I am loving this.

These 2 should just get a room and fuck (and end up killing each other).

Putin Says He Misspoke Too, Withdrawing Claim Clinton Got Millions Stolen From Russia
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/18/putin-says-misspoke-withdrawing-claim-clinton-got-millions-stolen-russia

7/19/2018 12:28:19 AM

I see Trump has latched onto the Tracey/Greenwald false choice of placation or war this morning.

It’s as absurd a dichotomy as when the Neo-Cons made the choice be pro-Iraq war or anti-American and both of those hacks should know better.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/world/europe/trump-intelligence-russian-election-meddling-.amp.html

This leak actually makes me uncomfortable. And to leak something like this must mean that some people in IC are absolutely terrified about what Trump might do. I mean this is straight up sourced and methods and if Nunes et al demand information people will get killed.

[Edited on July 19, 2018 at 8:21 AM. Reason : This is same as synapse link]

7/19/2018 8:03:12 AM

Quote :

"I see Trump has latched onto the Tracey/Greenwald false choice of placation or war this morning"

... right after meeting with Putin, because this this theory is typical and common russian propoganda (i hit on this a little while back when someone (adultswim?) made the same point)

here's a good blog post that describes how it was used going back to stalin:
The Soviet roots of invoking fears about World War III
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/04/24/the-soviet-roots-of-invoking-fears-about-world-war-iii/

7/19/2018 8:33:29 AM

^^ at this point we have most of the outline (which will be completed and filled out in mueller's report) and i think the only question now is what did trump know and when did he know it.

if trump was just a useful idiot (believable considering his need for financing and ego) who turned into a windfall for russia, that wouldn't explain all of his actions after he was told about russia's actions. if that report is true it makes all of his statements since then against then acts for a foreign power.

i think other than finalizing details we know trump is compromised, now i think the question should be how much of congress is involved. (and from the scale and sophistication i doubt this would be limited to the republican party, we already know something was up with stein and i suspect we will find out some democrats have been involved with russia as well)

7/19/2018 11:24:03 AM

^

7/19/2018 12:13:38 PM

and on the subject of any democrats involved:

Mueller's list of evidence in the Manafort trial includes emails from Sanders' Chief Strategist (Tad Devine) to Paul Manafort right before he joined the campaign. no reason to believe this implicates tad devine in any wrongdoing (although the dem machine is running wild with it)

the emails seem to be in relation to consulting work with Yanukovych, it's evidence to use against manafort so i'm not sure in what way that would implicate tad devine but it's something to watch i guess

(and this is somehow being spun by the machine as being some kind of left wing socialist thing despite devine being a longtime democratic consultant who's safely part of the democratic establishment)

[Edited on July 19, 2018 at 2:43 PM. Reason : .]

7/19/2018 2:42:34 PM

Wasn’t he involved with Kerry in 2004 too?

7/19/2018 3:23:10 PM

Bear in mind those emails are evidence against manafort, not Devine. So most likely the emails display the same behavior that manafort exhibited with other people with respect to lobbying and coordination. Atm it's entirely possible Devine told him to go fuck himself

7/19/2018 3:30:20 PM

Woke Michael Cohen I did not expect

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/us/politics/michael-cohen-trump-tape.html

[Edited on July 20, 2018 at 11:43 AM. Reason : A true patriot]

7/20/2018 11:25:01 AM

I...worked on this thread for a year...and...he just...he tweeted it out.

7/20/2018 11:49:27 AM

These are some of the dumbest criminals on earth. No wonder the mob was happy to do business with this bumbling fool. At what point do the rubes finally realize Trump is a moron? I guess if libs cry, never.

7/20/2018 11:54:33 AM

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/07/russiagate-off-the-rails.html

I really, really don’t care for pieces like this

7/20/2018 2:03:07 PM

Eh, it's an editorial. Best policy is to just not read opinion pieces.

7/20/2018 2:42:09 PM

i think campaigning on russia is a bad idea but i also don't see that being done

they seem upset that the news is covering *checks notes* the biggest political story of the decade

it seems to all go back to the weird way the far left has consistently tried to downplay russian hacking presumably because it undermines their narrative that clinton lost solely because she was a bad candidate. they hold onto their criticism of this story the same way the right does even in the face of mounting evidence that this is a real story.

7/20/2018 2:47:39 PM

It’s a bizarre idea though. Aside from a handful of really weird Clinton folks no one even argues against the fact she was a bad candidate with lots of skeletons.

For some reason this group of people refuses to accept that there could have been MANY reasons she lost and not ONLY because of her personal flaws.

Also, those in this camp always seem to fall in the anti-anti-Trump camp.

7/20/2018 2:53:55 PM

go live on twitter for a bit, there are plenty of people who think clinton lost ONLY because of russia

7/20/2018 2:56:21 PM

Trump in a weird way is achieving the outcome on foreign policy the left has always wanted

Trump has no problem ignoring human rights abuses, or ignoring our alliances or agreements to defend other countries. This is what the US not being the “world police” looks like.

The problem is this philosophy was also supposed to include a massive reduction in military spending too so we could have things like universal Pre K or maternity leave, or free college, or cheaper healthcare.

What does it mean when you have a massive powerful military, no social goods, frayed alliances with friendly progressive countries, and your best global partners are the worst human rights abusers?

7/20/2018 2:57:24 PM

uh, no

7/20/2018 3:09:41 PM

Quote :

"they seem upset that the news is covering *checks notes* the biggest political story of the decade "

and potentially the biggest political scandal in American history

7/20/2018 3:48:21 PM

^^

How so?

7/20/2018 6:28:12 PM

few but the extreme isolationists want to ignore allies and agreements, the left generally just wants to stop being imperialist. we can drastically cut our military and still support our nato allies.

7/20/2018 8:12:04 PM

Poll: Majority of Trump voters would support him even if he colluded with Russia

Only 14 per cent believe president should resign if found he connived with Moscow

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/poll-president-donald-trump-voters-support-collusion-russia-kremlin-moscow-democrats-republicans-a8115161.html

OMG, utterly shocked!!!

[Not]

7/20/2018 8:57:34 PM

Legit depressing. We have a very long road ahead of us in this country.

7/20/2018 10:55:18 PM

It's not like he wore a tan suit or anything serious like that

7/20/2018 11:40:53 PM

Putin Says Trump Gave Up Crimea And Other Parts Of Ukraine During Private Summit
https://hillreporter.com/putin-says-trump-gave-up-crimea-and-other-parts-of-ukraine-during-private-summit-4097

7/21/2018 9:10:26 PM

Obama and David Cameron gave up Crimea when they refused to honor our security assurances with Ukraine. Trying to blame that on Trump is disingenuous.

7/22/2018 12:05:14 AM

I see Trumpists are choosing to die on the Carter Page hill again this morning..

7/22/2018 9:31:03 AM

Kinda crazy we found out this week a Russian spy infiltrated the NRA and got them to funnel money to Trump’s campaign, this same spy was reporting Trump was on board with their agenda in February 2016, the FBI released a 400 page application describing how Trump’s national security advisor was also a Russian spy, and Trump has a 2 hr meeting with Putin with no official record of what was discussed

And people are acting like this is all normal

7/22/2018 7:13:53 PM

I’m starting to wonder too is Russia didn’t ask Trump to terminate the Iran nuclear deal. Iran has already restarted reactors and Iran and Russia are allies.

7/22/2018 7:19:06 PM

Scrapping the Iran deal was pretty advantageous to Russia.

-It created another huge rift with our European allies
-It further destabilizes the middle east, the type of instability that allows Putin to swoop in, push on divisions, and get toe holds with the dictators.
-It sets up a possibility of conflict with the US. If you consider the way Russia has been buzzing our planes and ships, as well as outright attacking our troops in Syria. They want a confrontation (even if just minor, I think it plays well to Putin's "base" in russia).
-Most importantly I think, it made the price of oil jump $20/barrel, which pretty much balanced Russia's budget overnight.

7/23/2018 8:48:13 AM

Quote :

"Obama and David Cameron gave up Crimea when they refused to honor our security assurances with Ukraine."

Fact.

7/23/2018 10:22:36 AM

Clearly there was never a recognition that Crimea was a part of Russia now.

What would you propose would have been a better response than sanctions?

7/23/2018 12:30:43 PM

the sanctions weren't nothing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_the_Ukrainian_crisis

we also sent military equipment, trainers, and aid for the ukrainian national guard

nato also took steps in the 2014 and 2016 summits to be better prepared in the future

7/23/2018 1:06:45 PM

Judge grants immunity for five witnesses in Manafort case
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/23/politics/manafort-witnesses-immunity/index.html

i wonder who the 5 are

7/23/2018 1:38:39 PM

Quote :

"What would you propose would have been a better response than sanctions?"

A full military defense of Crimea is the absolute only response that would have kept it from being taken.

It's Obama's single largest failure as President, in my opinion. But I don't place all of the blame on him. If Bush and Cheney hadn't taken us into Iraq for absolutely no reason then it is far more likely Americans and Congress would have supported Obama in a defense of Ukraine. I think Obama's failure to act was entirely premised on the fact that we had been at war for over a decade in a place we didn't belong and correctly assumed he'd have no support for Ukraine.

Considering that, the only other option was sanctions which have certainly not been nothing.

I also wonder who the five are, particularly considering the conservative press was going ape shit last week talking about Podesta being one of them.

7/23/2018 1:57:29 PM

the sanctions were next to nothing. If they had the guts to embargo natural gas exports from Russia, it might have been effective. Unfortunately, Europe is too dependent on Russian gas to do the only thing short of military action that might have deterred Russia.

7/23/2018 2:05:34 PM

^^How about "We didn't need to go to war with Russia."

That would have been (and still is) a fine excuse for what happened with Crimea. You can liken Obama and Trump to Chamberlain all you want, but really, do we want military action against Russia?

7/23/2018 2:26:29 PM

Ukraine seems nice and all but not nice enough to die over.

7/23/2018 2:45:42 PM

Obama's biggest failure was prosecuting no one for the economic collapse, but it's not surprising to see imperialists say Ukraine was his biggest failure.

Also, you can think that the response to the Crimea invasion was weak and also believe the facts to date on this current Russia issue, those things are not opposite in any way

7/23/2018 3:55:17 PM

Looks like Podesta is not one of the witnesses. Good job Fox News...

Quote :

"How about "We didn't need to go to war with Russia." That would have been (and still is) a fine excuse for what happened with Crimea. You can liken Obama and Trump to Chamberlain all you want, but really, do we want military action against Russia? "

Yea and no one wanted to go to war with Germany when it first started annexing territory and we see how that turned out.

Quote :

"Also, you can think that the response to the Crimea invasion was weak and also believe the facts to date on this current Russia issue, those things are not opposite in any way "

Correct.

Quote :

"Ukraine seems nice and all but not nice enough to die over."

Kind of the central tenet of an alliance...

[Edited on July 23, 2018 at 4:11 PM. Reason : a]

7/23/2018 4:09:01 PM

We dont have that with Ukraine, the Budapest (which Russia was also part of) isnt a protection agreement similar to NATO.

Ideally any kind of major military action would be a multilateral UN action and there was not the support for that. We sent military aid and trainers instead, the typical proxy war stuff. We should be better prepared to respond to Russian military aggression after the 2014 and 2015 NATO summits

[Edited on July 23, 2018 at 4:54 PM. Reason : .]

7/23/2018 4:53:41 PM

Quote :

"Ideally any kind of major military action would be a multilateral UN action and there was not the support for that."

Yep - we wasted our capital on Iraq.

7/23/2018 4:57:03 PM

The consequences of going to war could be a little higher these days than in 1938. I do agree that the sanctions were too weak, but there is no way that Obama could have risked destroying the world for Crimea.

[Edited on July 23, 2018 at 8:09 PM. Reason : could be]

7/23/2018 8:08:19 PM

Plenty of people in Crimea are OK with what happened. That doesn't make it 'right', but it's not really fair to compare it to the invasion of Poland.

7/23/2018 8:27:15 PM

Eisenhower didn’t do shit when the USSR invaded Hungary,

Reagan didn’t do shit when the USSR declared martial law in Poland (well sanctions)

GWB didn’t do shit when Russia invaded Georgia (he airlifted Georgian soldiers out of Iraq to join the fight)

No one wants to get in a direct conflict with Russia. It’s nuts to think we could have bombed Russia out of Crimea and it not turn into a shit show epically larger than what it is now.

The real test will be Estonia and Latvia.

7/23/2018 8:37:51 PM

Quote :

"Ideally any kind of major military action would be a multilateral UN action and there was not the support for that."

We didn't even have support for major sanctions, because Western Europe is so dependent on cheap Russian natural gas that they couldn't risk having their supply jeopardized. Russia made sure Europe was aware of this issue by inventing some natural gas supply crises during the initial conflicts with Ukraine. The US didn't have the export infrastructure in place in 2014 to make up the difference should that happen, but the completion of Cove Point changed that.

Despite all this and the increasing risk of Russia further invading into the Baltics, the only European country that seems to be concerned at all with this situation is Poland. They're offering $2bn for a permanent US base in the country and kicking their 2% of GDP into NATO funding because they see the writing on the wall.

7/23/2018 9:47:37 PM

so Cohen is definitely out for himself and not holding onto any loyalties to trump

7/25/2018 8:37:49 AM

Wonder what’s on the sealed divorce papers?

Obviously the rape but maybe other psychological or physical abuse?

Not that it will matter at all because nothing matters.

7/25/2018 8:59:13 AM

Guiliani said that trump's team submitted a proposal to Mueller that Trump will agree to answer questions on collusion but not obstruction.

Trump needs a new legal team, and also Trump knows he's guilty of obstruction

7/25/2018 9:06:28 AM

Does he though? He continues to amaze me with his lack of understanding of well, anything.

7/25/2018 9:56:40 AM