Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

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Thad
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Thad » Thu Jul 12, 2018 10:17 am

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh piled up credit card debt by purchasing Nationals tickets, White House says

Amy Brittain wrote:Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh incurred tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt buying baseball tickets over the past decade and at times reported liabilities that could have exceeded the value of his cash accounts and investment assets, according to a review of Kavanaugh’s financial disclosures and information provided by the White House.

White House spokesman Raj Shah told The Washington Post that Kavanaugh built up the debt by buying Washington Nationals season tickets and tickets for playoff games for himself and a “handful” of friends. Shah said some of the debts were also for home improvements.

In 2016, Kavanaugh reported having between $60,000 and $200,000 in debt accrued over three credit cards and a loan. Each credit card held between $15,000 and $50,000 in debt, and a Thrift Savings Plan loan was between $15,000 and $50,000.

The credit card debts and loan were either paid off or fell below the reporting requirements in 2017, according to the filings, which do not require details on the nature or source of such payments. Shah told The Post that Kavanaugh’s friends reimbursed him for their share of the baseball tickets and that the judge has since stopped purchasing the season tickets.

Shah did not provide the names of the friends or additional details about the tickets. Kavanaugh, who is known to be a Nationals fan, declined to comment.


Rosenstein asks federal prosecutors for help in review of Kavanaugh documents: report

Is any of this going to make any fucking difference? I dunno, maybe. It might give the handful of Democrats who voted for Gorsuch an excuse not to vote for Kavanaugh, and if every Democrat and one Republican votes against him, he's sunk. I wouldn't count on it, though, and even if they managed to knock him out of the running, the odds of their managing to stall until January are even slimmer (never mind that their odds of taking the Senate aren't great).

Not for nothin', Kavanaugh appears to be Kennedy's personal pick for his replacement. How a private meeting with Kennedy helped Trump get to ‘yes’ on Kavanaugh

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby François » Thu Jul 12, 2018 10:50 am

Maybe there's something about the nomination process that I don't understand, but even if Kavanaugh doesn't work out, I'm not seeing it making a lot of difference either way. I mean, as much as I'd like to rejoice over anyone connected to this administration stepping down or getting fired or not getting a sensitive job in the first place, there's no shortage of absolute shitsacks that Trump can replace them with. Pruitt leaving the EPA doesn't mean Trump's gonna call Al Gore and ask him if he's got some free time.

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jul 12, 2018 4:55 pm

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Thad » Fri Jul 13, 2018 12:18 am

François wrote:Maybe there's something about the nomination process that I don't understand, but even if Kavanaugh doesn't work out, I'm not seeing it making a lot of difference either way. I mean, as much as I'd like to rejoice over anyone connected to this administration stepping down or getting fired or not getting a sensitive job in the first place, there's no shortage of absolute shitsacks that Trump can replace them with. Pruitt leaving the EPA doesn't mean Trump's gonna call Al Gore and ask him if he's got some free time.

Yeah, pretty much.

If the Dems manage to stall until January and get a majority in November, then that's a potential game-changer -- but as I said, that's very unlikely. And anything short of that? We're looking, at best, at the difference between fresh shit in the litterbox and dried shit on the floor.

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Fri Jul 13, 2018 2:53 pm

Russian military officers have been formally indicted for hacking the DNC. There's a bunch of spicy info in the indictments:



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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jul 14, 2018 2:43 am



I'm sorry but I have to laugh.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jul 18, 2018 4:23 pm

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Actual Affadavit (if you need confirmation of the tweet).
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Fri Jul 20, 2018 3:09 pm

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jul 21, 2018 3:13 pm

hoooooooolllllllyyyyyyy shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit



You keep thinking this can't get any crazier, but then...
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Blossom » Sat Jul 21, 2018 4:38 pm


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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jul 22, 2018 1:44 am

TA wrote:

Not fully getting this bit? Mainly:
Looks like O'Malley might not be getting away with trying to run a primary against Hillary so easy after all

Uh, jokes about Hillary being dumb enough to run again aside, he's using past and future tense in one sentence?
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jul 22, 2018 1:53 am

Also...



oooh ah oh my what a surprise
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Blossom » Sun Jul 22, 2018 3:43 am

Mongrel wrote:
TA wrote:

Not fully getting this bit? Mainly:
Looks like O'Malley might not be getting away with trying to run a primary against Hillary so easy after all

Uh, jokes about Hillary being dumb enough to run again aside, he's using past and future tense in one sentence?


The political consultant class is a mire of inbred, politically shiftless mercenaries who bounce wherever they are paid. The Hoarse Whisperer is a donut twitter shithead who spent the rest of that day claiming that this was proof that Devine ran Sanders as an astroturf candidate, to spend the entire primary season doing media buys to smear Clinton in general-election battlegrounds under Putin's orders. And not that, you know, consultant firms partner up and get hired in a huge corporate pile. Such as O'Malley's campaign manager and his partners from the evidence list.

The Hoarse Whisperer also spent most of yesterday scolding the DSA for associating with the color red, because the Republicans already claimed it.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jul 22, 2018 5:17 am

I doubt Bernie was run as an astroturf candidate, and Devine might very well had no idea about Russian connections or anything like that.

But how often does the Kremlin inform those they're subtly manipulating via various means? It would be trivial for Devine to have received faulty or ambiguous advice or data, been fed a suspect connection, or nudged in the direction of causing collateral damage. If nothing else, it does once again confirm that whet you said is true: the vast majority of political consultants are inbred, politically shiftless mercenaries (who all know each other as well).

Of course maybe none of that even mattered, being too subtle to have much impact, but Putin's overall strategy was to literally throw everything he had at fucking with the election, hoping some of it would stick, so any small impact is still part of a smaller picture.

One which incidentally displays Putin's weakness rather than his strength. He gambled and won big. Maybe he hadn't bet the farm, but he sure got his nickel's worth. But it was far more a semi-desperate - albeit calculated - throw of the dice than it was any sort of brilliant bond villain scheme.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Thad » Sun Jul 22, 2018 12:59 pm

Mongrel wrote:Of course maybe none of that even mattered, being too subtle to have much impact, but Putin's overall strategy was to literally throw everything he had at fucking with the election, hoping some of it would stick, so any small impact is still part of a smaller picture.

I think that's the right of it, yes.

While it's clear that Trump was Putin's preferred candidate, there's good evidence that Russia was meddling everywhere, that there were astroturfers across the political spectrum. Putin's goal is chaos and division; that his preferred candidate won is a bonus, but even if Trump hadn't ended up in the White House Putin would still have gotten valuable knowledge about weaknesses in our system, from the voting infrastructure itself to the parties' information retention practices to how we disseminate information on social media.

And if Trump had lost the election, there's a good chance he'd still be out there even now ranting about how it was rigged. Putin still gets what he wanted: half of the electorate believes the president's election was illegitimate and starts to distrust our electoral apparatus; it would just be the other half.

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jul 22, 2018 3:04 pm

It would be pretty staggering if some major Washington political consultant (not necessarily Devine), did in fact turn out to have been an actual mole (blackmailed or voluntary) or even directly on the Russian payroll for decades. Chances of that are low, I think, but recent events have shown that's far from impossible and what a story that would be.

More likely though, any actual Russian agents or moles are these second-tier folks like Maria Butina, who simply spent their way in, hiring lobbyists or getting in with special interest orgs and think tanks, rather than actual high-level party campaign staff (Trump's campaign excepted, obviously).
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby nosimpleway » Sun Jul 22, 2018 3:25 pm

Russia doesn't need as many spies or moles anymore, as long as Putin has the Pee Tape.

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jul 22, 2018 3:37 pm

nosimpleway wrote:Russia doesn't need as many spies or moles anymore, as long as Putin has the Pee Tape.

It's interesting that I think that Trump actually being confirmed as a real-life Manchurian Candidate would still be big news, even though so many of us expect it.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Grath » Mon Jul 23, 2018 8:21 pm


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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jul 24, 2018 12:02 am

So many good ones right now.



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