Ryan: Still no evidence of collusion between Trump campaign, Russia https://t.co/KTuQt9EfhB pic.twitter.com/AdiU0Z0vRz
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) March 2, 2017
Goalpost 1: No contacts, period.
Goalpost 2: No contacts we're aware of.
Goalpost 3: No evidence of collusion https://t.co/NXk4DoQcrL— Majestik møøse lamb (@ZeddRebel) March 2, 2017
After watching Sam Bee dissect “the Pride of Janesville,” I’m guessing tickets to her April 29th #Not The White House Correspondents Dinner must be very scarce indeed…
***********
But, speaking of weak reeds, if Nixon had relied on people like Carter Page for his dirty work, the Watergate scandal would’ve broken before the 1972 election…
Bizarre Carter Page interview on MSNBC Chris Hayes. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/kkmI5FtgfV
— This Is Not Normal (@NetworkJunkyz) March 3, 2017
Bizarre Carter Page interview on MSNBC Chris Hayes. 2/2 pic.twitter.com/5jaAinBP0n
— This Is Not Normal (@NetworkJunkyz) March 3, 2017
TenguPhule
The Russians must have a tape of Paul Ryan buggering a kindergardener.
It would be irresponsible not to speculate!
Mary G
The change to the Republican platform removing support for Ukraine needs to be run down.
Millard Filmore
Except for Adam Silverman, us balloon-juice commenters don’t have inside connections in politics or the intelligence community. We see the leaks, the rumors like “Trump will die in prison”, the news. We have our hopes and dreams.
The Republican party leadership, on the other hand, DOES have inside connections. They see what we see and a whole lot more. Yet their reaction to the leaks and problems is not what I expect. They are acting as if they can brazen all this out. Who is telling them that obstruction will be a successful strategy, and that they will get through this with their fortunes and freedom intact? This does not add up.
gene108
@Millard Filmore:
They brazened out shutting down the government, blocking a jobs bill, and a bunch of other stuff without a problem…hell, they have been rewarded for their fuck-nuttery, by gaining control of the federal government and many state governments
If you are a betting man and brazening it out always pays off, what would you do?
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Putin must be mortified at this interview. I’m sure he’s telling the KGB to make sure Carter Page “accidentally” walks into a jet engine.
amk
@gene108: This in a nutshell. Voters kept rewarding them for all their assholishness with more governorships, state legescongress, senate, and finally, presidency. No way the rethugs, both the voters and the cong critters, are gonna boot out the twitler. There is plenty of wishful thinking here. Only way to beat them, is to vote in more dem cong critters and governors and state leges.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@Millard Filmore: fascists and authoritarians delude themselves to great ends (ie germans predicting fatherland comeback in 1945/David Broder predicting Bush comeback in 2007).
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
It’s the wrong analogy. The more apt analogy is Benedict Arnold.
By the end of 2015, Benedict Donald had begun secret negotiations with the Russians to surrender NATO, Ukraine, Crimea, in return for money and a command in the White House. Benedict Donald’s chief intermediary was former US General Mike Flynn.
BlueDWarrior
@amk: unfortunately, voters dont respond to Democrats until the disaster is well underway and lot of bodies have pulled up. Maybe the incarnation of the Republican party will die when there is an outbreak and there are few tens of thousand dead bodies and millions of bankruptcies and a general economic calamity.
It seems to be Americas curse, if you will.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
What makes this Carter Page disaster all the more hilarious and predictable is Chris Hayes implied afterwards that none other than Griftwald asked him to put Page on thinking Page would make a good impression.
M. Bouffant
Didn’t see the interview, but look at this from Page:
Origuy
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Benedict Arnold was one of Washington’s most capable generals. He switched sides after a dispute with the Continental Congress led to being passed over for promotion. Had he stayed loyal, there would be statues of him everywhere. I don’t see anyone putting up a statue to Donald, even without le affaire russe.
NotMax
Especially inconvenient scheduling for most of the U.S., Z on TCM at 4 a.m. Eastern time Saturday.
If you’ve ever seen it, no further recommendation required. If you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to experience it.
Bruce K
@Origuy: If Benedict Arnold doesn’t quite work as a parallel, how about Vidkun Quisling? (Granted, I’ve got to concede that Quisling wasn’t as close to the edge of the Dunning-Kruger curve as the cheeto…)
sukabi
@M. Bouffant: that’s a special kind of snowflake. Drumpf surrounds himself with with only the best and bigliest delusionaries.
m0nty
Is that what Hayes is like all the time? He needs to lay off the uppers.
TS
@m0nty:
Yes. The faster you talk – the more you can say – that no-one understands it because you are talking too fast is irrelevant
Chet Murthy
@TS: I noticed that about Chris in the interview. didn’t help for comprehensibility, that’s fer sure. Dr. Maddow is -much- better at explaining a complex (to the lay public) subject, b/c she explains it at least three times, and slowly. With obvious and theatrical relish (which gets old by the third time, but hey, nobody’s perfect).
Chet Murthy
Open thread, so I figure I’ll ask. But first, I’m -not- trying to start a flamewar here. that said, this comparison of beshear and wilmer seems on target.
I watched both, and yeah, I thought wilmer did a better job.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Bruce K:
Quisling actually had a history of legitimate service and had been a relatively competent officer in the past.
Totally unlike Deadbeat Donnie.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Chet Murthy:
God spare us from more “was the messaging effective” bullshit. The reason why we’re here is thirty years of it.
Steve Beshear is a decent guy and was a popular governor from a pulsing red pustule who got term limited out. In an electoral climate where Democrats are getting routed, his legacy is so well thought of that his son got elected AG.
Clearly, he appeals in some way to red state voters on an emotional level in ways that Sanders doesn’t – and speaking for me as a deep blue voter in deep blue Louisville (the city that happpily sends the extremely progressive John Yarmuth to Congress), when I hear Bernie speak on television, I have to restrain myself from shooting the TV. His voice sucks. His body language sucks. His accent sucks. His “One Note Bernie” rage schtick sucks, along with his lousy character and preening ego – fuck that guy.
Zinsky
I keep thinking about what Ronald Reagan would say about this, if he were alive today and still lucid, he would be appalled! He was deeply distrustful of Russia (or the Soviet Union) and would be horrified that an, ugly, little-dicked KGB stooge like Vladimir Putin was playing the U.S. like a violin during a presidential election. St. Ronnie must be spinning wildly in his grave!
Chet Murthy
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Edmund, peace. I’ve lived in Blue cities all my adult life, and can’t imagine how either of them comes across, except to a blue-stater. I trust you that Beshear came across better to folks in red states. Peace, and thanks for enlightening me.
prostratedragon
@NotMax: Seconded! Great political thiller with a lot of dash, based on a true story. Best FF Oscar, 1970.
Trailer: click “cc” for English subtitles.
Gvg
I woke up this morning recalling my earlier impression of Trump that he was really unprepared for how much negative attention the President gets. Right after he was elected I thought he seemed to think the public would quit bothering him about thing like tax returns and just like him.
He clearly has been running his business just as crooked as he is trying to run us. If he had made the right sort of dogged personal enemy years ago, he would have already been in jail. He was able to bribe away investigations as a private person but he didn’t understand that you can’t bribe everyone away. As president, his actions matter to too many people, there are always many who aren’t bribable.
However it’s a shame we don’t have enough attention for all the members of Congress. Clearly there are some we should have paid closer attention to before.
Applejinx
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: If you don’t want to fight the Republicans, get out of the way.
Sherparick
@amk: because they promise to cut their taxes, kick-out the browns, reenslave the blacks, & punch the hippies e.g. the real enemies.
Paul in KY
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: How about George, Duke of Clarence under Edward IV? Complete buffoon, with no accomplishments to speak of, who thought he should be king & ended up forcing his brother to have him executed.
Butch
@Chet Murthy: Hayes is often better than that. It struck me that for some reason he didn’t expect to run into the solid wall of nonsense and deflection that he encountered with Page. I don’t know how you could not have expected it, personally.
Kay
@Chet Murthy:
As far as Ohio goes, the idea that Trump was a reaction to yearning for populist politics doesn’t really fly. We have two liberal populists in NW Ohio and they’re powerful people in the Democratic Party- Sherrod Brown and Marcy Kaptur are not marginalized and ignored in the Democratic Party. Kaptur recruits House candidates. A lot. Her candidates haven’t won.
In this rural rest belt county Obama’s economy in 2016 was unequivocally better than Bush’s in 2004. Better on every measure. IN ADDITION Obama’s Medicaid expansion covered thousands of low wage working class people in this county – literally free health care. That’s a direct in-kind contribution to their standard of living. It’s like giving them 5000 in wages every year, in terms of value. For many of them (because it’s insurance) it’s worth much much more than 5000- depending on the medical treatment they’re getting it could be 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000. Yet Bush won in 2004 and Clinton lost in 2016.
It really isn’t “the economy, stupid”. It’s more complicated than that.
jonas
@Millard Filmore: You make an interesting point. One answer might be that while the FBI has been documenting a lot of contacts between Russians and the campaign, they have not yet connected enough dots to say there was “collusion” — a legal term the FBI would be very careful about deploying, even in confidential briefings. Ryan is possibly putting this out there having parsed that word very carefully. Another answer is that after this past year, Ryan has learned that regardless of how awful things look, you don’t bet against Trump. We spent all last summer and fall with our jaws on the floor as one horrible revelation about Trump after another would come out and Ryan would stand there looking like he was passing a kidney stone, but refuse to denounce it.
In the end, it appears that Ryan and the GOP are betting that, like with the pu$$ygrabber remarks, there’s enough stuff here about Russia to get the media and the Democrats all lathered up, but not enough to seriously damage Trump in the eyes of their base. Of course if Comey comes out with some huge bombshell in the end where he basically confirms everything in the Steele dossier, for example, it could be another story. But I think Trump just rides this out by blaming the media and fake news and that’s good enough for his base. They. Don’t. Care.
Shrillhouse
OMG.
Who thought it was a good idea for Carter Page to go on TV?
hovercraft
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
To be fair, GG still thinks his is an influential voice with democrats, so not that surprising.
Kay
@Chet Murthy:
This is anecdotal and no one will use it politically because it’s impossible to phrase in a way that won’t offend them, but I hear it so often because of the work I do that I have to report it. A lot of the younger white working class men who support Trump (or say they support- many of them probably don’t vote) are mad that they pay child support. They pay child support thru juvenile courts because they aren’t married to the children’s mothers. It’s certainly not true of all of them but, man, they are some angry people. Here’s the thing- I’m not that sympathetic to young men who feel persecuted because they have to pay child support. I know it means they can’t get ahead on what they make and child support is the reason many of them stay poor, but these children they are fathering have expenses.
One of the reasons they don’t have the (admittedly) slow and steady economic progress their parents had is because their parents weren’t paying court-ordered support beginning at age 18. They could pitch in here, these angry young white men. They could take some fucking responsibility for birth control. Figure out birth control. It’s just math. If you make 12.50 an hour and you’re paying 40% of it in child support you are probably not moving out of your parents’ basement.
hovercraft
@M. Bouffant:
WOW, just WOW !
Peale
@M. Bouffant: ah. So now they’re expecting to be exempt from all laws because their parents sent them to parochial school.
Barbara
@Kay: I don’t have a huge reservoir of sympathy for these guys either, except that I do think a lot of them have been systematically taught to believe and follow rigid gender stereotypes, frequently through religious indoctrination, and that if they screw up before their own experience teaches them that the rigidity prescribed as normative by their upbringing has become exceedingly maladaptive for most working people, they are knocked back so far they can never get ahead.
Jeffro
@Millard Filmore: who’s telling them they can brazen this out?
Ayn Rand fever dreams and visions filled with Mercer cash, that’s what’s telling them they MUST brazen this out.
That, and the knowledge that if they actually did their jobs and exposed Trump, it would mean immediate Republican civil war
hovercraft
@Jeffro:
History. A tape of him saying he could sexually assault women with impunity came out and yet his supporters stuck with him, repeatedly , brazenly lying, in such a way that everyone knew he was lying and could prove it, yet they stayed, displaying his ignorance and unpreparedness at every turn and still they stayed. Why should the Russia thing be different, his entire life is based on bullshit and bluster, he bluffs his way through bankruptcies to keep himself afloat, why not this. The media has showed it’s self to be willing and actually eager to be his next marks. Sadly they are not alone, his approval rating as of yesterday was 43 approve, 51 disapprove, that’s a lot of people buying the con. Last week polls showed that the public is lowering standards in order to normalize him, and thinks the media is too negative and harsh in their dealings with him.
Boatboy_srq
@TenguPhule: More like one of him getting buggered by high school coach. The GOTea have no problem with tops – it’s the bottoms they detest.
Aimai
@Applejinx: christ who died and made you head of the resistance uou absurd little puffed up boychick?
Boatboy_srq
@Millard Filmore: Bravado and conviction of superiority is what has preserved white male privilege globally for two millenia. It drove the Greeks, the Romans, the Holy Roman Empire, the French, Spanish and British colonial empires and the Third Reich, and largely shaped the American Experience. The GOTea has no reason to change that attitude, and plenty of historical experience proving the attitude works.
Vhh
@Origuy: l’affaire russe
Vhh
@jonas: Reports are that, bit by bit, the Steele dossier is being confirmed. Read it, and never mind the golden showers part (a paragraph or so). If even a couple of pages of the 35 hold up, this makes Watergate look like a piffle. Joe McCarthy would roll over in his grave and vote Democratic.
jonas
@Vhh:
True, but for today’s Republicans, Russia is identified less with the old communist USSR and more with the kind of white, nationalist/Christianist authoritarianism Bannon loves so. It’s now cool on the right to like Holland now, too, for example, because the country has turned staunchly anti-immigrant, even though a decade or two ago the Netherlands were sneeringly dismissed by conservatives as a decaying Neo-Gomorrah for their gay marriage, and liberal marijuana and euthanasia laws. Times change and politics make for strange bedfellows.
cmorenc
What’s truly sad is that Paul Ryan doesn’t seem to realize that the one person we have no choice but to count on to save this country is President Paul Ryan, if /when Trump and Pence go down over the Russia scandal (Speaker of the House is next in constitutional succession after the VP if the President resigns or is impeached). And so far, Trump is standing in the way of Ryan’s chance to enact his dream Randian agenda more than even the democrats. Perhaps he’s too afraid of getting kicked out of his speakership post if he moves too soon against Trump ?
It’s nightmares all the way down.
Feebog
@TS:
I have to disagree with you about Chris Hayes. Yes, he got excited and was pushing through the questions; he is not a professional advocate or trial lawyer. I have advocated cases in many forums during a forty year career. Like about 500 cases with the EEOC, Merit Systems Protection Board and in Contract Arbitration. The last 12 years I have maintained a practice as a labor and commercial arbitrator. I consider myself a fairly accomplished cross-examiner. A very effective technique of cross examination is to start examination at a fairly slow pace and escalate the rate at which you ask questions. This gives the witness less time to think, and you then get what we saw with Carter Page last night; evasive non answers or contradictory answers. It is a very effective technique. I’m not saying Hayes did it deliberately, but the rapid fire pace of his questions sure rattled Page.
pk
@hovercraft:
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told it was just “locker room talk”. Or “bill Clinton actually raped a woman”. They’ll rationalize everything. That’s why I’m pretty sure that nothing will come out of the Russian thing. Trump supporters need to lose everything, jobs, homes, healthcare not just for themselves but for their children and for generations in order for them to maybe even begin voting for democrats. Or the democrats could talk of rounding up blacks and minorities and putting them in concentration camps and they’ll gain the majority white vote instantly.
EBT
@Kay: There is an episode of The F Plus where one of the documents being read is a 19 year old child asking how to get sole custody of his son from the mother. His plan is to then goose the child off on his OWN mother. Then take the child support and spend it on Xbox games.
RobNYNY1957
@Vhh: Fake French drives me crazy. One of my colleagues says “coupe de gras.”