just wondering where all the trump sycophants are to defend this latest disaster? Buehler......Buehler......Buehler.....

7 hours ago, DRW50 said:

They need Europe in some ways, but I don't think North Korea is a topic they'd sway on. I think it's just something the press likes to push as valuable.

 

Russia certainly doesn't care one way or the other about North Korea other than the usual self-preservation concerns, like every other country that doesn't want to be subject to the whims of the Kim regime.

 

China is different-as I've mentioned in a previous post, China shares a border with North Korea, China is North Korea's biggest trading partner and China is interested in whatever stability prevents a migrant flow across the border into China and they are not about to risk any of that perceived stability for the likes of the U.S. or the Trump administration's non-policy on North Korea.

 

2 hours ago, Roman said:

just wondering where all the trump sycophants are to defend this latest disaster? Buehler......Buehler......Buehler.....

 

 

Seems like the GOP and Tea Party (remember them?) have grown silent on a few issues that they were once vehemently vocal about.

 

Why Obamacare’s Loudest Critics Aren’t as Loud Anymore

Edited July 9, 20178 yr by DramatistDreamer

You had to love the Republicans on the Sunday talk shows this morning!!   They so wanted to call him an [!@#$%^&*].

There is no "probably" about it

 

 

Tada!

18 hours ago, dragonflies said:

There is no "probably" about it

 

 

Thank God. I was starting to think they would get that unholy piece of legislation through.

Josh Marshall unpacks the very damning NYT story re: Don Jr. (whose hasty explanations have changed).

 

Quote

What I suspect is the most important detail in this story is the sources. The Times reports that they got the information from “three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.” They apparently talked after the release of the first story. This is highly, highly significant. Needless to say, advisors to the White House are not in the business of taking highly damaging stories and volunteering new information which makes them catastrophically damaging. The only reason a President’s allies ever do something like that is either to get ahead of something much more damaging or get a first crack at shaping the public understanding of something much more damaging. There’s really no other explanation. We don’t know yet what drove them to volunteer such highly damaging information. Five of them did it. It wasn’t a matter of one person going rogue.

Charles Pierce on the story:

 

Quote

Let us pause for a moment and consider the Magnitsky Act. Sergei Magnitsky was an auditor from a Russian law firm who uncovered the biggest case of tax fraud in the history of Russian kleptocratic corruption, which is something. In response, Magnitsky was arrested and put on trial for tax evasion in front of a bunch of crooks in lovely kangaroo suits. He died in prison of untreated medical problems and (probably) from being beaten to death by the good people from the Interior Ministry. In 2012, the Congress passed a law that froze the assets and effectively rendered non-persons 18 Russian officials who were tied in some way to the persecution and murder of Sergei Magnitsky. This got up the nose of Vladimir Putin, who responded by suspending the adoption of Russian children by American families. He also launched a PR blitz headed by a well-connected hack lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya. Which is where Junior comes in.

 

Veselnitskaya was the person with whom Junior—along with Paul Manafort and the inevitable Jared Kushner—took the meeting. Let's let Junior's most recent explanation speak for itself, because it's just the funniest thing ever.

 

In a statement on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance. "After pleasantries were exchanged," he said, "the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information." He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children. "It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting," Mr. Trump said.

 

This, then, is Junior's official explanation: I thought we were colluding to ratfck the Democratic candidate, and the presidential election in general, but then she started talking about getting the mobsters' money back. Bitch set me up.

 

This is not an argument I would bring to court.

 

Right now, there are more Russians involved in this story than there are in War and Peace. Many of them have the power to cloud men's minds; how else to explain the fact that both Kushner and Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III both forgot to mention to the responsible vetting agencies meetings with various Russians. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if the statue in the Lincoln Memorial was wearing a fur hat some morning very soon. At this point, I wouldn't be shocked if the R in Rhode Island suddenly turned backwards.

 

To get the full picture, the redoubtable Booman suggests that we examine the criminal complaint that Preet Bharara filed against one Denis Katsyv, another one of Veselnitskaya's clients, and the alleged mastermind of the massive fraud that got Sergei Magnitsky killed. He's right. The breadth and depth of the corruption is almost impossible to believe. There's identity theft … of corporations. (I guess they really are people, too.) There's the entire world as their laundromat, including "Manhattan real estate." Russian security forces raided corporate offices and then used what they took to set up front companies to clean the cash. Essentially, they looted this hedge fund of about $230 million. Magnitsky looked into it. He got busted by the same people he was investigating, and it got him killed. Of course, Bharara got fired, and the case was quietly settled for $6 million and no admission of guilt by anybody.

 

What I believe I see here is an incredibly corrupt American family doing business with criminal gangs that are way, way out of their league, and that are in league with the institutions of government, and the formidable security apparatus, of an authoritarian state. Talk about punching out of your weight class. This isn't cheating some poor subcontractor. These people throw you out windows. And the Trumps have being doing business in this financial abattoir for years. This doesn't make them sharp. This makes them compliant minnows in a shark tank.

 

Not to borrow trouble, but what if these guys decide that the president's son—or, god forbid, the president himself—have become as inconvenient as Sergei Magnitsky was. For months now, people have been asking what the Russians "have" on Donald Trump. Maybe it's just fear. If it's not, it ought to be.

 

NYMag on the rise, fall and rise of Steve Bannon:

 

Quote

When the lights went up in Cleveland, [Megyn] Kelly went right after Trump, confronting him with his history of sexist statements. “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals,’ ” she said. “Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?”

 

Within minutes of the debate’s end, even as Trump was still nursing his grievances on live television, reporters started to realize that the revelations of his past behavior, so bluntly excavated by Kelly, had caused an intense reaction among Republican voters — not against Trump but against Fox News. Bannon and the Breitbart editors had the same reaction and immediately turned on Kelly with a fusillade of negative articles slamming her as a backstabbing, self-promoting betrayer of the cause. Breitbart soon became the locus of pro-Trump, anti-Fox conservative anger. Between Thursday night, when the debate took place, and Sunday evening, Breitbart published 25 stories mentioning Kelly, and the site’s editor-in-chief, Alex Marlow, went on CNN to accuse Fox News of “trying to take out Donald Trump” and staging “a gotcha debate.”

 

The intensity of Republican anger stunned Fox News executives. The debate had drawn a record 24 million viewers. Now many of them were apoplectic at the network’s top talent. In a panic, Ailes called Bannon and begged him to call off the attacks. “Steve, this isn’t fair, and it’s killing us,” Ailes said. “You have to stop it.”

 

“Fûck that, that was outrageous what she did!” Bannon retorted. “She pulled every trick out of the leftist playbook.”

 

The call ended without resolution. Bannon and Ailes would not speak again for almost a year. Even after Ailes and Trump patched up their relationship, Bannon refused to relent. In fact, Breitbart’s attacks on Kelly grew uglier. “Flashback: Megyn Kelly Discusses Her Husband’s Penis and Her Breasts on Howard Stern,” read a Breitbart headline a week after the debate. Ailes eventually dispatched his personal lawyer, Peter Johnson Jr., to the Breitbart embassy in D.C. to deliver a message to Bannon to end the war on Kelly. When he arrived, Johnson got straight to the point: If Bannon didn’t stop immediately, he would never again appear on Fox News. Bannon was incensed at the threat.

 

“She’s pure evil,” he told Johnson. “And she will turn on [Ailes] one day. We’re going full-bore. We’re not going to stop. I’m gonna unchain the dogs.” The conversation was brief and unpleasant, and it ended with a cinematic flourish. “I want you to go back to New York and quote me to Roger,” Bannon said. “ ‘Go fûck yourself.’ ”

Edited July 10, 20178 yr by Vee

1 hour ago, Juliajms said:

Thank God. I was starting to think they would get that unholy piece of legislation through.

People need to keep the pressure on.  I won't believe it's dead until it is,

Looks like the Feds are stepping up their investigation into the land deal brokered by Jane Sanders.  Just yesterday I was wondering why things were so quiet about this.

 

Federal prosecutors step up probe of land deal pushed by wife of Bernie Sanders

32 minutes ago, DramatistDreamer said:

Looks like the Feds are stepping up their investigation into the land deal brokered by Jane Sanders.  Just yesterday I was wondering why things were so quiet about this.

 

Federal prosecutors step up probe of land deal pushed by wife of Bernie Sanders

 

"One of the listed donations, for example, was a $1 million gift from Corinne Bove Maietta, a member of a well-known Burlington family. In fact, trustees learned, the $1 million had been intended as a bequest upon her death."

 

Oh that's a no-no.

 

 

SCOOP: Admin officials huddled on Capitol Hill last week in attempt to weaken Russia sanctions, per 2 sources https://t.co/rQEivs2ZcG

— Andrew Desiderio (@desiderioDC) July 10, 2017

Right on time:

 

 

EXCLUSIVE: Lawyer Alan Futerfas hired to represent Donald Trump Jr. in connection with Russia probes pic.twitter.com/jQsudsroez

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) July 10, 2017

5 hours ago, JaneAusten said:

People need to keep the pressure on.  I won't believe it's dead until it is,

 

The truth is it will never be dead unless the GOP is out of power. Repubs are nothing if not focused on the long game. They are still trying to destroy Medicare and Social Security which have been around for decades.

6 hours ago, JaneAusten said:

People need to keep the pressure on.  I won't believe it's dead until it is,

 

IA.

 

I heard someone (forget who) on NPR's "Weekend Edition" mention McConnell's threat to the GOP that if they didn't pass this piece of legislation, they would be forced to collaborate with the Democrats.  Of course, as this person said, since the Democrats are not about to deliver cutbacks to Medicare and Medicaid OR tax cuts to the rich, I'd say those negotiations, should they occur, will be combative, to say the least.

 

I know it's petty to say this, but...when it comes to looks...Donny Jr. and Eric REALLY got shafted.

Edited July 11, 20178 yr by Khan

So now it's about Junior's e-mails!

 

Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign