Fun fact. The “Gr” in his last name is silent.
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Go placidly amid the noise and waste,
And remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep.
Rotate your tires.
Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself,
And heed well their advice, even though they be turkeys.
Know what to kiss, and when.
Consider that two wrongs never make a right, but that three do.
Wherever possible, put people on hold.
Be comforted that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment,
and despite the changing fortunes of time,
There is always a big future in computer maintenance.
‘Deteriorata’
National Lampoon
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TPM is basically dedicated to the idea that spewing lazy MSM CW narratives is the opposite of journalism and a mortal threat to democracy. Which means that when they fall into them, you get a glimpse of how those narratives are born and perpetuated.
The “still largely unsubstantiated” line is purely a matter of defensive narrative, a response to the right-wing ref-working. That’s why the MSM uses it and it’s not surprising that it gets picked up and unthinkingly incorporated into reporting by people who associate with the regular MSM. And the thing is, no one in either the nearstream media like TPM or the regular MSM has gone back and compared what we know now to the dossier. If they did, they would see that almost all of it is at least consistent with what we know now, they’d see that the “unsubstantiated” portions neatly tie things we do know into a coherent narrative, they’d see that significant parts of it have, in fact, been substantiated, and they’d see that very little of it has been discredited.
Seth Abramson’s has been doing a lot of this work in one to two hundred tweet Twitter threads. It is work that should be read critically and skeptically, and you should always bear in mind that the speculation linking the facts isn’t fact. But it’s fascinating. His problem is that his medium, and his history as a really over the top Berniebro, of the delegate math magical thinking variety, undermine his credibility. And of course, Maddow is deemed inherently lacking in credibility by the MSM because the alternative is admit she’s kicking their ass.
But the real barrier to anyone taking a hard look at it is the pee-tape allegations. As far as most of the people in the MSM are concerned, that is the entire dossier. The slightly more “look how savvy i am” take is that, no, of course the pee tape stuff is the least important part of it, but it has become so associated with the dossier in the public mind that we simply can’t be seen to be taking it seriously lest we risk our precious credibility by trying to inform people that stuff they think they know is wrong.
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First, that phrasing deserves to be seen again. And second, because the above quotes are empirically true, it makes one wonder*: why could the Dems not field a candidate who could beat him in 2016???
*Avoiding a tangential discussion by not using the phrase “begs the question”!
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Dems did field a candidate who beat him. The reason she didn’t win the EC vote was Jim Comey + suspiciously precise Russian microtargeting of a few people in a few key swing states.
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Charles E. Grassley, is a self-proclaimed “pig farmer from Iowa,” but isn’t a attorney, however he heads the Senate Judiciary Committee!
I never knew being a pig farmer (nothing against pig farmers) made you smart enough to head a Senate committee, however in the world of republicans, if you were around a pig sty say 60 years ago, you’re smart enough to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee!
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No arguments with you there, but i am referring to the Iowa Senate seat. I can see how the quoted phrasing in my comment could be applied to either Republican.
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But the longer they drag this out then the more money Trump is syphoning out of the RNC to pay for Trump and Fils legal defense, thus less money for campaigns. Hmmmm
Info on Fusion GPS
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Trivia question. Remember the old “Andy Griffith Show”? What was the name of that actor that played Andy Griffith on the show?
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A drop in the bucket. Last I saw it’s up to 400k. The RNC could wipe their ass with 400K and still run an election that would wipe Dems off the map. Hell, at the moment Sally and Charlotte could raise enough money at their lemonade stand to take down most Democrats.
Indeed. Republicans could easily inveigle conspirators to testify before their committees by offering them immunity and thereby making them unprosecutable. Everyone remembers what happened with Ollie North.
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During the Clinton administration, especially after Rethugs took the majority in Congress they began hauling every single White House staffer up to testify before multiple committees to try to create perjury traps. “Why, Ms. Clerk-Typist, you told my colleague before the Beggar-You-With-Legal-Bills Committee that you ate a peanut butter sandwich on that date, and now you’re admitting it also had jelly! Were you lying then, or are you lying now? And think very carefully, maam, what flavor was the alleged jelly?”
I’d bring a lawyer, especially if I was innocent.
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I guess I’ve always felt if I knew the truth about my actions, and relayed the same exact story, consistently, to any questions about what I did, it would leave scant opening for alleging an inconsistency. I get out of bed, look at the clock, it’s 6AM. A hundred people can try to trick me about what the hell time I got up, They’re all getting told 6AM. No damned lawyer in the world can assist me in explaining that, nor protect me from getting tripped up on answering the question. If you’re whole story is essentially an extended version of “I got up at 6AM” how damned hard is it to navigate a few questions?
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Oh. The answer to that question is that I am scared Iowa has slipped through our fingers the way Nebraska did. Aging, exceptionally white population, largely rural populations absolutely drenched in Fox and Hate Radio for two decades and, before we know it, Granger states that were once reliably Democratic became occasionally Democratic and are now reliably Republican.
Also possible that Monsanto has slipped some kind of genegineered mind-control protein into the corn pollen, but that’s just a theory. It would explain why the same thing happened to Missouri despite the large urban areas and greater diversity.
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In North Carolina, the answer is “The Single Greatest Actor and Star of the Single Greatest Half Hour Comedy Show in Human History.”
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The distinction that was made by @sonsofares is critical. If a cop doing a canvas knocks on your door and asks you a question whose answer you can prove beyond all question through alibis and, preferably, security footage, yeah, talk to the cops. You’ll make yourself a suspect if you don’t.
But if the circumstances of the questioning indicate that you are already a suspect, you absolutely, positively, must lawyer up. If the cops want you to come down to the station to answer a few questions, it means they are in the process of locking up on you as the perp or as an accessory. If a prosecutor ever, ever, ever wants to talk to you, it’s even more important for you to get a lawyer.
And the problem here is that memory is deeply malleable and plastic. The reason lawyers have people write memos to the file as soon as things happen is that your brain is programmed to make sense of all the random shit that happens in a day by editting and rearranging it into satisfying stories because that’s what enables us to keep us from eating deathcap mushrooms or getting eaten by the lions.
But, unfortunately, cops and jurors look at those mental revisions of reality as proof that you’re lying. And prosecutors look at them as ways to prove to jurors that you’re lying.
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That’s what I think this is about. As dumb as he is, he’s at least smart enough to know that it won’t only be PP to face the music, they’ll all go down with the ship. If it’s as bad as we think it is, next year we may be looking at taking seats we never fathomed would be competitive. That’s what Grassley’s afraid of.
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