Listen all i know is that the past 4 page of this thread are about it. The current explanations are "Stuff happens" and "Something is shady". The next 4 pages wont bring different results. So why dont we just wait what the FBI investigations bring?

Despite that we should really be wondering how Jeff Sessions, confirmed racist and liar is still in office.

Novel idea to get the GOP to keep Energy Star: we charge the companies who have products that get the Energy Star sticker/logo/approval... Just enough to cover the $57M per year it costs.

Then, we give those companies $57M a year in tax breaks. The Republicans will love it, I tell ya!

Also, can we put this in freaking perspective for a second? This is part of their plan to increase defense spending by $54 BILLION with a B. They're cutting $57 million with an M.

Put another way, that's not even the amount of money the Jaguars are going to spend on Calais Campbell.

The server thing...you could also ask why nothing's come of it 6 months later, and there's been zero reason given to think the FBI has uncovered anything. I'd be happy to see something more come of it later but I think this was just CNN looking for something to fill their hourly "breaking news" slot.

If there is a problem discussing it, it's that there are actual smoking guns worth more attention right now. That, and the inevitable conjecture it's going to lead some people to. That may be how the Trump crowd does business, certainly Breitbart would have a field day with it if this concerned a top Dem, but I'd rather stay above that. There isn't enough there to get behind and I don't feel like giving anybody ammo if the FBI says, "nah, it was nothing."

I can't speak for others, but I've made maybe three or four posts on the subject. I felt like I could offer some technical insight to users who had questions, so I did. I think it's not a smoking gun itself (given the information we currently have), but it's very smoky, and we definitely need more information about it.

I think the reason Jeff Sessions is still in office is because Republicans control the Executive Branch, and both houses of the Legislative branch, and they're putting their team ahead of the interests of the American people.

By the way, just to add to the server thing, I have done some web development before at a pretty simple level and would have been listed as the admin for the domains I registered as a contractor for companies. It in no way, shape, or form meant that I wasn't acting at their behest or that they didn't own the site.

I don't know about the intricacies of DNS lookups in this case, but I have a basic enough understanding, and that high of a percentage of queries coming from those two companies, along with talk they were only receiving from those IP addresses seems extremely odd.

But, by far, the oddest thing in the Slate article is the claim that when the NYT reached out to Alfa Bank but NOT Trump's people, the Trump server was quickly shut down... And when a new one popped up, Alfa Bank was the first to look it up. This being a coincidence would be the equivalent of a friend shutting down their phone, getting a new number, and you immediately calling it without them having told you what it was. Except that instead of guessing 10 random digits, you'd have to guess a full domain name with ~20 characters.

That's very fishy.

On this subject, (sorry Jack ), I think there's an issue with some of the reporting in regards to technical details. In the Slate article, it states:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...th_russia.html

Bolded emphasis mine.

The problem here is I can't tell if the author is (in the first paragraph) referring to actual ICMP echo requests, which are commonly referred to as "pings", or if he is conflating that with DNS lookups. From what I understand, we know the Russian server continuously performed DNS queries to resolve the host name of the Trump server, but we don't know if it continuously sent ICMP echo requests.

If in fact the Russian server was sending ICMP echo requests to the Trump server, which was met with ICMP echo replies by the Trump server, but the researchers' ICMP echo requests were firewalled, meaning only the Russian bank's IP address was allowed to successfully send an ICMP echo request, then I would have to say this definitely looks like a smoking gun, as it indicates the Trump server was specifically set up to allow connections from the Russian server, but disallow all other connections, which is known as a default deny firewall rule. Specifically allow X IP address, block everything else.

So if the reporting was clearer on the technical details, it would really be helpful. If the technical details reflect what they say, meaning "ping" in both paragraphs actually means ICMP echo requests, then this is very smoking gunish imo.

For readers unaware, ICMP echo request/reply is like this:

Computer A says "Computer B, are you alive?" Computer B says, "yes, I'm alive!" is a sucessful ICMP echo request and reply
Computer A says "Computer B, are you alive?" Computer B says ....... is not a sucessful ICMP echo request and reply

So how big is this Flynn/Turkey revelation? It seems like it should be pretty huge, but much like Sessions, Rs will say it's totally normal and a nonstory while they feverishly look for a bigger rug to sweep all of these things under.

Trump's First 100: Days 41-50 - Will Trumpcare Cover Acute Paranoia?


Day 41

• Missed from Day 40: Signed, without any announcement or fanfare, a bill allowing severe mental illness to no longer be a factor in background checks to buy guns.
• FCC chairman Pai says net neutrality was a mistake.
• Pai was outvoted on the matter in 2014 and 2015, when he wasn't chairman, but is now likely to succeed in getting rid of net neutrality going forward.
• Montana Rep Ryan Zinke confirmed Sec of the Interior by a vote of 68-31.
• Zinke is a former eagle scout and an avid outdoorsman who has advocated against giving protected federal lands back to the states.
• He is also a strong supporter of coal, and has a 4/100 lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters.

Day 42

• Attorney General Sessions talked to the Russian Ambassador twice in 2016, then lied about it to the Senate during his confirmation hearings.
• Sessions was a vital part of the president's campaign team.
• For weeks he refused requests to recuse himself from heading FBI investigations into Russian ties with the same campaign.
• Today, under mounting pressure from lawmakers due to his lying to the Senate, Sessions recuses himself from Trump campaign probes.
• Sec Spicer says, "There's nothing to recuse himself [from]. He was 100% straight with the committee,"
• Spicer adds that the Democrats who bring attention to Sessions lying under oath in the Senate should be "ashamed of themselves."
• WH claims not to know of Sessions' meetings with the Russian ambassador.
• Senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner also met with the Russian ambassador, in December, in Trump Tower.
• WH counsel's office tells staffers to preserve any materials related to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
• Much of this material was carefully archived and disseminated by the outgoing Obama administration, in order to prevent its destruction.
• Ben Carson confirmed as HUD secretary by a vote of 58-41.
• Carson is the only black nominee for a cabinet position. There is also one Asian nominee in the 22-member cabinet.
• Former Governor Rick Perry confirmed as Sec of Energy.
• Perry tells the Senate he regrets earlier vows to abolish the department he now heads.
• VP Pence used an AOL account for official business while governor of Indiana.
• The account was hacked by a scammer, who sent emails to his contacts claiming Pence's wife was stranded and broke in the Philippines.

Day 43

• Asked about his use of a private email account for public business in comparison to former Sec Clinton's use of a private email account for public business, Pence says, "There's no comparison whatsoever."
• Watchdog groups say Trump 2020 campaign is illegally piling new donations into the 2016 campaign, allowing contributors to give the max twice; once for 2016 and once for 2020.
• Tweets, "It is so pathetic that the Dems have still not approved my full Cabinet."
• 18 of 22 cabinet positions have been confirmed.
• Republicans hold the majority in the Senate and control the pace of cabinet approvals.
• Tweets a picture of Sen Schumer (D) with Vladimir Putin.
• Writes, "We should start an immediate investigation into @SenSchumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite!"
• Sen Schumer answers, "Happily talk re: my contact w Mr. Putin & his associates, took place in '03 in full view of press & public under oath. Would you &your team?"
• Tweets, "I hereby demand a second investigation, after Schumer, of Pelosi for her close ties to Russia, and lying about it."
• Takes three attempts to spell 'hereby' correctly.
• Rep Pelosi answers, "@realDonaldTrump doesn't know difference between official mtg photographed by press & closed secret mtg his AG lied about under oath."
• WH claims Sessions met with Russian ambassador in his capacity as Senator, not as a Trump campaign higher-up.
• But Sessions used Trump campaign funds to pay the expenses involved with the Russian meeting.
• GOP drafting its health care repeal in secret, in a basement room with Capitol police guarding the doors.

Day 44

• Supporters of the president gather in towns and cities during a planned March 4 Trump event.
• Crowd sizes supporting the president on this Saturday range from several people to several hundred people.
• After saying "The time for trivial fights is behind us," in his Day 40 speech, tweets "Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't voluntarily leaving the Apprentice, he was fired by his bad (pathetic) ratings, not by me. Sad end to great show."
• Sends multiple tweets accusing former president Obama of wiretapping his Trump tower office in 2016.
• WH staff offers no comment on this.
• Three possibilities exist:
• The first is that former president Obama wiretapped the offices illegally and without the knowledge or permission of a federal court.
• There are no creditable news reports or sources that suggest this.
• The second is that candidate Trump was under surveillance through an order from a FISA court.
• This would mean that a federal judge felt there was probable cause to believe that the Trump campaign had committed a serious crime, or that someone in his camp was an agent of a foreign power.
• The third is that the president was duped into believing something false by one or more of the fringe right wing news sources he relies upon.
• A spokesman for former president Obama, as well as several of his former aides, as well as the former Director of National Intelligence, all say the wiretapping claim is false.

Day 45

• WH puts out official press release stating that it has no comment on the wiretapping business.
• The same statement calls on Congress to investigate the matter.
• FBI director Comey asks the Department of Justice to publicly state that the president's wiretapping claim is false.
• Former Trump campaign official Roger Stone admits on Twitter to having a personal back-channel with Wikileaks,
• Wikileaks is the outlet that released the hacked Russian information on the DNC during the election.
• Stone then deletes the tweets.
• Eric and Donald Trump Jr say they are using connections made on the 2016 campaign trail to expand the Trump company holdings.

Day 46

• Department of Justice remains silent on FBI director Comey's request to knock down the president's wiretapping accusations.
• Trump signs revised travel ban affecting six predominantly Muslim nations.
• Iraq, included in the old defunct travel ban, has been removed from the list.
• Iraq's government is a close US ally and a partner in our shared battle against ISIS.
• No citizens of the six remaining countries in the ban have been involved in any recent attack on US soil.
• HUD Sec Carson says that black slaves were immigrants who "worked harder for less," and who had a dream that one day their descendants "might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”
• WH press release on energy policy contains a paragraph cut and pasted directly from an ExxonMobil press release.

Day 47

• While watching a feature on Fox & Friends, blames Obama for 122 "vicious" prisoners released from the Guantanamo Bay prison.
• 113 of these 122 prisoners were released by the Bush administration.
• This is one of six tweets he sends this morning that are directly related to today's Fox & Friends episode, which is playing while he tweets.
• GOP bill effecting rollback of Affordable Care Act unveiled.
• New bill will cut funding to states that help poor adults with their Medicaid programs.
• Will bar Planned Parenthood from receiving federal Medicaid reimbursements.
• Will cut back on financial assistance for lower income families shopping for insurance.
• Will offer tax incentives and the ability to open tax free health care savings accounts.
• Many families live from paycheck to paycheck and can't afford to maintain a standard savings account, much less an additional savings account.
• Allows insurers to charge older people substantially higher rates than were allowed under the ACA.
• Repeals tax penalties on larger employers who do not offer coverage.
• Repeals tax penalties on people who do not buy insurance.
• Will instead punish the uninsured with higher premiums if they miss more than 2 months of coverage.
• Repeals 10% sales tax on fake tanning salons.
• Gives tax breaks to insurance executives making more than $500,000/year.
• 6 of the bill's 60 pages are dedicated to handling lottery winners.
• The president has signaled his full support for the bill.
• Steel from the US will not be used exclusively on the Keystone Pipeline, as was promised by the president.
• The pipeline will use Canadian steel manufactured by a company 1/3 owned by Roman Abramovich.
• Abramovich is a Russian billionaire oligarch with longstanding ties to Vladimir Putin.
• Under pressure from the Justice Dept, former national security adviser Flynn registers himself retroactively as an agent for a foreign interest.

Day 48

• Opposition to the GOP health bill from every Democrat as well as some GOP members of Congress has imperiled its passing.
• Sponsors of the bill now calling it a "work in progress."
• At a closed meeting with GOP congressmen, the president tells them the 2018 midterms will be a "bloodbath" if they don't pass their health bill.
• Spokesperson Conway is not sure that the president would like Trumpcare to be called Trumpcare going forward.
• Says she prefers for now that Trumpcare be called something other than Trumpcare.
• WH's Office of Management and Budget director Mulvaney says the GOP won't consider the number of people who lose their insurance as a measure of success or failure for Trumpcare.
• He adds, "insurance is not really the end goal here, is it?"
• Press Sec Spicer concurs, saying that the number of people who will be covered under Trumpcare "is not the question."
• On Democrats and passing the original ACA aka Obamacare in 2010, Spicer says, “With all due respect, this is the same group who passed it and then told us we could read it,”
• The original ACA was available for review and debated in congress for nearly a year before it was passed.
• Citing "multiple reports," Spicer falsely claims that Fox reporter James Rosen had his phones tapped by the Obama administration.
• Rosen denies that he or anyone close to him was wiretapped.
• China approves Trump-branded trademarks for spas, massage parlors, escort services, hotels, finance and real-estate companies, retail shops, restaurants and bars.
• Representatives of the largest US candy companies are giving Trump resorts a large amount of business, booking several conventions at the Trump National Doral resort near Miami and the Trump International Hotel in DC, as well as buying group golf outings at Trump courses.
• They are preparing to lobby the administration on rolling back sugar subsidies, as well as other matters of import to their industry.

Day 49

• Asked about the booming Trump golf business, Eric Trump says, "The stars have all aligned. I think our brand is the hottest it has ever been."
• Sen Rand Paul (R) Introduces a bill to rival Trumpcare.
• Paul's bill will simply repeal the ACA without offering an alternative.
• Head of the Environmental Protection Agency says he doubts that increased carbon dioxide caused by human activity is "a primary contributor to global warming."
• Close UK Trump Ally Nigel Farage pays 40 minute visit to the Ecuadoran embassy, where Wikileaks head Julian Assange lives.
• Asked by reporters what he's doing there, says he doesn't remember.
• Senate Majority Leader McConnell, asked if Mexico will pay for the proposed border wall, says "Uh, no."
• Several states are now suing to overturn the president's revised travel ban.

Day 50

• Attorney General Sessions asks for the resignations of 46 US Attorneys, all appointees from previous administrations.
• This is not unprecedented, as the Clinton administration asked for an equivalent number of resignations in 1993.
• The president has cancelled two open press events this week: one without explanation; the other due to the venue being too full, according to a spokesperson.
• Brookings Institute analysis of Trumpcare estimates that 15 million people will lose their insurance coverage.
• The president, long a vocal doubter of past job gain figures issued by the Bureau of Labor, now praises current the job gain figures, issued by the Bureau of Labor.
• Sec Spicer says that the president tells him the figures "may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now.'"

Notes:
On Day 46, Gold Star father and Trump critic Khizr Khan cancelled a scheduled speaking engagement in Canada, claiming his travelling privileges were under review. There are unanswered questions about his claim. As a US citizen with a valid passport and no felony convictions, Khan has a right to travel overseas. There are really no privileges, as such, that can be revoked. A few spiteful things could be done involving having ones name added to either the No Fly List or the Secondary Security Screening Selection list, but there's no use speculating until Mr. Khan clarifies what he's talking about.


Days 1-40 are up top in the sticky http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/41...-days-1651105/

this will come as a shock to all of you I'm sure but Pence was lying when he said he didn't know about flynn's turkey stuff till tuesday--when not only did it hit the main news for a bit--well it also turns out cummings (D-house ethics committee) told him about it 3 months ago.

ya know UK doesn't have a fifth amendment... brits wanna help farage "remember" what that meeting was about?

suitedjustice is a gentleperson and a scholar!

suitedjustice, thank you for your continued sevice. One I hadn't caught when it happened was Mitch saying "uh no" about Mexico paying for the wall. What's even better is he starts laughing afterward. Like that's gotta be a first: a Republican Senate Majority Leader laughing contemptuously at the head of his party in full view of the press. Amazing.

After 100 days, we should have your worked etched in stone and displayed in the National Mall. It will be like the Veterans Memorial, but for incompetence.

I still can not believe the tax returns have not been hacked. Did the IRS delete all digital evidence? How long do they keep records anyway?

-------------------------

If anyone actually read this
http://www.democracycorps.com/attach...2017_FINAL.pdf
Horrendous indictment of the corporate Democratic establishment (Hillary & Co Dems)

And, they are working on the Judicial:

(Note: it is common practice for presidents to get rid of their predecessor's appointees. That is not the focus. It is the heavy-handed manner with which it is being done.)

http://www.cleveland.com/court-justi...ml#incart_2box

Thank you!

Lol, I'll have to check out the video! Everything I'm getting down is thanks to the hardworking "fake" "dishonest" media: headlines and details taken from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, the Hill, Politico and even Buzzfeed, who used to be a huge joke, but has hired a decent reporting crew of late.

Thanks suited j.

Finding a solid connection from Trump people colluding with Russia will not happen.

Why?

Because Putin hated Hillary, he didn't care about who her opponent was. Its really only a Putin-hates-Hillary story.

Top level analysis. If only there was a shred of evidence for your position and all that pesky evidence of links between Trump's camp and Russia didn't exist, hey?

Facts are the cryponite for nearly every single position of the right.

I guess? It's still not THAT coherent: Trump has a lot of investments everywhere. Why were his Russian interests so paramount that he allowed himself to horse trade with Putin? And how did they compromise him? With pee pee videos? And then what did the Russians get? Sanctions removed? They avoided HRC, who seemed more hawkish against their interests? Maybe; the thing that seems to have rankled Putin and Russian interests the most is the The American/EU sanctions against Rosneft in conjunction with the sale of the company after their aggression in the Ukraine, but even that is pretty much conjecture.

You have to admit this plot and scandal seems really Rube Goldbergish and not clear. And as I said, we're just two guys on the internet with a lot of freedom to Google around and cull together sources and speculate; that's good and bad since the bar is pretty low for us to shoot from the hip. Media or more respectable people have to toe a line; has anyone on the left, the Democrats, anyone in the media really laid out the scandal front to back? The best I can see is someone like Josh Marshall at TPM. But even as you describe it ("Trump has business interests, they have him compromised, they colluded to win") still leaves like a dozen unanswered questions that no one has -- to my knowledge, anyway -- really satisfactorily answered. The best I've seen are scenarios like us -- people on the internet trying to cull together something coherent.

To me that seems like a problem. Or it seems indicative of past 'scandals' that were more manufactured than substance. Where the actual crimes and wrongdoings and motivations and incentives and conclusions weren't really obvious or clear and random evidence and data was presented (basically, as I said, p-hacking a scandal out of random anecdotal stuff).

I agree it's all fishy but if the left and Democrats want to do real damage, I think the onus is on someone to put the whole story together here.

So far everything they've cut has been in the hundreds of millions at best, so we just need them to cut a few hundred more small programs and we've got that military increase paid off.


Then we just need to cut a few hundred more to pay for the wall. Piece of cake and totally the way a smart businessman would do things.

I think it all makes more sense if we stop assuming it is only Russia with which the Trump organization had or has nefarious ties. There is good evidence for several other non-Russian examples. See the recent episode of The Gist for an example in Azerbaijan.

Russia is getting all the attention because its leader is Putin (a classic American adversary) and they appear to have directly interfered with the election.

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcas...jan_hotel.html

I mean the most coherent version of the story is basically that the Russians engage in a bunch of low-rent trolls of the global liberal order akin to just what we witnessed: ham-handed hacks to get rubes to hand over their passwords ala Podesta, dumping it to Wikileaks, funding fake news operations.

Trump is a low-rent grifter who leads a political movement that is actually quite explicit in their admiration for Putin's ethnonationalist authoritarian disruption troll regime and wants to import it the West.

I'm sure if we squint hard enough we'll find some crimes in here but all of this seems transparent enough.

In the end, scandalizing this seems like a form of cognitive dissonance. We recognize that we have some systemic biases that favor a rich minority (FPTP system, federalized voting that allows systemic disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, the EC). That's all hard to dismantle and entrenched and baked in, and the left and the Democrats don't know how to tackle that quickly. So like other hard problems, we move onto what we can solve quickly.

And so we scandalize the election results: rightfully horrified that so many of our fellow Americans are happy to abandon democratic principles and cozy up to the nascent authoritarian nationalist movement, we declare it a scandal. It's terrible, it's sad, I'm horrified, and Trump and Putin are liars and scoundrels. But more or less, this is all kayfabe -- the lying and scandals obscuring what is pretty obvious that this is all for grift and personal enrichment at the elite levels of the authoritarian nationalist order; and it's powered in societies with some democratic social norms by the perceived payoff that racial and religious minorities might finally get brutalized by the state. And while I'm sure there are some genuine morons who aren't hip to what's going on, *most* people who are behind Trump understand the game and simply want it. Others who feel slightly bothered by Trumpism but ultimately voted straight ticket Republican, aren't actively resisting any of them, and serve to empower the movement here via passive consent -- sure, maybe they aren't front-line soldiers in the nationalist autocracy but they have made their priorities and hierarchies visible, and decided the tax cuts are going to be so sweet that harassed Muslims and immigrants and a highly degraded political culture where our norms eroded is worth it.

Scandalize it if we must; I hope scandalizing this works. But let's admit it too -- scandalizing the Trump/Putin collusion -- seems like a pretty transparent short-sighted reaction to a problem we can't solve via the tools we'd prefer to use (e.g., engineering genuine popular consensus and revulsion against the movement on principle).

I think these are good points but you are missing the huge difference between corruption as usual and the Russian example. There is good evidence they directly interfered in the election and possibly tipped the scales to Trump. This is not corruption as usual. This is a significant deviation from the norm and, if repeatable, either in the US or elsewhere could be a serious blow to the democratization of the globe.

It is very likely Russia is trying again right now in France.

Sure, OK. Just to be clear. What was the "direct interference" again, that Russians engaged in? Remember I read the news so I get the broad outlines but I want to make sure we have consensus on this definition before I consent to agreeing there are huge differences and this is very exceptional.

So let's define the extent of their direct interference.

Glibly in the sardonic tone, I think we can sum their direct interference as: they convinced a not insignificant percentage of the electorate that Trump's opponent's scandalous nature was typified by a pedarasty ring operated inside a pizza joint.

To that I would say, OK, that did happen. But come now. If your republic rests on stuff like that NOT happening, then we were a weak, sickly, diseased system already rotted to the core.

Like democracy is great, the liberal order will endure, and civic wisdom will rule the day.

...unless opposed interests tell fantastical preposterous lies to flatter the sensibilities of the ethnic majority's retrograde resentments against minorities. That is completely unbeatable exceptional direct interference and cheating of the highest order.

How is hacking servers not "direct interference"? This isn't mere convincing, it's blantantly illegal activity.