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February 17, 2018 07:08 AM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 56 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“The press is the enemy.”

–Richard M. Nixon

Comments

56 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread

    1. And of course Democratic Senators never get bought.  Wasn't that Robert Menendez D-NJ on trial recently?

      Not a Senator, but former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown D-FL  just reported to prison to start a 5 year prison term for fraud.

      Here's a list of corrupt high ranking politicians that have gone to jail

      .Corrupt Democrats

       

      1. Andrew J. May ???  Gee dude. That was in the 1940s. Yes, there are corrupt politicians in both parties. But you are REALLY grasping at straws going back almost to World War II to find a Dem who ended up in jail.

        And Menendez's trial did not end up in a conviction from what I've read. But, hey, it's New Jersey. You are familiar with Bridge Gate?

        1. But you are REALLY grasping at straws going back almost to World War II to find a Dem who ended up in jail.

          So former Illinois Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich doing 14 years in federal prison for corruption doesn't count?

          Yes I’m familiar with Bridgegate, some top officials were convicted and went to jail. I find it hard to believe Christy wasn’t indicted as well. There’s an old Greek saying, “a fish rots from the head.”

          1. Didn't address Rod B. one way or another. But he is a typical Chicago politician. In Chicagoland area, both parties are corrupt. Did you see the recent issue of National Review with the cover story of Governor Rauner being the worst Republican governor in the country? 

          1. 9 Allyn Coopers I could find in the US ..none in Colorado. If this one is a Russki, he will never tell us anything about himself, nothing that can be verified. When did he first appear…?

            1. Not everyone we disagree with is a troll. I don't think we have any genuine trolls posting on here now. The definition of a troll is 1) posting inflammatory comments that promote dreary flame wars 2) diversion, Squirrel! And what-about-itis, and 3) posting deliberately false or distorted information from partisan talking points.

              By this definition, all of us on here indulge in trollish behavior at tomes, even though we may not actually be trolls.

               

  1. Russian bots got busy capitalizing on the Parkland school massacre to promote a pro-gun, anti-left agenda. WIRED magazine reports:

    Pro-Gun Russian Bots Flood Twitter After Parkland Shooting

    Some misinformation botniks are spreading on social media include questioning the number of school shootings, trying to tie the Parkland murderer * to Antifa , or to Al Quaeda. (he was a white nationalist and a Trumper).

    * I refuse to use the sanitized terms “shooter” and “shooting”. Call him a murderer. Call it mass murder or a massacre. Or a terrorist attack. Those are the words the media would use if the murderer had brown skin or was from a foreign country.

    1. Agreed. He is a domestic terrorist and mass murderer. I don't care if his skin is whiter than the new fallen snow. My “thoughts and prayers” include that white skin turning a crispy golden brown as he fries in an electric chair.

      There is evidence he was a white nationalist or at least somehow self associated with that (despicable) cause. And he may have been a "Trumper", but if so that is no more relevant than the domestic terrorist and murderer in the congressional baseball shooting who was a Bernie Sanders supporter.

    1. Shooters are enabled by a lack of EVERYONE's actions, and motivated by their own unique interpretations of various ideologies. In Parkland, the link apparently is mainly on the right, with the shooter wearing a MAGA cap and (maybe) attending right-wing nut job gatherings. In the softball shoot-em-up, the link is mainly on the left, with the shooter having tracks to the Bernie-side of the party.

      I think neither of them would be able to pass a multiple-choice test about the partisan stances of their connection.

          1. Interesting background on Pence vs. Christie for VP.  If Chris Christie had been Trump's pick, somehow, I think someone would have dropped a dime on Trump, thus ensuring Christie would be Prez by now.

            1. I had no idea that Paul M. was the brain behind that decision. I always presumed that Jarod Kushner put the kibosh on Governor Donuts as payback for putting Jarod's daddy in prison.

              For the sake of party unity, Manafort's strategy made sense.  How excited would the base have gotten if given a ticket consisting of an ideological shape-shifter from NYC and a RINO (of sorts) from NJ?

              Hatred of HRC would only have gotten them so far….

    1. Oops. 

      Former Trump aide Richard Gates to plead guilty; agrees to testify against Manafort, sources say

      A former top aide to Donald Trump's presidential campaign will plead guilty to fraud-related charges within days — and has made clear to prosecutors that he would testify against Paul Manafort, the lawyer-lobbyist who once managed the campaign.

      The change of heart by Trump's former deputy campaign manager Richard Gates, who had pleaded not guilty after being indicted in October on charges similar to Manafort's, was described in interviews by people familiar with the case.

       

  2. Russia Wanted Trump to Win. And It Wanted to Get Caught.

    https://nyti.ms/2C4mLOD

    It’s a Hollywood cliché that’s been adopted by villains from the trickster god Loki in Marvel’s “The Avengers” to James Bond’s “Skyfall” nemesis Raoul Silva: They are captured, only for the heroes to realize — too late! — that being caught was part of the villain’s evil plan all along. With Friday’s release of an indictment detailing Project Lakhta — the information operations component of Russia’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election — it’s worth asking whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been reading from a similar script.

     

    United States intelligence officials themselves have voiced suspicions that Russia intended to be caught. “They were unusually loud in their intervention,” James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, told Congressat a hearing last March. “It’s almost as if they didn’t care that we knew.” Wade into any online political discussion, where the conversation-ending accusation “Russian bot!” has become a commonplace, and it’s hard to deny that it’s worked.

     

  3. Why are CO Dems so sanguine about this being a purple state? When was the last time Diana DeGette visited here to show the base some commitment? John the Hick? Jared Polis? 

    1. Diana Degette : met with 1000 constituents  at a town hall last February. She marched in the Women's march. I really have no complaint about her voting record. She's been a consistent champion for reproductive rights and other issues I care about.

      That said, her reputation is that she is often rude or mean to people who visit her in Washington. She refused to even hear arguments about GMO labelling.

      Hick and Polis have both met with constituents recently. It's a mixed bag, for sure.  Neither one is as progressive as I'd like, and they both try to please all sides on the conflict between oil and gas industry and residents living on the surface. Of course, Polis is a staunch supporter of Colorado's cannabis economy.

      I'll vote for Polis should he get the nomination. I'll be glad to see Hick go, and hope he is replaced by someone better.

          1. Actually, mj's first choice was Rosa Luxemburg, but she is slightly dead.  She could use a course in formal logic like I took, however.

            Apparently, she didn’t read the latter part of her post, where it discusses when choices really are li!ited. If an ice cream vender only has vanilla and chocolate, it’s foolish to insist on mint.

        1. Hick has been OK for Colorado . . . 

          . . . if you like a placeholder, a guy with potential and even some charisma who did nothing but maintain the status quo and kick the can down the road, squandered eight years of opportunities, and avoided taking meaningful action, on nearly every issue or problem that crossed his path and faces this State.

          . . . Pol Pot would have, admittedly, been worse. 

  4. Diana 'we're all Democrats now' Degette could do so much more from one of the safest of safe seats in Congress. But that's just not her issue.

    Not sure where you want Polis – he's everywhere.

    1. he's everywhere.

      Jared even spent time in Yuma County hemp fields this past summer, Zappy (the same one MamaJ helped us harvest).  Much to Nutlid's chagrin we have a vibrant industrial hemp industry in Colorado and you can thank the Congressman for his leadership during the 2014 Farm Bill process for that.  We were the number one state in the US for hemp production in 2017. 

      1. Hemp and wind farms are the biggest drivers of the economy now on the Eastern Plains. Too bad so many of my fellow Republicans think there should be o & g wells everywhere instead. Yes, I drive a car and heat my home with natural gas (plus passive solar). But there has to be a balance.

        1. This entire conversation (conservation, sustainability, environmental stewardship, local (and free) energy markets) should have been the narrative of the truly 'conservative'.  Instead, we get the #ProsperityJesus,  'clean coal', 'let's grow corn in Canada' freak show while throwing in a couple of gay wedding cakes and gunz for everybody as good measure for the party platform.

          I hope I live long enough to see the party reclaim its soul.  

          1. Driving through Kansas this past week, I was astonished to see a huge wind farm.  I asked myself how did that sneak past Sam Brownback?

            Turns out, it was the Italians!

            Smoky Hills is the largest wind farm in Kansas and more than 100 landowners are participating in the project. Including the land used for roads, turbine foundations and maintenance buildings, less than two percent of the 20,000 acres covered by the wind farm will be removed from agricultural service.

            The first two phases of the Smoky Hill Wind Farm have been completed and at peak production the wind farm can generate 250 MW of electricity. The electricity is produced by 140,000 pound Vests V80 1.8-megawatt wind turbines.

            The energy is being delivered to five local utilities: Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, Midwest Energy, the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities, the City of Independence, Missouri and the City of Springfield, Missouri.

            But in other Kansas news — I-70 is now a toll road on the way to Topeka.  Unlike Colorado, where the toll lanes are optional, Kansas' privatization (piratization?) of the federal highway gets you coming and going in both directions unless you want to take a country road detour 🙁

              1. It's been a while I suppose — I lived in Wichita for two years (1978 to 1980) before moving to Denver.  I found out about the toll road headed south into Wichita in 1985, but I don't recall I-70 being a toll road in 2001 when I last drove through the state on the way back to my family in Georgia.

                But yeah, I agree with V'ger and Michael, I won't drive that route again.

  5. No doubt about it now — Putin has Trump's balls in a glass display in his office, and Trump will only get them back if he promises to be a good boy for Putin:

    President Donald Trump railed against the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election Saturday night into Sunday, sending off a stream of tweets attacking the FBI, CNN, the Democratic Party, his own national security adviser, former President Barack Obama and the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

    He did not criticize Russia, or voice concern over Vladimir Putin's attempts to undermine U.S. elections.

     

  6. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times puts it more directly:

    President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.

    That is, either Trump’s real estate empire has taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin — so much that they literally own him; or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released; or Trump actually believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says he is innocent of intervening in our elections — over the explicit findings of Trump’s own C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. chief

    1. There's no way the pee tape embarrasses this horrible excuse for a human being. I think there are only two explanations for his blackmailed status –  the fact that the oligarchs own him, and that he knows he has had incriminating conversations with Russians (maybe Putin) during the time he was being "recruited" by them to run for President. He knows the Russians tape everything – he has no doubt been recorded making a deal with the Putin Devil.

      1. There's no way the pee tape embarrasses this horrible excuse for a human being

        True. Half of his supporters would believe that it was a hoax created by CNN in collaboration with the NY Times and financed by George Soros. The other half would buy it as real but would find it hot to watch.

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