Good lord, what is this, the Orient Express? Next we'll hear that North Koreans were posing as Wisconsinites, and that ISIS had a mailing campaign!

Per a long tweetstorm by J.J. Mcnab, Russians have been inserting themselves into media and social media for the last NINE years, spreading disinformation and actively fomenting anti-government (to both left and right) and anti-everyone-not-white (to the right). Jill Stein and Alex Jones have been appearing on Russia Today for years as well as in some kind of Iranian media outlet. (David Walman reports on this here: http://kagrox.libsyn.com/kagro-in-the-morning-october-23-2017

This is a big deal and must be both exposed and addressed -- once, and if, the traitors currently in the WH are gone. Among other things, Blotus himself is swallowing a lot of this crap which makes its way to FOX/Breitbart, etc.

But enough folks may have been influenced by the lies being spread around the internet to affect the election (which, remember, was won by just 0.02% in Wisconsin). Getting to the 'truth' about the Clintons requires that one wade through so much untruth, demagoguery and partisan bullshit that I fear that mere mortals such as you and I can never be assured that we have the full unvarnished picture.
I know this: she'd have been light years better for our futures than the present idiot-in-chief.

Actually, yes, if that's what it takes for Democrats to compete. Money is not inherently evil: charities, for instance, regularly solicit, manage and distribute large piles of it every day. Of more importance is who the donors are. That's why I do believe in total transparency by politicians.

It has been established that candidates can raise enough money from small contributions.

I don't think that's true on the national level, and state races are increasingly expensive. Bernie may have actually proved the opposite, because even though he did well enough early on with smaller donations (and some free network time), to compete with Hillary in California, for instance, required that he accept significant cash infusion from bigger donors. Political advertising ain't cheap.

P.S. BTW, don't make the mistake of concluding from that, that I don't think money has a major influence on politicians. It has a HUGE influence on those who manage to get elected. I just don't think it changes the minds of many voters as to whom to vote for.

I've always suspected that money is grossly overrated as a dominant influence on voters. I, and pretty much everybody I've ever known, cast our votes based on either ideological or economic (pocketbook) issues.

The fundamental political division between the right and the left will always be, does the voter in question expect to get more back from the common pot than he contributes, or does he expect to get back less than he kicks in.

The former always vote left, the latter always vote right, and nobody much ever changes his mind based on political advertising.

If politicians recognized that verity, they could spend a great deal less time and money on campaigning.

Like you Paula, this wasn't even on my radar, until I was confronted with it. Once I realized that they were deliberately convoluting the story in order to obscure the flaws in their logic, I felt that it was my civic duty to try to sort it out here.

It seems the righties, as usual, are more intent on trying to prove Dems also-do-bad-things than they are to prove Repubs haven't. They seem to think they can't be judged for anything they do so long as somewhere in time some Dem did something "similar".

Yeah, the old 'equivalency' argument is a favorite, because it plays to that base instinct of 'fairness' that makes a twin throw a fit when her sibling is allowed to do something she can't.

Her parents may know that, based on past behavior, the one is more trustworthy with certain things than her sibling, but that doesn't stop the tears.

Similarly, the Right throws a fit whenever their agenda is challenged, but everyone knows that if you don't keep a legal and legislative eye on them, they'll start passing laws that grant windfalls to billionaires, disadvantage already oppressed communities, or militarize and/or privatize government functions. That's just fact.

And in this case, they don't seem to understand that colluding with a foreign power to undermine democratic institutions is not the same as allowing that same foreign power to conduct legal business transactions in Canada, with standard restrictions.

But I've given up believing that Republicans actually have 'principles' - not since they elected a this dim-witted playboy bigot to the White House, anyway. They just want to be pulled along in the wake of his populist, mindless, juggernaut as long as they can. It's despicable.

And then Vladimir said, "let's see what we can do to even those odds", and spent a billion dollars on an underground smear campaign against Clinton.

And we now know that Trump was taking big money from his billionaire buddies all along. You didn't think he was really paying for all that with his money if he didn't have to, did you?

Why the value of having Mercer's data mining operation at his disposal alone was worth tens of millions of dollars, and Trump's own polling/data operation mirrored it(or, by some accounts, outdid it).

The main problem with One Demand is that, since Republicans wouldn't in a million years support it, it amounts to unilateral disarmament by the Left at the very same time that Citizens United and other easing of campaign finance laws have flooded the Right's coffers with cash.

But Mikerin apparently defined 'collaboration' as 'bribery, extortion and kickbacks', and was on the FBI's screens as early as 2009, when (gasp!) Robert Mueller was still the head of the agency.

In late 2009, the FBI recruited an American Businessman doing business with Mikerin as an informant. The first kickback payment recorded by the FBI through its informant was dated Nov. 27, 2009 (nearly a year before the CFIUS rendered its decision, if you're keeping track).

I imagine the agency was overjoyed, then, when in 2010 Mikerin was sent to the US on a work visa (approved by the gasp! Obama Administration, the article notes, unnecessarily) to open Rosatom’s new American arm called Tenam.

It is at this point, I assume, that the authors of the article believe that the DOJ should have lowered the boom on Mikerin and Rosatom, alerting government officials to the corruption going on in America's heartland on the Russians' behalf. They write that the agency: "continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions."

So are the writers of this piece suggesting some sort of collusion between the White House, State Department and Justice department to deliberately withhold critical information from decision makers, so that the Canadian deal would be approved?

Rather, are they suggesting that the FBI should have cut short an investigation that had essentially just gotten started and had experienced a recent windfall in the person of Mikerin, whom they could follow and wiretap to their hearts' content, now that he was on US soil, in order that a Russian company not be allowed to establish a minority stake in a Canadian mining company?

Neither scenario makes any sense to me.

The investigation into Mikerin's activities, ultimately supervised by (gasp!) then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, not only netted Mikerin, who ended up, after a plea deal, paying a $2.1 million fine, and having to serve four years in one of our finest Federal Corrections institutions, but also according to the article, "proved a gold mine, in part because it uncovered a new Russian money laundering apparatus that routed bribe and kickback payments through financial instruments in Cyprus, Latvia and Seychelles."

This is information that could prove mighty useful in Mueller's current Russia investigation, wherein, for instance, Manafort's dealings with a bank in Cyprus is a thing.

So to sum up, the article in the Hill on which the current Republican "Uraniumgate" scandal is predicated is either a deliberately confusing hit piece or tragically confused piece of reporting that suggests connections that don't actually exist, provides information that isn't relevant, and darkly suggests corruption by Obama administration officials without any supporting evidence. It's not only fake, but also recycled news. I rest my case.

Now, here's the link that I promised:

Fox News Found a Russia Story It Likes: Obama and Clinton Were the Real Colluders!

I had no idea of what he was talking about.

It turns out that last Wednesday, The Hill published an article headlined:

FBI uncovered Russian bribery plot before Obama administration approved controversial nuclear deal with Moscow

and that article set Fox off, and Fox set my friend off. Dominoes.

I'm going post a link in the next comment to a very good article in Slate about what Fox did with the story. Needless to say, the Hill story was music to their ears.

But there are several problems up front with that Hill story, which conflates upfront an FBI investigation that nobody knew about at the time (I'll get to that), and the multiagency review of the partial sale of a Canadian mining company, Uranium One, to the Russian energy company Rosatom, which, the authors added, "(gives) Moscow control of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium supply."

But that's just false. Uranium One remained under the control of the Canadians. The mines are on Canadian soil, for chrissake. Moreover, America has lots of places it could buy Uranium from; we even have Uranium mines that we could stimulate to boost production if we needed to. I heard one expert say just now on the BBC that the amount of Uranium involved in this deal, total, is only about 2% of the world's supply. In other words, we bought some of our Uranium from Canada because that's handy, and we like Canadians.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which (gasp!) included both Clinton (i.e., the State Dept.) and Eric Holder (i.e., the Justice Department), unanimously approved the transaction, because they could find no reason not to - there are no allegations even to this date that there was anything wrong with the deal itself. It's worth noting that Canada had given the matter a fairly rigorous review themselves, before it even reached the Americans for sign-off.

For her part, Clinton had nothing to do with the matter, according to her spokesman. The State Department official who regularly handled those sorts of matters, and had prepared this one, said she “never intervened ... on any [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] matter.”

So much for the Russian money given to the Clinton Foundation that was supposed to influence the deal. Money down the drain, apparently, unless it happened to come up at a staff meeting.

Besides, the reporters source the allegations of impropriety regarding the Clinton Foundation to "conservative author Peter Schweitzer and The New York Times", who first raised the issue in 2015, during the campaign.

Schweitzer, you might recall, is the author of the Anti-Clinton bestseller titled "Clinton Cash", a book so riddled with inaccuracies and so thoroughly debunked so often that it truly deserves zombie status by now, at least.

So there's that half of the Hill story, so I'll continue in the next post -

The Mercers really like Ted Cruz.

Yes, Speak, I know about the hedge fund billionaire Mercers/Cambridge Analytica and their connections with Cruz/Conway/Bannon/Trump and his campaign.

What? Did you think Bannon was acting from some sense of right and wrong (in his mind)? Get real!

What? Did you assume that just because I opined that Bannon "finally decides to make himself somewhat useful" that it meant I thought he was doing it out of a sense of moral rectitude, honesty, or integrity?

I needed a good laugh. Thank you. Even spiders make themselves useful by eating bugs. :)

Help an old fogey/newcomer, what exactly is "One Demand"?

i used to play ultimate at a fairly high level (open regionals), so i'm fully aware that the level of physical exertion ultimate requires is nothing to sneeze at. sorry about your injury though.

JL

Except Ted Cruz! What the hay? Bannon finally decides to make himself somewhat useful but declines to mess with Texas. We feel neglected.

Go Astros!

http://mashable.com/2017/10/20/burger-king-bullying-ad/?utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial#aCnBY3hcsPqK

When the story first broke, I read one account where she had supposedly said she tried to get the family to hand her the phone so she could cuss Trump out! This wasn’t a woman who had simply listened to the words Trump said and twisted their meaning for her own benefit — she witnessed firsthand the effect that Trump’s callous words had on people she cared about and she was furious!

Wilson just needs to ask Kelly if he was sitting with the Gold Star family when Trump called them, because she didn’t know he could see their reactions to Trump’s words like she could. The fact that Kelly had to explain what is was that Trump was attempting to convey to this family is proof enough that Wilson’s account of the conversation was accurate!

My ballot was tossed. I could have included a letter explaining that I had shattered my hand and had to have screws put in my hand which is why I had authorized my friend signing on my behalf, but did not since my ballot would not have changed the outcome of any races. (Who knew ultimate frisbee was such a dangerous sport? ; D )

My decision not to support One Demand is because I refuse to only have ONE demand of candidates in order to gain my support!

Are those votes for Homer Simpson or Deez Nuts that are written in for elections all over the country all from One Demand supporters?

Here’s a thought: Maybe you have your supporters write in “One Demand” on the ballots instead of their own name so that people realize that they aren’t being narcissistic or silly — they are actually protesting something!!! Protests tend not to have much influence on people if no one realizes a protest is occurring!

See [15]

Do you have anything to contribute here other than correcting the presumed mistakes of others?

I was less worried about stolen ballots.

Where I saw the greatest potential for "fraud" was coercion by a family member. Husband coercing wife, in particular, in the eastern part of the state. That doesn't seem to be happening too much, though.

I'm not sure about Don [4] and same-day registration working so well. Should it come to pass, we'll see what happens.

Guy

I live in WA and I love that we vote by mail here! It has made it so much easier to vote! For those that worry that this could lead to people stealing ballots as they are mailed out and falsifying votes, a ballot must have a signature that matches your signature that is on file with the Sec. Of State’s office.

And I can attest that it works: I put it to the test this past year by signing the ballot differently — and by “differently” I mean that I got a friend to sign my ballot for me. A week or so later, I got a letter from the Elections Board saying that my ballot was being held and they needed me to turn in a new signature card before they would count my vote since the signatures did not match. I was happy to see that they caught the difference in my signatures.

Shame on you!

Quoting from the study: 'After Colorado's legalization of recreational cannabis sale and use, opioid-related deaths decreased more than 6 percent in the following 2 years.' So the experts have proven that legalizing recreational marijuana saves lives.

As in favor of legalization as you are, I’d hope that you wouldn’t fall for and promote false facts like this! My dog died in the following 2years as well; so does that prove that he was killed by marijuana? NO! (He died from an OD of catnip and Grey Goose, sadly.)

Trick or Treat, Punk! The end draws nigh. :)

Aren't we clever? Very well done, sir.

I'm sure we've all heard the idiom "you don't know the half of it." Well, Kelly does know "half of it," but it'll be interesting as all "get out" to see his reaction when he gets wind of the other half. :)