Moose & Squirrel v Boris & Natasha: what's the deal with the rooskies and trumpland?

[LD0506]

I hope that Grassley's constituents take note of the fact that he ignored their comments and questions vis-a-vis the growing Russian morass when he denied the Dem senators request to have Sessions appear before them and "re-explain" about his lying to them, instead opting for a written reply. This is not fake news Iowans, this is not spin or nuance, you braced him repeatedly in the townhalls about this and here ya go, he heard you, but he's standing tough on his "party before country" position.

 

The left isn't the side that needs to get angry.

 

[Jumbo]

As Alex (Clockwork Orange) would say..."welly welly well..." 

 

On mornings I'm going to be posting in here I can usually count on don & co providing some sort of fresh pile of **** between the end of my day and the beginning of the nex to use for fodder. Some mornings are more bountiful than others. The tweets this a.m. are excellent! 

 

I laugh in the spirit of Nero. I won't bother taking them down for how stupid they are---too easy and was pretty thoroughly done by others before 7a.m. my time. And I think all the caterwauling about all the caterwauling can relax a bit too (both groups, really). Covering every stupid/bull**** tweet and every stupid bull**** thing or lie he or his mouthpieces say  is seemingly no big impediment to also covering what's important, and quite thoroughly. Also, the left, just like the right, will always have extremes (spazzing/crazed/noisy/overactive/hateful/dirty politics/etc) and the more moderate---you can't intelligently expect either side will suddenly divest themselves of extremes. But the degree to which the extremes are running that party's show and how many of the otherwise more mainstream rank and file will play along is what's on the table, especially in the matter of attracting independents or "others" to either party.

 

 Meanwhile, the powerful anti-trump movement should start to feel a little optimistic that "even just" this russia stuff is at a point where it's going to collapse on this admin eventually in one way or another---either by all these cover-up moves being so openly busted that **** will get very serious for don even if the reason was just stupidity in handling it and not to hide any truly problematic content of the meeting (this a more benign possibility that I find unlikely), or solid evidence of collusion of some nefarious form will emerge. One way or another, I think this is going to be a crippling matter in time.  

 

I watched Lindsey Graham give an excellent town hall this morning. He addressed this straight-on, along with other hard questions, did conservatism proud imo, and even reacted to the tweets. He showed backbone and said it really worries him because if the tweet was true about the taps, then there is a huge problem either way, because if Obama did some autonomous work-around to get such a tap it would be the most serious scandal since Watergate, but if they were tapped because the situation met the FISA standards then it means that the issues with russia are likely to be the most serious scandal since watergate. I think it was clear which he thought was most likely, but he didn't go farther (from what I saw).

[Larry]

26 minutes ago, Jumbo said:

 

I watched Lindsey Graham give an excellent town hall this morning. He addressed this straight-on, along with other hard questions, did conservatism proud imo, and even reacted to the tweets. He showed backbone and said it really worries him because if the tweet was true about the taps, then there is a huge problem either way, because if Obama did some autonomous work-around to get such a tap it would be the most serious scandal since Watergate, but if they were tapped because the situation met the FISA standards then it means that the issues with russia are likely to be the most serious scandal since watergate. I think it was clear which he thought was most likely, but he didn't go farther (from what I saw).

 

Or it indicates how pathetically easy it is, to get the FISA court to rubber stamp what the government wants to do. 

[Jumbo]

I've mentioned liking Michael Smerconish, a moderate goper who has a saturday show on cnn and makes other appearances. His views, conduct, style, and  references and recommendations (books/sources) have always resulted in favorable impressions even when I disagree (which isn't that often).

 

Today he endorsed a pcie by a guy (Perry Bacon Jr) unfamiliar to me and at a site I know of but don't visit. I think it's worth posting in this collection as a summary (the piece was psoted on the 2nd, so nothing since then--like the tweets---is considered).

 

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-big-question-why-were-sessions-and-other-trump-officials-talking-to-russia/

 

 

The Big Question: Why Were Sessions And Other Trump Officials Talking To Russia?

 

 <edit opening background material>

 

Quote

 

Those two stories fit into a broader narrative that has been ongoing since November. The Post and Times have produced a series of stories (here is one on Nov. 10, one on Jan. 19 and another on Feb. 14,) that allege various Trump aides and advisers met or connected with Russian officials in the run-up to the election. Separately, the two papers have also publishedstories that showed Trump allies — one-time National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and now Sessions — had given false, misleading or incomplete descriptions about pre- and post-election contact with Russian officials. These stories have had immediate impact, with Flynn resigning from his post at the request of Trump, and Sessions now promising to recuse himself.

Where is all this heading? There’s one big question we still don’t know the answer to: What were Trump World and the Russian officials talking about? The answer to that question will go a long way toward determining how big a scandal Trump’s Russia ties turn out to be. So to help make sense of all this reporting, let’s run through some plausible scenarios, starting with the most extreme.

Collusion

The Times’ article hints at this. The effort to preserve the hacking evidence, the Times writes in the ninth paragraph of its Thursday piece, “also reflected the suspicion among many in the Obama White House that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Russia on election email hacks — a suspicion that American officials say has not been confirmed.”

Whoa. If the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians on the hacking, that would be a huge story. If Trump were found to have authorized such a hacking, there would be calls for him to resign from office. (Maxine Waters, a Democratic congresswoman from California, has already been making this case and invoking the specter of impeachment.)

Trump and his team have denied that they were coordinating in any way, regarding hacking or anything else, with Russia during the election.

But what’s happening in Washington is all premised around this question: Did Trump or one of his allies somehow authorize or support the hacking of the DNC and Hillary Clinton aides? The press is not sure, so it is investigating the question. Democrats in Congress want the Department of Justice to launch a full-scale investigation of the Russian hacking and Trump’s connections to Russia. They didn’t want Sessions involved, since he is a top Trump ally and they don’t trust him to be impartial. And in the wake of the disclosures about Sessions’s meeting with Kislyak, even some top congressional Republicans said Sessions had to recuse himself from whatever investigation of Russia that DOJ conducts.

So the most extreme, game-changing scenario is that Trump or his allies, while meeting with Russian officials in the run-up to the election, either encouraged the hacking or actually authorized it.

The benign explanation

Even if these contacts between Russian officials and Trump’s team did happen, that doesn’t mean they were nefarious. In 2008, Michael McFaul, then an Obama campaign adviser, met with Russian officials in Moscow, as he recently told the Post. Once Obama was in office, McFaul became one of his top aides on Russia policy and later the U.S ambassador to Russia.

It is not uncommon for foreign governments to reach out to the team of a major American presidential candidate or top-ranking former or current officials in U.S. government. This is Sessions’s argument, according to his aides, that he meets with ambassadors all the time. But we simply don’t have any precedent for how presidential campaigns or senators typically do or should interact with officials from governments that are involved in hacking schemes that affect the American election.

The policy explanation

Maybe these contacts with Russia by Trump allies were driven by policy, not hacking or election strategy or business. In short, the talks between Trump’s team and Russian officials could have been the start of an attempt at a kind of detente between the U.S. and Russia, similar to the secret talks the Obama administration had with officials from Iran and Cuba before Obama shifted American policy with those nations.

Trump, in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, while not naming Russia, seemed to make a nod to his view that U.S.-Russia relations are currently too toxic.

“America is willing to find new friends, and to forge new partnerships, where shared interests align. We want harmony and stability, not war and conflict. We want peace, wherever peace can be found. America is friends today with former enemies. Some of our closest allies, decades ago, fought on the opposite side of these terrible, terrible wars,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

more at link

[FanboyOf91]

Late to this but...

 

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 

PUTIN IS REINFORCING THE ARCTIC YOU DUMBASS

 

[visionary]

 

[mistertim]

My god, these people are incompetent amateurs at absolutely everything...even lying and denials. They can't even get that right. I obviously wasn't a fan of the Bush admin but at least they were somewhat competent when it came to plausible deniability and keeping their stories and lies straight. 

Edited March 4, 2017 by mistertim

[visionary]

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 4, 2017 by visionary

[LadySkinsFan]

He's doing the same thing he did during the campaign, tell an outright lie about anything and without any proof whatsoever. He uses Tweets and all his followers believe it absolutely from the get go. It doesn't matter if it's fact checked and found to be a lie.

 

 

[twa]

10 minutes ago, LadySkinsFan said:

He's doing the same thing he did during the campaign, tell an outright lie about anything and without any proof whatsoever. He uses Tweets and all his followers believe it absolutely from the get go. It doesn't matter if it's fact checked and found to be a lie.

 

 

 

 

Maybe Bill ordered it when chatting with Shorty at the airport .

 

[BornaSkinsFan83]

29 minutes ago, LadySkinsFan said:

He's doing the same thing he did during the campaign, tell an outright lie about anything and without any proof whatsoever. He uses Tweets and all his followers believe it absolutely from the get go. It doesn't matter if it's fact checked and found to be a lie.

 

 

I'm curious where how his go-to projecting plays into this 

[mistertim]

Is there some point where a president's mental faculties and competency can be questioned enough to where he would have to go through some sort of testing for dementia or a legitimate mental illness in order to stop him from (even inadvertently in the case of some diseases) causing some worldwide catastrophe? Do they have to undergo anything like that before they take office? 

[SkinsHokieFan]

The story is what is Comrade Trump and his administration of imbeciles hiding.

 

Trump can end this very quickly, if he makes public all information about his dealings, as well as the dealings of his lackey's with Putin's government. 

[twa]

12 minutes ago, mistertim said:

Do they have to undergo anything like that before they take office? 

 

He was thoroughly vetted by this guy.

 

 

[BRAVEONAWARPATH]

 

[mistertim]

Is it just me or does that dude not look exactly like Brent Spiner in Independence Day?

 

 

Edited March 4, 2017 by mistertim

[mistertim]

14 minutes ago, SkinsHokieFan said:

The story is what is Comrade Trump and his administration of imbeciles hiding.

 

Trump can end this very quickly, if he makes public all information about his dealings, as well as the dealings of his lackey's with Putin's government. 

 

Which we know he absolutely won't as he wouldn't even release his tax returns. There was plenty of speculation that one of the reasons for that was lots of dealings with Russia. I think the only way we'll ever get to see anything is through a special prosecutor and subpoenas. Both of which I think are obviously becoming necessities. 

Edited March 4, 2017 by mistertim

[mistertim]

17 minutes ago, BRAVEONAWARPATH said:

 

 

This is one hell of a Hail Mary. If a FISA court actually DID permit a wiretap of Trump that would likely mean there was quite a bit of hard evidence of him colluding with foreign governments for less than savory purposes or even engaging in some sort of espionage. He would essentially be shooting himself in the head by finding the document that proves his assertion right. Of course he doesn't actually think that far ahead (or at all).

 

This presidency is melting down even faster than I imagined before he took office.

Edited March 4, 2017 by mistertim

[Jumbo]

so I haven't vetted this, and had not heard about it as a whole, but I caught this on a maddow repeat (seems at least 24 hrs old) during an msnbc check-in (i pop in on them and fox fairly often to contrast)...it it's been in the media before in piecemeal fashion and trump was even questioned about the guy somewhere for some reason...but it can serve as one of many russian-connection side-dish stories just for fun in here.......and i'll be trying to repeat a lot of info heard one time...(and all i get out of what pieces of it i heard is just "iffy connections" nothing like any smoking gun)...so ya heard about some house/property in florida don sold a russian "fertilizer king" (who is some sort of power/broker i guess) sometime back for a cool 100 mil...when don had paid 40 mil for it a short time prior (no, it didn't appreciate miraculously but normally)...the guy never visited the property btw and the house is being torn down...

 

anyway, this russian "fertilizer king" is also on the board of the bank of cyprus, supposedly a place that int'l IC has putin connected to for laundering some of his 100 billion...at this time don is in trouble with deutsche bank (even trying suing them i think) and needed big money...and the sale to this guy makes a yuge diff as don immediately pulls a 60 mill profit on it in that short time, so at least 60 mil goes right to don's aid...and when don is asked last summer about this guy (because he was a "russian of interest with strong connections to putin") don says he don't know spit about him, that it was all done through intermediaries...so we now bring in the guy, who put don together with the rooskie fertilizer king (and putin pal), and this guy is also a major stockholder on the bank of cyprus, and the only american one....and his name is wilbur ross...and he was just made secretary of commerce...

 

 

so the Big Pull is that don owes rooskies big money of course, and this is just one of many such vapor trails...but it's all cradled by the reasonable notion that if you take don, putin, and billions of dollars, and put it within all the extensive context, it's not hard to believe "bad" is what would likely happen...and that you're seeing it congealing into the kind of substance you might expect...

[skinny21]

Jumbo, how you gonna say all that and leave off the coincidence of them being in the same place at the same time during the campaign... 5 or 6 times wasn't it?

 

 

[BRAVEONAWARPATH]

This is what Jumbo was referring to.

 

 

[mistertim]

Interesting stuff there, Jumbo. 

 

Don the Con.

 

So he's draining the swamp of water and filling it with diarrhea. 

[visionary]

 

[mistertim]

Seems like almost every time Trump keeps accusing someone of doing something bad it means he has done it himself and wants to go on the attack and make sure focus on it stays away from him. He accused Hillary all the time of being involved in crony capital politics, etc. and talked about how he was the opposite and would "drain the swamp" of such awfulness in DC. Then it turns out he was likely involved in stuff 100 times more shady than her before he took office and now that he has he is appointing the worst and most inexperienced crony capital friends possible. This is quite possibly the biggest con job in American history. I'm disgusted but at the same time somewhat in awe. 

[FanboyOf91]