Happy New Year to all my fellow DUers!

Enjoy tonight and this weekend, because later this month the struggle begins!

My appearance this morning on Fox & Friends re: Democratic Losses, future and Obama

Did Trump warn someone of this Tweet, giving them insider information AKA Insider Trading?

So, Hillary had Russian intelligence, the leader of the FBI, Trump/GOP, the Media, Bernie or Busters

and various other holier than thou Progressives against her and the fact that she was the first woman candidate from a major party with all the attendant sexism and she still won the popular vote?

And the BoB crowd is still saying she wasn't a strong candidate?

Imagine the Reverse of Friday Evening's News and Hillary had won the election after Putin Intervened

Imagine the Reverse of Friday Evening's News and Hillary had won the election after Putin Intervened on Her Behalf

http://steveleser.blogspot.com/2016/12/imagine-reverse-of-friday-evenings-news.html

I read today’s (12/9/2016) bombshell news in the Washington Post https://goo.gl/HCH4Ql about the CIA’s assessment that Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, intervened in the US elections to try to help Donald Trump and after taking that in for a few minutes, I had an amusing thought. What if the reverse had happened? What would that be like now?

It’s funny to me because as a Liberal/Democratic pundit, I have for years faced off on camera against Republican pundits over every over-engineered scandal they have tried to manufacture against President Obama, Hillary, and other Democrats. Republicans are experts at making mountains out of ant hills (or out of nothing at all) never mind mole hills. What would they do if presented instead with an actual mountain, to continue the metaphor, as we have now?

If Putin had sent GRU, SVR and other Intelligence Service descendants of the KGB out to do whatever they could do to help Hillary as it seems he has done to help Trump and after she won evidence of that came out as it has now, the outcry from Republicans and their friends in the conservative segments of the media would be deafening.

Republicans in the House would already be drafting articles of impeachment, Rush Limbaugh would spend three quarters of every one of his daily three hour shows talking about it. Every Republican elected official from county executives to mayors all the way up to congressmen and senators would be going in front of cameras saying Hillary is disqualified as a President and she should say she will not take the oath of office and that the electors should vote for the other candidate. My conservative pundit friends would be analyzing the scandal from every possible angle during every segment of every show on conservative networks.

This news is big stuff. A militarily strong foreign power that has been behaving antagonistically towards the United States for the last 3-5 years has meddled in our Presidential elections to try to get their preferred candidate elected and that candidate won. Who is to say what effect that meddling had? A mere 80,000 votes spread out over three states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, determined the outcome. That’s not a lot of votes at all. Did the role the Russian’s played in WikiLeaks, hacking, and publicizing the DNC’s emails and other efforts to make Hillary and the Democrats look bad influence things enough to turn 80,000 votes in those states?

That is a question that everyone should be thinking about because 80,000 votes spread out over three states can change if a candidate trips while walking up the stairs or other similar trivial campaign occurrences. It is a very small percentage of the vote totals. Virtually anything that happens during a campaign can move the vote totals by that much. So, I would argue yes, the meddling by Putin did play a factor in Trump’s victory.

It gets better. The Washington Post reported that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, the highest ranking Republican elected official at the time, threatened the Obama administration that if they released the information about Putin’s efforts to meddle in the election before election day, he would come out and call the Obama administrations statements “an act of partisan politics”. McConnell, in effect, worked to deny the American public a vital piece of knowledge they should have had in making their decision for whom to vote.

The other question that should be on everyone’s mind is, why does Putin want Trump to win. What advantage does Putin think he gets from that and why? I have many issues with Putin and the things he does and says. What I would never say is that Putin is stupid. He is a very smart guy. The actions he takes are very deliberate and he has a clear objective in mind when he takes them and he considers all possible consequences and factors them in. Meddling in our election is a very risky thing to do. First one must consider what might happen if his meddling is discovered before the election. Second, what if it is discovered and his chosen candidate loses. What kind of relationship would he have with the new President?

Whatever Putin thinks he gains from a Trump Presidency he believes is worth all those risks. That fact should greatly concern every American.

I will be very interested to see the response to this from grassroots, and elected politicians and pundits from all parts of the political spectrum. I know what the reaction would be like if the situation was reversed.

I heard some folks say Hillary wasn't pro-Pot enough. Well, say hello to AG Sessions

I have no idea why knowing the other guy will crush everything we care about isn't enough to get some folks to go out and vote or make them enthusiastic.

And yes, regardless of what any Republican nominee says during the campaign, we KNOW they will crush everything we care about.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/12/02/trump-pick-could-halt-legal-pot-industry/jJzBgw7GAowt0dKvZiJwIK/story.html?p1=Article_Trending_Most_Viewed

Trump AG pick could halt legal pot industry



WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, who has a long history of hard-line opposition to marijuana, could unravel the burgeoning recreational marijuana industry across the country, including in Massachusetts.

Senator Jeff Sessions, a former federal prosecutor and Alabama attorney general, has been taking on marijuana dealers since the 1970s.


He said earlier this year that “good people don’t smoke marijuana” and “we need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say ‘marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized.’ ”

Because marijuana remains illegal under federal law, Sessions, if he is confirmed, could choose to order targeted prosecutions of recreational marijuana farms and shops that are operating legally under state law. Such a move could seriously threaten the retail marijuana industry, worth a billion dollars in Colorado
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Ever heard of double reconciliation? No and no one else did either before Nov 9th.

Be prepared for GOP policies being ramrod-ed through. More dirty tricks from the GOP.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stancollender/2016/11/11/gop-to-do-previously-unimaginable-things-to-slam-dunk-its-agenda/#685a044567b5

GOP To Use Previously Unheard Of Tactic To Slam Dunk Trump Agenda

The Republican congressional leadership is seriously considering an unprecedented procedure to guarantee that its and President-elect Donald Trump’s highest priorities are quickly enacted soon after Congress convenes next year.

The key is “reconciliation,” the part of the congressional budget process that allows highly controversial policies to be considered in the Senate without any possibility of them being filibustered.

But reconciliation by itself isn’t the unprecedented procedure; it’s the novel way the leadership plans to use reconciliation: For the first time in the 4-plus decades’ history of the congressional budget process, reconciliation may occur twice in the same year.

Theoretically, two reconciliations in the same year are legally impossible because the Congressional Budget Act only allows one set of reconciliation instructions per budget resolution.
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(more at above link)

BoB/JPR folks are best understood in the context of Orwell's description of negative nationalism

I talk about Nationalism and Negative Nationalism as Orwell describes them in his "Notes on Nationalism" a lot and that is because in politics, you see that kind of behavior quite a bit, particularly when someone or some group becomes over the top about something.
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat
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Instability. The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, as I have pointed out already, they can be and often are fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H. G. Wells's Outline of History, and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary.

Hillary won the popular vote by a greater margin than 24 of 45 elected Presidents.

With the object of hate that spawned them gone, JPR descends into an existential squabble

sabrina (4258 posts) (Reply to Octafish - post #5) November 17, 2016 at 9:15 pm
72. So the DU infiltration of trolls WON?? Did TM99 step down or did the DU triolls

succeed in getting him off the site? Would you like ME to step down Manny? Just say so, but when you make that decision, do not speak for me I will speak for me as I have always done.

As far as I know, TM99 was not informed that of what you are claiming. I want to be clear, if you want me to step down please make that request public.

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Crabby Abbey (501 posts) (Reply to sabrina - post #72) November 17, 2016 at 9:17 pm
74. Yeah, this sounds a lot like censorship. Isn't that what we all came here

to avoid? I did!

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Post Removed (626 posts) (Reply to sabrina - post #72) November 17, 2016 at 9:23 pm
76. I think mods should be elected by popular vote.

Anywho I nominate

TM99

sabrina