Generic 2018 U.S. Election Cycle Recycling Bin

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  1. Neoliberals were typically always against Wikileaks because actual neoliberals support violent interventions on foreign soil.

  2. Wikileaks is not just chaos, and has a very strong ideology that it editorializes at every opportunity. Even their release schedule is designed for an ideology and not as an agent of chaos which implies acting without intent.

  3. Both Assange and Wikileaks recently decided to start pushing conspiracy theories on public forums and in interviews, and have been embraced by and embraces the alt-right at least since the primaries this year. That’s how within days of each other Assange tells the world that Hillary probably killed the DNC leak source and the Wikileaks twitter account makes an antisemitic tweet after accusations of Russia just barely surfaced.

If the opposite happened and Trump was railroaded by Wikileaks showing a personal connection between him and Russia and whatever else and Hillary sailed to victory (and they behaved the same), I would still be critical of Wikileaks for abandoning their mission and being a mouthpiece for Assange’s personal politics.

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Ellison is only running for DNC chair, isn’t he? Not starting a Presidential campaign?

I’m definitely not convinced he’s an anti-semite. But I do understand that DNC chair shouldn’t be a part-time job (a la DWS), and that there is an issue starting with people with negative baggage from the outset (a la Clinton).

This is why I’m also a long way from convinced by Cory Booker as a 2020 candidate. Especially after his recent vote against importing pharmaceuticals from Canada.

But we’re just setting up for another left vs centrist purity vs. electability fight again. Woo.

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Good on the baker to step forward and set the story straight.

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I loved the sign in the lower right side of this tweeted picture:

“Melania, are you okay?”

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So far?

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When he started and was mostly going after releasing things on the Iraq war I paid little attention, honestly, since it was long since clear that Iraq was a massive clusterfuck (also I wasn’t actually unambiguously supportive of Manning and their doc dumps, though that’s a tangent, and I disagreed with the sentencing even if I was perfectly fine with seeing Manning charged). Still I liked the idea in principle since one of my values is transparency and the idea of hacktivism/Wikileaks as a model for increasing transparency seemed feasible, though it turns out an important part of that model is that you want the party providing transparency to be a neutral party, and Assange’s biases and susceptibility to being manipulated by intel agencies make his project worse than worthless. Selective transparency is at least as bad as none, and perhaps worse since it give a false sense of trust.

I’d initially assumed from the “wiki” bit that it would be a collective project, but due to his horrible management of Wikileaks it’s not an organization so much as his personal hobby to do whatever he pleases with, even when what he’s doing is working diligently and successfully to get Donald Trump elected.

While the die-hards didn’t take the rape charges seriously, I wasn’t comfortable at all with dismissing women claiming to be raped (esp. when Assange already seemed like a narcissist), he’d already damaged the org. badly to the point that it was impossible to be trusted, and from then I eyed him and Wikileaks as a unfolding mess. I just didn’t realize how serious the problems were until later when he was effectively stumping for both Trump and Russia. Those problems should be been clearer to me earlier, really, given that he’d been on Moscow’s payroll:

So yes, my thinking evolved. It didn’t just evolve because he wasn’t an ally to my political interests per se, but because over time I saw more and more how totally compromised he was and how useless the Wikileaks model is given the ease of abuse by intel agencies (who were already using WL as a front at least by 2015).

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Booker is in the Obama establishment camp which has always been at odds with then Clinton establishment camp, and based on his actions I think he rather see someone else run in 2020.

Ellison’s strength and the new common voice of potential DNC heads is to work local and grassroots on up instead of President down. The difference is Ellison is really good at it and is already working with the establishment well. Mind you, progressives are already getting sore about Ellison agreeing that the DNC shouldn’t ban corporate support for the party (about 7% of its budget.)

I would love Ellison lead the party, I would love progressives to take local and state elections. The right of center Dems are the only ones that ever win elections federally so it’s harder for me to say what can be done there.

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Booker is at least (1) young and (2) black, which are two qualities with a recent track record of getting the vote out on election day.

Seriously, it has been over a hundred years since a non-incumbent Democrat over 55 won the White House.

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We had one near us that said something like: “Melania, blink 4 times slowly if you need help”.

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Warren? Wyden? Gabbard?

Really, we can start with pretty much any Democrat who (a) hasn’t been investigated, rightly or wrongly, for ethics violations or similar, and (b) hasn’t worked for Farrakhan, David Duke, or the like. There are far more than zero of these.

Everyone has dirt on them

Even if this is true, not all come with so much well-established easily-googlable dirt.

I never said she was…I’d certainly have voted for her over Trump, though I’m not sure she’s more qualified for the job.

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She did? I missed that too, and haven’t seen anything about it yet. Well, travel to Moscow isn’t cheap, and she’s got that recount money she never used. cough

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http://www.jill2016.com/stein_in_russia_calls_for_principled_collaboration

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“Speaking as part of a panel of foreign policy experts, Jill Stein…”

Um. Russian Television considers Jill Stein America’s foreign policy expert?

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Her and Flynn, who also had a trip to Moscow and sat with her a few times.

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This is fine.

This bill repeals the United Nations Participation Act of 1945 and other specified related laws.

The bill requires: (1) the President to terminate U.S. membership in the United Nations (U.N.), including any organ, specialized agency, commission, or other formally affiliated body; and (2) closure of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

The bill prohibits: (1) the authorization of funds for the U.S. assessed or voluntary contribution to the U.N., (2) the authorization of funds for any U.S. contribution to any U.N. military or peacekeeping operation, (3) the expenditure of funds to support the participation of U.S. Armed Forces as part of any U.N. military or peacekeeping operation, (4) U.S. Armed Forces from serving under U.N. command, and (5) diplomatic immunity for U.N. officers or employees.

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I just made a thread about that! (no Rob Ford reference)

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Someone remembers this series:

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The cover article in the most recent Economist doesn’t pull any punches. Nor does their cover art, which I think is brilliant: they put Trump’s smirking face on the well-known George Washington portrait in such a way that we see him 1) pasted over an actual patriot who couldn’t be more different in every way and 2) bald.

Anyway, here’s what they have to say about the point you’re reporting:

Just as Mr Trump underestimates the fragility of the global economic system, so too does he misread geopolitics. Even before taking office, Mr Trump has hacked away at the decades-old, largely bipartisan cloth of American foreign policy. He has casually disparaged the value of the European Union, which his predecessors always nurtured as a source of stability. He has compared Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor and the closest of allies, unfavourably to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president and an old foe. He has savaged Mexico, whose prosperity and goodwill matter greatly to America’s southern states. And, most recklessly, he has begun to pull apart America’s carefully stitched dealings with the rising superpower, China—imperilling the most important bilateral relationship of all.

The idea running through Mr Trump’s diplomacy is that relations between states follow the art of the deal. Mr Trump acts as if he can get what he wants from sovereign states by picking fights that he is then willing to settle—at a price, naturally. His mistake is to think that countries are like businesses. In fact, America cannot walk away from China in search of another superpower to deal with over the South China Sea. Doubts that have been sown cannot be uprooted, as if the game had all along been a harmless exercise in price discovery. Alliances that take decades to build can be weakened in months.

Dealings between sovereign states tend towards anarchy—because, ultimately, there is no global government to impose order and no means of coercion but war. For as long as Mr Trump is unravelling the order that America created, and from which it gains so much, he is getting his country a terrible deal.

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And this is from Harper’s Magazine. Lack of paragraphs is original. Packs quite a punch:

Tower of Babble

“What I say,” says Trump, “is what I say.”

By Joe Kloc

Donald J. Trump, a reality-television star erecting a mausoleum for himself behind the first-hole tee of a golf course he owns in New Jersey, first declared his candidacy for president of the United States in the atrium of Trump Tower, which he built in the 1980s with labor provided by hundreds of undocumented Polish workers and concrete purchased at an inflated price from the Gambino and Genovese crime families. “The American dream is dead,” Trump said to the audience members, each of whom he paid $50 to attend. During Trump’s primary campaign, he told his supporters that he knew “all about crazies,” loved “Wall Street guys” who are “brutal,” planned to “use the word ‘anchor baby,’ ” and preferred to pronounce “Qatar” incorrectly. Trump, who in 1999 cut his sick infant grandnephew off the Trump Organization’s health-care plan and in 2011 compared being gay to switching to a long-handled golf putter, pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and said he’d consider trying to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage. Trump said that his book The Art of the Deal was second in quality only to the Bible and that he never explicitly asked God for forgiveness. At a church in Iowa, he placed a few dollar bills into a bowl filled with sacramental bread, which he has referred to as “my little cracker.” Trump, who once dumped a glass of wine on a journalist who wrote a story he didn’t like, told his supporters that journalists were “liars,” the “lowest form of humanity,” and “enemies,” but that he did not approve of killing them. “I’m a very sane person,” said Trump, who once hosted a radio show in which he discussed the development of hair-cloning technology, the creation of a vaccine for obesity, the number of men a gay man thinks about having sex with on his morning commute, and the dangers of giving free Viagra to rapists. Trump denied being the voice of John Miller, one of several fictional assistants he had previously admitted pretending to be, in a recording of himself telling a reporter that he had “zero interest” in dating Madonna; that he had three other girlfriends in addition to Marla Maples, with whom he had been cheating on his wife; and that he had an affair with Carla Bruni, who later responded by describing Trump as “obviously a lunatic.” Trump, who once offered the city of New York vacant apartments in his building to house homeless people in hopes they would drive away rent-controlled tenants, sent a bumper sticker to a group of homeless veterans whom he had previously declined to help and asked them to campaign for him. Trump, whose companies have been cited 24 times since 2005 for failing to pay workers overtime or minimum wage, said the federal minimum wage should go up, and then said it should not. Trump referred to 9/11 as “7-Eleven,” and called Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren “the Indian” and “Pocahontas.” Trump, who had previously labeled a deaf contestant on his reality-TV show The Apprentice “retarded,” and had described poor Americans as “morons,” said the country was on course for a “very massive recession,” one resembling the U.S. recession of 2007 to 2009, which Trump once said Americans could “opt out of” by joining Trump Network, a multilevel-marketing company that sold a monthly supply of multivitamins purportedly tailored to customers based on a test of their urine. Trump submitted his financial-disclosure form to the Federal Election Commission, on which he swore under oath that his golf course in Briarcliff Manor, New York, which was being sued by the town for causing flooding, was worth $50 million, despite having sworn in a previous property-tax appeal that it was worth $1.4 million; and swore that his golf course in Palos Verdes, California, which he was suing for five times its annual revenue, was worth more than $50 million, despite previously having filed papers with Los Angeles County stating it was worth $10 million. Trump claimed he made $1.9 million from his modeling agency, which a foreign-born former model accused of “modern-day slavery,” alleging that the agency forced her to lie about her age, work without a U.S. visa, and live in a crowded apartment for which she paid the agency as much as $1,600 a month to sleep in a bed beneath a window through which a homeless man once urinated on her. Trump sought to exclude a recording of himself telling the nephew of former president George W. Bush that he grabs women “by the pussy” from a fraud suit filed against Trump University, a series of real-estate seminars taught by salespeople with no real-estate experience, which was housed in a Trump-owned building that the Securities and Exchange Commission said also housed the country’s most complained-about unregistered brokerages, and whose curriculum investigators in Texas described as “inapplicable.” Trump announced that he would win the Latino vote, and tweeted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl from Trump Grill in Trump Tower with the message “I love Hispanics!” Trump referred to a black man at one of his rallies as “my African American,” and pledged his support for black people at a gathering of mostly white people in Wisconsin, whom he often referred to as “the forgotten people.” “I am the least racist person,” said Trump, who was sued twice by the Justice Department in the 1970s for allegedly refusing to rent apartments to black tenants, whose Trump Plaza Hotel was fined $200,000 by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1992 for removing black dealers from card tables, who allegedly told a former employee that he hated “black guys counting my money,” who in 2005 floated the idea of pitting an all-black Apprentice team against an all-white one to reflect “our very vicious world,” and who was endorsed by leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, one of whom said, “What he believes, we believe.” Trump tweeted statistics credited to a fictional government agency falsely claiming that the majority of white murder victims in the United States are killed by black people. Trump tweeted a photoshopped picture of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who Trump had said “had blood coming out of her wherever,” standing next to a Saudi prince, who tweeted back that he had “financially rescued” Trump twice, including once in 1990, when the prince purchased Trump’s 281-foot yacht, which was formerly owned by a Saudi arms dealer with whom Trump often partied in Atlantic City, and with whom Trump was implicated in a tax-evasion scheme involving a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. Trump disputed former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s claim that Trump magazine is defunct, showing as proof an annual circular for his clubs that was not Trump magazine, which folded in 2009. Trump republished his book Crippled America with the title Great Again. Trump told and retold an apocryphal story about a U.S. general who executed Muslim soldiers with bullets dipped in pig’s blood and proposed that Muslims be banned from entering the country. At the first primary debate, Trump praised his companies’ bankruptcies, including that of Trump Entertainment Resorts, in which lenders lost more than $1 billion and 1,100 employees lost their jobs, and that of Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, a publicly traded company that Trump used to purchase two casinos for almost $1 billion, and from which he resigned after the company went bankrupt for the first time, but before it went bankrupt for the second time. “I made a lot of money,” said Trump. At the fifth primary debate, Trump defended the idea of retaliating against America’s foreign aggressors by killing non-combatant members of their families, saying it would “make people think.” At the eleventh primary debate, Trump told the crowd there was “no problem” with the size of his penis. Trump said that he knew more about the Islamic State than “the generals,” and that he would “rely on the generals” to defeat the Islamic State. Trump said he would bring back waterboarding and torture because “we have to beat the savages.” Trump offered to pay the legal bills of anyone who assaulted protesters at his rallies, denied making the offer, then made the offer again after a 78-year-old white supporter in North Carolina punched a 26-year-old black protester in the eye and said, “Next time we see him we might have to kill him.” Trump, who in 1999 called Republicans too “crazy right” and in 2000 ran on a Reform Party platform that included creating a lottery to fund U.S. spy training, said that the 2016 primaries were “rigged,” then clinched the Republican nomination for president, receiving more votes than any Republican in history. “I was the one who really broke the glass ceiling,” said Trump when his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, became the first woman to lead a major party’s ticket. Trump hired Steve Bannon, the editor of the white-nationalist website Breitbart, to replace his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who ran a firm that once lobbied for the military dictator of Zaire, and who himself replaced Corey Lewandowski, who resigned from the campaign not long after he was filmed grabbing a Breitbart reporter by the arm to prevent her from asking Trump any questions. Trump selected as his running mate Indiana governor Mike Pence, who previously backed a bill that would allow hospitals to deny care to critically ill pregnant women, and who once criticized the Disney character Mulan as a “mischievous liberal” created to persuade Americans that women should be allowed to hold combat positions in the military. In his general-election campaign, Trump said he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory, and called on Russia to hack into Clinton’s email account. Trump said that he doesn’t pay employees who don’t “do a good job,” after a review of the more than 3,500 lawsuits filed against Trump found that he has been accused of stiffing a painter and a dishwasher in Florida, a glass company in New Jersey, dozens of hourly hospitality workers, and some of the lawyers who represented him. “I’m a fighter,” said Trump, who body-slammed the WWE chairman at WrestleMania 23 in 2007, and who attended WrestleMania IV with Robert LiButti, an Atlantic City gambler with alleged mafia ties, who told Trump he’d “fucking pull your balls from your legs” if Trump didn’t stop trying to seduce his daughter. Trump, whose first wife, Ivana, accused him in divorce filings of rape, and whose special counsel later said rape within a marriage was not possible, said “no one respects women more than I do.” Trump threatened to sue 12 women who accused him of sexual misconduct, including one who recalled Trump trying “like an octopus” to put his hand up her skirt on an airplane 35 years ago; four former Miss Teen USA contestants, who alleged that Trump entered their dressing room while girls as young as 15 were changing and said, “I’ve seen it all before”; the winner of Miss Utah USA in 1997, who alleged that Trump forcibly kissed her on the lips and then told her, “Twenty-one is too old”; an adult-film star, who alleged that at a golf tournament in Tahoe in 2006 Trump offered her $10,000 and the private use of his jet to spend the night with him; and a People magazine reporter, who alleged that while she was writing a story on Trump and his current wife, Melania, on the occasion of their first wedding anniversary, Trump pushed her against the wall and forcibly kissed her before telling her, “We’re going to have an affair.” “What I say is what I say,” said Trump, who previously told a pair of 14-year-old girls that he would date them in a couple of years, said of a 10-year-old girl that he would date her in 10 years, told a journalist that he wasn’t sure whether his infant daughter Tiffany would have nice breasts, told the cast of The View that if Ivanka weren’t his daughter “perhaps I would be dating her,” told radio host Howard Stern that it was okay to call Ivanka a “piece of ass” and that he could have “nailed” Princess Diana, and tweeted that a former winner of his Miss Universe pageant, whom Trump once called “Miss Piggy,” was disgusting. “Check out sex tape,” tweeted Trump, who once appeared in a soft-core pornographic film breaking a bottle of wine over a limousine. Trump did not comment on reports that he used over $200,000 in charitable contributions to the Trump Foundation to settle lawsuits against his businesses, $20,000 in contributions to the Trump Foundation to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself, and $10,000 in contributions to buy a smaller painting of himself, which he hung on the wall of his restaurant Champions Bar and Grill. “I’m the cleanest guy there is,” said Trump, who once granted the rights to explore building Trump-branded towers in Moscow to a mobster convicted of stabbing a man in the face with the stem of margarita glass, who was mentored by the former lead counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Gambino and Genovese crime families, who once purchased a nightclub in Atlantic City from a hit man for a Philadelphia crime family, who once worked with a soldier in the Colombo crime family to outfit Trump Golden and Executive Series limousines with a fax machine and a liquor dispenser, and who once purchased helicopter services from a cigarette-boat racer named Joseph Weichselbaum, who was charged with drug trafficking in Ohio before being moved to Trump’s sister’s courtroom in New Jersey, where the case was handed off to a different judge, who gave Weichselbaum a three-year prison sentence, of which he served 18 months before moving into Trump Tower. Trump told journalists he “made a lot of money” when he leased his house in Westchester to the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. “I screwed him,” said Trump. Trump, who in 2013 said that he did “have a relationship” with Vladimir Putin, said in 2016, “I don’t know Putin.” Trump, who wrote in 1997 that concern over asbestos was a mob conspiracy, who in the 1990s spent $1 million in ads to bolster the theory that a Native American tribe in upstate New York had been infiltrated by the mafia and drug traffickers, who once implied that Barack Obama’s real name is Barry Soetoro and that he won reelection by making a secret deal with Saudi Arabia, and who in 2012 tweeted that global warming was a “hoax” created by “the Chinese” to weaken U.S. manufacturing, suggested to his supporters that the Islamic State paid the phone bills of Syrian refugees, that his primary opponent Ted Cruz’s Cuban father was involved in a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy, and that U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia may have been suffocated with a pillow. During the first debate of the general election, Trump said that Rosie O’Donnell had deserved it when he called her “disgusting both inside and out,” “basically a disaster,” a “slob,” and a “loser,” someone who “looks bad,” “sounds bad,” has a “fat, ugly face,” and “talks like a truck driver.” At the second general-election debate, Trump invited three women who have accused Clinton’s husband of sexual misconduct to sit in the front row; claimed that Clinton had once laughed about the rape of a 12-year-old girl, which audio showed not to be true; claimed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had endorsed him, which it had not; and afterward suggested that his opponent had been on drugs during the debate. Trump, who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters, told his supporters that Clinton could shoot one of them and not be prosecuted. Trump told the audience at a Catholic charity dinner that Clinton “hates Catholics,” and told his supporters that she is “the devil” and that Mexico was “getting ready to attack.” Trump, who once kept a collection of Adolf Hitler’s speeches at his bedside, told his supporters that the election was “rigged” against him, won the election despite losing the popular vote by a margin of almost 3 million, claimed that he had in fact won the popular vote, and then announced that he would be staying on as executive producer of The Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, which a year earlier had fired him because he called Mexicans “rapists.” “Our country,” said Trump at a victory rally, “is in trouble.”

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This one is interesting:

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