The Goat Pen

So just how many times before did you say this really isn't a Trump issue?

For starters, Russian attempts to meddle in US elections have happened long before Trump:

Over the course of 11 presidential elections between the end of World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union, we identified three secret attempts to influence an election.

• 1960: Through his ambassador to the United States, Mikhail Menshikov, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev offered Adlai Stevenson help from a secret propaganda campaign. However, Stevenson declined the offer. He lost in the Democratic primary to John F. Kennedy.

• 1968: The Soviet Union’s ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Dobrynin, offered to secretly fund Hubert Humphrey’s campaign against Richard Nixon. Humphrey declined the bribe.

• 1976: Fearing that anti-communist Democrat Henry "Scoop" Jackson stood a good chance at winning in the wake of Nixon’s resignation, the KGB began a smear campaign. Soviet spies forged FBI paperwork to make it appear Jackson was secretly gay and sent the fake reports to newspapers around the United States during the election and for years after.

They've been meddling in European elections since the '60's too, where Trump was never an issue. They will still be meddling with US elections when Chelsea runs.

You also keep ignoring the fact that the Russians successfully bribed the DEMOCRAT NOMINEE in 2016, who signed off on a deal which gave - the Russians! - 20% of the US uranium industry. In return - the Russians! - then gave millions to the Democrat nominee's fake charity/family slush fund. The Russians also paid Hillary's husband $500,000 for a speech.

You also keep forgetting that the Democrat nominee gave $3.6 million to - the Russians! - for the fake pee pee dossier on Trump.

If you are really so concerned with collusion between high level government officials and - the Russians! - then stop chasing mythical phantom dreams about Trump and pay a little attention to the person who actually did it.

Let tick live in his own little hysteria. He can't except the fact that his candidate was a failure even when she had every advantage offered to her than any other candidate in history.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... 016-215774

Wow, that was an amazing article. Who knew Donna Brazille has a moral compass after all? The cynicism about Hillary and fondness for Bernie in the article is very surprising. Isn't this the same Donna Brazil who used her position at CNN to leak secret debate questions to Hillary and put Bernie at a huge unfair disadvantage? Maybe she got a sudden pang of conscience, and this is her act of contrition.

Repentance is a beautiful thing.

Hey, I love it. The blanket denials have morphed into whutaboutisms. "Whutabout President Clinton!" - good God Hannity is such a goob.

Lessee, Trump says Hillary paid 12 million and prof says 3.6. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKBN1D15XH

I'm thinking the Washington Free Beacon paid more than that, but I'll leave it to you experts to decide.

DNC is broke....

----------------------------

Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.

By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

its a good read - rest of it here

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... 016-215774

Professor Tiger wrote:Wow, that was an amazing article. Who knew Donna Brazille has a moral compass after all? The cynicism about Hillary and fondness for Bernie in the article is very surprising. Isn't this the same Donna Brazil who used her position at CNN to leak secret debate questions to Hillary and put Bernie at a huge unfair disadvantage? Maybe she got a sudden pang of conscience, and this is her act of contrition.

Repentance is a beautiful thing.

You literally cut and pasted your own post from puter's forum.

You literally cut and pasted your own post from puter's forum

...or to paraphrase:

The Today Show/GMA/etc. take their first half hour (lead) stories directly from the NYT front page.

I actually didn't see Sardis post until now

Don't worry, nobody else looks at sardis's posts either...

Since I improperly used the word "except" instead of "accept" I am glad no one saw it.

The PAH’s takeover of the DNC and theft of the 2016 primaries from Bernie were so disgraceful the even top Democrats (other than Brazile) are condemning them:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 4b055836c6

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/02/politics/ ... atic-party

Stolen by Russian ads on Facebook. Stolen by “collusion,” whatever that might be. Stolen by racism. In other words, they were robbed and the only thing that matters now is catching and jailing the robber.

Sorry, fellas. The 2016 election was the culmination, not the beginning, of a Democratic implosion.

Over the previous six years, Democrats had lost 60-plus House seats, nine Senate seats, 14 governorships and 1,000 state and local offices. Russians didn’t do that. Democrats did — with the help of a surging Republican Party that found itself after election night in its strongest electoral position across the country since 1928.

Democrats need to understand their own role in their own rotting position — including how they sold themselves to the Clintons for a mess of pottage they never even got to eat — if they are to have any hope of reversing the Republican tide.

The atheist Democrats won’t get that “mess of pottage” reference.

that was the NY Post

"Sorry, fellas. The 2016 election was the culmination, not the beginning, of a Democratic implosion."

I'd say the republican party has, if not imploded, been severely compromised as a party more so than the democrats. As for the state and local level republican takeover, it's been a takeover alright, one based on potentially illegal gerrymandering and manipulation. You decry the possibility of large urban areas having outsize influence over "the rest of the country", but that's exactly what has happened on the state and local level all over this country, with republicans basically creating virtual urban areas wherein they are assured of victory. It won't last...

I just remembered a dream I recently had in which Neil Gorsuch had scathing comments on Trump...

hedge wrote:"Sorry, fellas. The 2016 election was the culmination, not the beginning, of a Democratic implosion."

I'd say the republican party has, if not imploded, been severely compromised as a party more so than the democrats. As for the state and local level republican takeover, it's been a takeover alright, one based on potentially illegal gerrymandering and manipulation. You decry the possibility of large urban areas having outsize influence over "the rest of the country", but that's exactly what has happened on the state and local level all over this country, with republicans basically creating virtual urban areas wherein they are assured of victory. It won't last...

how has the republican party been severely compromised? it rose from the ashes in the last election, it owns the white house, house and senate and the majority of governors in the country, IIRC, are republicans.

eCat, why are you such a rain cloud on their hopes and dreams?

people just see the world thru different prisms I guess.

just last week I heard on the radio about how health insurance prices are going to jump dramatically for 2018, but not to worry, the government is going to increase the subsidies to the people that are eligible so they can still get it

and this is a good thing

except its a horrible thing because the people that are getting the subsidies are a very very small number of the people who are mandated to buy insurance - like 20m versus 180m.

So the 180m? well they have to live with the dramatic price increases brought on in large part because of our government. And yet the Jimmy Kimmels of the world are out there every day talking up how our government has an obligation to provide us with health care

the government isn't providing us with health care, the government is forcing us to participate in a pyramid scheme

we have some very stupid people given a very big pulpit on which to push their views.

"how has the republican party been severely compromised?"

Incumbents aren't seeking reelection b/c they don't want to be beholden to Trumpsters and they can't win without them. Plenty of notable longtime repubs are openly not merely lukewarm on Trump but openly hostile towards him. Maybe you see this as a good thing, but it's certainly not conducive to party cohesion. I see the republican party as being split b/w the old guard and this new iteration of the tea party. Yes, they are still in power, but it seems to be in name only. Doesn't seem like they can even get together to get something as ostensibly uncontroversial (to repubs) as Obama Care overturned. The only thing they seem to be able to agree on is tax cuts. So yeah, they're "in power", but if you're not getting anything accomplished, what good is it? Maybe you see this, too, as a good thing, but this sort of stagnation used to be b/c of gridlock b/w repubs and dems, not gridlock within one party. I think you're going to see a much more focused dem party in the next few years. We'll see...