Going Up in Smoke
Bottom line: Russiagate is going up in smoke. The claim that Russian military intelligence fed thousands of emails to WikiLeaks doesn’t stand up to scrutiny while Mueller is not only unable to a prove a connection between the Internet Research Agency and the Kremlin but is barred from even discussing it, according to Friedrich’s ruling, without risking a charge of contempt. After 22 months of investigating the ins and outs of Russian interference, Mueller seems to have finally come up dry.
“Revenge of the oligarchs” might be a good headline for this story. The IRA indictment initially seemed to be a no-lose proposition for Mueller. He got to look good in the press, the media got to indulge in yet another round of Russia-bashing, while, best of all, no one had to prove a thing. “Mueller’s allegations will never be tested in court,” noted Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor turned pundit for the rightwing National Review. “That makes his indictment more a political statement than a charging instrument.”
Then came the unexpected. Concord Management hired Reed Smith, a top-flight law firm with offices around the world, and demanded to be heard. The move was “a real head-scratcher,” one Washington attorney told Buzzfeed, because Concord was beyond the reach of U.S. law and therefore had nothing to fear from an indictment and nothing to gain, apparently, from going to court. But then the firm demanded to exercise its right of discovery, meaning that it wanted access to Mueller’s immense investigative file. Blindsided, Mueller’s requested a delay “on the astonishing ground,” according to McCarthy, “that the defendant has not been properly served – notwithstanding that the defendant has shown up in court and asked to be arraigned.”
Prigozhin was forcing the special prosecutor to show what he’s got, McCarthy went on, at zero risk to himself since he was not on U.S. soil. What was once a no-lose proposition for Mueller was suddenly a no-lose proposition for Putin’s unexpectedly clever cook.
Now Mueller is in an even worse pickle because he’s barred from mentioning a major chunk of his report. What will he discuss if Democrats succeed in getting him to testify before the House intelligence and judiciary committees next week – the weather? If his team goes forward with the Concord prosecution, he’ll risk having to turn over sensitive information while involving himself in a legal tangle that could go on for years, all without any conceivable payoff. If he drops it, the upshot will be a public-relations disaster of the first order.
As skeptics have pointed out, the IRA’s social-media campaign was both more modest and more ineffectual then the Mueller report’s over-the-top language about a “sweeping and systematic” conspiracy would suggest. Yet after Facebook Vice President Rob Goldman tweeted that “the majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election,” he was forced to beg for forgiveness like a defendant in a Moscow show trial for daring to play down the magnitude of the crime.
But it wasn’t Goldman who shaved the truth. Rather, it was Mueller. Thanks to the unexpected appearance of Concord Management, he’s now paying the price.
Robert Mueller is so dishonest. He is right up there with James Comey when it comes to dishonesty.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for today:
Monday, July 15, 2019. Joe Biden tries a new excuse for his selling of
the Iraq War "I'm actually dumber than the Village Idiot," and much
more.
Let's start with Senator Tammy Duckworth.
Let's start with Senator Tammy Duckworth.
It’s a national tragedy when our troops have to worry if their families will have enough to eat & their kids will go to bed hungry.
I’m glad @TODAYshow highlighted this critical issue + the legislation @RepSusanDavis & I introduced to prevent military families from going hungry.
Really, Tammy? That's where you draw the line for children? If their parents are serving? So it's not a national tragedy when an American child doesn't have enough to eat or they go to bed hungry if their parents are in the US military?
That's part of the nonsense that has built up since 9/11 as each person tries to make it clear that they support the military even more than the other person does.
It's crap.
Every American child should be fed -- regardless of their parents job. No child in this country should go to bed hungry.
And if Tammy's unable to embrace all of America's children, here's something she might want to consider: You don't know which of these children will later end up in the military. Oh, my goodness, Tammy, you might, right now at this minute, be spitting on future troops!
Again, there's no excuse for any American child -- or any child in America -- to go hungry. There's no excuse for it. That's it.
It's like our homeless problem. It exists and it goes beyond troops although that's all anyone in Congress wants to focus on. We have a homeless problem in America. It's a serious problem and no one should be homeless.
I'm all for veterans getting what they have been promised and I've long advocated for that here.
But we don't have a two-tier system of citizenship. We are a democracy where every person is supposed to be equal.
So Tammy's decision to fret over hungry children only if their parents are in the military suggest that possibly she should leave the US Congress -- which is supposed to represent We The People -- and move over to a VSO where her concerns might be more appropriately addressed.
The only good thing about the current election cycle is that Tammy didn't throw her hat in the ring. But 25 people are seeing the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Including? Former Vice President and former US Senator Joe Biden.
The always ridiculous Fred Kaplan of SLATE has drawn chuckles again by insisting that Joe Biden is the only candidate in the race with foreign policy experience when Joe's only foreign policy experience has been promoting and voting for war over and over again.
Joe was not Secretary of State. That was Hillary Clinton and the John Kerry. Joe has no real foreign policy experience to brag of.
Just a reminder: Joe Biden was a leading Democratic voice in favor of war in Iraq, it was he who laid the groundwork for Bush's invasion! We would have no peace if he's our President!
- Joe Biden Says He's Ready To Handle The World. He Got Iraq Wrong Three Times. |
#JoeBiden has a long record of being on the wrong side of #history, including his vote in favor of #GeorgeWBush's #Iraq war & support for #ApartheidIsrael's #ethniccleansing of the #indigenous people of #Palestine & pursuit of #genocide in #Gaza; #NoBiden
pbs.org/newshour/polit…
As chairmen of the Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden relentlessly promoted the Iraq War. A cheerleader for one of the worst foreign policy blunders in U.S. history should not be POTUS. @BernieSanders opposed the war from the beginning. #Bernie2020
\Over the weekend, Joe saw the opportunity to promote his 'expertise' by offering yet another attempt to weasel out of his vote for the Iraq War and his selling of it before it began as well as afterwards.
Joe Biden on his vote for the Iraq war: The "mistake I made was trusting" former President George W. Bush
The "mistake I made was trusting" Bully Boy Bush. That's the best Joe can offer.
It's a lie but if he wants us to believe him, okay, let's play.
Joe wants to be president. But on one of the most important decisions of this century, he got it wrong, he says, because he trusted Bully Boy Bush.
Now the younger among us may not remember but Bully Boy Bush was not seen as the brightest bulb. In fact, he was seen as the Village Idiot.
So Joe's justification currently is that he should be president even though he's so stupid that a Village Idiot managed to trick him.
That doesn't speak well to Joe -- not to his character, not his sense of judgment.
"Status Quo Joe" is the latest nickname the War Hawk's received.
Today, Joe's expected to deliver (as his campaign has whispered all weekend) remarks that will call for ObamaCare to stay and reject Medicare For All.
- David Sirota Retweeted
A reminder that opponents of Medicare for All are trying to preserve, protect and defend a system that produces this 
Various fakes and phonies -- hey, Clara Jeffrey, we're looking at you -- insist that everything needs to be cute and cuddly. Their "Hey, guys, we have to defeat Trump" is a lot like the spirit bunny speech Kelli Maroney's Cindy gave in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH.
This isn't a game.
We have children going hungry in this country. We have homeless people in every state. We have never-ending wars. Medicare For All is a basic right. ObamaCare was a loser when Mitt Romney first sold it as RomneyCare.
A couple of years ago, Joe Biden was vice president and now he wants to be president but the best he can offer is ObamaCare? Oh and he'll "seek" a public option.
Didn't he and Barack promise a public option while running in the 2008 general election? Yes, they did.
Not to seek it, they promised to provide it.
Eleven years later, Weak Ass Joe can't even promise that. He can only promise to "seek" it.
It's the vision thing -- he has none.
In the intensifying debate over Medicare for All, I don't think there's been enough focus on the fact that the very *first* thing Joe Biden did to launch his presidential campaign was hold a fundraiser with the CEO of a giant health insurance company. theintercept.com/2019/04/25/joe…
Again, to those clutching the pearls and insisting we all be genteel, this isn't pie in the sky. This is about the country's future and -- sorry, Joe -- our future isn't our past.
As Joe makes an idiot of himself over healthcare, he can take comfort in the fact that it may distract from yet another lie of his being exposed.
NEW: Biden's opposition to busing was far more sweeping than he has led voters to believe. @asteadwesley and I took a deep dive into his record. He fought the court that forced Wilmington schools to desegregate.
"We want to end court-ordered busing." nyti.ms/2XHEPcU
From Astead W. Herndon and Sheryl Gay Stolberg's report:
In the two weeks since Senator Kamala Harris of California, a rival for the nomination, invoked her own story of being bused to school to forcefully challenge Mr. Biden during the first Democratic presidential debates — and on the heels of criticism of his work with segregationists on crime legislation — Mr. Biden’s standing has dropped among the Democratic electorate, and his status as the race’s early front-runner is freshly threatened as his polling lead among black voters softens.
[. . .]
Mr. Biden has said that his record on school desegregation has been misrepresented, and he maintains that he supported busing as a remedy for the intentionally discriminatory policies that kept white and black students in separate schools in the South — a position his campaign spokesman, Andrew Bates, reaffirmed on Sunday in a statement to The Times. But a review of hundreds of pages of congressional records, as well as interviews with education experts and Biden contemporaries in Wilmington and Washington, suggests that his opposition to busing was far more sweeping than he has led voters to believe.
“I don’t know whether he’s just reconstructed this history in his own
mind, but he’s factually untruthful, that’s for sure,” said Gary Orfield, a California professor who has written extensively about school desegregation, including in Wilmington, and who testified before Mr. Biden in 1981.
He said that for politicians like Mr. Biden, the busing question was “a
real test of conscience and courage. I think he failed.”
Mr. Biden also, more than any other Northern Democrat, adopted the
language of conservatives on the issue, using terms like “forced busing”
when his fellow liberals would emphasize desegregation, not
transportation. Civil rights advocates note that students had, of
course, been riding buses to school for decades; opponents of
court-ordered busing never raised a ruckus when black children were
forced to ride buses miles away from their homes to attend
“colored-only” schools.
“I oppose busing,” Mr. Biden said in a lengthy television interviewentered into the Congressional Record in 1975. “It’s an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me.”
From 1975 until 1982, Mr. Biden — often in partnership with his fellow Delawarean, Senator William Roth, a Republican — promoted nearly a dozen pieces of legislation aimed at placing strict limits on the authority of federal agencies and the courts to
mandate busing to achieve racial integration in schools. At a time when
busing controversies were provoking racial unrest in cities like
Boston, Mr. Biden argued that housing integration — which would take
much longer to implement than a busing plan — was a far better way to
desegregate public schools.
“The new integration plans being offered are really just
quota-systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or
whatever in each school,” Mr. Biden told the television interviewer.
Repeating, this election is about real issues. And the notion that anyone should have to hold anything back about Joe Biden after he's had two weeks of using surrogates -- even his own wife -- to attack Kamala Harris? No, the gloves need to be off and Joe needs to stop hiding behind women's skirts.
The never-ending wars continue -- despite Joe refusing to even mention Iraq in his 'major foreign policy address' last week. These aren't games. People are dying. If you don't care about the people of Iraq and Afghanistan who continue to die, maybe you can care that another American has died in these forever wars?
Search results
This is Sgt. Maj. James G. Sartor. He was killed by small-arms fire in Afghanistan on Saturday, July 13 while deployed with 10th Special Forces Group.
Between Iraq and Afghanistan, Sartor was deployed in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2017 and 2019.
RIP.
We'll note this.
Iraq denies arrival of new batch of U.S. soldiers at military base
So Iraq's government is denying the rumor that more US troops are present. Are they? A working press might actually explore that.
They might also rebuke those Iraqi officials who've repeatedly sold the lie that residents of Mosul have willing returned in large numbers and that rebuilding is taking place.
No, it's really not.
#Iraq That’s why for 2 years nothing has been done to help Old #Mosul ‘s residents to rebuild their homes & businesses. The Governor and unidentified investors want to create a "new city" with gleaming high rises, and large supermarket & restaurant chains aljazeera.com/indepth/featur…
Let's wind down with this reality.
Iraq's penal code allows husbands to 'discipline their wives', and there is currently no law criminalising domestic violence aje.io/ngp39
Before Joe sold and supported the war on Iraq, Iraqi women had more legal rights than women in any other Middle Eastern country. Thanks to Joe, that's no longer true. This despite all the money US taxpayers has provided Iraq (and its corrupt rulers).
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