Today, U.S. Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Chairman and Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), released a bipartisan report examining the U.S. State Department’s grants to OneVoice—a non-governmental organization operating in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The group received nearly $350,000 in grants from the U.S. State Department to support peace negotiations between Israelis and the Palestinian Authority over a 14-month grant period ending in November 2014. In December 2014, Israeli elections were called following the collapse of peace negotiations.
The Subcommittee’s investigation concludes that OneVoice Israel complied with the terms of its State Department grants. Within days after the grant period ended, however, the group deployed the campaign infrastructure and resources created, in part, using U.S. grant funds to support a political campaign to defeat the incumbent Israeli government known as V15. That use of government-funded resources for political purposes after the end of the grant period was permitted by the grant because the State Department failed to adequately guard against the risk that campaign resources could be repurposed in that manner or place limitations on the post-grant use of resources.
The Kremlin says they met with the Ambassador. So far as I'm aware, no one has produced evidence. The Kremlin has been caught a few times now creating fake news, which is how that idiot Napolitano got outed by repeating RT fake news about the wiretapping of Trump.
The problem is that while that will certainly play to Trump's supporters, he does not in fact have a lot of supporters in the one place right now where it counts: Congress. For now, Republicans need to play nicey-nice with Trump because they have a legislative agenda they need to get passed, but if the President keeps getting nailed with allegations of links to the Russians, or even worse, investigations end up mapping up clear ties between Trump and the Russians during the campaign, then even a Republican-controlled Congress is going to have an increasingly hard time standing behind the Administration. And he just keeps making it worse by floating newer and more bizarre conspiracy theories with each and every iteration. He's beginning to sound like the kind of demented conspiracy freaks on the Internet, which would be fine, if he was a private citizen, but he's not, and thus the merging of madness and denial with the highest office in the United States is pretty damned frightening.
He applied QM to black holes to determine that they inevitably must radiate energy, and thus are finite and will eventually evaporate. Why Hawking Radiation has yet to be observed (darned hard), it's one of the first critical examples of how Quantum Mechanics would effect a Classical system (in this case, a black hole, a singularity born out of General Relativity). So yes, it's pretty darned important.
If you have some evidence of malfeasance in the Clinton Foundation, please provide it. Otherwise, you're just repeating exactly the kind of fake news the Russians produced and the witless Trumpites repeated.
Comey sat in front of a Congressional hearing today and made it clear that the three letter agencies are very much investigating links between Trump's campaign and Russia, so your own particular line of defense no longer holds any water.
I don't know very many people claiming the Russians altered the vote, and I think most people are aware the POTUS isn't selected by popular vote. The claim is that the Russians used a selective information/disinformation release campaign to undermine support for Clinton. And the US isn't the only country where this kind of these kinds of activities have been seen, so why it's so damned unbelievable in the US is beyond me. But at any rate, there seems to be this conflation between "interfering in the election" and "tampering with ballots" used by Trump defenders, the reason being the former has some people in fairly high places stating it happened, whereas the latter is indeed a left-wing conspiracy theory that no one takes seriously.
Translation: No, Clinton operatives did not leak the information, but I need to sex up what actually happened to perpetrate the "evil Clinton Crime Empre" conspiracy I hold so near and dear.
And for fuck's sake, the WP has been delivered leaked information for a long goddamned time now. Do you feel Nixon got a raw deal because Deep Throat picked Bob Woodward? At the end of the day, leaks suck, but if the leaks actually point to misconduct and malfeasance, ought not your primary concern be those doing bad things, rather than those who blow the whistle?
But that's how they are designed. Intelligence agencies have to act to some extent at arms length from the government. It's why the Attorney General or its equivalents is somewhat unique in most governing systems, because the job is to be the highest officer of the law in the land, and thus means that that may require investigating other members of government, including, on a pretty rare occasion, the President himself. To have someone like the head of the FBI or the NSA to be a partisan would be a bad thing.
But really, all this "the intelligence guys are against Trump", with it's more specific "whose leaking the information" seems to me to miss the point. It's pretty obvious that Congress has been aware for a while, and the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have access to a lot of information. Republicans in Congress may be frustrated about the leaks, but some of their colleagues were being apprised of issues with Russia for quite a while now.
How is it a good move? For the Democrats, at worst this is a Republican Benghazi, an investigation that goes nowhere. That didn't exactly seem to harm the Republicans, and you still see their supporters harping on about it. But if it does turn out that there was collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russians, if that doesn't outright undermine Trump's presidency, it heavily damages his political capital (I'd argue, to some extent, that even the insinuations of involvement probably already area).
So, to put it simply, at worst the Dems come up with a fishing expedition that doesn't catch anything significant, and life goes on. But for a fishing expedition that is supposed to come back empty handed, it has already cost Trump's National Security Advisor his job and has forced Trump's Attorney General to recuse himself from anything to do with the FBI's investigation into Russian activities surrounding the election. That's 1.5 casualties thus far for a supposedly "FAKE NEWS" investigation. Thus we have the spectacle of the Director of the FBI telling Congress there's no evidence of any wiretapping of Trump by the Obama Administration, but that there is an active investigation by multiple branches into links between Russia and the Trump campaign. And it's not like Comney is breathlessly reporting vast conspiracies, he was very cautious and cagey in what he said, appearing neither dishonest or hyperbolic, but simply confirming, as much as he can, to an open hearing.
The problem here, as I've seen many times in other contexts is that those making these claims aren't really interested in whether the claim has any foundation in truth, or even in any way properly sourced. What counts is that the claim was made. The claim can be utter rubbish, and not even make any damned sense at all (i.e. Pizzagate), but once made, it can be published and then endlessly repeated. The point here is simply to say something, anything, and repeat it long after it was debunked. That way, when the issue comes up for discussion, the declaration can be made "Yeah well, I read this from a totally reliable guy like Napolitano!"
This, in the Creationist debate circles is known as the Gish Gallop, based upon (in)famous Creationist Duane Gish, whose debating style was to making as many unfounded and ludicrous assertions as possible during a debate, knowing full well that his interlocutors could never possibly deal with all of them in the allotted time, and then he and his supporters could champion those untouched claims as showing the falsehood of evolution. What's more, even where all the claims were debunked, he'd simply repeat them anyways.
The object of this kind of rhetoric is simply to overwhelm one's opponents or the generally incredulous with as many claims as possible, to overwhelm the opponents and make it seem as if they are faltering under the weight of the evidence of a vast conspiracy. And we see now how it has been used to extraordinary effect, that in this particular/. thread alone, there must be a dozen or more claims that were debunked or traced back to unreliable or non-existent sources. But they keep being made, over and over again.
Does anybody imagine that politicians are going to be any more trustworthy than the average citizen? While I'm not saying that we should just blindly accept deceit in politics, there's a reality here that politicians are people, and that like anybody else, they can be dishonest and hypocritical. So when you have voters declaring "So-and-so is a liar!", well, I suspect no small number of those people shaking their fists and preparing the tar and feathers are probably every bit as dishonest.
Where politicians gain the advantage is that they are usually in charge or at least have heavy direct or behind-the-scenes influence on investigations. That's why most modern systems of government create separation of powers, with the assumption that, at worst, everyone is a lying hypocrite, but that not all of them have the same goals. But I don't think that the situation is that dire. Honestly, I don't think most politicians start their careers plotting to rake in vast amounts of money or abuse their powers for the gain of themselves or others. That certainly does happen, and always has, but at the end of the day, in a democracy, politicians do have to justify themselves to the voters.
We will reach the Nixonian "what did he know and when did he know it" at some point soon. Even the Republicans on the committee could only really gripe about leaks, which tells you even they know that this hearing is going to reach some damned dangerous ground. And don't imagine for a second that they'll sacrifice their political careers to keep a Republican President afloat.
Generally a conviction requires at least some nod towards intent. Yes, she broke the law, but without demonstrating intent, her lawyers likely could get her off, or at least with a much reduced punishment. And as others have pointed out, this is an administrative sanction, so the likely punishment would be pretty moderate. And generally when anyone is pondering a prosecution, the likelihood of conviction is weighed pretty heavily, and where it is deemed that the likelihood is small, it's often the case that charges won't be laid.
What the hell does any of this have to do with the fact that the Director of the FBI has confirmed that they are investigating links between Russia and the Trump campaign?
Nobody is contesting that Trump won. Hell, no one is really contesting that Clinton wasn't a horrible candidate who ran a bad campaign (her own husband has said as much). But again, that has fuck all to do with what is happening right now. It seems you're the one with the badly over-aged talking points.
Because the big story here is the leaks, not the fact that Flynn was discussing sanctions with Russia. And I thought it was the Washington Post that revealed that. Where does the "Clinton operative claim" come from?
And what exactly is Trump? If his campaign team (and thus, at least indirectly he himself) are part of an active investigation over Russian links to the campaign, what exactly would you call that?
The claim that GCHQ could have been involved in spying on Trump Tower, which was a rather silly attempt to keep the wiretapping story going even though everyone knew that the claim was bullshit. If Trump has one singular problem above all others, it's the inability to walk away from his own absurd claims.
The question you should ask is "Was Trump's claims that he was wiretapped by US intelligence or by US Allies' intelligence true or not." And today before Congress that claim was discarded.
Yes, US citizens are at times put under surveillance, and long have been. Lincoln had every telegraph line that entered the Union tapped, and that was a century and a half ago. But this isn't about claims of general capability, this is about the specific claim that the Obama Administration placed wiretaps, or had through some third party, had wiretaps placed on Trump Tower. That claims is false, so it is irrelevant what happens sometimes under some circumstances. What counts is whether the specific statement Donald Trump made is true or not.
The US pretty much got dragged into that. France and Britain were the first to start making plans to do something about Libya, largely because they were very concerned that if Ghadaffi wasn't stopped, hundreds of thousands of Libyan refugees would end up in Western Europe. They wanted US support in part because they wanted to this to be a sort of "Allied action", and in part the US just has the better satellite systems, making the whole job easier. We can debate the value of going into Libya, but at least one should understand why it happened.
Just keep those fake claims coming. Now suddenly it's the "establishment"?
There was no wiretapping of Trump. Never happened. What there was was spying on Russians, and the fact that the likes of Flynn and Sessions are such fucking idiots that they would basically use open communication systems to yack with the Russians indicates not only are they traitors, but pretty fucking stupid ones.
Obama didn't order wiretapping, Britain's GCHQ didn't do it for him. It never happened. It was a conspiracy theory started by Mark Levin, picked up by Breitbart, and Trump, being a pretty stupid man himself, picked up that ball and went with it. Whatever comes out of these hearings and the FBI's investigation, the fact is that Trump asked for it. He's the one that demanded the wiretapping claims be investigated, he's the one that forced a Republican-dominated Congress to continue digging even when I suspect most House and Senate Republicans would rather not even pick up a shovel.
A stopped clock is right twice a day. That conspiracy theorists will sometimes hit the nail on the head doesn't instantly mean their every proclamation is the truth. Napolitano based his claim on somewhat RT bullshit, in other words he was repeating Russian-sourced fake news.
Oh give it up. His late-election statements that Clinton Emails were back under investigation likely cost her the election. He appears to be no one's friend.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
To say the Obama Administration worked to screw over Netanyahu's re-election bid is a heavy distortion of what happened.
The Kremlin says they met with the Ambassador. So far as I'm aware, no one has produced evidence. The Kremlin has been caught a few times now creating fake news, which is how that idiot Napolitano got outed by repeating RT fake news about the wiretapping of Trump.
The problem is that while that will certainly play to Trump's supporters, he does not in fact have a lot of supporters in the one place right now where it counts: Congress. For now, Republicans need to play nicey-nice with Trump because they have a legislative agenda they need to get passed, but if the President keeps getting nailed with allegations of links to the Russians, or even worse, investigations end up mapping up clear ties between Trump and the Russians during the campaign, then even a Republican-controlled Congress is going to have an increasingly hard time standing behind the Administration. And he just keeps making it worse by floating newer and more bizarre conspiracy theories with each and every iteration. He's beginning to sound like the kind of demented conspiracy freaks on the Internet, which would be fine, if he was a private citizen, but he's not, and thus the merging of madness and denial with the highest office in the United States is pretty damned frightening.
He applied QM to black holes to determine that they inevitably must radiate energy, and thus are finite and will eventually evaporate. Why Hawking Radiation has yet to be observed (darned hard), it's one of the first critical examples of how Quantum Mechanics would effect a Classical system (in this case, a black hole, a singularity born out of General Relativity). So yes, it's pretty darned important.
If you have some evidence of malfeasance in the Clinton Foundation, please provide it. Otherwise, you're just repeating exactly the kind of fake news the Russians produced and the witless Trumpites repeated.
Comey sat in front of a Congressional hearing today and made it clear that the three letter agencies are very much investigating links between Trump's campaign and Russia, so your own particular line of defense no longer holds any water.
I don't know very many people claiming the Russians altered the vote, and I think most people are aware the POTUS isn't selected by popular vote. The claim is that the Russians used a selective information/disinformation release campaign to undermine support for Clinton. And the US isn't the only country where this kind of these kinds of activities have been seen, so why it's so damned unbelievable in the US is beyond me. But at any rate, there seems to be this conflation between "interfering in the election" and "tampering with ballots" used by Trump defenders, the reason being the former has some people in fairly high places stating it happened, whereas the latter is indeed a left-wing conspiracy theory that no one takes seriously.
Just how many fake claims can you make in four sentences? I applaud you, sir. That is amazing demonstration of the fevered nature of your imagination.
Translation: No, Clinton operatives did not leak the information, but I need to sex up what actually happened to perpetrate the "evil Clinton Crime Empre" conspiracy I hold so near and dear.
And for fuck's sake, the WP has been delivered leaked information for a long goddamned time now. Do you feel Nixon got a raw deal because Deep Throat picked Bob Woodward? At the end of the day, leaks suck, but if the leaks actually point to misconduct and malfeasance, ought not your primary concern be those doing bad things, rather than those who blow the whistle?
But that's how they are designed. Intelligence agencies have to act to some extent at arms length from the government. It's why the Attorney General or its equivalents is somewhat unique in most governing systems, because the job is to be the highest officer of the law in the land, and thus means that that may require investigating other members of government, including, on a pretty rare occasion, the President himself. To have someone like the head of the FBI or the NSA to be a partisan would be a bad thing.
But really, all this "the intelligence guys are against Trump", with it's more specific "whose leaking the information" seems to me to miss the point. It's pretty obvious that Congress has been aware for a while, and the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have access to a lot of information. Republicans in Congress may be frustrated about the leaks, but some of their colleagues were being apprised of issues with Russia for quite a while now.
How is it a good move? For the Democrats, at worst this is a Republican Benghazi, an investigation that goes nowhere. That didn't exactly seem to harm the Republicans, and you still see their supporters harping on about it. But if it does turn out that there was collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russians, if that doesn't outright undermine Trump's presidency, it heavily damages his political capital (I'd argue, to some extent, that even the insinuations of involvement probably already area).
So, to put it simply, at worst the Dems come up with a fishing expedition that doesn't catch anything significant, and life goes on. But for a fishing expedition that is supposed to come back empty handed, it has already cost Trump's National Security Advisor his job and has forced Trump's Attorney General to recuse himself from anything to do with the FBI's investigation into Russian activities surrounding the election. That's 1.5 casualties thus far for a supposedly "FAKE NEWS" investigation. Thus we have the spectacle of the Director of the FBI telling Congress there's no evidence of any wiretapping of Trump by the Obama Administration, but that there is an active investigation by multiple branches into links between Russia and the Trump campaign. And it's not like Comney is breathlessly reporting vast conspiracies, he was very cautious and cagey in what he said, appearing neither dishonest or hyperbolic, but simply confirming, as much as he can, to an open hearing.
The problem here, as I've seen many times in other contexts is that those making these claims aren't really interested in whether the claim has any foundation in truth, or even in any way properly sourced. What counts is that the claim was made. The claim can be utter rubbish, and not even make any damned sense at all (i.e. Pizzagate), but once made, it can be published and then endlessly repeated. The point here is simply to say something, anything, and repeat it long after it was debunked. That way, when the issue comes up for discussion, the declaration can be made "Yeah well, I read this from a totally reliable guy like Napolitano!"
This, in the Creationist debate circles is known as the Gish Gallop, based upon (in)famous Creationist Duane Gish, whose debating style was to making as many unfounded and ludicrous assertions as possible during a debate, knowing full well that his interlocutors could never possibly deal with all of them in the allotted time, and then he and his supporters could champion those untouched claims as showing the falsehood of evolution. What's more, even where all the claims were debunked, he'd simply repeat them anyways.
The object of this kind of rhetoric is simply to overwhelm one's opponents or the generally incredulous with as many claims as possible, to overwhelm the opponents and make it seem as if they are faltering under the weight of the evidence of a vast conspiracy. And we see now how it has been used to extraordinary effect, that in this particular /. thread alone, there must be a dozen or more claims that were debunked or traced back to unreliable or non-existent sources. But they keep being made, over and over again.
Does anybody imagine that politicians are going to be any more trustworthy than the average citizen? While I'm not saying that we should just blindly accept deceit in politics, there's a reality here that politicians are people, and that like anybody else, they can be dishonest and hypocritical. So when you have voters declaring "So-and-so is a liar!", well, I suspect no small number of those people shaking their fists and preparing the tar and feathers are probably every bit as dishonest.
Where politicians gain the advantage is that they are usually in charge or at least have heavy direct or behind-the-scenes influence on investigations. That's why most modern systems of government create separation of powers, with the assumption that, at worst, everyone is a lying hypocrite, but that not all of them have the same goals. But I don't think that the situation is that dire. Honestly, I don't think most politicians start their careers plotting to rake in vast amounts of money or abuse their powers for the gain of themselves or others. That certainly does happen, and always has, but at the end of the day, in a democracy, politicians do have to justify themselves to the voters.
We will reach the Nixonian "what did he know and when did he know it" at some point soon. Even the Republicans on the committee could only really gripe about leaks, which tells you even they know that this hearing is going to reach some damned dangerous ground. And don't imagine for a second that they'll sacrifice their political careers to keep a Republican President afloat.
Generally a conviction requires at least some nod towards intent. Yes, she broke the law, but without demonstrating intent, her lawyers likely could get her off, or at least with a much reduced punishment. And as others have pointed out, this is an administrative sanction, so the likely punishment would be pretty moderate. And generally when anyone is pondering a prosecution, the likelihood of conviction is weighed pretty heavily, and where it is deemed that the likelihood is small, it's often the case that charges won't be laid.
What the hell does any of this have to do with the fact that the Director of the FBI has confirmed that they are investigating links between Russia and the Trump campaign?
Nobody is contesting that Trump won. Hell, no one is really contesting that Clinton wasn't a horrible candidate who ran a bad campaign (her own husband has said as much). But again, that has fuck all to do with what is happening right now. It seems you're the one with the badly over-aged talking points.
Wow, 100 million dollars you say... Why not say a billion gazillion dollars?
Because the big story here is the leaks, not the fact that Flynn was discussing sanctions with Russia. And I thought it was the Washington Post that revealed that. Where does the "Clinton operative claim" come from?
And what exactly is Trump? If his campaign team (and thus, at least indirectly he himself) are part of an active investigation over Russian links to the campaign, what exactly would you call that?
And once again, statements like "I wouldn't be surprised" do not constitute actual evidence of anything.
The claim that GCHQ could have been involved in spying on Trump Tower, which was a rather silly attempt to keep the wiretapping story going even though everyone knew that the claim was bullshit. If Trump has one singular problem above all others, it's the inability to walk away from his own absurd claims.
The question you should ask is "Was Trump's claims that he was wiretapped by US intelligence or by US Allies' intelligence true or not." And today before Congress that claim was discarded.
Yes, US citizens are at times put under surveillance, and long have been. Lincoln had every telegraph line that entered the Union tapped, and that was a century and a half ago. But this isn't about claims of general capability, this is about the specific claim that the Obama Administration placed wiretaps, or had through some third party, had wiretaps placed on Trump Tower. That claims is false, so it is irrelevant what happens sometimes under some circumstances. What counts is whether the specific statement Donald Trump made is true or not.
The US pretty much got dragged into that. France and Britain were the first to start making plans to do something about Libya, largely because they were very concerned that if Ghadaffi wasn't stopped, hundreds of thousands of Libyan refugees would end up in Western Europe. They wanted US support in part because they wanted to this to be a sort of "Allied action", and in part the US just has the better satellite systems, making the whole job easier. We can debate the value of going into Libya, but at least one should understand why it happened.
Just keep those fake claims coming. Now suddenly it's the "establishment"?
There was no wiretapping of Trump. Never happened. What there was was spying on Russians, and the fact that the likes of Flynn and Sessions are such fucking idiots that they would basically use open communication systems to yack with the Russians indicates not only are they traitors, but pretty fucking stupid ones.
Obama didn't order wiretapping, Britain's GCHQ didn't do it for him. It never happened. It was a conspiracy theory started by Mark Levin, picked up by Breitbart, and Trump, being a pretty stupid man himself, picked up that ball and went with it. Whatever comes out of these hearings and the FBI's investigation, the fact is that Trump asked for it. He's the one that demanded the wiretapping claims be investigated, he's the one that forced a Republican-dominated Congress to continue digging even when I suspect most House and Senate Republicans would rather not even pick up a shovel.
A stopped clock is right twice a day. That conspiracy theorists will sometimes hit the nail on the head doesn't instantly mean their every proclamation is the truth. Napolitano based his claim on somewhat RT bullshit, in other words he was repeating Russian-sourced fake news.
Oh give it up. His late-election statements that Clinton Emails were back under investigation likely cost her the election. He appears to be no one's friend.