Enjoy President Trump, Courtesy of The Kremlin

[Tyrannical]

The day after the election, the Putin-bots obviously swapped to anti-trump. Because that's what the Russians do.


So, how does it feel to be ignorantly complacent for the last year?

Yup, your 'anti-Trump' sources have been all Putin since election day

[JimC]

Seriously. If I ever post something from InfoWars, without being funny, ring for help.

Nah, we''l just commission a hit man to put you down like a rabid dog...

[Brian Peacock]

The day after the election, the Putin-bots obviously swapped to anti-trump. Because that's what the Russians do.


So, how does it feel to be ignorantly complacent for the last year?

Yup, your 'anti-Trump' sources have been all Putin since election day

Here's the thing Ty - political discourse in the US is so polarised and partisan that criticising something from one side is assumed to mean you're automatically a shill for the other side. Russian interference in the US democratic process is a problem for all Americans regardless of individual political leanings. Highlighting, discussing, and/or criticising the links between Trump and Russian isn't 'anti-Trump', it's 'pro-democracy' - but you don't reckon democracy anyway, do you?

[Animavore]

Seriously. If I ever post something from InfoWars, without being funny, ring for help.

Nah, we''l just commission a hit man to put you down like a rabid dog...

Fair enough. It's probably too late for me if I get sucked into that world. I'll be alongside people who follow David Icke, Milton William Cooper, and this gobshite...



Along with "truthers" of all kinds.

I've met people at various times into all of the above and they tend to be wide-eyed and twitchy. They talk what amounts to gibberish and they have a hard time discerning fact from fiction. You can't even help them because if you point out that they may have a condition they'll only say "That's what 'they' want you to think."

It's sad really, seeing someone surrender their critical faculties like that. The people into this stuff I have known all started out quite intelligent people. Then they just lost it.

[Animavore]

A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”

Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry.

In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.

We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.

Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.

We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.

Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.

cont. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/opin ... d=fb-share

[Tero]

Don Jr was too stupid to know he was being manipulated. Bannon now blames Manafort for anything that happened.


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... -fire-fury

[Forty Two]

Everyone knows "Never Trumpers" hired Fusion GPS too, during the GOP primaries. We keep forgetting how most Republican politicos were against Trump, and a good number even declared their infinite opposition to him with "Never Trump." That's one of the things that's encouraging about Trump having been elected. He did so despite the opposition of the assholes on both sides of the traditional political divide. The establishment hated him, and that's great. None of that changes the fact that the Democrats and Clinton colluded with Fusion GPS to get dirt on Trump, and they paid money to FusionGPS which went to obtaining dirt from foreign governments and agents of foreign governments, including Russians. And, that's fine - they paid for dirt. Big deal? What was the dirt? Nothing much. Other than Trump being an egomaniac blowhard who has the management style of Atilla The Hun and Genghis Khan rolled into one and who lacks class and has no governor on his tongue, well, he's a rather effective Chief Executive. He's an asshole, yes, but he wasn't installed by the Russians, and he's doing pretty well.

A 2013 study published in the Journal of Economic Growth found that accumulated regulations between 1949 and 2005 slowed the American economy by an annual average of 2 percent. One of McLaughlin’s studies estimates that the cumulative effect of government regulation caused the economy to be $4 trillion smaller in 2012 than it might have been. “That amount equaled about a quarter of the U.S. economy in 2012, and if it were a nation’s GDP, it would be the fourth largest in the world,” he wrote. http://www.weeklystandard.com/donald-tr ... le/2010141

[L'Emmerdeur]

Senator Feinstein released the transcript from the Fusion GPS Senate testimony.

Essentially what he [Steele] told me was they [the FBI] had other intelligence about this matter from an internal Trump campaign source and that -- that they -- my understanding was that they believed Chris at this point -- that they believed Chris's information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization.
[From pg. 175 of Simpson's testimony]

An NBC reporter says that this is actually a reference to the Australian source telling the FBI about information from Papadopoulis.

[L'Emmerdeur]

None of that changes the fact that the Democrats and Clinton colluded with Fusion GPS to get dirt on Trump, and they paid money to FusionGPS which went to obtaining dirt from foreign governments and agents of foreign governments, including Russians.

collusion noun : secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose • acting in collusion with the enemy

Can you elucidate what illegal or deceitful purpose was intended by the Clinton campaign in hiring Fusion GPS?

[L'Emmerdeur]

Some editorializing from that horrible website 'Talking Points Memo.'

'The Only News Out of The Simpson Testimony is Republican Disgrace'

Over the course of the day I’ve been listening to news reports which say that the Fusion GPS testimony from co-owner Glenn Simpson belies the received narrative about the Steele dossier, or at least that argued by Republicans and Trump supporters. As Jake Tapper put it when speaking with CNN’s Jim Acosta today, Simpson’s account “contradicts president Trump and his supporters who argue that the dossier was a purely political document paid for by Democrats trying to hurt Trump.” Really though this is a testament to the power of disinformation when it is empowered by one of the country’s two political parties. Let’s put this more simply: this is a testament to what can happen when the GOP unites behind a campaign of willful disinformation at the country’s expense.

We shouldn’t take any party’s account at face value. But the testimony released today confirms what has always been clear. A business intelligence firm (contracted by a law firm which in turn was working for the Clinton campaign) hired a former British intelligence officer, with deep Russia experience, to look deeper at Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. What he found went well beyond fodder for political campaigns and made him worry that there was a genuine threat to US national security, either because Trump or people around him were conspiring with Russians or because Trump was or could be blackmailed. He took that information to the FBI. He had worked with the FBI before and they trusted his work.

...

As we’ve long discussed, the so-called dossier is not and was not intended to be a final intelligence ‘product’. It’s raw intelligence. Everything is piled together. We shouldn’t assume that everything in it is accurate even if we believe it was compiled in good faith by a seasoned professional. But Steele here was clearly acting in some sense like a whistleblower. It’s not clear whether Steele told Simpson he was contacting the FBI at the time or soon after the fact. But if Simpson’s account is accurate, Steele was acting as a former intelligence officer of America’s closest ally.

This was all basically clear a year ago. What’s happened is that we’ve had a year tarnishing the reputation of a man who did right by the United States for no obvious reason other than his allegiance is to our closest ally and creating a comic, degenerate alternate reality in which the people who alerted us to the problems and those who first sought to understand them are the malefactors rather than the people who were at a minimum cozying up to a foreign power. It is actually quite like the cliched story of the whistleblower who speaks up and then becomes the scapegoat in the cover-up of the bad acts he was trying to bring to light. In fact that’s exactly what it is.

[Seabass]

[Brian Peacock]

But it's so much easier to shoot the messenger and say that those who are accountable are really the victims.

[tattuchu]

Forty-Two: "That's one of the things that's encouraging about Trump having been elected. He did so despite the opposition of the assholes on both sides of the traditional political divide."

I'm a little confused. How does opposing Trump make a person an asshole? Only a colossal FUCKWIT would support, vote for, or defend in any way the complete failure that is Trump. This should be obvious to anyone with even the merest hint, the slightest shred, of intelligence or rationality. To think that ANYONE, EVER, could support such a cretinous and so-utterly-and-completely feckless and feculent piece of steaming shit simply beggars belief.

[Scot Dutchy]

Trump was not elected! He lost the popular vote by a big margin so it proves the uselessness of Electoral College.

[Tero]

But he MAGA! It’s unpatriotic to oppose the asshole! He’s destroying death taxes! Send rapists back to Mexico!