Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans in disarray!

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Let me file that under fuck it.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Getchya Fresh News Here!

Getchya Fresh News Here!

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The New York Times reported today on a story you saw in Balloon Juice more than a month ago, based on accounts in Finnish media. A wealthy Russian businessman was buying up properties along an important Finnish sealane. The Finnish authorities raided those properties, which had some of the look of preparing for military action. Finnish government and business websites were then hit with a DDoS attack.

Anyhow, welcome to the party, New York Times!

And open thread!

Reader Interactions

98Comments

  5. 5.

    Kraux Pas

    @Joe Falco:

    The New York Times: “The Most Current News of Yesterday, Today!”

    Well, we can’t inform the public about things that may harm them before the perpetrators have had an opportunity to profit off of it.

  6. 6.

    A Ghost To Most

    A Washington state representative is under federal investigation after his “Biblical Basis for War” manifesto leaked, outlining a 14-step process for right-wing Christians to seize power and kill their political enemies.

    The four-page document distributed by state Rep. Matt Shea (R-Spokane) is a Christian call to arms that demands an end to legal abortion and same-sex marriage, and spells out a chilling fate for anyone who refuses to obey “biblical law,” reported the The Spokesman-Review.

    “If they do not yield – kill all males,” the document says.


    Religion of peace, my ass

  8. 8.

    Ruckus

    @A Ghost To Most:
    Many old religions were never peaceful long ago. Of course a lot of the non peacefulness was towards people who wouldn’t fall in line. Hard to keep a grift going when people can just walk away. For proof I present your post about a wonderful politician with an idea that biblical law is the real deal. It was more than an ideal long ago. He just wants to get back to what he considers normal.

  11. 11.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @A Ghost To Most: He didn’t appear in a vacuum. Who else is he talking to? Where did he come from? Who put this stuff in his head? How many of them are there?

    I hope to get back to a society where murder and terrorism are crimes even when committed by white evangelicals.

  12. 12.

    Gin & Tonic

    So in anticipation of today’s news conference by that idiot Jacob Wohl presenting the “credible witness” accusing Mueller of rape or something, it appears that said witness has suddenly gotten cold feet and will not be at the news conference.

    Who could have predicted?

  14. 14.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Chyron HR:
    There may be no word I hate more than ‘neoliberal.’ The dumbasses who use it correctly define it, but they’re so determined to be More Pure Than Thou that they think the Democratic Party is neoliberal. It’s a fantasy land of what our policies are as warped as Republicans’. They just love that the word sounds like ‘liberal’ and they can make the association.

  16. 16.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Cheryl Rofer:
    I have a Finnish friend, and the language sounds like gibberish to English speaking ears. Like, not even ‘a foreign language I don’t understand.’ It sounds like something you would make up on the spur of the moment pretending to speak a foreign language for a joke. However, I challenge anyone to read the Kalevala and not come away with the belief the Finns are better than us.

  21. 21.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Frankensteinbeck: Yes. Finnish and Estonian put the stress on the first syllable, which is how the Kalevala works. The best translations repeat the rhyme scheme. But English mostly puts the stress on the second syllable, so Finnish and Estonian can sound like gibberish to English speakers. When I was learning Estonian, an article came out about how babies learn to speak their language. Early on, they recognize the stress patterns. “Oh good,” I thought, “I’m not even up to the baby stage.” But now I can hear the words and even understand some large part of what people are saying in Estonian. There are aspects of the syntax that completely baffle me, though.

  24. 24.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Cheryl Rofer:
    If you haven’t read the Kalevala (and you seem like someone who would have), I cannot sufficiently recommend it. Boy, is it not like any other national oral epic. It’s practically a season of My Little Pony. Lessons in friendship and instructions for practical skills!

  25. 25.

    Platonailedit

    “US authorities have brought criminal charges against two former Goldman Sachs bankers and Malaysian financier Jho Low.

    The Department of Justice charges stem from the long-running scandal at Malaysia’s state development fund, 1MDB.

    One former Goldman banker admitted to conspiring to launder money and violate a US anti-bribery law, it said.

    The other banker has been arrested, while Mr Low remains at large.

    These are reportedly the first US criminal charges to surface in the scandal, in which authorities say public officials stole billions from the state fund to buy art, property and other items.

    The claims of corruption played a role in the election defeat earlier this year of Malaysia’s former prime minister, Najib Razak.”

    https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46062576

  26. 26.

    PaulWartenberg

    NaNoWriMo officially starts today for 2018. 30 days of 50,000 words.

    Also, work is driving me crazy.

    The two are surprisingly unrelated EVEN THOUGH I am hosting a kickoff Write-In tonight at the library. Y’all are invited to attend. It’s from 4 to 7 PM in Bartow FL

  29. 29.

    Origuy

    Cheryl or Frank, can either of you recommend a good translation? I’ve been meaning to read the Kalevala for a long time. My first exposure to it was in the Harold Shea stories of Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague DeCamp.

  32. 32.

    bjacques

    That details of that suspected Russian plan for invading Finland reminds me of a really old episode of The Avengers, from back when England was all villages and a hundred nogoodniks with Sten guns and a few Austin Minor vans (yeah, I had to look it up) could conquer the whole country starting in Margate.

  33. 33.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @A Ghost To Most:
    I am sympathetic to the way a purely academic treatise could be mistaken for a personal agenda, except there is no old testament justification for outlawing abortion. So, without even further investigation his excuse falls apart.

  34. 34.

    Doug R

    I guess the NYT needs to eats their spinach so they can fights through the Finnish.
    What can I say? I yam what I yam.

  35. 35.

    Amir Khalid

    @Platonailedit:
    Jho Low’s a wanted man in Malaysia too. Najib has already been charged, and I imagine there are charges ready to go here against Jho Low as soon as someone gets hold of him.

  36. 36.

    germy

    Let me get this straight

    Let's set the story straight. There are 2 women who the press suggests somehow we offered to pay. All of it false. Lorraine Parsons, a person who does not exist & Jen Taub, who does exist, but received an email from a person who does not exist. Thursday we unveil the real accuser— Jack Burkman (@Jack_Burkman) October 31, 2018

    Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.

  39. 39.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Origuy: The translation I have is by Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. Not sure if there’s a more recent one. I’ve also got an English translation of Kalevipoeg, but it’s with the Estonian version in a very fancy edition. Probably not available outside of Estonia.

  40. 40.

    catclub

    @A Ghost To Most:

    a 14-step process for right-wing Christians to seize power and kill their political enemies.

    Did they crib ‘first we kill all the lawyers’ from Bill Shakes.

  41. 41.

    Anonymous At Work

    The Pittsburgh shooter just plead Not Guilty to all 44 charges and requested a jury trial. Am I being paranoid that he wants a jury trial to preach to the jury about Antisemitism and conspiracy theories?

  42. 42.

    Kent

    @A Ghost To Most:

    Astonishing. I live in Washington State and had heard nothing of this or Matt Shea other than he is the typical wingnut from the eastern side of the state. The Raw Story article on this biblical nonsense was first reported by the Spokane newspaper. I went back and searched the archives of my local paper (Vancouver Columbian) as well as the two big Seattle papers and none of them reported on it or really had any news reports on Matt Shea other than old tea party nonsense and bigotry he was involved in going back to 2013.

    Really seems like a failure of the big mainstream media in this state to report on far down the rabbit hole the psychopathic wingnut GOP has gotten in this state.

  43. 43.

    clay

    @germy:

    Jen Taub, who does exist, but received an email from a person who does not exist

    Whoa. This is getting too deep for me.

  45. 45.

    Kent

    This is our boy Matt Shea from a 2013 Seattle PI article. Apparently he has been a complete wingut for a long time

    An Eastern Washington legislator, speaking at a “Self-Reliance Rally” of Tea Party activists and survivalists, predicted last weekend that the United States economy is going to collapse and told activists to stock up on ammunition and stay in top physical condition for when that happens.

    “We need to prepare for the inevitable collapse that is going to happen: You know it’s going to happen. That’s right, I am a politician and I am standing up here and saying that,” said state Rep. Matt Shea, a Republican from Spokane Valley. The lawmaker’s remarks were reported in the Coeur D’Alene Press.

    “When it happens, we need to look at this as an opportunity, not a crisis,” Shea added. “Whose job is liberty? That’s our job.”

    ……

    Shea is no stranger to controversy. The Spokane Spokesman Review reported an incident, about two years ago, in which he pulled a loaded gun on another motorist in what was described as a road rage incident. He was cited for having a loaded handgun in his pickup truck without a concealed weapons permit.

    While a defender of traditional marriage, Shea was also in the news for his recent divorce. The lawmaker’s wife sought two temporary restraining orders and a protection order, and claimed to have been treated like a “possession.” She claimed that Shea insisted that she walk on his left side “because his sword, if he had one, would be on his right side.”

  46. 46.

    A Ghost To Most

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: This is the kind of seditionist crap that flows between my family and their friends. Too occasionally, they reply to their entire contact list, and I get Shit like this, and worse.

    For me, it’s personal.

  47. 47.

    germy

    This video:

    Today's the day for Jacob Wohl's big press conference on his supposed Mueller assault allegations. I'll be there covering it, starting at 12 pm. Meanwhile, Wohl has released a video on it (and acknowledging that he runs Surefire Intelligence) https://t.co/1UuK64Omk9— Will Sommer (@willsommer) November 1, 2018

    These two guys are so obviously crooked, I’d walk out if I found myself in a car dealership with them.

  50. 50.

    Mandalay

    More horse shit on the horse race from the NYT:

    Democrats in an All-Hands-on-Deck Scramble to Save Menendez in New Jersey

    …party leaders are being forced to mount a last-minute, all-hands-on-deck effort to rescue Mr. Menendez’s candidacy and preserve their long-shot dreams of a Senate majority.

    Scary stuff!!! Except Menendez is up by 8 points in the most recent poll, and 538 gives him a 90% chance of winning.

    While Menendez is probably going to win, an 8 point lead and a 90% chance of winning is not a done deal. But what on earth is prompting the narrative “a last-minute, all-hands-on-deck effort to rescue Mr. Menendez’s candidacy”? He’s been ahead in every poll for the past month.

    The reporting about this election has been mediocre, and the NYT has been a serial offender for weeks.

  51. 51.

    patroclus

    I predicted that the Dems are going to flip the House and pick up 80 seats in the House on Tuesday the other night and now I’m going to predict that the Dems are going to break all historical records and pick up at least 12 governors as well. The most ever flips was in 1994 when the Republicans picked up 11 governorships – I think we’ll beat that and establish the Dems as the majority party at the statehouse level as well. Here in Illinois, Pritzker only leads the odious Rauner by 18 – I can hardly believe that we’re doing so poorly. The Senate? Well, we have a chance, but I’m not going to predict it. This would be a good result (obviously) but we can do better. Go vote and drag others with you!

  52. 52.

    Kraux Pas

    @Mandalay:

    The reporting about this election has been mediocre, and the NYT has been a serial offender for weeks.

    People won’t be interested in the horse race election coverage if we don’t act like things are close and everything is a crisis. And they certainly won’t be interested in stories of substance. /MSMgenerallyNYTspecifically

  54. 54.

    Chyron HR

    @germy:

    Thursday we unveil the real accuser— Jack Burkman

    Wouldn’t it have been more convincing if they’d gotten a woman to accuse him?

  56. 56.

    chopper

    @germy:

    and acknowledging that he runs Surefire Intelligence

    so at least one of these motherfuckers is willing to listen to his lawyer.

  59. 59.

    The Pale Scot

    @Frankensteinbeck:
    Finnish is related to Basque, they are considered closest to the Proto Indo European originator language. many of their nouns for objects like horse or hut are thought to very close to the language spoken by the first wave off the steppes

  60. 60.

    Wapiti

    @Doug R:

    I guess the NYT needs to eats their spinach so they can fights through the Finnish.
    What can I say? I yam what I yam.

    I don’t know whether to boo or groan.

  65. 65.

    The Moar You Know

    Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.

    @germy: They already lost. FOR ONCE, our guys played offense and broke the story first. Unlike football, in media wars, the defenders almost always lose, even if they’re better. And in this case, they are not. Those guys are going to try and salvage their ginned-up bullshit, but it won’t work.

  66. 66.

    Brachiator

    The New York Times reported today on a story you saw in Balloon Juice more than a month ago, based on accounts in Finnish media. A wealthy Russian businessman was buying up properties along an important Finnish sealane. The Finnish authorities raided those properties, which had some of the look of preparing for military action. Finnish government and business websites were then hit with a DDoS attack.

    Coincidentally, this podcast, by a French techie currently living in Finland, gave an interesting take on this story.

    Russian “investments” near Turku

  67. 67.

    H.E.Wolf

    @Kent:
    Thanks for pulling the curtain open on this individual. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

    There have been, and are, a lot of Democratic volunteers on the ground in that district this year. It’s been great to see (from my back-room, data-entry perspective).

  70. 70.

    germy

    They have a talent for finding gigs and making money.

    scoop this a.m.: Carter Page, the former Trump adviser who found himself at the center of multiple Trump-Russia investigations, has a new gig: He’s hosting a talk show for One America News Network: https://t.co/HWa2O4tOuq— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24) November 1, 2018

  72. 72.

    Sister Golden Bear

    But to me it seems quite clear
    That’s it’s all just a little bit of history repeating

    https://theconversation.com/how-the-nazis-destroyed-the-first-gay-rights-movement-80354

    It’s this willingness to make a blood sacrifice of minorities in exchange for “normalcy” or prosperity that has observers drawing uncomfortable comparisons between then and now.

    …Fascist parties offered Europeans a choice of stability at the price of democracy. Tolerance of minorities was destabilizing, they said. Expanding liberties gave “undesirable” people the liberty to undermine security and threaten traditional “moral” culture. Gay and trans people were an obvious target.

  73. 73.

    Kraux Pas

    @germy:

    He’s hosting a talk show for One America News Network

    If Fox News isn’t dishonest and apocalyptic enough for you…

  77. 77.

    Gin & Tonic

    @The Pale Scot: I’m sorry, but I believe that is entirely mistaken. Neither Basque nor Finnish are Indo-European. Basque is, in fact, an “isolate” – it may be called pre-Indo-European, but not proto-Indo-European. Finnish is proto-Uralic, and is at least somewhat related to Estonian and, further back, Hungarian, but has no known relationship to Basque.

  78. 78.

    germy

    Wohl and Burkman say their Mueller accuser is a woman named Carolyne Cass. Wohl says he believes her. Usually, he says, "my default is to not believe the accuser."— Will Sommer (@willsommer) November 1, 2018

  80. 80.

    A Ghost To Most

    @A Ghost To Most: Neiwert closes:

    People of conscience who want to stop this alt-right movement and Donald Trump and the Republicans have to stop fighting with each other. They have to get over the Bernie stuff. They have to get over the loftier-than-thou, holier-than-thou, purity-test nonsense. Recognize that we are in a constitutional crisis in this country.

    Ultimately it all depends on whether people want to believe in democracy. A lot of people unfortunately seem to think that democracy is dead. I’m not ready to give up on it yet. Too many people on the left believe that democracy is a dead letter. I don’t. I’m willing to fight for democracy until my dying breath

  82. 82.

    Gravenstone

    @germy:

    my default is to not believe the accuser

    Only when it’s convenient to me or the scam I’m running at the moment. Keep digging little dude. Keep digging.

  84. 84.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Cheryl Rofer: Same stress-on-1st-syl in magyarul – um, Hungarian – all Finno-Ugric tongues.

    Some of the most brilliant minds involved in the Manhattan Project were from Hungary (Johnny von Neumann, Eugen Wigner, etc.) & when gathered together naturally slipped into their Ursprache. Baffled listeners-in would ask what language that was & were told Hungarian…but the story goes (you surely already know this, but for the unaware amongst us) that many refused to believe it – the rumor went round that those guys were in fact Martians who’d learned to disguise themselves perfectly as human beings, except once in awhile they’d slip up & start speaking Martian amongst themselves – Hungarian was a natural cover story since no one except a Hungarian would know the difference, & they were all Martians anyway…

  86. 86.

    clay

    @germy: I cannot think of a worse person to host a show than Carter Page. Mr. Flop-Sweat-Talk-Himself-Into-A-Corner has a horrible television presence.

  88. 88.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Uncle Cosmo: One of my trips to Estonia was coordinated with a graduate student studying monuments and their meanings. At that time, Tallinn still had some wonderful used book shops that she greedily patronized. She had spent a year in Hungary as an exchange student and after a couple of days said, “Oh, Estonian is just like Hungarian, but different vocabulary!”

  89. 89.

    Snarki, child of Loki

    @bjacques: “that suspected Russian plan for invading Finland reminds me of a really old episode of The Avengers, from back when England was all villages”

    Plus Emma Peel dressed in skin-tight leather and tied up by the baddies, also, too.

    Good times, good times.

  90. 90.

    evodevo

    @Frankensteinbeck: Yes. The ONLY times abortion is even obliquely mentioned is in a context of miscarriage caused by misadventure (treated as a property damage tort kind of way) and as a sort of ordeal by abortifacient administered by a priest in a temple(?). No mention AT ALL of outlawing it.

  91. 91.

    StringOnAStick

    @germy: I like that a liberal dude has shown up in the parking lot of the “news conference” site with a giant inflatable rat with the Mango Moron’s “hair”. Thats the level of respect Wohl and Co deserve, which is none.

  92. 92.

    StringOnAStick

    @A Ghost To Most: Neiwert nails it in that quote. I know of two leftier than thou people IRL; one moved to India and thankfully quit her job in our dental office since I was sick of the diva act/snottiness since none of us were Boulder hipster enough to not contaminate her, and the other is a patient I see every 4 months who can’t stop talking loudly and saying “fucking idiots” so loud that other patients hear him, so he’s a bit of a douche. Of course he hates Nancy Smash with a passion.

  95. 95.

    StringOnAStick

    Even more better: as his partner in crime was calling li’l Wohl a brilliant young man” a heckler yelled “he can’t even open an Etrade account!”..

  96. 96.

    opiejeanne

    @Uncle Cosmo: That’s a great story, made me chuckle.

    I used to play the organ at a Hungarian Reform church in the late 1970s, so I heard Hungarian every Sunday and sometimes on the following Monday as well. I know one word in Hungarian: lelke. (Lelki?). It means “soul”.
    They preached a lot about witches and Communism in the sermon delivered by the Lelke Pastor, or instructed to turn to page XX in the Hymnusz (spelling?). A lot of words were borrowed. Apparently the Communists were practicing witchcraft. The congregation split over some silly disagreement while these very old people were busy building a new church building. One sweet old guy in his 90s insisted on going up the ladder to look at the roof rafters after church and we were all terrified. The truly hilarious thing about the schism is that the preacher of the new church was the son of the preacher and the congregation attended both services on Sundays, to support the younger man as well as their chosen leader. I played for that congregation a couple of Sunday until I just couldn’t take it any more.
    After about a month they reconciled and everything went back to normal. I would sometimes find myself drifting off during the extremely long sermons and imagine I could understand Hungarian, but when I heard the word “hymnusz” I’d spring into action and play, disappointed that I did not now understand Hungarian.

  97. 97.

    Dan B

    @Kent: There’s a history of nazis in Washington state. It originates in Redmond, WA. Yeah, that Redmond, on the wet side, not the Aryan Nations Spokane / Northern Idaho part of the PNW. William Dudley Pelly founded a nazi group in the 30’s called the Silver Shirts. They had enough members to get Pelley on the ballot as a candidate for President. I believe the party was renamed the Christian Party. After Pelley was convicted of sedition in the 40’s they drifted to eastern WA and were the core of the Aryan Nation and other groups. The current Neo Nazi groups strategy is to look and sound respectable. Their plan to power is to take over the state GOP. They’ve gotten lots of coverage from small media orgs but not the biggies.

  98. 98.

    u

    @Cheryl Rofer: Ded thred, but what the hell.

    IIRC once the Hungarians got control of their cultural institutions via the Ausgleich of 1867, one of their early projects was to strip all the non-Magyar-rooted words out of the vocabulary. Worked well enough for them that the Nazis tried the same thing upon assuming power. They, however, fell foul of the Teutonic tendency to construct massive compound words.

    According to my 20th Century German Lit prof at JHU, Dr. William McClain (RIP), the seminal early instance of a non-Aryan word marked for extinction was der Nase (“nose”, from the Latin). The “good Aryan” replacement they came up with was – wait for it –

    Die Gesichtsvorsprung

    (“the projection out of the face”)

    Apparently the day after this was introduced it was the hot topic of conversation in Lokalen, Restauranten, on S-Bahn & U-Bahn & whatever-the-hell-Bahn platforms – with the vast majority of participants doubled over with laughter.

    In a very short while the putsch, erm, push to Teutonize the German language was quietly tief-Sechs‘d, never to resurface.

    Dr. McClain noted that it took most of the world’s developed nations 6 years & tens of millions of casualties to defeat the Third Reich on the battlefield – but the German people managed it in days. By laughing at them. Fascisti & other authoritarians hate, hate, hate to be made objects of ridicule.

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