Category: Knowledge and News

He’ll be missed.

OK, maybe we can make an exception to that thing about not speaking ill of the dead.

“Under his watch, Isil became one of the brutal terrorist outfits in modern history.”

Nice job, special forces!

“Donald Trump’s mixture of threats and locker-room banter infuriated Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.”

Erdogan is being rash, but that was a lame letter, to be sure. It seemed to be written by an impulsive fifth grader. “Don’t be a tough guy.” “Let’s work out a good deal.”

1. No ceasefire
2. I ain’t meetin’ with Pence.

He’s into some next level shit, and this is not good.

Can’t blame him about the Pence thing, though. I don’t know whether I could stay awake for five minutes talking to Mike Pence.

President Erdogan says he will refuse to meet with VP Pence, who is due to travel to Turkey to argue for a ceasefire in the ongoing Syria conflict. https://t.co/dKM2IvCR3R

— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 16, 2019

Any full-scale war is bad, but this one has repercussions for the USA: Turkey is a member of NATO, and thus ostensibly our ally. Syria under Assad is our enemy.

But …

In this case it is possible to argue that the Syrians are the good guys. Two reasons: (1) They are defending their own borders against the invading Turks; (2) They have swept in to be a white knight and prevent the genocide of the Kurds, who really were our allies until about a week ago.

Of course the Kurds can’t trust Syria, but then again they couldn’t really trust us either, could they? They took the only road open to them.

In other words, it’s a shitshow, and a probable lose-lose for America.

“You can pull your troops out, as President Obama learned the hard way out of Iraq, but the ‘enemy gets the vote’ as we say in the military. And in this case, if we don’t keep the pressure on, then ISIS will resurge. It’s absolutely a given that they will come back.”

Former Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis

Good to know. We all miss those guys. Gosh, I just hope their comeback works out better than that reboot of Twin Peaks.

We pretty much already knew this, since we knew that he talked to Trump in between two of his text messages, but “Sondland’s testimony will raise the possibility that Trump wasn’t truthful.”

Trump might have lied? That’s not the Donald Trump I know! 

It’s only true that the president said it, not that it was the truth.

Gordon Sondland, US Ambassador to Europe, to a colleague

“The statement that Rudy was demanding was a quid pro quo for a White House visit, there was no doubt about that. By Sept. 9, Sondland had grown increasingly concerned, as military funding for Ukraine now appeared tied to the statement as well. “

But …

Sondland “somehow wants all of us to believe that he is ‘shocked, shocked’ that anything he was wrapped up in was aimed at the Bidens. That beggars belief.” 

Here’s a quick summary of what seems to be Sondland’s position.

• I knew that the Burisma investigation was a quid pro quo for the White House visit
• I began to suspect that the Burisma investigation was also a quid pro quo for military aid.
• However, I was not aware that Burisma had anything to do with Biden.

This position may be true, but needless to say, it is raising some eyebrows.

From Mercury, when both planets are on the same side of the sun and separated by a “mere” 60 million miles, Earth and its moon look like an impressive binary star system.

From Saturn, they blur together into a tiny, unimportant blue dot, dwarfed by the celestial magnificence of the ring system.

“Trump tells reporters he doesn’t know if Giuliani is still his attorney”

Do you think Rudy has spotted the bus coming yet?

Probably not.

But he’s starting to think he might hear the horn. His response, ringing with confidence, was: “I spoke to him yesterday and I have no reason to believe I’m not.”

This story is really getting complicated. These are the same two guys we read about Monday when they refused to testify or be deposed in the impeachment investigation. Shortly thereafter, they were fleeing the country.

Pictured in the photo: the two suspected criminals.

Also pictured: the two Ukrainian guys.

Allegedly, these are two unrelated cases. Congress wanted them to testify about the Ukrainian Bidengate scandal, while the feds arrested them for laundering money to make illegal campaign contributions. (Illegal because they were channeling money from foreign donors into American elections to support Trump and others.) I have a feeling things may tie together when all the curtains are pulled back. At the moment it is not clear whether they were fleeing the country to avoid the expected Congressional subpoenas, or because they knew the feds were closing in on the criminal charges.

But here’s a kicker. Get this. The two had one-way tickets to Vienna. Rudy Giuliani was also scheduled to travel to Vienna the following day. Rudy claims those two trips were unrelated, that he was going to Vienna for a completely different reason, and that he was not scheduled to meet with them until they returned to Washington – a pretty difficult trick considering they had one-way tickets!

I wonder if Rudy will still go ahead with his Vienna trip, just to pretend that he was telling the truth about that completely different reason. Probably not. One thing about Rudy – he doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to construct plausible lies. He just wings it.

Much like his main client.

Here’s another kicker, hot off the presses: Giuliani was not only using these two guys in his crusade to dig up dirt in Ukraine, but he also accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from them for consulting and legal services!

These guys are tight!

at least there’s no video pic.twitter.com/JVaUyJpm4V

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) October 10, 2019

They concluded that there was a significant Russian effort to interfere in general, and to stoke racial division in particular.

The report details how a Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency used automated posts and fake social media identities to hurt Hillary Clinton. Their research uncovered the fact that about 2/3 of their Facebook posts were focused on race, and that they inundated potential black voters with messages like these: “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton,” “Don’t Vote At All,” “Why Would We Be Voting,” “Our Votes Don’t Matter,” and “A Vote for Jill Stein is Not a Wasted Vote.”

The conclusion of the committee was that the giants of social media can’t be trusted to police themselves, and that some additional government oversight is essential.