Sessions — went in order to conceal that this was the real reason Trump wanted Comey gone.
• The claim that Sessions wanted to plant negative stories on Comey suggests that the attorney general might have been "trying to set up some predicate for firing him without disclosing what the true reason was," Schiff told me.
• "If it’s accurate that the White House said this document said nothing about the Russia investigation, and that turned out to be another false statement, that may be further evidence of corrupt intent in concealing, again, the true motivation behind the Comey firing," Schiff said.

Republican Senators Recommend Charges Against Author of Trump Dossier

(2922) (comments)

• Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a senior committee member, told the Justice Department they had reason to believe that a former British spy, Christopher Steele, lied to federal authorities about his contacts with reporters regarding information in the dossier, and they urged the department to investigate.
• He also said and that "Mr. Simpson and his attorney demanded during the interview that the transcript be kept confidential." A lawyer for Fusion GPS, Joshua Levy, in turn, disputed that account, and said that upon review, his client now wanted the transcript to be made public — a request Mr. Grassley has denied.

We tested the effects of hiding downvotes in r/politics. Here's what we learned

(212) (comments)

• Working on a short timeline and expecting the platform to change reddit’s design any day, we assembled a quick pilot study that we hoped would offer further evidence on the question, even if it wouldn’t provide a conclusive answer.
• In our discussion with r/politics community members, we heard worries that days without downvotes would leave them defenseless against their political opponents, and that they would be flooded with bad-faith comments from another side. Yet other people wondered if bad-faith comments might be the product of good-faith commenters who experience systematic downvoting and who lose faith in the possibility of a respectful conversation.
• Despite the little red bubble that says "Vote based on quality, not opinion.", people see downvoting as a mechanism to suppress, or in some cases - "punish", posts that they may not agree with; instead of replying and engaging in productive discourse.

Friday Fun Off-Topic Megathread

(172) (comments)

• Please keep in mind that civility rules are still in place, and that meta discussion should be saved for modmail or our monthly meta thread. Please feel free to share any political cartoons, image macros, infographics, memes, or other things that would typically be off-topic here on /r/politics.
• More accurately, the credibility of the details of the story have become very difficult to challenge in the current climate, especially when the truthiness of the story is apparent.
• He doesn't seem like the most up front guy, and so far I haven't read anything about his departure, but I'd wager he may have lost access last year. Even Trump's disaster of an administration would probably be able to catch on that the guy has been there a year and nobody really has an explanation.