Rudy Giuliani was hired for one reason: to immunize the Trump base from revelations of the president’s wrongdoing with respect to Russia. He has no other purpose. He’s not a lawyer here. He’s not a fixer. He’s a party mouthpiece and his job is to give the base enough information in just the right way that it softens the blow for the truth and they dismiss it as unimportant.
“He didn’t know about the payments”
“He knew about the payments but didn’t authorize them”
“He authorized them but that’s not illegal”
“It might be illegal but it’s a minor infraction. Everybody does it”
Now this:
“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign… I have not. I said the President of the United States,”
Next will be:
“Ok, the President was colluding with the Russians but that doesn’t mean he knew what they were going to do.”
Then:
“So he knew what the Russians were going to do but he didn’t authorize it”
“He authorized it but he didn’t know it would be successful”
“It was successful but that doesn’t mean he agreed to do anything for Russia in return”
“Ok, so he agreed to lift sanctions, exit Syria and undermine NATO but that doesn’t mean he’s a Russian asset”
“Sure he’s a Russian asset but that doesn’t mean he knew what he was doing. Everybody knows that Trump is a fucking halfwit. ”
{{facepalm}}
“I got nothin'”
Now we all might be wondering why Giuliani is diving into his fall from Grace. A couple of possibilities:
1.) His recent divorce is expensive and he needs the money.
2.) He likes the attention.
3.) He’s a cynical SOB and he figures the law will catch up with Trump eventually. At least Hillary was never President.
Or all of the above.
*****************************
And now this:
Isn’t Liberty University a Jerry Falwell creation? Yes! Yes, it is! Fancy that. The evangelicals were paid to rig a poll (lie to the public), in order to get a very bad, unscrupulous man elected.
Hmmm, that sounds like something that I’ve heard before…
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
By jove, I think you’ve got it!
The news is a swirl today, although I can’t any of this surprising. I just listened to Virginia Heffernen interview real life Hero Bill Browder on Trumpcast. Mr. Browder described how even upstanding US citizens can get pulled into acting as an asset/agent for Russia. None of it is new, but the Russians have devoted much effort, money and manpower to finding the small crack in an individual’s ethical stance and leveraging it to the fullest extent.
Of course, with someone like Trump, his lack of any ethics makes that work much easier.
Oh, and “Women for Cohen” on Twitter, promoting his singular hunkiness…ahahahahahahaha! You can’t make this stuff up!
Chris Matthews was fangirling all over “movie star handsome” Michael Cohen, last night and you are right-you can’t make this stuff up.
Giuliani literally says things that a mob boss would say. “Yeah, we stole the money, but we weren’t the first ones to do something like that.”
The next step will be, “There was collusion, but it’s not a crime, and Hillary and Obama colluded with many countries while in office. England, Canada, France, Denmark.. Trump chose to collude with Russia. Same thing, just different countries.”
Republicans do anything and everything to win; their weird perverted marriage of financial rapaciousness and religion allows them to rationalize all of it. Rig polls, suppress the vote, give polling data to Russia to use; tell Russia to hack mails; lie about everything; pervade the media with planted fake news stories. It’s all of a piece. They have no compunction, no standards, no boundaries. We used to call this organized crime. They’ll never, ever stop, just mutate into new methods of corruption and cheating. The only possible antidote is people wising up, doing their own research, using logic, and fighting against it. “Both sides” is an antiquated notion. Waiting for Republicans to somehow revert to an imagined past era, is futile. Hoping for bipartisanship is ludicrous. It would be like hoping for Capone to go straight, and give his money to charity.
Colluding to do what?
Conspiracy is more accurate.
Conspiring to do what?
Defraud the citizens of the US. Conspiring against the USA.
America First is a conspiracy against the USA! Black is white! How many levels of Jew brainwashing you on, bucko?
Ok, Blizz, you know we only let you post here because you serve a useful purpose. But anti-semitism is not allowed.
You will be moderated from now on.
Note to other commenters: don’t overreact to Blizz. He wants to provoke and irritate. His droogs are in for a very rude awakening soon and this is his burning screeching swamp monster shtick.
It won’t last.
Oh and I got two words for you, Blizz:
President Pelosi.
Probably won’t happen but you never know. It’s looking dodgy for trump and pence.
Have a nice lunch! 😃
“Note to other commenters: don’t overreact to Blizz.”
I don’t need to – the prime lesson of the last 4000 years of recorded history is “don’t f*k with us – it will end badly eventually”. Antisemitism is always self-correcting. Ask the Assyrians. Or that Austrian housepainter.
I’m 1/8th Jewish, which means I get one day of Hanukkah. And my 1/8th wanted to trap him with a tent stake while he’s sleeping.
Blizzy serves a useful purpose?
This dumb bastard got the inoculation.
Natasha Bertrand, who I sort of imagine as Nancy Drew grown up, and having chosen a journalistic career to continue her sleuthing, notes that Giuliani said that “The President did not collude,” but said nothing about Trump the candidate not colluding.
Sixty votes were needed in the Senate yesterday to keep the administration from removing the sanctions on Deipaska-owned companies. They only got 58, 46 Democrats and 12 Republicans. Bernie Sanders was mysteriously not present for the vote. It wouldn’t look good for him to vote against Russian sanctions, as he always does, while getting ready to run for President as a Democrat.
The sooner we kick these Russian assets out of the Dem primary the better. They can run 3rd party for all I care. So far we have Tulsi and Bernie. I’m sure there are more waiting in the wings to cause dissension and chaos.
Bernie has conveniently missed saying anything about Russian interference, votes sanctions before and yesterday. He should be royally booted out of the race this time around. Kick the motherfucker out. Hillary was too nice and gracious.
pm317,
After Nov., 2016 I came across this op-ed and I find it interesting to re-read or to link to as it concerns Bernie.
It ought to be required reading for every Bernie partisan.
https://www.newsweek.com/myths-cost-democrats-presidential-election-521044
Thanks JMS. Yeah. There is a strain of the extreme left which is as dumb in its arrogance as it is with the extreme right being dumb in its ignorance. Both are strident. Bernie will not receive any concessions this time. People have learnt their lesson I hope. A true democracy is one where these dumb fuckers are given a chance to fuck themselves but the electorate is astute enough to put them in their place.
I got the number slightly wrong, it was 57-42, with 60 votes needed. Every single Democrat voted the right way–except for Bernie, who did not vote. But the news stations which discuss it, say that it fell two votes short. Two votes gets 59. Where is 60? Sanders wasn’t there. No one says that on TV. He is protected by certain broadcast and written journalist types. If Hillary hadn’t shown up for a vote like that when she was in the Senate, it would been talked about forever. Sanders is some kind of asset of Russia. likely not as much so as Trump and his people, or Gabbard, or Stein, or Rand Paul, but to some extent. Russia wanted him to win, if Trump did not. I still wonder why Sanders chose to run in 2016; he and Hillary had voted similarly about 96% of the time in the Senate, so why did he suddenly decide to challenge her? And yes, they will look for another candidate to try to help them, someone who at least will attack the other Democrats. And also they and Republicans will try to get the Democrat with the worst chance to win nationally, to be nominated. The stupid open primaries will help them in that attempt.
Funny, I just looked at the MSNBC website and they certainly mentioned that Bernie wasn’t there for the vote – because he was meeting with the women who reported sexual harassment while working for his campaign.
If you want four more years of Trump, the surest way to do it is to organize the traditional Democratic circular firing squad.
They had only been asking to meet with him for 2 years but this is probably going to not affect Bernie. His voting with Putin on sanctions is going to. I really think he’s done between all the Russian issues he has and now the sexual harassment and assault that went on in 2016.
Remove this motherfucker from office NOW!! He is a national security risk.
Unbelievable!
pm317,
Could not agree with you more. Was completely astounded as this was a congressional delegation trip.
Did you read his letter? OMG, he is so petty and dumb. He mimics the language in her letter but does not realize in so doing, he is exposing national security risks of a person third in line of succession.
It’s been over two years since the election and I still cannot believe that people voted for him. I know people believe that government should be run like a business, but it’s entirely different and it’s not possible or right for a CEO to dictate an agenda the way tRump is doing.
I live in Illinois and in 2014, Bruce Rauner was elected governor. He is a billionaire business man with no previous public service or elected position. He wanted to enact a “turnaround” agenda that favored business as he was a Republican himself.
We did not have a state budget for over 2 years because he refused to work with the legislative leaders, both Democrats. It really became a preview to a tRump administration. It”s that much worse because he is such an ignoramus. He believes the conventions do not apply to him.
I hope that Nancy gives him the “time out” he so thoroughly deserves!
JMS, I have always been upset at so many people in this country pining for a “business type, mistakenly thinking that what it takes to run a business is anything close to what being an effective President requires. I’m sure it started before I followed politics,, but I remember back to when Iacocca and Ueberroth were written about in the major newsweeklies as possible good choices for President. Then of course there was Ross Perot, a crackpot billionaire who got 19% of the vote, and would have gotten more, had he not left the race for some weird reason, and then gotten back in. And there were Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, in California, and many others. People have this idea that “politicians” are all partisan and wasteful and ineffective, but that a person who ran a big company will be frugal because he or she does not need the money, and will somehow be non-partisan. But these rich businesspeople are almost all Republicans, and they are used to ordering people to do what they want them to do, and they almost all think they are smarter than they are. And Trump in that framework, is the ultimate horrifying outcome of American’s flirtation with the man or woman of business.
William,
You are right. I think that people believe that having experience as an executive equates to being an administrator and it doesn’t.
This “run the government like a business crap” goes back at least to Henry Ford’s aborted Presidential campaign in 1924.
People, I think it is time was DC government to shut the water supply to the WH? what do you say?
Sounds about right.
She is waiting for some sex scandal to come out and then she will be really satisfied to vote for him.
Notice she is ignoring the 9 bills to reopen on the House side that McConnell has stopped from bringing it to the floor. Speaker is doing her job. #theAsset and his treason sidekick McConnell are not. BTW, House also voted overwhelmingly to keep the sanctions on the Russian Deripaska’s companies while treason sidekick McConnell and his cronies failed.
McConnell is the worst Senate Majority Leader in history, and I write that confidently, even not knowing much about any of them in the 1800’s. It is one thing to be intransigently partisan. McConnell has broken virtually every norm imaginable. Not holding a hearing for a year on a Supreme Court nominee made by the other party. Now, not bringing bills to the Senate floor which would re-open the government, because he doesn’t want the President of his party to have to veto them and thus look like more of a villain than he is seen as so far, or even to then see his Senate override the veto, thus crippling Trump’s presidency. In other words, he has no interest in the welfare of the citizens, he does not even care about the will of the Senate, he is going to protect Trump at all costs, for whatever reason we might imagine. He has utterly abrogated his constitutional role. He has forever damaged both the Senate and the country. And he doesn’t care.
I hope he chokes on his pretzel. Isn’t there anything the media can dredge up on him? I am sure he is every bit corrupt and shares Russian connections like #theAsset.
I agree with your assessment on him but really shouldn’t there be some recourse for Senate Republican’s. I can’t see how they are stuck with him. Surely, they could remove him from majority leader and put someone in who isn’t so clearly compromised. I find it very odd that just a few people in legislative bodies can amass so much power that they basically dictate everything. I don’t believe that the Founding Fathers meant for a legislative body to be hijacked like this.
(per Lawrence’s show and video) See what McConnell did today when Tim Kaine introduced the bill to reopen. He objected and that was the end of it. He needs to be removed! But I am hearing he shut the senate for the next 10 days. I don’t know what that is about.
This was about yesterday’s vote. Investigate each one of these Republican motherfuckers.
Connecticut Dem senator…Straight from the horse’s mouth. We know but spread it far and wide.
I agree.
FUCK YOU! When we have this motherfucker Cuomo with a megaphone why do we need trump minions to destroy our country? And, what a shame for Mario Cuomo? May be give up that last name, fucker! You are bringing shame to your dad’s name.
That is exactly what Trump and his people are hoping for. That enough media people will say, “Come on, Republicans and Democrats, make some kind of deal!” Both sides get blamed, people start to blame Pelosi as much as Trump. Since McConnell has no intention of negotiating with Pelosi; since Trump will negotiate virtually nothing, that makes Pelosi the one who has to satisfy the hostage takers. This would not happen, if these people who get on the air and have shows, would stop this inane equvalence. I wish I could be on one of these, shows, just to tell Cuomo that the House passed not only a clean bill to fund the government for a couple of months, but the same bill that the Senate had passed almost unanimously a couple of months ago, until Trump changed his mind because of pressure from right-wingers. So it is all on Trump and McConnell. It is really simple. Someone whose father was a long-time Governor of New York, and who has spent much of his life in politics, should be able to figure that out. This is another example of how this incessant both-sidesism of the media is so damaging. There is no right or wrong, or facts or history for them, just two sides arguing, so they must compromise.
Cuomo is getting clobbered with some big names in that thread. My fervent hope is when these media people do this kind of fucked up nonsense, more and more visible and influential people tweet back and put them in their place which correcting them. At least in this thread, it is happening.
Lawrence says he has a senate procedure where senate can bring a bill (to reopen) for vote without McConnell. Watch!
Lawrence on his show says, McConnell is not the only person to bring a bill for vote on the senate floor. Anybody can but the tradition is to restrict it to the majority leader to keep order. Today Tim Kaine announced the bill to reopen for vote disregarding that tradition. But McConnell objected and that was the end of it. So, McConnell is not only not bringing it for vote but he is preventing other senators who have the right to bring it for vote. This is another knock on this motherfucker. How the hell do we get rid of these motherfuckers?
Sneak it in when the motherfucker McConnel is not on the floor. Get the number of R senators needed and revolt.
Federal workers don’t make a lot of money to begin with and if they live around the DC area, much of their salary goes toward rent! and now add this.
Getting closer and closer to #theAsset
Amy Klobuchar asked Barr about this at the hearing
https://twitter.com/justinjm1/status/1086105094037356544
https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1086103249667702785
One thing just occurred to me, as a refugee from the twisted rThug politics of North Carolina (once more making the news as the skullduglerist state in the nation) – much as this looks like the moron in chief throwing yet another high-level temper tantrum, what it has the practical effect of is nullifying the recent elections.
IOW, if the government can’t function, and it can’t as of right now, the House might as well have never been switched over. House Democrats are not able to exercise their newly won powers.
Very much like the rThug attempt to remove a duly elected President, Clinton via ginned-up moral outrage, or just about anything NC rThuglicans have pulled since Roy Cooper won in spite of them.
More than anything else, I believe this is the reason for what the media are breathlessly reporting, without any other context, as the longest shutdown in history.
Even MSNBC is showing the line ‘Trump and Pelosi at odds over shutdown.’ Can’t believe McConnell is not held to account.
My fear is that the media is starting to try to make this a cat fight between trump and Pelosi. Where is McConnell?
Revelations of the past couple of days seem aimed at neutralizing Bill Barr whether they intended that way or not. And Amy Klobuchar grabbed the spotlight again. Her disdain when he didn’t answer was palpable…
Logic does not work well with people who knowingly don’t want to see it or who are inoculated.
Others remind him in that tweet, it is “factual claims”
People are catching up to my theory that the Bushies are trying to save the party after trump while GOP uses him to do all their dirty deeds.
Sounds like a valid theory. After Watergate, I thought that the Republicans would not win an election for decades, but Ford almost won the very next one, and then the Republicans won the next three. Most people chose to believe that the Republican Party was fine, it was just Nixon who was crooked. After Iran-Contra. the Republicans won the next election with the person who somehow claimed he was out of the loop on it. After Clinton turned the deficit into a surplus, and left office with a 65% favorability rating, the Republicans “won” the next election and the one after that. After the Republican agenda led to the near destruction of the world economy, they lost two Presidential elections, but Republicans across the country took over the Congress and almost all of the state legislatures.
So sadly enough, people do not seem able to make the connection. And so it is very possible that even if Trump is removed from office, Republicans will be able to keep winning other races. I keep hoping for some Democrats to be able to tie the entire party to this swamp of corruption and treason, because most of them are either a part of it, or are knowingly enabling it. Hillary would have done that. Most of the other Democrats in high positions seem desperate to try to coax Republicans to just get rid of Trump, by praising them as “the party of Lincoln,” (a nonsensical concept, since that was 160 years ago, with a much different alignment), or saying things like, “I hope our friends across the aisle will step up…” They aren’t our friends. They won’t step up to much of anything. I am choosing not to see the “Vice” movie, because I remember all of that era, and it was so miserable and almost hopeless. The thought of a repeat of that era, with a Republican President who is not a lowlife like Trump, but is simply a willing pawn of the mega-corporations, a follower of social darwinist “trickle down” economics, a non-believer in climate science or preservation of our natural resources, is very depressing, but it is very possible. I want the whole party to be forever tarred with the Trump Presidency, and rendered unelectable. But they have tons of money, and most of the media, so they are not too worried about it. People are so desperate for any sign that some of them will move away from Trump, that they would receive great praise if they did, a praise which would be for something which was simply political preservation on their part.
McConnell has announced that the Senate is to be shut down for ten days? Is that going to get headlines? Kevin McCarthy yesterday said he was appalled that Pelosi had scheduled a trip to meet the troops in Afghanistan, apparently because he thinks she should be “negotiating.” But Lindsey Graham traveled to the dictatorship of Turkey, and the Senate is shut down. Is the media afraid of McConnell? Because he is never blamed for any of it. And why did he shut down the Senate? I assume, so that some senators could not keep calling for a vote on the House bill to reopen the government.
Yeah Chris Murphy was tweeting that last night and I couldn’t believe it. Nothing will change for 10 days. Scary! Media is not making any move to hold McConnell accountable. They didn’t even air Kaine’s attempt to introduce bill to reopen and him objecting to it without explanation.
#callthevote get this trending!
My own speculation about why Mueller responded to Buzzfeed article is to just say to people, hold your horses, we are not there yet. Because some lawmakers and other people started saying what if Mueller waiting for and if he has that evidence he should put it out before it is too late and that congress should start impeachment proceedings. People were getting ahead of it and Mueller wanted to slow them down and also say unequivocally that this information did not come from their office.
Haha… Tribe agrees with me. Had not seen this comment before making my comment above (aka give me some credit…)
“Pro-life” motherfuckers not pro-file at all. Imagine that! Fuck this administration and their supporters.
I can’t tell you the disgust I feel for that guy and all his peers over there, not to mention the parents and the school system that are hoisting these next generation bastards on this earth and in this world. I would spit on that motherfucker if I were standing there. It is even more abhorrent to note that the person he is harassing is a descendant of the people who have the first claim to this land. Where can we deport this obnoxious motherfucker and all the rest of the horrible people surrounding him to?
https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1086670906787852289
These kids, these kids are just despicable. But they get this from home and from their environment, their friends. Their actions are the opposite of what this country is about. It seems like all the progress we’ve made is going up in smoke. These kids and their parents need to be ridiculed and ostracized.
https://twitter.com/RedTRaccoon/status/1086673387974545413
“…They were brought up to believe I’m less than human.” Breaks my heart to read that. But like Kumail Nanjiani said in that podcast with Preet, yeah it hurts but the problem lies with those kids and their parents, school, community and not Mr. Phillips. He must know that. We know that.
OK Chris Cuomo doing it right in this video only if temporarily because there is no telling they will go back to both sides in the next breath.
https://twitter.com/CuomoPrimeTime/status/1086452819882901505
Rudy Ghooliani pranced around the TV shows to protect trump and he knew buzzfeed article was coming
Buzzfeed produced an article blaming trump…not revealing sources (of course) and this time it was a direct hit on trump, suborning perjury
Mueller got involved only to the extent to say ‘not my sources…we are not ready yet.’
But as Katyal says in the video, there is enough to start the process in congress without jeopardizing Mueller.
SCOTUS rejected to take up DACA yesterday and it is in effect for one more year (as I saw in a tweet). I think #theAsset was waiting to see if they will take up DACA. I think he might open the government with some face saving now.
Nope, just offering to repair the damage he did to DACA in the first place for that fucking wall. A no go with Dems.
Putting money for border security has never been a problem for Democrats and they have but yet, A. B. Stoddard spouts both sides on TV that the Democrats must do that in return for whatever the fuck #the Asset offers including DACA which is lame because SCOTUS is not doing anything about DACA and the Dems don’t want it unless it includes full rights for the DACA recipients.
One could say, never underestimate Trump; but it is the media which allows him to get away with what he does. And he and his people know it. And all the things the media has done wrong in the last thirty years, were things that they chose to do. Increasingly owned by right wing billionaires, the media mostly carries the narrative handed to it by the American oligarchs/ And of the few which resist that, there are plenty of them who still bend over backwards to play their favorite games of “both sides,” and “why can’t they work together?”
Trump offered essentially nothing, he never has in his life. He offered to restore something that he had recently taken away, and only temporarily, in exchange for a permanent guarantee of wall funding. This would never work, unless the media helped him to sell it. Trump is a very stupid person, but he and his advisors have a sort of cunning; and Russia helps them in that regard. Shut down the government, then make an offer of almost nothing, and then unless Democrats accept it, blame it all on them. And the media, which feels guilty for always going after Trump, is eager to start blaming Democrats again, even if Hillary isn’t exactly there as a target. And of course they feel guilty about pushing the Buzzfeed story. As to Buzzfeed, I wonder if this was just overeager and shoddy journalism, or a set-up. And Ben Smith, former head of right-wing front Politico, is now head of Buzzfeed. Whatever the case. if the media were not so eager to start blaming Democrats for the shutdown, the same way they blamed Hillary for everything, Trump’s strategy would never work. But people do not understand nuances, they just want to have the government reopened. There will be another offer soon, and it will scarcely be better, but the media will say, “Trump continues to offer compromise, but Pelosi refuses to negotiate.”
My fear is that that motherfucker McConnel will bring this proposal to vote and force other republicans to vote yes when all Dems will vote no. Media better not put it on the Dems.
Media better frame the narrative properly next week.
THIS! Exactly this.
https://twitter.com/TonyFratto/status/1086733377716158465
Yep, all Kavanaughs but won’t end up in the SCOTUS that takes some exceptional privileges.
https://twitter.com/TheKerryOMalley/status/1086806380600733697
This is in the right direction. Democrats should get people on the border states who say the Wall is ineffective and propose other ideas they think will work and Democrats should make the case, that that is what they will fund and not a red cent for the Wall.
Yep, good symbolism to adopt.
Oh myyyy…
Break time. 😛
“Werr iz mouse? We wuz told evry compooter haz mouse!”
Brilliant.
Uh, that’s NOT what the sign means… 😮
Funny
Since we have one coming up Sunday night:
Good mom but I am feeling a bit of sad for the third kitten which is left out.
https://twitter.com/ellievan65/status/1086658015590264832
The right wing already has developed an alternative narrative for the boorish behavior of the Covington Catholic students saying that Mr. Phillips purposefully went to that one kid and stood in front of him and banged his drums in his ears. BTW, G. Conway, the guy who is going to save us from trump, retweeted one such tweet.
Yeah. They are crazy. Even in the short clips you can see the guy move close to Phillips all the while staring down at him.
This thread gives you some info about the school. Another G’Town Prep with a whole lot of Kavanaughs in the making but now with trump steroids in their blood.
Live coverage of the lunar eclipse.