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@Earth
Throw the baby out with the bath water basically means that just because something caused a complication, you just need to deal with the complication, not the thing that caused the complication.
The literal reference, if you have ever bathed an infant or toddler (that is not toilet trained), refers to what happens when you're bathing a baby or toddler and they go to the bathroom in the tub. You get rid of the water; keep the baby... unless you're a progressive feminist, then the baby is patriarchal oppression of women, in which case you must go on a monologue about your plight. lol
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The point here is that it is not obvious or even clear what aspect of the Buzzfeed story the Special Counsel's office disputes. But, it is clear that they did not dispute the whole article, or any factual conclusions.
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@Greyparrot
>What are your thoughts on the recent fake news incident with buzzfeed over the Cohen felony allegations?
I assume you are referring to Buzzfeed's story that Trump directed Cohen to lie to congress.
This is the story: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/jasonleopold/trump-russia-cohen-moscow-tower-mueller-investigation?__twitter_impression=true
There is a lot going on in that story. First, the story reports that Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Second, the story attributes the source to "two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter".
That's a very vague source attribution. Vague enough that it could plausibly be construed as referring to people in the Muller probe. That is a problem for the Muller Probe, given that this *could* constitute the first "leak" from the Muller probe to the media; and not just to any media, but to Buzzfeed. That's a problem for the Muller probe, because they do not leak.
The second paragraph discusses Trump's support for a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential election, in order to personally meet with Vladimir Putin to jump-start the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations. These same sources reportedly told Buzzfeed that Trump told Cohen to "Make it Happen."
Then, this is what the Special Counsel's office said:
"BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate."
Here's what the Buzzfeed Article said, relative to that point:
The "special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office."
Further, the "special counsel wrote that Cohen had provided details about his contacts with “persons connected to the White House” in 2017 and 2018 and about how he had prepared his statements to Congress."
And "the law enforcement sources familiar with his testimony to the special counsel said he had confirmed that Trump directed him to lie to Congress, and also that he had provided details of his conversations about the project with the president and Ivanka and Donald Jr."
Finally, "Ivanka Trump was slated to manage a spa at the tower and personally recommended an architect. She also instructed Cohen to speak with a Russian athlete who offered “synergy on a government level” to get the Moscow project off the ground, in another aspect of the deal first revealed by BuzzFeed News that later was affirmed by the special counsel’s sentencing memo. "
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@Swagnarok
> You claimed that the Trump towers are themselves laundered assets of Russian oligarchs.
That is not what I said.
>Most of these are located in the United States, correct? And though they might be sold, the buildings themselves, along with the land they're sitting on, cannot simply be withdrawn from the United States and put in Russia. Since the US government could in theory just confiscate ownership over all of these buildings, wouldn't Trump's cooperation with the oligarchs in this respect have the long-term benefit of giving the US government significant leverage over them (say, to keep Putin in check and keep him from doing anything really stupid or else forfeit all of these assets)? Would this not serve to advance the cause of peace in Eastern Europe and the world, since Putin has to answer to the oligarchs? If this is the case, isn't it even possible that all this time Trump might've been a double agent for the FBI or the CIA?
No.
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@Alec
You're of course welcome to address my post lol...
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@David
Reminder to continue your AMA.
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@Earth
>Thoughts on Ojeda? What kind (refering to your past post on this subject) of candidate is he?
I think Ojeda is outstanding. He's the first democrat in a while who actually genuinely cares about the working class.
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@KingLaddy01
The reason why Gillette is making a female-friendly ad is because they know that about 1/2 of all their sales are from purchases made by women; and of those sales, about 1/3 of are for female use. Why, you may wonder? Because the Gillette Fusion razors are better than anything that exists on the market for women, and Gillette knows this. They are also generally cheaper than the razors and blades targeted for women. Gillette desires to expand this demographic.
Now, is the ad stupid? Of course it is. Corporate virtue signaling is beneath contempt. But, the world we live in is the one where moral virtue is commoditized just as indulgences were commoditized before the Reformation. What a time it is to be alive.
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@Mharman
stupid liberal policyThat's a little redundant there.
This, on the other hand, was not a good comment and it was not one that I am ever going to approve of.
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@Mharman
Those laws only state a debt collector may not threaten, lie to, or verbally abuse a debtor. That is far different from refusing to go along with someone's pronouns.The criteria for a First Amendment violation depends on the kind of speech being censored, it has nothing to do with how narrow an interaction may be. Threats are not lawful. Lying in business and legal interactions is scamming/perjury and therefore not lawful. Using the pronoun of the gender they were born as is perfectly lawful under the First Amendment because you are showing your beliefs that you will not bow down to the idea that there are more than two genders- that you hold your own position and will stand firm in that position.
I'm going to take a minute to address this post of yours, in particular. There were several good things about it. First, you attempted to distinguish between kinds of laws which restrict speech in a business context and kinds of speech that restrict speech in a non-commercial private context. Second, you tried to indicate just what exactly that distinction was, and what kind of a distinction it was. Third, you made something approximating an effort at saying why that distinction mattered, even if you did it in a way that was a bit obtuse.
If you made the effort to write comments like that at least most of the time, I'd treat you very differently. You'd be hearing actual, substantive engagement from me in a way that did not immediately dismiss you as a naughty little right wing brat. That isn't because I agree with you, either. I don't agree with about 50% of what you wrote. But, to the extent that regulating how individuals use language in their interactions with one another is profoundly obviously a sort of encroachment on individual liberty that goes well beyond the realm of what is acceptable for any just government to do. Just as Canada's idiotic compelled speech laws were beyond forgiveness, so too would something be even more so in the United States. After all, we have a First Amendment. Canada doesn't (though it has something like something similar).
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@Greyparrot
>When will Muller finish?
Muller will finish by the end of March, unless something else happens.
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But Trump had a problem, too. Trump couldn't get loans from conventional sources because he was a deadbeat, in every sense of the word. He stiffed everyone, even his lawyers. Even, in the end, Michael Cohen. No one would lend to him. That put Trump in a bit of a bind. Enter, Russia. They solved that problem. They lent to him. They financed him when no one else would. They facilitated funding from DanskeBank and DeutscheBank to fund Trump Tower in Chicago. They paid for the beautiful golf course in Scotland.
1. Did this involve helping them evade US sanctions (presumably from 2014 and beyond)?
Not likely. The deals between Trump and Russia now are more in the fashion of "relieve" sanctions on Putin and his people, in exchange for dream business deals with Russians in general and Russian Banks to finance more Trump Tower projects in particular.
2. How has this harmed the interests of the United States?
This in itself is the kind of post I'm going to have to come back to, because the categories of US interests that are harmed are not limited to one category or another. They are both domestic and international; on military, diplomatic, and economic axioms. Generally, Trump has ceded US power and influence to hostile foreign powers, forsaken US alliances, and created conditions for global instability of every possible kind because he has withdrawn America from the world. We have never been closer to a total war than we are, now. This is ironic, because the Trump people claimed that in fact it was Clinton who would start WWIII. The domestic harms, though, predominate. Trump conspired with a hostile foreign power to undermine American democracy.
3. Has the damage to the United States caused by Trump (supposedly, at this point) colluding with Russia exceeded the damage caused by the erosion in the public's faith in the government caused by these long, drawn out, and very public investigations into a sitting president commenced by the Democratic party and senate Republicans?
I reject multiple premises within that question. Because there are so many premises that have to be broken down, this is a topic I'll have to return to later.
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@Swagnarok
From what I heard, the main accusation against Trump was that he helped a large number of Russian oligarchs launder their money.
That is correct, but that's not the end of the story. Trump's relationship with Russians in the KGB began when he was identified as a potential agent of influence who could be useful to them in the future. He was invited to Russia and went there many times, where he has engaged in a number of questionable activities. Some of those activities you may have heard about, which would be the golden shower tape. Other activities you may not have heard about, like a certain video of Trump with a prostitute in the late 1980s in a hotel in Moscow. This is called "compromat" in the form of a honey pot trap. But, even though this is basically standard operating procedure for the KGB, the KGB are much more sophisticated than merely luring someone like Trump into a sexually compromising position.
Where the KGB's talent really comes through is in their business acumen, and to understand this, you have to go back to what happened after the sort of privatization (read: theft of state assets) that occurred in the 1990s after the fall of the USSR. While the process isn't really all that important for our purposes, a very small number of people got very rich, very quickly. But, no one in what was then Russia knew anything about asset valuation and so they undervalued nearly everything... until people like Bill Browder started throwing money around (that's another story for another day, though). Once people figured out how to gain private ownership of state assets, political alliances solidified. Though there was a period of relative freedom, state power quickly consolidated by about 1997-1998. By that time, though, Yeltsin had made a lot of very real enemies. He needed someone who would protect him and his family. Putin was that person.
I have a lot of things to say about Putin, but what matters about Trump and Putin is that the oligarchs Putin empowered in some cases, or created in others had a problem. Their problem was that they had amassed spectacular wealth in Russia because of their theft of state assets, mostly in raw materials exports (petrochemicals, nickel, phosphates, aluminum, etc.). So, the challenge was "how do we get the money from Russia to a place more stable?" This was a real problem, because the Ruble is a really precarious currency (take a look at how it changed between 2000 and when Bush invaded Iraq, and then how it fluctuated until the present day. What, then, do you do if you are an oligarch in need of protecting your stolen assets? It's not like you can just walk up to Goldman Sachs and say "hey, I'd like to invest!" You've got all kinds of problems that anything approximating a minimally adequate level of due diligence would reveal.
So, you want stability. You also want to be able to spend your money on things in the West. You want to be able to do that without the trivialities and inconveniences of, say, taxes... to the extent they can be avoided. But, you can't really just buy these things yourself. Holding companies that own mysterious LLCs that own mysterious LLCs that own mysterious LLCs that own mysterious LLCs need to be set up. For most people, when you've got someone going to such a great effort to obscure the source of their money, that's a red flag, and that red flag is a problem, and that red problem means that I'm not going to do business with you because of various US laws, like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and my potential criminal liability for doing business with you. But, if you've got an all-cash transaction from the bottom LLC?
Trump didn't ask questions. Maybe because he was too stupid to ask; maybe because he didn't care. Money was money. This was very helpful for Russians who needed to move money out of Russia and move it into the United States. Trump was the way to launder money into the United States. Trump got a cut, too. The properties were almost uniformly overvalued, which is the other thing that's nice about residential real estate... valuation is pretty subjective. This makes condos an ideal currency to launder money with. It turns out, that's how most of Trump Towers' condos in every US City with one and Canada got purchased. Most of them aren't even occupied.
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@oromagi
You and I don't agree on what science fiction is. You've got a narrow definition of it. There objectively exists a broader meaning, but you obviously disagree with that broader meaning and, well... fair enough. There isn't much more to say than that.
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@Greyparrot
And you know well enough that there is no one "main" cause, and even if there was, taxes by their nature can't account for why the cost of living is so high in California. Hold yourself to a higher standard...
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@Greyparrot
That's a very unidimensional assessment of California's cost of living. There are numerous factors that come into play; taxes and regulations play a part, sure, but they aren't the only part. They're not the whole picture, and you're smart enough to know better. Rejecting one proximate cause in favor of another when neither are mutually exclusive is not an argument. It's a weak dogmatic claim.
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@Greyparrot
Your implication is in vain. Republican national economic policy was the proximate cause of Flint's decline; local Democrats can't even stop the bleeding.
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The real difference for me manifests on the axis of judicial politics. Being in the line of work that I am, where about 95% of everything is predictable, it's in that universe of 5% unpredictability that truly evil things can be accomplished by and through judicial activism. The Republicans came up with the term "judicial activist" to refer to people who read the constitution for what it is, in light of the present day; despite the fact that the same Republicans read the constitution for what they want it to be, to hurt people they don't like and help people they like. It really is that simple.
That is not to say that "all" right wing judicial activism I disapprove of. I don't disapprove of nearly everything Anton Scalia has written about the Fourth Amendment, and in general I think that that Neil Gorsuch's property rights theory of Fourth Amendment protection is not only the most constitutionally viable, but the most pragmatic and workable in the society. I think left-wing types, post Earl Warren, tend to defer to the Government far too much. The right wing, on the other hand, has almost always been the strongest defender of Fourth Amendment protections in the courts. Neil Gorsuch, case and point. Both Scalia and his ideological progeny have redefined the limits on governmental power, by and through their activist interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.
Nonetheless, there's a lot more in play beyond the Fourth Amendment that has to be considered. In particular, substantive and procedural due process rights have been constrained acutely by the right wing, and will likely continue to be in the future if present and historical trends continue as they have. As well, the right wing has consistently made a practice of creatively interpreting the constitution to maintain the social and legal status quo, rather than to rectify historical systemic and structural injustices, as well as to achieve political ends through legal means. The big hot button issues include their systemic erosion of the right to medical privacy over their perfectly idiotic obsession with abortion (coupled with a complete indifference to everything that leads up to abortion), and equality before the law as it relates to race, gender, and sexuality.
Strange as it may seem for someone like me to be talking about those "big three" (race, gender, and sexuality) because of my repeated tirades against identity politics, don't be lured into the misapprehension that I'm changing my tune now, because I'm not. The goal of legal reform within the domains of race, gender, and sexuality is to restore to members of disfavored groups the same status as is held by non-members of those disfavored groups. So, rather than see a gay man as a gay man; to see him only as a man. Rather than see a black woman as a black woman; see her only as a woman. Rather than see a trans person as a sexually anomalous problem without a solution (which is basically how the right treats them), see them only as a person. In each case, the law's objective should be to remove identity-based classifications from individuals which delineate them from majority groups. Or, alternatively, to draw so many distinctions across every individual that one can't help but see all people as only individuals rather than as members of one group or another. The individual is, after all, the ultimate minority. The intersectionalists are going to inevitably come to this same conclusion; even if they took the most idiotic and circuitous path to an idea that humanity already sorted out in the enlightenment -- even if at that point the idea had not yet fully materialized.
The Republicans can't abide by that, though. For all their talk of individual merit and merit or competence based hierarchy, at every level of analysis they still write rules in a way that it turns out that a black man is going to get a harsher sentence for the same crime committed in the same way, against the same kind of victim, in the same courtroom and often by the same judge. As well, these are the same people who would have castrated Alan Turing for being gay, who would and still long to uphold the constitutionality of anti-sodomy laws, and who at every level think women have no place in any working context. But, for all the Republicans' horrors on social policy; all of that pales in comparison to their pro-corporate and anti-environmental bias in the courts and in regulations. They will strike down environmental regulations that hurt Republican donor companies (see generally, the State of West Virginia) but shield stock brokers who recklessly mismanage retirement funds from facing civil liability. A post four times as long as the one I'm writing now could be solely devoted to merely *describing* the pro-corporate and anti-person biases that manifest on every level of right wing judicial activism, and it wouldn't even scratch the surface.
Why does this matter? Politicians appoint judges, and I want the judges appointed to be ones that aren't evil, no matter how banal that evil may seem. A lawyer can accomplish more with his briefcase and papers than a thief can with a gun, after all.
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@Alec
The question OP asks is a fair one. Collaterally, a lot of people who I know don't understand why I, for example, bother to vote for Democrats when so many of them (Clintons) are corporate whores, whose policies have hurt the middle class and resulted in catastrophic economic harm that has spanned the last three decades. The question of whether the Democrats or the Republicans, though, is really a misnomer. The Democrats are only "better" insofar as they are "less worse" than the Republicans. Even still, by no means is that to say that the Democrats are without flaws.
Overall, the way this shakes down for me is that the Republicans fail on economic and social policies, full stop, and they get economic policies right about 1/2 of the time (with the exception of Trump, who usually gets between 10-15% of each problem right, and then fucks everything else up). Democrats, along the same general axioms, get domestic policy right about 1/2 of the time, and economic policy right about 1/2 of the time. They get foreign policy right about 1/3-1/2 of the time, too. So, these things aren't equal, the democrats are less worse.
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@oromagi
Star Wars is science fiction, and you and I both know that all the creative nonsense you just cited is not disproving that. To be clear, you can argue that it is things in addition to science fiction until your fingers bleed from overtyping. That will not change the fact that the movie is science fiction.
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@Swagnarok
All great questions. I can't answer these briefly. This will take a lot of time. Stay tuned. Ask more if you want.
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@Greyparrot
You are misinterpreting the article.
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@Greyparrot
That has nothing to do with retaliation, and does not contradict anything I have said. You misinterpreted the article.
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@Greyparrot
NYT has not contradicted what I said.
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@Earth
>Will Flint ever not be a shithole?
Depends what you mean by "shithole". The property tax base there has been depleted and depleting since the late 1970s; things got much worse (as they did for nearly everyone except for rich white people) under Reagan, because he gutted the unions, broke apart favorable trade deals, and generally laid the preconditions for the complete destruction of the American middle class. HW sort of didn't improve things, but Republicans in Congress in the 1990s basically reduced Flint to a status approximating that of a third world country. Now, anyone with any marketable skills has left. All who remain are those who couldn't leave. There is zero indication that the cycle of poverty will ever correct itself.
Notably, it didn't have to be that way. Were it not for Republican policies for the last 40 years, Flint would be probably indistinguishable from Rockford, IL. Nevertheless, the factories closed. The work left. The economy crumbled.
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@Swagnarok
>Eckhart Tolle
I had to google him. I didn't know who he was, which tells you something in itself. From a brief review of the first page of the Google Results, and a skim reading of his Wikipedia page... the guy looks like a quack.
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@3RU7AL
>Have you ever seen the 1939 movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"?
Yes.
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@Earth
>So how is Mueller doing?
Looks like the report's first draft is done. And, to the surprise of none, Muller has found that Trump conspired with Putin to undermine American interests and to promote Russian ones. None are surprised, but the Republicans will distort this in every conceivable way. Stupid Americans will be mislead by propaganda efforts driven by a shameless conspiracy theory organization (Fox News) in support of a spineless, weak, cowardly president (Trump) whose agenda will destroy this country and already has weakened our place in the world on at least fifteen different dimensions.
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@3RU7AL
>Can't you just post as YYW on DDO something like, "I am now coal on DArt" and then link it here?
No.
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@Earth
Foreign companies in Detroit because I want to bring capital from abroad, not take it from another state. Unions do not factor into the analysis.
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@Outplayz
This wouldn't be criminal; it would be civil, given the nature of the offense. So, on that score, I'm unconcerned.
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@Greyparrot
The amount of disinformation from right-wing sources is incredible. The counter-intel investigation into Trump was in play before Comey was fired, and it was being developed even when Comey told Trump that he was not a "target" of any investigation but merely a "subject". Comey knew that Trump was going to become a target of investigation, which is why he refused to speak to congress on the subject.
Further, the suggestion that the FBI "retaliated" against Trump begins and ends in conspiratorial absurdity. The Special Counsel's office took over that investigation after Muller was appointed, meaning that the FBI was not running point at that time. So, how could the FBI have "retaliated"? They couldn't have. After all, the DOJ is what caused the Special Counsel's office to come into existence.
If you want to go article by article, from the right wing nut jobs... feel free. We'll speak facts to fantasy, though not quite "truth" to "power" because the right wing has no power, now. The only power held by these right wing media figures is over the minds and imaginations of people like MHarman, who believe in the fantasy that Fox News and their compatriots have created for their viewer-base. Basically, Fox News is to Republicans what North Korean Media is to Kim Jong Un's loyal worshipers.
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@Outplayz
Thank you for that. From what I can tell, nothing about that suggests any civil or criminal penalty for "misgendering" anyone. As is predictable, this is right wing nonsense.
Now, it may well be the case that the people of California considered passing something like Ontario's revisions to the Ontario Human Rights Code, within which is a provision for imposing civil penalties in the form of fines for "misgendering" someone. Of course, that would be a regretful development. But, so far as I can tell, nothing similar exists in any California law, statute, or regulation.
Maybe it will in a few years, and then a discussion can be had about it. Or, maybe such a bill will be proposed. But, we're not there now.
This whole story sounds like trash from Alex Jones, Breitbart, the conspiracy theorist Matt Drudge, RT, Pravda or Sputnik.
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@Mharman
As usual, you are wrong on every level.
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@Mharman
Boyo, I sometimes wonder about you. Really do.
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It may be fair to say that Star Wars is not *only* science fiction, and that it has elements consistent with fantasy, or whatever, but it would be factually wrong for about thirty obvious reasons to say that Star Wars was *not* science fiction, because it absolutely is.
It is in addition to being science fiction, a hollow, unidimensional, poorly written, nearly entirely plotless movie whose appeal to sexually frustrated adolescent boys (or men who have reached, at most, the psychosexual maturity of sexually frustrated adolescent boys); is therefore entiely pedestrian, and wholly lacking in anything approaching "quality" in the way of film.
I realize this position places me outside the realm of like at least 1/2 of all people on this site, and probably about 1/4th of the general population of the United States, but those movies are beneath contempt. I cannot seriously appreciate how anyone likes them.
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The NYT article is not inconsistent with what I said. The counterintel investigation was in play before Comey was fired.
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@Alec
Please provide a source. This sounds like right wing propaganda. Like, show me the actual law.
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@Earth
I disagree that the adjective "good" or anything resembling "good" could be properly and justifiably used in any sentence to describe the universe of "Star Wars" anything.
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Before Trump fired Comey, the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation against Trump. Comey likely knew this was coming, which is why he was unwilling to tell Congress that the president was not a target of any investigation, but merely a subject. It turns out that Trump became a target even before Comey was fired.
Muller has Trump's iCloud data, and likely every email and text sent by anyone in the White House. If it turns out that Trump knew about this before he fired Comey, he will be indicted for obstruction of justice and almost certainly convicted on that charge alone.
More ominously, if it turns out that Trump was in fact doing the Russian government's bidding (as seems increasingly more likely given his actions from the 2016 Republican convention to present, to the point that it is a near certainty among those who have been paying attention and who do not view the world through the blinders of "loyalty" to Trump), he will be indicted, prosecuted, and convicted of treason.
Examples of treason:
1. Changing the US's foreign policy platform in relation to intervention in Ukraine in exchange for something of value from the Russian government.
2. Conspiring with agents of the foreign government, directly or indirectly, to change US policy related to intervention in Syria in exchange for something of value from the Russian government.
3. Relieving or promising to relieve, or refusing to enforce or implement, sanctions of any kind, including in particular, those against Oleg Deripaska and those generally targeted by the Magnitsky Act, in exchange for something of value from the Russian government.
4. Offering, or promising to offer, any particular US citizen, or former US Citizen, including Bill Browder, to the Russian Government, in exchange for anything of value from the Russian government.
5. Receiving, conspiring to receive, or knowingly directly or indirectly benefitting from election assistance of any kind from the Russian government or any agent of group of agents from the Russian government; in exchange for anything of value to or from the Russian government; either on an isolated basis, or on an ongoing basis.
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@blamonkey
It's rare that a pattern like that exists, but this is perhaps the best time do to both LD and PF.
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I am making something like spanish roast pork in the crock pot. It's basically stew meat pork cooked with spanish herbs, fire roasted tomatoes, a spanish onion, salt and pepper.
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Here's another:
In your OP, and in your profile pic, and based on my knowledge of you in general, you display five layers of identities: (1) Jewish, (2) Aspie, (3) democratic socialist, (4) potentially goth/emo, and (5) gay.
What role do these identities play in your understanding of yourself, and why? As you conceive of yourself, are you the sum of your overlapping identities, and, if so, do you agree that the set of them and their intersection indicates the degree of your own individuality? If so, why? Further, if the overlapping intersection of those or other identities or groups to which you belong, do you also believe that the individual must therefore be the fundamental social unit (as opposed to the groups, themselves)? Are identity-based groups social units of relevance?
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@David
Excellent. I'll think of a few more. Take your time. These are fairly complex questions, except the one about Ben Shapiro, who is as unidimensional and monolithic as he is obnoxious.
Why democratic socialism, and, more interestingly, why NOT anything else? I may be misremembering, but I seem to recall that you were not always a democratic socialist, or even politically on the left. What changed, and why? Why have you stuck with this?
I've noticed that you've had a lot of debates about whether Jesus is the messiah, here and elsewhere. Do you feel that validation of your religious beliefs requires the invalidation of Christianity? If so, why Christianity in particular? Further, if you believe that Christianity would need to be invalidated in order to validate your own religious beliefs, do you also feel this way about other Abrahamic religions, namely Islam? If you do not believe that Islam or other Abrahamic religions would need to be invalidated, why Christianity in particular? Beyond Abrahamic religions, have you similarly considered and rejected (as you have with Christianity) other world religions? Namely, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism?
How do you feel about Ben Shapiro?
How do you feel about Noam Chomsky?
How do you feel about the current situation between Israel and Palestine?
Let's talk the interplay between politics and religion. Discuss your thoughts on contemporary Israeli politics, the degree to which you think Israel should or should not remain a 'Jewish' state, and what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state. In particular, compare Netanyahu to Sharon; discuss the settlements, and their ongoing progression; and describe what if any changes you would make to the status quo, if any, and in particular what, if anything, you would do about Jerusalem.
To what degree is, or ought Israel be accountable to the so called "international community"? Discuss in particular accountability to Islamic countries, and so called Islamic scholars of "international law" who claim that Israel has, for any number of reasons, violated "international law" and demand that Israel do or cease things they are currently doing as it relates to Palestine.
How do you feel about the fact that Netanyahu has made a deal with the terrorist state of Saudi Arabia to unite against Iran?
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