Turkey fans BOO during pre-match minute's silence for the victims of Paris attacks an

[Unregistered]

Conservatism stronger than ever!

That’s why all the Congress critters from GOP retiring ? Rest are pretty quiet ....some waiting for their indictments perhaps ?

Know anybody looking for a job? The economy is drowning in jobs. Get people working and keep them off subsidies. Watch what that does to the deficit.

That’s why they GOP budget abandoned all language around deficits? GOP tax package EXPLODES deficit. Talk to the hand till you have numbers .

In the mean time we can stop pretending that we have problems with our infrastructure. I believe you called it multitasking. Can’t reduce the deficit by doing nothing, Obama tried that.

I don’t respond to word salad

[Unregistered]

It’s time Cons ....

Mueller clearly knows where this investigation is going and is methodically building it brick by brick: His first wave of charges, against Manafort, Gates, and George Papadopoulos, established that the Trump campaign had been lying about its contacts with Russians; his second wave—the guilty plea by Michael Flynn—established that those lies extended to figures inside the White House; his third wave of charges, against the Internet Research Agency, establishes that there was a criminal conspiracy to help Trump and undermine Hillary Clinton. Any Americans who knowingly participating in that conspiracy will also, presumably, be vulnerable to prosecution.

Mueller has ALREADY

1) established trump campaign lied about Russian contacts

2) people inside the WH lied about Russian contacts

3) established that a criminal conspiracy assisted trump and specifically sought to hurt Clinton

None of the rest of us knows where this investigation is heading, not even the targets of the investigation. Three times now Mueller—in the most watched investigation in history—has charged and gotten guilty pleas from people who weren’t even on our radar: Papadopoulos and Richard Pinedo, a Californian who pleaded guilty last Friday to unwittingly aiding the Russians with identity theft, as well as the Dutch lawyer who pleaded guilty earlier this week..

Tee hee
Bwa ha ha

[Unregistered]

Keep dreaming Teeheeman.

Your response hasn’t aged well Bore-us .

[Unregistered]

Democratic Memo released...

https://assets.documentcloud.org/doc...ratic-memo.pdf

[Unregistered]

Interesting info about pardons...

No U.S. President has ever tried to pardon his own alleged co-conspirators in a crime. So if Trump does start issuing pardons for people like Rick Gates or Michael Flynn, the courts will have to step in and rule whether such pardons are constitutional. There’s a strong argument that such pardons would be an act of obstruction of justice, and could therefore be struck down on the spot.

It’s also important to note that in many of these instances, it’s too late for pardons to help Trump. For instance, Gates and Flynn have already spilled their guts to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. If they’re pardoned, they’ll get to avoid prison, but Mueller will still have the evidence against Trump. There’s also another factor to consider. Because accepting a pardon is legally established by the courts as an admission of guilt, Trump’s people would be waiving their Fifth Amendment rights in the process. In other words, anyone he pardons will have to testify against him to Mueller.

In short, if Donald Trump begins pardoning his own people, there is probably only a fairly small chance that those pardons would even be allowed to go into effect, a big chance that those pardons would directly backfire on him, and in large part it’s too late for such pardons to matter anyway. The time for Trump to pardon his co-conspirators was six months ago, before they started cutting deals against him. We don’t know if Trump’s attorneys have informed him of any or all of the above.

[Unregistered]

Hey! Whatever happened with that Nunes memo? You know, the one that Hannity said "...makes Watergate look like stealing a Snickers bar from a drug store." The one Bore-us was shouting to the mountaintops about. That one.

[Unregistered]

No U.S. President has ever tried to pardon his own alleged co-conspirators in a crime. So if Trump does start issuing pardons for people like Rick Gates or Michael Flynn, the courts will have to step in and rule whether such pardons are constitutional. There’s a strong argument that such pardons would be an act of obstruction of justice, and could therefore be struck down on the spot.

It’s also important to note that in many of these instances, it’s too late for pardons to help Trump. For instance, Gates and Flynn have already spilled their guts to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. If they’re pardoned, they’ll get to avoid prison, but Mueller will still have the evidence against Trump. There’s also another factor to consider. Because accepting a pardon is legally established by the courts as an admission of guilt, Trump’s people would be waiving their Fifth Amendment rights in the process. In other words, anyone he pardons will have to testify against him to Mueller.

In short, if Donald Trump begins pardoning his own people, there is probably only a fairly small chance that those pardons would even be allowed to go into effect, a big chance that those pardons would directly backfire on him, and in large part it’s too late for such pardons to matter anyway. The time for Trump to pardon his co-conspirators was six months ago, before they started cutting deals against him. We don’t know if Trump’s attorneys have informed him of any or all of the above.

Thanks for posting. I think the analysis is sound.

One thing unlikely I think. Gates isn’t going to pull out of deal now. That flare up a few days ago? While Muller backed away and dropped 50 more counts to clarify gates mind. Appararantly Gates “friends” encouraged him not to cave and looked for a lawyer who would take case for 50% standard rate. Hence the rumors. But he didn’t switch ...cut deal

Won’t back out after that .

BTW the lawyer who was rumored to be taking case ? Some guy named Pollock ....is also a lawyer for another interesting guy

Julian Assange

[Unregistered]

Hey! Whatever happened with that Nunes memo? You know, the one that Hannity said "...makes Watergate look like stealing a Snickers bar from a drug store." The one Bore-us was shouting to the mountaintops about. That one.

Maybe it’s with Hillary’e emails?

[Unregistered]

Thanks for posting. I think the analysis is sound.

One thing unlikely I think. Gates isn’t going to pull out of deal now. That flare up a few days ago? While Muller backed away and dropped 50 more counts to clarify gates mind. Appararantly Gates “friends” encouraged him not to cave and looked for a lawyer who would take case for 50% standard rate. Hence the rumors. But he didn’t switch ...cut deal

Won’t back out after that .

BTW the lawyer who was rumored to be taking case ? Some guy named Pollock ....is also a lawyer for another interesting guy

Julian Assange

Of course you think the analysis sound...you wrote it.

[Unregistered]

Of course you think the analysis sound...you wrote it.

After all this time, Bore-us cannot discriminate between TWO people whose posts have recognizable stylistic differences .

Drag that IQ over the ground why don’t cha ?

Too funny.

Like watching POTUS howl at the moon for 24 min on judge jeanine show. We were going to watch a movie but then wife and I realized we never watch him start to finish only clips.

Wow. Was he “off” like a 🥜 ter last night.

The messiah of the GOP. Y’all must be proud to give up your decades long beliefs for him

[Unregistered]

Thanks for posting. I think the analysis is sound.

One thing unlikely I think. Gates isn’t going to pull out of deal now. That flare up a few days ago? While Muller backed away and dropped 50 more counts to clarify gates mind. Appararantly Gates “friends” encouraged him not to cave and looked for a lawyer who would take case for 50% standard rate. Hence the rumors. But he didn’t switch ...cut deal

Won’t back out after that .

BTW the lawyer who was rumored to be taking case ? Some guy named Pollock ....is also a lawyer for another interesting guy

Julian Assange

Gates acting like he wasn’t going to cooperate was very strange because he had already had his “Queen for a day” interview with Mueller. Anyway, he’s safely in the fold now.


On another note... I see Bore-us is waving the white flag with his snippy one sentence butt-hurt replies. Seems even he is starting to see the writing on the wall.

[Unregistered]

https://assets.documentcloud.org/doc...ratic-memo.pdf

They forgot to check with Andy.

[Unregistered]

Dear cons,

The CONSERVATIVE Supreme Court just told the Trump admin no, we will not intervene in DACA right now. They said that trump needs to proceed through normal appeals process .

So Trump will CONTINUE to take DACA apps and the mar 5 date is just another day on calendar

<golf clap> I love the GOP #winning these days. Just love it

[Unregistered]

Before I get into the absurdities of “Russiagate” and McCarthyism 2.0, let me point out that I do, in fact, dislike Donald Trump and the Republican Party establishment. I also dislike Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party establishment. Those feelings are not mutually exclusive.

For some reason, our country’s political discourse is like a single-throw switch. You can only either be Republican or Democrat. Leaving aside the fact that in 2016, Independents accounted for almost 40 percent of registered voters, more than Democrats (32 percent) and Republicans (23 percent), the idea that we can only exist in one extreme or the other is the kind of absurd paradigm that both civil wars and sandbox tiffs are made of.

It is also what Russiagate is made of. On our two-dimensional political stage, all cameras are focused on a blurry, nebulous mass labeled “Russia did it.” The political theater involved with turning this heap of fallacies and conjecture into something that rivals Pearl Harbor and 9/11 is as impressive as it is terrifying.

The entire media machine is exhausting itself running anti-Russia stories nonstop, as if the entire world has set aside all its differences, crises and disasters just so we would have nothing else to report on. On four separate occasions at four different airports, I found myself bombarded with televisions blaring, “Russia meddled in our elections and stole the crown from Hillary” on repeat. On my final early morning flight, I looked around for Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, but neither they nor a buck-toothed rodent were anywhere to be found.

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What’s also nowhere to be found is how any of the recent indictments prove that the Russian government dismantled our democracy via Facebook ads. Let’s start with the latter point: What do we know about these ads and their power to disrupt our democracy?

The key figure in these latest indictments is a Russian company called the Internet Research Agency (IRA). In a 2015 New York Times article, author Adrian Chen speaks with a former employee who had recently released an exposé on the company. The ex-employee, Ludmilla Savchuk, describes an intense and depressing work environment: 12-hour days, shady employment practices and the emotional toll of posting vitriol and lies.

The IRA clearly doesn’t care about best business practices—or indeed turnaround. Savchuk wasn’t the only one to call it quits. Several of the people listed in Robert Mueller’s indictment don’t even work for the company anymore. Some haven’t worked there since 2014, a solid two years before the election. Other details regarding the company’s practices contrast with the picture painted by Mueller and the establishment.

As noted by Savchuk, most of the posts she and her colleagues were charged with creating weren’t strictly political. Even CNN concedes that most of the IRA’s work around election time wasn’t about the U.S. election. Rather, the bulk of IRA’s work focused on making Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin look good, a goal shared by hundreds of trolls, particularly since the anti-government protests in 2011. Seeing the potential for dissent to spread over the internet, Putin’s government came down hard, passing Orwellian laws that ramped up online censorship and surveillance against those trying to express opinions that run counter to Putin’s platform.

The online wars didn’t stop there, however, and the Internet Research Agency soon shifted some focus to the fact that “the foreign internet was biased four to one against Russia.” Posts and pages started popping up in English. Chen highlights one in particular called Spread Your Wings, a supposed pro-America page that “posted photos of American flags and memes about how great it was to be an American, but the patriotism rang hollow once you tried to parse the frequent criticisms of [Barack] Obama, an incoherent mishmash of liberal and conservative attacks that no actual American would espouse.” Fast-forward to today, and the bewildering, often comical ads attributed to the IRA are just as convincing.

There’s one that shows Jesus and Satan arm-wrestling as Satan proclaims, “If I win, Clinton wins!” Jesus wittily retorts, “Not if I can help it!” The post urges viewers to “Press Like to help Jesus win!” The post was run on a page called Army of Jesus, with a demure profile pic of the white savior. The post also points out that “Donald Trump isn’t a saint” but that “he cares deeply for this country” and “is an honest man.”

Another ad, called the Buff Bernie coloring ad, features Bernie Sanders in an Adonis stance, with multicolored limbs and a teal White House in the background. The post claims that the image is part of a coloring book for Berniacs featuring “attractive doodles of Bernie Sanders in muscle poses.” Apparently, it’s also “something that suits for all people.” It’s unclear whether this ad is supposed to attract you to Bernie or scare you. As a bi woman, all I can say is that I’m uncomfortable and will now be more diligent in screening the coloring books I give to my niece. If that was Russia’s goal, well done.

The idea that ads like these swung an election is, for lack of a better phrase, ****ing absurd.

Last October, Facebook’s newsroom reported that 10 million people in the U.S. saw the ads. The report also states that only 44 percent of the ad impressions occurred before the election, meaning that the majority happened after. Furthermore, roughly 25 percent of the ads were never shown to anyone. Later that month, Facebook told Congress that 126 million Americans had seen “divisive content” posted by “Russian agents.” Ads are not specified, nor do we know what is specifically meant by “divisive.” Still, even on the high side, by Facebook’s own admission, the IRA posts were equivalent to 1 in 23,000 of Facebook’s posts.

[Unregistered]

As former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein pointed out in a recent MSNBC interview, the fact that her campaign got a mention or two in these Russian ads “compared to trillions of ads on Facebook” just doesn’t even “pass the laugh test.” The idea that those who did see or click those ads were thereby swayed to vote against Clinton doesn’t pass the laugh test either. Rob Goldman, vice president of ads for Facebook, wrote in a thread on Twitter earlier in February: “I have seen all the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.”

Furthermore, Facebook’s own algorithm is structured to show you things that you already agree with. Known as “filter bubbles,” Facebook builds an online experience that coddles your bias and keeps you away from opposing perspectives, even if they feature a rather sharp-looking graphic of Satan and Jesus.

Speaking of which, it’s worth noting that not all of the Russian’s click-baity posts were a success. The Jesus Trump vs. Satan Clinton got a mere 71 impressions and 14 clicks. The creepy and colorful Bernie only garnered 848 impressions and 54 clicks. Meanwhile, a recent post featuring a Noam Chomsky quote on a page that I co-manage has more than 2,000 impressions (even though the page is relatively small). A paint company got more than 100 million impressions for heteronormative posts about paint color names. I never saw the paint ads, and chances are good that you didn’t either.

Does this mean I think it’s OK to create fake ads of any kind in order to trick people or make money off their gullibility? No. I actually feel the same way about advertising as comedian Bill Hicks did. That said, I don’t think that fake ads aligned to your existing biases should get credit for undermining our shining city upon the hill. For that matter, fake events shouldn’t either.

According to the Mueller indictments, several rallies and marches were organized and/or co-organized by Russian trolls. The only problem is that, much like the ads, there’s no evidence to suggest that they had any effect on the election. For starters, of the eight marches listed in the indictment, three took place after the election. The first two, “March for Trump” and “Down with Hillary,” may never have taken place. No written or photographic evidence exists of either rally. The third, “Support Hillary, Save American Muslims,” was scheduled for July outside the White House, but if anyone showed up, no evidence exists of that rally either. The fourth, “Florida Goes Trump,” was a series of flash mobs and rallies held in Florida cities on Aug. 20, 2016. But here again, despite a relatively solid interest in the event page on Facebook, turnout was either minimal or not documented. For instance, one video from Pensacola shows eight Trump supporters on a street corner holding flags. Another rally consists of another eight Trump supporters holding signs outside a Bass Pro Shop in Fort Myers. Spring Hill, though, really ramped it up, with 15 supporters across the street from a Walmart.

Now, if you’re thinking that perhaps there’s still cause for concern, let’s entertain that idea. As Aric Toler from Bellingcat wrote in an article last September, “Russians starting an event page that leads to real Americans holding a political rally is a capability to keep an eye on, but we should also keep our ear on what was actually produced in the Pensacola flash mob: eight people unable to simultaneously yell an anti-Hillary Clinton slogan, with their voices drowned out by the wind and passing traffic.” However, even this thought process is missing the point. As harsh Putin critic Masha Gessen wrote recently in The New Yorker, “Even the fact that Russians put money into organizing rallies and demonstrations across the political spectrum would be absurd: surely they didn’t force people to join these rallies. If sincerely held beliefs brought people to the rallies, then it makes no difference to the broader political life whether someone paid for an actress to take part. …”