REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

TRUMP - Just because.....................Naw, I just can't say it!

POSTED BY: SHINYGOODGUY
UPDATED: Tuesday, July 23, 2024 11:14
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Saturday, January 7, 2017 6:38 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


So here you are, on your soapbox, all alone.

I read the unclassified report.

Out of 26 pages, about six or seven are blank pages or cover pages. Seven ... SEVEN! ... are on "RT", where the report attempts to "expose" RT's pro-Russian agenda, and they go back several years to demonstrate it. Including blaming RT for its anti-fracking (yes, you read that correctly) coverage. But anyone reading RT will figure out their pro-Russian bias very quickly; it hardly needs an "expose" of long-gone information.

And what does this have to do with the election anyway??

They spend a lot of time making completely bogus claims about Russia trying to destroy our "liberal" democracy. (uh huh) and imputing motives to Putin and to other Russians that they can't POSSIBLY know. They refer, without any examples to back up their claim, that Russia has interfered with other elections in the past, even OUR elections. Gee, don't you think that should have come up before now?? In a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't tactic they criticize Putin for NOT saying anything about Trump, and they criticize Putin for saying anything about Trump.

They repeat the same things over and over.

It's like a bad term paper, where about two pages of un-researched material is fluffed up into 20 pages of utter garbage.

But where the rubber meets the road is that they claim that Russia gave the files to an intermediary, who gave them to Wikileaks. In other words, Russia was depending on someone else ... someone disaffected enough with their own Democratic party to do their dirty work for them. That one critical step ... disseminating the emails ... was out of Russia's hands. Without that one person, all of that "spying" would have gone for naught. It seems to me like there was a critical flaw in the Russian plan. If that person had not been available or willing .... what then?

And it brings up a bunch of questions, like

Who is that person?
HOW, exactly, were the efiles transmitted? On thumb drive in person? Wouldn't that make the leaker suspicious?
And if not that way, how?
How did the leaker know how to get in touch with Wikileaks? Was contact information provided?
Why hasn't the leaker been arrested or at least identified?

To tell you the truth, it still sounds like so much bullshit. Yep, everyone hacks everyone and whatever we accuse the Russians of doing, you can bet your last dollar that we do the same thing. The fact of this kind of low-level hacking would normally be treated with a big shoulder-shrug from the intelligence community. The RELEASE is STILL not from Russian hands, and the report has not provided any evidence that Russia even provided the material, or directed that person to go to Wikileaks, or provided contact information, or any number of critical steps that would have to be in place.

And it brings up an even bigger question, one which the Obama administration and the MSM seem to be pointedly ignoring: IF HACKING UNSECURED SERVERS IS SUCH A PROBLEM, WHAT ABOUT HILLARY'S PRIVATE SERVER? The one where Scy State information was commingled with "personal" email? That one that she directed 30,000 email evidence to be destroyed from?

I just kind of roll my eyes and throw up my hands at the lack of critical thinking.


-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND

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Saturday, January 7, 2017 10:08 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

And it brings up an even bigger question, one which the Obama administration and the MSM seem to be pointedly ignoring: IF HACKING UNSECURED SERVERS IS SUCH A PROBLEM, WHAT ABOUT HILLARY'S PRIVATE SERVER? The one where Scy State information was commingled with "personal" email? That one that she directed 30,000 email evidence to be destroyed from?

I just kind of roll my eyes and throw up my hands at the lack of critical thinking.

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND
Google "was hillary's email server hacked?" and you will get whatever answer you want, Signym. 99% chance according to Breitbart, which is run by Trump people. On the other hand, the FBI says there was no evidence. Choose one or the other, if you feel that is an important choice.

The important problem is Trump’s reading comprehension of the report, not what choice Trump will make about the report because Obama already made the choice. The report says Russia hacked many countries. Trump turns that upside down and backwards by saying many countries could have hacked the DNC in the USA. See the difference? Trump is creating alternative facts to justify doing nothing. But he doesn’t need “facts”, either real or imaginary, to justify what he will not do.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 7, 2017 11:27 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Maybe RT Has a Bigger Influence on American Politics Than We Think
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/01/maybe-rt-has-bigger-influence-a
merican-politics-we-think

The intelligence report on Russian hacking devoted an awful lot of space to RT America, the Kremlin-funded cable TV network. That struck me as odd since I don't think RT had much influence on the election. Shortly after I wrote that, I got this tweet:

Pat Bagley @Patbagley
Quote:
@kdrum Don't think you know how influential RT is among Christian Right, most of whom don't know what RT means
7:58 PM - 6 Jan 2017 · Salt Lake City, UT
And this email:
Quote:
I think you underestimate the influence of RT on the Jill Stein and "Never Hillary" crowd among Bernie supporters. This is only one aspect of delegitimizing the center. A leftist progressive friend who works on Syrian refugee issues was really disturbed by how many on that part of the spectrum think Putin is just dandy.
And this from Vox's Zack Beauchamp:
Quote:
The ODNI report focuses, to an almost surprising degree, on RT — the Kremlin’s international, English-language propaganda media outlet. The report contains several striking observations about RT’s reach, message, and proximity to the Russian government.

....According to the report, RT — as well as Sputnik, another Russian government–funded English-language propaganda outlet — began aggressively producing pro-Trump and anti-Clinton content starting in March 2016. That just so happens to be the exact same time the Russian hacking campaign targeting Democrats began.

....During the 2016 campaign, RT aired a number of weird, conspiratorial segments — some starring WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange — that cast Clinton as corrupt and funded by ISIS and portrayed the US electoral system as rigged.
Put this all together and you have a portrait of a sometimes Alex Jones-esque "alternative channel" that appeals to fringe elements on both the left and right and successfully hides its identity from them.

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Saturday, January 7, 2017 5:43 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Maybe RT Has a Bigger Influence on American Politics Than We Think
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/01/maybe-rt-has-bigger-influence-a
merican-politics-we-think


So what? Are they trying to say that the American narrative only survives when people don't get to hear another POV?

It must not be a very good narrative, then.



-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND

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Sunday, January 8, 2017 7:45 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So what? Are they trying to say that the American narrative only survives when people don't get to hear another POV?

It must not be a very good narrative, then.
It is a Russian narrative, chosen to be of most advantage to Russia, and intended to mislead.

RT (formerly Russia Today) is not talking about tabletop physics where anyone at home could run an experiment involving servers and hacking to demonstrate that RT is falsifying its stories about Russian actions, now are we? Because the facts can’t be verified at home, RT feels free to create whatever "facts" best serve Russia.

To be as blunt as I possibly can be, RT is free to slip poison into its news and commentary. A little poison into the American mainstream can’t hurt Russia, can it? It might even be healthy, at least for Russia, to sicken America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)
RT America on youtube: http://bit.ly/2i6HbLO

Look what I found about Russia using "poison" on its enemies. The metaphor is real. Some enterprising journalist should ask Trump about this. I would expect Trump to go on the defensive for Putin with something along the line of anybody could have done this. Why blame Putin? :

In 2007, the UK expelled Russian diplomats and severed contact between their security services. Much of the West was in an uproar with Moscow. The trigger? The murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a KGB defector who was poisoned with polonium 210, a nuclear isotope.
www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/alexander-litvinenko-the-man-who
-solved-his-own-murder

The operation, a British investigation concluded, was approved by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
www.cnn.com/2016/01/21/europe/litvinenko-inquest-report/

The Litvinenko murder was regarded as an extraordinary act because Russia was carrying out revenge in a way that could harm the population of a major western capital. The worry was that it could happen again.
www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/dec/08/russia.topstories3

The tweeting president-elect and the election hacking row.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2017/jan/08/donald-trump-and
-the-bear-under-the-bed


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, January 8, 2017 7:45 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two



Captain Bernie Sanders
www.redbubble.com/people/ittakesii/works/24732581-captain-bernie-sande
rs

A sneak peek of Alan Tudyk lending voice to Hei-Hei the chicken in Disney's Moana (2016).



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, January 8, 2017 8:19 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
It is a Russian narrative, chosen to be of most advantage to Russia, and intended to mislead.
And the NYT and WaPo narrative is chosen to be the most advantage to the USA deep state, and ALSO chosen to mislead. The analogy is almost a perfect mirror image.

SECOND, you have to have your metaphorical shitscreen in place, no matter WHO you read. If your worldview can't tolerate an alternate or challenging POV, then you really should revise it to be more durable. Reality wins, no matter what you want to believe.

What this boils down to is WHAT ARE AMERICA'S INTERESTS? For all that you and THUGR and GSTRING and KRAPO go on and on ... and on and on ... about Russia, you seem utterly uninterested in even thinking about the interests of the nation that you claim alligience to (except KRAPO, who is British, and maybe GSTRING who might be Canadian).

Does the USA have an interest in creating jihadist havens across the Mideast and North Africa (MENA) and Central Asia? If not, why do we keep doing it? IF SO, what would that interest be?

Does the USA have an interest in picking a military fight with Russia? If not, why do we keep doing it? IF SO, what might that be?

Does the USA have an interest in provoking a trade war with China? If not, why are we doing it? If so, what might that be?

Once you start picking apart those real questions.... as opposed to the fake crises that get tossed on our TV screens and PC monitors all the time .... then you have to start thinking ... WHO IS AMERICA? WHOSE INTERESTS ARE WE REPRESENTING?

You start to learn about your interests by contrast with the interests of other nations. And you learn about the interests of other nations, not by reading what VOA or NPR or NYT says about them, but by reading ... intelligently ... what they say about themselves. Recognizing, of course, that every culture and every nation presents the most flattering picture of itself.







-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND

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Sunday, January 8, 2017 9:03 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
It is a Russian narrative, chosen to be of most advantage to Russia, and intended to mislead.
And the NYT and WaPo narrative is chosen to be the most advantage to the USA deep state, and ALSO chosen to mislead. The analogy is almost a perfect mirror image.

SECOND, you have to have your metaphorical shitscreen in place, no matter WHO you read. If your worldview can't tolerate an alternate or challenging POV, then you really should revise it to be more durable. Reality wins, no matter what you want to believe.

What this boils down to is WHAT ARE AMERICA'S INTERESTS? For all that you and THUGR and GSTRING and KRAPO go on and on ... and on and on ... about Russia, you seem utterly uninterested in even thinking about the interests of the nation that you claim alligience to (except KRAPO, who is British, and maybe GSTRING who might be Canadian).

Does the USA have an interest in creating jihadist havens across the Mideast and North Africa (MENA) and Central Asia? If not, why do we keep doing it? IF SO, what would that interest be?

Does the USA have an interest in picking a military fight with Russia? If not, why do we keep doing it? IF SO, what might that be?

Does the USA have an interest in provoking a trade war with China? If not, why are we doing it? If so, what might that be?

Once you start picking apart those real questions.... as opposed to the fake crises that get tossed on our TV screens and PC monitors all the time .... then you have to start thinking ... WHO IS AMERICA? WHOSE INTERESTS ARE WE REPRESENTING?

You start to learn about your interests by contrast with the interests of other nations. And you learn about the interests of other nations, not by reading what VOA or NPR or NYT says about them, but by reading ... intelligently ... what they say about themselves. Recognizing, of course, that every culture and every nation presents the most flattering picture of itself.
As usual, you missed the point, either deliberately or incompetently. Trump said the Russians did not do it. Trump did not explain how he knew this. Who told him? Nobody, since he made up his own facts because, as a salesman, Trump knows what is best for himself at any moment. But he was not thinking beyond this momentary crisis. There will be plenty more in the next eight years. Bush started the same way, ignoring what he was truthfully told about Osama bin Laden during his early intelligence briefings.

Now that Trump has smeared every US intelligence agency and the FBI, where will Trump be getting his facts? From RT (formerly Russia Today)? And Breitbart? Because Trump does not read foreign news not in English. Or will Trump be like he always been, making up his own facts? Once he is President, nobody can stop him but himself.

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Sunday, January 8, 2017 9:20 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


No, SECOND, YOU missed the point.

This "report" by the FBI is complete political hogwash. There is nothing in there of substance, and nothing I myself haven't posted already, more than once: the DNC, like all government-affiliated servers, is subject to "hacking" by all kinds of foreign agents. So much so that the server was hacked by at least TWO different entities which were apparently operating independently of each other.

How do I know this??? Because the second spearphising attack actually exposed the presence of the first (more adroit) hack. IF these entities were working together, they would have shared information and the second hack would not have been necessary, and nobody would be the wiser, not even today. So, two different entities.

As far as the LEAK is concerned, the LEAK exposed the spearphising email which set this whole thing off. If the hacker gave emails to the leaker, wouldn't it have been better to delete the self-incriminating email?

The report attempts to paint Russia as some sort of mastermind cyber-enemy, but in reality the hacks and the leak point to different parties operating rather primitively and in un-coordinated fashion. Simple logic overturns much of what the report alleges.

And if the report is pointless in terms of cyber security, what WAS the point? As far as I can tell, this whole "report" had one goal: to make life difficult for Donald Trump. Period. The end.



-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND

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Monday, January 9, 2017 7:38 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
No, SECOND, YOU missed the point.

The report attempts to paint Russia as some sort of mastermind cyber-enemy, but in reality the hacks and the leak point to different parties operating rather primitively and in un-coordinated fashion. Simple logic overturns much of what the report alleges. . . . Period. The end.

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND
Signym, it is time for you to flip-flop on this point because "He {Trump} accepts the fact that this particular case was entities in Russia, so that's not the issue," Priebus said on "Fox News Sunday."

It was the first acknowledgment from a senior member of the Republican president-elect's team that Trump had accepted that Russia directed the hacking and subsequent disclosure of Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential election.

Priebus’ wording did not appear to foreshadow the dramatic reversal of Trump’s apparent Russia policy that experts say would be required to deter further cyber attacks.

“It will take a lot more than what we heard on television today to make Putin cool it,” the expert added. “In fact, there may not be anything that can deter Putin from pursuing a course he’s bet his future and Russia’s on,” said a U.S. intelligence expert on Russia

www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-cyber-idUSKBN14S0O6

It is Trump's people saying Trump has flip-flopped, but you know they are the ones with brains. Trump might forget what has been decided and brainlessly spout off today or tomorrow the absolute opposite because he runs his mouth without thinking.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 9, 2017 10:08 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Ethical-buck-10843
565.php

Disclosure law directed at Trump and Tillerson should be on Congress’ to-do list.

The buck stops here!

Harry Truman’s famous sign, at all of 20 characters, may have been ahead of its time when it comes to tweeting politicians.

But the sentiment is as old as government — leaders should take ultimate responsibility.

As Donald Trump prepares to enter Truman’s former office, voters have reason to worry that they’ll see the sentiment flipped upside-down — excuses start here!

A new report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that 150 different financial institutions across the globe hold debt in businesses that Trump owns or is a major stakeholder. That international web of debt almost guarantees to trip up the future president in a conflict of interest. The scariest thing is that the American people simply don’t know how wide that web reaches. Breaking from decades of common practice, Trump has failed to make public his tax returns.

But Trump is not the only one with something to hide. Rex Tillerson, who has been nominated as the next secretary of state, has also failed to provide his full tax returns for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Tillerson has taken some motions toward transparency by submitting a lengthy financial disclosure, according to the Washington Post. The former Exxon CEO has also announced plans to place his $180 million corporate payout into a blind trust — a routine ethical step that Trump has refused to take with his own business interests.

Whether Trump or Tillerson, these conflicts leave our government vulnerable to bribery and self-enrichment at the expense of the American people, and also raise questions about the administration’s ability to put America first.

The intelligence report released Friday by the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that Vladimir Putin had positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia.

Voters have reason to worry whether Tillerson’s Exxon deals and Trump’s real estate ties will guide their thinking, consciously or unconsciously, on foreign policy.

Truman famously refused to sit on any corporate board after leaving office because he believed that it would diminish the presidency. It nearly landed him in poverty.

Now we face that problem flipped upside-down. Faced with politicians who insist on maintaining or hiding their corporate ties, Congress has a duty to create new ethical disclosure requirements. The buck stops with them.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 9, 2017 10:32 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


www.gocomics.com/theargylesweater/2017/01/09


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 9, 2017 11:10 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
As far as I can tell, this whole "report" had one goal: to make life difficult for Donald Trump. Period. The end.- SIGNY

Because why?- G


Because (IMHO) Trump is about to knock the CIA and the State Department down a peg or two, because these agency staffers will get in the way of Trump's agenda. Because these two agencies are infested with Brzezinski's "full-spectrum-dominance" neocons.

As evidence, I pointed to a number of specific instances where the State Department and the CIA were caught promoting the destruction of Ukrainian and Libyan governments, quite probably inserting snipers and chemical weapons into events as false flags, and shipping Saudi and Qatari arms to our terrorist proxies in Syria. The high-level intelligence whitewashing was so bad that 50 of the DIA's lower-level analysts wrote an open letter protesting the manipulation of their less-than-positive assessment of the Syria strategy (i.e. promoting the "moderate opposition") into happy-talk-blather. And not to be outdone, 50 State Department staffers wrote an open letter of their own promoting a more "kinetic" approach to Syria. I linked all of these in the past, many times. If you insist I'll find links (again) to support all of this.

Trump, for example, literally just fired all of the State Department ambassadors. Told them to pack up their bags and go home on Jan 20, no exceptions. And while the President has the authority to do it, very few have. So Trump is doing a clean sweep of the State Department too, as much as possible.

In any case ALL IS NOT HAPPY IN SPOOK-LAND. There is a serious power-struggle going on behind the scenes. The CIA is protecting its turf.

Quote:
Signym, it is time for you to flip-flop on this point because "He {Trump} accepts the fact that this particular case was entities in Russia, so that's not the issue," Priebus said on "Fox News Sunday."
First of all, I couldn't give a rat's ass about what Priebus says. Politicians lie, so do "the spooks". Haven't you been lied to enough to have figured that out?

The "hacking" tools could be ought online from a Ukrainian website, and it was so casual and disconnected of an effort that anybody could have done it. But on the basis of ciu bono? I assume that at least ONE of them was a non-serious attempt by the Russians to gather information. I've been saying that Russia was an involved party ALL ALONG. Maybe it's time you learned how to read. Or comprehend. Or think. Or something, because once again you're putting words in my mouth ... strawmanning as usual.

But the Russians didn't release the emails. It was some third party, which gave them to Wikileaks. Julian Assange knows the provenance of these emails, and he insists - even today, in press conference- that it was not a state party that was the source. The rest is so much blather.

If you want to know who the REAL manipulators of the election were, is was the Democratic Party, who manipulated Bernie Sanders out of the primaries, and Google and Facebook and the MSM who first promoted Trump's candidacy (since he was estimated to be the weakest candidate for Hillary to ruin against) and then, when to their horror the DNC found Trump gaining ground, manipulated coverage in the opposite direction. Even manipulated the polls. Wake up and smell the coffee, SECOND.


-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND

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Monday, January 9, 2017 11:44 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
But the Russians didn't release the emails. It was some third party, which gave them to Wikileaks.- SIGNY

The fact that you believe this is beyond incredible.- GSTRING


THE ODNI REPORT ITSELF SAYS SO.
Read it for yourself, if you don't believe me.



-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND

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Monday, January 9, 2017 6:08 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Was 'G' saying something? I'm sure it was beyond stupid.

Anyway,



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/us/politics/democrats-joe-biden-hill
ary-clinton.html?

Democrats at Crossroads: Win Back Working-Class Whites, or Let Them Go?

By JONATHAN MARTIN and ALEXANDER BURNSDEC. 15, 2016



Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Washington on Tuesday. He lamented last week that Hillary Clinton had not done enough to reach white working-class voters during her bid for the White House. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Sounding like a frustrated Cassandra, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. lamented last week that Hillary Clinton had not done enough to reach white working-class voters in the presidential campaign. Even more egregious to Mr. Biden, some fellow Democrats had concluded that blue-collar whites were not even worth pursuing.

“I mean these are good people, man!” Mr. Biden exclaimed in an interview on CNN. “These aren’t racists. These aren’t sexists.”

With his typically unambiguous assessment, the vice president thrust himself into a heated debate that has shaped the Democrats’ self-diagnosis since Donald J. Trump won the presidency: Should the party continue tailoring its message to the fast-growing young and nonwhite constituencies that propelled President Obama, or make a more concerted effort to win over the white voters who have drifted away?

For Democrats, the election last month has become a Rorschach test. Some see Mrs. Clinton’s loss as a result of an unfortunate series of flukes — Russian tampering, a late intervention by the Federal Bureau of Investigation director and a poor allocation of resources — but little more than a speed bump on the road to a demographic majority. Others believe the results reflect a more worrisome trend that could doom the party.

It is a sensitive topic, touching on race and class, but the choices that Democrats make in the coming months will shape their post-Obama identity and carry major implications in both the 2018 midterm elections and the next presidential race.

Few leading Democrats are arguing for a large-scale reconsideration of the party’s core liberal agenda. After all, history is a game of inches, and Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, but lost the presidency by 77,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — less than the capacity crowd at Lambeau Field on any given Sunday.

“Demographically, the Electoral College is heading in the right direction” for Democrats, Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to Mr. Obama, said. What Mr. Trump pulled off, he added, “would be hard to replicate.”

Even those who believe the party has become too fixated on identity politics do not think it should reverse course on such issues as immigration, criminal justice and legal protections for gay and transgender Americans.

Yet as a matter of politics, those in Mr. Biden’s camp believe the party’s ethos of inclusion may add up to less than the sum of its parts.

In the minds of those Democrats, they will not be a majority party again in Washington or across much of the country without winning back white voters of modest means.

“You don’t need those people?” Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, asked. “You’re going to wait how many decades before this other strategy works?”

Mr. Vilsack, a former Iowa governor, had tried to push Mrs. Clinton, a longtime ally, toward focusing more on rural America, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. He was just as exasperated over what he described as his party’s decades-long pattern of neglect of many of the voters he spent eight years working with in his cabinet post.

“Rural America is 15 percent of America’s population,” Mr. Vilsack said. “It’s the same percentage as African-Americans; it’s the same percentage as Hispanics. We spend a lot of time thinking about that 15 percent — and we should, God bless them, we should. But not to the exclusion of the other 15 percent.”

In their zeal for pursuing clearly defined constituencies, some Democrats now worry they missed the bigger picture: failing to deliver a message that would cut across all constituencies, and ceding too much territory to Republicans in whiter, more conservative areas that Mr. Trump won by wider margins than other recent Republican nominees.

Entering the race for chairman of the Democratic National Committee on Thursday, Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez summed up this view in blunt terms.



http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/16/us/politics/the-two-amer
icas-of-2016.html?_r=0

“We got our ass kicked in a lot of these rural pockets because we weren’t there in sufficient force,” Mr. Perez said.

Representative Gwen Graham, Democrat of Florida and a likely candidate for governor in 2018, called her party’s message “too funneled.” It needed to be more open to pursuing moderate and conservative voters, she said. Ms. Graham, who was elected in a conservative-leaning district in the Florida Panhandle, said she would campaign across every part of the state if she ran for governor. Though she declined to criticize her party’s presidential nominee directly, such campaigning would be starkly different from the approach Mrs. Clinton took in 2016, when she focused overwhelmingly on the state’s biggest metropolitan areas. “I would run a 67-county strategy,” Ms. Graham said. “And I would reach out to all different kinds of Democrats and Republicans, along the ideological spectrum.”

But while this may make for a good message at the outset of a campaign, it is, to a vocal contingent of Democratic strategists, a dated approach that ignores inexorable political and demographic trendlines. To win in a changing country, these Democrats said, the party must tailor a platform and strategy that explicitly appealed to younger and nonwhite voters on issues like policing, climate change and immigration.

Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster, said it was folly to continue developing a message for and devoting considerable resources to “a shrinking, increasingly resistant market.” Mr. Belcher recalled focus groups in North Carolina this year in which nonwhite voters who had come out for Mr. Obama’s two elections could not name the party’s Senate candidate in the state. (It was Deborah Ross; she lost.) “We’re spending all of our resources on broadcast television chasing this mythical unicorn white swing voter,” he said. Mr. Belcher, who has published a new book about race and the Obama presidency, “A Black Man in the White House,” said the party should not ignore white voters. But he said Democrats also should not react to this election by refashioning their appeal as if the country were just as white as it was when Bill Clinton and other centrists began the Democratic Leadership Council 30 years ago. “Why would we go back to running campaigns as though it’s the 1980s?” Mr. Belcher asked. “Because it’s not the 1980s.”

Mr. Pfeiffer, the former Obama adviser, noted that red states like Arizona and Georgia were closer to turning blue this year even as Mrs. Clinton lost, and argued that new arrivals in Florida and North Carolina would make those states tilt Democratic.

Yet even Democrats in solidly blue states, who can in theory win elections without a single conservative vote, said the party’s identity-heavy message was lacking.

Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles said Democrats had not explained to many voters how tolerant social values translated into government action. “Of course we are for a tolerant, diverse, inclusive, cooperative future,” he said. “It isn’t enough.” Mr. Garcetti likened the party’s message to the gestures of conciliation proposed by civic leaders in Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots in the 1990s — well intentioned but insufficient. “If the starting point is: ‘Hey, we are a party and we are a country that stands for blacks and Koreans and people of all stripes liking each other,’ that’s not an agenda,” Mr. Garcetti said. “These values aren’t just about social inclusion. They’re about getting things done.”

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Monday, January 9, 2017 6:24 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-15/theres-smart-way-resist-trump
-very-stupid-way-democrats-chose-latter



There's A Smart Way To Resist Trump & A Very Stupid Way (Democrats Chose The Latter)


Let me start this post by reiterating my view that a Trump Presidency carries various undeniable risks. Specifically, his stated views on civil liberties as well as a recent embrace of Wall Street, leaves much to be desired.

That said, if you want to effectively push back against the real risks Trump presents, it’s important you live in reality. Hysterically comparing him to Hitler, or saying he’s going to put Muslims in concentration camps, is a surefire way to incinerate your credibility and strengthen Trump’s support amongst the public. Trying to steal the office from him via an extremely dangerous and irresponsible coup attempt is equally foolish. These tactics only serve to strengthen Trump.

This is because a majority of Americans simply weren’t really into Trump or Hillary. Many of these people voted for Trump not because they like him or his policies, but because they just wanted to put up a gigantic middle finger in the face of the establishment and the mainstream media. Whether or not Trump is really such a middle finger is highly questionable, but that’s not the point. The point is enough people didn’t buy into the hysterical claims about Trump in the run up to the election, otherwise he wouldn’t have won. The lesson Trump opposition should have learned from Hillary’s loss is that the “just act like insane lunatics” approach to Trump doesn’t work against him. This would’ve been the logical conclusion reached upon genuine reflection and introspection, but this is not what happened.

Indeed, what many so called “liberals” have done in their post-election meltdown is fully embrace exactly what they have always accused the opposition of being — warmongering, racist, hateful, insensitive lunatics. In their clouded hysteria, many of these people are turning into the monsters they claim to be fighting.

For more on this, see recent articles:

Daily Kos Founder Tells Readers – ‘Be Happy for Coal Miners Losing Their Health Insurance’

Video of the Day – The ‘Fake Left’ Has Lost Its Mind

The example I will highlight today comes from Tim Wise. Let me be clear about something before I move forward. I have nothing personally against Tim. In fact, I had never even heard of him before today. A quick look at his bio doesn’t point to anything nefarious or hateful. He appears to be a guy who is genuinely compassionate about fighting racism. Like so many others who are no longer thinking clearly, he appears to have fully descended into the gutter and risks becoming indistinguishable from those he condemns.

First, Tim’s entire career seems to be dedicated to anti-rascist activism. As is seen from his Twitter profile.



With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of his recent tweets:

I have no idea if the above is representative of how this person has conducted himself over the years, but I’ll assume that it isn’t. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his unhinged hate-mongering is the result of a mental breakdown following Donald Trump’s election. It’s not just him, of course. This mental collapse has clouded the judgement of so many self-proclaimed “liberals,” and resulted in them acting exactly like the monsters they profess to fight.

Beyond that point, the even larger issue is that although the type of commentary above might feel good in the moment, it is incredibly damaging to one’s reputation and does irreparable harm to any real attempt to oppose Trump. Nobody who isn’t already a card-carrying Hillary Clinton cultist or deranged neoconservative is going to read his tweets for the first time and think, “yeah, this guy’s really on to something.” Those are the people he is appealing to, and in the process he gleefully disparages an entire nation (Russia) as well as an entire race (white people).

Which brings me to the most depressing realization about the fake left. If you want to frame your entire political identity as a warrior against demonization and hate, you can’t merely apply this to select groups. Unfortunately, for many of these people, xenophobic commentary about Russia, as well as condescending language about poor white people is fair game. In its haze of anti-Trump anger, the fake left cannot even recognize its own disturbing hypocrisy, and this deranged attitude will be its undoing.

While this post has so far focused on the wrong way to oppose Trump, what’s the right way? For a perfect example, I turn to someone I’ve featured on these pages on numerous occasions, computer security expert Bruce Schneier. Bruce is no fan of Trump, but due to his ability to remain cogent and clearheaded, he is able to thoughtfully and effectively outline the ways in which he plans to resist.

From his post, My Priorities for the Next Four Years:

I spent the last month both coming to terms with this reality, and thinking about the future. Here is my new agenda for the next four years:

One, fight the fights. There will be more government surveillance and more corporate surveillance. I expect legislative and judicial battles along several lines: a renewed call from the FBI for backdoors into encryption, more leeway for government hacking without a warrant, no controls on corporate surveillance, and more secret government demands for that corporate data. I expect other countries to follow our lead. (The UK is already more extreme than us.) And if there’s a major terrorist attack under Trump’s watch, it’ll be open season on our liberties. We may lose a lot of these battles, but we need to lose as few as possible and as little of our existing liberties as possible.

Two, prepare for those fights. Much of the next four years will be reactive, but we can prepare somewhat. The more we can convince corporate America to delete their saved archives of surveillance data and to store only what they need for as long as they need it, the safer we’ll all be. We need to convince Internet giants like Google and Facebook to change their business models away from surveillance capitalism. It’s a hard sell, but maybe we can nibble around the edges. Similarly, we need to keep pushing the truism that privacy and security are not antagonistic, but rather are essential for each other.

Three, lay the groundwork for a better future. No matter how bad the next four years get, I don’t believe that a Trump administration will permanently end privacy, freedom, and liberty in the US. I don’t believe that it portends a radical change in our democracy. (Or if it does, we have bigger problems than a free and secure Internet.) It’s true that some of Trump’s institutional changes might take decades to undo. Even so, I am confident — optimistic even — that the US will eventually come around; and when that time comes, we need good ideas in place for people to come around to. This means proposals for non-surveillance-based Internet business models, research into effective law enforcement that preserves privacy, intelligent limits on how corporations can collect and exploit our data, and so on.

And four, continue to solve the actual problems. The serious security issues around cybercrime, cyber-espionage, cyberwar, the Internet of Things, algorithmic decision making, foreign interference in our elections, and so on aren’t going to disappear for four years while we’re busy fighting the excesses of Trump. We need to continue to work towards a more secure digital future. And to the extent that cybersecurity for our military networks and critical infrastructure allies with cybersecurity for everyone, we’ll probably have an ally in Trump.

Those are my four areas. Under a Clinton administration, my list would have looked much the same. Trump’s election just means the threats will be much greater, and the battles a lot harder to win. It’s more than I can possibly do on my own, and I am therefore substantially increasing my annual philanthropy to support organizations like EPIC, EFF, ACLU, and Access Now in continuing their work in these areas.

My agenda is necessarily focused entirely on my particular areas of concern. The risks of a Trump presidency are far more pernicious, but this is where I have expertise and influence.

Right now, we have a defeated majority. Many are scared, and many are motivated — and few of those are applying their motivation constructively. We need to harness that fear and energy to start fixing our society now, instead of waiting four or even eight years, at which point the problems would be worse and the solutions more extreme. I am choosing to proceed as if this were cowpox, not smallpox: fighting the more benign disease today will be much easier than subjecting ourselves to its more virulent form in the future. It’s going to be hard keeping the intensity up for the next four years, but we need to get to work. Let’s use Trump’s victory as the wake-up call and opportunity that it is.

That is how you fight back and gain allies, not by throwing temper tantrums and resorting to the same sort of xenophobic hatred and racism you claim to despise.

At the end of the day, Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because of Comey, Russia or miscounted votes. Hillary lost because the Democratic Party rigged its own primary and chose the wrong candidate.

As the following cartoon so accurately depicts:






How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 3:26 AM

SHINYGOODGUY


I'm gonna resist the urge to call this what it is and just say that "smart" and "stupid" should never be bandied about when describing anything Trump.

Not much else to say other than: Trump finally admits that Russian hacks do exist. WHAT A FUCKING NIGHTMARE!!! YOU ARE A REAL WORLD-TRAVELER, YEAH YOU ARE and a REAL SMOOTH TALKER!!!
(500 Points if anyone can guess which movie is the above from)


SGG

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 3:39 AM

SHINYGOODGUY


Thanks for posting G - that was HI-larious.

Not only Hi-larious, but to the point!


SGG


Quote:
Originally posted by G:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
www.gocomics.com/theargylesweater/2017/01/09




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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 3:43 AM

SHINYGOODGUY


BLAH, BLAH, BLAH blah, blah blah..................

Nah, it wasn't the teacher from the Peanuts cartoons, she has way much better
things to say than say 2 Russian trolls desperately seeking "susan".


SGG

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 5:10 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Trump finally admits that Russian hacks do exist.
Where is that?
ETA: oh, never ming. I found it.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 5:30 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


WHERE THE DNC FILES CAME FROM AND HOW THEY GOT TO WIKILEAKS

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4034038/Ex-British-ambassador-
WikiLeaks-operative-claims-Russia-did-NOT-provide-Clinton-emails-handed-D-C-park-intermediary-disgusted-Democratic-insiders.html

14 December 2016
EXCLUSIVE: Ex-British ambassador who is now a WikiLeaks operative claims Russia did NOT provide Clinton emails - they were handed over to him at a D.C. park by an intermediary for 'disgusted' Democratic whistleblowers

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and associate of Julian Assange, told the Dailymail.com he flew to Washington, D.C. for emails
He claims he had a clandestine hand-off in a wooded area near American University with one of the email sources
The leakers' motivation was 'disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the 'tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders'
Murray says: 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks'
'Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that,' Murray insists
Murray is a controversial figure who was relieved of his post as British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct but is close to Wikileaks


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4034038/Ex-British-ambassador-
WikiLeaks-operative-claims-Russia-did-NOT-provide-Clinton-emails-handed-D-C-park-intermediary-disgusted-Democratic-insiders.html#ixzz4VLxQkHQH






How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 7:20 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Obama Paradox

Our first black president has an unyielding faith in the goodness of America. It got him elected. And it will cost him his legacy.

www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2017/01/what_bara
ck_obama_could_ve_learned_from_jeremiah_wright.html

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 7:33 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Law says a civilian must run the Pentagon. Does Gen. Mattis deserve an Exception?

Why has Donald Trump picked so many generals for his cabinet? A few popular theories: Trump has patterned himself on the movie “Patton”; he spent his boyhood years at New York Military Academy; he likes the martial machismo of gold-braided uniforms; he needs to balance the ruthless image he cultivated on the “Apprentice” with a nod to sacrifice and service.

Before approving a cabinet with a heavy representation from the military, senators may want to consider whether Trump is simply selecting for a value that is uniquely prized by the military: following orders.

Trump’s choices for defense (James Mattis), homeland security (John Kelly), and national security adviser (Michael Flynn, who does not require Senate confirmation) are all retired generals. His interior secretary (Ryan Zinke) was a Navy SEAL commander; his CIA director (Mike Pompeo) was an Army captain who graduated first in his class at West Point.

Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA and CIA, suggested that Trump’s overrepresentation of the military in his appointments was simply due to a lack of a better alternative.

Hayden went on to compare retired Marine General James Mattis, Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, to George C. Marshall, the five-star general who President Truman once called “the architect of victory” in World War II.

Many of Mattis’s Republican backers will make the same comparison this week, as Congress begins to consider whether or not to make an exception to the 1947 National Security Act. The law requires the secretary of defense to be “appointed from civilian life,” which now means a seven-year waiting period between retirement and appointment.

Marshall is the only general for whom Congress has ever made an exception. Mattis would be the second.

The Mattis waiver will require 60 votes in the Senate, 10 more than the simple majority needed to confirm a presidential appointment. Democrats, who hold 46 seats, could block it. But so far only one Democratic senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, has come out against the waiver, calling civilian control of the military “fundamental to the American democracy.”

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/09/the-law-says-a-civilian-must-run-t
he-pentagon-does-gen-mattis-deserve-an-exception/ continues on to explain what had worried Congress before it passed the law to keep the Pentagon under the control of a civilian.

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 9:37 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by lkiki:

At the end of the day, Hillary Clinton didn't lose because of Corney, Russia or miscounted votes. Hillary lost because the Democratic Party rigged its own primary and chose the wrong candidate.
13,206,428 voted for Bernie in primaries.
16,914,722 voted for Hillary.

The party did not rig that vote, despite what lkiki says. The party did not stuff the ballot boxes with extra votes for Hillary. The party did not destroy ballots marked for Bernie. Hillary got 3.7 million more votes than Bernie in the primary. She only got 2.9 million more votes than Trump in the general election.

How about lkiki's notion that Hillary's votes went to the wrong candidate?

That is a matter of opinion, but this is not: 13,206,428 who voted for Bernie did not all vote for Hillary in the general election. Hillary could have definitely used all 13,206,428 Bernie votes. She did not get those votes because Bernie lovers hate Hillary.

If 10,705 bitter Bernie voters in Michigan, out of the millions who voted for Dem in Michigan, had voted in the general election for Hillary rather than tell her to fuck off, Trump would have lost Michigan. This is what it cost for Bernie lovers to express their hatred of Hillary and their fixation on Hillary as a greater evil than Trump.

The same goes for bitter Bernie voters in three other close states who expressed their hatred for Hillary by converted a win for Hillary into a win for Trump.

That was not really a clever tactic of 1kiki or Bernie voters to convert an easy fight against the evils of President Hillary into “a lot harder” fight against evil President Trump.
Quote:
Originally posted by lkiki:

Those are my four areas. Under a Clinton administration, my list would have looked much the same. Trump’s election just means the threats will be much greater, and the battles a lot harder to win.
The Bernie lovers could have won almost all their battles against President Hillary, with Bernie always around to LOUDLY remind Hillary of her promises. But with their less than keen political minds, the Bernie lovers’ choice was to lose most of their political battles with President Trump, who won’t have anybody like Bernie softly whispering in his ear as the little voice of his conscience. Trump has no respect for any of Bernie’s beliefs. Hillary does. Too bad Bernie lovers don’t understand that difference in respect is important, but maybe some of them will learn the lesson. Trump will be their teacher who loves to punish his students.

www.nytimes.com/elections/results/michigan

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 5:45 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:
The party did not rig that vote, despite what lkiki says.
It may well have. All you have to do is google: irregularities voting democratic primaries

And of course there's the extremely well-documented collusion between the DNC - which is mandated to be neutral - the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and the media.
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/

And 'Bernie' is the scapegoat de jour? Not Comey, 'because ... Putin!', the stupid Constitution with its stupid electoral college, or Wikileaks? Did I forget any of your obsessive rationalizations where you channel the DNC over and over and over?

But what the hell, SECOND. Be an ignorant twit. Bury your nose in the party's butt. In fact, put your whole head up that ass for all I care, if that's what it takes for you to feel all cozy and secure. I really have no interest in you.

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 9:32 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:

And 'Bernie' is the scapegoat de jour? Not Comey, 'because ... Putin!', the stupid Constitution with its stupid electoral college, or Wilileaks? Did I forget any of your obsessive rationalizations where you channel the DNC over and over and over?

But what the hell, SECOND. Be an ignorant twit. Bury your nose in the party's butt. In fact, put your whole head up that ass for all I care, if that's what it takes for you to feel all cozy and secure. I really have no interest in you.
No. No. No. Bernie is solid. Bernie is a Rock. It is the Bernie lovers, the millions of them who decided they were going to teach that ugly-bitch Hillary a lesson she would never forget once she was back living in the White House. They were not going to vote for her so that they could deeply, permanently hurt her feelings.

Bernie's "We love only you forever" supporters did this despite Bernie campaigning for Hillary and asking them to please, pretty please, vote for her. She might be the distant second best, compared to beautiful Bernie, but according to Bernie, Hillary was a thousand times better than Trump.


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 9:42 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
It is the Bernie lovers, the millions of them who decided they were going to teach that ugly-bitch Hillary a lesson she would never forget once she was back living in the White House. They were not going to vote for her so that they could deeply, permanently hurt her feelings.

Bernie's "We love only you forever" supporters did this ...
Facts SECOND? Links? Post-polls or exit polls showing Bernie voters swung the electoral college? Of course not. Not from you. NEVER from you.

And 'Bernie' is the scapegoat de jour? Not Comey, 'because ... Putin!', the stupid Constitution with its stupid electoral college, or Wikileaks? Did I forget any of your obsessive rationalizations where you channel the DNC over and over and over?

But what the hell, SECOND. Be an ignorant twit. Bury your nose in the party's butt. In fact, put your whole head up that ass for all I care, if that's what it takes for you to feel all cozy and secure. I really have no interest in you.


How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 10:44 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:

Facts SECOND? Links? Post-polls or exit polls showing Bernie voters swung the electoral college? Of course not. Not from you. NEVER from you.
Do you have some polls that show Bernie lovers voted for Hillary? Please share with us.

Now that Trump won, Bernie lovers might want to falsely claim they voted for Hillary so that the stink of Trump does not contaminate them, but can they provide proof they did vote for the Democrat? No, they can't, unless they took a selfie or they Xeroxed their mail-in ballot.

I voted by mail and even I forgot to make a copy and I always scan into a .pdf file every important document. I would post my ballot online if only I had it to post. Damn, damn, damn it all, I've got no proof I even voted.

P.S. Did 1kiki remain pure by voting for Jill Stein? Or did 1kiki maintain absolute purity to Bernie by not voting at all?

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Tuesday, January 10, 2017 11:26 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
It is the Bernie lovers, the millions of them who decided they were going to teach that ugly-bitch Hillary a lesson she would never forget once she was back living in the White House. They were not going to vote for her so that they could deeply, permanently hurt her feelings.

Bernie's "We love only you forever" supporters did this ...
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Facts SECOND? Links? Post-polls or exit polls showing Bernie voters swung the electoral college? Of course not. Not from you. NEVER from you.

And 'Bernie' is the scapegoat de jour? Not Comey, 'because ... Putin!', the stupid Constitution with its stupid electoral college, or Wikileaks? Did I forget any of your obsessive rationalizations where you channel the DNC over and over and over?

But what the hell, SECOND. Be an ignorant twit. Bury your nose in the party's butt. In fact, put your whole head up that ass for all I care, if that's what it takes for you to feel all cozy and secure. I really have no interest in you.


How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Wednesday, January 11, 2017 12:42 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


1kiki, when you get crazy, you start to shout in big, red letters. But shouting is not the same as understanding. Did you maintain your purity by voting for Jill Stein? Or did you keep your virginity by not voting at all, saving yourself for Bernie 2020? He can always run again, maybe start his own political party just for you and him. A political party of two. It will be very cozy. He's not going to be elected President, but you and Bernie can live together forever.

1kiki, do you realize that you wrote the following without a single citation to backup your delusions that you are competent to predict electing Hillary meant the End-of-the-World?
Quote:
Personally, I saw the US stupidly escalating conflict with Russia, which, given the neo-liberal neo-CONS on hillary's side, could have escalated into global nuclear conflagration.

And YOUR COUNTRY would whither and die along with all the others. All your feeling of political isolation somehow translating to some kind of magical physical protection, would provide you with ZERO shield against radiation. So, how do YOU feel about nuclear conflagration NOW?
www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60980&mid=1019531#
1019531

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, January 11, 2017 4:03 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Personally, I saw the US stupidly escalating conflict with Russia ...
I don't know how I could have been any more clear that this was MY PERSONAL OBSERVATION AND OPINION.

What's YOUR excuse for spouting bogus shit as fact?

Originally posted by second:
It is the Bernie lovers, the millions of them who decided they were going to teach that ugly-bitch Hillary a lesson she would never forget once she was back living in the White House. They were not going to vote for her so that they could deeply, permanently hurt her feelings.

Bernie's "We love only you forever" supporters did this ...
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Facts SECOND? Links? Post-polls or exit polls showing Bernie voters swung the electoral college? Of course not. Not from you. NEVER from you.

And 'Bernie' is the scapegoat de jour? Not Comey, 'because ... Putin!', the stupid Constitution with its stupid electoral college, or Wikileaks? Did I forget any of your obsessive rationalizations where you channel the DNC over and over and over?

But what the hell, SECOND. Be an ignorant twit. Bury your nose in the party's butt. In fact, put your whole head up that ass for all I care, if that's what it takes for you to feel all cozy and secure. I really have no interest in you.

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Wednesday, January 11, 2017 6:48 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


US Intelligence: Evidence of Trump-Russia Ties Might Be Credible

If true, the information suggests that Moscow has assembled damaging information — known in espionage circles by the Russian term “kompromat” — that conceivably could be used to coerce Trump.

Oh, and did I mention that the compromising information on Trump supposedly includes evidence of Trump's "personal obsessions and sexual perversion," including "sex parties" in Moscow? Well, consider it mentioned.

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/01/us-intelligence-evidence-trump-
russia-ties-might-be-credible


What you need to know about the Donald Trump “golden showers” intelligence report

Trump is alleged to have engaged in “perverted sexual acts” that were “arranged/monitored” by the Russian intelligence, including hiring prostitutes to urinate on the bed in the Presidential Suite of the Ritz Carlton hotel in Moscow where Obama and his wife had slept during an official visit, out of supposed hatred for them. Trump allegedly engaged in other “unorthodox” behavior in Moscow that Russian officials believe left him open to blackmail, the full report says.

https://qz.com/882677/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-donald-trump-gol
den-showers-intelligence-report-claimed-by-the-russians/

After a great deal of thinking, Trump responded:
Quote:
'BuzzFeed Runs Unverifiable Trump-Russia Claims' #FakeNews
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/819000924207251456
Quote:
FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/818990655418617856

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Wednesday, January 11, 2017 6:50 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Obama’s subtle warning to working class Trump voters: You played yourself
www.vox.com/2017/1/10/14233506/obamas-farewell-trump-voters

For one, brief, shining moment Obama stopped being polite and started being real: “If every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and undeserving minorities, then workers of all shades will be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves.”

It does not take a genius to understand who is whom in this parable. Donald Trump, who was born rich and lives in a gold-plated tower, is a wealthy person who can withdraw further into his private enclaves. So is his son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner. So is his billionaire education secretary Betsy DeVos. So is his billionaire commerce secretary Wilbur Ross. So is the Goldman Sachs executive he’s tapped to run the National Economic Council and the Goldman Sachs trader turned hedge fund manager he’s tapped to run the Treasury Department. This crew is laughing all the way to the bank as white working class votes install a new regime based on regressive tax cuts and bank deregulation.

Obama continued: “If we decline to invest in the children of immigrants, just because they don’t look like us, we diminish the prospects of our own children – because those brown kids will represent a larger share of America’s workforce. And our economy doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Last year, incomes rose for all races, all age groups, for men and for women.”

What Obama chose not to dwell on, given the tenor of the occasion, is that this broad-based income growth didn’t impress everyone. Older and less-educated white Americans embraced Donald Trump’s story that the country was going to hell in a handbasket, and then as soon as he won they immediately started saying the economy was good again. Actual results in the form of rising incomes weren’t good enough. Trump telling them the good old boys were back on top again was.

Continues at www.vox.com/2017/1/10/14233506/obamas-farewell-trump-voters

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Wednesday, January 11, 2017 7:04 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND you've spent your entire time since Hillary lost shifting from one "explanation" to another: Bernie supporters, people being "deplorable", Comey, DNC emails, BUT PUTIN!, the Electoral college, vote hacking ... I can't even begin to remember them all!



You've argued fervently and at GREAT length, and when you fail to get traction with one argument, you'll shift to (once again) to one that's you've already argued several times before.

Your mind is skittering around like a drop of water in a hot pan. In reality, there were multiple reasons why Hillary lost, but I believe the biggest one is that she ran as the "more of the same" candidate, and in the end too many people outside of liberal urban areas simply couldn't stand the thought of "more of the same". Bill Clinton said it best when he wrote "It's the economy, stupid", and Obama forgot that. Numbers like per-capita-GDP and percent unemployed hid the fact that nearly all jobs added under Obama were low-paying, part-time, no benefits, service jobs, and that the vast majority of people saw their economic prospects DEcrease even as wealth inequality went thru the roof. Obama might have successfully shucked and jived liberals into believing that HE wasn't at fault, but that anger about the economy was real, and shifted onto Hillary.



-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND

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Wednesday, January 11, 2017 7:05 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


1kiki, like many a funny person, you think that having an opinion, a personal one, keeps you from being insignificant. It will, if a professional comedian can work your ideas into their standup comedy act. Maybe get in touch with Norm McDonald. He could immortalize you on youtube, like he did for an unnamed German starting at 5 minutes into this video:



Personally, I saw the US stupidly escalating conflict with Russia ...
I don't know how I could have been any more clear that this was MY PERSONAL OBSERVATION AND OPINION.

What's YOUR excuse for spouting bogus shit as fact?



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, January 11, 2017 7:26 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


In crucial ways, Donald Trump is the second coming of George W. Bush.

Tax cuts, big government, and financial regulation — everything old is new again.

Trump has embraced Bushism on financial regulation.

Of particular note is that the proximate cause of the Bush-era collapse of the American economy was his administration’s belief that banks should not really be regulated.

There is more at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/9/14161740/trumponomics-bushono
mics

I do hope it works out better a second time with Trump than with Bush, but consequences for disastrous decisions were not apparent until years after Bush made them. For example, Bush's first term decisions on banks had terrible results mostly in his second term. The same will happen with Trump's bad decisions. If he lasts a single term, Trump will be out of office before that happens, but the USA will be living with the consequences long after Trump is gone, as is true with Bush's worst decisions.
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND . . .

You've argued fervently and at GREAT length, and when you fail to get traction with one argument, you'll shift to (once again) to one that's you've already argued several times before.

Your mind is skittering around like a drop of water in a hot pan. In reality, there were multiple reasons why Hillary lost, but I believe the biggest one is that she ran as the "more of the same" candidate, and in the end too many people outside of liberal urban areas simply couldn't stand the thought of "more of the same". Bill Clinton said it best when he wrote "It's the economy, stupid", and Obama forgot that. Numbers like per-capita-GDP and percent unemployed hid the fact that nearly all jobs added under Obama were low-paying, part-time, no benefits, service jobs, and that the vast majority of people saw their economic prospects DEcrease even as wealth inequality went thru the roof. Obama might have successfully shucked and jived liberals into believing that HE wasn't at fault, but that anger about the economy was real, and shifted onto Hillary.

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Wednesday, January 11, 2017 10:19 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND you've spent your entire time since Hillary lost shifting from one "explanation" to another: Bernie supporters, people being "deplorable", Comey, DNC emails, BUT PUTIN!, the Electoral college, vote hacking ... I can't even begin to remember them all!



You've argued fervently and at GREAT length, and when you fail to get traction with one argument, you'll shift to (once again) to one that's you've already argued several times before.

Your mind is skittering around like a drop of water in a hot pan. In reality, there were multiple reasons why Hillary lost, but I believe the biggest one is that she ran as the "more of the same" candidate, and in the end too many people outside of liberal urban areas simply couldn't stand the thought of "more of the same". Bill Clinton said it best when he wrote "It's the economy, stupid", and Obama forgot that. Numbers like per-capita-GDP and percent unemployed hid the fact that nearly all jobs added under Obama were low-paying, part-time, no benefits, service jobs, and that the vast majority of people saw their economic prospects DEcrease even as wealth inequality went thru the roof. Obama might have successfully shucked and jived liberals into believing that HE wasn't at fault, but that anger about the economy was real, and shifted onto Hillary.



-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND

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Thursday, January 12, 2017 8:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

SECOND you've spent your entire time since Hillary lost shifting from one "explanation" to another: Bernie supporters, people being "deplorable", Comey, DNC emails, BUT PUTIN!, the Electoral college, vote hacking ... I can't even begin to remember them all!
I don't remember mentioning vote hacking. Wasn't that a red herring used by the Republicans? But in science many ideas can be true about the same subject. For example, "Trump is a lying sack of shit" is true. The Confirmation Bias is also a true scientific concept.

The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway.
www.edge.org/response-detail/27147

In the year of the Trump, what scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?

This year’s question presented a particular challenge, which scientists writing for a broad audience might not have faced for generations. Namely: to what extent, if any, should your writing acknowledge the dark shadow of recent events? Does the Putinization of the United States render your little pet debates and hobbyhorses irrelevant? Or is the most defiant thing you can do to ignore the unfolding catastrophe, to continue building your intellectual sandcastle even as the tidal wave of populist hatred nears?

In any case, the instructions from Edge were clear: ignore politics. Focus on the eternal. But people interpreted that injunction differently.

One of my first ideas was to write about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and to muse about how one of humanity’s tragic flaws is to take for granted the gargantuan effort needed to create and maintain even little temporary pockets of order. Again and again, people imagine that, if their local pocket of order isn’t working how they want, then they should smash it to pieces, since while admittedly that might make things even worse, there’s also at least 50/50 odds that they’ll magically improve. In reasoning thus, people fail to appreciate just how exponentially more numerous are the paths downhill, into barbarism and chaos, than are the few paths further up. So thrashing about randomly, with no knowledge or understanding, is statistically certain to make things worse: on this point thermodynamics, common sense, and human history are all in total agreement. The implications of these musings for the present would be left as exercises for the reader.
www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3075

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 12, 2017 8:40 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


There Are Four Sources For Claims of Possible Trump-Russia Blackmail

The BBC's Paul Wood provides yet more detail on allegations that the Russians have possession of blackmail tapes on Donald Trump:

1) Claims about a Russian blackmail tape were made in one of a series of reports written by a former British intelligence agent. As a member of MI6, he had been posted to the UK's embassy in Moscow and now runs a consultancy giving advice on doing business in Russia. He spoke to a number of his old contacts in the FSB, the successor to the KGB, paying some of them for information.

2) ....The former MI6 agent is not the only source for the claim about Russian kompromat on the president-elect. Back in August, a retired spy told me he had been informed of its existence by "the head of an East European intelligence agency".

3) Later, I used an intermediary to pass some questions to active duty CIA officers dealing with the case file — they would not speak to me directly. I got a message back that there was "more than one tape", "audio and video", on "more than one date", in "more than one place" — in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow and also in St Petersburg — and that the material was "of a sexual nature". The claims of Russian kompromat on Mr Trump were "credible", the CIA believed.

....Last April, the CIA director was shown intelligence that worried him. It was — allegedly — a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign.

4) It was passed to the US by an intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States. The CIA cannot act domestically against American citizens so a joint counter-intelligence taskforce was created....A lawyer — outside the Department of Justice but familiar with the case — told me that three of Mr Trump's associates were the subject of the inquiry. "But it's clear this is about Trump," he said.

That's four sources, though obviously we don't know if they're all getting their information from the same place. Nor do we know if any of this is true. It might still all be baseless innuendo.

Still, four sources. This Paul Wood fellow is either a world-class crank or a helluva reporter. And we never would have known any of this if BuzzFeed hadn't gone ahead and published that dossier.

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/01/bbcs-paul-wood-there-are-four-s
ources-possible-trump-russia-blackmail

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Friday, January 13, 2017 8:05 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Golfweek Exclusive: Can Donald Trump make golf great again?
http://golfweek.com/2017/01/11/golfweek-exclusive-can-donald-trump-mak
e-golf-great-again/

This is one of the best analyses of Trumponomics that I’ve seen. What he can do is shift economic activity around so that a larger share of the population ends up in jobs where they are providing services to the most affluent tier of consumers — the people whose taxes will fall the most under Trump. That means more jobs in places like golf courses, who’ll be eager to hire since laxer Labor Department rules will make it easier for them to offer low pay.

That’s not exactly the coal-and-steel road to prosperity that Trump promised on the campaign trail, but it’s much easier to see how Trump is going to increase structural demand for golf course memberships than for manufactured goods.
Quote:
Wages – A Department of Labor regulation, currently under court challenge, would inflate employer costs, if not reversed.

Taxes – There are three bread-and-butter issues: lower marginal tax rates would create more disposable income, the industry’s lifeblood; faster depreciation rates would spur much-needed renovations to courses and facilities; and disaster-relief aid is a big issue, particularly in coastal areas.

Water – A new EPA regulation expanding federal jurisdiction over bodies of water, including on golf courses, almost certainly will be eliminated.

Immigration – The industry would like more, and more timely, H-2B visas for temporary workers.

General tenor – Golf has been an easy punching bag for opportunistic politicians, and that has had real-world implications (e.g., sharp cutbacks in corporate golf). The game could use some unabashed advocates in Washington.
Here is how Trump's tax plan redistributes the money and how much people already have.
Where are you in the ranks of wealth? High? Middle? Or Low?
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/10/final-numbers-are-trumps-t
ax-plan-huge-windfall-wealthy


https://dqydj.com/net-worth-in-the-united-states-zooming-in-on-the-top
-centiles/


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, January 13, 2017 8:15 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Official in charge of ethics harshly condemned Trump’s plan
www.vox.com/2017/1/11/14243146/trump-conflicts-office-government-ethic
s-speech

The nonpartisan director of the federal Office of Government Ethics ripped into President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for his businesses in an unusually public and blisteringly critical speech Wednesday afternoon. Walter Shaub went so far as to say that Trump’s conflicts of interest put democracy at risk, break with decades of tradition, and call into doubt whether Trump’s own patriotism stands up to history.

Trump’s plan to step back from his businesses day to day is “meaningless from a conflict of interest perspective,” Shaub said in his remarks at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“Every president in modern times has taken the strong medicine of divestiture,” Shaub said.

The Office of Government Ethics has hammered out hundreds of divestiture agreements involving federal officials. They have had to “divest assets, break open trusts, and dissolve businesses,” Shaub said, and taking those steps can be expensive and painful.

But, Shaub said, “their basic patriotism usually prevails as they agree to set aside their personal interests to serve their country’s interests.” When officials were reluctant to take the required steps, the ethics office’s demands were backed up by “the unwavering example of presidents who resolved their own conflicts of interest.”

Trump’s lawyers did NOT run their plans past Shaub. If they had, he said, he would have told them it was very possible for the president to sell his real estate assets, and that other officials in the past have done so.

As for Trump’s justification — that the president “can’t have a conflict of interest” — that’s nonsense, Shaub said.

“A conflict of interest is anything that creates an incentive to put your own interest before the interests of the people you serve,” Shaub said, quoting a Supreme Court decision from 1961 that called conflicts of interest “an evil which endangers the very fabric of democratic society.”

If anything, Shaub said, it’s more important for presidents to avoid conflicts of interest: “The potential for corruption only grows with the increase in power.”



Remarks of Office of Government Ethics Director Walter M. Shaub Jr.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/11/us/politics/trump-conflicts-of-
interest.html

This is a copy of prepared remarks that Mr. Shaub gave Wednesday during a news conference at Brookings Institution in Washington, addressing a plan by President-elect Donald J. Trump to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest as president. Mr. Shaub made clear that he believes Mr. Trump's plan is inadequate. The whole speech is only 4 pages. Here is one quote:
Quote:
I think Politico called {Trump's plan} a “half-blind” trust, but it’s not even halfway blind. The only thing this has in common with a blind trust is the label, “trust.” His sons are still running the businesses, and, of course, he knows what he owns. His own attorney said today that he can’t “un-know” that he owns Trump tower. The same is true of his other holdings. The idea of limiting direct communication about the business is wholly inadequate. That’s not how a blind trust works. There’s not supposed to be any information at all.

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Friday, January 13, 2017 11:21 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by G:

Hate to say it, but this is a dead end without any legal mandates. And just thinking of how it could possibly work in real life it's just damn impossible to do or monitor. Would someone sit in on his visits and phone calls so he doesn't talk business with his kids or some other legal estate guardian? It's not going to happen, this is going to die like many other road blocks, er, acts of wishful retaliation.
During the campaign, about a dozen Republican Party senators indicated that they would not vote for him. One might think that US senators who deemed Trump too dishonest, unstable, unethical, and possibly corrupt to vote for would, after his victory, insist on rigorous congressional oversight of his business dealings and his appointees. But one would be mistaken.

While Trump has received some pushback from Capitol Hill on this or that, by and large the Republican senators who opposed him are currently trying to implement a strategy of “forgive and forget,” thinking that if they agree to ignore his financial conflicts of interest, he will sign the laws they pass, and all will end happily ever after.

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Saturday, January 14, 2017 12:36 AM

SHINYGOODGUY


Not to worry............Trump is going to do something so Constitutionally stupid that he's going to get Impeached for being to stupid fuck that he is.

Plain and simple; he will join Nixon in the annals of Stupid Fucking Moves...........End of Story.


SGG


Quote:
Originally posted by G:
Hate to say it, but this is a dead end without any legal mandates. And just thinking of how it could possibly work in real life it's just damn impossible to do or monitor. Would someone sit in on his visits and phone calls so he doesn't talk business with his kids or some other legal estate guardian? It's not going to happen, this is going to die like many other road blocks, er, acts of wishful retaliation.

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Saturday, January 14, 2017 12:38 AM

SHINYGOODGUY


The answer is D...............All of the Above!!!


SGG


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND you've spent your entire time since Hillary lost shifting from one "explanation" to another: Bernie supporters, people being "deplorable", Comey, DNC emails, BUT PUTIN!, the Electoral college, vote hacking ... I can't even begin to remember them all!



You've argued fervently and at GREAT length, and when you fail to get traction with one argument, you'll shift to (once again) to one that's you've already argued several times before.

Your mind is skittering around like a drop of water in a hot pan. In reality, there were multiple reasons why Hillary lost, but I believe the biggest one is that she ran as the "more of the same" candidate, and in the end too many people outside of liberal urban areas simply couldn't stand the thought of "more of the same". Bill Clinton said it best when he wrote "It's the economy, stupid", and Obama forgot that. Numbers like per-capita-GDP and percent unemployed hid the fact that nearly all jobs added under Obama were low-paying, part-time, no benefits, service jobs, and that the vast majority of people saw their economic prospects DEcrease even as wealth inequality went thru the roof. Obama might have successfully shucked and jived liberals into believing that HE wasn't at fault, but that anger about the economy was real, and shifted onto Hillary.



-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND

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Saturday, January 14, 2017 7:28 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by SHINYGOODGUY:
Not to worry............Trump is going to do something so Constitutionally stupid that he's going to get Impeached for being to stupid fuck that he is.

Plain and simple; he will join Nixon in the annals of Stupid Fucking Moves...........End of Story.

SGG
Not "End of Story". The Vietnam War didn't end when Nixon resigned. Nor were Nixon's laws and executive orders repealed. His appointees to the Supreme Court and elsewhere did not step down.

There is an article about Underestimating Trump.
www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_good_fight/2017/01/stop_u
nderestimating_donald_trump.html

Even if Trump is impeached, his VP Mike Pence will calmly take power and the Republican Congress and Trump's Republican controlled Supreme Court and Trump's Cabinet and thousands of Trump's appointees will finish what Trump started. They won't finish with Trump's unique style, but they will get the job done. Without Trump, the GOP machinery will run faster, smoother and quieter. It will run better without Trump, but it will still be going to the same old Trump destinations.

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Saturday, January 14, 2017 7:29 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Ethics chief reminds Trump what ethics are
https://qz.com/885497/in-a-new-memo-us-ethics-chief-walter-shaub-remin
ds-everyone-in-the-executive-branch-what-ethics-are/

Walter Shaub, the director of the US Office of Government Ethics, which as emerged as an unexpected hurdle to Donald Trump’s plan to keep his business while president, published a “director’s note” on Friday.

It doesn’t name Trump, but seems clearly aimed at him.

Shaub’s note, the first director’s note the agency has published on its website in almost two months, explains the executive branch employee rule about “misuse of position,” which reflects a view that “that one definition of corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.” The rule, he notes, prohibits executive branch employees from:

1) Using public office for their own private gain, for the private gain of friends, relatives, or persons with whom they are affiliated in a non-government capacity;

2) Endorsing any product, service, or company;

3) Engaging in financial transactions using nonpublic information, or allowing the improper use of nonpublic information to further private interests; and

4) Misusing government property or official time.

https://www2.oge.gov/web/oge.nsf/Director's%20Notes/BA9EE0185F52C2
FB852580A70063149F

It is part of the “Standards of Ethical Conduct” for the US government’s executive branch employees, Shaub explains. “These rules serve to guard the federal service against ethical problems that could undermine public confidence in the integrity of the government’s operations,” he said. “By focusing on this rule and their other basic ethical obligations, employees can truly honor the principle that public service is a public trust.”

One mainstay of the Trump Organization is endorsements, and Trump’s daughter and son-in-law both have businesses of their own which create potential conflicts for the incoming president. Those have already cropped up—in one instance his daughter Ivanka accompanied Trump on a meeting with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, as her company was negotiating a deal with a Japanese firm with state backing.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 14, 2017 8:12 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


I see in today's newspaper:

House Republican summons ethics chief over his criticism of Trump

Oversight Committee Chair calls director’s actions ‘highly unethical’ public relations.

www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/house-republicans/

It is an often used trick by Republicans: if caught in a lie, accuse your accuser of being a liar and if caught being unethical, then your accuser must have questionable ethics, too.

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Saturday, January 14, 2017 8:51 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Even if Trump is impeached, his VP Mike Pence will calmly take power and the Republican Congress and Trump's Republican controlled Supreme Court and Trump's Cabinet and thousands of Trump's appointees will finish what Trump started. They won't finish with Trump's unique style, but they will get the job done. Without Trump, the GOP machinery will run faster, smoother and quieter. It will run better without Trump, but it will still be going to the same old Trump destinations.


You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.

Trump has always been to the left on most issues not regarding fiscal policy.

You can start crying when something happens to Trump and Mike Pence is at the helm with all of those appointees. You guys better hope that nothing bad happens to Trump, either physically or via impeachment.

Put the two of them in two different columns, and on the side write down your top 10 political issues and compare the two of them and how they will likely shape politics for the next 4-8 years.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, January 14, 2017 9:31 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.

Trump has always been to the left on most issues not regarding fiscal policy.
If you judge him by what he has actually done with many decades of his life, rather than what he said in the last year about what he believes is good, Trump is not to the left on anything.

Trump has never taken any actions that show he believes in anything so he won't be fighting against the GOP's tendencies. He does not care about those issues. He is simply a very successful salesman making a pitch to a bunch of suckers who wanted to be told that President Trump loves and respects them and has the power to fix what is wrong with their lives. He is committing fraud here. Mr. I-Don’t-Settle-Lawsuits will pay $25,000,000 next week to settle his lawsuits over "alleged" fraudulent practices. Alleged his ass -- by paying he is admitting to fraud.

And don't give me this crap that Trump settled because he was busy. The judge estimated the trial would last 3 days. At 8 hours a day, Trump was valuing his time at a million dollars per hour. Not even he thinks his time is worth that much.

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Saturday, January 14, 2017 10:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Let's just be honest here Second... You would be going out of your way to say any negative things you could about any republican who beat Hillary. Trump just happens to be the guy who won this time.

I believe that I was just as pissed off when Obama won 8 years ago, and even more the second time he won.... but yanno what? Since I didn't have anything good to say, I didn't say anything at all.... not at least until after his second term began.

We're still almost a week away from Trump taking office and you can't shut up about the guy. I held my tongue here about Obama for nearly 5 years before saying anything.



I know in your mind, it's a much different story, but just take a step back and show a little empathy. Believe it or not, just about half of the country was as unhappy about Obama 8 years ago as you are about Trump right now.

I hope you're wrong about Trump. This was the first time I voted for a President and was actually kind of excited about it. I do not consider myself a stupid or gullible person.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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