US Politics March 2019: “I can’t say I’m happy. I can’t say I’m thrilled”

What else is he gonna do, govern?

so much happened on the tv!

And he railed against an ...Snl Christmas rerun?

Just imagine all the clouds he shouted at without tweeting about it.

someone sound the KREMLIN AGENT siren

if u aiming at me, that's not it boss, but i kinda wanna know what's the what in that clapzilla suit, or whatever claimant is called. the reason facts are sought in a depo might be to establish that content of the dossier was either false or maybe there was a lack of care, or some other relevant fact. life is too short for me to figure out exactly what this SCARY PIECE OF INFO was getting to by researching it esp if ilx know. and it's fine if the reason deponent was asked for is different from taibbi's reason for re-barfing it. but shit is done for reasons it's reasonable to wanna know why.

The short version is that Webzilla sued Buzzfeed for defamation for publishing the Steele dossier - which they claimed was both incorrect and recklessly compiled. Alexei Gubarev, who runs Webzilla, was accused of directly participating in the DNC hack. iirc Buzzfeed retracted and issued an apology but he sued anyway - partly with an aim of finding out how he ended up in the dossier in the first place. Steele’s deposition, and the iReports thing, related to that.

This is what Pelosi and Schumer are asking for in the investigation into Cindy Yang pic.twitter.com/itc0ZNuNIV

— Sam Stein (@samstein) March 18, 2019

xp That the dossier is raw intelligence has been reported 5,000 times. So, sorry to go red scare on you Milo, but why is Taibbi retweeting the worst of Twitter (M. Tracey), shouting about this?

thanks for summary SV and patience with my laziness all

"raw intelligence" posted by "unknown users" ... so, literally reading the comments?

No.

why is Taibbi retweeting the worst of Twitter (M. Tracey?)

This is really not that surprising

retweeting the worst of Twitter (M. Tracey)

Yes, definitely much worse than the millions of openly fascist Twitter accounts.

Russia has curdled so many brains.

hyperbole, dude. I get that there are worse people out there, but he is terrible, and his post is bosh.

you might want to lay off the Russia card just a bit yourself?

i both hate when people are into russiagate fanfic and also really hate it when people bring up "russiagate fanfic" as a way of shaming people who are legit interested in some of the very serious and very sketchy stuff related to russia's meddling in the election, their relationship to trump and his cronies, etc.

it's like social media makes people so eager to "take sides" that people can't occupy a sensible middle ground.

Russia has curdled so many brains.

i have seen the best shitposts of my generation destroyed in the interest of board comity, bullshit hilarious retweeted, dragging us all through the woke streets at brunch looking for a centrist fix desperate post-hipsters agitating for some enervated post-wwii regurgitation of a cold war memento in the machinery of trump’s blight

it's like social media makes people so eager to "take sides" that people can't occupy a sensible middle ground.

seconded

the dossier stuff is widely believed to be BS, is it not?

as far as I know the dossier is a great deal of paint thrown at a wall, some of which has stuck, but maybe just because the trump administration is an especially paint-seeking wall

that metaphor got a bit away with me, but

And even where the details are not exact, the general thrust of Steele’s reporting seems credible in light of what we now know about extensive contacts between numerous individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/steele-dossier-retrospective

sure, so we can go by what’s actually been reported by legitimate media outlets and verified. this isn’t that hard

curious what parts seem the farthest fetched for you? (sorry to pin you for specifics, it is 35 pages long!)

well, the pee tape stuff specifically, and generally that it was largely compiled from russian sources

I think Steele gave that a 50/50% probability.

But... if you're interested in what Steele wrote about Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Paul Manafort & Michael Cohen, I think you'd find that between the prison sentencing and guilty pleas that there may be a bit more to the dossier than you realize.

there's a certain line among some of my friends "on the left" (how they'd describe themselves, i guess) that any attention paid to russiagate is wasted motion. they might allow that some of it is true, and even that some of it is worrisome, but i think they feel that it's essentially a distraction from a genuine populist progressive project. which always seems vaguely insulting to me, like they are projecting their own inability to multitask, to think along two tracks at once.

the problem is that the russia stuff, whatever you think of putin's actual impact on the US election, is inextricable from the essentially cronyism and antidemocratic values not just of trump but of the entire GOP at this point. so there's no dividing line between a "genuine populist project" and the deep corruption of those in power, because there's no hope for the former if the latter become genuinely entrenched for a generation.

/high horse

Pee tape was one paragraph in 35 pages.

Jeb! campaign sponsored HUMINT is little different from state sponsored HUMINT. The raw input is rough and preliminary. Some of the dossier has been substantiated, a lot was probably fed to Steele or his sources by Russian FSB, a mix of truth and dezinformatsiya. IIRC, some of Steele's Russian associates disappeared after the dossier became public, so the FSB was fishing for loose lips too.

Steele was/is held in high regard by US intel, which had access to the dossier months before it was leaked to news outlets and further months before its publication. They found enough to alarm them that they ramped surveillance of the Trump clan's foreign contacts in the summer of 2016, and after the election took steps to compartmentalize their investigation from future interference. At least that's what I've inferred following former NSA analyst John Schindler since then.

Is there any reason to find John Schindler a more reliable source than any other Twitter pundit? Based on the little I’ve seen from him his primary motivation is making himself seem relevant and in-the-know.

there's a certain line among some of my friends "on the left" (how they'd describe themselves, i guess) that any attention paid to russiagate is wasted motion. they might allow that some of it is true, and even that some of it is worrisome, but i think they feel that it's essentially a distraction from a genuine populist progressive project

I'm probably more or less one of those people - at least to an extent. Its partly that its difficult to actually keep on top of what is actually the case, partly a feeling that on some level there's some wishful thinking about russiagate, partly that I don't know that realistically its going to result in anything (I don't see how impeachment is possible, criminal charges seem unlikely against a sitting president, and I think he's much more easily removed via the ballot box in 18 months time).

I don't want Mueller not to do his job! But I'm not putting any focus on it, and I'm not sure that Democrats focusing on this instead of policy is either a net good, or a winning strategy. I get the point about multitasking but airtime is limited, messaging space is limited, and I think results are generally won around a single flagship issue that gains momentum, and the others follow in its wake.

Dems should be focussing not just on getting rid of Trump via the front door but what they are going to do when they get in. If Mueller somehow gets him out some other way, fine, thats Mueller's job. Otherwise the danger is that we end up with Biden in office

Democrats focusing on this instead of policy

this seems like (mostly) a straw man to me, which is sort of what i was suggesting in my allusion to multitasking. aside from some folks on the internet, is anyone with a truly significant pulpit or power actually doing this -- that is, focusing on russiagate to the exclusion of policy. the best that i can think of is that one congressman from california whose name i am forgetting at the moment.

ted lieu! that's who i was thinking of.

...you might even say that he's focusing on russigate in lieu of spending time writing policy

don't forget to tip your waiter.

Ted lieu and the pharmacists

is anyone with a truly significant pulpit or power actually doing this -- that is, focusing on russiagate to the exclusion of policy

i was thinking of CNN more than the politicians themselves! i guess people like Maddow?

She does cover a lotof stuff other than Russia, has looked at corruption and lack of response to natural disasters etc.
Russia is something she returns to frequently but not sure to what extent to the actual exclusion of other topics.

I am not dismissive. I am waiting for the legit reports.

good morning!

I know this got reported last year, but it's worth mentioning again. From the NYT story about Trump + Deutsche Bank:

n the late 1990s, Deutsche Bank, which is based in Germany, was trying to make a name for itself on Wall Street. Its investment-banking division went on a hiring binge.

The bank recruited a handful of Goldman Sachs traders to lead a push into commercial real estate. One was Justin Kennedy, the son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

xps salacious/absurd ≠ farfetched

Pretty sure the UK’s current Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, was working at Deutsch Bank around that time.

is anyone with a truly significant pulpit or power actually doing this -- that is, focusing on russiagate to the exclusion of policy

i was thinking of CNN more than the politicians themselves! i guess people like Maddow?

― anvil, Tuesday, March 19, 2019 5:06 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this stuff obviously gets ratings. i only tune in to Chris Hayes occasionally but it seems like he devotes at least a segment to Russiagate every night even in the absence of real news on the subject and likely his own personal lack of interest (at least judging from his Twitter feed and podcast, wherein Russia rarely comes up).

Maybe one of the problems here is people still giving televised news a single iota of their attention. The Russiagate discussion I'm exposed to is basically limited to these threads.

Hayes has made it clear the Russia stuff is for the sake of his producers, whereas Bush bottom feeders like Nicole Wallace got shows for the purpose of bipartisan outrage over Trump's vulgarity.

I feel like there's at least eight or twelve forms of covering/focusing on Russia stuff, and some are more valid than others. The Russian government tried to interfere in the elections process, which seems worth investigating, and the entire GOP has elected to deflect and make excuses and change the subject, because their guy may have been the beneficiary (or may have had people on his team who were in on it, or may have had some inkling what was going on, or may even have been in on it himself, whatever). That mass deflection and denial on the part of a major political party and all its elected officials seems legitimately scandalous and has a claim to being daily front-page news until something's resolved. It's just when it gets entangled with a mentality of this being how to "get" Trump or the GOP, by people who want life to be a multi-season procedural about hero lawyers bringing down a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, that it becomes one of the most tedious possible conversations you could get stuck in at a bar.

Unfortunately the corporate media shapes and also reflects the widespread conviction held by the public that Donald Trump is a crass outlier, and if only Barack Obama and even George W. Bush were in command so we can forget about paying attention to the news. I know b/c this percentage comprises most of the fiftysomethings I know who watch MSNBC.

Otherwise the danger is that we end up with Biden in office

otoh that is the "postponing the inevitable" scenario

Y'all acting like you ain't heard the Zager and Evans song. We got a good 7500 years comin

Positing this as a worst case scenario is why “the left” can gfi

Second-worst.

Worst case scenario:

1. Trump reelected, Dems lose House majority

Best case scenario:

1. Asteroid collides with Earth.