Jose posted:

lmao

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1005769318469197825

Jose posted:

lmao

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1005769318469197825

Agean90 posted:

so do we have a cc post insisting that this was completly normal?

comedyblissoption posted:

zeal posted:

ah i remember that scrum

it was during the bruce rappaport period right, when john lewis was wheeled out by the dems to cast aspersions on bernie's civil rights movement cred

Jose posted:

lmao

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1005769318469197825

Ytlaya posted:

There's something about the hypocrisy of a bunch of people with cushy, high-paying jobs trying to act like they have the moral high ground from a left-leaning perspective that is absolutely infuriating. With conservatives, they're lovely people but at least they explicitly disagree with your ideology and goals.

quote:

Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Ytlaya posted:

I think the thing that disgusts me about that whole "dynamic" (with liberals condemning the left for things like this) is that these people are all free to blindly hold to these morals (like "you absolutely can't disagree with John Lewis" in this case, or stuff like "how dare you condemn the ACA, what about the people it helped?!") because they're already extremely privileged and have no personal stake in whether actual material progress is made. Because they face zero pressure personally, they're free to construct this moral framework that allows them to comfortably feel good about themselves and feel righteous outrage towards others.

There's something about the hypocrisy of a bunch of people with cushy, high-paying jobs trying to act like they have the moral high ground from a left-leaning perspective that is absolutely infuriating. With conservatives, they're lovely people but at least they explicitly disagree with your ideology and goals. My personal theory is that this sort of liberal has a similar issue to conservatives who complain about being persecuted; they have to imagine the left as a bunch of privileged white IT workers, because the reality that they're actually the privileged ones in this situation doesn't fit with their worldview.

Jose posted:

lmao

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1005769318469197825

anime was right posted:

its a pro-trump pac filing the lawsuit

anime was right posted:

also that voter roll thing is kind of the final nail in the democratic coffin. it was nice knowing you all.

Taintrunner posted:

hahah... yes... yes!!!

Jose posted:

lmao

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1005769318469197825

Ytlaya posted:

From my experience you won't make any progress against people who aren't already leftists with this argument, because they will require actual proof that the language in question translates to opposition to single-payer (or proof that there's no genuine desire to transition from a public option to single-payer). The fact that such proof is impossible without some recording of the politician saying "by the way, by access I definitely mean not-single payer!" is irrelevant to them.

Lord of Pie posted:

I called John Lewis an establishment dem in one of the old bernie threads and hoo boy did that bring out the succ

quote:

“In the summer of 1992, I felt like a rock star,” McFaul boasts. To extend this metaphor, Russia over the next few years resembled Altamont. McFaul acknowledges his team’s failure to secure democracy, noting Yeltsin’s authoritarian strain and self-destructive personal habits, the rise of a corrupt oligarchy, and the growing appeal of far-right nationalism. But McFaul more or less shrugs off the vast scale of human suffering caused by the firesale privatization of Russia’s economy, which he reduces to a few bland sentences about inflation and deficits. “Intellectually, I tended to side with the shock therapists” who blamed privatization for not being audacious enough, “But Russians blamed the guy at the top, Boris Yeltsin.”

Funny how that happens! And funny how Yeltsin, despite his deep unpopularity, somehow won reelection in 1996. At the time McFaul was teaching at Stanford and working part-time at the Carnegie Moscow Center, where he felt the need to insist that he was not a CIA operative to Russians who assumed otherwise. Their suspicions were not exactly allayed by his open support of the Clinton administration’s efforts to secure Yeltsin’s victory—though on balance, there’s no real cause to doubt McFaul on this point. To judge by Hot Peace, he has always been a guileless booster of American-style democracy as the global panacea of first resort—The Loud American, if you will.

Indeed, throughout the book, McFaul constantly shrugs off the KGB (rebranded the FSB in post-Soviet Russia) and the CIA as fringe players at every juncture in U.S.-Russia relations. He is forever convinced that he is an earnest democrat engaging with other earnest democrats—and forever perplexed that anyone might see any nefarious U.S. agenda behind any of his work. There’s no reason to doubt his sincerity. Judging by his high-frequency Twitter account (@McFaul), on which he engages politely on a regular basis with bad-faith egg accounts likely operating out of the Kremlin’s “troll factory,” it seems more likely McFaul believes his own bullshit. He’s not a spook; he’s a dupe, and over decades of in-person interactions with the most powerful figures in both Russia and the United States, he never seems to figure this out.

Twitter is not a minor part of this story. McFaul devotes an entire chapter to the social-media platform, which he began using during his stint as ambassador in 2012 as a way to communicate directly with the Russian people. Some comical gaffes ensue, as when McFaul referred to Russia’s fourth-largest city, Yekaterinburg, as “yoburg,” a slang nickname he somehow fails to recognize means “fuckburg.” (This incident also recalls how McFaul personally provided the wrong translation for “reset” to Hillary Clinton prior to her meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, thus embarrassing her and the entire country from the policy’s outset.) But despite this and other hiccups, McFaul enjoyed being a rock star on the Russian scene again, and he especially enjoyed receiving personal endorsements from unidentified Russian Twitter accounts.

Jose posted:

lmao

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1005769318469197825

Jose posted:

lmao

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1005769318469197825

Nonsense posted:

Obama is boosting buttigieg, which makes 2020 look like a battle between Bernie, Obama’s failson, and Pelosi and Schumer’s safe bet.

Jose posted:

lmao

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1005769318469197825

Gunshow Poophole posted:

is there reporting on this that doesn't require dme to read the NY Post

did some googlin and found our very own Joementum's take on it

Seems like the Democrats have been sleepin on this which is also hilarious

anime was right posted:

its a pro-trump pac filing the lawsuit

Condiv posted:

can you post the text? i don't wanna pay bozos to read lovely wapo articles.

Dave Weigel posted:

In an interview Tuesday with MSNBC, after calling for a “purge” of FBI agents proven to be biased against President Trump, Rep. Francis Rooney (R-Fla.) made an eye-popping accusation against Hillary Clinton.

“We’ve seen a lot of ends-before-the-means culture, both out of the Obama administration; out of Hillary Clinton, you know, with her $84 million of potentially illegal campaign contributions or the Clinton Foundation Uranium One [scandal],” said Rooney. “People need a good clean government.”

What was behind Rooney’s claim that Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign possibly received millions in illegal money? It was the first time a member of Congress had referred to a Federal Election Commission complaint lodged by a pro-Trump super PAC against Clinton and most state Democratic parties.

In the complaint, the Committee to Defend the President asked the FEC to determine whether the defeated Democrat engaged in “unprecedented, massive, nationwide multimillion-dollar conspiracy” to allow large donors to spread more money around. The “conspiracy,” however, may have simply taken advantage of new loopholes in campaign finance law — loopholes expanded after a Supreme Court victory by the lawyer who filed the new complaint.

The story starts in 2012, when Republican donor Shaun McCutcheon sued over FEC regulations that limited how much money donors could give to parties and candidate, in total, in any campaign cycle. McCutcheon’s case made it to the Supreme Court in 2013, where defenders of the FEC limits failed to convince the court’s conservative bloc that lifting the limit would allow candidates to blow past their own donation limits by routing more money through state parties.

“How realistic is that?” asked Justice Samuel Alito during oral arguments. “How realistic is it that all of the state party committees, for example, are going to get money and they’re all going to transfer it to one candidate?”

In the end, it was very realistic. In 2016, Clinton’s campaign created a Hillary Victory Fund — a joint fundraising committee — that allowed the candidate to raise money for both her campaign and 32 state parties at the same time. Donald Trump’s campaign did the same, albeit with fewer state parties. During the campaign, neither move courted much controversy.

After the campaign, the dam broke. In October, former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile began releasing excerpts from her memoir “Hacks,” in which she described a DNC that was effectively run “from Brooklyn” — i.e., by Clinton’s campaign. Brazile’s criticisms got noticed by Dan Backer, who’d won McCutcheon’s case at the Supreme Court, and who happened to be the attorney behind the Committee to Defend the President. Donors who had given to the Hillary Victory Fund, whose money had been “earmarked” to elect Clinton, had, he argued, been part of a laundering scheme.

“The DNC, in turn, contributed most of those funds to HFA, made coordinated expenditures with HFA and otherwise transferred control of its money to HFA, as both the DNC’s own public filings and former DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile’s public confessions make clear,” Backer wrote in the complaint. “In McCutcheon v. FEC, 134 S. Ct. 1434, 1455 (2014), the Supreme Court itself recognized this precise arrangement would flatly violate federal earmarking restrictions, … though the court dismissed the possibility of such a flagrantly illegal scheme as ‘unlikely’ to occur. Not even the Supreme Court could anticipate the extent to which the Democratic Party and its elite, wealthy donor class would commit willful felonies in a futile attempt to facilitate Clinton’s election.”

Until Tuesday, most coverage of the FEC complaint had appeared in conservative media. Fox News reported that Clinton and the DNC had been accused of a “corrupt money scheme.” Backer explained the complaint’s logic in the conservative op-ed pages of Investor’s Business Daily.

Democrats, meanwhile, basically ignored the story. Reached for comment, several state party chairs — all of their state parties having been named in the complaint — said they were unaware of it. In the weeks since Brazile’s book was released, state Democratic Party chairs have criticized the 2016 funding arrangement; none thought it was illegal.

In an email, Backer argued that the complaint rested entirely on what Democrats had said and done about the JFC.

“If state parties never had any actual custody or control, the ‘allocation’ of funds to them was never a contribution to them, but rather an attempt to paper the funds through strawmen on the way to the DNC, where the funds were placed under the control of Team Clinton in Brooklyn,” Backer wrote. “Thus, the $300,000(ish) from Calvin Klein was not a contribution to each of the participating entities, but rather an excessive contribution to at least the DNC, and since they took that money and put it under the custody and control of Team Clinton, it is an excessive contribution to the campaign. If that’s how it was pitched to donors (I’ll bet you a steak dinner on that one), those doing the pitching violated federal law.”

Democrats have, by and large, declined to comment about Backer’s complaint. Campaign finance watchdogs, however, believe that the pro-Trump super PAC may be on to something. Paul S. Ryan, a vice president of Common Cause who works on campaign finance issues, said that “the possibility of this type of scheme was why I was critical of McCutcheon in the first place,” and that some type of probe into practice of new, larger joint fundraising agreements might have been inevitable.

“In my view, the complaint does show enough smoke to warrant investigation into whether there was a fire,” said Ryan. “It would be good to get some guidance from the FEC on this. Either way you cut the Backer complaint, this is either illegal activity, or it’s legal but troubling.”

Campaign finance watchdogs had been waiting for a tough examination of the donor pools created in 2016. It’s unclear how long it might take the FEC to dig in; it took years after the 2008 and 2012 cycles for the commission to levy fines against the campaigns of John Edwards and Mitt Romney.