Another Mueller Report Thread

by 3:56 pm. It has 190 Comments.

The last one is getting long.

Here’s a searchable version. I’ve downloaded it for my own convenience. I haven’t found any stunning surprises yet, including about some of the (apparently) bit players like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

It’s worth noting that Barbara Ledeen, whom Trump asked to find Clinton’s emails and came up with some fakes from “the dark web”, is married to Michael Ledeen, another of those slimebag holdovers from Iran-Contra and other scams. I think it might be worth looking further into what part of “the dark web” they were from. Ledeen was connected to Joel Zamel, who is part of an intelligence-for-hire group. The connection is through a relatively inocuous part of Zamel’s empire, a group called Wikistrat.

Carry on.


“Impeach the Motherfucker”

by 11:53 am. It has 331 Comments.

You can read the redacted Mueller report for yourself here. I am not a lawyer, but here’s what seems to be the nut graf(s), from Part II of the report, page 220 of 448:

Barr’s disgraceful tap dance this morning was an attempt to distract us from the fact that he substituted his own judgement on the obstruction question to exonerate Trump, whereas the Mueller report says that question is for the U.S. Congress to resolve. This cannot stand, not if we don’t want to make the banana republic thing official.

As for Part I of the report, the conclusion seems to be that while the Russians interfered specifically to elect Trump and there’s evidence of a conspiracy with various members of the campaign, the investigators couldn’t conclusively prove that Trump and/or the bumbling, corrupt flunkies populating his campaign operation were active participants in the attack on our election. So, the President of the United States is crowing about a report that suggests he’s merely a stooge rather than a mastermind. Let that sink in, fellow citizens.

Open thread!


Splitters! (Open Thread)

by 11:34 am. It has 347 Comments.

A new Atlantic piece lays out Bernie Sanders’ 2020 strategy, and guess what, you guys? We were right — it is about splitting the party in hopes of hanging onto the largest chunk:

The 2020 Race Is Going Just Like Bernie Sanders Wanted
The Vermont senator is starting to think he will not only win the Democratic nomination, but beat Trump and become president.

“There’s a three out of four chance we are not the nominee,” Faiz Shakir, the current campaign manager, said he tells the senator, “but that one in four chance is better than anyone else in the field.”

The Vermont senator’s pitch is a mix of idealism and a shouting anger about the system, but at its heart is a hard-nosed math: he’s the only candidate with a sizable chunk of the electorate that won’t waver, no matter what, so a field that keeps growing and splitting support keeps making it easier.

He’s counting on winning Iowa and New Hampshire, where he was already surprisingly strong in 2016, and hoping that Cory Booker and Kamala Harris will split the black electorate in South Carolina give him a path to slip through there, too. And then, they believe, they’ll easily win enough delegates to get him into contention at the convention. They say they don’t need him to get more than 30 percent to make that happen.

So he’s eagerly gotten into fights, like one over the weekend with the Center for American Progress over a video produced by an affiliated website speciously accusing him of profiting off his 2016 run, and then he’s fundraised by citing the fights as evidence of the resistance to the revolution he’s promising.

So, how does Sanders propose to reunite the Democratic electorate after fracturing it? Easy peasy!

Doubters suspect a Sanders nomination could be the one sure way to give Trump a second term, but Sanders’s thinking is that he could get the same Democratic and anti-Trump votes as other nominee, plus all the people who would only vote for him.

Now, I’m Team Broken Glass, but I’m unclear on how waging a scorched earth primary results in Democratic voters resetting their default to “generic Dem” after the race is wrapped up. (See 2016, presidential election of.) There’s a breathtaking arrogance in that assumption, but hey, it explains the lack of outreach to non-Sanders supporters in the party, otherwise known as “the majority of registered Democrats.”


Speaker Pelosi on 60 Minutes

by 10:31 am. It has 121 Comments.

I haven’t seen the whole interview yet, but The Post has a top five points compilation up on YouTube:

I’m glad she said this:

“The Mueller report is about an attack on our elections by a foreign government. And we want to know about that. We want to know about that in terms of being able to prevent it from happening again. So it’s bigger even than Donald Trump.”

There was a tinge of sarcasm in that last sentence, as was fitting. She’s absolutely correct, and while I don’t think it was Trump’s strategy to make it all about himself (that’s his default setting), he largely succeeded, which is just one of the many ways he’s failed utterly to live up to the oath of office.

Anyhoo, boy, did Pelosi ever hit the nail on the head here, when asked to describe Trump’s abilities as president:

Pelosi: “I think that there’s nobody in the country who knows better that he should not be President of the United States than Donald Trump.”

Stahl: “You think he knows it himself?”

Pelosi: “I think he does, yeah.”

No wonder Trump rushed to Twitter to lamely attacked Pelosi as soon as he saw the program. The truth hurts.

On the future of the party, Pelosi said this:

I think our future is strong enough, is built on a strong enough foundation to withstand everything, including the current occupant of the White House. I don’t think for two terms, though.

Agree with that too.

Meanwhile, moments ago, Elizabeth Warren just busted out a plan to manage public lands. I don’t know if she’ll win the nomination, but she seems to be writing the 2020 party platform. Works for me!

Open thread!


Hey @aravosis! Check This Out!

by 8:00 pm. It has 160 Comments.

Earlier today John Aravosis decided to rightly tear the bark off of Waleed Shahid:

Since I don’t tweet, I thought I’d link to and reprise some of my takedown of Shaheed’s attempt to misrepresent Senator Feinstein’s actions back in February, which was fresh on the heels of his attempt to do the same thing to Senator Harris. In both cases he barbered video footage until he got the out of context material he wanted and then weaponized it on Twitter. And I’d appreciate it if those of you who do tweet would tweet this at Aravosis.

Anyhow, as I wrote back in February:

Earlier today Waleed Shahid, fresh off of getting dragged for posting barbered and highly edited clips of Senator Harris from her town hall on his twitter feed several weeks ago, decided it was time to set his sights on the senior senator from California. As I suspected in the comments to an earlier post, Shahid had once again posted heavily edited videos on his twitter feed to go after someone that doesn’t measure up to his purity fanaticism. Fortunately, just like the last time, someone came along to set the record straight.

Shahid was once again full of shit, imagine that!!!!

Unfortunately, for all too many, Shahid’s lies will have already been taken as the gospel truth. It is bad enough that Democratic candidates and Democratic officeholders, as well as the organizations and individuals who support them, are going to be subjected to influence operations from the Russians, as well as a host of other state and non-state actors as we move into the 2020 elections, they shouldn’t have to also worry about being targeted by ideological fanatics like Shahid.

And as for the Justice Democrats, apparently they are running a protection scam where they require the candidates they endorse to send them funds rather than raise funds and send them to the candidates they’re endorsing! 

These fanatics aren’t interested in making things better, they are interested in promoting themselves, fleecing their donors, and ultimately tearing down the people that have the only real chance of ending the current President’s reelection chances and then beginning the long, hard, slow, and frustrating work of fixing all of the messes that the President, his administration, and his Republican Party and conservative movement enablers have created. I’m all for opening up the debate and pulling the center back somewhere closer to where it should be from where the Republicans and the conservative movement have pulled it for over the past 40 years. Waleed Shahid, the Justice Democrats, his fellow travelers, and their attempt to create an ideological inflexible Tea Party and Breitbart of the left is not the solution to any of these problems.

As I’ve been writing here for almost three years, we were attacked and are still being attacked by a hostile foreign power! We are at war! But rather than everyone that isn’t supporting the domestic beneficiaries of the ongoing attacks – the President, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement that supports them –  pulling together to fix our problems, Shahid and his fellow travelers would rather do the enemy’s work for them and pull us apart. With “friends” like these, Democrats, liberals, progressives, the center left to left of center Americans don’t actually need enemies.

Many more tweets and links exposing Shaheed’s and the Justice Democrats’ scam at the original post.

Open thread!