Random Political comments...

And that bolded part is what so few pro-Trump conservatives either do not understand or refuse to acknowledge: you don't have to be indicted for a case that you choose to give testimony in. Many a criminal case has been built on the testimony of people who are testifying in exchange for leniency in their own, unrelated cases.

These guys aren't built for prison, and the fact that Papadoupolous has already pled guilty is pretty much evidence of that.

 

Absolutely, and this president being the horrible person he is quickly threw Popadopoulous under the bus. Of course he had nothing but praise for him when he came onboard that shipwreck.

 

Well, at least Trump understands how fucked his administration is. The only thing left now is for Trump voters to argue that Hillary was behind everything, forcing George Papadopolous to work for the Trump camapaign with the objective of meeting with Russians to...um, help her lose the election. You just know some nutter like Sean Hannity is going to make that argument with a straight face.

 

This is a hot trending topic on Twitter today:

https://twitter.com/samstein/status/926038478932070400

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774


Some highlights from the article:

 

I doubt that HRC called Donna Brazile a 'brain dead water buffalo', but it does explain how Hillary and Brazile had a falling out and this book came out.
I think most of us knew that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was a Clinton loyalist and was not a fair advocate for the Bernie campaign at the DNC.
But Bernie already knew this, since he didn't become a member of the Democratic party until he decided to run for POTUS in 2015.

I'll have to try to research the exchange between Hillary and Brazile some more to see if it's corroborated anywhere else, HRC has known Brazile since her husband was POTUS, so it's hard for me to imagine she would go nuclear against Brazile in public like that.

As I suspected, the report of HRC melting down in an expletive laden tirade has been debunked by Snopes and comes from a phony embellished story from conservative conspiracy website, Victurus Libertas
https://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-threw-a-tantrum-with-matt-lauer/

For younger folks less familiar with HRC, they actually believe she's borderline insane and genuinely a hateful person in private. That's because you don't have a feel for her personality.
For those of us who have followed her since the Clinton administration, we've seen enough reporting and disclosure about HRC that we KNOW she's not the type to cuss out her staff, especially a top staffer like Donna Brazile.
Yes, HRC gets angry, but not like what was depicted by Victurus Libertas.

It's easy to see why HRC lost to Trump. Way too many voters read phony stories like this about Hillary that make her seem like a witch, and for some reason millions of Americans were inclined to believe them because of the two previous decades the Republicans had already spent smearing her name.

HRC is far from perfect, but she's not this evil, dark force in American politics either.

That entire exchange between HRC and Brazile was MADE UP by right wing phony news writers.

ColiBreh1, the Victurus Libertas excerpt you credited to Politico did NOT appear in the Politico article.

What's up, bro???lol

 

The goal of anti-Democratic propoganda is not to convince you that the Republicans are great, but to convince you that everyone is awful. I cannot stress that enough. If you ever meet someone who says something like "they're all crooks" or "it's all rigged against us," they are extremely likely to vote one of two ways: 1) for Republicans or 2) Not at all.

This doesn't mean that every criticism of Democrats is invalid. Or of Clinton. I'm just saying you should be wary of falling in to this trap, because it's a deliberate ploy. I have taken the "wait and see" approach where I wait and see what happens when something is actually investigated. Benghazi? Investigated out of the wazoo, they found nothing to indict literally anyone involved with. Clinton's Email scandal? Again, nothing, and the FBI explicitly stated that there was no grounds for indictment.

But we're only a few months in to the Trump-Russia investigation, and already some major players are indicted with serious charges, and one has already plead guilty. For me, that's the bottom line.

 

Yeah its pathetic really. The people that buy into it aren't worth conversing with.

 

It's also Putin's intelligence strategy to defeat democratic nations by creating public skepticism and cynicism about their free elections, until voters on both sides believe all politicians are crooked, all elections are rigged and their votes don't count.

Putin first adopted this same strategy to slowly take control of Russia with very little public dissent, initially. Russians know Putin is an autocrat, but they also believe the rest of the politicians are no better than him so there's no need to remove him from power.

Americans need to be careful about becoming politically cynical and apathetic because that's when you leave open the door for our own version of Putin in the future.

 

True, but of course he'd never admit to such. The funny thing is that he (and his followers) are acting as if the actions this week from Mueller's indictments are some sort of clincher to their claim. I guess delusions of grandeur will do that. Even if you don't agree/like Mueller no one in their right mind would ignore the fact that he's assembled a top-notch team, and they're being thorough. 45 may indeed escape this (we know that's all that really counts to his followers), but I'd bet much that this is far from being over.

 

"This week we learned you can betray your country as a deserter,
rape minors,
and rig an election with Russia as long you’re a Democrat."
- Chris Stegal

 

You cosign with this statement??

Bo Bergdahl lost all his military retirement benefits with a dishonorable discharge, which many employees regard the same as serving time for a felony conviction. The man was held captive 5 years by the Taliban and is basically a pariah for the rest of his life.

Who exactly 'raped' minors and got away with it???

Finally, what election did HRC 'rig'?? Sanders was never a part of the Democratic party, Hillary is the one who gave the DNC tens of millions of dollars in 2015 so the wouldn't go bankrupt and knew better than Bernie how to lock up super delegates before the primaries were over.
That's not rigging. That's knowing how the game is played.

Sanders didn't raise a dime for the DNC when he had the opportunity, and suddenly he expects to be treated like he's been a member of the party his entire life.

End of the day, in the primary states that counted, HRC simply won more votes than Sanders.
And he still couldn't manage to break through Hillary's huge advantage among Black and Hispanic voters.

That's not cheating. Instead, I'd call that an institutional advantage.
Even now, Bernie progressives are trying to follow the HRC blueprint by getting as many Bernie progressives working inside the DNC as possible.
Because that's how you WIN primary presidential nominations.

Just so you know, Bliss, when the Trump Experience collapses in a burning pile of poo, I'm definitely going to rub it in your face.

For some reason every critical thinking neuron in your brain has shut down when it comes to Trump, and for the life of me I have no clue why.

 

Oh shit, there will be no poo in my face, now what can l rub your face in when the Experience rides off into the sunset?
But seriously, my brain is just fine, TYVM.

Per the rape question, to get it out of the way first..

'He is a pedophile': Kevin Spacey, then 24, had sex with teen, 14, and later tried to rape him claims victim, while EIGHT House of Cards workers say actor harassed or assaulted them for years on set.

************

Next, Bo.
Bergdahl could have gotten 15 years to life. Yet he got nothing. Stop with equating the loss of benefits as being the same as serving time.
BTW, he is also appealing the dishonorable discharge, according to his civilian lawyer (Gen. Robert Abrams), so he is clearly delusional, though who can blame him with the get-out-of-jail gift he got. He is a deserter and people died looking for him. Next time, leave a note, asshole. Bad call from the judge.

********
Hillary didn't donate shit. Her donors such as Harvey Weinstein and George Soros did. (Now, at least Trump put his money where his mouth was for some, if not most of his election campaign). She used their money to bribe the DNC for full manipulation and control, (lol @ 'saving the DNC from bankruptcy', oh, Andre that's hilarious)
Then the cherry-topper, she (and Obama's Campaign) paid MILLIONS for a fake dossier, then made sure it was 'leaked'. (no pun intended).
Obama’s Campaign Paid $972,000 To Law Firm That Secretly Paid Fusion GPS In 2016
http://thefederalist.com/2017/10/29/obamas-campaign-gave-972000-law-firm-funneled-money-fusion-gps/
'Clinton's senior-most officials in her campaign and the DNC were aware of the dossier. Public FEC filings show that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid Perkins Coie a combined $12.4 million.'

Now remember, Donna Brazile exposed Hillary in that she doesn't automatically get the nomination, except that Hillary controlled the fund..."...described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp".

You know what...l'll let Donna break it down for ya in the next post, lol...

 

Surprisingly, or not, Obama was the reason the DNC was so in debt...

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books.
Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016.

Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news...

*****

...Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.
When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement...

For the rest of the excerpt..

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774

 

Kevin Spacey didn't rape 14 year old Anthony Rapp. Even Rapp never claimed this. He said decades ago Spacey came on to him, then laid down on top of Rapp, clothed. Rapp struggled and pushed him off and Spacey no longer pursued anything.
Why is it so hard for right wing rags just to REPORT the actual news instead of embellishing??

BTW what's fake about the Christopher Steele dossier??? So far nearly every report from it has been proven true.

Even Donna Brazile admits it was HRC that kept the DNC from going into debt. I don't know how you wedged Harvey Weinstein and George Soros into being Hillary's sole major fundraisers. Hillary had hundreds of high rollers who backed her campaign, not just the two men the right finds most controversial.

As for Bergdahl, his appeal of his dishonorable discharge won't ever be overturned. His military career is officially over and the government won't pay his legal costs for an appeal.

As for the right-wing smear that U.S. soldiers died looking for Bergdahl, another falsehood. Take it from the military's own publication, Stars and Stripes;
https://www.stripes.com/news/command-sergeant-major-no-troops-died-searching-for-bergdahl-1.402016

It's part of the reason the judge gave Bergdahl such a lenient sentence. If soldiers had indeed died, Bergdahl would have been held accountable with time in prison.

Your right wing news sources are good for gossip, but not the facts. Everything has to be spun to either push an agenda or smear the subject being covered.

You can't make up news to fit your own agenda.

 

How is Time Magazine and CNN, Right wing news outlets? Agenda my ass...

http://time.com/2809352/bowe-bergdahl-deserter-army-taliban/

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/08/us/bergdahl-search-soldiers/

Not everything makes it to trial. Can the military be sued?

 

Those soldiers died from the commission of their normal duties in the Paktita province of Afghanistan, at the time one of the most dangerous posts in that country.

None of these soldiers died while looking for Bergdahl.
Dying from a roadside bomb while riding in a military transport is not the fault of Bergdahl deserting, nor is being shot while supporting Afghan troops against the Taliban.

The military thoroughly investigated this and decided Bergdahl's desertion was not responsible for the death of his fellow soldiers of the 4th Battalion Combat Team.

It's not as if these soldiers died in a search and rescue for Bergdahl, or were searching for him for months.
Support the troops. Trust the military on this one.

 

I know right and some how Trump won. Plain mind boggling

 

Just addressing one of the points here, the sexual harassment allegations: who is simply ignoring this? Where are you getting this from? Do you see a lot of people saying "What Kevin Spacey did was okay?" He's being written out of the show he starred in. I've seen multiple people condemn him. I don't see people defending Weinstein, either. I think a great demonstration on this discussion can be found in this poll done last week:

http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/tabsHPSexualHarassment20171012.pdf

For those who don't want to sift through all those numbers, here is the percentage of people who believe the accusations against Harvey Weinstein and against Trump, broken down by party affiliation:

Weinstein Sexual Assault:
69% of Democrats believe the allegations are credible
61% of Republicans believe

Trump Sexual Assault:
69% of Democrats believe
18% of Republicans believe

This is definitely not a "both sides" issue. Democrats are literally exactly as likely to believe the allegations against Weinstein as they are to believe the allegations against Trump: Republicans are willing to believe allegations against a Democratic donor, but are far less willing to believe allegations against a Republican president.

I don't mean to suggest that literally no Democrats are hypocrites on this front. I'm sure you can find some, because there are literally tens of millions of Democrats out there. But in total, there is significantly more tribalism occurring on one side than the other.

 

I said this before it is like the volume on the ignorant & delusional machine is turned up on the "right". I'm not into politics, find them divisive but I would be delusional myself If I didn't notice that at least the liberal public(not all) is making more sense right now and are having human decency.