Political Roundtable Part XIII

[FAH1223]

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[AFM]

I understand the outrage that is sparking the filibustering of Gorsuch. Doesn't matter how nice the guy is, he has no business being put up for nomination. None. Still. If the Republicans invoke the nuclear option, that means every single octogenarian Supreme Court Justice has to somehow survive the next four years or we are screwed for generations. I just wish the timing were different, that we weren't wasting our powder on the replacement for Scalia.

Although maybe if the Dems win either house in 2018 the nuclear option will probably work in their favor. Man, this is some high stakes **** going on right now.

Aren't most of the seats up for grab in 2018 democrats?

[Wizardspride]

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[AFM]

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[dckingsfan]

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/

[Wizardspride]

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[AFM]

Which key claim? That he had Russian hookers pee pee on him?

[Wizardspride]

Which key claim? That he had Russian hookers pee pee on him?

This one:


Steele's "dossier", as the material came to be known, contains a number of highly contested claims.

At one point he wrote: "A leading Russian diplomat, Mikhail KULAGIN, had been withdrawn from Washington at short notice because Moscow feared his heavy involvement in the US presidential election operation… would be exposed in the media there."

There was no diplomat called Kulagin in the Russian embassy; there was a Kalugin.

One of Trump's allies, Roger Stone, said to me of Steele, scornfully: "If 007 wants to be taken seriously, he ought to learn how to spell."

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Kalugin was head of the embassy's economics section.

He had gone home in August 2016 at the end of a six-year posting.

The man himself emailed journalists to complain about a "stream of lies and fake news about my person".

If anyone looks like a harmless economist, rather than a tough, arrogant KGB man, it is the bland-faced Kalugin.

But sources I know and trust have told me the US government identified Kalugin as a spy while he was still at the embassy.
It is not clear if the American intelligence agencies already believed this when they got Steele's report on the "diplomat", as early as May 2016.

But it is a judgment they made using their own methods, outside the dossier.

A retired member of a US intelligence agency told me that Kalugin was being kept under surveillance before he left the US.
In addition, State Department staff who dealt with Russia did not come across Kalugin, as would have been expected with a simple diplomat.

"Nobody had met him," one former official said. "It's classic. Just classic [of Russian intelligence]."

Last month, the McClatchy news website said he was under "scrutiny" by the FBI as he left the US. They did not report, as my sources say, that he was a member of one of Russia's spying organisations, the SVR or GRU.

Steele's work remains fiercely controversial, to some a "dodgy dossier" concocted by President Trump's enemies.

But on this vitally important point - Kalugin's status as a "spy under diplomatic cover" - people who saw the intelligence agree with the dossier, adding weight to Steele's other claims.
But then they knew him already.

I understand - from former officials - that from 2013-16, Steele gave the US government extensive information on Russia and Ukraine.

This was work done for private clients, but which Steele wanted the US authorities to see.

One former senior official who saw these reports told me: "It was found to be of value by the people whose job it was to look at Russia every day.

"They said things like, 'How can he get this so quickly? This fits exactly with what we have.' It was validated many times."

[Wizardspride]

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[Benjammin]

These tweet posts aren't accessible from the real GM mobile app, which is either very annoying or quite a relief.

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[sfam]

Color me surprised. A very capable person who worked for Jered Kushner as the editor of a newspaper Kushner bought apparently as a vanity project finds describes him largely as an an entitled, spoiled dilettante who probably won't be innovating government anytime soon.

He viewed investments in terms of opportunity costs. “Why should I put more money into the Observer when I could invest in a software company?” he would say. This is a legitimate question for any returns-driven investor. But news media doesn’t scale like software. You need people to produce content, at least until artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and sensitive sources are willing to trust a bot.

Why would you buy a newspaper if you expect it to scale the way software does? Why assume that media and software have the same risk profile and dynamics? Kushner would frequently point to a media company with a 60-person editorial staff and ask why our two-person desk wasn’t producing as many stories or as much traffic. Or he’d argue, bizarrely and incorrectly, that because Gawker started with one person, that meant you didn’t need head count to scale a media company. The Internet makes media more scalable, of course — distribution is unlimited and gained at little marginal cost. But that doesn’t mean a media company is just like Uber...

...Kushner’s claim to business knowledge, beyond admiring Silicon Valley, boils down to his work for his family’s commercial real estate company, which is hardly comparable to a government institution. And if industry dynamics are not transitive across the board, expertise isn’t, either.

On that count, I’m not even sure how to quantify Kushner’s expertise, anyway. Yes, he ran the company — which he inherited, not uncommon in New York’s dynastic, insular real estate world. But he was sure he had the goods. When I worked for him, I wasn’t sure he had a realistic view of his own capabilities since, like his father-in-law, he seemed to view his wealth and its concomitant accoutrements as rewards for his personal success in business, and not something he would have had in any case. To me, he appeared to view his position and net worth as the products of an essentially meritocratic process.

That same obsession with the tech world permeates Kushner’s new project. Cost-cutting is important in situations where there is excess, but it is not what catalyzes evolution; if the point here is to make government more effective, not just more efficient, cuts alone won’t do it. The Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Kushner has roped into helping him with the new office — such as Apple’s Tim Cook, Salesforce boss Marc Benioff and Tesla founder Elon Musk — would be the first to tell him that scale is important, and that growth is often a function of prioritizing R&D investments. You prototype cheaply to get to a minimum viable product, but if you stop there, you’re in trouble. You have to reinvest, constantly...

...When it became clear in 2012 that Kushner was conflating running lean with starvation, I submitted my resignation and left the Observer mostly on good terms with him, but I was disappointed. The company president resigned a few weeks later. Kushner eventually filled our positions with a family friend and his brother-in-law, the latter of whom had no media experience. He wanted outsiders to run the business — but loyal, compliant outsiders.

A few days after Trump won the election, Kushner folded the now attenuated print newspaper and subsequently announced that the Observer, in its digital incarnation, was for sale. He probably would refer to it as a “lean” operation. I would say in his zeal to trim the fat, he began eliminating muscle and hacked into a few bones. I realize also, in retrospect, that he may never have intended to grow it or improve it. It was for him, in essence, another vanity object — like the beautiful, expensive desktop computer he used as a monitor.

[bealwithit]

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Don't mean for this to become the Louise Mensch thread, but she ended up being right about Ellis being the source for Nunes.
I still won't post anything of hers in this thread though.

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[Zonkerbl]

So she's kind of an idiot savant journalist.

[Zonkerbl]

I have a next door neighbor who is illiterate and clearly cannot get a job in this economy. She claims to be bipolar and also has these weird ass rheumatoid arthritis flareups and basically she lives off disability somehow, even though she can't fill out the paperwork herself.

On the one hand it seems like she is borderline scamming the system, but on the other what the hell else is she supposed to do?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2017/03/30/disabled-or-just-desperate/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_decidedisabled-prebuild%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.bfa071ef96c0

[Wizardspride]

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Don't mean for this to become the Louise Mensch thread, but she ended up being right about Ellis being the source for Nunes.
I still won't post anything of hers in this thread though.

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FakeNews obviously.

[Induveca]

So she's kind of an idiot savant journalist.

She thinks her florist is a Russian spy. She is also convinced Nigel Farage is a KGB agent, and the Brexit vote was "hacked" by Russia to destabilize the EU.

My latest personal favorites are her claims that Rudy Giuliani is a long time Russian agent, as are Jill Stein and Glenn Greenwald. Russia also according to Mensch:

- Directed, and then sabotaged the Sanders campaign to assist Clinton.
- Logic being (of course) a Clinton candidacy assured Trump would win.

Huh? To make things even more bizarre she is the SVP of Strategy and Creative at News Corp of all places.

[AFM]

So she's kind of an idiot savant journalist.

We have an idiot savant President, so...

[Wizardspride]

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[verbal8]

So she's kind of an idiot savant journalist.

We have an idiot savant President, so...

In what area has he been a savant?

[Induveca]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.france24.com/en/20170330-russia-actively-involved-french-election-warns-us-senate-intelligence-chief

LePen up in French polls, Russia hacking claims ensue. This is getting ridiculous.