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Why Is It So Hard for Our President to Condemn White Supremacy and Islamophobia? Because Trump's base is bigots, followed by cowards, all of them un-American liars even before Trump fell under Putin's kompromat.

Now they're just pools of spineless authoritarian jello, like Trump's diapered ass. Kendalls, pretending the Republican party doesn't have a shit tonne of racists, that it's "really" the Democrats who are the racist party...

  Just take Kendall's good word for it, or Trump's. Or a single source of propaganda run by an Australian Billionaire's brats. Or Nigel Farage's, or even the most truthful lips Trump has ever kissed, Vladimir Putin's.

After all, he saw someone almost being denied a supreme court seat because they once had a beer while in school. He wouldn't lie about that. He's not a traitor.

Which is an misunderstanding of stupidly interpreted evidence. There's no evidence of the files being transferred off the DNC servers at 22mb/s, there's evidence of the files being written at 22mb/s on July 5th.

You mean July 5th when the "hack" was alleged to have taken place? Like Pootie Poot himself downloaded files and immediately transferred them to a thumb drive for Wikileaks without bothering to spend any time analyzing what he had? Talk about stupidly analyzing evidence.

This is beating around the bush anyway. What tells anyone with two functioning brain cells is that if this was a real scenario that the government actually wanted to investigate, the first thing Mueller or the FBI would have done is subpoena the DNC servers for a proper forensic analysis. He never bothered to do so. This should bother Russiagate die hards most of all, as there could be proof of a Russian hack buried in firmware or encrypted files, just waiting to be found by an analyst. But it's never happened. Because this was never anything but a pile of Hillbot swiftboating, Mccarthyite BS from the very beginning.

• Within 24 hours of Clinton's concession speech, top officials gathered "to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up...Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."

Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak — an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.

‘ To this day, however, the intelligence agencies that released this assessment have failed to provide the American people with any actual evidence substantiating their claims about how the DNC material was obtained or by whom. Astonishingly and often overlooked, the authors of the declassified ICA themselves admit that their “judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.” ’

Seriously?

That article is preceded by a giant editorial essay basically saying:

"Hey! We only published this thing because we think it's important to ask more questions about the topic! Oh, and it turns out the article author actually misrepresented parts of the report, and the group that released the report actually had a lot reservations about publishing it!!"

The evidence that it was a Russian hack continues to be pretty overwhelming.

Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak — an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.

‘ To this day, however, the intelligence agencies that released this assessment have failed to provide the American people with any actual evidence substantiating their claims about how the DNC material was obtained or by whom. Astonishingly and often overlooked, the authors of the declassified ICA themselves admit that their “judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.” ’

to the rescue.., and if that's not enough.

Google Search for gop racist policy turned up at least three things. If these aren't enough, I can dig deeper.

First, Republicans favor voter photo ID laws, particularly in environments where the median black or Latino is far less likely to drive or have some other convenient means to travel to the local Bureau of Motor Vehicles branch to obtain an adequate ID. This is despite lack of verifiable evidence that voter fraud is more than negligible.

Second, Republicans are also fairly aggressive at redistricting to manufacture a majority in state legislatures and the House of Representatives. These lines have often been drawn in ways that dilute the vote of majority-minority neighborhoods.

Third, Republicans have been using race-baiting dog whistles used by Lee Atwater and others to win votes.

couple of family member illnesses hit in 2006. Then the 2008 crash wiped me out when I started getting back on my feet. By the time the Affordable Care Act's protections kicked in my career and finances were pretty well shot. Right around the time I recovered from that kid got to be college age. Of course nothing saved (even though I made 2x median income and lived like crap driving a 20 year old car). Suddenly had $20k+/year in school bills. I could borrow, but what's the point? They're gauranteed loans. I can never default. They'll just garnish my wages and toss me in jail if I can't/don't pay.

The American working class got shafted since Clinton. The double whammy of Clinton Democrats and the GOP both siding with mega corporations against me left me screwed. H1-Bs flooded the market and my wages plummeted. I think the Berniecrats will eventually fix it, but I'm pretty sure I'll be dead by then.

States like Texas, Georgia, etc have been closing polling places in minority neighborhoods.

So all the more important to get line length info so you can go when it's at a lull...

However fewer places alone does not mean they do not have multiple choices still. For instance, from an article on one of the worse reductions (in Arizona):

Phoenixâ(TM)s Maricopa County, the largest in the state, reduced the number of polling places by 70 percent from 2012 to 2016, from 200 to just 60.

I don't know if you know numbers at all, but 60 is quite a lot larger than 1. Since the post I was responding to was all about single verses multiple polling locations, I'm afraid all we can infer is that you don't know that 60 is larger than 1.... that would match with the typical liberal failure to understand numbers generally.

It's not like Republicans have been hiding their voter suppression efforts.

It's always amusing to me when a liberal fascist such as yourself complains about election fraud on one hand and then turns right back around and attempts to block anything that contributes to election integrity.

If you really cared you would go to one of the counties with reduced polling stations and help transport people to the polls with the shortest lines. But I am pretty sure come Nov 2 you will be sitting on your ass whining on Slashdot instead. Oh I will be also, but I don't make any pretense to care about how counties choose to manage polling locations since I don't like to comment without having so depth to my understanding, unlike your knee-jerk reactionary posts based on your own non-understanding of complex issues...

For a plethora of reasons that you apparently don't understand a digital snapshot is *way better than working on the machine.

There's a plethora of reasons why you shouldn't lecture people about not understanding something when you don't bother to read, as the false dichotomy of "use CrowdStrike image" or "FBI moves servers to their office" was addressed the first time. Of course the FBI would use images of the server for analysis - but images they they created, by using agents with functioning legs to go to the server while it's powered on.

Crowdstrike isn't some fly by night outfit.

Yeah.

The CrowdStrike report, released in December, asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine's war with Russian-backed separatists.

But the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) told VOA that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. IISS disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. Ukraine's Ministry of Defense also has claimed combat losses and hacking never happened.

They are.

The FBI has never examined the DNC's computer servers - an omission that is beyond preposterous. It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC's employ. Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as vigorously anti-Russian. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which suffers the same prejudice. Problems such as this are many.

So you're relying on a hack firm that is massively biased, both for being rabidly anti-Russian and for being hired by the DNC, which at the same time was one and the same Hillary's campaign. A campaign that knew the Uranium One deal was a liability for her, one that also ensnared John Podesta, Hillary's campaign manager. So it was time for some good old fashioned Swiftboating, and to project Hillary's Russian problems onto her opponent. As further proven by the Hillary campaign paying for the Steele Dossier - colluding with foreign intelligence agents. Something Mueller is equally uninterested in looking at as he is in analyzing the DNC servers.

To be fair to Trump, he probably doesn't like those people and doesn't agree with them,

That's being kind to Trump, and unfair to America. The Trump family has a rich history of white supremacy, and ignoring it is doing yourself and the nation a disservice.

Trump probably doesn't like those people, but he probably does agree with them. That's how he can describe Nazis as "fine people" without choking on his tongue.

Sweeden is one of the country where the nordic model of prostitution was developed (hence the "nordic" moniker).
It's not completely legal as in some other European countries (DE, CH, NL, etc.)

Although the prostitutes themselves aren't considered criminals, every one around them is (e.g.: Amnesty mentions land lord being harassed for "pimping" if one of their rentee happens to work in prostitution). As such in nordic countries, according to findings of Amnesty, prostitute tend to try to keep hidden, and they probably prefer anonymous transaction (so mainly cash). (I might suspect that any financial intermediate accepting to collaborate with prostitutes could be similarly harassed)

But in other European countries (again, like Germany, Switzerland, Netherland, etc.) it's just a legitimate job like any other with everything that entails with it (taxation, social security and welfare, ...)
Most sex workers should be easily able charge your debit/credit cards (there was a salon around making street advertisement that they've introduced even bitcoins. - Yes here around making ads for a sex salon is just as normal as advertisements for any other business, as long as the practical visuals aren't indecent).
as long as they give you the necessary VAT-receipt slip.

I see that without any sense of irony whenever I go against the reigning russiantroll-climate I'm modded as troll.
Here's a good overview of the DNC hack https://www.thenation.com/arti...

The political documents walked out. They did not get moved out by a "network".
"Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak" (Aug 9, 2017)
https://www.thenation.com/arti...
"... demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive).”"

I'm going to assume you're not a moron and try to explain.

The fundamental, most basic cornerstone of a democratic government is the right to vote. (Yes, I know we're technically a republic.) Everyone has a constitutional right to vote. When you put barriers in place, no matter how innocuous they may seem, you will inadvertently deny people their constitutional right to vote. You will deny them their ability to participate in self-government, which is the cornerstone of freedom.

Voter impersonation does not rise to the level of concern that we should be denying people their right to vote by placing barriers up that don't accomplish their stated goal. I live in Wisconsin, and here are some of the things that happened when we implemented voter ID:

90 Year Old Iwo Jima Vet denied the right to vote.

When he presented his veterans administration card with his picture on it, he was told that the card was not listed as 'acceptable' proof of his identity. He responded: 'You mean veterans can't vote?'

A birth certificate with a typo on it causes a man to not be given a photo ID so he can't vote.
People of all races, all walks of life turned away from the polls.

And for what? For what possible purpose did we implement a voter ID law in Wisconsin?

Attorney General Brad Schimel suggests Donald Trump won Wisconsin because of the state's voter ID law

That's why. Partisan. Fucking. Politics. Not because voter impersonation is an issue. Because some evil asshats decided that getting their people elected was more important than some people's constitutional rights and freedoms.

And for the record, I feel the same way about gerrymandering and denying felons the right to vote. None of these things are helping voters participate in democracy, and they're not solving any issues that are remotely of the scale that it would make it necessary to put these barriers in place.

It's shocking to me how undemocratic we've become (or we've always been, but it's really visible now) as a country, and I think it's well past time to undo all of this stupidity. And make federal voting day a national holiday with a mandatory half day off for everyone. If you really want to tackle voter impersonation, that's an easy way to do it. With a guaranteed half day off, there should be no reason people can't get to the polls. And the more people who vote, the less viable voter impersonation becomes. It's already a non-issue, but something like 90% voter participation would absolutely put a stake in it.

Chattanooga is a decent citation.

WiFi is great for in the house and on the porch, but as an uplink to an ISP, it sucks whether it's public or private. It can be good, but only if you're willing to do more engineering than just plugging the AP in. Unfortunately, no ISP, public or private, seems willing to work with anything more than that.That's why I am talking about broadband rather than WiFi. If you're talking about blanketing an area in wifi so everyone's laptop just works, the problem is the PRIVATE vendors invariably painting a far too rosy picture of the range and under-specifying the number of APs needed to actually provide reliable coverage.

Uber is not even the same market as public transportation. Many people would go (more) broke taking uber to work daily. The last time I needed a cab, coming out of the public mass transit station, my choice was call an Uber, or take one of the regulated cabs already there waiting for me to get in, and costing the same amount.

Amtrack is only semi-public and only exists because private passenger rail services went belly up. So if you want to compare them to the private option, I would have to say it's literally better than nothing.

By some measures, the U.S. government is the most violent government in the world. The US Has Military Bases in 80 Countries. All of Them Must Close.

Google has become EXTREMELY abusive, in some areas.

By some measures, the U.S. government is the most violent government in the world. The US Has Military Bases in 80 Countries. All of Them Must Close.

Most violent? Are you kinding me? Without US policing around the world, other countries will have much more wars with each other. You can dislike US superpower, but you can't deny that the superpower bring peace to the world.

Google has become EXTREMELY abusive, in some areas.

By some measures, the U.S. government is the most violent government in the world. The US Has Military Bases in 80 Countries. All of Them Must Close.

Yes, even this article, which takes a fairly critical view of the deal Amazon has with the USPS, indicates that package delivery is a critical part of keeping the USPS afloat:
https://www.thenation.com/arti...

The biggest issue appears to be that infrastructure changes necessary for handling a much higher percentage of packages have not been made. That seems like a USPS duty - not Amazon.

AC the data walked out. It was a person who understood internal US domestic politics and who had access to data the media had to see.
"A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack" (Aug 9, 2017)
https://www.thenation.com/arti...

It was Seth Rich, a bernie-bro, and he paid for his truth-telling already.

https://www.thenation.com/arti...

Did I mention Abu Ghraib? What is it with Red Herring fallacies that makes you keep using them?

The conversation is about waterboarding. There was a great deal of waterboarding at Abu Ghraib and in fact, the Abu Ghraib story was how a lot of Americans learned about waterboarding in the first place.

https://www.thenation.com/arti...

You know very well that's not a "red herring". You make the mistake of thinking that debating techniques that work over at /TheDonald will work in the real world. You're in for a surprise.

Venezuela is slouching into becoming a failed and bankrupt state.

Actually, they've tripled their GDP while lifting millions of people out of generational poverty. They also have an ideal climate for agriculture - if they wouldn't have to out-subsidize American crops dumped into the market below the cost of production.

It's the murder capital of the Western Hemisphere.

It's #3, after Honduras (thanks Hillary, thanks Obama!) and El Salvador.

It's a complete shithole.

All the shit is due to western imperialists in the U.S. and rich/bourgeois traitors in Venezuela.

Venezuela, as a basically Communist country

You wouldn't know communism if zombie Stalin and Castro took turns kicking you in the balls. Venezuela's economy is still overwhelmingly capitalist - what was socialized was the oil industry. But that's interfering with the god-given right (and the petrodollar) to have profits sent to colonialist shareholders in other countries.

of course, that the Democrats tend to put forth foreign policy much more friendly to the rest of the world

Bullshit. Prove it.

The New York Times Accurately Portrays Hillary Clinton as an Unrepentant Warmonger
Why the election of Hillary Clinton promises a more dangerous world
Good Riddance to Warmonger Hillary Clinton

From, of all places, The Nation:

Russiagate or Intelgate?

The publication of the Republican House Committee memo and reports of other documents increasingly suggest not only a “Russiagate” without Russia but also something darker: The “collusion” may not have been in the White House or the Kremlin.

Was Russiagate produced by the primary leaders of the US intelligence community, not just the FBI? If so, it is the most perilous political scandal in modern American history, and the most detrimental to American democracy. ...

If Russiagate involved collusion among US intelligence agencies, as now seems likely, why was it undertaken? There are various possibilities. Out of loathing for Trump? Out of institutional opposition to his promise of better relations—“cooperation”—with Russia? Or out of personal ambition? ...

What was President Obama’s role in any of this? Or to resort to the Watergate question: What did he know and when did he know it? And what did he do? The same questions would need to be asked about his White House aides and other appointees. Whatever the full answers, there is no doubt that Obama acted on the Russiagate allegations. He cited them for the sanctions he imposed on Russia in December 2016 ...

With all of this in mind, and assuming Trump knew most of it, did he really have any choice in firing FBI Director Comey, for which he is now unfairly being investigated by Mueller? ...

Listening almost daily to the legion of former US intel officers condemn Russiagate skeptics ever more loudly and persistently in the media, we may wonder if they are increasingly fearful it will become known that Russiagate was mostly Intelgate. For that we will need a new bipartisan Senate Church Committee of the 1970s, which investigated and exposed misdeeds by US intelligence agencies and which led to important reforms that are no longer the preventive measures against abuses of power they were intended to be. (Ideally, everyone involved would be granted amnesty for recent misdeeds, ending all talk of “jail time,” on the condition they now testify truthfully.) But such an inclusive investigation of Intelgate would require the support of Democratic members of Congress, which no longer seems possible.

Wow. The Democrats have lost The Nation.

Ouch.

PopeRatzo most upset.

When Fascism comes to America ... it will still kill FAR MORE people for political gain than the left you hate

The regulations don't deal with the core destructive and problem-causing issues which are also massively profitable. All regulations which have any teeth are walked back by politicians. See "How Wall Street defanged Dodd Frank". Now, Dodd-Frank was a joke for a lot of reasons, but the big reason was its intentional complexity and incompleteness and its unwillingness to deal with core issues. But even the pieces of Dodd-Frank that had small teeth were defanged.

Back in 2008, the big issue was lenders not having 'skin in the game' - they could make loans and shed all repayment risk when they sold off the loan to investors or the government. It's a license to print money and a perverse incentive to create bad debt. If you google "QRM safe harbor and risk retention", you'll get some history (QRM = qualified residential mortgage). There was an attempt to make lenders retain some small portion of repayment risk, instead of the government taking all of it, but that was walked back, as the above search will tell you.

The current Wall Street economic model is "privatize the profits and socialize the losses." Not a thing was done to address that. "Too big to fail" was never addressed - the biggest banks are even bigger today than in 2008 ("In the US, since the crisis, the six largest US banks now control nearly 70 per cent of all the assets in the US financial system, having increased around 40 per cent (against overall asset growth of only 8 per cent). JP Morgan, the largest US bank, has over $2.4 trillion in assets, larger than most countries." -- The Independent)

So. Instead the regulations are along these lines: Instead of just outlawing robbing people, they outlaw robbing people at 12 Noon. The rest of the day is fine. But then they add, 'well you can't rob people at 3 PM either'. And so on. They refuse to deal with the core issues (i.e. "you can't rob people"), instead nibbling ineffectually around the edges.

"Complexity breeds loopholes." That's the point of complex regulations - to breed loopholes. It's fantastic because it keeps competitors out of the business, because you need vast legal and accounting departments to stay abreast of the regulations. And it does little to stop the destructive behavior.

Here is evidence that sometimes government does things better than private industry: Chattanooga Was a Typical Postindustrial City. Then It Began Offering Municipal Broadband.

Versus when others chose to divest portfolios: Harvard University activists were an early proponent of divesting from companies associated with fossil fuels, but the wheels of change moved so slowly, the legendary portfolio actually lost money from fallling oil prices before the pressure to sell off these assets reached a crescendo.

After finally winning the divestment prompted the sell off of petroleum and coal assets at a time of market downturn.

Absolutely. But the economic version of natural selection still applies... if he doesn't do it, his company will tank and another will take over. So the choice is, "Do we push this problem onto the taxpayer or do we go bankrupt while someone else pushes it onto the taxpayer?"

Seems like an easy choice.

Yup. And the owners of many companies made the first choice. How 'bout we tax them for the burden they put on us?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/c...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/h...
https://www.thenation.com/arti...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.commercialappeal.co...

Many more where those came from.

....and after this, the Southern Democrats left the Democratic Party and migrated to the GOP.

Lee Atwater on the Southern Strategy in 1981: https://www.thenation.com/arti...

Linus created an operating system, while Trump got caught committing treason colluding with a foreign hostile adversary's attack on our democracy.

I don't see the comparison.

Trump is going to prison.

Linus is a good person.

Nearly right!

Linus created an operating system

Linus wrote a kernel. Most of the rest of Linux distributions comes from elsewhere, hence the preferred title GNU/Linux.

while Trump got caught committing treason

No he didn't. If you think otherwise, please give details of what exactly he did and why it is legally treasonous.

treason
n noun
1 (also high treason) the crime of betraying one's country, especially by attempting to kill or overthrow the sovereign or government.
2 (petty treason) historical the crime of murdering a master or husband.

colluding with a foreign hostile adversary's attack on our democracy.

collude
n verb come to a secret agreement in order to deceive others; conspire.

Governments (like corporations) always collude; in terms of foreign policy, they do little else. But what is this "foreign hostile adversary"? (a multiply redundant expression, by the way). Russia is in no way hostile to the USA, and the only way in which it is an adversary is that it competes in trade - which is what capitalism enjoins - and sometimes declines to do what the US government orders it to do.

Needless to say, there was no "attack on our democracy". First because there was obviously no "attack", and second because there is obviously no "democracy".

https://www.thenation.com/arti...
https://consortiumnews.com/201...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.strategic-culture....
https://scholar.princeton.edu/...
yournewswire.com/jimmy-carter-the-u-s-is-completely-subverted-by-oligarchs/

Trump is going to prison.

No, he isn't.

The serious answer here, is that politics is populist by its nature. The USPS is ultimately in a position to have to pass major changes back through congressional oversight. Closing of post offices, raising of rates, changing work shifts and delivery schedules in a major way - all have had to go back to congress, where ALL have seen major push back. Change is easy to call for - people want "change" they just usually don't want the change to come at their own expense. So when the post office talks about closing THEIR OWN post office in Podunk, Nebraska, it's time to mount up and call the senator! And when a set of businesses face the prospect of losing absurdly low bulk mail or package rates, they spend hundreds of thousands or millions on their lobbyists to voice doom and gloom predictions in public, to fund "friendly" research, and to grease the skids in congress in private through staff entertainment. Seem cynical? Look for yourself. https://www.linns.com/news/pos... https://www.thenation.com/arti... https://federalnewsradio.com/m... https://federalnewsradio.com/b... Or go search it: https://www.google.com/search?...

America is not authoritarian. You may want to look up what the word means.

"Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by strong central power and limited political freedoms." Check. "Juan Linz's influential 1964 description of authoritarianism characterized authoritarian political systems by four qualities: Limited political pluralism," (Check.) "[...] A basis for legitimacy based on emotion, especially the identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems" (Check.) "Minimal social mobilization" (Check.) "Informally defined executive power with often vague and shifting powers." (Check.) ... you were saying?

Russia is openly authoritarian, and does not pretend otherwise.

That's not at question currently, but thanks for handwaving.

Furthermore you demand evidence of Russian involvement in Ukraine but provide none for the Western over throw of the Ukraine government.

That's like asking for evidence that the Bush Administration was full of crap about Iraq's WMD's and role in 911. Remedial current events here.

Before the coup, the assistant Secretary of State was on video bragging about spending $5 billion to 'give Ukraine the future it deserves' - and then Americans whine about imaginary interference in our elections. The same assistant secretary of state was also recorded picking post-coup leaders.

The United States immediately recognized the junta as illegitimate after the blatantly unconstitutional vote to remove Yanukovych from power, which itself was based on a known false flag operation:

• "So the chief of the government's security forces, the head of the opposition's security forces, and the snipers themselves all admit the snipers were killing both protesters and police."

And if that wasn't enough, the Vice President's son woke up one morning and just happened to find himself a top executive at a Ukraine energy company.

• "Isn't that a bit fishy? Why do you say that?

  Because he's the vice-president's son! That's a coincidence. "This is totally based on merit," said Burisma's chairman, Alan Apter.

  He doesn't sound very Ukrainian. He's American, as is the other new board member, Devon Archer.

  Who? Devon Archer, who works with Hunter Biden at Rosemont Seneca partners, which is half owned by Rosemont Capital, a private equity firm founded by Archer and Christopher Heinz.

  Who? Christopher Heinz...John Kerry's stepson."

The IMF also picked up their entire book of rules and threw it in a paper shredder to give the illegitimate government a legitimate loan:

• The IMF broke four of its rules by lending to Ukraine:
  (1) Not to lend to a country that has no visible means to pay back the loan (the "No More Argentinas" rule, adopted after the IMF's disastrous 2001 loan to that country).
  (2) Not to lend to a country that repudiates its debt to official creditors (the rule originally intended to enforce payment to U.S.-based institutions).
  (3) Not to lend to a country at war - and indeed, destroying its export capacity and hence its balance-of-payments ability to pay back the loan. Finally
  (4), not to lend to a country unlikely to impose the IMF's austerity "conditionalities." Ukraine did agree to override democratic opposition and cut back pensions, but its junta proved too unstable to impose the austerity terms on which the IMF insisted.

So the United States only spent billions to subvert Ukraine's democracy, recognized a blatant coup as a legitimate impeachment, immediately gave billions in aid to the junta, and then sends the highest number of troops to Eastern Europe under the premise that Russia is a threat.

And American Exceptionalists like yourself just eat that shit up. With a spoon. You didn't learn a damned thing from the lies about Iraq and Afghanistan, did you?

The guy who Trump picked to head Health and Human Services tripled the price of insulin when he was CEO of Eli Lilly. After the drug's patent expired.

https://www.thenation.com/arti...

In 2006, diabetes was cured in a Toronto lab. The treatment, iirc, is to ?electro-chemically "shock" the pancreas, and the effect was described as similar to shocking a heart that is in defibrillation, meaning that the pancreas subseuqently "resets" itself, and begins to operate correctly, producing insulin normally.

This didn't get much news in US, though I believe the treatment actually made it into the US without much fanfare, hopefully under the radar of any power made rich selling insulin in the US.

Is it possible that suppy and demand dictated the price of insulin? If no one needs insulun anymore, I think it might get more expensive. Actually, I honestly have no idea. But I don't think anyone needs insulin anymore, and if they think they do, they instead need to have their diabetes cured.

have pushed average prices for new double-wides up more than 20 percent in five years, putting them out of reach for many of the newly homeless.

Late-stage capitalism is when you can't afford the rope to hang yourself, but your #MAGA hat is subsidized.

In other news...

The guy who Trump picked to head Health and Human Services tripled the price of insulin when he was CEO of Eli Lilly. After the drug's patent expired.

https://www.thenation.com/arti...

You can't have a gov't that looks out for your interests but not your neighbors (well, not unless you're very, very rich). Elections have consequences. Here's one right now.

The Republican-appointed FCC chairman did this, yes. And the Democrats rather heavily supported SOPA and have been trying to get it past under our noses ever since, except worse (think TPP's many nasty provisions that have nothing to do with trade).

I'd do a lot more research to refute this, but to be honest, I doubt you'll read it. Your blind adherence to the narrative is to your own detriment. Neither party is innocent or good here, and we'd "merely" have draconian Internet regulation and probable censorship in the name of copyright enforcement if Hillary was elected. This kind of rigid, party-centric thinking is what's going to be our undoing.

Try picking up a book(or his), it'll do you wonders.

Donald Trump did not write "his" book. It was written by a ghostwriter named Tony Schwartz. Trump admits this. There still isn't any evidence that Trump can write anything but his name.and tweets.

https://www.thenation.com/arti...

as if their opinions are somehow more valid, important, or enlightened than the rest of us.

"The rest of us" being the minority of the population who votes right wing? Look at the right wing right now. Yes, they are more enlightened than you are.

It has been proven that it [meaning the DNC hack] was a leak and not a hack.

Nope. One researcher claimed that it was a leak and not a hack, but the evidence to show that was weak. The Nation (which was the first mainstream outlet to publish those charges first) later published a second article pointing out the weaknesses in the case made by the first article: https://www.thenation.com/arti...

The files where copied locally using cp -R based on the time and date stamps. It was a 25MB per second copy(i.e. USB2.0).

So, what the metadata showed was that at some point the data was copied at 25MBits/second. What wasn't shown, however, was at what stage in the hack this transfer speed happened. The files could have been stolen off a server at one speed, but then copied to another file at a higher speed sometime before being released. 25 MBits/second isn't necessarily the speed at which they were initially copied.

also, note that this is MegaBITS per second, not bytes. In fact, high speed internet connections do reach and exceed this speed, so the analysis doesn't even particularly show that the files weren't stolen across an internet connection.

So, bottom line, the metadata analysis, in this case, was interesting but didn't really prove anything, and most particularly, didn't show that the leak was internal rather than external.

And based on my experience with IT staff, they tend to lean left.

It's Georgia. Kennesaw, Georgia.

And Republicans in Georgia have always run crooked elections.

https://www.thenation.com/arti...

I'll bite Mr. AC, you and your short memory. Obama took over after a certain W spent a surplus away with tax cuts for the rich (that didn't improve the economy or create jobs) and a WAR that we're still fighting over WMD's that didn't exist and that they told us would pay for itself. Obama turned that around. Hell, he permitted the government to save the U.S. auto industry - remember GM about to go belly-up - when Mitt Romney said in his own words to let it go bankrupt. Everyone driving a sweet, new, spanky Camaro today should friendly thank you to Mr. Obama for preventing the Rominator from letting the "market" slice GM into whatever would have turned a fast buck. Funny thing, facts: they don't always agree with the prejudice you want to maintain.

Here's another one: GDP tends to go up under Democratic administrations, down in Republican ones. I suppose Trump is still enjoying the fruits of Obama's hard work, here in his first year. But as he keeps throwing monkey-wrenches at the health-care and insurance markets with his Tweets and executive orders, instead of just leaving it alone, health care and health insurance is only going to go up, up, up as insurance companies can't predict what to charge to cover their asses. Does that affect rich people? No, billionaires and Senators can pay cash to the best doctors and hospitals. But it affects YOU, hits YOUR paycheck or, if you don't get health from your boss, hits you with bankruptcy when that pain in your gut turns out to be cancer, when that traffic accident with that uninsured drunk in the pickup kills your kidneys and puts you on dialysis for the rest of your life, hits you as you get old and your knees start to give out. Trump will get his knees replaced, and tax-payers will pay for it. YOU will just live with it, buy a walker from Walgreen's and shuffle around between your bed and your TV couch. Dammit, what happened to the Fox News? Had to choose between the pain pills and the cable bill - guess which one's more addictive.

It's bad enough that Trump's lawyer admits he has documents related to Russia in his safe.

The people who joined Mueller's team wouldn't join unless he had something very compelling. Add the fact that the NY AG is also involved so Trump can't just pardon anyone like a get out of jail free card. Mueller is going after Trump and co on multiple fronts, both from the Russian investigation side as well as RICO and tax evasion. Trump's current legal team are like the keystone cops. All the competent lawyers have quit in frustration over the fact that Trump won't take their advice and/or pay them.

Also, don't forget Felix Sater who is singing like a canary. Sater was involved in numerous Trump business dealings. The fact that it wasn't disclosed at the time that Sater was a convicted felon to the other parties is also highly illegal.

Then there's Trump's adviser Carter Page who has been under surveillance under a FISA warrant since 2014.

Who doesn't get the giggles when you see that "Democracy dies in darkness" masthead slogan? LOL. As if they're on the side of the people or something? The deplorables? A laughable concept. Washington Post is Jeff Bezos' personal blog.

And who would have guessed that Bezo's has his own Neoliberal Education Reforms plans?

https://www.thenation.com/arti...

Really this is all a cover up for the real scandal which is that the Hillary camp stole the nomination from Bernie. That act got the Bernie people to leak DNC emails which they had access to... and now the DNC is blaming the consequences of their own corruption on Russia... which has lead to sanctions on Russia and all sorts of diplomatic consequences. The impact of Russia or any hack on the election is at best dubious.

Fact is that the Dems got split by a corrupt primary followed by a serially weak candidate that failed last time around and shocker failed again. Dems are mad at Trump... they did this to themselves. The Obama presidency was relatively popular... just like the end of the Clinton administration. They could have rolled that into another Dem presidency. But they decided to blow it.

And just like with the Gore campaign, rather than own up to serious errors in judgment and misteps... the Dems have claimed that the election was stolen from them.

Guess any time Dems don't win it must be a rigged election, right guys?

Of course, despite saying that, the dems seem very resistant to the idea of Voter ID reform or Election inspections or anything that would address the thing they allege is taking elections from them. Its almost as if they don't really believe it. Its almost as if its just a dumb excuse they tell rubes to keep them angry and protesting. If the dems actually thought they were getting elections stolen from them, they'd be the ones pushing election reform. That they're the ones resisting reform makes it very clear their assertions are insincere.

Well on the Russian side, they hacked the DNC servers and found information that they then provided to the Trump campaign and released on WikiLeaks.

Actually, no. Whoever stole that information from the DNC's mail server(s) provided that information to EVERYBODY. But it was an inside job, not a "Russian hack." Here you go, have a nice thorough write-up about the details, provided to you by a very liberal outlet and author both of whom hate Trump, but who are increasingly embarrassed by people like you who have taken the bait from the left-leaning media and their DNC handlers. The DNC hasn't even allowed the the FBI to look at those servers. Gee, I wonder why? Assuming you've got the attention span for it, do yourself some homework:

https://www.thenation.com/arti...

Israel doesn't need much military because it has most of the west, including the US. So that 5th grade kid has the backing of high schoolers the next block over, and sometimes visits for lunch.

These suggest that Israel makes their own modern nukes.
https://www.thenation.com/arti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://nationalinterest.org/fe...

I'm coming to the realization that the Democrats are actually corrupt(*).

I was reading about the DOJ slush fund [breitbart.com](**) and it struck me just how deep and insidious the corruption has been in this country.

Why not Teapot Dome, Credit Mobiler, Iran-Contra, Enron, and Bernie Madoff?

This is paired with the IRS selecting conservative charities for intense scrutiny

And liberal ones. Who both needed to file proper reports to meet their non-profit status.

Even Congress had to admit it was all proper in the end.

11 California counties have more registered voters than adults

You can't blame California for Steve Mnuchin, Tiffany Trump, Jared Kushner, and Steven Bannon, who nonetheless, remind us, it's not a crime. Despite false claims otherwise.

And let us not forget after the election, leftists pleaded with the EC delegates to be faithless,

I pleased with the EC delegates to quit myself, it might be the only thing that gets us past that broken system.

then pleaded with the supreme court to invalidate the results,

No, the Supreme Court acted in 2000, unlawfully overriding state courts for their own partisan gain.

then pleaded with the U.S. military to step in and prevent the inauguration (wtf?),

Like those massive crowds of people that Trump (falsely) claimed were there, huh?

leaked secret and sensitive information - not to expose crimes, but for political slander,

Oh wait, you mean when they leaked Trump's fake pictures of Time Magazine covers, right?

and rioted for weeks

No, that was Chicago celebrating winning the World Series.

For example, Hillary made no statements condemning the riots,

Also she didn't condemn the sugar plum fairy.

and most of the left blamed the rioting on Trump.

Trump called for it himself.

blocking reasonable voter registration,

No, that was the GOP.

and suppressing the military vote.

sure man

There's a sub-conversation on the net that holds that the Democratic party *won't survive* once all the corruption has been rooted out.

Sure man, and what else are they discussing? Why they can't find the dead bodies in the Pizza Parlor?

The Democratic ideals are so far from what people want that they require all the extra boost they get from a tilted playing field.

Is that why they keep getting more voters?

I'm not sure I believe that bit about the Democratic party not surviving, but after reading about the DOJ thing, and knowing the level of effort we're putting into the Russia probe while ignoring some seemingly obvious evidence [dailysignal.com] on the Democratic side, it makes me wonder...

Actually, the Republicans in Congress are still busy chasing their tails over Hillary.

I gues

Considering the fact that Obama was trying to ram TPP through, trying to blame this on the Republicans and Trump is ridiculous.

First of all, realize that the TPP is NOT about free trade. It's about intellectual property control and a variety of other topics. "Free trade" is a generic cover for the whole thing. The real motivators are things that would be balked at if they were negotiated separately.

For details as to what TPP really IS about, well, here's a very short summary:

The TPP and Intellectual Property

And the EFF's position on it:

EFF on TPP
EFF and the Copyright Trap

I'm not going to go into a lot of research for that particular question since this has already been hashed out a million times before.

However, as for the Democrat portion... well, first off, Obama spearheaded TPP and intended to try to get it rammed through towards the end of his term.

Obama and the TPP

Hillary in fact praised it as the "gold standard" while it was in development (in secret, I might add, to the point where Congressmen had to go to a secure room to look at the drafts and could not keep their notes on it with them):

Hillary on the Gold Standard

TPP Secrecy (note the caption on the picture)

Now she did try to back off on this and flip-flopped, although this might well have been a pose for the campaign:

Hillary and TPP

But the fact is that the Democrats did not officially oppose it.

Rejecting formal TPP opposition

Some would say that the fact that Hillary is particularly likely to lie about this to get elected, even among politicians. But people specifically close to her indicated that, if she was elected, she'd flip-flop on it pretty rapidly.

Terry McAuliffe's view on TPP flipping

Additionally, while people seem to very much enjoy shitting on the Republicans for draconian copyright laws, fact is that the Democrats are just as bad, and in some cases, worse:

Congressional support for SOPA and PIPA

This raises doubts as to what parts of TPP would be "renegotiated," if that had happened, which was one option that seemed to be spoken of for a Hillary presidency. Suffice it to say that it is likely that the IP law portions would not receive renegotiation that would be considered consumer-friendly.

Stereotypical "Republicans are evil 'cuz Republicans" and "Trump is evil 'cuz Trump" is not going to fly here, unless you're also willing to jump on board the "Democrats are evil 'cuz Democrats" train. Fact of the matter is, both sides are bought and paid for by the technology and content generation industries. This was the sentiment when SOPA was defeated by massive Internet backlash:

Backlash after massive SOPA protests

And Democrats were certainly benefiting from Hollywood donations which "encouraged" them to support SOPA:

So in short, both sides are filthy here. You can blame one side or the other for the majority of the problem a