Ecuador Will Imminently Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over to the UK.

What Comes Next?

“It is highly unlikely that Moreno – who has shown himself willing to submit to threats and coercion from the UK, Spain and the U.S. – will obtain a guarantee that the U.K. not extradite Assange to the U.S., where top Trump officials have vowed to prosecute Assange and destroy WikiLeaks.”

Whoa! Trump vs Assange. Vince McMahon would cringe at pitting heels against one another.

Michael Cohen secretly taped Trump discussing payment to Playboy model

“In the big scheme of things, it’s powerful exculpatory evidence,” said Rudy Giuliani, probably under the influence of a mind-altering drug.

Let’s see, if I were a married guy accused of having an affair that I wouldn’t want my wife or the public to know about:

  • If I had not had the affair, I’d tell my fixer, “Of course we don’t pay. Nothing she says is true, and I can prove I was elsewhere.”
  • If I had the affair, I’d tell my fixer, “Make sure you make the payment in a certain way.”

Let’s see which one Trump said….

Oops.

“Powerful exculpatory evidence.”

Trump has known the absolute fact of Russian meddling since before he was President

“Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election. The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.”

Putin says he might have made a tiny error

He claimed that Clinton campaign received 400 MILLION DOLLARS in contributions from people accused of tax evasion in Russia.

Turns out he meant to say 400 THOUSAND DOLLARS, per Russian state media.

Even that is wildly exaggerated. The actual amount is closer to 400 DOLLARS!

So Putin was close.

The Ziff brothers, the Bill Browder associates referenced by Putin, donated $1.7 million to various political groups and individuals in 2016, spread around to both parties. Of that, $1.1 million went to Democrats and $0.6 million to Republicans. Hillary actually received $17,700.

By the way,  Bill Browder is Putin’s sworn enemy, and the man almost single-handedly responsible for the Magnitsky Act, versions of which are slowly freezing the global assets of Putin and his cronies. In the hopes of discrediting Browder and countering the Magnitsky Act, Putin and his lackeys have accused Browder of just about everything they can think of.  “They accused me of being a serial killer; they accused me of being a CIA/MI6 agent determined to destroy the Russian government; and they accused me of somehow stealing $4.8 billion of IMF money back in the 1990s that was destined for the Russian Treasury.”

Magnitsky, by the way, was Browder’s lawyer.

And Browder himself, although born in Chi-town, is a British citizen, so Putin is barking up the wrong tree. Of course Putin knows he would go nowhere with the leaders of the UK, who are on to his baloney, so he is looking to work on a world leader who is a bit soft in the head and weak on the facts.

Gee, I wonder who he might have in mind.

Ya gotta give props to Putin. At least he doesn’t nickel-and-dime his lying. You think Trump told a whopper about his inaugural crowd size? Hah! Child’s play. Putin’s claim is roughly equivalent to Trump having claimed that the entire population of the universe was in Washington for his inauguration.

Our ever-clueless president said on Wednesday he does not believe Russia is still targeting the United States.

Needless to say, he has no reason to hold this position, nor any logic behind it.

Last week Dan Coats (a Trump appointee as Director of National Intelligence) said that “the digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack.” And, in particular, Russia is the “most aggressive foreign actor, no question. And they continue their efforts to undermine our democracy.”

Dan Coats also told a congressional committee in February that he already had seen evidence Russia was targeting U.S. elections in November, when Republican control of the House of Representatives and Senate are at stake, plus a host of positions in state governments.

AFTER Trump’s comments, Coats repeated, “We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy.”

Um … you know Putin admitted meddling in the election, right?

Most of the people in the news media were so focused on Trump’s assorted blarney, that they glossed over this crucial exchange between a reporter and Putin.

REPORTER: Did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?

PUTIN: Yes, I did. Yes, I did.

Yeah, that’s right. Putin publicly admitted meddling in the election right after Trump claimed that Putin was denying it.

Trump Retreats and Says He Accepts U.S. Finding Russia Meddled

That’s his version of the Magic 8-Ball answer “Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later.” This is just his temporary answer, applicable only until the next time he appears in front of his base.

He’s a master of playing that base, but he’s just not too good at this whole Presidentin’ biz, is he?

He now says he accidentally slipped when he said, “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” He allegedly meant to say, “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be.” It’s difficult to choose the lamest lie he’s ever come up with, because there are now thousands to choose from, but that could be a winner.

The U.S. Presidential IQ hoax was a mid-2001 e-mail and internet hoax that purported to provide a list of estimated IQs of the U.S. Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush.

It was reprinted as if factual by the ever-gullible Guardian, and was cited in a Doonesbury cartoon as if it represented reality.

In reality, we have a good handle on only three Presidential IQs.

JFK was tested at 119 by his prep school.

President Bush the Younger scored 1206 on the pre-1974 SAT, which converts to an IQ of about 129 on the Otis scale. (There was a close correlation between SAT and IQ in those days. The correlation was dependable enough that MENSA accepted a 1250 score for membership at that time. Over the years the tests have been revised, the correlation no longer exists, and MENSA no longer accepts SAT scores in its admission process.)

Richard Nixon was one of the gifted students studied by Terman in his longtitudinal study. Nixon biographer Roger Morris says RMN tested at 143 when he was in Fullerton High School in California.


Al Gore was never elected President (or was he?), but we also have a pre-1974 SAT score for him. He scored 1355, which is equivalent to about 137-138 on the Otis scale, and would place him in the upper 1%, about in the same league as Nixon.

The Hillary Clinton Russia Uranium One Conspiracy Theory (Doesn’t Make Any Sense)

It’s hard to believe anybody thinks there is anything there, but research is difficult and requires sober, rational thinking. As Mencken noted, one thing is always lucrative, and that is “underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” If you throw something out and defend it with a straight face, no matter how silly it is, there will always be people who believe it. The Pyramids were built for grain storage? The world is flat? The universe is 6000 years old? Sure, tell me more.

The whole case against Hillary is preposterous, but the right-wing spin doctors have thrown it out, and people will believe it, so let’s review the case again, shall we?

First I’m going to give you a very quick summary of the uranium market, because it is important to understand it, and very few reporters enjoy mathematical analysis, so they have generally concentrated on Clinton’s involvement in the deal:

1. How big is the deal itself?

It is so small as to be virtually non-existent. The entire commercial uranium market in the USA is 25,300 tons per year. Of that, only 2,800 tons are mined in the United States. Of that, Uranium One, the controversial Canadian company owned by Russian state mining interests, only constitutes 300 tons of that market. That’s it. A whopping 11% of the domestic market, therefore 1% of the total market.

As Clinton’s opponents have stated, Uranium One has 20% of the commercial, domestic uranium mining capacity, but those opponents fail to note that the actual production of the company is less, only 11% of the uranium mined in the USA. But even if they produced ALL of it, it would STILL be insignificant, because 89% of America’s commercial uranium is mined overseas.

2. But can’t they just give all of our uranium to Russia?

First of all, they can’t even sell that uranium to Canada, even though they are theoretically a Canadian company. Their charter forbids them to export uranium mined in the USA.

Second and perhaps more important, what the hell would Russia do with it? They don’t know what to do with all the uranium they have now, except sell it to us. Russia, along with its buddies Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, currently accounts for 38% of the uranium purchased in the United States. If they wanted to tighten the screws on us, they would do it with that 38% from their mines, not the other 1% from ours.

3. Does Uranium One have any power at all?

Not a lick. In fact the opposite is true. The USA holds all the cards. Since they are such a tiny portion of the market, our commercial users of uranium could easily stop buying from them completely and fill that 1% elsewhere. Since Uranium One can’t export the uranium, if we stopped buying from them, they would essentially have no business at all. They have to sell to us or close the mines. Why do you think those mining assets were for sale in the first place? They are in a very vulnerable position, completely at our mercy.

Most mainstream sources have covered the political side of the deal, and I’ve already noted that the deal is insignificant to begin with, so I’ll just give a top-line summary.

A Russian company paid money to purchase controlling interest in a Canadian company which owned mining assets in the USA. Because of US laws involving strategic assets, a nine-person panel, consisting of representatives from nine different US agencies, had to approve the sale. None of them objected. One of the agencies is the Department of State.

The State Department was represented on the matter by the Assistant Secretary assigned to the Foreign Investment Committee, Jose Fernandez. He made the decision not to object to the sale. Hillary Clinton never got involved in any way. (It’s not clear whether she even knew about it, except as another matter in a very large in-box. We presume that Fernandez filed a written report to Clinton, and that she chose not to override him, but he pointed out that she never weighed in with him at all, so his decision stood.)

In other words:

1. The whole matter is insignificant.

2. Hillary had only 1/9 of the power to approve. It was approved unanimously.

3. Hillary did not even exercise her 1/9 to influence the decision. One of her subordinates, the one with specific expertise in that field, made the decision. Mrs. Clinton had no specific knowledge in this area, and presumably had actual significant matters to occupy her time.

Did the Clinton Foundation get a massive donation ($131 million) from one of the former owners of Uranium One?

Sure, but it was before Clinton was Secretary of State.

And, equally important, by the time the deal happened, in fact 18 months before Hillary became Secretary of State, that guy (Frank Giustra) had already sold his stock in Uranium One!

Moreover, it’s not surprising that Giustra contributed so much, considering that the donation specifically went to “The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership,” which is a specific initiative within the Clinton Foundation. I hear that guys tend to support causes named after themselves.

Or to word it another way, his donation to the Clinton Foundation had nothing to do with the sale of Uranium One, nor could it have, given the timing.

But even if it had, Clinton did not get involved in that decision.

But even if she had, there was nothing wrong with the decision

And even if it had been a bad decision, the deal was insignificant to the uranium market.