Jan 192020
 
 January 19, 2020  Posted by at 10:36 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,


John Collier “Grandfather Romero, a member of the family of Juan Lopez, the majordomo, is ninety-nine years old.” Trampas, New Mexico 1943

 

Biden Charges Sanders Camp Issued ‘Doctored Video’ To Attack Him (Pol.)
Rod Rosenstein Admits To Leaking Texts Between Peter Strzok, Lisa Page (NYP)
DOJ Court Filing Reveals Rosenstein Behind Strzok-Page Text Dumps (ZH)
House Files “Framers’ Worst Nightmare” Legal Brief (ZH)
Gowdy: God Help Us If The Trial Lasts Six Weeks (ZH)
Rudy Giuliani Once Had A Real Chance Of Becoming President (G.)
Boris Johnson Plans To Move House Of Lords To York (R.)
A Hidden Parliamentary Session Revealed Trump’s True Motives In Iraq (Webb)
The Petrodollar and the Phantom of the Petroyuan (Webb)
Putin Rejects Idea Of Soviet-Style Leaders For Life (R.)
Russia To Combat Rewriting Of WWII History With New Open-Archive Center (RT)

 

 

Does Biden know how a video is doctored? He’s handing the Sanders camp a big freebee.

Biden Charges Sanders Camp Issued ‘Doctored Video’ To Attack Him (Pol.)

Joe Biden accused Bernie Sanders’ campaign Saturday of issuing a “doctored video” to attack him over Social Security, a false claim that ratcheted up the tension between the two campaigns in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. “Let’s get the record straight,” Biden said at Simpson College here. “There’s a little, doctored video going around … saying I agreed with Paul Ryan, the former vice presidential candidate, about wanting to privatize Social Security.” But the video in question — of Biden’s 2018 remarks to the Brookings Institution think tank — was not doctored by Sanders, whose campaign this month stepped up criticisms of Biden’s record on Social Security.

Sanders’ campaign did say in a recent campaign email that “Biden lauded Paul Ryan for proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare” — which PolitiFact said Sanders’ campaign got wrong. But there is no evidence that the campaign altered any video. Biden, however, referenced the fact-checking website in making a muddled claim: “PolitiFact looked at it and they doctored the photo, they doctored the piece and it’s acknowledged that it’s a fake.”


Sanders’ campaign bristled at the criticism from Biden — a serious charge that Democrats recently have begun to level at Republicans, including Donald Trump, for manipulating images and videos on social media. An aide said Sanders might address the criticism head on. “Joe Biden should be honest with voters and stop trying to doctor his own public record of consistently and repeatedly trying to cut Social Security,” said Sanders Campaign Manager Faiz Shakir in a statement Saturday. “The facts are very clear: Biden not only pushed to cut Social Security — he is on tape proudly bragging about it on multiple occasions.”

Read more …

Things are moving too fast for me to keep up. Rosenstein was in the Trump camp’s crosshairs forever, but now all of a sudden he’s the other camp’s worst enemy?

Rod Rosenstein Admits To Leaking Texts Between Peter Strzok, Lisa Page (NYP)

Mystery solved. Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has ‘fessed up to giving explosive text messages of FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to the press in 2017. The messages between the two, exchanged in 2016 while both were involved in sensitive political probes, revealed their antipathy to then-candidate Donald Trump and loyalty to Hillary Clinton. Rosenstein’s admission came in a Friday-night court filing by the Department of Justice, which is seeking to dismiss Strzok’s lawsuit challenging his June 2016 firing, Politico reported. The former agent’s case seeks damages for invasion of privacy, arguing that the texts were disclosed due to political pressure from the White House.

But Rosenstein, who left the DOJ last year, says he made the texts public to protect Page and Strzok — because Congress was about to hear about the embarrassing messages anyway. “Providing the most egregious messages in one package would avoid the additional harm of prolonged selective disclosures” from leaky congressional staffers, wrote Rosenstein, who now has a corporate law gig. The texts showed that Page and Strzok had feared Trump might win the election. Both had worked on the probe into whether Clinton jeopardized classified information by using a private email server while she was secretary of state as well as Crossfire Hurricane, the feds’ investigation into the Trump campaign.

Later, they worked briefly on special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into alleged ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia. “This man cannot be president,” Page wrote in March 2016. “She just has to win now,” she said in a July 2016 message, referring to Clinton. In his texts to Page, Strzok referred to Trump as an “idiot” and a “douche.” Shortly before the 2016 election, he wrote that the prospect of a Trump presidency made him “scared for our organization.”

Read more …

Strzok and Page sent 100s, 1000s of messages to each other, often during work hours, but they still get to claim invasion of their privacy?

DOJ Court Filing Reveals Rosenstein Behind Strzok-Page Text Dumps (ZH)

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized the release to the media of text messages between ‘FBI lovebirds’ Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, many of which revealed deep animus towards then-candidate Donald Trump while they were investigating him during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to Politico. In a Friday night court filing submitted shortly before midnight, Rosenstein says he made the decision to protect Strzok and Page from the damaging effects of lawmakers and others releasing the texts for use as political ammunition.


“In the messages, Strzok and Page regularly disparaged Trump and appeared to seek to reassure each other he could not be elected. Both called Trump an “idiot” and said Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton deserved to win. The texts also included murky discussions of an “insurance policy” to guard against Trump’s election. Trump backers have interpreted the reference as a plan to use the then-ongoing investigation into ties between Trump advisers and Russia as way to prevent him from taking office or undermine his presidency, but Strzok and Page have denied any such intent.” -Politico. Lisa Page – who sued the DOJ and FBI in December over the release, appears to be pissed.

Strzok has separately sued the agencies as well – for which Rosenstein’s admission was submitted as part of the government’s defense. The former DAG says that public disclosure of the texts was inevitable in connection with testimony he was set to give the next day in front of the House Judiciary Committee. “With the express understanding that it would not violate the Privacy Act and that the text messages would become public by the next day in any event, I authorized [Justice’s Office of Public Affairs] to disclose to the news media the text messages that were being disclosed to Congressional committees,” wrote Rosenstein.


“In November, the Justice Department asked U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson to throw out Strzok’s suit, which challenges both his firing from the FBI and the release of the texts. However, Strzok’s attorneys countered in a court filing last month that one reason to allow the suit to proceed was that Justice Department was being vague about just who made the final call to give the messages. Arguing that an air of mystery continued to surround the disclosure, Strzok lawyer Aitan Goelman called “revealing” Justice’s decision to seek dismissal of the suit without identifying the responsible official. “An agency cannot avoid Privacy Act liability for a disclosure actually made for an improper purpose by eliciting a sanitized after-the-fact rationale from an official who does not have all of the facts,” Goelman wrote. -Politico

Read more …

Always wonder why people claim to know exactly what the Framers meant, and to the exclusion of their political rivals.

House Files “Framers’ Worst Nightmare” Legal Brief (ZH)

Ahead of Tuesday’s opening arguments in the Senate impeachment trial, House Democrats – seven impeachment managers led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff – filed their legal brief today. The 111-page summons urges the Senate to “eliminate the threat that the President poses to America’s national security” as it lays out the case against President Trump. The House legal filing (due by 5pmET) reiterates the findings of the House Intelligence and Judiciary panels, which, after hearing from witnesses and experts, settled on charging Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Additionally, the case that House prosecutors sent to the Senate references new evidence that wasn’t part of the impeachment inquiry, including material from Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, according to Democratic officials familiar with the argument. “The evidence overwhelmingly establishes that he is guilty of both. The only remaining question is whether the members of the Senate will accept and carry out the responsibility placed on them by the Framers of our Constitution and their constitutional Oaths,” the brief reads. “History will judge each Senator’s willingness to rise above partisan differences, view the facts honestly, and defend the Constitution.”

Compiled by the seven Democrats serving as impeachment managers, the brief describes the president’s conduct as “the Framer’s worst nightmare” in arguing that he should be impeached and removed from office. “President Trump’s ongoing pattern of misconduct demonstrates that he is an immediate threat to the Nation and the rule of law. It is imperative that the Senate convict and remove him from office now, and permanently bar him from holding federal office,” they write. President Trump’s legal team outlined the fiery response to its impeachment summons, calling the two articles of impeachment passed by the House last month “a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president.”

The six-page document – which they stressed is different from the brief that is not due until Monday – offers a taste of the rhetoric expected to be deployed by the president’s defenders in the Senate. “This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election, now just months away,” the filing states. Trump’s legal team, led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, is challenging the impeachment on both procedural and constitutional grounds, claiming Trump has been mistreated by House Democrats and that he did nothing wrong. Notably, at least four of the impeachment managers, including Schiff, are scheduled to appear Sunday on political talk shows.

Read more …

Only six weeks? But that only takes us to early March, 8 whole months before the election.

Gowdy: God Help Us If The Trial Lasts Six Weeks (ZH)

Former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) told Fox News this week that he predicts President Donald Trump’s Senate trial will be short and that the president’s best defense is a review of the transcript. “The transcript is the single best piece of evidence that the president has,” Gowdy said. “Who brought up Rudy Giuliani’s name? It wasn’t Donald Trump. It was Zelensky. This was the second call, not the first call. If President Trump were really hell-bent on ensuring that Ukraine investigate the Bidens, would he not have brought that up in the first telephone call he had with Zelensky? Why wait till the second?” “As far as the timing of this trial is concerned, Trey, they are estimates that it could be quick, it could last as long as six weeks,” Fox News co-host Sandra Smith said. “Where do you fall on that, and what is the length of time mean?”

“I mean God help us if it lasts six weeks,” Gowdy responded. “The investigation is over, so it’s Schiff’s job to present the case. If he’s going to present the case on the paper with the depositions, it shouldn’t take that long. I don’t need Adam to read the depositions to me; the jury can go read it themselves.” “If they open it up to witnesses, and they want Bolton, and then there’s some Republicans that want four or five other witnesses, it could last six weeks,” Gowdy continued. “Sandra, I just have not met anyone whose opinion has changed during the pendency of this investigation. I can’t identify – maybe three open-minded jurors in the U.S. Senate. I just don’t, no matter how long it lasts, I don’t think it’s gonna change anyone’s mind in the Senate or among my fellow citizens. The shorter the better.”

Fox News co-host Bill Hemmer asked, “Did you want to give us a time frame for that?” “I’m saying two weeks,” Gowdy said. “If it goes six weeks, then they’re going to have to make some hard decisions on which witnesses are important enough to hear from and which ones, while they may have relevant evidence, we just don’t – I think in terms of a real trial.” “Why would you ever not call a witness if that witness has relevant information?” Gowdy continued. “How do you pick which ones to call and which ones not to? You can never do that in a real trial. So, if we’re going to open this thing up anew to a brand new investigation, then call everybody, and God knows how long that’ll take.”

Read more …

Nobody feels bad he didn’t get the job, himself least of all.

Rudy Giuliani Once Had A Real Chance Of Becoming President (G.)

If things had gone a little differently, Rudy Giuliani might have been elected president in 2008. The former New York City mayor turned Donald Trump stooge led polling in the Republican primaries for almost a year, and was seen as someone who could defeat Hillary Clinton – then the presumptive Democratic nominee – in key metropolitan areas. Giuliani, still riding a wave of good feeling from his handling of the 9/11 attacks, was raising serious amounts of cash, and was the best-known of the Republican candidates. He had a very real chance of succeeding George W Bush. But Giuliani’s campaign collapsed in chaotic fashion, and he became a political irrelevance – until re-emerging a decade later as Donald Trump’s lawyer, mouthpiece, bungling envoy to Ukraine and a central character in the third impeachment of an American president.

It’s hard to imagine now, but at the end of 2006, Giuliani was the most popular politician in the country. In March 2007, after Giuliani formally announced his White House campaign, he was the early favorite to win the Republican primary contest, with 44% support nationwide. (John McCain, the eventual nominee, was second with 20%.) Giuliani maintained that lead throughout the year, and raised the most money. Armed with a campaign slogan that read like the responses to a word-association examination – “Tested. Ready. Now” – Giuliani seemed destined to represent the Republican party in the November 2008 election.

“When Rudy Giuliani entered the race he was seen as the frontrunner,” said Capri Cafaro, a former minority leader of the Ohio senate and an adjunct professor at the American University school of public affairs. Oprah Winfrey had dubbed Giuliani “America’s mayor” following the 9/11 attacks – a moniker that stuck – while Time magazine went further, naming Giuliani its person of the year for 2001 and branding him “mayor of the world”. Cafaro said: “His strength predominantly came from being seen as America’s mayor – in light of this being just a few years after 9/11. [He was] playing to his strengths: his strengths in national security and essentially being able to rise to the occasion as a leader.”

[..] Giuliani was still leading the polls in the summer of 2007, six months out from the first Republican vote in Iowa. But he hit an unexpected problem, in the form of a man dressed in a chicken suit – the “Iowa Chicken” – who tirelessly followed Giuliani around in protest at him skipping the Ames straw poll, a traditional barometer of the Republican primary race.

Read more …

Can we move the Senate to the Appalachians?? Alabama?

Boris Johnson Plans To Move House Of Lords To York (R.)

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is planning to relocate parliament’s upper house, the House of Lords, to the northern English city of York, the Sunday Times reported. In last month’s national election for the lower house, Johnson’s Conservatives won a swathe of seats in the traditional Northern English heartland of the opposition Labour Party as he secured a large majority in parliament. With a view to securing these gains, Johnson has promised to ramp up investment in the north of England, which suffered under the decline of heavy industries and austerity policies since the financial crisis, the Sunday Times said, without citing sources.


York, founded by the Romans and famed for its large minster, is first choice for the move, ahead of Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city. The unelected House of Lords, which dates back to the 14th Century, is principally seen as a revising and refining mechanism but it technically has the power to block laws.

Read more …

Whitney’s laying it on a little thickish.

A Hidden Parliamentary Session Revealed Trump’s True Motives In Iraq (Webb)

Since the U.S. killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis earlier this month, the official narrative has held that their deaths were necessary to prevent a vague, yet allegedly imminent, threat of violence towards Americans, though President Trump has since claimed whether or not Soleimani or his Iraqi allies posed an imminent threat “doesn’t really matter.” While the situation between Iran, Iraq and the U.S. appears to have de-escalated substantially, at least for now, it is worth revisiting the lead-up to the recent U.S.-Iraq/Iran tensions up to the Trump-mandated killing of Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in order to understand one of the most overlooked yet relevant drivers behind Trump’s current policy with respect to Iraq: preventing China from expanding its foothold in the Middle East.

Indeed, it has been alleged that even the timing of Soleimani’s assassination was directly related to his diplomatic role in Iraq and his push to help Iraq secure its oil independence, beginning with the implementation of a new massive oil deal with China. While recent rhetoric in the media has dwelled on the extent of Iran’s influence in Iraq, China’s recent dealings with Iraq — particularly in its oil sector — are to blame for much of what has transpired in Iraq in recent months, at least according to Iraq’s Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who is currently serving in a caretaker role.

Much of the U.S. pressure exerted on Iraq’s government with respect to China has reportedly taken place covertly and behind closed doors, keeping the Trump administration’s concerns over China’s growing ties to Iraq largely out of public view, perhaps over concerns that a public scuffle could exacerbate the U.S.-China “trade war” and endanger efforts to resolve it. Yet, whatever the reasons may be, evidence strongly suggests that the U.S. is equally concerned about China’s presence in Iraq as it is with Iran’s. This is because China has the means and the ability to dramatically undermine not only the U.S.’ control over Iraq’s oil sector but the entire petrodollar system on which the U.S.’ status as both a financial and military superpower directly depends.

Read more …

Part 2 from the article above. Of course the US is worried about China’s growing influence, in the Middle East and elsewhere. But how much oil can you trade for services before you run out of those? That only seems a concern if Iraq would become a Chinese satellite. Not going to happen.

China is a threat to the petrodollar only when the yuan becomes freely tradable. But that would be a direct threat to the CCP and Xi.

The Petrodollar and the Phantom of the Petroyuan (Webb)

In his televised statements last week following Iran’s military response to the U.S. assassination of General Soleimani, Trump insisted that the U.S.’ Middle East policy is no longer being directed by America’s vast oil requirements. He stated specifically that: “Over the last three years, under my leadership, our economy is stronger than ever before and America has achieved energy independence. These historic accomplishments changed our strategic priorities. These are accomplishments that nobody thought were possible. And options in the Middle East became available. We are now the number-one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world. We are independent, and we do not need Middle East oil. (emphasis added)”

Yet, given the centrality of the recent Iraq-China oil deal in guiding some of the Trump administration’s recent Middle East policy moves, this appears not to be the case. The distinction may lie in the fact that, while the U.S. may now be less dependent on oil imports from the Middle East, it still very much needs to continue to dominate how oil is traded and sold on international markets in order to maintain its status as both a global military and financial superpower.

Indeed, even if the U.S. is importing less Middle Eastern oil, the petrodollar system — first forged in the 1970s — requires that the U.S. maintains enough control over the global oil trade so that the world’s largest oil exporters, Iraq among them, continue to sell their oil in dollars. Were Iraq to sell oil in another currency, or trade oil for services, as it plans to do with China per the recently inked deal, a significant portion of Iraqi oil would cease to generate a demand for dollars, violating the key tenet of the petrodollar system.

Read more …

Putin is being practical.

Putin Rejects Idea Of Soviet-Style Leaders For Life (R.)

President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday he did not want Russia to return to the late Soviet-era practice of having lifelong rulers who died in office without a proper succession strategy. His comments, made to World War Two veterans in St Petersburg, came days after he unveiled a sweeping shake-up of the political system which led to the resignation of Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister along with his government. Putin, in a surprise move, picked Mikhail Mishustin, the low-profile head of the country’s tax service, as the country’s next prime minister. Russians are now waiting to hear which ministers will keep their jobs in a new government.


Putin’s changes, which would amend the constitution to create new centers of power outside the presidency, were widely seen as giving the 67-year-old scope to extend his grip on power once he leaves the presidency in 2024. He has dominated Russian politics, as president or as prime minister, for two decades. Critics accuse Putin, a former KGB officer, of plotting to stay on in some capacity after his term ends. They suspect he wants to continue to wield power over the world’s largest nation, which is also one of its two leading nuclear powers. In his comments on Saturday, Putin, who has already said he wants to limit future presidents to two terms in power despite currently serving out his fourth term himself, rejected the idea of Russian presidents for life.

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I don’t get why RT has to repeat the “shut your filthy mouth” phrase multiple times. Obviously lost in translation. But the narrative changes are real. Poland was very wrong in WWII (see Shoah). And now they try and rewrite that.

Russia To Combat Rewriting Of WWII History With New Open-Archive Center (RT)

Moscow is to create the most extensive collection of WWII documents, open to all persons anywhere, to once and for all “shut the filthy mouth” of those seeking to rewrite history for short-term gains, the Russian president said. Any person, Russian or non-national, will be able to access the archive, including through a website resource, and the ultimate goal is to debunk any disinformation about the most devastating conflict in human history, President Vladimir Putin pledged, during a meeting with veterans of the Great Patriotic War, held in St. Petersburg on Saturday. The creation of the center would leave no chance to those willing to distort the truth about the war for their own political needs, he argued. “We will shut the filthy mouth of some public figures abroad, who open theirs only to achieve short-term political goals. We will shut them up with reliable and fundamental facts.”

The center is expected to incorporate the biggest and most extensive collection of documents, as well as photos and video footage dating back to the World War II era. The president first floated this idea during his annual state-of-the-nation address earlier this week, arguing that Russia should combat “brazen lies and attempts to distort history.” In St. Petersburg, Putin also said that Moscow should follow the example of Tel Aviv, which virtually allows no one on Earth to forget about the true horrors of the Holocaust. “Among the Holocaust victims, a large number were Soviet Jews,” he said, adding that “we should also not forget about the sacrifices of other Soviet peoples, the Russian people” who defended “their homeland and the whole world from the brown plague [of Nazism].”

Putin’s words come amid a row between Moscow and Warsaw over the events that led to the Second World War. Poland has been revising that devastating conflict’s history for quite some time, seeking to shun any responsibility relating to events during that period, while presenting itself as a victim of both Nazi and Soviet aggression and occupation. Warsaw has been removing monuments to Soviet soldiers who died while liberating the city from Nazi Germany occupation, and also initiated an EU Parliament resolution in September, which claims that the 1939 non-aggression pact between Moscow and Berlin had “paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War.”

This last move did not sit well with Moscow, which labeled it a falsification of history. Putin himself eventually joined the heated debate between the two nations, when he called Jozef Lipski, the Polish ambassador to Berlin from 1934 to 1939, “a bastard and an anti-Semitic pig.” The Russian president referred to the fact that the envoy had promised Adolf Hitler that Poles would “erect for him a beautiful monument in Warsaw” if he expelled all European Jews to Africa. Warsaw took offense to Putin’s remarks, though no one disputed Lipski’s words, which have long been known to the public.

Read more …

 

 

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle January 19 2020

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  • #52805

    John Collier “Grandfather Romero, a member of the family of Juan Lopez, the majordomo, is ninety-nine years old.” Trampas, New Mexico 1943   • Bi
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle January 19 2020]

    #52806
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    John Collier “Grandfather Romero, a member of the family of Juan Lopez, the majordomo, is ninety-nine years old.” Trampas, New Mexico 1943

    What a perfectly wonderful picture; just so, there…

    A pretty good compilation of the crazy, mixed up, insanity Usians live in, along with 90% of the rest of the planet…
    Individual sanity is at a premium; rare, and hard to maintain in the long run, if one is not constantly diligent.
    Out side of my own existence; I see little to encourage (especially in the west) that a life can be happily lived, with minimum stress…
    Here in S.E. Asia, we’re pretty much okay…

    #52807
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Things are moving too fast for me to keep up. Rosenstein was in the Trump camp’s crosshairs forever, but now all of a sudden he’s the other camp’s worst enemy?”

    Yes, like Comey, Dore, Trump himself. First they’re registered Democrats, far leftists even. Then they cross not the principles, not the party, but HRC or the NeoLibs and suddenly they’re far right Nazis who work for Putin. (except that Russia fought the Nazis) Expect no less. So if you believe in universal health care, social security, free speech, are antiwar etc, you’re now a Nazi, where if you DON’T want that, like Biden and HRC, you’re a Democrat. #OppositeLand.

    The weird part is, no one notices.

    Strzok and Page sent 100s, 1000s of messages to each other, often during work hours, but they still get to claim invasion of their privacy?

    Yup. See above. My side right or wrong. On a phone with a bone. In a boat with a goat. On a fully-monitored government phone, in their home. Enough texts that show they could not possibly have done any other work, or heck, even this work. And I paid for it all, paid for them to rig the elections. RussiaRussiaRussia!

    Always wonder why people claim to know exactly what the Framers meant

    Well that part’s easy: with their voluminous letters it would take a lifetime to read. Downside: they often disagreed with each other. They don’t bring that part up, as it would discredit both sides. What was it Lincoln said both sides pray to the same God for victory? Both sides refer to the framer-saints rather than engaging their brains today, an appeal to authority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

    However, they were concerned if they put in impeachment, it would be constantly used instead of elections. You know, like the last 4 out of 5 Republican Presidents. (Snopes) However, the risks of NOT allowing impeachment are too high, and I agree. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102 If the people themselves are corrupt, nothing can save them. They so often say “The Government” oughta do/fix/make/punish such-and-such” as if the government were not us and made of the same people. If we’re corrupt, they’re 100x more corrupt, because of selection bias and Lord Acton’s “Power Corrupts.” So we’re giving more power to the MOST corrupt people in our society. Nope. The answer to government corruption is more laws and more government. Forever. Hey, where’d all this tyranny come from in here? I meant pursue and arrest MY enemies when THEY have opinions, not me and mine. Hey, what’s this bag and why is it dark sudden?

    Meh. Suppose he even got booted. So what? If the people didn’t stand for it, they’d vote his equivalent right back in, or else hold sit-ins like the one in Alexandria. You can’t actually make them. …Which is why impeachment a day before election is so counter-democratic and infuriating. Is it really too much to pick a good candidate people like and vote them in? Fighting this guy has got to be the easiest election ever, yet they still fail. “All they have to do is be less crazy than Trump.” — Bill Maher Of course the whole thing is garden-variety election-rigging, just what they accuse him of. So…we should impeach the House of Representatives. I’d start the petition, but when VA representatives got their 10% recall petition in just a few days, they simply raised the threshold to 20%, kind of like the DNC debates. If they got to 20%, they’d raise it to 90%. If 90%, then 99%. Democracy!

    mayor turned Donald Trump stooge” Nice. I see no bias at all from The Guardian. And he was considered great because his city was bombed and he completely failed even any attempt to stop it, nor protected anyone from the health consequences, nor led the charge to fix the original breach. This is considered totally normal. No one notices. And he was defeated by a chicken, not McCain’s thundering herd of RINOs. I live here and I don’t even remember a chicken. But sure, Guardian, sure it was.

    were necessary to prevent a vague, yet allegedly imminent, threat

    Wow, face-recognition of the protestors showed they were trained militias organized by Iran and were at that minute destroying the Embassy. Even on the outside I can tell the top suspect for a really-smart attack on the U.S. would be Soleimani. Yet they’re like “What attack are you talking about?” The one that the media was breathlessly reporting 24/7 until it failed and then the media threw a temper-tantrum about it? That one? I’m not saying there were or weren’t others, but like, IT’S HIS JOB to have all sorts of military plans. So if he DIDN’T have plans, he should have been fired for dereliction of duty. But: no plans. Sure, media, sure.

    Anyway, what’s Trump and Rouhani supposed to say, we colluded to erase Rouhani’s chief rival, the same way he most probably requested permission from Assad and Putin to bomb (empty, targetless) Syria? (Why? Because Maddow and Williams demanded it, and such a charge could have been impeachable if he couldn’t pull up a signed document saying it could not possibly be a war crime. It went one way since there is nothing on earth Democrats and the Media love more than war, but it could have gone the other way, and I bet they wish they had.) Anyway, I can’t prove it, but what does their resulting behavior look like? Media is still reporting how Iran will attack us worldwide, using thousands of sleeper agents. Okay, when? 2055? That WOULD be tricky. “We’ll get you when you least expect us: 50 years after Trump leaves office, see if we won’t.” No. No. Your brain is on backwards. Iran hits essentially nothing, anywhere? We’re the world’s softest target. Our infrastructure is so third-world you could take out a whole city with a backhoe. Sure they’re super-mad. Sure they are.

    The Petrodollar and the Phantom of the Petroyuan (Webb)”

    Nah, they could use a gold-trade note and it’s safer. If RMB, we’d just rock their market with our usual unlimited manipulations, like we do every day, every where, and you can destroy the Petro and US$ just by stopping us from printing fake dollars for real goods, which a gold-trade, or even BTC-trade note would do. The U.S. would have to make stuff then, do work. Hey, is that what Cheeto has feverishly been trying to do, and resisted at every turn? The beginning of jobs, the beginning of the U.S. working for a living like a fair partner? Weird. Sounds like a coincidence.

    We will shut them up with reliable and fundamental facts.

    Boy is he going to be surprised. Since when have facts mattered to the Anglos or the whole West? They just think it, write it down, and it’s true! At least all my friends say it is, and they edit Wikipedia! Just like how Russia was a Nazi instead of the near-sole ENEMY of the Nazis, above.

    I like facts as much as the next guy, but I would like them to matter before I die.

    #52808
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “No. No. Your brain is on backwards. ”

    That’s a keeper. I’ma steal it. An imaginary award goes to whoever can craft a good Descartesian version of this.

    #52809
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Big Chief deSota

    Ever since we let armed brigades round us up into chain gang plantation workers (you know: “civilization”), we’ve had this thing for being ruled. If so, I vote we elect deSota. cuz man, can that cat grrove.

    Bonus musical political commentary:

    Christopher Columbus

    I suppose some would think the lyrics to both tunes are politically incorrect. As if politics could ever be correct.

    #52810
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Every Knock is a BOOOOOOOST!

    Don’t know when this number was released, so I can’t say if Eddie Harris influenced Luois or vice-versa.

    #52811
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    FInal comment from the youtube selection above:

    “OBVIOUSLY patriarchal-heteronormative, sustainability-deficient speciesist binary non-intersectional alt-alt somethingphobic climate-change-denying migrant-hostile exploitational carbon-compromising aspects. Bury it with ALL truth.”

    Not sure what he said but man, he sure nuff said it.

    #52812
    zerosum
    Participant

    See …. that’s what enablers can do
    No proof of wrong doing – Biden
    https://nypost.com/2020/01/18/how-five-members-of-joe-bidens-family-got-rich-through-his-connections/
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/not-just-hunter-widespread-biden-family-profiteering-exposed

    five members of the Biden family, including Hunter, got rich using former Vice President Joe Biden’s “largesse, favorable access and powerful position. (Joe’s brothers James and Frank, his sister Valerie, and his son-in-law Howard )”
    For over a decade, the work of five-time New York Times bestselling investigative reporter Peter Schweizer has sent shockwaves through the political universe.
    In Profiles in Corruption, Schweizer offers a deep-dive investigation into the private finances, and secrets deals of some of America’s top political leaders. And, as usual, he doesn’t disappoint, with never-before-reported revelations that uncover corruption and abuse of power—all backed up by a mountain of corporate documents and legal filings from around the globe. Learn about how they are making sweetheart deals, generating side income, bending the law to their own benefits, using legislation to advance their own interests, and much more.


    CALL Peter Schweizer IN THE IMPEACHMENT HEARING

    #52813
    PlanetaryCitizen
    Participant

    Poland’s Chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich, stated that “for us Jews, it is particularly outrageous for Putin to manipulate the tone of Lipski’s comments made in his conversation with Adolf Hitler in 1938. One shouldn’t forget Poland supported the emigration of its 10 percent Jewish minority, but it did so partly in cooperation with the Zionist movement, to which it gave clandestine military support. At the same time, however, when the Third Reich expelled thousands of Polish Jews in 1938, Polish diplomatic services, including Ambassador Lipski personally, assisted them. Accusing Lipski of antisemitism on the basis of one sentence taken out of context is extremely irresponsible.”[13]

    Professor Mariusz Wołos stated that “Lipski’s extensive legacy… has no traces of antisemitic attitude. Lipski was not an antisemite.

    Jerzy Turowicz: And I did not say that today anti-Semitism is no longer a problem for the Poles, as it remains a problem for every Christian. What I do think, however, is that the conception and the execution of the “Final Solution” was exclusively the doing of the Nazis, and I do not see why anybody else should be burdened with co-responsibility for it. It was in this sense that I said, indeed, that the Polish anti-Semitism has nothing to do with the Holocaust.

    #52814
    VietnamVet
    Participant

    Back in the Bush I Administration, the Western Elite became the sole hegemon. They couldn’t help themselves. Instead of peace, they reverted to the being the crooks they are. Democracy subverted. Resources exploited. Unions destroyed. Regimes changed. They stole everything they could.

    After decades of hybrid and actual war, Shia Muslims, thanks to being blessed with bountiful oil fields, have built thousands of precision guided conventional ballistic, drone and cruise missiles that can destroy the Middle East’s oil production facilities and crash the world’s economy, if Iran is attacked. There are two choices; peace or escalating the current WWIII. Already Donald Trump has backed down twice, but the USA continues to occupy Iraq and Syria illegally.

    Australia is burning up. So is the West Coast of North America, Siberia, the Amazon and Central Africa.

    The West is facing a fundamental dilemma across the board especially in Australia, France, UK and the USA. Corporations assured that government leaders were bought servants until Donald Trump who is an incompetent low level oligarch. Mankind’s survival is dependent on bringing corporations back under the rule of law. Government must once again be responsible for saving people’s lives not killing them. Peace, Clean Air and Water, Education, Health Care and Shelter are a right.

    Change is coming.

    #52815
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    What Vietnam Vet said.

    I don’t think we’ll be in Iraq and Syria much longer. Pretty sure our residual military presence in the ME will be limited to Saudi Arabia and it’s wee affilate states like the UAE and Qatar.

    I want my kids to have 40 acres and a mule. Looks like we’ll have to have another Civil War first.

    Meanwhile, hail Atlantis!

    Ellington Meets Nashville in Jimi Hendrix’s Afterlife

    #52816
    boscohorowitz
    Participant
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