Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

The willow is too close to the house.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

I don’t care how fun he is after a few whiskies. fuck that guy.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

There’s some extremely good trouble headed their way.

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

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We have all the best words.

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Women: they get shit done

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Dolt 45 / Speculations Are Open

Speculations Are Open

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We’ve all been wondering about the subject of the whistleblower complaint being withheld by Acting DNI Joseph Maguire from the House Select Intelligence Committee.

Tonight, Washington Post has a hint for us. Twitter is exploding with speculation, and why should they be the only ones?

From Adam Schiff’s letter to Maguire, it can be surmised that the incident that provoked the whistleblower’s concern had to do with someone in the White House.

From WaPo:

The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

What was the “promise”? And which foreign leader?

Have at it. Here are some tweets.

Reader Interactions

155Comments

  1. 1.

    Cheryl Rofer

  4. 4.

    B.B.A.

    Calling it now – nothingburger. Fool me once, can’t get fooled again.

  6. 6.

    J R in WV

    Rachel seemed to think it was a phone call with Putin, but of course no idea what Trump (R-Stooge) promised Putin illegally.

  8. 8.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    My speculation: the whistleblower is John Bolton

  10. 10.

    lumpkin

    Would anyone, supporters or opponents of trump be surprised that he would offer help to Russia before he would to California? From my observations of typical conservatives these days, I would expect them to applaud it. There’s a hobby interest forum I follow that is mostly populated by conservatives and I can guarantee that they truly are this treasonous. Almost all of them.

  12. 12.

    geg6

    I forget her name but she got fired right after Coates was fired. What’s her name????

    That’s who I think it is.

  16. 16.

    Jeffro

    You know, I thought this story might be a little bit more important…glad to see it get a post tonight! (thanks Cheryl!)

    Tomorrow should be a doozy!

  17. 17.

    Gelfling 545

    @zhena gogolia: Still, he likes to see himself as patriotic rather than batsh!t. He might become quite overwrought if Trump made promises to the wrong (in Bolton’s view) people.

  18. 18.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Not to derail things, but PM Justin Trudeau dressed up in brownface in 2001 for an event at a private school where he taught. Photos have just emerged — shockingly, and purely coincidentally, a month away from a general election in Canada.

    Again, I don’t want to get into it on this important thread, but wanted to put down a marker for the next open thread.

  22. 22.

    Another Scott

    From the Lawfare link:

    According to Schiff, on Aug. 12 an individual (it’s not public who) in the intelligence community submitted to the inspector general a whistleblower disclosure intended for Congress. The inspector general determined that the disclosure was credible and qualified as an “urgent concern,” and on Aug. 26—exactly 14 days after receiving it—transmitted to Maguire the whistleblower disclosure together with his determination on the disclosure’s credibility and urgency.

    So the incident happened before August 12, maybe days or even weeks before. The Greenland stuff blew up later in the month. Drats. ;-)

    Trump’s Wacky, Angry, and Extreme August.

    Hmm…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  25. 25.

    Gvg

    @Gelfling 545: i’d Rather it was an actual professional intelligence person. That would make it more credible. I already take it as a given that Trump was never socialized enough to get patriotism. I don’t want to waste time on a fool like Bolton.
    I don’t know if Trump still has any real professional of any type around him. I only hear about Crackpots who shouldn’t work for any reputable organization. The flakes seem to have outlasted the experts.

  26. 26.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Not to derail things, but PM Justin Trudeau dressed up in brownface in 2001 for an event at a private school where he taught. Photos have just emerged — shockingly, and purely coincidentally, a month away from a general election in Canada.

    Well, I guess the only sensible thing for Canadians to do now is to poutrage and withold their votes so the neofascist Cons can prevail. Both sides after all /s

  29. 29.

    Another Scott

    Twitter:

    Matthew Miller Verified account @matthewamiller

    Matthew Miller Retweeted Susan Hennessey

    Perhaps telling that the DNI consulted with DOJ before making that determination. Barr’s role in trying to keep this all secret is going to merit a lot of scrutiny.

    Matthew Miller added, Susan Hennessey Verified account @Susan_Hennessey

    This new development makes it completely impossible to believe that the DNI actually, reasonably concluded it was not an “urgent” matter as the DNI GC claimed just 24 hours ago. Just unfathomable that the IC would try to hide this from Congress. https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1174129639507333121 …
    Show this thread

    6:22 PM – 18 Sep 2019

    Of course Barr is involved in this.

    Grrr…

    (via nycsouthpaw)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  32. 32.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
    I want to make clear I’m not making light of brown/blackface. Trudeau was wrong to do this. I just hate this is happening now. The Canadian Cons have recently made supportive noises about crackdowns in Russia on protesters/activists, describing them as “instructive”. The implications of that are both horrifying and obvious

  34. 34.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Steve in the ATL:

    It was apparently an Arabian Nights theme, and he was Aladdin, AFAICT. He has apologised unequivocally in both official languages. No idea how this will affect the election.

  35. 35.

    Wag

    Fascists here
    Fascists there
    Trump and Putin disgust me. When I was a kid, I was confused about Nazis on the right and Communists on the left. They both seemed so similar. My mom explained to me that the right/left continuum was a circle, not a line, and that the extremes of right and left bent reality to meet on the far side of the circle, on the side opposite from representative democracy.

    Trump and Putin are shaking hands on the other side of our circle.

  37. 37.

    Gex

    @SiubhanDuinne: I’m seeing lots of people wonder why it didn’t come out when he ran before.

    It would seem maybe a great deal of effort was made to keep it from coming up before. So, yes, there’s probably fuckery going on here, but he could have defused this at any time prior to now. Is he surprised to learn that bad actors are going to be trying to weaponize such things?

  39. 39.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    compressed thread:

    Brian ‘Obama Netflix?’ Beutler @ brianbeutler
    Some completely random dates in chronological order:
    Jul 31: Trump has shady undisclosed call with Putin about “forest fires.” (It was about “normalizing” relations.)
    Aug 8: Coats and Gordon out at DNI
    Aug 12: Maguire in at DNI
    Also Aug 12: Whistleblower complains to ICIG
    Sept 9: CNN breaks first story about exfiltrated Russian spy in U.S.
    Also Sept 9: IC IG transmits the fact of the complaint to Schiff
    Sept 10: Bolton resigns
    Sept 13: Schiff goes public

    and

    — Connie C. Keys @ hotelkeys
    Aug 7 Huntsman resigned too
    Aug 28, while we’re at it:
    trump freezes military aid to Ukraine

  40. 40.

    Cheryl Rofer

  45. 45.

    ola azul

    @Gex:

    I’m seeing lots of people wonder why it didn’t come out when he ran before.

    It would seem maybe a great deal of effort was made to keep it from coming up before …

    Simplest explanation why it didn’t come up before is, I suspect, timing and potentcy. Trudeau elected PM Nov. 4, 2015. The Northam blackface scandal erupted just this year (hard to believe; hadda look it up, seemed longer ago; scandal-fatigue, I guess). 

  47. 47.

    Brachiator

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Not to derail things, but PM Justin Trudeau dressed up in brownface in 2001 for an event at a private school where he taught. Photos have just emerged — shockingly, and purely coincidentally, a month away from a general election in Canada.

    Well, it certainly provides a distraction from Canada’s own espionage scandal.

    A senior Canadian police intelligence official charged with espionage-related offenses had access secret information from both domestic and international allies it was confirmed Monday.

    Cameron Ortis is accused of multiple offenses under the Security of Information Act, as well as two sections of the country’s Criminal Code, according to a statement from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

    They include the “unauthorized communication of special operational information” and possession of a device “for surreptitiously communicating, obtaining or retaining information,” the RCMP said.

    The case has rocked the elite Mounties and sent diplomats scrambling to contain the fallout.

    Some of the information may relate to Russian money laundering. I wonder whether there might be a Trump connection here.

  52. 52.

    ola azul

    @joel hanes:

    Excellent supposition. Wouldn’t never take that one offa my Trump-treason bingo card, that’s for sure! (And really, limiting Trump’s possible offenses to just any single one over the course of a long, rambling phone call would be a disservice to his sterling capacity to be multi-treasonal!)

  53. 53.

    Quaker in a Basement

    Y’all might be jumping the gun to assume it’s Putin. Other possibilities: Netanyahu, Kim, bin Salman.

  54. 54.

    sdhays

    No way the whistleblower is John Bolton. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would think that rules like whistleblower process apply to him when he knows people in Congress and the media will take his calls.

    But it would not surprise me at all if this is related to his firing. I never really accepted the party line that it was because Bolton was too hawkish. Though I was assuming that Dump was angry that Bolton had allowed the IC to protect their spy from his leaks.

  57. 57.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    OT:

    I was reading this LG&M article about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book that has a chapter on the Sandusky scandal at Penn State. Gladwell tries to defend Paterno, absurdly claiming that he couldn’t possibly have known what was going on, on account of him being a doddering old fool obsessed with football. Which is not even close to what the real Joe Paterno was like

    Apparently, there are people who are so obsessed with Penn State football that they refuse to believe that Paterno knew about the rapes, lest it ruin their enjoyment of the team. Which is pretty fucked up to say the least. Can any BJer football fans explain to me why people who never went to college follow college ball in the first place? The NFL I can understand, but who cares how many games Flyover State Technical wins? Is it because that’s where the NFL gets their players from?

  58. 58.

    Brachiator

    @Amir Khalid:

    This Justin Trudeau has something of a shady background, so I hear: the Rolling Stones once wrote a song about his parents.

    What? The Rolling Stones song, “Respectable,” which you may be referring to, came out in 1978. Justin Trudeau was 7 years old. Must have been a hell of a shady kid. Or not.

    Trudeau’s mother had been seen partying with Mick Jagger and the Stones in 1977, and soon after divorced her prime minister husband. But she was a troubled woman.

  60. 60.

    Kay

    Robert O’Brien ‘Looks the Part,’ but Has Spent Little Time Playing It
    Mr. O’Brien, President Trump’s new national security adviser, is said to bring milder views and a sunnier personality to the job than John R. Bolton.
    nytimes.com

    Oh, no. Not again. “This one will be different”

    He’s horrible, or he wouldn’t have been asked. It’s a job requirement.

  64. 64.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I interrupt your speculation with a bulletin on our serial-lying liar who lies most junior associate Justice

    lison Kodjak @ alikodjakNPR
    Brett Kavanaugh agreed to talk to @katekelly and @rpogrebin for their book – If they wrote that they didn’t talk with him. The authors — who told the story tonight @PressClubDC — refused and walked away from the interview.

    they say they didn’t put it in their book because it happened so late in the process… but they’re talking about it now… these journalists strike me making some odd decisions

  69. 69.

    Hitlesswonder

    @Kay: NPR played a clip of a previous interview with the new guy in which he said that Trump would not be a “Panda hugger” with regard to relations with China. Regardless of what you think those relations should be, using that phrasing in an interview seems less than circumspect or serious. The piece also noted that O’Brien was dispatched by Trump to monitor the trial of A$AP Rocky in Sweden. So, yeah, what you said.

  71. 71.

    Adam L Silverman

    @zhena gogolia: The problem is we do not actually know all of the phone calls the President makes because the White House has been less than forthcoming about what, exactly, the President actually does all day. And that’s not even counting the calls he makes on his unsecured phone from the residence at night when he’s on his own.

  72. 72.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:
    Yeah, I didn’t think of that angle. I suppose if you like football and don’t have a nearby professional team, college football is your next best option

  73. 73.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Gvg: The way the WaPo story is reported, the person who filed the complaint with the IC’s IG is a career intel officer who was detailed to the National Security Staff on the National Security Council.

  74. 74.

    sdhays

    @Cheryl Rofer: I don’t remember where now, but I’m sure I read today a quote from Mark Warner about how this is serious and the DNI should release the information that’s required by law. It was much more measured than Schiff’s letter, and it didn’t suggest any extra knowledge.

  75. 75.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Adam L Silverman:

    The problem is we do not actually know all of the phone calls the President makes because the White House has been less than forthcoming about what, exactly, the President actually does all day.

    Huh, it’s almost like they’ve got something to hide. What’s that old right-wing saw about having nothing to hide and nothing to fear?

  77. 77.

    Mai naem mobile

    Sad that the automatic assumption is that this has to do with Putin. There is no speculation that its anybody else. Not NK, not Bibi, not MBS, not China. Fucking traitor in the WH.

  78. 78.

    sdhays

    @Adam L Silverman: That occurred to me too. Why should we assume that the promise was made on one of the calls we’ve been told about? It even makes more sense that it was on an unsecured call since that could be how the issue came up through the IC system in the first place – listening in on Putin (or whoever) and surprise, surprise Captain Traitor is on line one.

  79. 79.

    jonas

    This sounds more serious than Trump offering to lift sanctions on Russia. We know that’s basically what Flynn was negotiating and it’s sort of old news at this point. I’m betting it was something more alarming to the IC like promising to unmask or withdraw our intelligence assets in a critical country like Russia or China in return for some kind of specific quid pro quo. Trump’s been quoted in recent weeks complaining about how human intelligence (i.e. spying) is “unfair” or something like that, and we know now that the CIA smuggled a highly-placed mole out of the Kremlin last year fearing Trump would say something compromising to the Russians about him.

    This is totally normal, by the way.

  80. 80.

    Another Scott

    @Adam L Silverman: But they don’t say that the person was on Donnie’s NSC staff at the time, do they? Maybe the person heard the information through other channels?

    Dunno.

    I assume we’ll know more in coming days.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  83. 83.

    Kay

    @Hitlesswonder:

    seems less than circumspect or serious

    They should just pick people from a Trump rally. Make it a contest. Call them up on stage and have Trump pretend to interview them. Fun! The three hour hatefests aren’t getting the ratings they used to.

  84. 84.

    sdhays

    @Mai naem mobile: I think it’s either Putin or Prince Bonesaw. I don’t see Dump as being sufficiently subservient to Kim or Xi. And I think what Dump might promise Bibi wouldn’t be disturbing enough (to career IC) to warrant all of this. But it’s more than possible that I’m just not imaginative enough.

  85. 85.

    joel hanes

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:

    explain

    Humans are social animals, and for most of our history, we lived in bands or tribes.
    We have a deep need to belong to a tribe, and to affirmatively demonstrate membership in that tribe.

    Watch the primate dominance displays in the opening “Africa waterhole” scenes of 2001 A Space Odyssey — not so much the invention of the weapon and the killing, but the capering and screaming that precede it.
    Then watch the fans at a close sportsball game.
    Then watch Rep Collins’s recent performance in the Lewandowski hearing.

    I see deep connections.

    https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674010048

  86. 86.

    Mai naem mobile

    @Kay: Pompeo doesnt get along with him which I like because Pompeo is an evangelist nutjob but he kinda sorta gets along with Mick Mulvaney who I think will end up being labelled as one of the top three assholes in the Trumpov admin and that’s saying something with so many assholes competing for the top 5 spots.

  87. 87.

    MomSense

    @sdhays:

    One of our allies could have picked it up, too. I don’t know that it’s necessarily Putin. Trumps been hot to get dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden from Ukraine.

  88. 88.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Cheryl Rofer: This is the real counterintelligence problem. Or one major part of it. Because there’s nothing but a preemptory readout of the 31 July call, if that is even the actual call since the White House is less than forthcoming about what exactly the President does all day, and it is highly likely that whomever he was speaking with made their own recording, that the President has opened himself up to blackmail and to be influenced by a foreign power. Even if the promise is something that shouldn’t be a threat to American interests or those of our allies, because almost no one in the US knows anything about it, but whomever he made the promise to does, the President has made himself open to blackmail and foreign influence. He’s turned himself into an insider threat to the security and interests of the US.

  89. 89.

    Kay

    @joel hanes:

    I think Trump was giving up the American spy that the US extracted from Russia, so that Putin can kill him.

    i have no idea and you may well be right but isn’t it wild how this is now part of normal speculation? I wondered about that “frog boiling” thing and that turns out to be true. What becomes normal, over time.

  95. 95.

    Kay

    @Mai naem mobile:

    I don’t know- aren’t all these descriptions of him just basically saying “they like how he looks and he’s friendly”?

    He literally could be 20 million other people. The descriptions are like “well, he isn’t an evil gargoyle, that’s for sure”

    Most people aren’t. I just thought one needed a little more than that. It’s a very low bar.

  96. 96.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @joel hanes:
    That’s also a good explanation. On a related note, most televised sports aside from high-stakes games like the Super Bowel, bore me to tears. The only times I have found sports exciting is when I’ve either physically been in the stands or played them

  98. 98.

    Martin

    Apropos of nothing, this July 31 Trump-Putin phone call, which Trump initiated ostensibly to offer assistance for wildfires in Siberia, has never made sense to me. Also, California was burning at the time, and Trump barely lifted a finger.

    To his credit, Putin delivered WAY more votes for Trump than California did, so y’know.

  101. 101.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Another Scott: The way the piece read to me, the implication is this was a career intel officer detailed to the National Security Council from their home agency. That may not be the case, but I’m not the only one who read it that way. Former CIA officer and National Security Council spokesman Ned Price had the same takeaway. We could both be wrong. We could both be right. We won’t know until we know.

  103. 103.

    dww44

    @SiubhanDuinne: For pity’s sake. Sounds like a nothingburger to me. Now the suppressed whistleblower complaint seems a tad more than a nothingurger. It could even be a Whopper burger.

  105. 105.

    dlwchico

    @lumpkin: I am interested in slipjoint pocketknives and the right wingers are thick in this hobby. I have just about quit several times just because I don’t want to be associated with them. I did quit all the FB groups I was in about the hobby.

  106. 106.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Martin: That’s my read. Could be CIA, could be DIA, could be one of the few career DNI folks (most of the folks at DNI are also detailees/seconded), could be someone from the National Security Sections at DOJ or FBI or someone from NSA, etc, etc.

  112. 112.

    feebog

    @Adam L Silverman:

    he way the WaPo story is reported, the person who filed the complaint with the IC’s IG is a career intel officer who was detailed to the National Security Staff on the National Security Council.

    Given that information it is only a matter of time before the whistle blower is identified by some industrious reporter. There can’t be that many intelligence analysts coming and going on the National Security Staff, no?

  113. 113.

    Amir Khalid

    @Brachiator:
    Yes, the link is indeed to Respectable. Margaret Trudeau was actually following the Rolling Stones tour party in Canada that year. (I don’t know if she was an actual groupie, but at the time it did kind of look that way.) It was a tour with extra scandal points — the Mounties busted Keith Richards for heroin. Keef narrowly avoided a long stretch in jail, which could have meant the end of the Stones. Does that make Justin’s past potentially shady? If you squint the rght way …

  116. 116.

    Adam L Silverman

    @feebog: Right now Mick Mulvaney, having been screamed out of bed by the President, is now screaming at someone to compile a list of the senior career IC officials assigned to the National Security Staff at the National Security Council who went back to their home agencies at the end of July/beginning of August.

  121. 121.

    Millard Filmore

    @Adam L Silverman:

    whomever he made the promise to does, the President has made himself open to blackmail and foreign influence

    Unless there is other blackmail behind all this, Trump can just claim “I never said that.” With Trump, it has to be big to be useful as a stick.

  122. 122.

    Yarrow

    @Adam L Silverman:

    the President has made himself open to blackmail and foreign influence. He’s turned himself into an insider threat to the security and interests of the US.

    So nothing new then. This has been the case since before he became President.

  123. 123.

    dww44

    @Mai naem mobile: I don’t dislike Warner but agree with you about how he got elected in Virginia. He seems to be a quite right of center Democrat. And in the not so distant past, Burr gave off some true patriotic vibes, but of late seems to be firmly in the Trump camp. I swear I hope I live long enough to understand what exactly Trump has on these elected Republicans that’s rendered them spineless and/or sycophantic supplicants.

  125. 125.

    Martin

    @Adam L Silverman: And it seems to me that a career staffer would go ballistic if Trump was promising to turn over a US asset under US protection to Putin, who would most likely disappear forever. That transcends the disagreement over policy, declassification arguments.

  126. 126.

    Chetan Murthy

    @dww44:

    what exactly Trump has on these elected Republicans that’s rendered them spineless and/or sycophantic supplicants.

    He has their voters. And they’re nihilistic creeps who only believe in one thing: power.

  127. 127.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Adam L Silverman:
    Damn. The Bronze Age was a lot different than the Silver Age of Comics. A lot more mature themes. But honestly, I have a hard time seeing the PM of Canada trying to fuck with the US government in practically any universe

  129. 129.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Mai naem mobile: @dww44: Mark Warner was basically the Bill Clinton of Virginia — the guy who tweaked Democratic strategy just enough (by being wonkish and good for jobs/business) to make the party palatable to the middle-class suburbanites who used to be the Republican base. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that George Allen and his nooses were a dominant force in Virginia state politics.

  130. 130.

    dww44

    @MomSense: I think it’s a given that the Senate Intel committee is likely to do nothing. But Adam Schiff and the House committee will do something. And, as Adam L says above, we shall wait to see if Devin Nunes highfoots it to the White House after the closed door hearing in the a.m. I sure hope Schiff has figured out that angle ahead of 9 a.m.

  131. 131.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Martin: I don’t think the timeline is right for the asset that was reported on last week. That story didn’t break until September. The call and the promise had to happen by the end of the first week of August.

  132. 132.

    joel hanes

    what exactly Trump has on these elected Republicans

    Republican voters are wildly supportive of Trump.
    These elected Republicans know it.

  134. 134.

    FlipYrWhig

    If this were 24 the call would be Trump telling Netanyahu he’d successfully arranged an election-eve surprise in Saudi Arabia.

  136. 136.

    FlipYrWhig

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Judging by his speeches, Trump seems like the kind of person who happily tells people things they already know, and that he’s already told them. “Hey, Bibi, I did that thing, you know, the big thing we’ve been talking about, with the explosions?”

  142. 142.

    piratedan

    well, with these guys, I wonder how much damage would be done if someone informed Trump that not only is Sean Hannity working as an Intelligence Asset for Canada, Mitch McConnell has a secret understanding with the PRC in regards to trade concessions for the State of Kentucky and is laundering his cash thru Bloomberg so that Trump never gets a taste….

    with these guys its not only business, its also personal….

  145. 145.

    NotMax

    @Amir Khalid

    Because bellyaching that the the U.S. (population 327 million) buys more from Malaysia than Malaysia (population 32 million) buys from the U.S. makes so-o-o much sense. //

  149. 149.

    Amir Khalid

    @NotMax:
    I’ve done my bit to help reduce the US trade deficit with Malaysia. I have purchased Levis jeans and Linda Ronstadt CDs. I have eaten at McDonald’s. I own guitars and amps from Fender Musical Instruments Corp. (Which Fender made in China, though.)

  153. 153.

    barbequebob

    @Amir Khalid: I always took this song as commenting on some of the people associated with the Carter Administration (not Carter himself) who were far less “straight” than prior administrations. Lines like, “you’re the rag trade girl, you’re the queen of pron you’re the easiest lay on the White House lawn” seemed to me to make it a song about Washington DC

  154. 154.

    Hunter

    “The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress. . . . ”

    No — it’s not a showdown between the “intelligence community” and Congress, it’s another case of Trump telling Congress to blow off. And based on Congress’ record to date, he’ll get away with it — again.

  155. 155.

    djysrv

    Nobody seems to have asked whether the so-called “whistleblower letter” comes with an attachment, that is, a electronic intercept of the person at the foreign power which US intel monitors via NSA. If it exists, then the intercept will contain the US person speaking or “making a promise” and the record will be there. In other words, the US person speaking will be recorded not because they were being tapped, but because the person they were talking to was.

    Case in point, former national security adviser Micheal Flynn was taped talking to potential clients not because he was a target, but because they were.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-reviewed-flynns-calls-with-russian-ambassador-but-found-nothing-illicit/2017/01/23/aa83879a-e1ae-11e6-a547-5fb9411d332c_story.html

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