4463 replies to this topic

[Mr. Roboto]

[Mr. Roboto]

]

[Mr. Roboto]

The POTUS is confirmed to be part of an investigation by the FBI, who also confirms Obama didn't tap his phones. 

 

Trump's head must be ready to explode. I can't only imagine what the right wing would have been doing if Obama acted this way out of the gate. Unbelievable, the whole thing. 

 

 

 

 

[freedom78]

Trump's shit is worse than the shit they made up about Obama.  We're only two months into a 48 month term.  What's the over/under on impeachment?

[AxlsMainMan]

But, but.. Hillary and her emails.. 

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Trump's shit is worse than the shit they made up about Obama.  We're only two months into a 48 month term.  What's the over/under on impeachment?

 

I'm still waiting for actual evidence and not Mother Beaver's Storytime from some 3rd rate DNC politician.  

[PERM BANNED]

But, but.. Hillary and her emails.. 

 

 

you mean an instance where there was real evidence of criminal wrong doing (classified material on an unsecure non-government network) versus Maddow's wet dreams?

[Mr. Roboto]

A President’s Credibility

 

Trump’s falsehoods are eroding public trust, at home and abroad.

 

If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.

 

The latest example is Mr. Trump’s refusal to back off his Saturday morning tweet of three weeks ago that he had “found out that [Barack] Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory” on Election Day. He has offered no evidence for his claim, and a parade of intelligence officials, senior Republicans and Democrats have since said they have seen no such evidence.

 

Yet the President clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle, rolling out his press spokesman to make more dubious claims. Sean Spicer—who doesn’t deserve this treatment—was dispatched last week to repeat an assertion by a Fox News commentator that perhaps the Obama Administration had subcontracted the wiretap to British intelligence.

 

That bungle led to a public denial from the British Government Communications Headquarters, and British news reports said the U.S. apologized. But then the White House claimed there was no apology. For the sake of grasping for any evidence to back up his original tweet, and the sin of pride in not admitting error, Mr. Trump had his spokesman repeat an unchecked TV claim that insulted an ally.

 

The wiretap tweet is also costing Mr. Trump politically as he hands his opponents a sword. Mr. Trump has a legitimate question about why the U.S. was listening to his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and who leaked news of his meeting with the Russian ambassador. But that question never gets a hearing because the near-daily repudiation of his false tweet is a bigger media story.

 

FBI director James Comey also took revenge on Monday by joining the queue of those saying the bureau has no evidence to back up the wiretap tweet. Mr. Comey even took the unusual step of confirming that the FBI is investigating ties between the Trump election campaign and Russia.

 

Mr. Comey said he could make such a public admission only in “unusual circumstances,” but why now? Could the wiretap tweet have made Mr. Comey angry because it implied the FBI was involved in illegal surveillance? Mr. Trump blundered in keeping Mr. Comey in the job after the election, but now the President can’t fire the man leading an investigation into his campaign even if he wants to.

 

All of this continues the pattern from the campaign that Mr. Trump is his own worst political enemy. He survived his many false claims as a candidate because his core supporters treated it as mere hyperbole and his opponent was untrustworthy Hillary Clinton. But now he’s President, and he needs support beyond the Breitbart cheering section that will excuse anything. As he is learning with the health-care bill, Mr. Trump needs partners in his own party to pass his agenda. He also needs friends abroad who are willing to trust him when he asks for support, not least in a crisis.

 

This week should be dominated by the smooth political sailing for Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee and the progress of health-care reform on Capitol Hill. These are historic events, and success will show he can deliver on his promises. But instead the week has been dominated by the news that he was repudiated by his own FBI director.

 

Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 39%. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.

 

https://www.wsj.com/...vlk34Ls8TL1HQ==

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https://www.bloomber...-s-surveillance

[freedom78]

https://www.bloomber...-s-surveillance

 

Interesting.  If this is what Trump meant when he stated that Obama wiretapped him, then he grossly overstated his case.  This would seem to be normal surveillance under the broad umbrella of FISA, rather than the much more controversial surveillance of US persons.

[PERM BANNED]

Interesting.  If this is what Trump meant when he stated that Obama wiretapped him, then he grossly overstated his case.  This would seem to be normal surveillance under the broad umbrella of FISA, rather than the much more controversial surveillance of US persons.

 

I totally agree.  But if they had FISA warrants on Trump's people, that is something the public needs to know immediately.  If they didn't have FISA warrants and analysts were passing around recordings they shouldn't have kept, while not the end of the world, it shows a problem in the NSA that needs to be resolved.

[Mr. Roboto]

Trump, Working-Class Zero

 

It’s not unknown, of course.

 

In ancient Egypt, there was the symbol of the ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. Nerve-addled octopuses sometimes consume their own arms.

 

But we’ve never watched a president so hungrily devour his own presidency.

 

Soon, there won’t be anything left except the sound of people snickering.

 

Consumed by his paranoia about the deep state, Donald Trump has disappeared into the fog of his own conspiracy theories. As he rages in the storm, Lear-like, howling about poisonous fake news, he is spewing poisonous fake news.

 

The Hirshhorn has a sold-out exhibit of Yayoi Kusama’s stunning infinity mirror rooms. But they are nothing compared to the infinity mirror room of Trump’s mind, now on display a mile and a half away at the White House.

 

Many voters who took a chance on the real estate mogul and reality TV star hoped he would grow more mature and centered when confronted with the august surroundings of the White House and immensity of the job. But instead of improving in office, Trump is regressing. The office has not changed Trump. Trump has changed the office.

 

He trusts his beliefs more than facts. So many secrets, so many plots, so many shards of gossip swirl in his head, there seems to be no room for reality.

 

His grandiosity, insularity and scamming have persuaded Trump to believe he can mold his own world. His distrust of the deep state, elites and eggheads — an insecurity inflamed by Steve Bannon — makes it hard for him to trust his own government, or his own government’s facts.

 

Angela Merkel did not get a surprise shoulder squeeze from this president. He ignored the chancellor’s request to shake hands. But Merkel still looked jittery.

 

Many who meet with Trump — from foreign leaders to our own lawmakers — look like cats on a hot stove. One Democratic senator told me he was determined not to smile in a session with the president in case Trump suddenly said something offensive or batty while the senator was politely grinning for the cameras.

 

Everyone is tiptoeing around the mad king in his gilded, sparse court. His lieges make fools of themselves trying to justify or interpret his transcendentally nutty tweets and willfully ignorant comments.

 

For two weeks, he has refused to back off his unhinged claim that his predecessor tapped his phones during the election.

 

According to CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, Trump got furious reading a Breitbart report that regurgitated a theory by conservative radio host Mark Levin that Barack Obama and his allies had staged a “silent coup.”

 

It is surpassingly strange that the president would not simply pick up the phone and call his intelligence chiefs before spitting out an inflammatory accusation with no proof, just as it was bizarre that Trump shrugged off the regular intelligence briefings after he was elected. He preferred living in his own warped world.

 

Sean Spicer offered a shaky Jenga tower of media citations to back up the president, including the contention of Fox’s Judge Andrew Napolitano that Obama had used GCHQ, a British intelligence agency, to spy on Trump.

 

In a rare public statement, the GCHQ called the claim “utterly ridiculous.”

 

Fox News also demurred, with Shepard Smith saying it “knows of no evidence of any kind that the now president of the United States was surveilled at any time, in any way. Full stop.”

 

Even Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, gave up the Sisyphean effort of defending Trump’s tripe. He said that if you took Trump’s remarks “literally” — as we expect to do with our commander in chief’s words — “clearly the president was wrong.”

 

Asked by a German reporter about GCHQ rubbishing the wiretapping claims, Trump was dismissive. “All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind,” he said. “You should be talking to Fox.”

 

Trump’s aversion to veracity is exacerbated by his inner circle of sycophants and conspiracists. As far as Trump is concerned, his budget and health care plan are going great, when everyone else in Washington is averting their eyes.

 

In a Wall Street Journal piece, Bannon said his anti-elitist worldview was shaped by his father’s decision during the financial crisis in 2008 to sell his AT&T stock, at a loss of more than $100,000. Marty Bannon, who started at AT&T as a lineman, got spooked by Jim Cramer’s advice on the “Today” show to take “whatever money you may need for the next five years” out of the market.

 

Even though one son, Steve, was a banker at Goldman Sachs and another son had an investment background, Marty Bannon did not consult them or a financial adviser until the sale was completed.

 

He preferred, like Trump, to get crucial information from TV pundits and eschew the experts in his own circle who might have told him that selling during panics is not wise and that having one stock in an undiversified portfolio is not smart.

 

“Everything since then has come from there, all of it,” Steve Bannon, the multimillionaire architect of Trumpworld, said of the stock sale. So, essentially, because Bannon’s father made a bad, hurried financial decision based on watching TV, we now have to slash Meals on Wheels, Big Bird, the arts, after-school programs, health insurance, immigration from Muslim countries, climate change research, diplomats and taxes for the rich.

 

Maybe if these elites-pretending-not-to-be-elites deigned to talk to some knowledgeable elites in government once in a while, they might emerge from the distorted, belligerent, dystopian, Darwinian, cracked-mirror world that is alarming Americans and our allies. They might even stop ripping off the working-class people they claim to be helping.

 

https://www.nytimes....class-zero.html

[freedom78]

I totally agree.  But if they had FISA warrants on Trump's people, that is something the public needs to know immediately.  If they didn't have FISA warrants and analysts were passing around recordings they shouldn't have kept, while not the end of the world, it shows a problem in the NSA that needs to be resolved.

 

If they had a FISA warrant (and I haven't read anything to suggest that), then that's bad news for Trump.  I'm broadly opposed to the NSA listening in on American's communications without a warrant, though it might unintentionally happen during routine surveillance of foreign agents.

[Mr. Roboto]

For the next thirty seconds, I want you to disregard all political affiliation and ponder this;

 

How many ‘coincidences’ does it take to make a fact?

 

In the first week of December Sergei Mikhailov, the head of the Russian FSB cyber unit was in a meeting, when men came in, put a black bag over his head, and dragged him out. He hasn’t been seen since. And now he’s been charged with Treason, presumably for giving information to the United States of America. He’ll face a secret military tribunal and nobody will ever know what happens to him.

 

Shortly thereafter Ruslan Stoyanov, head Russian FSB counterintelligence whose job it would have been to find spies, was also arrested as a traitor.

 

In the last week of December, an ex-KGB chief suspected of helping the former MI6 spy Christopher Steele to compile his dossier on Donald Trump was murdered by the Kremlin and his death covered up. Oleg Erovinkin, a former general in the KGB and its successor the FSB, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on December 26, 2016. Erovinkin was a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and now head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, who is named in the dossier.

 

Now before you re-activate your partisan brain, consider for a moment that Exxon Mobil, under Rex Tillerson, brokered a deal with Russia in 2013 for 60 million acres of Russian land to pump oil out of, but all that Russian oil went through pipelines in the Ukraine, who heavily taxed the proceeds, and were applying for admission into NATO at the time.

 

Putin subsequently invaded Ukraine in 2014, secured the routes to export the oil tax-free by sea, and took control of the port where their Black Sea Naval Fleet is based, by taking the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine by force and not giving it back. This was Hitler-tier imperialism that broke every international law in the free world.

 

After Obama sanctioned Russia for the invasion, they could only pump oil from approximately 3 of those 60 million acres. But now Rex Tillerson is soon to be our Secretary of State, and as of today, there’s information circulating that Donald Trump will likely unilaterally remove all sanctions against Russia in the coming days or weeks.

 

You realize that Putin will make half a trillion dollars from that much untapped oil, right? All pumped tax-free through Crimea, stolen from Ukraine, now owned by Russia?

 

You realize that Putin may have subverted our government just to become the richest man on the planet, right?

 

You realize that placing Trump in the Presidency may never have been the primary objective of the Russian election interference, which was simply to put a man in place who could be blackmailed into giving Rex Tillerson, recipient of the Russian Order of Friendship medal, power and influence, right?

 

And check this: The State Department has undergone a purge. People who have been there since the ‘70s have all resigned or been asked to leave. The diplomatic branch of the United States government will now be Tillerson’s workplace alone. Rex Tillerson is now the real man in charge of international affairs, doing the real deals. Trump is just a figurehead tweeting about torture and crowd size, insulting Mexico for the lulz, and photoshopping his hands so they look bigger.

 

Guys, what is really going on?

 

Putin has vast experience blackmailing billionaires as leverage to pry apart self-destructing superpowers from his KGB days. And what’s happening in the USA of 2017 fits that modus operandi to a tee.

 

After reading through the Steele paper, and seeing that the only real criticism of it has been that it seems too good to be true, I’m definitely inclined to believe that the CIA and FBI aren’t just pretending to be concerned in the name of party politics (especially since they very rarely see eye-to-eye on anything).

 

Don’t you find it suspicious that Trump hasn’t made any move to stop sucking up to Russia despite the fact that his entire intelligence network is telling him that the FSB played him like a fiddle, and was directly responsible for sabotaging the American election? Instead, he’s just flipped into indignant denial mode and still aggressively pursues a close economic relationship with a nation who is directly opposed to the USA in every geopolitical way imaginable.

 

We need to wake up before it’s too late.

 

America has had its lunch money stolen by the yard bully, and now he’s dangling it in front of us all saying he didn’t do shit. And the average Trump follower just doesn’t care. No matter how damning the evidence, if the news isn’t pro Trump, then it’s “fake news.” The degree of collaborationist sentiment and blatant disregard for Truth in the face of infiltration by our most dangerous geopolitical threat is truly staggering. Most trump supporters would have Hillary executed for using a private email server, but would let Trump, Tillerson, and the Russian government get away with a massive scheme like this, and smile about it.

 

Diminishing or ignoring what is happening isn’t going to solve anything. Are you honestly telling me that you don’t see a conflict of interest here that potentially endangers our National Security? Because it looks like the Cold War just ended, only we didn’t win. Putin’s job is done here, now he can just sit back and watch us go at each other. The allies that we haven’t yet alienated actually feel horrible for us, and secretly fear that America will tear itself apart in the next 4 years.

 

So the question is, what are you prepared to do? I know it feels like there’s nothing you can do, but here is something you can do: Contact your Senators and Representatives to tell them that you oppose Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State, and aggressively support the Congressional Hearings by telling your Congress people that you want Trump’s tax returns subpoenaed, and the allegations in the Steele Dossier investigated. Demand a full and fair investigation into the objective Truth of the matter, whatever it may be, for the safety and security of America.

 

Or you can convince yourself this is still about the election, just say “Hillary lost, Trump won”, and let it slide. But if we do that, there may be no coming back from it. And I don’t think anyone wants that.

 

However, if it turns out that is what everyone really wants, well I mean hey, I guess we had an awesome run with this “Democracy” thing…

 

This article has been distributed elsewhere around the web for maximum exposure.

 

Sidenote: I was going to cite and link to all the facts presented here, but those who don’t wanna hear the facts will just shriek ‘fake news!!!!’ anyway.

 

So fuckit.

 

J

 

UPDATE: 1 Feb 2017

 

Today is Wednesday 1st Feb 2017. It is FOUR DAYS after I published this blog post. It has just been announced that and I quote “House approves resolution killing SEC requirement for oil, gas, mining companies to disclose payments to foreign governments” – I’m sure it’s pure coincidence this was announced on the exact same day that Rex Tillerson was sworn in as Secretary of State. Right?

 

Blog post doesn’t seem so silly now does it?

 

Next on the agenda, lifting US sanctions against Russia. You just watch.

 

UPDATE: 2 Feb 2017

 

In another total coincidence, 5 days after this post was published the US Treasury Dept announces it’s easing sanctions to allow companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, successor to KGB.

 

 

UPDATE: 6 Mar 2017

.…and here’s Ivanka Trump just days before Russia annexed Crimea, partying with wife of Abramovich, Putins bud who owns the co providing steel for Keystone.

 

 

 

 

https://jesterscourt...ral-government/

 

[Mr. Roboto]

Trump shits all over our clean power plan for meager gains at best. So shortsighted, I guess none of their kids/grandkids don't need to breath air in the future.