8 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. Trump has been bloviating again. More stinky hot air. Stay upwind, all!

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2. There is a stink in Gilead.

   It comes from Donald Trump.

   Stay upwind, America.

   It's important.

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3. It appears that Mueller's investigation is revealing how thoroughly Trump's campaign was infiltrated and compromised by Russian influence.

   In 2014, Yanukovych fled into exile in Russia, and according to Mueller’s indictment, Manafort and Gates’s “Ukraine income dwindled.” That’s when the second part of their scheme began. From 2015 to 2017, in what looks like a frantic scramble for cash, the indictment says, they “fraudulently secured more than $20 million” in bank loans by lying about their finances.

   We don’t know why they needed all this money. But we do know that in 2014, lawyers for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska filed a petition in the Cayman Islands claiming that Manafort and Gates couldn’t account for almost $19 million that a company controlled by Deripaska had given them to invest. Deripaska, who is reportedly very close to President Vladimir Putin, has been denied entry to the United States because of his suspected ties to Russian organized crime. One would not, presumably, want to owe him a debt that could not be paid.

   Manafort really was the inside man for Putin and the Russian mob.

   Perhaps Trump didn’t realize that his campaign was being run by alleged Russian money launderers, that at least two of his foreign policy advisers had entanglements with Russian intelligence, and that his campaign had a heads up about Russian plans to dump stolen Clinton emails online. None of last week’s new information proves that Trump is too disloyal to his own country to be president. But the only alternative is that he’s too clueless.

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   1. Trump's been on the receiving end of enough Russian mob cash and bank loan backing to know what's in front of him if presented with even the most basic background checks. The problem is, he's already looked the other way on his own financial lifelines and is in no position to complain about how others make their money.

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   2. "In April, as The Washington Post reported, [Manafort] emailed an employee in Kiev about his new job, and wrote, apparently in relation to Deripaska, “How do we use to get whole?”"

      He's f##ked.

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   3. 🙁

      Bill Browder knows.

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4. No, duh!!?!! . . . 

   Jared Kushner’s Security Clearance Downgraded 

   https://nyti.ms/2t2yWIg

   Now how about let’s double-check that clearance for the yuguest security risk in the history of all times, President Yammyputkins???? 

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5. Two more state legislative seats flipped tonight.

   The first is in New Hampshire House, Belknap-3 – a +19 swing from Trump/Clinton and +7 from Obama/Romney.

   The second is in Connecticut HD-120, where the Republican outperformed Trump by +1 but still lost a State House seat that had been in Republican hands for 40 years.

   A third race, in a blood-red Kentucky district HD-89, swung 28 points toward the Democrat but remained in GOP hands.

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