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suddenly shaggy

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  1. Trump also held up aid to Ukraine in 2017 and 2018. He also refused White House meeting with Ukraine's previous President (Petro Poroshenko) until Poroshenko stopped all investigations in to Manafort and the Black Ledger that revealed massive corruption under the Russian Puppet Viktor Yanukovych.

    Lots of interesting bits in this new Daily Beast article. Mick Mulvaney held up sending Javelin anti-tank misses to Ukraine, because he was worried that it might twist Putin's panties a bit.  OMB officials were interfering in aid for other countries, besides Ukraine. Which other countries was OMB also interfering with for Trump's personal gain? 

    She (White House official Catherine Cross) noted that

    OMB staff also started attending meetings regarding aid to countries besides Ukraine and that the increase in their involvement was “quite taxing on a very small organization...

    “In a briefing with Mick Mulvaney, the question centered around the Russian reaction,” she continued. 

    “What was the concern about the Russian reaction?” asked the staffer. 

    “That Russia would react negatively to the provision of Javelins to Ukraine,” she said. 

     

    Quote

    Under Mick Mulvaney’s leadership, the Office of Management and Budget temporarily put a hold on the delivery of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine in 2017 because of concerns their arrival would upset Russia, according to former White House official Catherine Croft. 

    She described OMB’s objection as “highly unusual.”

    Croft’s testimony indicates that concerns about the U.S. relationship with Russia had a direct—though short-lived—impact on U.S./Ukraine policy in the first year of Trump’s presidency.

    Croft told congressional impeachment investigators that after the Trump administration greenlit the delivery of Javelin missiles to Ukraine in late 2017—the first delivery of lethal aid to the country since Russian separatists seized territory in its Eastern region in 2014—Mulvaney’s office held it up. 

    “Did you understand why?” asked the congressional staffer questioning her. 

    “I understood the reason to be a policy one,” she replied. 

    “What was the policy one?” 

    “In a briefing with Mick Mulvaney, the question centered around the Russian reaction,” she continued. 

    “What was the concern about the Russian reaction?” asked the staffer. 

    “That Russia would react negatively to the provision of Javelins to Ukraine,” she said. 

    The Daily Beast first reported last month that OMB held up the 2017 shipment of Javelins to Ukraine. Croft said the hold lasted “about a week or two,” and that “all of the policy agencies” wanted the aid to go to Ukraine. She said OMB’s interest in the decision about whether to send Javelins to Ukraine was abnormal. 

    “[It] was rather unusual to have OMB expressing concerns that were purely policy-based and not budget-oriented,” she said. 

    “At the beginning of the Ukrainian Javelin process, I had been told that OMB was taking a policy interest,” she continued. “And OMB began sending working level officials to attend meetings... which was very unusual at the time.” 

    She noted that OMB staff also started attending meetings regarding aid to countries besides Ukraine and that the increase in their involvement was “quite taxing on a very small organization.”

    Mulvaney and several other OMB officials have refused to participate in the congressional impeachment inquiry.

     

     https://www.thedailybeast.com/mulvaneys-omb-held-up-lethal-ukraine-aid-in-2017-for-fear-of-russian-reaction

  2. 41 minutes ago, Degenerate Gardner said:

    Long but informative dive into a entity that was news to me, TheSoul Pulishing. 

    Lawfareblog

    The Biggest Social Media Operation You’ve Never Heard of Is Run Out of Cyprus by Russians

    What the heck is TheSoul Publishing? I’m still honestly not sure.

    Here’s what I do know: Measured in terms of views and subscribers, it had the third-largest reach of any group of entertainment channels on YouTube in November—outranked only by Disney and WarnerMedia. It is run by Russian nationals and based in and managed from Cyprus, with U.S. operations housed in a shared work space in New York. It funds itself with ad revenues from YouTube and Google worth tens of millions of dollars. And in 2018, it purchased a small suite of Facebook advertisements targeting U.S. citizens on political issues—and it made those purchases in rubles.

     

    Here’s what I do know: Measured in terms of views and subscribers, it

    had the third-largest reach of any group of entertainment channels on YouTube in November—outranked only by Disney and WarnerMedia. It is run by Russian nationals...

    TheSoul’s numbers are undeniably impressive. Its largest channels have millions of subscribers and billions of views, according to information publicly available on the YouTube channels themselves. As of Dec. 16, 2019, 5-Minute Crafts had more than 62.8 million subscribers, and a total of 16,648,886,677 viewsBright Side had more than 32.3 million subscribers and 6,286,157,368 views.

     

    All pages started 2015, or later. Now has the third largest reach behind only Disney and WB. That should get everyone's attention and is fucking staggering. They are making tens of millions of dollars and can pay for themselves many times over. Producing and distributing Russian propaganda is now highly profitable. 

     

    TheSoul isn’t only on YouTube. It has also built an

    enormous Facebook presence—which is impressive given that the pages I have examined were all developed after 2015 and thus have had only a few years to attract an audience. For example, Bright Side, whose Facebook presence claims to have begun in June 2004—Facebook’s transparency measures put the start date on July 2, 2015—has more than 44 million followers. By contrast, the New York Times’s Facebook page has a comparatively paltry 16 million followers. Lawfare’s meager Facebook page has just over 24,000 followers.

     

    What type of things are they discussing on these Russian propaganda channels?

    Russia occupying the bulk of Asia and Europe. 

    Screen%20Shot%202019-12-18%20at%208.35.2

     

     

    Josef Stalin was actually a Robin Hood like crusader for the poor.

    The second leader after Lenin’s death was Josef Stalin. He started to recover the country after the revolution.

    Josef reformed the country. He took the wealth from rich people and the property from the middle class and united all of these people with poor ones in the collective farm and the collective property. Russian Robin Hood—bang! ...

     

    The US did not purchase Alaska from Russia, Kruschev gifted it to the US in 1957. Questioning the US claim on Alaska is a popular topic for Russian disinformation. 

    By 1960, the Soviet Union succeeded, in 1957 the rent of Alaska was over and the country’s leader at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, gifted Alaska to the USA. That’s when Alaska became the 49th state of the US.

     

    Buying political ads for US elections and paying in rubles. 

    One thing that TheSoul is definitely doing on Facebook, however, is buying ads—and, at least sometimes, it’s doing so in rubles on issues of national importance, targeting audiences in the United States.

     

     

    Cue our cadre of Russia apologists to yet again falsely claim Russian interference amounts to a few Jesus arm wrestling Satan gifs. 

     

    • Like 2
  3. 9 minutes ago, shnsajax said:

     


    Is this the point they all drink the grape flavoraid?

     

    Not looking like it. Judging on Anastasis and zork's posts, it looks like they are going to try to fuck a different chicken for a while.

    They are all in on the lies, why would reality start intruding into their worldview now? Don't look for a bottom, or a line. There is none. 

  4. 3 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

    LOL. You distancing yourself now from your prior deep throated defense of the veracity of the specific claims of the Steele dossier? I am not sure that you really know what a strawman is. I mean it is clear that you don't know what appeal to authority is.

    You forgot your gif. I just can't take you seriously without a gif.

  5. 8 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

    Focus bitch made. Maybe Horowitz will include the FBI assessment table that relates the verification status of each of the claims in the Steele dossier.  Then wecan compare it to the WaPo piece you love. That would be something. 

    Your first sentence is a personal attack. Your second sentence is an appeal to authority. Your third sentence sets up a strawman. 

    Even for you, this is an impressive amount of consecutive logical fallacies.

    If only you'd concluded it with a gif that grotesquely oversimplifies and misstates the situation. So close to a masterpiece of trolling and yet so far. 

     

    • Like 2
  6. Just now, hayden_horn said:

    sigh. whatever. it gives ammo. it's an unforced error. 

    i've made my thoughts clear, yall can disagree.

    I'm not sure it is. The GOP and FOX are going to gaslight. Dems are just picking what topic the GOP is going to lie about.

    Let them spin their histrionics on it. It's pretty easy to show they are massively overreacting by showing people what she actually said. 

  7. 4 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:

    eh, she might have gone full mama bear, but got her spokeswoman to compose it up. it was a regretful comment by the professor. 

    There's nothing inappropriate about what she said. As per usual, the GOP is tilting at windmills. 

    ""The Constitution doesn’t allow titles of nobility," she said. "The president can name his son Barron, but he can’t make him a baron."

    • Like 4
  8. The money is only half of it. Russia is one of the best in the world at cyber espionage. He's also got blackmail material on a lot of these traitors. Work for Putin and he'll reward you. Go against him and he'll destroy you.  

    Plata o plomo.

    Серебряный или вести.

    Silver or lead.

    • Like 2
  9. 27 minutes ago, 4th&Five said:

    from the trump campaign:

     

    Non-Existent dick, crackless ass and adult diaper all confirmed. 

  10. 7 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    Straw man fallacy (both in the choice you offer, and  in your apparent attribution to me of a position I have not taken).  I don't think that a coup and resulting violence is either preferable or equally proportional to his missteps.  Of the two courses, I'd prefer a re-run of the election.  Of ALL courses, I'd prefer that he hadn't gone down the goddamned "president for life" road that this type of leader fucking ALWAYS seems to go down, making the current outcome more likely than it should have been.

    ^ Spot on and pretty much how everyone on here feels, bad_teammate and Fozzz's constant obfuscation and intentional sowing of discord not withstanding. Fucking trolls. 

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