Rep. Nunes will, on occasion, make an accurate statement! ---I loved Fiona Hill's testimony and had to keep reminding myself she worked for Dr. Strangelove - er - John Bolton who would attach himself to a missile aimed at Iran or Russia. So I take her sure bet assumption Ukraine had zero to do with the 2016 election with a grain of salt.
In theory, two different nations could monkey around in the same U.S. election! That said, did Ukraine "meddle" or "interfere" with the 2016 election? Within our current tribal wars, this question has been bouncing around in the past two weeks, almost always being discussed in a muddled, incoherent manner.
Daily Howler
And let me ask this very dangerous question -- How do I know for sure that all Hunter Biden did was collect his 50K a year? Or that he never slipped a few words to his dad to earn that 50K? Sorry, but I've always viewed Joe Biden as suspect from way back when as a senator for banking and credit card companies. Obama saved him from himself by making him VP, though Obama is certainly not showing Joe much love lately. Actually I think that the Trump attacks to weaken and already weakened Biden have helped other candidates who in the long run may have a better chance than Biden of beating him.
I'm looking at all sides of the issues as a way to read through the muck. There are minority voices on the left/liberal wings that are pushing back against the Democratic narrative. Michael Fiorillo has been a left skeptic of Russiagate from the earliest days. Blogger Daily Howler advertises himself as a member of the liberal tribe though I'm not so sure at times since he seems to aim most of his darts at the so-called liberal press, with particular focus on MSNBC, the NY Times and Washington Post. I posted his comments on the ICE-Mail listserve and here Michael comments - followed by the DH post.
Fiorillo:
Wow, it's shocking to observe some sanity and critical thinking in an American journalist concerning Son of Russiagate.The "Manafort Ledger" was released to the US media by members of the Ukrainian government, with the explicit purpose of harming Trump's campaign - and it did, resulting in Manafort leaving the campaign - as reported contemporaneously by the Financial Times. The Ukrainians had obvious reasons to prefer Clinton, given Trump's statements about Russia and Putin over the years, yet somehow that doesn't rise to the Pearl Harbor/911-level of interference the #McResistance TM insists we feel about childish, semi-literate Facebook posts, supposedly sent by the Russian government (although unable to provide evidence of such, Mueller and the DOJ have in fact been prohibited from making that claim in court, not that Rachel Maddow would ever consider that news).It should also be pointed out that, while Russian government hacking of the DNC and Podesta is certainly plausible (unlike the "collusion" narrative, which was preposterous and riven with inconsistencies from the start), in fact it has not been "proven" that they did so.Recall that the DNC to this day has not turned over its servers to the FBI for forensic analysis, which was instead done by Crowdstrike, a DNC vendor (which probably relates to Trump's incoherant/confused reference to it in the Zelensky phone call).Additionally, Bill Binney, a mathematician who was a rock star at the NSA (and later a whistleblower revealing NSA spying on ths US populace) and is now a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, claims that, based on the information made publicly available, it would not have been possible for the DNC/Podesta data to have been hacked remotely; he claims instead it must have been downloaded on to a thumb drive. He claims it was a whistleblower, not a hacker, who revealed the info.The point is, the "proof" about Russian Interference In Our Democracy is less certain than is claimed and which the #McResistance TM would have us think.Enjoy Son of Russiagate Theater while you can, since it's likely to help re-elect Hair Furor.But the #McResistance TM is actually fine with that, just as long as they control the narrative and keep Bernie from the nomination...
Posted: 23 Nov 2019 09:41 AM PST
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2019
Why we can't have nice things: Trigger warning! We start today with a statement so vile that it may rock your world.
The statement in question goes like this:
Even a tribalized player like Devin Nunes will make the occasional accurate statement.