And it Begins:Special Prosecutor To Investigate Trump And Russia

[DBS1970]

Duly noted. No surprise there, right wingers get a pass on a board dominated by right wingers. How shocking!

And btw when DBS says I support Russians and communists it's just as bad as calling someone a traitor. The soviet 'communists' killed my grandfather in cold blood and confiscated all of our family's property after WWII and during the '56 uprising. Our family members were denied jobs, were oppressed by the State and were spied upon. My father and uncle fought against the communists tooth and nail, they were both charged with capital offenses and had to flee for their lives. For DBS to say I love the Russians and communists is an insult I won't take sitting down.

But as far as this board, don't worry Lyn, I'll back down, as I always do. Don't want to see anyone going over a ledge.

And you went over to their side politically. You embrace the political ideology that murdered your family and dispossessed them what does that say about you?

 

[DBS1970]

Your loyalty to fellow veterans and POWs on the other hand...

You talking about Crazy Old Man McCain AKA Songbird? The guy that talked to the NVA?

 

[Tibs]

And you went over to their side politically. You embrace the political ideology that murdered your family and dispossessed them what does that say about you?

You are one confused SOB. Being liberal and progressive is aligning with soviet communism? Man, your issues go deeper than I thought. Have a nice day.

 

[DBS1970]

You are one confused SOB. Being liberal and progressive is aligning with soviet communism? Man, your issues go deeper than I thought. Have a nice day.

You are not liberal you are a statist. There is no progress in big government socialism that has failed everywhere it is tried.

 

[IndySteel]

Or any one of Indy's personal attacks, the latest being that I like taking it up the ***. .

Boo fuckity hoo. Point proven.

 

[Troglodyte]

You are not liberal you are a statist. There is no progress in big government socialism that has failed everywhere it is tried.

And yet nobody dare mention cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

 

[Tim Steelersfan]

You are one confused SOB. Being liberal and progressive is aligning with soviet communism? Man, your issues go deeper than I thought. Have a nice day.

I suggest you read Witness by Whitaker Chambers - the one time Communist who left the Communist party at great risk to his own life and exposed Alger Hiss and countless other communists working in our Government between World Wars. Fascinating, beautiful read. Not taught in schools any longer. White washed from American History because Hiss was a celebrated Liberal. Chambers was a writer for TIME for 9 years. World renowned editor and writer.

And as he wrote, Liberalism IS Communism. He breaks it all down. To those of us with open eyes, there is no question.

In August 1948, Chambers, an editor at Time, identified Alger Hiss, a golden boy of the liberal establishment, as a fellow member of his underground Communist cell in the 1930s. Hiss, a former assistant to the Secretary of State and former General Secretary of the United Nations founding conference at San Francisco, and then president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, immediately denied Chambers' allegation.

A great deal more than the reputations of the two men was at stake. If Hiss was innocent, anti-Communism--and the careers of those closely associated with it, like Richard Nixon, a prominent member of the congressional investigating committee--would be dealt a deadly blow. If Hiss was guilty, anti-Communism would become a permanent part of the political landscape, and its spokesmen would become national leaders.

It took two protracted trials (Hiss reluctantly sued Chambers for slander), but Hiss was finally convicted of perjury for denying his espionage activities and sentenced to five years in jail. Hiss went to his grave more than 40 years later still protesting his innocence--and still lauded by many on the Left. But the Venona transcripts of secret KGB and GRU messages during World War II (released in the mid-1990s) confirmed that Alger Hiss had been a Soviet spy not only in the 1930s, but at least until 1945.

In 1952, Chambers published his magisterial, best-selling autobiography, Witness. The work argued that America faced a transcendent, not a transitory, crisis; the crisis was one not of politics or economics but of faith; and secular liberalism, the dominant "ism" of the day, was a watered-down version of Communist ideology. The New Deal, Chambers insisted, was not liberal democratic but "revolutionary" in its nature and intentions. All these themes, especially that the crisis of the 20th century was one of faith, resonated deeply with conservatives.

I suggest you read this entire article to get a taste. Modern Liberalism and Communism are too often one in the same.

https://www.heritage.org/political-...ing-the-enduring-relevance-whittaker-chambers

Whittaker Chambers is best known today as the veteran Soviet spy who became, in William F. Buckley Jr.’s words, “the most important American defector from Communism” when he testified against members of his underground Communist cell in the 1930s. Yet Chambers did more than reject Communism: He revealed a key problem with modern liberalism. In his now-classic autobiography Witness, he argued that Communism ought to be rejected in the name of something other than 20th-century modern liberalism by showing how the two grew out of a common ideology that places unbounded confidence in state power. As he remarked, New Deal acolytes had no principled reason for opposing unlimited state intrusion into the social, economic, and political realms. Herein lies the source of Chambers’ ongoing relevance: While Communism stands discredited, many still accept its fundamental conceit that man makes his own reality and that the government is the solution to all our ills.

Further

Imagine a disheveled, eccentric, if not brilliant, journalist and essayist who wrote for one of the most consequential publications in the English-speaking world testifying to the much-maligned House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) about intricate Communist activity within the federal government. Imagine further that the disheveled journalist’s testimony, disbelieved by virtually the entire ruling political class, would send to federal prison for perjury a former high servant of the New Deal and current president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Alger Hiss.

Moreover, this journalist’s testimony knocked the bloom off the rose of American progressivism and represented the first time that a conservative would deeply resonate with the American people about the challenge that progressivism was issuing to constitutional government.

The troubled journalist was Whittaker Chambers, a man known to many Americans in 1948—when he first testified before HUAC—as a superb writer in the Henry Luce media empire at Time. Chambers, however, had also been an underground member of the Fourth Section of Soviet Military Intelligence and had betrayed his country.

Chambers divulged his traitorous conduct because he came to understand the intrinsic evil of his former commitment to Communism. Driving Chambers’ painful insights into his ideological commitments were the Stalinist purges and his existential conversion to Christianity. From this conversion emerged his desire to immolate himself before Congress and the country if it meant that America would finally understand its existential Communist foe.

Yet Chambers did more than simply testify about espionage. Standing apart from liberal anti-Communists, he forcefully argued in his epic autobiography Witness that Communism must be rejected in the name of something other than 20th-century modern liberalism.

Being Liberal and Progressive DOES mean you often align with Communism.

 

[DBS1970]

And yet nobody dare mention cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Those of us who have been paying attention and can do basic math have been calling for SSI and Medicare to be privatized for YEARS.

 

[hamster]

The Mueller Probe is toast. Write the report, and put aside one of the darkest moments in American history....the attempted soft coup of a President of the United States.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/08/20/newt-gingrich-muellers-fatal-mistake.html


They no longer have any grounds for going to court to get a subpoena to compel the president to testify.


Mueller’s fatal mistake was revealed Saturday in The New York Times story titled, “White House Counsel, Don McGahn, Has Cooperated Extensively in Mueller Inquiry.” Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman reported that there were at least 30 hours of interviews between the Mueller team and the White House Counsel.


Don McGahn asserted throughout the interviews that “he never saw Mr. Trump go beyond his legal authorities.”


McGahn’s cooperation is historically unique because President Trump waived both executive privilege and attorney-client privilege. President Trump was so confident of his innocence that he waived both of these protections to allow the Special Counsel to thoroughly question the White House attorney.

 

[oneforthebus]

It's amazing that Hillary hires a Russian backed opposition research firm, known for it's smear tactics, to prepare a "dossier" on Trump, and Trump is supposedly colluding with the Russians.

Yes, Hil and Obama, so tough on our bitter enemy Russia! They would never allow these sinister Facebook ads of course, but selling them uranium in exchange for Clinton Foundation donations was A-OK...

 

[Supersteeler]

Yes, Hil and Obama, so tough on our bitter enemy Russia! They would never allow these sinister Facebook ads of course, but selling them uranium in exchange for Clinton Foundation donations was A-OK...

But Uranium never hurt anyone's feelings.

 

[madinsomniac]

I disagree that all liberals are supporters of communist ideals... the progressive extremists for sure, but the moderate liberals really don’t embrace that... though a good amount of those are voting Trump these days...

Look, for the majority of Roseanne Barrs career she was a liberal hero... her show was based on her politics and her comedy and it was extremely heralded by tge same orgs that tore her apart now... she is still a working class liberal hero.... she really hasn’t changed her viewpoints... the mouthpieces just went really far left.... i do not think every liberal is melting down over trump nor is every liberal idolizing Obama and I know they aren’t all hoping for free handouts in communist America ... its a vocal extremists group that has a lot of visibility right now... and that group is why the normal blue collar liberals have fled to Trumpism

 

[Tim Steelersfan]

I disagree that all liberals are supporters of communist ideals... the progressive extremists for sure, but the moderate liberals really don’t embrace that... though a good amount of those are voting Trump these days...

I don't think all are either. But much of Progressivism is. Read or listen to Witness. Understand, from a Communist himself, what Communism is. I daresay that most of us think we know what Communism is, but don't truly. I was educated quite a bit. And when you see Communism from the eyes of a Communist - one who betrayed the Communist party and left, it's very insightful. So many of the ideals of today's Leftist movement are rooted in the same foundations of Communism.

 

[DBS1970]

It depends on what type of liberal you are talking about. Classical Liberal like Thomas Jefferson? Sure. Neo-Socialists on the political left today? Nope. The Neo-Socialist wants the state to control you on their behalf because they think you owe them and they know how to run your life better than you do.

 

[oneforthebus]

I don't think all are either. But much of Progressivism is. Read or listen to Witness. Understand, from a Communist himself, what Communism is. I daresay that most of us think we know what Communism is, but don't truly. I was educated quite a bit. And when you see Communism from the eyes of a Communist - one who betrayed the Communist party and left, it's very insightful. So many of the ideals of today's Leftist movement are rooted in the same foundations of Communism.

Of course. The basic premise is :"equality". The government controls the pot, takes from some and gives to others so that in theory everyone is equal.

What progressive policy is NOT based on that premise? And of course it sounds good to those who don't have to pay for it.

The problem is that the suckers who work and produce and earn and pay for all of it will always get tired of doing all that just to be "equal" to the ones who won't do it. They stop working so hard, the pot shrinks and it all goes to hell.

 

[Tim Steelersfan]

Of course. The basic premise is :"equality". The government controls the pot, takes from some and gives to others so that in theory everyone is equal.

What progressive policy is NOT based on that premise? And of course it sounds good to those who don't have to pay for it.

The problem is that the suckers who work and produce and earn and pay for all of it will always get tired of doing all that just to be "equal" to the ones who won't do it. They stop working so hard, the pot shrinks and it all goes to hell.

Progressive policies are built upon that premise. This false notion of "equality"

To Whitaker, Communism was more fundamental than just that. Communism, as he puts it, is that man is the superior force in the world. Man is the superior being, the highest intellect, and man is "God." Communism denounces the soul and God. Man makes decisions that control the fate of the world. Not God. Not faith. Atheism is central to Communism.

“The Communist vision,” says Chambers, “is the vision of man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.”

The “Communist challenge,” he says, is “Faith in God or faith in Man?”

Chambers says that the America of his generation was “at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself,” because “two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgement, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate and future are involved.” He was making reference to Lenin’s statements about morality. Lenin in 1920 said that Communists rejected any moral code based in a belief in God, and that the Communist definition of morality is anything that would further the cause of world Communism.

In the book, Chambers points out that Communist hostility to religion was not specific to Christianity. Members of his espionage group were just as hostile to Judaism. He describes the attitude of his boss in the Underground, an ethnically Jewish Russian named Boris Bykov: “Bykov was Jewish, but he was a violent anti-Semite. His hatred of rabbis was pathological. If we passed a rabbi on the street, Bykov, who was otherwise so careful, would stop dead and stare while his face worked with anger.”

More...

As Chambers would learn, the ultimate goal of Communism, like all other ideologies bent on “immanentizing the eschaton” (bringing heaven to earth), would never be achieved. In fact, it would fail on a catastrophic level. At the cost of millions and millions of lives, Lenin and Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Chavez’s Venzuela (among many others) would crush the individual in “the name of the collective”. Instead of bringing man dignity, these regimes would violently disregard it. Instead of ushering in universal land, peace and bread, or fostering eternal brotherhood and comradeship, Communism created empty shelves, endless queues, paranoid informants and crushed dissidents. Freedom would be protected by barbed wire. Free thinking would be guarded by draconian orthodoxy. Communism was never a good idea badly applied. It was a bloody, bad idea.

Whittaker Chambers would ultimately defect (at great peril to his and his family’s lives) from the Communist Party after he came to grips with an enduring Truth,

Whitaker himself:

What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind – the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step. If I had rejected only Communism, I would have rejected only one political expression of the modern mind, the most logical because the most brutal in enforcing the myth of man’s material perfectibility…[If I had rejected only Communism I would] have remained within that modern intellectual mood which gives birth to Communism, and denies the soul in the name of the mind, and the soul’s salvation in suffering in the name of man’s salvation here and now. What I sensed without being able to phrase it was what has since been phrased with the simplicity of an axiom: “Man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God man can only organize the world against man.” The gas ovens of Buchenwald and the Communist execution cellars exist first within our minds.

 

[Tim Steelersfan]

Speaking of good ole' Communism...

Man is God. And when Man believes he is God, **** like this evolves into reality.

China Assigns Every Citizen A ‘Social Credit Score’ To Identify Who Is And Isn’t Trustworthy

Country Determines Your Standing Through Use Of Surveillance Video, Plans To Have 600 Million Cameras By 2020

China is rolling out a high-tech plan to give all of its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score, based on how they behave.

But there are consequences if a score gets too low, and for some that’s cause for concern, CBS2’s Ben Tracy reported Tuesday.

When Liu Hu recently tried to book a flight, he was told he was banned from flying because he was on the list of untrustworthy people. Liu is a journalist who was ordered by a court to apologize for a series of tweets he wrote and was then told his apology was insincere.

“I can’t buy property. My child can’t go to a private school,” he said. “You feel you’re being controlled by the list all the time.”

And the list is now getting longer as every Chinese citizen is being assigned a social credit score — a fluctuating rating based on a range of behaviors. It’s believed that community service and buying Chinese-made products can raise your score. Fraud, tax evasion and smoking in non-smoking areas can drop it.

China’s growing network of surveillance cameras makes all of this possible.

“It can recognize more than 4,000 vehicles,” Xu Li said.

Li is the CEO of Sensetime, one of China’s most successful artificial intelligence companies. It has created smart cameras for the government that can help catch criminals, but also track average citizens.

“We can tell whether it is an adult, a child, male or female,” Li said.

 

[jitter77]

how do you monitor 1.4 billion people 24hrs a day?

 

[Tibs]

 

[Troglodyte]

The problem is that the suckers who work and produce and earn and pay for all of it will always get tired of doing all that just to be "equal" to the ones who won't do it. They stop working so hard, the pot shrinks and it all goes to hell.

Any real life examples of this phenomenon?

 

[Tibs]

Ha ha, Indy's hero and personal saviour gets called out on live television...lol.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Someone called into C-SPAN and told Gorka him and other Trump allies "Treasonous little *******" <a href="https://t.co/ETpQYTDKTP">pic.twitter.com/ETpQYTDKTP</a></p>— jordan (@JordanUhl) <a href="https://twitter.com/JordanUhl/status/1031930785614442497?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 21, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Smash]

Every time I try to watch those call in segments on C-Span I lose brain cells. The host trying desperately not to roll his/her eyes at some of the stuff can be entertaining though.

 

[Steelworth]

"Treasonous Little *******!" Take that!

Anytime now (going on day 400+)

 

[Tibs]

Trump is powerless as his legal fate spins out of his control
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/21/...e-no-control-frustration-powerless/index.html

President Donald Trump may no longer control his fate, a plight that helps explain his increasingly volcanic Twitter eruptions.Trump's persona -- in politics, business and life -- relies on his self-image as the guy who calls the shots, closes deals and forces others to react to the shock moves of a master narrative weaver.

But as a legal web closes around the President, he's in a far weaker position than he would like, a situation especially underlined by the bombshell revelations that White House counsel Donald McGahn has spent 30 hours in interviews with special counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump reacted to a media frenzy over the McGahn revelations in characteristic fashion: by launching a new Twitter assault on Mueller, taking new shots at his new nemesis John Brennan and diverting attention with newsy comments on the Federal Reserve.

But sources told CNN on Monday that the President was unsettled that he didn't know the full extent of McGahn's testimony and had remained agitated through the weekend, believing the latest developments made him look weak.

McGahn's conversations with Mueller are not the only drama that is leaving Trump waiting on events, rather than dictating them.

Prosecutors and jurors over whom he has little control, the legal exposure of some of his top former associates and the surprising constraints of the most powerful job in the world and those who serve him are leaving him -- for once -- struggling to control his own story.

Trump is on tenterhooks, for instance, as a jury -- now entering its fourth day of deliberations -- weighs tax and fraud charges that could send Paul Manafort, his onetime campaign chairman, to jail for life.

New reports on Sunday that Michael Cohen is close to being charged in his own multimillion-dollar alleged fraud case ignited fresh speculation over whether the President's former personal lawyer could do a deal with prosecutors to testify against his former top client.

Then there is his duel with Mueller himself, who may be the most inscrutable, immovable foe Trump has ever faced.

The President has often raised fears that he could try to have Mueller removed or otherwise interfere with his investigation. But the consequences of derailing a criminal probe into the conduct of his own campaign would cause a crisis of governance in Washington and could so shift the political terrain that even Republicans who have given the President a free pass could be forced to confront him.

Still, on Monday Trump was still mulling the idea of a shock move -- or at least he wanted the special counsel, his own supporters and other Americans to think he might try something unthinkable.

 

[Superman]

Trump is powerless as his legal fate spins out of his control
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/21/...e-no-control-frustration-powerless/index.html

why, yes, it was on CNN.
good job, Tiberius