(A DNC/Obama/Clinton propagandist has a sad): It’s Getting Bad Folks

Josh Marshall is a pitiful little hack that keeps hoping that someday he’ll be ‘recognised’ as a journalist. If you read his articles you can see how damn hard he tries to be relevant. It’s never going to happen. No matter how much he tries.

It’s not just Marshall. All these WP and NYT hacks who have no problem with the lies and frauds committed by the Obama Admin, the Clinton Creature, and all her lickspittal lackeys prove just how useless and untrustworthy they all are. Here’s some of Marshall’s hissy fit

It’s Getting Bad Folks

Jeff Sessions is considering appointing a new special counsel to probe things President Trump said he wants investigated about Hillary Clinton and James Comey.

*
To not get ahead of ourselves, it is important to note that the letter in question only says that Sessions is considering the right course to take and that appointing a special counsel is just one option. But make no mistake: this is as bad as it looks. A President is demanding that federal law enforcement go after his political enemies. And federal law enforcement appears ready to comply.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/its-getting-bad-folks#more-1095288

Me again. I’m sitting here thinking wasn’t that EXACTLY what The Empty Suit and his cronies and cronettes secretly and ILLEGALLY doing when they were tapping the Trump campaign and the Trump family’s phones? The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had only given permission to tap into one person’s phone and that was Carter Page.

Since i’m talking some real dodgy and (in Obama’s case) illegal investigations, I have to stick all this stuff right here for back-up:

FISA Court Finds NSA and FBI Spied Illegally, Obama Justice Dept. Withheld Scope of Surveillance of US Persons.

Just weeks before the November 2016 election, the federal court that oversees issuance of FISA warrants was informed that the NSA and FBI had been conducting illegal surveillance of US citizens under Sec. 702, a loophole that allows the government to wiretap U.S. persons communicating with foreigners abroad without a warrant.

On April 26, 2017, The FISA Court (FISC) issued a secret memo that found that in October the Justice Department and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) had submitted incomplete and inaccurate sworn “certifications” concerning the surveillance of Americans conducted by the NSA and FBI under Sec. 702, McClatchy reported Friday. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/...
According to a footnote to the memo, these inaccurate certifications were supported by “Affidavits of Admiral Michael S. Rogers, United States Navy, Director, NSA; Affidkavits of James B. Corney, Director, FBI; Affidavits of John 0. Brennan, Director, CIA; and
Affidavits of Nicholas Rasmussen, Director, NCTC.”

It was under Sec. 702 that the NSA collected “incidental” communications intercepts of Michael Flynn with the Russian Ambassador. About a week before the Inauguration, the Washington Post broke a story naming Flynn and the contents of his conversations with the Russian Ambassador; citing “a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-did-obama-dawdle-on-russias-...

***

On October 24, 2016, the government orally apprised the Court of significant noncompliance with the NSA’s minimization procedures involving queries of data acquired under Section 702 using U.S. person identifiers. The full scope of non-compliant querying practices had not been previously disclosed to the Court. Two days later, on the day the Court otherwise would have had to complete its review of the certifications and procedures, the government made a written submission regarding those compliance problems.

This comes in the wake of revelations that in June 2016, the FISA Court had refused to issue a warrant for broad surveillance of Trump-connected figures suspected by some Obama officials of improperly colluding with Russians. A much narrower FISA warrant reportedly limited to surveillance of one U.S. person, Carter Page, was ultimately approved in late Summer or Fall of 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-obtained-fisa...
Any related targeting, dissemination and public exposure of a U.S. person’s identity appears to have been in direct defiance of the FISC and could be prosecuted as felony violations of the FISA and Espionage Acts.

I do have to laugh every time someone gets a case of the vapors and starts acting like James Comey shouldn’t be investigated. It’s known by the FISC that he lied regarding those wire taps. He already could be prosecuted along with that freak show Brennan for that. And then there’s the little matter of Comey’s ‘letter’:

JAMES COMEY PREPARED STATEMENT ‘EXONERATING’ HILLARY CLINTON BEFORE EMAILS INVESTIGATION ENDED
https://www.google.com/amp/www.newsweek.com/james-comey-clinton-emails-i...

Hell yes Comey needs to be investigated. He was Obama’s/DNC/Clinton’s ‘fixer’. He had his dirty hands in everything. Remember, the FBI agreed to help pick up the tab for the ‘ClintonDossier’ but news about it got out so the FBI didn’t pay Fusion GPS as planned. Now I wonder who in the FBI could have made a deal like that?

Anyway, back to Marshall’s tripe:

The main focus of Sessions decision appears to be the “uranium one” conspiracy theory which has been an increasing focus of President Trump’s and which he has demanded the Justice Department investigate.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/its-getting-bad-folks#more-1095288

Well yeah investigate that deal. The Clintons made tons of money on that sale. And Slick liked the RUSSIAns! well enough back then to give them one of his special $500,000 speeches.

Back to Marshall

To not get ahead of ourselves, it is important to note that the letter in question only says that Sessions is considering the right course to take and that appointing a special counsel is just one option. But make no mistake: this is as bad as it looks. A President is demanding that federal law enforcement go after his political enemies. And federal law enforcement appears ready to comply..
https://www.google.com/amp/www.newsweek.com/james-comey-clinton-emails-i...

That freaking tool doesn’t have a lick of sense. Or ethics. Or talent as a writer. What in the Hell do you call what the Obama Admin/DNC/ Clintons did? The ‘Clinton’ Dossier was their justification for a lot of really serious criminal and tortious acts that they committed. It was built on lies and gossip. The illegal wiretaps SHOULD have landed a number of people in the same damn place The Empty Suit wanted to put Snowden for telling us how corrupt Obama and our government really is.

They are starting to panic. And if our country didn’t have other serious business to deal with, and if it wasn’t costing the taxpayers millions of dollars, I’d laugh as the whole tawdry affair plays out. Instead i’m heartbroken to see what a corrupt country our kids and grandkids are going to inherit.

EDIT: stupid farking blockquote crap.
EDIT EDIT: same shit, different paragraph

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I commented to others today that the news seems nothing more than a propaganda war these days. It's so hard to sort through all of it for the nuggets of truth.

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Amanda Matthews's picture

@Chaddiwicker @Chaddiwicker
day and most of the night trying to figure these people out snd you still won’t make any sense of it all It’s a game for power and money which gives the top dogs CONTROL.

They are mindless, heartless, soulless, greedy thugs who will turn on each other when we have nothing left to take. Just exactly like they did when they brought the world’s economies to a screeching halt. Once they hand their filthy, grubby, greasy mitts on everything people worked and saved for, they started to canibalize each other. They are sociopaths AT BEST,. Many are psychopaths.

There’s something people don’t seem to think about anymore. All that lost money, the homes, 401k and retirement funds, life savings, whatever, did not evaporate into thin air. THEY FUCKING HAVE THAT TOO. Hidden somewhere. Like when you read about their hidden stashed in the Panama and Paradise Papers. Yep they still have every damn thing WE lost and as a bonus, Barack Obama’ couldn’t shove bailout money to the bastids fast enough.

The Fed's $16 Trillion Bailouts Under-Reported
The findings verify that over $16 trillion was allocated to corporations and banks internationally, purportedly for “financial assistance” during and after the 2008 fiscal crisis.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/...

And it’s the nutjobs like the Clintons, Obama’s, Bushes(sp), Cheney’s, Kissinger’s, that mske sure that all this happens. They have taken away our privacy. Oir rights against unlawful search and seizing private property are useless. They ARE NOW CENSORING THE INTERNET. And ot’s the ‘left’ who’s making it happen.

And then there’s fuckwits like Josh Marshall who defend and lie for those people. Which is what started my tirade off in the first place. I have about as much respect for Marshall as I do Alex Jones or Glenn Beck or Steve Bannon. Marshall is every bit as toxic as they are. But from the other direction. Instead of passing up that bunch of crap that he wrote, I stopped and read it. Stupid move.

How does this guy look at himself in a mirror? Does he not care that regardless of however much he has now, when the people he supports and lies for destroy the planet, he will have nothing? Does he think his little darlings will be grateful for the world they have to live in. Clockwork Orange here we come!

People world-wide are at a breaking point. Terrorists, wars, disease, famine, FUCKING DRONES. Yeah, that one is on Obama and I hope someday he has to answer for it. Like Clinton has to answer for Libya and Syria. And Trump (having to prove he’s as murderous and Iinhumane as his predecessors) is bombing innocents to death in Yemin.

I just do not see a rosy future in store for this country. Or the world for that matter.

There have been five mass extinctions in Earth’s history. Now we’re facing a sixth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/02/11/there-have-been-f...

Thank you very much for your compliments on my post. You post some really good stuff yourself. This is a great place to come to try and figure things out. To talk, or pitch a fit. And people here are smart and helpful. It’s good to have a place like this.

It’s almost 6:00 a.m. and I haven’t slept. I have a hard time falling asleep. I think i’d

*******

EDIT:
I guess I fell asleep mid-sentence.. How funny.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

Cassiodorus's picture

@Amanda Matthews I don't remember the exact piece but she claimed that the Fed had pretty much given the banks an endless line of credit -- and credit in this case means the ability to print as much money as they like, and hide said printing through differences in interest rates. Now there's your raw stuff of exploitation!

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

ggersh's picture

@Amanda Matthews https://www.theburningplatform.com/2017/11/13/the-unbearable-slowness-of...

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.”

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

@Amanda Matthews Putting aside politcal views, Bannon does not deserve to be part of that rogue's gallery, as he is at least intelligent. The other three are nothing more than mendacious morons.

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Amanda Matthews's picture

@orestes
STUPID. He’s been booted out of the administration. Mercer and **shudder** Stone have severed ties. He’s out running around trying to find allies but no one wants anything to do with him. He had shit tons of power until he started making an ass out of himself. He was like the proverbial bull in a china shop the way he went through Washington making enemies. That’s not exactly how a ‘smart’ person would operate.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

@Amanda Matthews
Thanks so much! That essay and this comment are exactly what people need to keep hearing to keep their heads straight during the perpetual Opposite Day strategy being inflicted.

This is the final looting phase, where those who believe that any remaining rights, money/property at all still belonging to the Non-Billionaire class have somehow deprived them get to collect it all before, as you say, they begin to cannibalize each other in a serious manner.

The last one to die will, by definition, have all of the toys, even if they were all wrecked in the process.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

snoopydawg's picture

there is a lot of information putting a lot of this Russian plot together. Hell yes Comey should be investigated for more than one issue. His bogus investigation into Hillary's use of her private email server does need looking into. The fact that he pretty much absolved Her before he finished the investigation shows that the fix was in to not charge her. He wrote it before his agents spoke with her at her house and they didn't record it or search her computers or cellphones. If this was a serious investigation, those things would have been done.
Why did he give Her staff members immunity before the investigation got serious and then never used their information against Her?
The Bill/Lynch tarmac meeting was so out of bounds, yet no one said anything about it. Why not?

One article I read said that the FBI didn't take over paying for the Steele dossier until after Her lost and that was when they got a court order to tap Trump's phone. Yet the article you referenced says that they got it in June 2016. Why were they focusing on the Trump/Russian collusion?
And there's Brennan in the middle of everything again and he again lied about the FISA warrant. He and Clapper are the ones who are pushing this.

The uranium deal has a lot of conflicting information on it. This article says that it's not true, but I don't see any evidence that it's been debunked.

The Facts on Uranium One

First, this is not correct:

We covered it during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Donald Trump falsely accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of giving away U.S. uranium rights to the Russians and claimed — without evidence — that it was done in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.

It's been reported numerous times that Bill did receive $500,000 to give a speech (again) to the companies involved with the deal and that the Clinton fraudantion received $200 million after the deal was signed.

This is supposedly the proof that the deal was false.

The Committee on Foreign Investments has nine members, including the secretaries of the treasury, state, defense, homeland security, commerce and energy; the attorney general; and representatives from two White House offices (the United States Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy).

Hillary may not have given her okay for the deal as shown here, but then why did her fraudantion receive the money?

For this and other reasons, we have written that Trump is wrong to claim that Clinton “gave away 20 percent of the uranium in the United States” to Russia. Clinton could have objected — as could the eight other voting members — but that objection alone wouldn’t have stopped the sale of the stake of Uranium One to Rosatom.

“Only the President has the authority to suspend or prohibit a covered transaction,” the federal guidelines say.

We don’t know much about the committee’s deliberations because there are “strong confidentiality requirements” prohibiting disclosure of information filed with the committee, the Treasury Department says on its website. Some information would have become available if the committee or any one of its members objected to the sale. But none of the nine members objected.

!??????!

Then it goes on to talk about Bill's speech and the donation to her fraudantion. This is funny the way it's stated...

The Times also wrote that Bill Clinton spoke at a conference in Moscow on June 29,20102010 — which was after the Rosatom-Uranium One merger was announced in June 2010, but before it was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States in October 2010. The Russian-based Renaissance Capital Group organized the conference and paid Clinton $500,000.

Again, well done. It will be interesting if it's ever investigated. But even if it shows that there was some hanky panky, no one will be charged for anything.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg

Yeah, it's not like Sec of State Hillary wielded any power or posed any threat once crossed or still had a State Department stuffed with loyalists when Trump got in, or anything. No way Her could have kyboshed or ensured any deal Her had a hand-out in.

Damn it, what was I reading not that long ago, where people were coming to Bill at about that time with concerns about their projects, since sec of State Hillary had not liked one recently which therefpre failed to be accepted? If I only had a memory... ring any bells with anyone here?

So much corruption, only so much space for handy mental storage of it...

But WTF is Her still doing publicly making trouble for the American people when Her's not even in any public office?

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

in fighting for the 99%. You can't go after the r's for corruption when you're corrupt your self. The r's are always upfront abut being bought by business and finance. The d's have to pretend to be for us, but never to the point of actually going to the mat for us. So we get Bushco2, Cheney. Rumsfeld, Rice skating along with Wall $treet bailouts and a republican forced insurance health plan. This going after Clinton is just the warning shots to lay off the r's or you'll be exposed,too. We need to elect people who are clean enough to go after the r's, and to rise in the democratic party today that's impossible without compromising yourself into a corner and irrelevancy .

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enhydra lutris's picture

@Snode

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@Snode about anything related to the 99%.

Dems don't want anything to do with the 99%.

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dfarrah

when we hear it? Everything we were ever told this country was is one big lie.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Steven D's picture

@dkmich better at knowing it.

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

@dkmich

They keep using the same shit every time, maybe piled a little differently, but always recycling.

The Cold War, Red Scare and Yellow Menace, for gawds sake!

When they go to make a killing, they like to see as much blood and pain as possible. And they're always making a killing somewhere or another, or many places at once. Quite amusing for them, apparently.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

I mean, if you've got nothing to hide, why should you be afraid of a little government snooping into your life and dealings and phone calls and computers and emails and...

I mean, at least that's what we little people are told.

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Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Dr. John Carpenter Heh.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Dr. John Carpenter

And if we all had better bodies, we wouldn't mind naked airport scans and groping for no actual reason - or roadside cavity checks carried out by police.

Seriously, who would carry anything they were planning to ingest in areas like that in the first place?

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

From wikipedia

Habituation is a form of learning in which an organism decreases or ceases its responses to a stimulus after repeated presentations.[1] Essentially, the organism learns to stop responding to a stimulus which is no longer biologically relevant. For example, organisms may habituate to repeated sudden loud noises when they learn these have no consequences.[2] Habituation usually refers to a reduction in innate behaviours, rather than behaviours developed during conditioning (in which case the process is termed "extinction"). A progressive decline of a behavior in a habituation procedure may also reflect nonspecific effects such as fatigue, which must be ruled out when the interest is in habituation as a learning process.[3]

Is the media and the cover up of the criminal class which seems to include all the super wealthy and the mega corporations, does this induce "habitation" ??

Note this is for an organism. Could be large or small, or maybe even the highest level of organism, namely humans.

The new name for humans by the French polymath, Bruno Latour is EARTHBOUNDS. We have to return to the earth.

He posted a tweet today which included an HUGE headline from a French newspaper about the statement from 15,000 scientists about climate change. This is an automatic translation from the French. Bruno on the super large title/headline of a French newspaper.

Never the world titles were as big, as if it were a declaration of war. The result! A form of habituation sorry! As Voegelin said: "a civilization can progress and regress at the same time, but not forever." Here we go.

Interesting. Progress and regress at the same time, but not forever.

Latour's metaphysics includes both humans and non humans, and foreshadowed the water protectors making water a political actor. And land is a political actor. And the thin layer a kilometer down and a few kilometers up within which all human live has been lived, Gaia, is The New Climate Regime.

The attempt to "habitation" of earthbound is not working and conflicts continue. It is a war.

The wikipedia article continues

The habituation process is a form of adaptive behavior (or neuroplasticity) that is classified as non-associative learning. Non-associative learning is a change in a response to a stimulus that does not involve associating the presented stimulus with another stimulus or event such as a reward or punishment.[4] (Examples of associative learning include classical conditioning and operant conditioning). Habituation is the decrease of a response to a repeated eliciting stimulus that is not due to sensory adaptation or motor fatigue. Sensory adaptation (or neural adaptation) occurs when an organism can no longer detect the stimulus as efficiently as when first presented and motor fatigue occurs when an organism is able to detect the stimulus but can no longer respond efficiently. In contrast, habituation is a learned adaptation to the repeated presentation of a stimulus, not a reduction in sensory or motor ability.

I just looked this up and am posting it here. Maybe someone who has been around this topic for some time and in some depth can comment on this.

The third paragraph.

Some related phenomena to habituation include sensitization and stimulus generalization/discrimination. Sensitization is the opposite process to habituation, i.e. an increase in the elicited behavior from repeated presentation of a stimulus. There may also be an initial increase in response immediately prior to the decline (a sensitization process followed by a habituation process).[5] Another related phenomenon is stimulus generalization, when habituation occurs in response to other stimuli that are similar to the original stimulus.[6] The opposing process, stimulus discrimination, is when habituation does not occur to other stimuli that are dissimilar to the original stimulus.

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k9disc's picture

I’m quite familiar with. But your mention of Sensitization towards the end of the blockquotes kind of freaked me out a bit.

No doubt that habituation and desensitization is going on on many fronts , in media and politics in particular — violence, sex, class, ideology— but the idea of sensitization via media and politics is super interesting. It actually does a good job of explaining the cognitive dissonance from the party faithful.

I need to mull this over a bit.

@DonMidwest

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

mimi's picture

@DonMidwest
I also liked to see the HUGE headline and Latour's tweet. I can't find it, sorry for it. Sad

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@DonMidwest

Yeah, apparently many criminal gangs routinely use desensitization for low-level entries who are disposable and useful for janitorial work where brutality is required.

And on the whole, people are definitely overburdened by the continual assaults and displays of blatant corruption in the corporate criminal/political class. We call it 'becoming blase' about things which should trigger outrage and it seems that many will even support 'their team' in such corruption and brutality displays. Sad but true.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

Don't get me wrong, I don't think selling uranium to another superpower is particularly intelligent or advisable, and the way she did it was highly corrupt and she should be prosecuted for it (and for a lot of other things).

But I'm still not particularly afraid of Russia. Even though Russia has a system which can apparently neutralize our navy's ability to attack, which I suppose should frighten me. But of all the geopolitical power players, Russia pretty much frightens me the least. I don't like their reliance on the petrochemical economy, and I don't like their corrupt oligarchs. But at least their corrupt oligarchs don't appear to be raving lunatics. They don't seem to want to burn the world down--quite the opposite. They even appear, at least, to want some kind of rule of international law, some system of customs and traditions that remains respected. They might want that system to be slanted towards them--I'm not saying they're angels. But they do seem to be in favor of human life and civilization continuing on this planet, which puts them ahead of a lot of the other power players. Their support of the petrochemical economy threatens both those goals, but there really is no way that Russia could afford under the political conditions of the past 25-30 years to get off oil. Because we decided to be an aggressive empire, and then devolved from there to being nothing better than well-funded bandits, both economically and militarily.

Ironically, had we leaped ahead in energy technology as we certainly should have, and moved to a primarily non-petroleum economy, it would have provided such an advantage to us against the other nations that it probably would have spurred other powers to try harder to do the same. How much more flexibility would it have given us if, for the past 25 years, petrochemical fuels had had primarily military and scientific applications, rather than being the lifeblood of our entire economy?

And I really have nothing but contempt for the recent attempt to reinstitute the Cold War without even the shoddy reasoning with which the Cold War justified itself. The threat used to be Communism and the domino effect.

As Q says at 1:50, "The issue is patriotism. You've got to get back to your planet and stop the Commies. All it takes is a few good men."

Let me just say that even if the domino effect scared me, which it didn't even at the height of Soviet imperialism, because it was plenty clear that we had a strong enough military and a strong enough economy that Russia was not going to be knocking on my door anytime soon, no matter which idiots screamed about Cuba being only 90 miles away--even if that had scared me, there's an obvious security difference between Cuba and the Crimea. Further, the ideological war that we were having, that we used to justify all this dick-measuring acquisitive bullshit, is over. We won. They're all capitalists now. Nonsense like talking heads on the television calling Russia "our enemy" as if we were Saxons and Normans and had a long history of conflict is just that. The last time we had a war that involved Russia, they were our allies, and a good thing too.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

divineorder's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal don't have anything yet but speculation, educated guesses. Please correct me if I am wrong.

That's why I would love to see an investigation. Someone might come forward.

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@divineorder Russia?

This is from the NYT, so take it with a grain of salt, but it seems fairly substantive:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-...

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

divineorder's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal enough for an investigation or two.....

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@divineorder I'm all for investigation. Not sure who's trustworthy enough to conduct one. You'd have to find somebody with the courage of an Elliot Ness and no partisan affiliation. In a country of 300 million, I'm sure we have some people like that, but not many.

I nominate Bill Binney.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

divineorder's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal don't have anything yet but speculation, educated guesses. Please correct me if I am wrong.

That's why I would love to see an investigation. Someone might come forward. But it will be a shocker if one ever gets underway imo.

Benjamin Wittes, editor of the Lawfare blog, argues Sessions’s letter is actually a convoluted way for the Justice Department to, ultimately, reaffirm its independence, by allowing the federal prosecutors to decide against an investigation. “What I think DOJ may be doing here is declaring a process in which senior career prosecutors will review the matter and make recommendations to the AG or the DAG . . . Theoretically, this could lead to a special counsel,” he wrote on Twitter. “In practice, however, it will not. The reason is that the allegations are not substantial and—at least insofar as I understand them—they will not serve as a proper predicate for a criminal investigation, let alone require a special counsel.”

“In short, I think this letter is best understood not as a hint to Trump that Sessions will do as the President wants, but as a way of shunting the matter to a mechanism that will enable him not to act—or, to be more precise, that will enable Rod Rosenstein not to act.”

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

WoodsDweller's picture

"It's getting bad, folks" because prominent figures may be investigated? Because they don't get a pass because they were once someone's political opponent? Because we should only look forward, not back? Because being a political figure should insulate you from accountability? Because the rule of law might be applied to people of importance?

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

@WoodsDweller
because the patronage than worms like Marshal rely on might dry up. Sounds like someone threatened to cut loose a few of the lower lever suck-ups.

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Mary Bennett

@WoodsDweller I was trying really, really hard to understand why this was a sign of things "getting" bad, but then I realized 1) this isn't the kind of thing that will change the day either way for those of us living in the 99% and 2) things are already "this bad", if not worse, for those of us living in the 99%. Corrupt government agent being picked on by other corrupt government agent? Boo-hoo, cry me a river. Even if there's an investigation, does anyone seriously expect justice? Just another day in the land of the free, etc.

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Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

but I feel more hopeful for the future and the young as the corruption that we knew was running the system has been brought to light. I see us as entering a period of Hegelian synthesis, in which the opposing theses can no longer hold. Of course there is no certainty about the new thesis that will adhere, but the spiral entropy that has informed my entire adult life cannot stand.

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To quote: "A President is demanding that federal law enforcement go after his political enemies. And federal law enforcement appears ready to comply."

Let's rewrite that for Obama: "A President is demanding that federal law enforcement NOT go after his political ALLIES. And federal law enforcement appears ready to comply.

What Clinton did with her emails was against the law. Defense department officials have been prosecuted for doing literally the same thing as noted early by Glenn Greenwald. Now Glnen does not think people should be prosecuted for breaking the law in these instances, but he did point out that Clinton herself was an absolutist about classified information.

Washington Has Been Obsessed With Punishing Secrecy Violations — Until Hillary Clinton
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/05/washington-has-been-obsessed-with-pu...

And there is this interesting article from an ex-prosecutor (on national review.com of all places) describing how the Obama administration DOJ basically let Clinton go over obvious transgressions over handling secret information and government documents compared to what Mueller is doing. Basically the legal instruments currently being used against Manaford were totally abandoned during the Clinton investigation. Makes sense why certain FBI agents were purported to be pissed off about the handling of the Clinton investigation. Pretty damning on the part of the Obama administration.

The Trump Collusion Case Is Not Getting the Clinton Emails Treatment
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453659/mueller-paul-manafort-inves...

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