Silly boy, that’s not my objective
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Jim, Pete is a Neo-Marxist Critical Theorist. He has openly stated that conservatism always leads to oppression and liberalism always leads to liberation.

When you point out that he never criticized a Democrat or complimented a Conservative, he admits "that’s not my objective."

He is on a Neo-Marxian mission. That's why he supports Critical Race Theory. Or Critical Theory in general.

If you have the slightest expectation that he will have a rational conversation with you in which he can recognize what you consider some tolerance or approval of any Conservative opinion whatsoever, you don't understand what he is about.

For him, THERE CAN BE NO TOLERANCE for any Conservative opinion. Any such opinion to him would by like garlic or a cross to a vampire.

His objective is the total eradication of "Conservatism." By any means necessary.

i agree with you 100%. i’m not sure anything them are capable of criticizing their own side, or complimenting the other side. difficult to have a worthwhile conversation. probably not worth trying.
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Neo-Marxism
Never as horrific as the right-wing propagandists claim,

And calling you a right-wing propagandists fits you like a glove :btu:

Both the rabid Trump fans have yet to realize they are actually his victims
Senate Republicans, including Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio, are now praising Rick Scott’s 2022 GOP platform that calls for raising taxes on “over half of Americans,” including seniors.

This all makes sense when you recognize that the supposedly conservative GOP believes that if you're rich you deserve to be rich, and if you're poor, you deserve to be poor.

To tax the rich is to deprive them of what they deserve, and to tax the poor is to give them what they deserve.
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"GOP believes that if you're rich you deserve to be rich"

True enough, I guess.

"if you're poor, you deserve to be poor."

Said no influential conservative, ever. I think policy results make it pretty clear that liberals are the ones who want a permanent underclass.

"To tax the rich is to deprive them of what they deserve, and to tax the poor is to give them what they deserve."

Again, no one thinks that.

Why did Trump double the standard deduction, which INCREASES the number of poor people who pay no federal income tax? Please explain why anyone would do that, if their goal was to stick it to the poor?

Just keep making up nonsense.

Look what it did to you guys. I'd say pretty horrific.

I've told the truth. If you consider that to be right-wing propaganda, then you may inadvertently be practicing Repressive Tolerance.

He is on a Neo-Marxian mission. That's why he supports Critical Race Theory. Or Critical Theory in general.

I've told the truth.

And calling you right-wing propagandists

Guess what I've told the truth :kewl:

Are you saying that Pete doesn't vigorously defend and support Critical Race Theory and doesn't try to persuade us to see and agree with its view of America being a racist system designed by white supremacists for the sole purpose of granting privilege to whites at the expense of those who are not white? And that the system cannot be incrementally improved, that the legal equality created by all the civil rights initiatives have actually further entrenched white privilege rather than liberating non-whites, and so must be torn down at its roots and replaced by an equitable system created by critically race conscious theorists and governed by the same sort? Are you saying CRT is not a neo-Marxian theory derived from neo-Marxist Critical Theory?

Are you saying that Pete F does not believe that "conservatism" inevitably leads to oppression and its ideas must be suppressed, not tolerated or even granted space in political and social discourse in public, political, and media spaces?

Are you saying that Pete is not on a mission to rid us of the classical liberal idea of individual sovereignty that we were founded on and replace it with the Progressive notion of universal equity created and enforced by authoritarian government that has unlimited power to give us what we need and that notions like individual liberty are outdated and are an obstacle to the Good that powerful centralized government can do for us?

I see the poor victims are crying again.
Interesting how the victims consistently defend the man who numerous times tried to subvert the American electoral system and didn’t care where he got aid in doing so from.
He was just kidding
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Poor baby! You see! (Through a glass darkly). . . And you spout! Yet your wonderful distortions are not able to prevail on so many of the poor that they are truly victims of your marvelously crafted nightmare . . . but you valiantly continue to preach! Oh! . . . will they not listen!

How tragic . . .

Trumplicans always project

"Mark Meadows, who as chief of staff to President Donald Trump promoted his lies of mass voter fraud, is facing scrutiny about his own voter registration status. Public records show he is registered to vote in two states."

January 2017: “I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states…”
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how is that different from 2016, when democrats also tried to subvert the electoral
system, by (1) asking electors not to cast their ballots for the winning candidate, and the.n (2) congress challenging the certification of election results in some states with zero evidence of wrongdoing, and (3) undermining confidence in our elections by saying “the russians did it”?

Answer - it’s always ok when democrats do it.
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The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday released the final report on its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, finding numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow posed a "grave" counterintelligence threat.

"We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement, directly refuting President Donald Trump's repeated assertions that Russian interference was a "hoax" perpetrated by Democrats.
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Pete, how about we be clear? are you saying trump didn’t win fairly?

And i know how much that question boxes you into a corner.

I have no doubt there was meddling. just like i have no doubt dead people voted in chicago. the question is, did it effect the outcome?
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I have no problem with that question
Trump had and encouraged aid from his Russian good friends.

What did Manafort do?
Why was he pardoned?
What are Manaforts connections to Russia and Ukraine?
Why did the Trump campaign push and succeed in removing Ukraine from the 2016 Republican platform?
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if you have no problem with that question, why didn’t you answer it?

I’ll ask again…

Did Trump win fairly?
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Trump had and encouraged aid from his Russian good friends.
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Can't answer! Shocker!

I suppose you think getting aid from his Russian friends is acceptable and fair.

Since you dismiss or encouraged Russian interference in the 2016 US election then explain how you’re now tough on Russia on Ukraine. The two acts are part of the same Putin plan to undermine rule of law & the West - aggression that goes back at least to Georgia in 2008.
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I don't think it's acceptable, but I'm certain it didn't effect the outcome.

If I combed through Hilary's donor list, I'm quite certainI'd find some loathsome people.

Anyway, I knew full well there was no way you'd give me a yes or no answer. You can't. If you say it was fair, you're going against the Narrative, and you can't do that.

If you say it wasn't fair, you know you sound exactly as nutty as Trump when he says 2020 wasn't fair.

I backed you into a corner, you couldn't escape with a direct answer, so you dodged.

Yes, both elections had significant evidence of russian interference.

But just keep repeating the Russian propaganda and claiming that what is clearly visible is fake news.

i’m not denying the russians interfered. i asked what evidence there is, that russian interference impacted the outcome in any way.

pretty simple question. you’ve obviously concluded that it had an effect.

there’s no evidence to support that. but you still believe it, because it supports the narrative
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There’s plenty of demonstrative, documentary and digital evidence that Russia’s million plus a month spending on a disinformation campaign to aid Trump had an effect on the outcome of the 2016 election, what would you find acceptable as evidence?
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Russia's spending is not enough evidence. The Dems raised 40 million dollars more in campaign money. The media propaganda was heavily in favor of the Dems. There's no telling how much influence money was spent by other countries and for whom. The polls, which should have reflected how much influence the spending (including Russia's) had on public opinion, were massively favoring the Dems.

Both US intelligence agencies and Mueller’s investigation affirmed that Russian hackers wanted to help Trump win office and committed crimes toward that end. Trump even acknowledged it at one point.

A Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Thursday indicated that beyond hacking and propaganda campaigns, the Kremlin’s efforts included attempts to penetrate elections systems in all 50 states. It also affirms there is no evidence Russian hackers messed with vote totals or were able to change votes. So in that very narrow sense, the claim that Russia didn’t affect the outcome of the election is defensible.

University of Tennessee Knoxville study funded by the Defense Department found that Trump’s polling upticks during the 2016 campaign correlated with social media activity by Russian trolls and bots. According to the study, every 25,000 retweets from troll and bot accounts connected with Russia’s Internet Research Agency predicted a 1 percent bump in Trump’s polling.

Damian Ruck, the study’s lead researcher, told NBC’s Ken Dilanian that his findings indicate Russia played a very key role in Trump’s victory:

In an interview with NBC News, Ruck said the research suggests that Russian trolls helped shift U.S public opinion in Trump’s favor. As to whether it affected the outcome of the election: “The answer is that we still don’t know, but we can’t rule it out.”

Given that the election turned on 75,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, “it is a prospect that should be taken seriously,” Ruck wrote, adding that more study was needed in those swing states.

He points out that 13 percent of voters didn’t make their final choice until the last week before the election.

There is also a strong argument to be made that WikiLeaks, which published the first tranche of emails purloined from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta by Russian hackers just hours after the Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape of Trump on October 7, swayed voters during the final month of the campaign. In this period, Trump overcame a string of sexual misconduct allegations and a 7-point deficit in the polls to win the election.

As Harry Enten noted for FiveThirtyEight in an analysis of WikiLeaks’ impact during the campaign’s closing stretch, the case remains circumstantial, but Americans were definitely paying attention to WikiLeaks. Enten found that for much of October, there was almost twice as much search interest in WikiLeaks than there was in the FBI, which was also in the news that month because of a letter then-Director James Comey sent to Congress publicizing the Clinton email investigation. Here are a couple additional important data points from Enten’s piece:

Trump, for instance, won among voters who decided who to vote for in October 51 percent to 37 percent, according to national exit polls. That’s Trump’s best time period. He carried voters who decided in the final week, when you might expect Comey’s letter to have had the largest impact, 45 percent to 42 percent.
It’s worth remembering that Trump’s closing message centered largely around WikiLeaks. He mentioned Julian Assange’s operation about five days a day during the campaign’s final month, but now pretends that never happened. (“Problematic is an understatement,” Mueller said on Wednesday about Trump’s promotion of WikiLeaks.) Is it possible the Clinton campaign email dumps and Trump’s relentless hyping of them on the campaign trail had no impact on the outcome of the election? It seems exceedingly unlikely.
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More election fraud found

Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters has been INDICTED on 11 counts and Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley on 6 counts in "election system breach." This is out of the DA's office in Mesa County.
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There is no evidence in all this that there is ENOUGH of what Russia did to change the election. Nor is there an accounting of the dark money that was spent in Hillary's favor.

The NYT says that dark money is what swayed the election in 2020 in favor of Biden. "A New York Times analysis reveals how the left outdid the right at raising and spending millions from undisclosed donors to defeat Donald Trump and win power in Washington.":

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/u...ey-donors.html

When a man tells you he wants to become a dictator, believe him.

"We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States. The deep state must and will be brought to heel." -- Trump proposes a drastic expansion of presidential power
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fundraising emails went out after a private jet in which Trump was traveling on March 5 lost power in one of its three engines after leaving New Orleans

Still fleecing his flock

But won’t commit to if he’s running
So he can keep the money flowing in
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sorry pete......


Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has effectively pulled the plug on a state criminal prosecution of Donald Trump and/or his family over the Trump Organization’s business and taxes. While Bragg has not formally shut the door, and Trump’s legal woes are far from over, it seems that New York will get no closer than the small-beer indictment of former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg over the tax reporting of perks.


Whatever you think of Trump as a political figure, that is a good thing. Political opponents bringing criminal charges against a former president is a dramatic step that has never before been taken in the United States. It would be entirely appropriate to charge Trump or another former president over a clear, obvious violation of a regularly enforced criminal law — if, for example, Trump actually shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. But pushing the envelope to indict a former president under a creative expansion of the law, upon tenuous evidence, in ways not customarily done to ordinary citizens, would be a disaster for the rule of law.

Back in 1988, Justice Antonin Scalia penned his famous lone dissent in Morrison v. Olson against the constitutionality of the independent-counsel statute. The statute, already unpopular with Republicans, was allowed to expire a decade later, after the investigations of Bill Clinton convinced Democrats that Scalia had been right about the risk of selective, politicized prosecutions when prosecutors are set to investigate one particular person and removed from the competing responsibilities of other cases.

Ben Protess, William K. Rashbaum, and Jonah E. Bromwich of the New York Times took a look under the hood of the Manhattan DA’s Trump investigation. What they found is a striking illustration of precisely the sort of loss of perspective that Scalia predicted.

Picking the Team

Scalia on the hiring of prosecutors recruited to pursue one particular target:

An independent counsel is selected. . . .What if . . . [this is] a prosecutor antagonistic to the administration, or even to the particular individual who has been selected for this special treatment? . . . The independent counsel thus selected proceeds to assemble a staff. . . . In the nature of things this has to be done by finding lawyers who are willing to lay aside their current careers for an indeterminate amount of time, to take on a job that has no prospect of permanence and little prospect for promotion. One thing is certain, however: it involves investigating and perhaps prosecuting a particular individual.

Can one imagine a less equitable manner of fulfilling the executive responsibility to investigate and prosecute? What would be the reaction if, in an area not covered by this statute, the Justice Department posted a public notice inviting applicants to assist in an investigation and possible prosecution of a certain prominent person?

The Manhattan DA’s investigation, initiated under Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance Jr., was headed by two veteran prosecutors specially tabbed for the role, Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne. How did Pomerantz come to this job? As a volunteer, working without pay, with nothing else to do but investigate one man:

Mr. Pomerantz, 70, had once run the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. He had also been a partner at the prestigious law firm Paul Weiss, and he came out of retirement to work on the investigation without pay.

Why was he hired?

In 2012, in the first of his three terms, Mr. Vance closed an investigation into accusations that Mr. Trump’s son Donald Jr. and his daughter Ivanka had misled potential buyers of apartments at one of the Trump Organization’s New York hotels, Trump Soho. The decision trailed Mr. Vance for years, subjecting him to criticism after Mr. Trump was elected president.

Who else did Vance consult when deciding to go forward? More people who had tried and failed to prosecute Trump:

As his tenure drew to a close in December, he consulted a group of prominent outside lawyers to help inform what would be his final decision. The group was referred to internally as “the brain trust” — a handful of former prosecutors that included two senior members of Robert S. Mueller’s special counsel inquiry into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.

How did Bragg get elected to replace Vance?

At the attorney general’s office, Mr. Bragg had overseen a significant amount of civil litigation against Mr. Trump and his administration — cases he often cited in the district attorney race.

Picking the Man

Scalia on the investigation’s tendency to expand beyond the original “crimes” it was supposed to investigate, while remaining fixated on the individual targeted:

Should the independent counsel or his or her staff come up with something beyond that scope, nothing prevents him or her from asking . . . to expand his or her authority . . . which would in all likelihood assign it to the same independent counsel.

He quoted Robert Jackson, then the attorney general and later a justice, on the hazards of approaching a criminal prosecution this way:

One of the greatest difficulties of the position of prosecutor is that he must pick his cases, because no prosecutor can even investigate all of the cases in which he receives complaints. . . . What every prosecutor is practically required to do is to select the cases for prosecution and to select those in which the offense is the most flagrant, the public harm the greatest, and the proof the most certain.

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.

It is in this realm — in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.

Here’s how the Manhattan DA’s investigation metastasized, with only the target staying the same:

For months, the prosecutors had envisioned charging Mr. Trump — and possibly Mr. Weisselberg and the Trump Organization — with the crime of “scheming to defraud” for falsely inflating his assets on the statements of financial condition that had been used to obtain bank loans. But by the end of the year, the prosecutors had switched gears, in part because Mr. Trump’s lenders had not lost money on the loans but had in fact profited from them.

The new strategy was to charge Mr. Trump with conspiracy and falsifying business records — specifically his financial statements — a simpler case that essentially amounted to painting Mr. Trump as a liar rather than a thief. The case still was not a slam dunk, Mr. Dunne acknowledged at the meeting. But he argued that it was better to lose than to not try at all. “It’s a righteous case that ought to be brought,” Mr. Dunne told Mr. Bragg.

Fixating on the Target

Scalia on why prosecutors employed only to chase one defendant lose the perspective provided by having other, important cases to prosecute:

The mini-Executive that is the independent counsel . . . operating in an area where so little is law and so much is discretion, is intentionally cut off from the unifying influence of the Justice Department, and from the perspective that multiple responsibilities provide. What would normally be regarded as a technical violation (there are no rules defining such things), may in his or her small world assume the proportions of an indictable offense. What would normally be regarded as an investigation that has reached the level of pursuing such picayune matters that it should be concluded, may to him or her be an investigation that ought to go on for another year.

How frightening it must be to have your own independent counsel and staff appointed, with nothing else to do but to investigate you until investigation is no longer worthwhile — with whether it is worthwhile not depending upon what such judgments usually hinge on, competing responsibilities. And to have that counsel and staff decide, with no basis for comparison, whether what you have done is bad enough, willful enough, and provable enough, to warrant an indictment.

How did the Manhattan DA’s prosecutors who had other cases to work on react?

Some of the career prosecutors who had worked on the inquiry for more than two years expressed concern. They believed that Mr. Vance, who had decided not to seek re-election, was pushing too hard for an indictment before leaving office. . . . Concern among the office’s career prosecutors about the investigation into the former president came to a head in September at a meeting they sought with Mr. Dunne. Mr. Dunne offered to have them work only on the pending trial of Mr. Weisselberg or leave the Trump team altogether. Two prosecutors eventually took him up on the latter . . . [at the end of Vance’s term], a third prosecutor left the investigation into Mr. Trump.

By contrast, how did Pomerantz and Dunne react?

Once [Bragg] told Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne that he was not prepared to authorize charges, they resigned. Explaining the resignation to his team of prosecutors in a meeting a day later, Mr. Dunne said he felt he needed “to disassociate myself with this decision because I think it was on the wrong side of history.” . . . Mr. Dunne, however, left the door open to a possible return. If Mr. Bragg reconsidered his decision, Mr. Dunne told colleagues, he would gladly come back.

Imagine having a prosecutor declare that a case should be brought so as to stay on a “side of history.”

This investigation was conducted under an elected district attorney, rather than a judicially appointed prosecutor accountable to nobody, so the process was not without some ultimate checks and balances. The Times notes that “Mr. Bragg’s decision on the Trump investigation may compound his political problems in heavily Democratic Manhattan, where many residents make no secret of their enmity for Mr. Trump.” But in the end, even Alvin Bragg has to consider what Pomerantz and Dunne did not: the public consequences of expending vast resources to pursue an unprecedented case on a flimsy theory that could easily fall apart in court. In that sense, Bragg’s decision vindicates Scalia’s view about the crucial nature of prosecutorial accountability to the voters. But the way in which this investigation proceeded is also a perfect illustration of prosecutors suffering from target fixation, so locked on the man they wanted to prosecute that they lost all sight of how we, as a society, are supposed to decide what crimes deserve prosecution.

is he not allowed to fundraise from a jet with two working engines after leaving New Orleans?

I bet a lot of people who sent money to biden-in-a-basement want their money back....

something other than your say-so.
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Let's flash back to when Trump was president to see how tough he was on Russia:

Russia got kicked out of the G8 for invading Ukraine. Trump covered for Putin and made up a new reason why and said he favored letting Russia back in. Real tough.
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trump took some tough actions against russia, sent you an article that went through all of them. you ignored it.

and you love obama, who famously mocked mitt romney for saying russia is a threat

As always with you, you have no actual principle here. Other then to hug liberals and spit on conservatives. You’ll ignore any fact, contradict anything you previously said, spin any yarn, in that pursuit. there’s nothing you won’t say toward that end.
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When Russia sanctioned Canada, it barred leaders from all major federal parties, including conservative leaders.

But when Russia sanctioned the U.S., it barred Democratic leaders only. It didn’t name a single GOP leader.

The signal couldn’t be clearer.
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Clear as Russian mud in the spring.

Trump backpedaled on his previous support of Vladimir Putin: “I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.”

Fact is, Putin hasn’t changed. He first invaded Ukraine in 2014, which Trump claimed the people of Crimea somehow welcomed. He poisoned Navalny while Trump was president. He twice interfered in US elections in which Trump was a candidate. SolarWinds hack was on his watch as well
In fact US imports of Russian oil doubled during Tweety’s administration, their GDP grew at double the prior rate….
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Good.