Not that it’ll do any good, but at least election tampering will be easy to spot.
Proper election tampering involves finding just the right places to sneak in a few extra votes here and there to just get you over the top.
Trump will not stand for barely winning again, especially not if he loses the popular vote. If we see election tampering by trump, he will win by 98% percent. (Or even 198%, why not?)
This was pretty fascinating. You have to wonder if Trump even thought about people digging into his past when he ran for President. There’s certainly a lot past deals and incidences with a lot of suggestions of corruption
For a lot of things that Trump does, there’s a question of whether he’s just stupid but really really lucky, or evil and narcissistic but good at playing dumb. That he continued on the election all of the way to the White House is probably the best evidence that we have that his stupidity isn’t an act. That the Republican party is failing to fully investigate him, and even sometimes run interference for him, leads into the idea that the man seems to have compromising pictures of Lady Luck somewhere.
Law enforcement agencies are biased against criminal organizations, news at 11! That they’re still trying to argue Trump’s campaign was illegally surveilled while they repeatedly contacted foreign operators under surveillance says all that needs said.
The NRA link is pretty fascinating indeed - fascinating and deeply disturbing. It’s entirely possible that many prominent mainstream conservatives and GOP have known for a while about Russia’s interest in supporting anti-democratic (both with a little and big ‘D’) causes. What’s fascinating is that Putin’s men were able to sense (and perhaps even help facilitated) a change of sentiment in America’s right wing, which as recently as 2012 still ran on the Reagan/Bush anti-Soviet legacy. But particularly within the last 5 years, in the wake of large scale failures like the Great Recession, the failure to win wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the migrant crisis, the rise of ISIS, and continued concerns over illegal immigration, American conservatism changed and Putin must have seen an opportunity to influence the political scene by picking sides with fervent nationalists. He did it in this country and he’s doing this in Europe. And I’d say his men are doing more than just picking sides, but actually helping to facilitate and spread nationalist causes. Putin’s not a republican - couldn’t give a drop of piss about the party. But he figured out that Democrats are serious about maintaining America’s global alliances, which are counter to Putin’s interests. And he figured out that conservatives in this country are increasingly isolationist and want nothing to do with responsibilities beyond our borders. Concurrent with the theme of isolationism is getting America to fight with itself over identity and what it means to be ‘American’. This is a fight that Putin wants us to have.
What troubles me is I wonder what other organizations and institutions he has infiltrated and what influence he has over them. Has he infiltrated the Department of Justice? The Department of Energy? The Department of Defense? Does he have operatives with close ties to the high levels of these organizations or actually have people on the inside who are perhaps getting some sort of incentive to politicize these institutions or destabilize them from within? It all seems to be in the realm of conspiracy theory thought but I’m not sure we can rule it out now.
And Russia’s goal is political instability not Republican rule, in the US. They would seek to gain (as McCarthy might say) control over Americans in organizations on both sides of the fence, political or useful for Russian propagandic purposes.
To step back from McCarthy, it’s really best to save our horses on the question of the NRA or any group beyond recommending them for investigation by the FBI.
Though with the NRA we can point to their involvement with Torshin, so that is certainly a reason to question their surprisingly bountiful political contributions year. But with the ACLU, I also do find that rather questionable. We’re looking at an organization full of liberal lawyers, who would certainly know that Nunes is a nutter and that anything he would produce would have all the quality of a pube covered sliver of almost depleted soap bar. It would be strange for such an organization to give much credence to the legal or even factual value of the document, let alone have their committee of top minds cone to a vote in support of the publication of the thing.
If The Jewish League issued a statement in support of Mein Kampf, I’d find it worth taking a gander at “The Jewish League”.
Trust no one, my friends! Trust no one, not even yourself~!
The ACLU tends to support more transparency and less secrecy in general. If there’s a memo, it should be published.
But speaking of things that seem odd, I’ll mention one that has truly puzzled me over the past couple of days.
Since the inception of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes, Gowdy and other Republicans have done nothing but use it to obfuscate, taint and misdirect. They’ve carried water for Trump the entire time, to such an extent that most people following the Russian subversion efforts closely don’t take anything that comes out of that committee from the Republican side seriously. What Nunes did with his stunt of “finding” materials that “supported” Trump’s contention that Obama was “wiretapping” Trump tower rises, in my opinion, to the level of a potential obstruction charge against him.
In short, they’ve acted to frustrate the actual purpose of the committee, to learn what actually happened between Trump, his organization and the Russians.
So why did those same Republicans agree with the Democratic committee members to release Glenn Simpson’s testimony? There is some seriously damaging stuff in there. I can’t figure out why this sudden change of heart. It bugs me.
Except they haven’t. I haven’t heard one peep of refutation to what is stated in Simpson’s testimony by them as yet. I’d have thought they’d have those talking points out front and center simultaneous to the release of the transcript, if that was the case.
Probably because they figured Schiff would pull a Pelosi regardless.
The Republican line was presented the day of the release. All allegations, no evidence, blah blah blah. No doubt ‘the base’ will eat it up hook, line, and sinker.
The Senate had released theirs, on the basis that it wasn’t that big a deal, not realizing that the House version was so drastically different. Politically, the House had to follow suit.
The Senate had released theirs, on the basis that there was a public call for it and it would become problematic if they didn’t. Politically, the House had to follow suit.
Not all of the House Intelligence Committee Republicans are stupid or crazy.
With the tax push done, the Republican party can afford to dirty themselves a bit right now on the basis that the next big crisis will be the Midterm elections and the general public will forget all about Simpson’s testimony by then.
With the funding crisis, Trump’s affair in the news, and the fact that the first set of testimony having not amounted to much, they may have figured that the second release would be crowded out of the headlines and not too many people would take a hard look at it.
They figured that they could just counter with the Nunes memo.