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@Salacious-Crumb I see you left off the last piece of my post saying I found the wording strange and I was not comfortable with it. Context and all that you know. The piece of my post that you bolded and then suggested was the Dems cultists spin was actually the quoted wording on the letter. There well may be some seriously corrupt practice going on from the anti Trump side but laying that bit on the Dems does not help your argument.
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Avenatti charged with wire and bank fraud.
- Celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti is arrested on charges of trying to extort up to $25 million from Nike by threatening to reveal negative publicity.
- Avenatti also is charged in a separate federal case of embezzling a client’s money “in order to pay his own expense and debts,” and of “defrauding a bank in Mississippi.”
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@Catogrande said in US Politics:
@Salacious-Crumb I see you left off the last piece of my post saying I found the wording strange and I was not comfortable with it. Context and all that you know.
Precisely. And I’ll repeat again: It’s not the prosecutor’s job to “exonerate.” That’s a strawman. Defense lawyers argue to exonerate, not prosecutors. And this was a Special Investigation before a Grand Jury where NO defense lawyers were permitted to be seated alongside their clients.
The piece of my post that you bolded and then suggested was the Dems cultists spin was actually the quoted wording on the letter.
Yup, and it’s still a strawman, whether Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein (who hates Trump, and is now eating some serious crow) signed off on it or not, it’s catnip for Dems, but is ultimately irrelevant. They found SFA to indict; ergo, there is nothing.
There well may be some seriously corrupt practice going on from the anti Trump side but laying that bit on the Dems does not help your argument.
Oh, please. You’re so naive. Who the Eff paid for that Fusion GPS and Steele dossier hoax in the first place, and who’s been peddling the scam for the past three years??
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@Salacious-Crumb said in US Politics:
The prosecutor found exactly ZERO evidence to indict. That’s why there are ZERO indictments and ZERO recommendations for indictments.
Those statements don't hold. Just because there are zero indictments doesn't mean zero evidence, just that in the US Attorney's experience the evidence isn't enough to be capable of achieving a conviction.
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@antipodean said in US Politics:
@Salacious-Crumb said in US Politics:
The prosecutor found exactly ZERO evidence to indict. That’s why there are ZERO indictments and ZERO recommendations for indictments.
Those statements don't hold. Just because there are zero indictments doesn't mean zero evidence, just that in the US Attorney's experience the evidence isn't enough to be capable of achieving a conviction.
If they had evidence — which was the whole point of the exercise — they would have indicted. They had sfa. This “no exoneration” canard is starting to smell a lot like, “you can’t prove Saddam doesn’t have secret stockpiles of balsa-wood drone nukes that can hit London in 45 minutes, this is open-ended and you just have to dig a little deeper.” The Dead-Enders and Bitter-Truthers.
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@Salacious-Crumb said in US Politics:
@antipodean said in US Politics:
@Salacious-Crumb said in US Politics:
The prosecutor found exactly ZERO evidence to indict. That’s why there are ZERO indictments and ZERO recommendations for indictments.
Those statements don't hold. Just because there are zero indictments doesn't mean zero evidence, just that in the US Attorney's experience the evidence isn't enough to be capable of achieving a conviction.
If they had evidence — which was the whole point of the exercise — they would have indicted. They had sfa. This “no exoneration” canard is starting to smell a lot like, “you can’t prove Saddam doesn’t have secret stockpiles of balsa-wood drone nukes that can hit London in 45 minutes, this is open-ended and you just have to dig a little deeper.” The Dead-Enders and Bitter-Truthers.
No you're missing the point. There's a world of difference between
- no evidence,
- some but not enough to secure conviction, and
- charge the fucker.
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@antipodean said in US Politics:
@Salacious-Crumb said in US Politics:
@antipodean said in US Politics:
@Salacious-Crumb said in US Politics:
The prosecutor found exactly ZERO evidence to indict. That’s why there are ZERO indictments and ZERO recommendations for indictments.
Those statements don't hold. Just because there are zero indictments doesn't mean zero evidence, just that in the US Attorney's experience the evidence isn't enough to be capable of achieving a conviction.
If they had evidence — which was the whole point of the exercise — they would have indicted. They had sfa. This “no exoneration” canard is starting to smell a lot like, “you can’t prove Saddam doesn’t have secret stockpiles of balsa-wood drone nukes that can hit London in 45 minutes, this is open-ended and you just have to dig a little deeper.” The Dead-Enders and Bitter-Truthers.
No you're missing the point. There's a world of difference between
- no evidence,
- some but not enough to secure conviction, and
- charge the fucker.
Your point is facile and really pertinent at the same time.
Facile in that the result is the result.. i.e not enough evidence or good evidence to proceed is all that matters.
It is pertinent because it is political so any shred of 'evidence' will be seized upon, so the difference between small amount of evidence and no evidence becomes very important.
Overall in this context I agree with @antipodean that it matters. -
He’s stealing my tweets.
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@Salacious-Crumb said in US Politics:
@Catogrande said in US Politics:
@Salacious-Crumb I see you left off the last piece of my post saying I found the wording strange and I was not comfortable with it. Context and all that you know.
Precisely. And I’ll repeat again: It’s not the prosecutor’s job to “exonerate.” That’s a strawman. Defense lawyers argue to exonerate, not prosecutors. And this was a Special Investigation before a Grand Jury where NO defense lawyers were permitted to be seated alongside their clients.
The piece of my post that you bolded and then suggested was the Dems cultists spin was actually the quoted wording on the letter.
Yup, and it’s still a strawman, whether Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein (who hates Trump, and is now eating some serious crow) signed off on it or not, it’s catnip for Dems, but is ultimately irrelevant. They found SFA to indict; ergo, there is nothing.
There well may be some seriously corrupt practice going on from the anti Trump side but laying that bit on the Dems does not help your argument.
Oh, please. You’re so naive. Who the Eff paid for that Fusion GPS and Steele dossier hoax in the first place, and who’s been peddling the scam for the past three years??
S'funny, you mention strawman twice and then pick arguments I haven't made.
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Michael Avenatti charged. (Stormy Daniels client and Kavanaugh accuser)The counts against him include conspiracy to transmit interstate communications with intent to extort, conspiracy to commit extortion and more.
Co-conspirator is Mark Geragos.
Mark Geragos represented Jussie Smollet as well as Colin Kaepernick and, like Avenatti , a CNN contributor.
The Trump curse is real:smiling_face_with_open_mouth_smiling_eyes: -
Now this is a floor speech, one of the funniest I’ve ever seen.
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LOL. “All time favorite duly elected president.”
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Michael Tracey is one of the few liberal journalists who was always skeptical of Russiagate. Here he lays out the consequences for Democrats, the media and Trump of no collusion being found -
As one of the vanishingly few people in journalism who has been pointing out the fundamentally fallacious premises behind “Russiagate” since the day it started, I can attest to how vociferously skeptics of this charade have been denounced as Donald Trump apologists or even secret supporters. Of course, there was always a vocal faction of people who are partisan boosters of Trump and rejected the Russia conspiracy for no real reason other than that they wanted to protect their beloved president. But for those of us who recognized how vital it was that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies be met with a rational, evidence-based opposition—rather than one overtaken by conspiratorial frenzy—highlighting the glaring flaws in this story was unavoidably necessary. Sadly, our warnings largely fell on deaf ears.
The end result is a grand ironic twist for Trump’s most ardent opponents: Because Democrats and their media allies invested so much political capital in the now-discredited Russia collusion theory, they have not only failed to topple Trump, they’ve actually strengthened his hand immeasurably. There’s just no way to sugarcoat it: Robert Mueller has fully exonerated Trump on the core conspiracy charge that impelled the creation of the special counsel in the first place, and Trump is absolutely justified to celebrate this as a profound humiliation for Democrats and huge swaths of the national media. Heading into a re-election campaign, liberals witlessly gifted him the standing to rightly declare victory over opposition forces that compromised their integrity and abandoned their critical faculties in a vain effort to oust him from power.
Rather than focusing on any number of Trump’s very real crimes and corruptions—the blatant conflicts of interest posed by his sprawling global real estate empire, his clear indebtedness to the Republican donor class he once maligned, his obsequious deference to repressive foreign states like Saudi Arabia and Israel—they instead chose to stoke this groundless Russia fever dream for nearly three straight years. In so doing, Democrats effectively insulated Trump from legitimate criticism, such that the real harms of his tenure have escaped scrutiny.
Democrats may have won in the 2018 midterm elections mainly on the strength of standard-fare economic issues like health care and taxes, but the elite Democratic-allied media chatter still remained relentlessly fixated on Russia all the way through. A disconnect developed: While most of the country was indifferent to the “collusion” melodrama, the core group of rabid, anti-Trump activist liberals became wholly consumed by Russiagate and all its attendant multifarious subplots.
Now their worldviews have been completely shattered. I saw many of these people at Democratic town halls, rallies, and other events between 2016 and 2018, where they would chant “treason” and wave elaborate banners graphically illustrating Trump’s supposedly homoerotic subservience to his best buddy Vladimir Putin. Instead of energizing these people around a substantive policy program that could lay the groundwork for removing Trump by normal electoral means, the cynical media instead force-fed them a wild international espionage fairy tale. Now that activist energy has been totally squandered.
Democrats have ended up giving the moral, political, and logical high ground to a president who is perhaps the most venal and sleazy individual to ever walk the Earth. Trump is a chronic complainer, often about the pettiest of slights, but Russiagate is the one subject about which his complaints have actually been legitimate. It’s astonishing but true: Democrats and the national media chose to spend three years validating Trump’s one grievance that actually has merit.
By ignoring the obviously flawed premises behind this investigation, Democrats ceded to Trump the authority to opine justifiably about the wrongdoings of what he calls the “Deep State”—a cadre of nefarious bureaucratic actors hellbent on undermining him. Though Trump’s spin on things often took an oversimplified, overpartisan tone, the truth is that Trump was fundamentally correct. There was a cohort of unelected security state officials who acted unilaterally to thwart him, on grounds now resolutely proven by Mueller to have been extraordinarily flimsy.
The reckoning with how elite journalists behaved throughout this sordid affair will also have to be far-reaching and painful, because the stark reality once again is that Trump’s critique does have much truth to it. He is absolutely, demonstrably correct that the media comported itself with incredibly reckless indiscretion—the errors, retractions, baseless speculative proclamations, and outright deceits are far too numerous to comprehensively list.
As such, journalists who hate Trump have given him an enormously effective bludgeon to gleefully wield for the rest of his presidency. He can now use their manifold, humiliating Russia-related failures an excuse to proclaim legitimate reporting on other subjects “fake news,” and unfortunately, there won’t be much for journalists to say by way of rebuttal. It wasn’t Trump’s doing that this collusion conspiracy bonanza became the dominant national political narrative of the past three years. The blame for that lies squarely with an irresponsible, ratings-and-clicks hungry media.
Democrats and journalists have now presented Trump with a potent argument for re-election on a platter. Though economic factors will undoubtedly play a much bigger role in whether Trump wins in 2020, the “no collusion” victory will allow him to deflect from all the actual shortcomings of his presidency—legislatively, temperamentally, and otherwise.
There is also the staggering irony that the so-called Resistance—comprising those who turned their flamboyant, overwrought opposition to Trump into a branding strategy and marketing ploy—has ended up making Democrats look not like crusading truth-seekers but a bunch of delusional clowns, thereby bolstering the very president they have incessantly warned is a world-historic menace who must be removed at all costs. Their inane tactics could well be what keeps him in power.
The Center for American Progress, the nation’s preeminent liberal Resistance think tank, adopted whole-hog the most maximalist conspiratorial version of the Trump-Russia storyline, launching something called “The Moscow Project,” which regaled credulous readers with an ever-expanding dark web of sinister Russia connections, and encouraged Democrats across the country to assume that a “collusion” finding was obviously forthcoming.
The institutional Democratic apparatus was fully committed to this discredited narrative, and the longer they remain in denial about how comprehensively wrong they were, the more political leverage they gift to Trump. For one thing, hawking the scam was a highly profitable boondoggle. Nancy Pelosi fundraised frantically by pushing the false notion that Mueller was perpetually on the precipice of being fired, as did the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other party organs. As is so often the case, the incentives for pushing Russiagate with such unrestrained vigor were nakedly, self-interestedly financial.
The consequences of these failed opposition tactics will be deep and long-lasting. For years, Democrats and members of the left-leaning media displayed remarkable incuriosity about the national security state machinations that brought about the Trump-Russia non-scandal in the first place. Agencies they once would have regarded with extreme skepticism—the FBI, CIA, NSA, and foreign intelligence services—suddenly became valiant defenders of truth and liberty because they appeared for the moment to be arrayed against Trump. Figures like former CIA Director John Brennan not only acted as sources for journalists eager to bandie coveted “bombshell scoops,” they were subsequently hired by these very same outlets to which the scoops had been provided. Because the national media discussion of Russiagate was so dominated by former security state officials, all the abuses that are now clearly evident—politicization of intelligence agencies, surveillance overkill, prosecutorial overreach—were excused or even celebrated because in the moment they appeared to disadvantage Trump.
Democrats often posture as opponents of overzealous state power, but in this case they turned around and cheered things like the months-long solitary confinement of Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager convicted on charges that had zero to do with any collusion conspiracy. Solitary confinement would ordinarily be widely regarded by liberals as tantamount to torture, but all their principles seemingly went out the window in the context of Trump-Russia. Consequently, they have weakened the progressive critique that could have otherwise be used with good reason against Trump.
So now the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have to reckon with the embarrassing fallout. They’ll be left to deal with the shock and anger of MSNBC- and Twitter-addicted liberal voters who are currently suffering from what could not-hyperbolically be described as an existential crisis: Everything they thought they knew about American politics for nearly three years has been dramatically shattered.
Even the candidates themselves look profoundly foolish. Most have at various points indulged in exaggerated, unsupportable Trump-Russia rhetoric—whether prematurely endorsing impeachment (Beto O’Rourke), suggesting that Trump would soon end up in prison (Elizabeth Warren), or declaring that there were “foreign powers infecting the White House like malware” (Kamala Harris). Even Bernie Sanders has made overwrought, conspiratorial intimations about Trump’s relationship with Putin. The only exception is Tulsi Gabbard, the congresswoman from Hawaii, who has bucked the trend and sharply criticized prevailing Democratic orthodoxy on this subject.
There’s no other way to put it: Mueller’s conclusion is an utter disaster for Democrats and their media allies. Not only have they wasted incalculable political energy obsessing about what has proven to be a deranged fantasy, they have dramatically emboldened Trump and given him a compelling, triumphant narrative for re-election. It’s finally now time to stop the lies, stop the distortions, and stop the excuses. Otherwise this fiasco will just keep getting worse.
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@Rembrandt said in US Politics:
He's certainly bouyed.
This bloke's timing and what he says is bloody good - he's reduced the pointless investigations to just two words - "ridiculous bullshit" - in a public rally before national news cameras which the MSM will be bound to broadcast, to show him being "crass". Those words will make sense all the way down to those with no interest in the detail of the machinations and those who have paid little attention to the whole imbroglio.
He does not make the mistake of boring everyone with continual invective for those lined up to bring him down, he describes just about everyone at some stage in positive terms (eg. the vituperative Grandma Viper Pelosi as a "good person") and invariably moves swiftly onto his next job for the day - last week while the media was poking through the entrails of Mueller's report for hours on end he was in West Virginia crafting a coal deal with China (which incidentally makes Australia's Liberal and Labor parties, and the empathetic fool Goddess Arden appear as the destructive drongos that they are).
No previous President has displayed the energy this bloke has. He has brought to bear a completely different approach to the long lunches and even longer deal making by the Washington elite, who spend their time enjoying each others company doing practically nothing for the constituents who sent them there.
As a property developer and entrepreneur he is accustomed to having several potential deals on his table simultaneously and, when one fails or exhibits a delay, he moves swiftly to the next one. He doesn't wail about the failure or delay or the people involved, that's history and there is no profit to be had in dwelling on it.
The US media is so stuck in the mud of their mindless bigotry (or so beholden to the demands of the evil money backing them). At the press conference after the first meeting with Kim Jong Il each of a half dozen Asian reporters putting a question prefaced it with polite congratulations on his initiative. The US reporters did not even mention it as they loudly demanded to see a signed surrender from North Korea - not one of them dignified the most profound positive move by the US in Asian diplomacy since President Nixon visited Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1972.
A career politician, in bed with the media from the moment he is elected, would be crushed by that. Donald Trump expects no better, he successfully by-passed them from Day One and he remains unaffected.
US Politics