Why is the inauguration still going ahead?

Now Trump represents about everything I dislike in a human being, an intellectually bankrupt narcissist coupled with all the dangers that are associated with that type of personality when given power.

However, he was elected by our "democratic" process such that it is/is not.

There have been many accusations so far among them:

  1. That he colluded with a foreign power to usurp our electoral system.
  2. That he is a sexual pervert and hence open to blackmail.

He is an habitual liar but then again that has not prevented any of our past Presidents from taking power, hence that can be ignored.

Those two accusations should be enough in themselves to prevent an inauguration taking place, the first being treason.

So why is the inauguration still going ahead?

A total lack of any verifiable evidence.

So we have an MSM and Democratic party going bat-shit over what amounts to hearsay. The reporting and associated commentary implies that this hearsay is irrefutable fact. They cannot even be bothered to add "allegedly" to any of the reporting, this is the usual get out clause to protect them from future litigation.

The so called bulletproof accusations supported by a word salad by the FBI and CIA have been notably lacking in any hard evidence. The ex-spy that reported the sexual misconduct is judged without supplying any documentary proof a "reliable source". Hence, because some give the reports of sexual perversion and actual blackmail verbatim because they believe them to be credible, they are now taken as factual. We should demand more proof than that.

These are extraordinary claims about an incoming President, but also remember that this was a candidate that was so obviously flawed yet the Democrats still couldn't beat him.

This sets an extremely dangerous precedent when coupled to the last round of the incoming President was a Kenyan Muslim and therefore not even an American citizen, are we going to have this every 4 years from now on? Rumours demand to be treated just as that no matter who is the source unless cold hard evidence is presented. The timing of these releases also needs to be questioned since they came out only after the election process was completed. Do they seek to overturn the result, they should, if true.

When the US tortured, documentary and photographic evidence was presented, then ignored, there was no punishment meted out to those responsible for the program.

The Government/CIA said "Saddam has WMD" when all the evidence reported that there were none at all, in the end the proof was that we had committed the war crime of pre-emptive war based on a lie. Nobody was punished.

So before we inaugurate someone accused of what amount to treason how about proving the assertions? I know that after the inauguration that any lack of evidence will bring cries of "cover up". The story will continue through the next election cycles as a partisan football, everything else of real import to you and I will be irrelevant once again.

Without evidence acceptable in a court of law: it is conspiracy theory.

This type of crap allows what is left our democracy to be undermined continuously.

I demand better and so should our journalists, will they never bloody learn.

To quote Obi Wan Bush "fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again".

Silly me wanting proof, but the fact that Americans have once again elected another bloody dangerous clown is sadly not enough.

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kharma's picture

And have personally experienced those 'tiny little cameras you can't even see.
I think the allegations might be true yet our 'democracy ' shat the bed and are resigned to sleeping in it. It wasn't like they weren't warned about Ms Inevitable.

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There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties.. This...is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.--John Adams

MarilynW's picture

He is asked about the rumours of his visits to Russia and he launches into a warning about tiny hidden cameras in hotel rooms???

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To thine own self be true.

terriertribe's picture

the same spy movies the rest of us have. He wouldn't be the first politician influenced by the movies.

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Now interviewing signature candidates. Apply within.

Hillbilly Dem's picture

Ronnie Reagan asked to see the "War Room". How disappointed he must have been to learn that it was nothing more Stanley Kubrick's cinematic license in "Dr. Strangelove".

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"Just call me Hillbilly Dem(exit)."
-H/T to Wavey Davey

Bisbonian's picture

Especially the eyebrow.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

Oldest Son Of A Sailor's picture

I could very well imagine what might be taped on tiny cameras in Russian hotel rooms...

Whether the stuff on the tape is blackmail material or not is less of a concern than having an adequate supply of Brain Bleach on hand should they ever be released. While the women in his life may be model material, it takes his wealth to attain a level of attraction sufficient for them, that will probably not work on anyone except a Russian Bride...

I'm taking an Aggressive Buy Position on Cortex Stocks (Makers of Brain Bleach) in the market and am shifting from a neutral position to a Strong Bull Position...

The Strong Bull extends to everything the mainstream media has to say these days...
Brain Bleach has also proven effective as a propaganda eraser...

brain bleach.jpg

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"Do you realize the responsibility I carry?
I'm the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House."

~John F. Kennedy~
Economic: -9.13, Social: -7.28,
MarilynW's picture

first one regarding Trump & the Russians. There are other factors like the "President" elect's advisor contacting the Russian envoy in the US, 5 times in one day, the day that sanctions were imposed on Russia by President Obama.

Reuter's

Michael Flynn, President-elect Donald Trump's choice for national security adviser, held five phone calls with Russia's ambassador to Washington on the day the United States retaliated for Moscow's interference in the U.S. presidential election, three sources familiar with the matter said.

The calls occurred between the time the Russian embassy was told about U.S. sanctions and the announcement by Russian President Vladimir Putin that he had decided against reprisals, said the sources. They spoke on condition of anonymity, citing internal U.S. government deliberations about the issue.

All the opposition here against anonymous sources doesn't consider that when Greenwald was contacted by Snowden initially, Snowden was an anonymous source. Greenwald had no proof that this person was credible but followed it up, even going to the trouble to learn how to encrypt his correspondence in order to continue communicating with this unknown person. He did not ignore this anonymous source but he is telling us we should ignore anonymous sources today.

Remember Watergate? the continuing saga was based on an anonymous source called "Deep Throat."

I am laying aside my scepticism concerning the MSM and watching these events develop. "Where there's smoke" and there's a lot of smoke.

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To thine own self be true.

A lot of smoke has been produced over many decades, most of it has been proved to be caused by flatulence.

Oh Trump probably has many skeletons in the closet. My issue is with the timing and after the inauguration the screams of cover up no doubt will start. Apparently these scandals have been known for years, why now.

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control himself. 0bama was bought & paid for and behaved himself. Not so with Trump who doesn't know what he's going to do and is unpredictable. It's an attempted coup-in-progress.

Pence is preferred.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

riverlover's picture

Things should start moving soon. Who is next in line now? Shudder.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

TheOtherMaven's picture

and we all saw how hard they tried.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

He appears very reasonable and intelligent. Notwithstanding his policies, I can see why people or the PTB would like him.

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dfarrah

and has that 1950's patriarchal appearance. I worry much more about Pence than Trump.

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elections, The UK in the spotlight at the moment, the US has been for decades.

An undercover investigation by Al Jazeera showed Mr Masot discussing how to “take down” pro-Palestinian MPs, including the Conservative foreign minister Sir Alan Duncan.

Students and campaigners told a reporter posing as a pro-Israel activist they had been given funding and support from Israel’s embassy in London to counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/israel-embassy-scandal-sha...

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MPs to be eliminated from office. It's an outrage and I hope that the BDS movement benefits from this report.

I wonder how much of the $Billions the USA gives to Israel each year comes back home to finance Israeli interests here in the USA.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

approval system.

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foreign country. Other groups that lobby for another country are required, aren't they?

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

OzoneTom's picture

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

They're part of the Grand Alliance of Good (as opposed to the Axis of Evil). So of course, everything they do is fine. The same way everything the DNC does is fine, because Republicans are Evil.

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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

MarilynW's picture

and many Americans are looking for ways to have him impeached one way or another.

Marcy Wheeler is investigating this, she is not dismissing it out of hand. I think it would be wise to follow her lead.

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To thine own self be true.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/01/11/the-democrats-newfound-love-for-ru...

First, note that this is not the complete dossier. There are references to reports that are not included with this dump. That means, even assuming the provenance on all else is solid, this is a cherry picked version of what the former MI6 consultant reported to Hillary.

Second, ask yourself why Hillary didn’t leak this dossier during the election (besides sharing the contents of it with David Corn). I don’t know the answer to that, but I’d sure like to know it (and I’ve got some theories that don’t raise my confidence about the dossier generally).

Third, as a number of people have noted, there are errors in this report, down to the spelling of Alfa Bank. That’s not itself discrediting, but it should caution people not to take this as finished intelligence.

It goes on, none of that report is above serious reproach and doubt

The MSM has no doubts in general.

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whether we as a democratic society want our candidates to engage in this kind of behavior- paying spooks to dig up whatever they can on their opponent and presumably great cost. I understand it's SOP, but I think we should discuss this openly in the context of whether this is how we want our political system to operate.

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have so successfully convoluted truth, reality, and democracy that I don't know what to believe about anything anymore. Nothing is too corrupt or depraved to be denied.

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

terriertribe's picture

It was broken by real journalists doing their jobs, not just printing government and corporate press releases and uncritically repeating rumors and what other commentators said. Most of the MSM at the time was going along with Nixon's line of "nothing there there" until the Post (it was a real newspaper then) forced the issue and others got on board.

I think perhaps you misunderstand Greenwald. I don't think he means we should simply ignore any information coming from anonymous sources, for as you correctly point out, he himself depends on them, but rather to ignore or at least be wary of assertions that can't be verified. We see a lot of these in the press, and many of them seem to come from "anonymous sources."

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Now interviewing signature candidates. Apply within.

of the press. These are serious charges and require serious proof, which has not been forthcoming.

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all fully dossiered up courtesy of our very own spooks and their anonymous sources. I do not doubt that there is a second dossier on Trump with a third in the works to follow; as many as it takes to produce the desired result.

Fool me once, fool me again. Why learn from our previous errors? The fear and hyperventilation around the idea of a Trump Presidency, together with an equally freaked out MSM pounding the Russia drum, has us ready to make another unsupported leap in to an abyss.

We, the American public, are being played. Again.

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Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes

true or false doesn't seem to matter.

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They didn't listen. Perhaps this was due to some defect in my delivery, but very few people there seem to see the similarity between what is happening now and what happened back then with Iraq.

I remember, though. You might say that the Iraq War was one of my formative political experiences. The war and its aftermath were occurring at exactly the time I was becoming politically aware, and so it has colored my view of the world and of politics ever since.

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dervish's picture

Their disease might be terminal.

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"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."

the media was not like it is nowadays. And Greenwald is the rare reporter nowadays.

And it kind of begs the question, why didn't all of these allegations about Trump come out earlier? You think the Clinton's, with their worldwide connections, couldn't have dug up plenty of dirt on Trump to dish during the election?

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dfarrah

Marcey Wheeler at Emptywheel, why didn't they use it? Perhaps they had serious doubts as well as to its veracity.

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Then again, maybe HRC thought she had everything so locked up, she didn't need to use it. But the Clintons aren't known for their lack of competitiveness......and HRC certainly didn't hold back on BO or Bernie.

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dfarrah

The dossier is the center piece of "the story" but now:

1) The President, Vice-President, and the President-Elect were briefed with a two-page summary of the contents of this dossier.

2) John McCain ran across this dossier and forwarded the dossier (with these contents) to Comey.

The contents (and the dossier, itself) was known about for months in the IC. The increasingly rapid circulation of the dossier and the summary IS the story.

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dervish's picture

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"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."

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MsGrin's picture

I think they honestly thought the pussy-grabbing audio was going to take him down.

I know they were working hard on getting the staff of The Apprentice to come forward with what they heard on set, but law suits were threatened and no one caved.

Here was the Brock/CTR offer: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/09/15/pro-cl...

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'What we are left with is an agency mandated to ensure transparency and disclosure that is actually working to keep the public in the dark' - Ann M. Ravel, former FEC member

MarilynW's picture

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/spy-who-wrote-trump-russia-m...

by David Corn Washington Bureau chief of Mother Jones (formerly from The Nation) interviewed the source. He was on CBC radio here in Canada this morning.
(A very convincing interview.) The following is from yesterday:

Last fall, a week before the election, I broke the story that a former Western counterintelligence official had sent memos to the FBI with troubling allegations related to Donald Trump. The memos noted that this spy's sources had provided him with information indicating that Russian intelligence had mounted a yearslong operation to co-opt or cultivate Trump and had gathered secret compromising material on Trump. They also alleged that Trump and his inner circle had accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin. These memos caused a media and political firestorm this week when CNN reported that President Barack Obama and Trump had been told about their existence, as part of briefings on the intelligence community's assessment that Russia hacked political targets during the 2016 campaign to help Trump become president. For my story in October, I spoke with the former spy who wrote these memos, under the condition that I not name him or reveal his nationality or the spy service where he had worked for nearly two decades, mostly on Russian matters.

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To thine own self be true.

was a smart and ethical reporter. Were my critical thinking skills malfunctioning or did he simply forfeit his integrity at some point for cash? Given his mendacious water carrying for Clinton in this election, I don't trust a word the man says or writes.

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It might be a case of vulgar tribalism, or it might be that he perceives some political advantage in siding with the Deep State to stop Trump. If it is the latter, I cannot help but think that he really hasn't fully considered the consequences of forming an alliance with the Deep State. These are not nice people. I don't like Trump at all, but I don't like the CIA/NSA/FBI/ONI/etc. either. As far as I'm concerned, both of these groups need to go, but if Trump succeeds in breaking the power of the Deep State, then that won't be a bad thing. What will be a bad thing is whatever Trump replaces it with, and that it had to be Trump that did it.

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your assessment appears to paint him as more craven or plain stupid than mine. ANd in the end, isn't money what Corn has to gain from aligning with the "deep state"? I agree with you.

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Well, once he forfeited his integrity for Monsanto, I quit trusting him and Mother Jones completely some time ago. Another sad loss among a number of once-respected information sources...

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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.

To open up relations with Russia. To seek common ground. So what? He's made no secret of it. How is this in any way treasonous? Who indeed has declared that Russia must be regarded as an enemy of the USA -- and why? Has this hostility been writ in stone somewhere?

And who the fuck cares about Trump's alleged sex games in Moscow, even if they did occur -- which in itself is doubtful. Good grief, Americans can be such prudes -- all the while repeating every salacious story they hear, and oggling Kim Kardashian's barely concealed behind.

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native

Steven D's picture

at c99 is duly noted. Clearly, we have been lax in our analysis of these reports and dossiers and whatever else has been going on in Trumplandia.

But, if I may ask a question, what is bothersome about President elect Trump's adviser, Michael Flynn, Trump's named selection to be his national security adviser, and Obama's former head of the DNI, contacting or being contacted by the Russian ambassador (not Putin) on a day when Obama was taking aggressive and, to my mind, excessive action to ramp up conflict between Russia and the United States?

The three sources stressed to Reuters that they did not know who initiated the five calls between Flynn, a former three-star Army general who headed the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency under Obama, and Kislyak. Nor did they know the contents of the conversations, and declined to say how they learned of them.

One source said there was nothing intrinsically odd or wrong about a Russian diplomat speaking to a member of Trump's team following the U.S. announcement. Moscow, the source added, probably would want to have some sense of what Trump's team thought about the measures.

Contacts, btw, that were revealed to the media by an anonymous source whose revelations clearly show they were obtained by the use of "sources and methods" of intelligence gathering (likely the NSA taps or "hacks"). The obvious disclosure of such "sources and methods have been used, paradoxically, by the US intelligence services to justify not releasing any substantial proof of the allegations that Russia "hacked" the email accounts of the DNC and John Podesta and gave them to its "co-conspirator/Russian agent" Julian Assange and his organization, Wikileaks in order to influence the election.

What makes this fight so tricky is that the CIA’s best evidence really might be information that it can’t release publicly without compromising valuable sources of future intelligence.

Trump made no secret that he wanted better relations with Russia during the election campaign. Obama, after using the "Red Phone" connection to the Kremlin, a communication that threatened Putin with "armed conflict" over possible cyber attacks by Russia, merely because Wikileaks continued to release documents from 2015 and early 2016, (a story leaked to NBC by an senior administration official). Obama then followed that threat up post-election (despite admitting that Russia did not "hack" or harm the integrity of the voting process on election day) with these high level diplomatic sanctions and nine months of massive military training exercises on Russia's borders, coincidentally timed during the same week this alleged Trump/Russia dossier (and now your claimed second dossier) alleging Trump's "treasonous" connections and ties to with Russia (and the possibility that he was compromised by Russian spy agencies.

To me, all this suggests a lame duck President who is pulling out all the stops to de-legitimize Trump's electoral victory on the eve a transition to a new Presidential administration. Trump, as President-elect, holds views antithetical to those of the Obama administration, GOP and Democratic party neocons, the Pentagon and the US intelligence services regarding US-Russian relations and the conflict in Syria.

Moscow said the two men discussed combining efforts in the fight against terrorism, talked about "a settlement for the crisis in Syria" and agreed that their aides would begin working on a face-to-face meeting between them.

Trump's office later said that Putin had called to "offer his congratulations" and that they had discussed shared threats and challenges, "strategic economic issues" and the long-term relationship between the two nations. [...]

Those views put Trump at odds with many GOP defense hawks, who have praised his promise to increase military spending but are uniformly suspicious of Moscow and have denounced Russian actions in Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Syria. The offer of cooperation could also immerse Trump in a deep controversy with the Pentagon, where military and civilian leaders have strongly opposed collaboration with Russia, particularly in Syria.

U.S. intelligence officials have also expressed concern, noting that the Kremlin is believed to have been involved with hacking the email accounts of prominent Democrats, in hopes of injecting chaos in the U.S. electoral process and perhaps swaying the outcome of the vote.

I'm all for March Wheeler looking deeper into this, as I am no fan of Trump, his policies (other than a lessening of our current renewed cold war approach to Russia), but to date I've seen nothing to change my mind that these are trumped up charges and part of a deliberate smear campaign suspiciously timed to distract and divide Americans further, and advance the interests of the MIC and it's neocon supporters in and out of Congress. They bet heavily on Clinton and lost. Yet supposedly this "oppo research" was available to Clinton prior to the election and she did not choose to use it. Nor did the first media outlets who were offered this "dossier" for publication choose to do so, including the NY Times.

In a brief interview in the Times newsroom on Tuesday evening, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said the paper would not publish the document because the allegations were “totally unsubstantiated.”

“We, like others, investigated the allegations and haven’t corroborated them, and we felt we’re not in the business of publishing things we can’t stand by,” Mr. Baquet said. [...]

Immediately after BuzzFeed’s publication, some reporters volunteered that they, too, had received copies of the report. “Raise your hand if you too were approached with this story,” Julia Ioffe, a journalist who has written extensively on Russia, wrote on Twitter, adding that she had not reported on the information in the document “because it was impossible to verify.”

Other organizations and outlets given the dossier refused to publish it, including the Brookings Institution's blog Lawfare, hardly a Trump friendly outfit. The Baltimore Sun, in perhaps the strongest language to date, condemned the publication by Buzzfeed as harmful to all journalists and professional media outlets:

In crossing one of the few lines left for mainstream news outlets, a demand for some level of verification, BuzzFeed could not have given Trump better ammunition with which to vilify the press as dishonest, biased and all the other claims he makes in trying to inoculate himself against valid criticism. [...]

The word “dossier” has been used to describe it. But that’s as phony as the language Smith used to try and wrap his site’s reckless click-chasing in the mantle of journalism.

If BuzzFeed was really doing anything approaching journalism in trying to confirm the information it published, it would have known that the “dossier” had been available to other journalists and they passed on it because they could not confirm. [...]

Thanks to BuzzFeed, all of us in the press are diminished.

Worse, instead of verified information they can trust, citizens get more salacious rumor from the Web and rancor from the president-elect.

I assume you approve of the actions of Buzzfeed, and the dissemination of this unverified information by a an alleged former (or perhaps current) British intelligence officer (MI6), Christopher Steele. A man the Telegraph is now saying has cast a shadow on the reputation of MI6.

For the past eight years [9-11 Grosvenor Gardens in London] has been the headquarters of Orbis Business Intelligence, where one of the desks is occupied by Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer who compiled a toxic dossier on Donald Trump that now threatens Mr Trump’s relationship with Britain, Russia, and the US intelligence services.

For more than a year, Mr Steele, a Cambridge-educated father-of-four, has worked in the shadows, building up intelligence from sources in Russia on Mr Trump’s dealings with the country after being hired by anti-Trump Republicans and then Democrats to find mud and make it stick.

More worryingly, he has also dragged MI6 into the growing row, with Russia claiming he is still working for his former employer. [...]

... Mr Steele was described by one source as a medium-ranked officer of middling ability, who spent most of his 20-year MI6 career on the Russia desk. [...]

By 2009 he had founded Orbis with Christopher Burrows, another MI6 retiree, offering clients access to a “high–level source network with a sophisticated investigative capability”.

So it was to Orbis that Jeb Bush, one of Mr Trump’s opponents in the Republican presidential primaries, reportedly turned when he wanted to find material that would damage the billionaire businessman.

Associates of Mr Bush hired FusionGPS, a Washington DC-based political research firm, which in turn hired Orbis in December 2015. When Mr Trump became the presumptive nominee, the Republicans ended the deal with FusionGPS, but Democratic supporters of Hillary Clinton stepped in and continued funding Mr Steele’s research.

By May last year journalists in Washington were already beginning to hear rumours about the dossier, and by October its existence, and the role of a “former spy” were being written about in US publications.

People hired to find dirt on other people for use in political campaigns usually manage to find something, no matter how far-fetched or implausible. That's the purpose of oppo research. It doesn't have to be verifiable or even truthful, it merely needs to be damaging. Clinton's team mentioned the thinly sourced 35 page "dossier" to favored reporters such as David Corn in October, but even they and he refused to publish its contents, though they did use its existence to attack Director Comey of the FBI and its investigations of the Clintons.

So forgive my naivete, and my failure to jump on board the Trump's a traitor bandwagon, despite my distaste and disgust over his impending inauguration. I haven't seen much of anything to substantiate the charges in Christopher's Steele's document, and apparently neiter have many, many reputable journalists. Yet, here we are, days before Trump becomes President, discussing this scandal, one which doesn't have much "there there". It's a lot of noise, to date, but not much else. Nonetheless, its mere existence has been used to justify increased conflict with Russia, investigations of Trump by Republicans and democrats alike, and more anonymously sourced stories that say little other than "trust us." If the shoe was on the other foot, and this dossier (or one similarly outrageous in its allegations) was being used to attack to President-elect Hillary Clinton, would you feel the same and express the same concerns about her impending Presidency that you are posting here about Trump's?

Please, feel free to take your time and answer honestly.

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

Obama sets a new list of sanctions days before the Trump inauguration. Trump's choice for national security adviser had 5 calls with the Russian ambassador the day they were announced. Putin, apparently against the advice of his security people, decides not to retaliate.

You have a problem with this? Look, I have as many problems with Trump as anybody at TOP. But the idea that we should have a new cold war, or worse, with Russia so that Hillary can sooth her feelings by persuading herself she didn't lose, the election was stolen, is not on my agenda.

Suppose the Russians hacked the DNC and RNC (Hell, we hacked Merkel.) and didn't release either. Maybe Assange is telling the truth and got the emails from a leaker.

In any case, why would the Russians have known such information would tilt the election? Clinton did a lot better in the areas where people sit around reading Wikileaks.

The whole plot doesn't have enough coherence to make a made for TV thriller.

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MsGrin's picture

And where there has been exactly ZERO evidence is the theory that the Russian hacking is what Assange received.

Those of us who were attempting to make sense of what was going down in real time were aware of the Fancy Bear and (I always forget the name of the second bear...) in the spring who hacked DNC.

But info about Wikileaks has been 'leaked' to one degree or another about the source of their leaks, and it does not appear to point to the above 'bears.' Why, for instance, did Assange, himself, put out a monetary offer on information regarding the death of Seth Rich and some feel come perilously close to perhaps revealing the name of a source? http://www.newsweek.com/seth-rich-murder-dnc-hack-julian-assange-hillary...

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'What we are left with is an agency mandated to ensure transparency and disclosure that is actually working to keep the public in the dark' - Ann M. Ravel, former FEC member

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

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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

"Pretty Helpful"? CSTS, you have a gift for understatement at times. I would have said "Incredibly Bloody Important" myself. A former British ambassador has met the leaker, and claims he has ZERO ties to Russia, and NONE of the American MSM will interview him? Thank you for this, CSTS! Kinda' puts everything in perspective. I intend to forward a link to all the people I know that are drinking that Rooshin Kool-aid.

Which I guess brings us back to the original point of this essay. Let's see, the same 3-letter agencies that basically invented the Rooshin thing out of whole cloth, can now be safely trusted to leak a completely factual, trustworthy, politically-damaging salacious rumor? Did I get that right? I'd like some proof too, please.

This level of anti-President-elect hysteria was not present for either the first or second swearings-in of President Barack Obama.

Sure, Trump gave him a lot of grief with that birther BS, but I think I resent Obama trying to repay him for that annoyance in a way that could get us all barbecued. Or, if not at ground zero, frozen. Does the neoliberal / neocon agenda just attract psychopaths, or create them? Just wondering.

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"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

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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

mimi's picture

is that just for me watching it from Germany or is it the same for viewers in the US?

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travelerxxx's picture

Might be you or where you are.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

among other things, he says that he knows the man who picked up the leaked material and that he was with him just before he did it. He doesn't know who the leaker is, but he has what you might call circumstantial corroborative evidence that it was a leak rather than a hack. It's not proof, but it's indicative that something was actually going on. And his friend did announce that it was a leak and that he knew who leaked it, and the mainstream press did not interview him or ask him any questions.

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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

US Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims

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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

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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

There was a lot of smoke regarding Clinton's Whitewater and Saddam's WMD's.

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MarilynW's picture

Not from the dreaded MSM, from David Corn formerly of The Nation, now Mother Jones.

Last fall, a week before the election, I broke the story that a former Western counterintelligence official had sent memos to the FBI with troubling allegations related to Donald Trump. The memos noted that this spy's sources had provided him with information indicating that Russian intelligence had mounted a yearslong operation to co-opt or cultivate Trump and had gathered secret compromising material on Trump. They also alleged that Trump and his inner circle had accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin. These memos caused a media and political firestorm this week when CNN reported that President Barack Obama and Trump had been told about their existence, as part of briefings on the intelligence community's assessment that Russia hacked political targets during the 2016 campaign to help Trump become president. For my story in October, I spoke with the former spy who wrote these memos, under the condition that I not name him or reveal his nationality or the spy service where he had worked for nearly two decades, mostly on Russian matters.

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To thine own self be true.

Mother Jones' Legacy Is Haunting Mother Jones as the Magazine Embraces Neoliberalism

MSNBC's David Corn on Trump's Ties To Organized Crime, Mafia, Jimmy Hoffa Murder

If I have to explain the significance of these two articles then you won't believe me anyway.

I believe Taibbi.

The secret services either know far more than they're letting on, or they're using all this fluff and nonsense to try to sell the public on a conspiracy story they themselves can't quite prove. Either possibility is crazy to contemplate.
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divineorder's picture

Meanwhile, Ynet in Israel is reporting that Israeli intelligence officials are deciding not to share intelligence with the incoming Trump administration. The report indicates they came to this conclusion after a recent meeting with American intelligence officials, who told them the Russians have "leverages of pressure" to use against Trump.

This is an extraordinary story. If our intelligence community really believes this, then playtime is over.

No more Clapper-style hedging or waffling. If Israel gets to hear why they think Trump is compromised, how is the American public not also so entitled?

But if all they have are unverifiable rumors, they can't do this, not even to Donald Trump.

The only solution is an immediate unveiling of all the facts and an urgent public investigation. A half-assed whispering campaign a week and a half from a Trump presidency, with BuzzFeed at the center of the action, isn't going to cut it. We need to know what the likes of Clapper and Comey know, and we need it all now, before it's too late.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-russia-story-reaches-a...

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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

over the years there have been a lot of bodies turning up around the Clintons and their interests, and I don't mean the innocent civilians they bombed the crap out of in various countries. Why don't I call them murderers, mafiosos, etc.? Because I don't have proof. There's plenty of smoke, though!

Can you imagine the outcry if we treated Hillary et al the same way Trump is being treated?

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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

there is a direct link between partisanship and an inability to think logically. That you confuse wanting to see proof with "ignoring anonymous sources" is where you lose the plot. Citing Greenwald only confirms this assessment. You will note- in your own citation- that Greenwald investigated the source and only reported on Snowden once he was able to confirm the authenticity of his claims and the evidence he brought forth. And Greenwald's assessment of that evidence has been proven to be true. That is exactly what this diary calls for. I frankly don't understand where your reading that the diary is calling for ignoring evidence/anonymous sources comes from.

Deep Throat was anonymous to the public, but was vetted by the WaPo. Here, news organizations vetted this "evidence" and it found unsubstantiated. The ethical thing to so was not to publish unverifiable rumors/allegations. I frankly don't understand why this eludes you.

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Where there's smoke, there may also be evil ninja creating it to blind your stinging eyes - and in this case, the facts were already established.

The whole pre-disproven claim was painfully obvious BS that the DNC heroic insider and other leaks, along with what has been otherwise released to the public, (to whom such information belongs,) to WikiLeaks were actually 'The Russians!!!' purportedly 'hacking' (the US PTB can illegally change law to 'legally' do that to literally everyone else on Earth, but they can't 'return the favour') the DNC/Clinton's servers to discredit Clinton by showing the American people what a corrupt and psychopathic person/campaign was involved and therefore 'interfered with the election' by revealing facts that the American public had a right to know about a Presidential candidate before possibly accepting her lies and being stuck with her for at least 4 potentially unsurvivable years - but the fact was that even the most blatant cheating couldn't make Her Royal Coronation happen. Not without riots, at any rate.

You can sometimes fool enough of the people enough of the time by repeating the most insane Big Lies until they accept them as fact, despite knowing differently - but it seems that the overly-well-traveled Corporate Parties pitcher has pretty much drained the well of the most susceptible.

So the Mob forming the current US government has devolved to the point of blatantly and provably lying about and threatening foreign governments, whole populations of people and their countries with nuclear obliteration and if anyone in the new administration can at least forestall Mutual Assured Destruction - because a few crazed PTB and the lackeys they cheat into government believe that they personally can survive a 'limited' nuclear 'war'-crime committed against multiple countries in order to gain totalitarian power over a world they're willing to destroy in the taking - more power to those potentially at least sane enough to admit that reality exists.

And perhaps even recognize that the governments of countries should be at least, rather than creating their own little delusion and calling it reality, dealing with and in the factual universe with the rest of us, being reasonably cooperative with each other, not with one greed/power-maddened group forcing a situation where multiple countries must begin firing warheads at each other, thereby dooming any immediately-surviving oxygen/water/food-dependent life on the planet within well under a decade due to not only radiation but global dimming, killing oxygen-producing plant-life as well as animal life, and worsening drought as well.

In reality-based studies, the facts show that nuclear explosions bring far worse and longer-lasting global dimming than do volcanic emissions and that even a small, local nuclear exchange would shut out sunlight essential to our life-support system for a decade or so, other effects including the aforementioned increase in drought... so there goes what remains of billions of years of evolution - all for greed and the world well lost.

Unlike the Dems, Trump's team may actually have enough brains to preserve their own skin by coming in out of the acid rain... We may or may not have a chance to find this out, but the American people were not given the election or choice to which they were entitled or permitted any candidate who would have dared work for the public good rather than for the destructive vampiric parasites mindlessly engaged in draining the life-blood out of them and the entire world without even having the smarts and basic connection to reality to realize that the parasite which kills off its hosts promptly becomes extinct as well.

Frankly, Hillary's Brookings promise to - immediately upon taking public office as President - bring Bibi in on 'Foreign Policy' (which is supposed to involve diplomacy and isn't supposed to mean a hostile global corporate/military takeover by whatever crooked hooks come to the mindlessly greedy) promised instant disaster as well as offering foreign control over the US government on the golden platter she expected yuuuuuge returns for - and there wasn't such a big concern voiced over that as there has been propaganda-created over any potential/actual Trump-connected contact with Putin, who is at least a lot saner than anyone that either of the US corporate Parties will allow to be produced as President, not to mention Bibi and the Likud generally.

And Obama has already been circling his chosen targets, of any countries capable of fending off conventional illegal military attacks/invasions, with missiles, so the intentions of TPTB and their lackeys are already known.

One can trust none of the above...

Edit: and this thwarting of Clinton's plot to let Bibi advise America's foreign policy - not to mention the loss of her other fabulous promises to drain American taxpayers MUCH more to provide Israel with much worse weapons that they already get annually - would explain Israel's distaste for Trump mentioned above, something which has raised my viewpoint of him at least to rock bottom.

Re-edit: just watched an interesting video above: the spy whose name and 'US ally' country cannot be mentioned will, of course, be Israeli...

And edited to add a couple of commas in the hope of adding clarity to a sentence, but it's 1:30 AM on a catastrophic-for-us weekend, so... oh, well...

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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.

terriertribe's picture

Seem to be interesting enough for some enterprising journalist to dig into. Old news, I guess. Or Fake News, since it's Something We Don't Talk About, like anything else outside the Trump Bad! universe. We've heard about all that made-up stuff, of course, but I'm still silly enough to be surprised at the number of people I know who haven't, and who poo-poo any thought of such of such a thing. "All made up!" they say. Of course, it would would also require an enterprising journalist, and the PTB have been working overtime to marginalize the few of them remaining.

The whole country seems to be rapidly devolving into [insert your favorite dystopian novel] or at least a Twilight Zone episode. I just can't decide if it's "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" or "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?"

Monsters:
[VIDEO:https://youtu.be/0Si0yS4fEp4]

Martian:
[VIDEO:https://youtu.be/5HvRz0TjmHI]

Soon, of course, if we're not careful, we'll find ourselves in the middle of "The Obsolete Man."

[VIDEO:https://youtu.be/P0zjn9OL_ag]

[editted to strike a redundant bit.]

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Now interviewing signature candidates. Apply within.

been in contact with Russians1

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Businesses and government have all kinds of intertwining ventures across countries.

The hysteria over Russia is ridiculous. And here is BO, trying his best to provoke a war with Russia.

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dfarrah

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and approved by Hillary (after appropriate donations to the Clinton Foundation). That's a documented act. Not interesting!

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of a/merging with Canadian Company by Rosatom [Ru]. As with all strategic reserves this would have had to go the DoS and money did flow to the Clinton Foundation shortly after. Getting this right is important.

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sojourns's picture

I fully expect that people will die. I'm not going to watch it, mind you; the highlights will be more that ample to disgust me.

Proof? I'd like that as well. Personally, these documents, verified or not, reflect that which I believe to be, at least in part, true.

Donald did spend time in Russia. He is stupid and arrogant enough to be careless. He's always careless and sloppy. As a matter of course, you can bet the FSB is tracking any high profile visitor such as Drumpf.

Forget the dossiers. The biggest revelation would be the contradiction between Donald and Donny Jr. Donald denies any financial or social ties with Russian politicians, while Donny jr. states that a disproportionate amount of money flowing into Turmp (heh- i like that typo) Enterprises are from Russian interests. That will eventually come out.

It's already out about what he actually owns from a recently released book, "The Art of the Donald" (paraphrased title) where the author has gotten a hold of several years of tax returns. The author was able to do that because Drumpf sued him for libel which was the mechanism for him to subpoena said returns. Turns out his empire is no empire at all. He owns one building outright in Manhattan but not the ground it sits on. He does not own his signature building, Trump Tower. The condo owners own it unit by unit. He own three golf courses which are heavily in debt and in the red. All the other golf courses are name licensing deals and partnered as it is with every other building with his name on it, also heavily indebted. His revenues have been suffering for decades since the collapse of his casino ventures, airline venture, etc., compounded by fewer reservations in his hotels since he threw his name in the presidential hat. Hardly the midas touch. Money has to be coming from somewhere. A lot of it.

Again. I'd like to see the proof along with you. I want to see it because the reputation of these 'intelligence' agencies has been built on lying about everything all of the time. Interesting how they all finally agreed that it is good evidence. Evidence is not proof. But we don't know that, right?

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"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

believe because it fits their own internal narrative/belief.

Therefore I want proof/evidence before I even go there.

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sojourns's picture

As we know, the media has been enormously successful in destroying the attention span of the general pop. I don't know about you but I am a natural born cynic. Holding advertisers suspect (I'm talking '60's television when advertising was relatively mild-- they wouldn't even name their competitors in those days -- simply us vs. product B and product C) about everything that came out of their mouths when I was 7, staying home sick from school, watching daytime television. ug.

Not enough people unafraid of their astute observations.

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"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

riverlover's picture

at least to the point of cynic. Tick, tick.

Not enough people unafraid of their astute observations.
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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

Song of the lark's picture

questions in life. Where do we come from, where are we going? Is there a God? They all come down to faith, not necessarily in the religious sense. There is no proof that can be had...enlightenment but no proof. Some causes are more just, some arguments seem more true.
Murder will out as Shakespeare said. Well, I say, Trump will out. It's going to be up to us to rally the FAITHFUL, to make as true an argument as can be made, even with un even proof. You can't impeach him until he is in office.
We can break him. He is eminently breakable. Even fuck you money and power can't stop what comes. He will destroy himself, that is his sordid history.

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at least not yet. IMO Trump's most powerful enemies are far more dangerous than he is. They are more likely to break him than we are. And if they succeed in breaking him (with or without our help) he will be replaced by their own man, Mike Pence, who will be in a much stronger position than Trump now is.

I say, leave Trump alone for the moment. Let him duke it out with the CIA and the Deep State, and see what happens. We might be surprised. When you have two enemies fighting one another, it is not the time to intervene. Better to step away, and wait until they are both weakened, before going on the offensive.

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native

Song of the lark's picture

But I still think he will do himself in one way or another.

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earthling1's picture

When he is about to make a mistake.
Some French guy.

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

TheOtherMaven's picture

Big Wheeler-Dealers", even when it's throwing good money after bad. He has a Big Name and a Big Rep, and he's very good at wasting Other People's Money. That's exactly what the banks are looking for.

They couldn't give a fart about small beans like you and me.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

sojourns's picture

ever since his 7 bankruptcies during the eighties and nineties. That is why he's borrowed heavily from China and Deutsch Bank .

Still, no they don't care about you or I except when they can profit from us.

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"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

jwa13's picture

quite some time ago --

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Pound_Bank_Note

Actually a pretty good tale - and related to his Reader with the usual S. Clemens verve and sense of the absurd --

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When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said “How well he spoke”.
When Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said “Let us march”.

jwa13's picture

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When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said “How well he spoke”.
When Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said “Let us march”.

"Trump went to Russia?"

Did you know that some of our prominent capitalists went to Russia to help them implement a capitalist system after the collapse of the USSR?

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dfarrah

Song of the lark's picture

a harsher version of our crony capitalism.

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took it from us.

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while they were at it.

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native

riverlover's picture

And the US of A holds their breath. More ganging against on FB, probably meaning that the threats and disses are Approved by Management. Scary times.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

Crider's picture

It's just a political opposition research document of dirt on Trump from the recent general election. It appears to have been ordered from a private DC company by the Anybody But Trump GOP faction in early June of last year. Later, that same company was able to resell it to the Democratic nominee. It became widely distributed. Eventually, David Corn wrote publicly about it. Senator John McCain gave a copy to the FBI. A two-page summary of the document showed up in a secret report on Russian election hacking. Then CNN reported about the document and BuzzFeed finally published the whole thing.

As a political opposition research doc, there's no reason to expect it have any journalistic veracity or legal proof. It was what it was. And there no proof that it is a CIA conspiracy. Don't forget that. I think it organically spread because there were so many copies of the thing out there. Just a matter of time. I don't feel sorry for Trump, I don't feel sorry for Russia, I don't feel sorry for Hillary, I don't feel sorry for our country -- though I will when the GOP legislative shit gets real.

I can't take it too seriously because it just like a reality TeeVee show and I would prefer more pee jokes than ridiculous moments such as Beaver Boy's nonsense:

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riverlover's picture

Not about a POTUS sending troops and munitions to 7 land wars we started? Glory be. Not. AUMF will disappear I hope, not sure that R-Congress is that brave. That was treason,

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Crider's picture

for the next four years!

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Song of the lark's picture

in the foreground. We're headed for a full scale conflagration. (A little sight pun for the wicked.)

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And LaFemista:

I demand better and so should our journalists, will they never bloody learn.

One has. Ben Swann of the CBS affiliate in Atlanta.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIyxCThxKws width:450]

Highlights:

Last year a Washington D.D. political research firm paid for by Trump's Republican rivals hired a British intelligence officer to investigate Trump's ties to Russia. When Trump became the Republican nominee, Democrats then paid for that same research.

Not one single sentence of one single claim has been proven by either the FBI or the CIA.

Strange claims of sexual behavior by Trump in Moscow apparently came from a 4chan user. It was passed to Rick Wilson who forwarded it to the CIA.

Buzzfeed them published the entire 35 emails but wrote "There is serious reson to doubt the allegations."

CNN then reported on the two-page summary of those memos.

"The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative whose past work U.S. intelligence officials consider credible."

But what CNN did not do was to explain that these claims had not been verified by anyone including the FBI or CIA, yet they were still included in a national security brief.

And I absolutely love what Ben Swann says in closing:

So what you need to know is once again, here we are talking about Donald Trump, the Russians and hacking and U.S. Intelligence.

To report on this, some of you will say about me 'well he's just a Trump supporter,' but no. As a journalist, I'm a truth supporter. and my responsibility - my charge - as it is for all journalists - is to what is true. This report by Buzzfeed which was then reported by CNN is not journalism and while mainstream outlets have been screaming about fake news for months, they now themselves are becoming the greatest purveyors of that very "fake news."

And that former British intelligence operative? He was unnamed. An anonymous source.

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MsGrin's picture

 Trump, Russia, and the Return of Scapegoating, a Timeless American Tradition
Our bipartisan tendency to blame others for our own failures will be the cause of American decline.

https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-russia-and-the-return-of-scapego...

Well worth reading.

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'What we are left with is an agency mandated to ensure transparency and disclosure that is actually working to keep the public in the dark' - Ann M. Ravel, former FEC member

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