ekstarks94 wrote:After watching the Strok hearing and now putting that under the contextual lenses we have now 2-3 weeks after...the GOP looks even more stupid.....David Frum mentioned on CNN today something so simple that I never thought of....the question I believe was why GOP backing Trump even with all this nonsense going on and how they totally ignore the correlation between meddling and it's impact on the election....he said that if they admit that the election was tampered with and Mueller has definitive evidence then all of the previous legislation that they have jammed thru plus SCOTUS has the possibility to be overturned due to the fact that the winner of the election colluded with a foreign power.....this makes a lot of sense into why the GOP will stand with Trump on his sinking ship

Respectfully disagree. The GOP is not stupid. It's the people and the Democrats that are stupid. What Trump and the GOP are doing behind the scenes is nothing short of dismantling every single protection, check and balance meant to keep corporations from completely taking over and running the country as they see fit for their own perverse pleasures. What you are seeing here is just the distraction, the more ad hoc and badly botched the more everyone screams for blood and focuses on the wrong thing. Russian meddling in the elections is definitely an issue worth focusing on, but the GOP is bleeding the US like a cut pig using that as a smokescreen.

Don't be fooled. The GOP in it's current stae is the most dangerous organization in the history of the world. Listen to Chomsky.

meloshouldgo wrote:

ekstarks94 wrote:After watching the Strok hearing and now putting that under the contextual lenses we have now 2-3 weeks after...the GOP looks even more stupid.....David Frum mentioned on CNN today something so simple that I never thought of....the question I believe was why GOP backing Trump even with all this nonsense going on and how they totally ignore the correlation between meddling and it's impact on the election....he said that if they admit that the election was tampered with and Mueller has definitive evidence then all of the previous legislation that they have jammed thru plus SCOTUS has the possibility to be overturned due to the fact that the winner of the election colluded with a foreign power.....this makes a lot of sense into why the GOP will stand with Trump on his sinking ship

Respectfully disagree. The GOP is not stupid. It's the people and the Democrats that are stupid. What Trump and the GOP are doing behind the scenes is nothing short of dismantling every single protection, check and balance meant to keep corporations from completely taking over and running the country as they see fit for their own perverse pleasures. What you are seeing here is just the distraction, the more ad hoc and badly botched the more everyone screams for blood and focuses on the wrong thing. Russian meddling in the elections is definitely an issue worth focusing on, but the GOP is bleeding the US like a cut pig using that as a smokescreen.

Don't be fooled. The GOP in it's current stae is the most dangerous organization in the history of the world. Listen to Chomsky.

Pretty much.

martin wrote:

arkrud wrote:

martin wrote:

arkrud wrote:Suctioned Russian oligarchs, corrupt government bureaucrats and intelligent officers moving wealth robbed from Russian state and Russian people and laundering them by investing this money in US and elsewhere. With sanctions we made it a little bit more difficult but this is all about it.
In fact sanctions and counter-sanctions by Russia only made live of Russian people even more miserable and repressions to Russian people from the Putin clika more severe.
Up to 70% or Russian youth want to leave the country and go anywhere to work and leave. Russian Empire is in the last decades of final destruction.
There are a lot of facts and research around it in Russia and internationally. I do not want to sadden anybody with zillion of links.
What we need is to be really careful in order to come up out of this major geopolitical calamity with less destruction and death as possible.
And it will not be easy. The Dem versus Reps struggle is completely insignificant and laughable in the content of the possibility of major Nuclier and military power disintegration.

I don't agree that sanctions only made it a little more difficult. Please substantiate. Putin has been all about removing Magnitsky sanctions and further actions above and beyond, that has been his big target. If Magnitsky is no big deal then the USA should make them more stringent.

Also, please let us know he relationship between these sanctions and the rest of the Russian community at large. I don't understand the correlation.

The sanction are targeting specific people around Putin and as this is basically one mafia group they moving this people to another "assignments" and replace them with other unknown dudes.
At the same time they using sanction as propaganda tool to rally common population against US and West. They are very adept in this and succeed in brainwashing common folk to state of complete hate to US.
To make matters worth Putin and Co declared a contractions and as a part of it they destroying all "sanctioned" food , medications, and other goods and criminally prosecute those who break the sanctions by distributing US and EU countries imports. Even live keeping medications which are not produced in Russia were attempted to add to the sanctioned list but was not implemented as people rebel too much.
Us people need to understand that Putin opposite to Trump is not a clown controlled by checks and balances but smart and evil dictator backed by millions of low-enforcement folks including military, government employees which are majority of all worker in Russia and old people who depend on pensions. He really has the whole nation forced to be behind him.
And every push on Russia makes his position stronger.

What you are suggesting is that doing anything against Putin is useless because he will take it out on his own people.

Dude is attaching our country. We can absolutely punch back and should. Sanctions are the tip of what the iceberg should be.

Also, I don't think your assumption that Magnitsky is not effective because it targets certain people is correct. Money and resources are limited as well as global movement.

We need to help those people in Russia who stand up against the murderous and corrupt state.
Unfortunately we are taking easy way out to show that we are punishing Putin and his criminal surrounding.
We can put sanctions on M15 or Zetas commanders with the same close to 0 result.
And in the meantime those in Russia who are imprisoned, beaten, torched, fired, ostracized, removed from school and have to run and ask for cover all around the world are not even on public display.
Even when young American citizens are killed in Russia by local Cops for money nobody in US knows the story.
Russian people need help not sanctions.
We need to open the door for refugees and people who need to run for political reasons.
Russian state is back to what it was in 70th when I was leaving in USSR and even worth getting close to bloody 30th and 50th Stalin times.

i feel like if we listed everything trump did and ended it with "now imagine if he was black" - the GOP and trump's base would be ready to burn down the white house.

crooked corrupt hypocrits and traitors...and many of them racist.

djsunyc wrote:

Tweet was deleted or there was problem with the URL:

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1019758991524745218

From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered

By David E. Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg

July 18, 2018

WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

The shifting narrative underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly picks and chooses intelligence to suit his political purposes. That has never been more clear than this week.

On Monday, standing next to the Russian president in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump said he accepted Mr. Putin’s denial of Russian election intrusions. By Tuesday, faced with a bipartisan political outcry, Mr. Trump sought to walk back his words and sided with his intelligence agencies.

On Wednesday, when a reporter asked, “Is Russia still targeting the U.S.?” Mr. Trump shot back, “No” — directly contradicting statements made only days earlier by his director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, who was sitting a few chairs away in the Cabinet Room. (The White House later said he was responding to a different question.)

Hours later, in a CBS News interview, Mr. Trump seemed to reverse course again. He blamed Mr. Putin personally, but only indirectly, for the election interference by Russia, “because he’s in charge of the country.”

In the run-up to this week’s ducking and weaving, Mr. Trump has done all he can to suggest other possible explanations for the hacks into the American political system. His fear, according to one of his closest aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is that any admission of even an unsuccessful Russian attempt to influence the 2016 vote raises questions about the legitimacy of his presidency.

The Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, held at Trump Tower, was a prime example. He was briefed that day by John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence; and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of United States Cyber Command.

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was also there; after the formal briefing, he privately told Mr. Trump about the “Steele dossier.” That report, by a former British intelligence officer, included uncorroborated salacious stories of Mr. Trump’s activities during a visit to Moscow, which he denied.

According to nearly a dozen people who either attended the meeting with the president-elect or were later briefed on it, the four primary intelligence officials described the streams of intelligence that convinced them of Mr. Putin’s role in the election interference.

They included stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been seen in Russian military intelligence networks by the British, Dutch and American intelligence services. Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash.

And ultimately, several human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin’s own role.

That included one particularly valuable source, who was considered so sensitive that Mr. Brennan had declined to refer to it in any way in the Presidential Daily Brief during the final months of the Obama administration, as the Russia investigation intensified.

Instead, to keep the information from being shared widely, Mr. Brennan sent reports from the source to Mr. Obama and a small group of top national security aides in a separate, white envelope to assure its security.

Mr. Trump and his aides were also given other reasons during the briefing to believe that Russia was behind the D.N.C. hacks.

The same Russian groups had been involved in cyberattacks on the State Department and White House unclassified email systems in 2014 and 2015, and in an attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They had aggressively fought the N.S.A. against being ejected from the White House system, engaging in what the deputy director of the agency later called “hand-to-hand combat” to dig in.

The pattern of the D.N.C. hacks, and the theft of emails from John D. Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, fit the same pattern.

After the briefings, Mr. Trump issued a statement later that day that sought to spread the blame for the meddling. He said “Russia, China and other countries, outside groups and countries” were launching cyberattacks against American government, businesses and political organizations — including the D.N.C.

Still, Mr. Trump said in his statement, “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”

Mr. Brennan later told Congress that he had no doubt where the attacks were coming from.

“I was convinced in the summer that the Russians were trying to interfere in the election,” he said in testimony in May 2017. “And they were very aggressive.”

For Mr. Trump, the messengers were as much a part of the problem as the message they delivered.

Mr. Brennan and Mr. Clapper were both Obama administration appointees who left the government the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated. The new president soon took to portraying them as political hacks who had warped the intelligence to provide Democrats with an excuse for Mrs. Clinton’s loss in the election.

Mr. Comey fared little better. He was fired in May 2017 after refusing to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump and pushing forward on the federal investigation into whether the Trump campaign had cooperated with Russia’s election interference.

Only Admiral Rogers, who retired this past May, was extended in office by Mr. Trump. (He, too, told Congress that he thought the evidence of Russian interference was incontrovertible.)

And the evidence suggests Russia continues to be very aggressive in its meddling.

In March, the Department of Homeland Security declared that Russia was targeting the American electric power grid, continuing to riddle it with malware that could be used to manipulate or shut down critical control systems. Intelligence officials have described it to Congress as a chief threat to American security.

Just last week, Mr. Coats said that current cyberthreats were “blinking red” and called Russia the “most aggressive foreign actor, no question.”

“And they continue their efforts to undermine our democracy,” he said.

Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, also stood firm.

“The intelligence community’s assessment has not changed,” Mr. Wray said on Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum. “My view has not changed, which is that Russia attempted to interfere with the last election and continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day.”

The Russian efforts are “aimed at sowing discord and divisiveness in this country,” he continued. “We haven’t yet seen an effort to target specific election infrastructure this time. We could be just a moment away from the next level.”

“It’s a threat we need to take extremely seriously and respond to with fierce determination and focus.”

Almost as soon as he took office, Mr. Trump began casting doubts on the intelligence on Russia’s election interference, though never taking issue with its specifics.

He dismissed it broadly as a fabrication by Democrats and part of a “witch hunt” against him. He raised unrelated issues, including the state of investigations into Mrs. Clinton’s home computer server, to distract attention from the central question of Russia’s role — and who, if anyone, in Mr. Trump’s immediate orbit may have worked with them.

In July 2017, just after meeting Mr. Putin for the first time, Mr. Trump told a New York Times reporter that the Russian president had made a persuasive case that Moscow’s cyberskills were so good that the government’s hackers would never have been caught. Therefore, Mr. Trump recounted from his conversation with Mr. Putin, Russia must not have been responsible.

Since then, Mr. Trump has routinely disparaged the intelligence about the Russian election interference. Under public pressure — as he was after his statements in Helsinki on Monday — he has periodically retreated. But even then, he has expressed confidence in his intelligence briefers, not in the content of their findings.

That is what happened again this week, twice.

Mr. Trump’s statement in Helsinki led Mr. Coats to reaffirm, in a statement he deliberately did not get cleared at the White House, that American intelligence agencies had no doubt that Russia was behind the 2016 hack.

That contributed to Mr. Trump’s decision on Tuesday to say that he had misspoken one word, and that he did believe Russia had interfered — although he also veered off script to declare: “Could be other people also. A lot of people out there.”

smackeddog wrote:Ha ha, such a liar! Now claiming he meant to say the word “wouldn’t” instead of “would”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44864739

::with Bill Maher's Trump Voice::
But he's the best. He never makes mistakes in his statements, why would he ever make a stupid mistake like that? I mean, why wouldn't he always make stupid mistakes like that?

Tweet was deleted or there was problem with the URL:

https://twitter.com/malcolmnance/status/1019777063916621830

nixluva wrote:

Tweet was deleted or there was problem with the URL:

https://twitter.com/rwpusa/status/1019791116202323969

We all need to get guns. When the democrats take over Congress in the fall, they are going to push back against Trump hard, and Trump is going to recklessly call on his racist supports to push back against them even harder. The dude is about to lead us into a civil war, with Russia's approval. White people have been saying for years that all the problems of blacks and hispanics are self created, everything's equal and if you just work hard you can make it, but as soon as they realized they might not be in the majority for much longer and might have to actually start competing with the other races on an equal footing as opposed to relying on white privilege, they let fear guide them to electing this idiot Trump to MAGA by returning us to the 1950's when whites reigned supreme and gays, blacks, Mexicans, and everyone else who was not European white knew their place.

meloshouldgo wrote:And if you need evidence of just how stupid the "People" are, here you go (Replace "Humanity" with "Amerika")

Loved Cosmos back in the day. As for the Kardashians, they are scary.

I am very impressed though that Kylie Jenner has marketed herself into close to a billion dollar fortune. She didnt do that on her iphone, in her spare time. At the age of 20, I respect that.

The rest of them.....