From: thangolossus@gmail.com

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/donald-trump-jr-natalia-vetelnitskaya-trump-tower-meeting

"But in a two-and-a-half-hour long interview with Bloomberg in Moscow, Veselnitskaya offered a much more damning account of the meeting, in
which she says Don Jr. hinted at a quid pro quo deal.

The “dirt” Veselnitskaya was peddling was information that the Clinton campaign may have received money from the wealthy Ziff family that
evaded U.S. taxes. (A spokesperson for the Ziffs said it had no
comment.) In exchange for proof that the Clinton campaign received
said illegal donations, Veselnitskaya said Trump Jr. indicated that,
if his father won the election, the Magnitsky Act—a retaliatory
measure the U.S. leveled against Moscow, blacklisting suspected
human-rights abusers—would be re-examined. “Looking ahead, if we come
to power, we can return to this issue and think what to do about it,’’ Veselnitskaya recalled Trump Jr. saying. He allegedly added, “I
understand our side may have messed up, but it’ll take a long time to
get to the bottom of it.”


---
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From: jeremyhdonovan@gmail.com

Anniversary of the Apocalypse
Michelle Goldberg
NOV. 6, 2017

In the terror-struck and vertiginous days after Donald Trump’s election a year ago, as I tried to make sense of America’s new reality, I called people who lived, or had lived, under authoritarianism to ask what to expect. I wasn’t looking for
concrete predictions — one of the disorienting things about that moment was that no one, no matter how learned, had any idea what was happening — but for
insights into how the texture of life changes when an autocratic demagogue is in charge.

A secular Turkish journalist told me, her voice sad and weary, that while people might at first pour into the streets to oppose Trump, eventually the protests would probably die out as a sense of stunned emergency gave way to the
slog of sustained
opposition. The Russian dissident writer Masha Gessen warned that there’s no way, with a leader who lays siege to the fabric of reality, to fully hold on to
a sense of what’s normal. “You drift, and you get warped,” she told me.

They were both right. The country has changed in the past year, and many of us have grown numb after unrelenting shocks. What now passes for ordinary would have once been inconceivable. The government is under the control of an erratic
racist who engages
in nuclear brinkmanship on Twitter. He is dismantling the State Department, defending the hollowing out of the diplomatic corps by saying, on Fox News, “I’m the only one that matters.”

He publicly pressures the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents. He’s called for reporters to be jailed, and his administration demanded that a sportscaster who criticized him be fired. Official government statements promote his
hotels. You can’t protest it all; you’d never do anything else. After the election, many liberals pledged not to “normalize” Trump. But one lesson of
this year is that we don’t get to decide what normal looks like.

Last month Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, took an unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia, where he met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who later had
a number of his rivals, including a Trump critic, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, put under arrest. In
The Washington Post, David Ignatius described Kushner’s talks with Prince Mohammed this way: “The two princes are said to have stayed up until nearly 4
a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy.” A year ago, that sentence would
have been unintelligible as a description of American diplomacy, even as a wry joke.

But this nightmare year has upended assumptions about the durability of the rules, formal and informal, governing our politics. There’s a metaphysical whiplash in how quickly alarm turns into acceptance and then into forgetfulness. It was astonishing
when Trump installed Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, a man who had previously run a white nationalist tabloid; now it feels like ages ago that he was even in the White House. (He’s been gone less than three months.)

It was staggering when credible evidence emerged that one of the president’s former national security advisers, Sebastian Gorka, was a member of a Nazi-aligned Hungarian group called the Vitezi Rend, and even more staggering when that revelation didn’
t immediately end his White House career.

Hannah Arendt once wrote of the role vulgarity played in undermining liberalism
in pre-totalitarian societies: “The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy
respectability.” I thought of this when I saw Ted Nugent, who on several occasions called for Barack Obama to be killed, grinning in a photograph taken in the Oval Office, or Kellyanne Conway appearing on television to urge America
to buy Ivanka Trump
merchandise. In this administration, crassness has become a weapon, annihilating social codes that once restrained political behavior, signaling that old standards no longer apply.

Lately, the pace of shocks has picked up, even if our capacity to process them has not. Trump’s former campaign chairman has been indicted. One of his former foreign policy aides has pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his
attempts to collude
with Russia. His commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, turns out to have retained a stake in a company with business ties to the son-in-law of President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

The new head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board once claimed that our air is “too clean for optimum health.” USA Today recently reported that the president has nominated several members of his clubs
to federal jobs.
Never in modern history, it said, “has a president awarded government posts to people who pay money to his own companies.” In another administration this
would have been a major scandal. In this one it barely registers.

How can America ever return from this level of systematic derangement and corruption? I wish there was someone I could ask, but we know more about how countries slide into autocracy than how they might climb out of it. It’s been
a year, and sometimes I�
��m still poleaxed by grief at the destruction of our civic inheritance.

In moments of optimism I think that this is just a hideous interregnum, and that in a brighter future we’ll watch prestige dramas about the time we almost lost America while members of the current regime grow old in prison. But
in my head I hear the
song that closed out Trump rallies like a satanic taunt or an epitaph for democracy: “You can’t always get what you want.”

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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From: jeremyhdonovan@gmail.com

Trump, Gillespie and the Same Old Party
Paul Krugman
NOV. 6, 2017

Since last year’s presidential election a number of establishment Republicans
have very publicly wrung their hands over what has happened to their party. George W. Bush has even lamented that he may turn out to have been the “last Republican
president,” because Donald Trump represents something so alien to the party’s tradition.

But how different is Trump, really? He’s cruder, ruder and less competent than his Republican predecessors — although on that last point, we shouldn’t forget the Bush administration’s disastrous occupation of Iraq and botched response to
Hurricane Katrina. But there’s a lot more continuity than his conservative critics want to admit. If Trumpism seems to be taking over the Republican Party, that’s largely because in many ways the party was already there.

What, after all, does the modern — by which I basically mean post-Reagan — Republican Party stand for? A cynic might say that it has basically served the interests of the economic elite while winning votes from the white working class with racial dog
whistles. And the cynic would be right.

And if that’s what modern Republicanism is really about, how much has changed
in the era of Trump? Consider two current news stories: the House Republican tax plan and the campaign that Ed Gillespie, a consummate Republican insider, has been running
for governor of Virginia.

On the tax plan: It’s a good thing news analyses keep telling us that Trump is a populist, because you’d never suspect such a thing from the content of his party’s tax plan (or his health care plan, or actually any of his policies).

True, the plan contains a few initial tax breaks for middle-income families, but these erode or disappear over time. According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, by the time the law would be fully phased in, there would be huge income gains
for millionaires — even bigger if you take repeal of the estate tax into account — with minimal benefits for a great majority of the population. In fact, tens of millions of middle and lower-income families would end up facing tax increases, which is
pretty amazing for a bill that would add $1.5 trillion to the deficit.

But just looking at how different income groups fare is only part of the story.
Even among high-income Americans, the plan seems designed to reward those who don’t work for a living — or more precisely, the less you actually do to earn your income,
the bigger your tax break. Business owners would owe less in taxes than high-earning professionals; passive investors, who just sit there and collect dividends, would owe less than those who at least run their businesses. And wealthy heirs, who did
nothing to earn their wealth except choose the right parents, would pay no taxes at all.

Wait, there’s more. You may have heard that the plan would end the deductions
for state and local income and sales taxes — which is true, if you’re an ordinary working American. But if you’re a business owner — or can pretend to be a business
owner, since the law would open huge new opportunities for tax avoidance — you would still be able to deduct those taxes as business expenses.

In short, Trumpist tax policy is as elitist if not more elitist and anti-populist than the policies of previous Republican administrations. Same old, same old.

But what about Trump’s more or less naked white nationalism? Isn’t that a departure? Well, how different is it from Ronald Reagan’s talk about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, or the elder Bush’s Willie Horton ad? And in any case, we don’t
have to argue about the past: Just look at how Ed Gillespie has campaigned in Virginia over the past few months.

Gillespie is, as I said, a consummate Republican insider, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and counselor to George W. Bush. So what does
it say about the Republican establishment and its values that he has run a campaign completely
focused on stirring up white racial hostility? As The Washington Post put it, “His campaign’s thrust has not been just a dog whistle to the intolerant, racially resentful parts of the Republican base; it’s been a mating call.”

So has Gillespie faced strong criticism from establishment Republicans for waging such a gutter campaign? No — there has been a bit of tut-tutting from lower-level figures, but hardly anything from people whose condemnation might matter.

In particular, if “never Trump” Republicans really wanted to purge Trumpism
from the party, they’d be urging voters to reject Gillespie for his vile tactics. This column was written before Virginia’s vote, but Gillespie might well win — and if
he does, the party will become even more Steve Bannon’s party than it is now.
So how many in the Republican establishment have spoken up to say that Gillespie must lose if the party is to save its soul? Hardly any.

Oh, and if you’re in Virginia, reading this, and haven’t yet voted, please do. This is a hugely consequential election, and it will be a shame — indeed,
a tragedy — if its outcome is determined by people who couldn’t be bothered
to get to the
polls.

***

This election has been estimated to be in a dead heat tie.
We will probably learn who won tomorrow...

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: jeremyhdonovan@gmail.com

I post full N.Y. Times articles because
most people only get to read a
limited number of free N.Y. Times
articles each month before being cut off.
Yet since I have a paid subscription,
I can access as many as I want. So ...
you're welcome, blowhard. :)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

One more election-day-anniversary post and I'll stop for now.

The New Democratic Party
Charles M. Blow
NOV. 5, 2017

A year ago this week, America made what I believe history will record as one of
the greatest electoral mistakes in the life of the nation: It elected Donald Trump president of the United States.

It did so while drowning in Russia-produced propaganda, under a torrent of Russia-stolen emails, facing the stiff arm of renewed voter suppression, and on
the watch of a splintering and dysfunctional Democratic Party.

All of those caveats are valid and necessary, but they don’t undo what has been done. They rightly call into question the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, but they don’t nullify it.

The only remedy is removal, and that’s a very high bar, although recent moves
in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation have renewed hopes.

How did we get here?

This is becoming old saw: Russia stole and published emails and also generated fake news, all in an attempt to hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances of being elected and therefore to aid Trump’s chances. What is new is knowledge of the
overwhelming extent
of Russia’s meddling and how it was aimed specifically at widening America’s divisions.

As Facebook’s general counsel testified to a Senate committee last week, 126 million Americans may have been exposed to Russia-generated content on that platform alone. As a point of reference, only 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 election.

Russia used American technology and American companies as weapons against American democracy.

The Democratic Party, or at least many of its highest-profile figureheads from the last election, is locked in a vicious cycle of re-examinations and recriminations. The latest of those is the controversial new political memoir, “Hacks: The Inside
Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House,” by Donna Brazile, about serving as acting head of the Democratic National Committee during the last legs of the campaign.

The book is dishy on a personal level but damaging on a political level. Maybe that’s the point. As Joy-Ann Reid wrote on The Daily Beast, “Donna Brazile may be burning the village in order to save it.”

But at a time when Trump is scrambling for anything at all to distract from Mueller’s plodding — and fruitful — investigation, is it the right time to start a three-alarm?

I don’t begrudge anyone the right to tell his or her own story, but my focus now is on protecting the country from Trump, and nothing else.

Brazile contended on ABC’s “This Week” that there would be no truly good time for her to release her book, and that people questioning the timing could “go to hell.” The problem is that we’re already in hell and trying to dig
our way out, and
many of us are crestfallen when any obstacle is added that might impede that effort.

A Newsweek cover story last week declared, “Trump is Leading the Most Corrupt
Administration in U.S. History, One of First-Class Kleptocrats.” He is a joke
on the international stage. He is pushing us closer to an unthinkable nuclear conflict with
North Korea. He is inflaming racial tensions by siding with the racists. His Justice Department is chipping away at civil rights. His Environmental Protection Agency is seemingly trying to do everything at odds with protecting the environment. And now
Trump and the Republicans want to give the rich a giant wet kiss of a tax break.

[ Btw, here's that Newsweek article referenced above: http://www.newsweek.com/2017/11/10/trump-administration-most-corrupt-history-698935.html - hint: turn your sound off to escape their bullshit ads]

The reign of Trump is the reign of ruin. That is why the Resistance is needed now more than ever.

And that’s the good news. The Resistance is strong and resolute, passionate and focused. The historic Women’s March has continued its work with a convention last month in Detroit. Resistance groups like Indivisible have continued their organizing and
pressure. Indivisible now boasts that “across the nation, over 5,800 local groups (at least two in every congressional district) are using the Indivisible
Guide to hold their members of Congress accountable.” And, as CNN reported on
Saturday, there
is an overwhelming surge of Democratic women interested in running for office.

More people in polls appear to be waking to the reality that Trump is a walking
failure who built his legend and his fortune on the lies that he was savvy and shrewd and a consummate deal maker. They are also waking to the very real possibility that all
these Trump campaign contacts with Russians that everyone on the campaign seemed to forget may not be an epidemic of amnesia, but instead a widespread effort to cover something up.

Liberals have the will and determination to turn this giant mistake around, to pressure their elected officials or possibly replace them. They have the resolve to resist Trump by every means at their disposal, while clinging to the
hope that he might one
day be replaced.

The only issue I see is that these efforts seem to be operating separately from
the national Democratic Party, a dinosaur of bureaucratic machinery in an evolved age of direct democratic action.

Liberalism has leapt over the Democratic Party. Liberalism has its eye on a new
beginning, while the mainstream party is stuck looking backward and bickering. The Resistance isn’t part of the old Democratic Party; The Resistance is the new Democratic
Party, or at least its future.

***

Let's see if I can generate just a little "resistance".

Trevor Noah - Silicon Valley Answers to Congress Amid the Russia Probe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUVlRZxJAy0

Colbert - Bannon Suggests Trump Defund Robert Mueller's Investigation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvG8J9x-VmA

Samantha Bee - The Matrix Has Your Vote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rshKK-i_CGA

***

A few choice quotes from the Newsweek article:

The number of White House officials currently facing questions,
lawsuits or investigation is astonishing.

“The most corrupt presidency and administration we’ve ever had,”
says Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor who authored
a book titled Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff
Box to Citizens United.

According to the presidential historian Robert Dallek, no American
leader has acted with more unadulterated self-interest as Trump.
Dallek says that in terms of outright corruption, Trump is worse
than both Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, presidents who
oversaw the most flagrant instances of graft in American
political history.

“What makes this different,” Dallek says, “is that the president can’t seem to speak the truth about a host of things.” Trump isn't just
allowing corruption, in Dallek’s view, but encouraging it.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat
on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, puts the
matter even more bluntly: "I've never seen anything like this."

David J. Apol, who heads the Office of Government Ethics, recently
wrote a memorandum that had him “deeply concerned that the actions
of some in Government leadership have harmed perceptions about the
importance of ethics."

“You don’t see any shame here,” says E.J. Dionne Jr., the
Washington Post columnist and co-author of the new book
One Nation After Trump. “And that’s really disturbing.”

“The tone was set by the president when he decided not to divest,”
says Walter M. Shaub Jr., who’d been appointed by Trump’s predecessor, Obama... He says this administration “came in unprepared for the rigors”
of working within the federal government, “unaware of the fact that
there are many requirements and a culture of accountability to the public."

Shaub blames a lot of the ethical lapses on White House counsel
Donald McGahn II, whom he charges with fostering an anything-goes
atmosphere by interpreting rules and laws in ways that allowed Trump
to skirt them. “He has been the great enabler. And he has been an
amplifier of the message that ethics doesn’t matter.”

Norman L. Eisen (chief ethics lawyer for Obama): “It’s an ethics
calamity of a kind we have never seen in modern presidential history.”

In June, a liberal super PAC called American Bridge 21st Century
found 74 lobbyists working in the administration, 49 of them in
agencies they once lobbied on behalf of clients. The new deputy
administrator of the EPA, for example, is former coal lobbyist
Andrew R. Wheeler.

Painter, the former Bush lawyer...thinks Trump isn’t just
eviscerating ethics laws but destroying the conservative movement
that, for decades, preached moral responsibility and fiscal prudence. “This,” he laments, “could be the end of the Republican Party.”

***

And what happened to Trump's once-touted "Drain the Swamp" plan??
Just go look at the page it was once on and see:

http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2017/11/01/image-99914.jpg

I saw all this shit coming from 1000 miles away. I *knew* it would
all be corrupt as hell. It's almost impossible to even keep up with
the horrible stuff going on there's so much of it.

As Newsweek puts it:
"The swamp has grown into a sinkhole that threatens to swallow
the entire Trump administration."

Don't get me started on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who's
trying to restart the war on drugs, militarize the police,
privatize the prisons, persecute the gays, and take us all back
into some stifling repeat of the 1950s. Then there's Ryan Zinke,
busy selling out our national lands, and EPA head Scott Pruitt,
muzzling all the scientists while practically encouraging
big corporations to rape and pillage the earth while poisoning
the people.

After sabotaging our health care system, what's next?
A HUGE tax giveaway to the rich, comprised of:
1) money taken OUT of all the public service functions of govt.
2) huge increases in our deficit

They're heathen money worshipers pretending to be "men of god".
The Trump administration is the closest thing to satan I've seen. :)

Still less than 10 months in.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: thangolossus@gmail.com

On Tue, 7 Nov 2017 17:37:47 -0800 (PST), "Jeremy H. Donovan" <jeremyhdonovan@gmail.com> wrote:

I post full N.Y. Times articles because
most people only get to read a
limited number of free N.Y. Times
articles each month before being cut off.
Yet since I have a paid subscription,
I can access as many as I want. So ...
you're welcome, blowhard. :)

I never get cut off, are you sure? Then again, I use Opera browser
which has a built in VPN with exits in Singapore, the US, Germany,
Canada etc so the IP can always be changed.

Your full postings are tedious and unnecessary, and therefore unread.
I doubt Chris reads them and I know Slider won't, and that just leaves
me here (and the Russian cunt who trolls the place from time to time)
and I've just told you they're Tl;dr. So, if you don't mind, just
post the fucking LINKS lol :)



---
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: thangolossus@gmail.com

Sorry to top post but someone has to tell you - you're being passive aggressive. You're also evidently very transparent (however, read
below for a caveat).

After a particularly verbose post I said to you a few days ago that
you should cease and desist posting entire articles rather than the
link. You responded, correctly, that the link in that case was a blog
on FB and I quietly accepted this on the basis that blogs change so
quickly and FB can be so obscure sometimes that in this instance the
entire article *was* appropriate.

However, you have now posted three (count them - 3) densely garrulous
entire or almost entire articles along with a few but not all links -
when the links plus terse comments and perhaps extracts for emphasis
would have sufficed, and should have sufficed. For instance, your
second post in this thread should have consisted only of the following
link (which has some pics, unlike your repost of the entire article):

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/opinion/gillespie-republicans-virginia-election.html

You are clearly doing this to irritate. While I don't give a shit,
you seem incapable of understanding that others are at least as
intelligent as you and accordingly can see right through you, right
through to your motivations.

Unless of course you *are* clever to the extent that you predicted
*this* response and therefore thought in the second degree, which is a
skillset possessed by very few. I doubt that. I think you are just
being passive aggressive and you haven't bothered, or don't know how
to, cloak it.

In any case, Tl:dr...


On Tue, 7 Nov 2017 16:03:23 -0800 (PST), "Jeremy H. Denisovan" <david.j.worrell@gmail.com> wrote:

One more election-day-anniversary post and I'll stop for now.

The New Democratic Party
Charles M. Blow
NOV. 5, 2017

A year ago this week, America made what I believe history will record as one of the greatest electoral mistakes in the life of the nation: It elected Donald

Trump president of the United States.

It did so while drowning in Russia-produced propaganda, under a torrent of Russia-stolen emails, facing the stiff arm of renewed voter suppression, and on

the watch of a splintering and dysfunctional Democratic Party.

All of those caveats are valid and necessary, but they don’t undo what has been done. They rightly call into question the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, but they don’t nullify it.

The only remedy is removal, and that’s a very high bar, although recent moves in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation have renewed hopes.

How did we get here?

This is becoming old saw: Russia stole and published emails and also generated

fake news, all in an attempt to hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances of being elected and therefore to aid Trump’s chances. What is new is knowledge of the
overwhelming extent
of Russia’s meddling and how it was aimed specifically at widening America’s
divisions.

As Facebook’s general counsel testified to a Senate committee last week, 126

million Americans may have been exposed to Russia-generated content on that platform alone. As a point of reference, only 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 election.

Russia used American technology and American companies as weapons against American democracy.

The Democratic Party, or at least many of its highest-profile figureheads from

the last election, is locked in a vicious cycle of re-examinations and recriminations. The latest of those is the controversial new political memoir, “Hacks: The Inside
Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House,” by
Donna Brazile, about serving as acting head of the Democratic National Committee during the last legs of the campaign.

The book is dishy on a personal level but damaging on a political level. Maybe

that’s the point. As Joy-Ann Reid wrote on The Daily Beast, “Donna Brazile may be burning the village in order to save it.”

But at a time when Trump is scrambling for anything at all to distract from Mueller’s plodding — and fruitful — investigation, is it the right time to start a three-alarm?

I don’t begrudge anyone the right to tell his or her own story, but my focus

now is on protecting the country from Trump, and nothing else.

Brazile contended on ABC’s “This Week” that there would be no truly good

time for her to release her book, and that people questioning the timing could “go to hell.” The problem is that we’re already in hell and trying to dig
our way out,
and many of us are crestfallen when any obstacle is added that might impede that effort.

A Newsweek cover story last week declared, “Trump is Leading the Most Corrupt Administration in U.S. History, One of First-Class Kleptocrats.” He is a joke on the international stage. He is pushing us closer to an unthinkable

nuclear conflict with
North Korea. He is inflaming racial tensions by siding with the racists. His Justice
Department is chipping away at civil rights. His Environmental Protection Agency is seemingly trying to do everything at odds with protecting the environment. And now Trump and the Republicans want to give the rich a giant wet kiss of a tax break.

[ Btw, here's that Newsweek article referenced above: >http://www.newsweek.com/2017/11/10/trump-administration-most-corrupt-history-698935.html - hint: turn your sound off to escape their bullshit ads]

The reign of Trump is the reign of ruin. That is why the Resistance is needed now more than ever.

And that’s the good news. The Resistance is strong and resolute, passionate and focused. The historic Women’s March has continued its work with a convention last month in Detroit. Resistance groups like Indivisible have continued their organizing

and pressure. Indivisible now boasts that “across the nation, over 5,800 local groups
(at least two in every congressional district) are using the Indivisible Guide to hold their members of Congress accountable.” And, as CNN reported on Saturday, there is an overwhelming surge of Democratic women interested in running for office.

More people in polls appear to be waking to the reality that Trump is a walking failure who built his legend and his fortune on the lies that he was savvy and shrewd and a consummate deal maker. They are also waking to the very real possibility that all

these Trump campaign contacts with Russians that everyone on the campaign seemed to forget may not be an epidemic of amnesia, but instead a widespread effort to cover something up.

Liberals have the will and determination to turn this giant mistake around, to

pressure their elected officials or possibly replace them. They have the resolve to resist Trump by every means at their disposal, while clinging to the
hope that he might
one day be replaced.

The only issue I see is that these efforts seem to be operating separately from the national Democratic Party, a dinosaur of bureaucratic machinery in an evolved age of direct democratic action.

Liberalism has leapt over the Democratic Party. Liberalism has its eye on a new beginning, while the mainstream party is stuck looking backward and bickering. The Resistance isn’t part of the old Democratic Party; The Resistance is the new Democratic

Party, or at least its future.

***

Let's see if I can generate just a little "resistance".

Trevor Noah - Silicon Valley Answers to Congress Amid the Russia Probe >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUVlRZxJAy0

Colbert - Bannon Suggests Trump Defund Robert Mueller's Investigation >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvG8J9x-VmA

Samantha Bee - The Matrix Has Your Vote >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rshKK-i_CGA

***

A few choice quotes from the Newsweek article:

The number of White House officials currently facing questions,
lawsuits or investigation is astonishing.

“The most corrupt presidency and administration we’ve ever had,”
says Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor who authored
a book titled Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff
Box to Citizens United.

According to the presidential historian Robert Dallek, no American
leader has acted with more unadulterated self-interest as Trump.
Dallek says that in terms of outright corruption, Trump is worse
than both Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, presidents who
oversaw the most flagrant instances of graft in American
political history.

“What makes this different,” Dallek says, “is that the president can’t >seem to speak the truth about a host of things.” Trump isn't just
allowing corruption, in Dallek’s view, but encouraging it.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat
on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, puts the
matter even more bluntly: "I've never seen anything like this."

David J. Apol, who heads the Office of Government Ethics, recently
wrote a memorandum that had him “deeply concerned that the actions
of some in Government leadership have harmed perceptions about the
importance of ethics."

“You don’t see any shame here,” says E.J. Dionne Jr., the
Washington Post columnist and co-author of the new book
One Nation After Trump. “And that’s really disturbing.”

“The tone was set by the president when he decided not to divest,”
says Walter M. Shaub Jr., who’d been appointed by Trump’s predecessor, >Obama... He says this administration “came in unprepared for the rigors” >of working within the federal government, “unaware of the fact that
there are many requirements and a culture of accountability to the public."

Shaub blames a lot of the ethical lapses on White House counsel
Donald McGahn II, whom he charges with fostering an anything-goes
atmosphere by interpreting rules and laws in ways that allowed Trump
to skirt them. “He has been the great enabler. And he has been an
amplifier of the message that ethics doesn’t matter.”

Norman L. Eisen (chief ethics lawyer for Obama): “It’s an ethics
calamity of a kind we have never seen in modern presidential history.”

In June, a liberal super PAC called American Bridge 21st Century
found 74 lobbyists working in the administration, 49 of them in
agencies they once lobbied on behalf of clients. The new deputy
administrator of the EPA, for example, is former coal lobbyist
Andrew R. Wheeler.

Painter, the former Bush lawyer...thinks Trump isn’t just
eviscerating ethics laws but destroying the conservative movement
that, for decades, preached moral responsibility and fiscal prudence. >“This,” he laments, “could be the end of the Republican Party.”

***

And what happened to Trump's once-touted "Drain the Swamp" plan??
Just go look at the page it was once on and see:

http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2017/11/01/image-99914.jpg

I saw all this shit coming from 1000 miles away. I *knew* it would
all be corrupt as hell. It's almost impossible to even keep up with
the horrible stuff going on there's so much of it.

As Newsweek puts it:
"The swamp has grown into a sinkhole that threatens to swallow
the entire Trump administration."

Don't get me started on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who's
trying to restart the war on drugs, militarize the police,
privatize the prisons, persecute the gays, and take us all back
into some stifling repeat of the 1950s. Then there's Ryan Zinke,
busy selling out our national lands, and EPA head Scott Pruitt,
muzzling all the scientists while practically encouraging
big corporations to rape and pillage the earth while poisoning
the people.

After sabotaging our health care system, what's next?
A HUGE tax giveaway to the rich, comprised of:
1) money taken OUT of all the public service functions of govt.
2) huge increases in our deficit

They're heathen money worshipers pretending to be "men of god".
The Trump administration is the closest thing to satan I've seen. :)

Still less than 10 months in.

---
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From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

On Tuesday, November 7, 2017 at 6:33:54 PM UTC-8, thang ornerythinchus wrote:

On Tue, 7 Nov 2017 17:37:47 -0800 (PST), "Jeremy H. Donovan" <jeremyhdonovan@gmail.com> wrote:

I post full N.Y. Times articles because
most people only get to read a
limited number of free N.Y. Times
articles each month before being cut off.
Yet since I have a paid subscription,
I can access as many as I want. So ...
you're welcome, blowhard. :)

I never get cut off, are you sure?

Completely sure.

Then again, I use Opera browser
which has a built in VPN with exits in Singapore, the US, Germany,
Canada etc so the IP can always be changed.

Your full postings are tedious and unnecessary, and therefore unread.
I doubt Chris reads them and I know Slider won't, and that just leaves
me here (and the Russian cunt who trolls the place from time to time)
and I've just told you they're Tl;dr. So, if you don't mind, just
post the fucking LINKS lol :)

I'll post however I fucking want to.
It is you who is 'tedious and unnecessary'. :)
And throwing around more absurdly inappropriate terms
like "passive aggressive" only makes you look sillier.

I'm just making sure anyone can always read all the NY Times articles
(no matter what their subscription status, internet setup, or browser).

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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From: allreadydun@gmail.com

dances w/cunts writes:

In any case, one mind-blowing fact to emphasize from this thread -
before juvenile boneheads totally high-jack it into the trash dump -
is that 126 million Americans were exposed to Russia-generated
Facebook content that specifically created to foment discord and
to largely favor Donald Trump. While still a bit hard to prove,
this fact alone makes it seem obvious that the Russians wielded
significant influence in the results of our American election.

so these were most likely bored housewives at home reading Facebook
and exchanging selfies. It still comes down to choosing. Besides
Facebook stuff is very sketchy to begin with. Less than USA Today
most of the time, and that ain't sayin' much. The voter has to
take some responsibility here.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: slider@anashram.org

dances w/cunts writes:

### - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDFN84kgc5E

;)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: slider@nanashram.com

On Wed, 08 Nov 2017 01:19:51 -0000, thang ornerythinchus <thangolossus@gmail.com> wrote:

Sorry to top post but someone has to tell you - you're being passive aggressive. You're also evidently very transparent (however, read
below for a caveat).

After a particularly verbose post I said to you a few days ago that
you should cease and desist posting entire articles rather than the
link. You responded, correctly, that the link in that case was a blog
on FB and I quietly accepted this on the basis that blogs change so
quickly and FB can be so obscure sometimes that in this instance the
entire article *was* appropriate.

However, you have now posted three (count them - 3) densely garrulous
entire or almost entire articles along with a few but not all links -
when the links plus terse comments and perhaps extracts for emphasis
would have sufficed, and should have sufficed. For instance, your
second post in this thread should have consisted only of the following
link (which has some pics, unlike your repost of the entire article):

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/opinion/gillespie-republicans-virginia-election.html

You are clearly doing this to irritate. While I don't give a shit,
you seem incapable of understanding that others are at least as
intelligent as you and accordingly can see right through you, right
through to your motivations.

Unless of course you *are* clever to the extent that you predicted
*this* response and therefore thought in the second degree, which is a skillset possessed by very few. I doubt that. I think you are just
being passive aggressive and you haven't bothered, or don't know how
to, cloak it.

In any case, Tl:dr...

### - he's not being passive-aggressive...

he's just being a... CUNT!!!

LOL :)))))

On Tue, 7 Nov 2017 16:03:23 -0800 (PST), "Jeremy H. Denisovan" <david.j.worrell@gmail.com> wrote:

One more election-day-anniversary post and I'll stop for now.

The New Democratic Party
Charles M. Blow
NOV. 5, 2017

A year ago this week, America made what I believe history will record
as one of the greatest electoral mistakes in the life of the nation: It
elected Donald Trump president of the United States.

It did so while drowning in Russia-produced propaganda, under a torrent
of Russia-stolen emails, facing the stiff arm of renewed voter
suppression, and on the watch of a splintering and dysfunctional
Democratic Party.

All of those caveats are valid and necessary, but they don’t undo what
has been done. They rightly call into question the legitimacy of
Trump’s presidency, but they don’t nullify it.

The only remedy is removal, and that’s a very high bar, although recent
moves in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation have renewed
hopes.

How did we get here?

This is becoming old saw: Russia stole and published emails and also
generated fake news, all in an attempt to hurt Hillary Clinton’s
chances of being elected and therefore to aid Trump’s chances. What is
new is knowledge of the overwhelming extent of Russia’s meddling and
how it was aimed specifically at widening America’s

divisions.

As Facebook’s general counsel testified to a Senate committee last
week, 126 million Americans may have been exposed to Russia-generated
content on that platform alone. As a point of reference, only 137.5
million Americans voted in the 2016 election.

Russia used American technology and American companies as weapons
against American democracy.

The Democratic Party, or at least many of its highest-profile
figureheads from the last election, is locked in a vicious cycle of
re-examinations and recriminations. The latest of those is the
controversial new political memoir, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the
Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House,” by

Donna Brazile, about serving as acting head of the Democratic National Committee during the last legs of the campaign.

The book is dishy on a personal level but damaging on a political
level. Maybe that’s the point. As Joy-Ann Reid wrote on The Daily
Beast, “Donna Brazile may be burning the village in order to save it.” >>
But at a time when Trump is scrambling for anything at all to distract
from Mueller’s plodding — and fruitful — investigation, is it the right
time to start a three-alarm?

I don’t begrudge anyone the right to tell his or her own story, but my
focus now is on protecting the country from Trump, and nothing else.

Brazile contended on ABC’s “This Week” that there would be no truly
good time for her to release her book, and that people questioning the
timing could “go to hell.” The problem is that we’re already in hell >> and trying to dig our way out, and many of us are crestfallen when any
obstacle is added that might impede that effort.

A Newsweek cover story last week declared, “Trump is Leading the Most
Corrupt Administration in U.S. History, One of First-Class
Kleptocrats.” He is a joke on the international stage. He is pushing us
closer to an unthinkable nuclear conflict with North Korea. He is
inflaming racial tensions by siding with the racists. His Justice

Department is chipping away at civil rights. His Environmental
Protection Agency is seemingly trying to do everything at odds with protecting the environment. And now Trump and the Republicans want to
give the rich a giant wet kiss of a tax break.

[ Btw, here's that Newsweek article referenced above:
http://www.newsweek.com/2017/11/10/trump-administration-most-corrupt-history-698935.html
- hint: turn your sound off to escape their bullshit ads]

The reign of Trump is the reign of ruin. That is why the Resistance is
needed now more than ever.

And that’s the good news. The Resistance is strong and resolute,
passionate and focused. The historic Women’s March has continued its
work with a convention last month in Detroit. Resistance groups like
Indivisible have continued their organizing and pressure. Indivisible
now boasts that “across the nation, over 5,800 local groups

(at least two in every congressional district) are using the Indivisible Guide to hold their members of Congress accountable.” And, as CNN
reported on Saturday, there is an overwhelming surge of Democratic women interested in running for office.

More people in polls appear to be waking to the reality that Trump is a
walking failure who built his legend and his fortune on the lies that
he was savvy and shrewd and a consummate deal maker. They are also
waking to the very real possibility that all these Trump campaign
contacts with Russians that everyone on the campaign

seemed to forget may not be an epidemic of amnesia, but instead a
widespread effort to cover something up.

Liberals have the will and determination to turn this giant mistake
around, to pressure their elected officials or possibly replace them.
They have the resolve to resist Trump by every means at their disposal,
while clinging to the hope that he might one day be replaced.

The only issue I see is that these efforts seem to be operating
separately from the national Democratic Party, a dinosaur of
bureaucratic machinery in an evolved age of direct democratic action.

Liberalism has leapt over the Democratic Party. Liberalism has its eye
on a new beginning, while the mainstream party is stuck looking
backward and bickering. The Resistance isn’t part of the old Democratic
Party; The Resistance is the new Democratic Party, or at least its
future.

***

Let's see if I can generate just a little "resistance".

Trevor Noah - Silicon Valley Answers to Congress Amid the Russia Probe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUVlRZxJAy0

Colbert - Bannon Suggests Trump Defund Robert Mueller's Investigation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvG8J9x-VmA

Samantha Bee - The Matrix Has Your Vote
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rshKK-i_CGA

***

A few choice quotes from the Newsweek article:

The number of White House officials currently facing questions,
lawsuits or investigation is astonishing.

“The most corrupt presidency and administration we’ve ever had,”
says Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor who authored
a book titled Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff
Box to Citizens United.

According to the presidential historian Robert Dallek, no American
leader has acted with more unadulterated self-interest as Trump.
Dallek says that in terms of outright corruption, Trump is worse
than both Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, presidents who
oversaw the most flagrant instances of graft in American
political history.

“What makes this different,” Dallek says, “is that the president can’t
seem to speak the truth about a host of things.” Trump isn't just
allowing corruption, in Dallek’s view, but encouraging it.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat
on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, puts the
matter even more bluntly: "I've never seen anything like this."

David J. Apol, who heads the Office of Government Ethics, recently
wrote a memorandum that had him “deeply concerned that the actions
of some in Government leadership have harmed perceptions about the
importance of ethics."

“You don’t see any shame here,” says E.J. Dionne Jr., the
Washington Post columnist and co-author of the new book
One Nation After Trump. “And that’s really disturbing.”

“The tone was set by the president when he decided not to divest,”
says Walter M. Shaub Jr., who’d been appointed by Trump’s predecessor, >> Obama... He says this administration “came in unprepared for the rigors” >> of working within the federal government, “unaware of the fact that
there are many requirements and a culture of accountability to the
public."

Shaub blames a lot of the ethical lapses on White House counsel
Donald McGahn II, whom he charges with fostering an anything-goes
atmosphere by interpreting rules and laws in ways that allowed Trump
to skirt them. “He has been the great enabler. And he has been an
amplifier of the message that ethics doesn’t matter.”

Norman L. Eisen (chief ethics lawyer for Obama): “It’s an ethics
calamity of a kind we have never seen in modern presidential history.”

In June, a liberal super PAC called American Bridge 21st Century
found 74 lobbyists working in the administration, 49 of them in
agencies they once lobbied on behalf of clients. The new deputy
administrator of the EPA, for example, is former coal lobbyist
Andrew R. Wheeler.

Painter, the former Bush lawyer...thinks Trump isn’t just
eviscerating ethics laws but destroying the conservative movement
that, for decades, preached moral responsibility and fiscal prudence.
“This,” he laments, “could be the end of the Republican Party.”

***

And what happened to Trump's once-touted "Drain the Swamp" plan??
Just go look at the page it was once on and see:

http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2017/11/01/image-99914.jpg

I saw all this shit coming from 1000 miles away. I *knew* it would
all be corrupt as hell. It's almost impossible to even keep up with
the horrible stuff going on there's so much of it.

As Newsweek puts it:
"The swamp has grown into a sinkhole that threatens to swallow
the entire Trump administration."

Don't get me started on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who's
trying to restart the war on drugs, militarize the police,
privatize the prisons, persecute the gays, and take us all back
into some stifling repeat of the 1950s. Then there's Ryan Zinke,
busy selling out our national lands, and EPA head Scott Pruitt,
muzzling all the scientists while practically encouraging
big corporations to rape and pillage the earth while poisoning
the people.

After sabotaging our health care system, what's next?
A HUGE tax giveaway to the rich, comprised of:
1) money taken OUT of all the public service functions of govt.
2) huge increases in our deficit

They're heathen money worshipers pretending to be "men of god".
The Trump administration is the closest thing to satan I've seen. :)

Still less than 10 months in.

---
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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From: allreadydun@gmail.com

### - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDFN84kgc5E

good one! perfect!

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: slider@nanashram.com

On Wed, 08 Nov 2017 19:44:45 -0000, Jeremy H. Donovan <jeremyhdonovan@gmail.com> wrote:

Maybe a "cunt" is best defined here as someone who...

### - sorry, did i call you a cunt?

make that CREEP! instead?

otoh: a CUNT by any other name is STILL a cunt!

ahahaha :)))

don't talk to me... cunt!

(what a 'cunt' that cunt is!)

:D

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