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Donald Fires FBI Director who's investigating Russian Election Hacking

jazzrule said:
Guess you don't watch Hannity where he showed multiple footage of Trump saying the Russians meddled in our elections. Quit watching CNN for your news and you might learn the truth, but you can not handle the truth.
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Did you see how he spoke when Putin was standing right next to him? Think that might be the new standard now.
 
The Thriller said:
An entire political party is attacking the FBI and working to overthrow our institutions. All because they’re either too scared of their crazy *** delegates in their primaries or because they’re corrupt from Russian rubles donated to the NRA.

Not the same as a handful of clowns who think that Jenny McArthy knows stuff.
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Anit-vaccine stances kill people. Working to overthrow the FBI does not. Actions that involve killing people, even indirectly, are worse.
 
One Brow said:
Anit-vaccine stances kill people. Working to overthrow the FBI does not. Actions that involve killing people, even indirectly, are worse.
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I disagree completely. Look at literally every dictatorship on the 20th and 21st century. Look at turkey, Hungary, and Poland today. Convincing the public (or a large part of the public) that American institutions are part of a “deep state” hell bent on destroying The Great Leader will undoubtably lead to death and potentially the transformation of western civilization forever. Americans seem to think that they’re immune to the totalitarian forces clearly on the rise today. It’s weird.

Not sure we’ve faced such a dire threat since the 1940s.

I’m not worried about a few idiots who think Jenny McCarthy knows stuff.

I’m much more worried about the 40 percent of the population that worships trump and has no respect for American institutions or civil rights.
 
Red said:
Did you see how he spoke when Putin was standing right next to him? Think that might be the new standard now.
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I would really like to know what is going on in that huge orange head of his, to find out exactly why he is so enamored with Russia. I mean on the surface we can see that he reveres leaders with total control. He has proven to be a control freak throughout his entire life, so that is no surprise. But I have to think there is something deeper than that. Maybe a financial interest, but many politicians have had that with other groups, countries, specials interest, etc. I don't think he is smart enough to actually pull off any kind of lasting change, such as removing the constitution or overthrowing the republic, or whatever. Or maybe he is just stupid enough to think he can become the next dear leader, but I doubt that. But there is something deeper there. I would be interested to know exactly what it is.
 
The Thriller said:
I’m not worried about a few idiots who think Jenny McCarthy knows stuff.

I’m much more worried about the 40 percent of the population that worships trump and has no respect for American institutions or civil rights.
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Can we just agree that they're BOTH existential threats? I mean, Trump can start a nuclear war (altho he'd pronounce it nucular) but anti-vaxxers could precipitate a plague like the black death.
 
gandalfe said:
Can we just agree that they're BOTH existential threats? I mean, Trump can start a nuclear war (altho he'd pronounce it nucular) but anti-vaxxers could precipitate a plague like the black death.
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Hasn’t trump proven this risk already in his press conference with Putin, subsequent dates with Hannity and Carlson, and later his walk back of his original press conference?

“I don’t see why Russia would be.”

Oh I meant to say, “I don’t see why Russia wouldn’t be.”

What’s stopping him from ordering:

“Let’s bomb North Korea!”

Oh I meant to say, “Let’s not bomb North Korea!

Colbert did a hilarious School house video on this:

 
The Thriller said:
I disagree completely. Look at literally every dictatorship on the 20th and 21st century. Look at turkey, Hungary, and Poland today. Convincing the public (or a large part of the public) that American institutions are part of a “deep state” hell bent on destroying The Great Leader will undoubtably lead to death and potentially the transformation of western civilization forever. Americans seem to think that they’re immune to the totalitarian forces clearly on the rise today. It’s weird.
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Let's be clear on this: any attempt to create a totalitarian state will need to rely on internal intelligence and law enforcement to enact it upon the populace. Within our federal government, this can only be accomplished by organizations like the FBI and NSA.

I agree that Trump loves dictators, and i find it easy to believe he would love to have dictatorial powers. Dictators don't just arise by fiat; they actually have to take over and subvert the institutions of power. Even if Trump were actively trying to lay a years-long plan to create a dictatorship (and I'm not sure Trump has the capacity for long-term planning), he would be actively interfering with his ability to accomplish it.

The US has had demagogues before, and will again. It has had period of heightened intolerance before, and will again. It may someday cease to be a democracy, but the people that arrange that change will be much more competent and clever that the clown-car this administration represents.

If you really want to worry about something, worry about how at the lower level appointments (undersecretaries and the like) are governing by destroying the government's regulations. That's where the real scandal and danger, not the White House side-show.
 
LogGrad98 said:
I would really like to know what is going on in that huge orange head of his, to find out exactly why he is so enamored with Russia.
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As Russia has become more homophobic, more intolerant of religious diversity, etc., the Dominionists have become more enamored with Russia. This has been happening for years.
 
One Brow said:
Let's be clear on this: any attempt to create a totalitarian state will need to rely on internal intelligence and law enforcement to enact it upon the populace. Within our federal government, this can only be accomplished by organizations like the FBI and NSA.

I agree that Trump loves dictators, and i find it easy to believe he would love to have dictatorial powers. Dictators don't just arise by fiat; they actually have to take over and subvert the institutions of power. Even if Trump were actively trying to lay a years-long plan to create a dictatorship (and I'm not sure Trump has the capacity for long-term planning), he would be actively interfering with his ability to accomplish it.

The US has had demagogues before, and will again. It has had period of heightened intolerance before, and will again. It may someday cease to be a democracy, but the people that arrange that change will be much more competent and clever that the clown-car this administration represents.

If you really want to worry about something, worry about how at the lower level appointments (undersecretaries and the like) are governing by destroying the government's regulations. That's where the real scandal and danger, not the White House side-show.
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Regarding your last observation, as you stated: "If you really want to worry about something, worry about how at the lower level appointments (undersecretaries and the like) are governing by destroying the government's regulations. That's where the real scandal and danger, not the White House side-show", in my own case this has been my focus and my worry in the case of the EPA and the Department of the Interior. In the case of the former, the actual policy actions of Scott Pruitt in rolling back regulations. The new EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, is a former coal industry lobbyist, and he has now curtailed Obama era regulations regarding coal ash:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-s-epa-rolls-back-obama-era-coal-ash-regulations-n892586

In the case of the latter, Ryan Zinke has made it clear America's public lands should exist for the interest of fossil fuel extraction, as well as our offshore waters:

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/ryan-zinkes-great-american-fire-sale

And drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is to get a fast review:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...73c11a-8a98-11e8-85ae-511bc1146b0b_story.html

These are some of my concerns and worries, and reason enough for me to vote out Trump when the opportunity presents itself in 2020.

But, I do also worry about the broader trend toward authoritarianism in the United States. I wonder, for instance, what role the tendency of Trump to label any journalism not favorable to him as "fake news", and the mantra "the media is the true enemy of the people" means to the survival of democracy itself. There is also the truism, which this president seems to understand quite well, that simply repeating something often enough sinks in and has an effect. Thus we see approval of Putin, and seeing Putin as an ally, is actually on the rise.

Trump understands repeating things in a mantra-like manner influences how people think, and therefore one can create greater support for ideas and/or policies that increase authoritarianism. If you also have a situation where a political party, in this case the GOP, cannot really separate itself from Trump, and also a situation where, like fireflies attracted to light, each new "outrage" supplants an earlier "outrage" in the attention focus of the media, you get a situation where, for instance and most recently, the discovery of Cohen tapes describing a Trump affair are now already supplanting the Trump/Putin press conference as what the media, and hence public attention, is focused on.

I'm sure I am rambling here, but I am one who does focus on specific actions by cabinet level officials, while at the same time being alarmed by the manner in which the words and actions of the president seem antithetical to American values yet somehow are tolerated and recede with the arrival of still another scandal.

I see now that it is quite likely that the president betraying the United States during the press conference with Putin will not matter at all. Receding already from the news cycle. It's an example of Trump's own adage that he could shoot someone at random, and not lose the support of his followers. A cult of personality lends itself to authoritarianism in the United States.

I know I'm flailing here, struggling to find a way of describing what I see as the danger to our democracy a cult of personality presents. But it was clear to me from day one we were dealing with a demagogue, and I see Trump as the most dangerous such individual in our history...
 
I'm thinking that maybe one effect of a Post Truth era is that citizens will simply stop judging whether the president is lying or telling the truth. The truth of the matter will become irrelevant. And maybe a president will be able to behave in a more authoritarian manner in an age where the only truth is the truth one chooses to believe. Again, I know I'm floundering here, it's a struggle for me to understand how a Post Truth era will change our democratic institutions. On the other hand, Orwell illustrated the power of the Big Lie. As long as a sufficient percentage of the electorate believe the Big Lie, it's far easier for them to believe the media is "the enemy of the people". Even the most exhaustively researched investigative journalism can be dismissed. It seems to me this has to make authoritarian rule a greater possibility....

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-snapchat-and-the-dawn-of-the-post-truth-era/

"What we politely call “fake news”—a formulation that presupposes some antecedent credible truth called “news” that we're now abandoning—is just the tribal folklore of a certain (and usually opposing) tribe. Our exhausting and constant absorption in a transitory but completely overwhelming media cycle is our own preliterate eternal present. Who thinks now of Cecil the Lion and the villainous dentist who shot him, whose practice was promptly ruined by an online mob? We’re too busy dealing with the third huge Trump scandal this week, which we’ll forget in due course thanks to next week’s school shooting. Could any of us, if pressed, even construct a chronological ordering of Trump media cycles, or would we have only episodic memories of highlights, as we do when trying to reconstruct some long-ago period of life from memory? Twitter’s Moments product is a constant stream of just such transitory and disordered reactions to context-free events. A history-less forgetfulness is the overarching product vision for Snapchat, whose posts—atomized and textless morsels of personal experience—are designed to disappear and never be consulted or searched.


Future historians will be no help in making sense of our era. There’ll be no authoritative history that more than one faction will trust; a dozen factions will each have their own history. Given the persistence and ubiquity of digital media, it will be the best-documented period in American history, but nobody will agree on what happened.

As always, some prophetic academics have seen this coming, titling this new media medievalism “the Gutenberg Parenthesis” (or in Marshall McLuhan’s coinage “the Gutenberg Galaxy”). The idea here is that Gutenberg opened a parenthesis of textual, literate society, and Zuckerberg (and others) effectively closed it by promoting atomized experiences online. How then does the open debate of democratic societies work in such a post-textual “oral” culture (where the “orality” is not the in-person oral tradition of storytellers and shamans, but an intermediated one of Snapchat stories and viral Facebook videos)?

By and large, it doesn’t."
 
The Carter Page FISA warrent documents, heavily redacted, have been released by the Dept. of Justice, and contain some interesting statements pertinent to Page, Russians, and interference in the 2016 election. First time ever that FISA warrants have been released to the public....

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/politics/carter-page-fisa.html

"On Saturday evening, those materials — an October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Mr. Page, along with several renewal applications — were released to The New York Times and other news organizations that had filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to obtain them. Mr. Trump had declassified their existence earlier this year.

This application targets Carter Page,” the document said. “The F.B.I. believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government.” A line was then redacted, and then it picked up with “undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election in violation of U.S. criminal law. Mr. Page is a former foreign policy adviser to a candidate for U.S. president.”.....

.....Visible portions showed that the F.B.I. in stark terms had told the intelligence court that Mr. Page “has established relationships with Russian government officials, including Russian intelligence officers”; that the bureau believed “the Russian government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with” Mr. Trump’s campaign; and that Mr. Page “has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government.”

The fight over the surveillance of Mr. Page centered on the fact that the F.B.I., in making the case to judges that he might be a Russian agent, had used some claims drawn from a notorious Democratic-funded dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent.

The application cited claims from the dossier that Mr. Page, while on a trip to Moscow in July 2016, had met with two senior Russian representatives and discussed matters like lifting sanctions imposed on Russia for its intervention in Ukraine and a purported file of compromising information about Mr. Trump that the Russian government had. (Mr. Page has denied those allegations, although he later contradicted his claims that he had not met any Russian government officials on that trip.)"

The documents:

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthe...isa-documents-foia-release/full/optimized.pdf
 
Red said:
The Carter Page FISA warrent documents, heavily redacted, have been released by the Dept. of Justice, and contain some interesting statements pertinent to Page, Russians, and interference in the 2016 election. First time ever that FISA warrants have been released to the public....

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/politics/carter-page-fisa.html

"On Saturday evening, those materials — an October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Mr. Page, along with several renewal applications — were released to The New York Times and other news organizations that had filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to obtain them. Mr. Trump had declassified their existence earlier this year.

This application targets Carter Page,” the document said. “The F.B.I. believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government.” A line was then redacted, and then it picked up with “undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election in violation of U.S. criminal law. Mr. Page is a former foreign policy adviser to a candidate for U.S. president.”.....

.....Visible portions showed that the F.B.I. in stark terms had told the intelligence court that Mr. Page “has established relationships with Russian government officials, including Russian intelligence officers”; that the bureau believed “the Russian government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with” Mr. Trump’s campaign; and that Mr. Page “has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government.”

The fight over the surveillance of Mr. Page centered on the fact that the F.B.I., in making the case to judges that he might be a Russian agent, had used some claims drawn from a notorious Democratic-funded dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent.

The application cited claims from the dossier that Mr. Page, while on a trip to Moscow in July 2016, had met with two senior Russian representatives and discussed matters like lifting sanctions imposed on Russia for its intervention in Ukraine and a purported file of compromising information about Mr. Trump that the Russian government had. (Mr. Page has denied those allegations, although he later contradicted his claims that he had not met any Russian government officials on that trip.)"

The documents:

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthe...isa-documents-foia-release/full/optimized.pdf
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Yep. More evidence of collusion. I love how Donald and his minions are desperately trying to discredit Page and the FISA warrants (approved by 4 republican judges). It makes you wonder just how damaging to Donald is the evidence that the FBI obtained via Page?

Furthermore, when was the last time we found evidence that helped Donald? Seems like it’s been pretty much a landslide of evidence showing dirty Russian money laundered through the NRA (who then “donated” to republicans). These donations were then reciprocated with gun deregulation. Which added more money to NRA coffers and more election wins for republicans. We’ve seen a landslide of shady meetings between Russians and trump surrogates. And the recent Putin summit only served as more evidence that trump appears compromised by Putin.

When will republicans wake up? Or is winning elections with dirty Russian money more important than our country?
 
Do you hear that?

It’s the sound of the human trash can flip flopping and throwing the intelligence community under the bus (again).

So tired of this guy’s crap.

 
Obama knew about Russia before the election...

Trump just found out Montenegro was a country a week or two ago.
 
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