Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Lee]

9 hours ago, Pariah said:

 

I love this. Do you know which of his works it's taken from?

Unfortunately, no I don't. Sorry.  Actually, it might be from The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, but I don't remember and didn't check. I just checked, and it is indeed from that book. Sorry for all the edits (including this one), I just hated not to be able to give you the information you wanted. 😊

 

Lee

[Pariah]

I wondered if that might be the case. That is one of my favorite books. It's been way too long since I've read it.

[Lee]

1 minute ago, Pariah said:

I wondered if that might be the case. That is one of my favorite books. It's been way too long since I've read it.

Mine, too and me, too!

 

Lee

[DShomshak]

Incidentally, the Sep. 21 2019 issue of The Economist has a nice little article on Giuliani's Ukraine activities. I foun d it... eyebrow-raising.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Incidentally, the Sep. 21 2019 issue of The Economist has a nice little article on Giuliani's Ukraine activities. I foun d it... eyebrow-raising.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Incidentally, the Sep. 21 2019 issue of The Economist has a nice little article on Giuliani's Ukraine activities. I foun d it... eyebrow-raising.

 

Dean Shomshak

[csyphrett]

2 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Incidentally, the Sep. 21 2019 issue of The Economist has a nice little article on Giuliani's Ukraine activities. I foun d it... eyebrow-raising.

 

Dean Shomshak

How far did you have to raise your eyebrows, Dean? You're tripling up here

CES

[Old Man]

He has three eyebrows.  Is there a link to the economist article or at least a tl;dr?

[megaplayboy]

The Washington Post‏Verified account @washingtonpost 30m30 minutes ago

More

Trump told Russians at infamous 2017 meeting that he wasn’t concerned about Moscow’s interference in U.S. election

 

 

[DShomshak]

20 hours ago, Old Man said:

He has three eyebrows.  Is there a link to the economist article or at least a tl;dr?

 

One for my psychic Third Eye, which tells me our cultural and political danger have just become even greater than before. (And I don't know why the forum software multiple-posts me, but it's quite annoying.)

 

I tried to get a link but the internet is not kind to my poverty-row dial-up connection today. There can't really be a tl;dr because the number and details of Giulinani's meetings are the point. The article does note that organized crime is pervasive in Ukraine; everyone knows the rules for dealing with the Mob; and the article bluntly calls Giuliani Trump's consigliere. When the Mob boss' consigliere wants a meeting, you take it.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Doc Democracy]

Hmm.  Been watching this closely but I have to now say that, until Kickstarter resolve their issues with their staff, I will no longer be supporting any Kickstarter based projects.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/09/kickstarter-to-workers-and-project-creators-drop-dead

 

Earlier in the dispute, workers asked folk not to boycott Kickstarter, I think that my conscience will not allow me to support a company fighting it's workers.

 

Personally, I need to get better at doing that consistently.  Was going to post this in the Kickstarter forum but I don't support enough projects for it to be particularly relevant there, but the dispute may harm the viability of future projects.

 

Doc

[Ranxerox]

7 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:

Hmm.  Been watching this closely but I have to now say that, until Kickstarter resolve their issues with their staff, I will no longer be supporting any Kickstarter based projects.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/09/kickstarter-to-workers-and-project-creators-drop-dead

 

 

Disappointing.  

[Doc Democracy]

Am pleased I supported Champions Now and Chivalry and Sorcery before this came to a head.

[Pattern Ghost]

So, they fired people for trying to organize a union? Seems like they're going to be in some hot water with the feds if that's the case. Then again, maybe not so much under the current administration. Bad precedent if they let it slide though.

[archer]

On 9/26/2019 at 3:13 AM, Lord Liaden said:

 

Every source I've read has noted that the investigation of the Burisma company for corruption had been inactive for over a year before Joe Biden, with the support of other world governments, pushed for the ouster of the Ukrainian chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, over inaction in fighting government corruption. Had Hunter Biden been engaged in any compromising activities as a board member of Burisma, it would have been to his benefit to leave Shokin in office, not agitate for a more pro-active prosecutor.

 

Politifact links to a Ukrainian news article dated March 6, 2019 where the fired prosecutor claims the investigation was still active when he was fired. They also link to a couple of articles which claim the investigation was not active. (Politifact is either leftist or centerist according to who you talk to.)

 

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/may/07/viral-image/fact-checking-joe-biden-hunter-biden-and-ukraine/

 

====

 

That prosecutor supposedly gave interviews to the Washington Post then later to ABC news early this year where he claimed he was fired due to his investigation into Hunter Biden's company. But honestly, links to those stories have been buried under so much recent garbage that it's not worth a few dozen hours of my time to dig through and find them. I'm not going to go into hard core research mode for something which would have only the effect of protecting Trump.   But if I happen to run across some source which links back to either of those articles, I'll post them later.

 

====

 

Here's a very lengthy article from July 8, 2019 which talks about Hunter Biden and looks at his involvement in the Ukraine. A good backgrounder on the Biden family in general and what happened with Hunter's involvement with the Burisma company in particular.

 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-biden-jeopardize-his-fathers-campaign

 

excerpts

 

Quote

In September, 2008, Hunter launched a boutique consulting firm, Seneca Global Advisors, named for the largest of the Finger Lakes, in New York State, where his mother had grown up. In pitch meetings with prospective clients, Hunter said that he could help small and mid-sized companies expand into markets in the U.S. and other countries. In June, 2009, five months after Joe Biden became Vice-President, Hunter co-founded a second company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, with Christopher Heinz, Senator

John Kerry’s stepson and an heir to the food-company fortune, and Devon Archer, a former Abercrombie & Fitch model who started his finance career at Citibank in Asia and who had been friends with Heinz at Yale. (Heinz and Archer already had a private-equity fund called Rosemont Capital.) Heinz believed that Hunter would share his aversion to entering into business deals that could attract public scrutiny, but over time Hunter and Archer seized opportunities that did not include Heinz, who was less inclined to take risks.

In 2012, Archer and Hunter talked to Jonathan Li, who ran a Chinese private-equity fund, Bohai Capital, about becoming partners in a new company that would invest Chinese capital—and, potentially, capital from other countries—in companies outside China. In June, 2013, Li, Archer, and other business partners signed a memorandum of understanding to create the fund, which they named BHR Partners, and, in November, they signed contracts related to the deal. Hunter became an unpaid member of BHR’s board but did not take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after his father left the White House.

In December, 2013, Vice-President Biden flew to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping. Biden often asked one of his grandchildren to accompany him on his international trips, and he invited Finnegan to come on this one. Hunter told his father that he wanted to join them. According to a Beijing-based BHR representative, Hunter, shortly after arriving in Beijing, on December 4th, helped arrange for Li to shake hands with his father in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel...

Hunter’s meeting with Li and his relationship with BHR attracted little attention at the time, but some of Biden’s advisers were worried that Hunter, by meeting with a business associate during his father’s visit, would expose the Vice-President to criticism. The former senior White House aide told me that Hunter’s behavior invited questions about whether he “was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasn’t done in that White House. Optics really mattered, and that seemed to be cutting it pretty close, even if nothing nefarious was going on.” When I asked members of Biden’s staff whether they discussed their concerns with the Vice-President, several of them said that they had been too intimidated to do so. “Everyone who works for him has been screamed at,” a former adviser told me. Others said that they were wary of hurting his feelings. One business associate told me that Biden, during difficult conversations about his family, “got deeply melancholy, which, to me, is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me. It’s like you’ve hurt him terribly. That was always my fear, that I would be really touching a very fragile part of him.”

For another venture, Archer travelled to Kiev to pitch investors on a real-estate fund he managed, Rosemont Realty. There, he met Mykola Zlochevsky, the co-founder of Burisma, one of Ukraine’s largest natural-gas producers. Zlochevsky had served as ecology minister under the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. After public protests in 2013 and early 2014, the Ukrainian parliament had voted to remove Yanukovych and called for his arrest. Under the new Ukrainian government, authorities in Kiev, with the encouragement of the Obama Administration, launched an investigation into whether Zlochevsky had used his cabinet position to grant exploration licenses that benefitted Burisma. (The status of the inquiry is unclear, but no proof of criminal activity has been publicly disclosed. Zlochevsky could not be reached for comment, and Burisma did not respond to queries.) In a related investigation, which was ultimately closed owing to a lack of evidence, British authorities temporarily froze U.K. bank accounts tied to Zlochevsky.

When Archer told Hunter that the board needed advice on how to improve the company’s corporate governance, Hunter recommended the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, where he was “of counsel.” The firm brought in the investigative agency Nardello & Co. to assess Burisma’s history of corruption. Hunter joined Archer on the Burisma board in April, 2014. Three months later, in a draft report to Boies Schiller, Nardello said that it was “unable to identify any information to date regarding any current government investigation into Zlochevsky or Burisma,” but cited unnamed sources saying that Zlochevsky could be “vulnerable to investigation for financial crimes” and for “perceived abuse of power”...

Several former officials in the Obama Administration and at the State Department insisted that Hunter’s role at Burisma had no effect on his father’s policies in Ukraine, but said that, nevertheless, Hunter should not have taken the board seat. As the former senior White House aide put it, there was a perception that “Hunter was on the loose, potentially undermining his father’s message.” The same aide said that Hunter should have recognized that at least some of his foreign business partners were motivated to work with him because they wanted “to be able to say that they are affiliated with Biden.” A former business associate said, “The appearance of a conflict of interest is good enough, at this level of politics, to keep you from doing things like that.”

In December, 2015, as Joe Biden prepared to return to Ukraine, his aides braced for renewed scrutiny of Hunter’s relationship with Burisma. Amos Hochstein, the Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy policy, raised the matter with Biden, but did not go so far as to recommend that Hunter leave the board ...

Robert Weissman, the president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, said, “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Hunter’s foreign employers and partners were seeking to leverage Hunter’s relationship with Joe, either by seeking improper influence or to project access to him.”

[archer]

Here's as complete of an account of the Trump-Ukraine phone call as exists. Judge for yourself how much pressure was applied by Trump.

 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Unclassified09.2019.pdf

 

(A Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation.· (TELCON) is not a verbatim transcript of a discussion. The text in this document records the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty "Officers and-NSC policy staff assigned to listen and memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation takes place. A number of factors can affect 'the accuracy of the record, including poor telecommunications connections and variations in accent and/or interpretation.)

 

 

In the transcript, Trump at one point mentions that VP Biden bragged about stopping the prosecution of Burisma. Here's the video of Biden at the a Council of Foreign Relations event where Biden did the bragging and a transcript of Biden's remarks.

 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/09/27/flashback_2018_joe_biden_brags_at_cfr_meeting_about_withholding_aid_to_ukraine_to_force_firing_of_prosecutor.html

[DShomshak]

At the library now, so I can get a link to the Economist article I mentioned above. Quite a web of intrigue.

 

 

Black snow - Rudy Giuliani's Ukrainian adventure | United ...

 

https://www.economist.com › united-states › 2019/09/21 › rudy-giulianis-...

1. Cached

Sep 21, 2019 - The Economist - Homepage ... At least part of the complaint, they say, concerns Ukraine. ... Fittingly, Mr Giuliani's main source of disinformation on Ukraine was Yuriy Lutsenko, a controversial former prosecutor-general.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

[archer]

https://www.msn.com/en-xl/northamerica/top-stories/joe-bidens-2020-ukrainian-nightmare-a-closed-probe-is-revived/ar-BBVvvd8?li=BBKxJ6T

 

02/04/2019

excerpts

 

Quote

U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts - usually more than $166,000 a month - from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia. The general prosecutor's official file for the Burisma probe - shared with me by senior Ukrainian officials - shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.

Shokin (the prosecutor who VP Biden had fired) told me in written answers to questions that, before he was fired as general prosecutor, he had made "specific plans" for the investigation that "included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden." He added: "I would like to emphasize the fact that presumption of innocence is a principle in Ukraine," and that he couldn't describe the evidence further...

U.S. and Ukrainian authorities both told me Biden and his office clearly had to know about the general prosecutor's probe of Burisma and his son's role. They noted that:

 

• Hunter Biden's appointment to the board was widely reported in American media;
• The U.S. embassy in Kiev that coordinated Biden's work in the country repeatedly and publicly discussed the general prosecutor's case against Burisma;
• Great Britain took very public action against Burisma while Joe Biden was working with that government on Ukraine issues;
• Biden's office was quoted, on the record, acknowledging Hunter Biden's role in Burisma in a New York Times article about the general prosecutor's Burisma case that appeared four months before Biden forced the firing of Shokin. The vice president's office suggested in that article that Hunter Biden was a lawyer free to pursue his own private business deals...

 
Most of the general prosecutor's investigative work on Burisma focused on three separate cases and most stopped abruptly once Shokin was fired. The most prominent of the Burisma cases was transferred to a different Ukrainian agency, closely aligned with the U.S. embassy in Kiev, known as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), according to the case file and current General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko. NABU closed that case, and a second case involving alleged improper money transfers in London was dropped when Ukrainian officials failed to file the necessary documents by the required deadline...

The bank records show that, on most months when Burisma money flowed, two wire transfers of $83,333.33 each were sent to the Rosemont Seneca-connected account on the same day. The same Rosemont Seneca-linked account typically then would pay Hunter Biden one or more payments ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 each. Prosecutors reviewed internal company documents and wanted to interview Hunter Biden and Archer about why they had received such payments, according to interviews. Lutsenko said Ukrainian company board members legally can pay themselves for work they do if it benefits the company's bottom line, but prosecutors never got to determine the merits of the payments to Rosemont because of the way the investigation was shut down...

 

The author, John Solomon, is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists' misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill.

[Lord Liaden]

2 hours ago, archer said:

 

Politifact links to a Ukrainian news article dated March 6, 2019 where the fired prosecutor claims the investigation was still active when he was fired. They also link to a couple of articles which claim the investigation was not active. (Politifact is either leftist or centerist according to who you talk to.)

 

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/may/07/viral-image/fact-checking-joe-biden-hunter-biden-and-ukraine/

 

====

 

That prosecutor supposedly gave interviews to the Washington Post then later to ABC news early this year where he claimed he was fired due to his investigation into Hunter Biden's company. But honestly, links to those stories have been buried under so much recent garbage that it's not worth a few dozen hours of my time to dig through and find them. I'm not going to go into hard core research mode for something which would have only the effect of protecting Trump.   But if I happen to run across some source which links back to either of those articles, I'll post them later.

 

 

 

The prosecutor who was fired claiming that he wasn't fired for the reason publicly stated, needs to be taken with more than a few grains of salt.

[Lord Liaden]

Several former officials in the Obama Administration and at the State Department insisted that Hunter’s role at Burisma had no effect on his father’s policies in Ukraine, but said that, nevertheless, Hunter should not have taken the board seat. As the former senior White House aide put it, there was a perception that “Hunter was on the loose, potentially undermining his father’s message.” The same aide said that Hunter should have recognized that at least some of his foreign business partners were motivated to work with him because they wanted “to be able to say that they are affiliated with Biden.” A former business associate said, “The appearance of a conflict of interest is good enough, at this level of politics, to keep you from doing things like that.”

 

Oh, how I long for the days when that was true.

[megaplayboy]

42 minutes ago, archer said:

https://www.msn.com/en-xl/northamerica/top-stories/joe-bidens-2020-ukrainian-nightmare-a-closed-probe-is-revived/ar-BBVvvd8?li=BBKxJ6T

 

02/04/2019

excerpts

 

I stopped reading after "by John Solomon".  He's a widely discredited hack.  

[Ranxerox]

45 minutes ago, megaplayboy said:

I stopped reading after "by John Solomon".  He's a widely discredited hack.  

 

Admittedly, "Frequent Guest of Sean Hannity" is not the most promising line on a journalist's resume.

 

Apparently, it was Mr Solomon's Ukrainian conspiracy theory that he spouted on Hannity's show that prompted Trump to push for the investigation against Biden and his son.  So, ironically, if Trump is impeached or loses the election over this, America will owe this discredited hack a strange debt of gratitude. 

[Old Man]

Even if he wasn’t a discredited hack, it’s still a crime for Trump to blackmail foreign leaders for political help. Further coverage of Ukraineghazi is just another obvious attempt at distraction. 

[archer]

8 hours ago, Old Man said:

Even if he wasn’t a discredited hack, it’s still a crime for Trump to blackmail foreign leaders for political help. Further coverage of Ukraineghazi is just another obvious attempt at distraction. 

 

That hack's story from Feb 2019 points out that Ukraine at that time had already restarted the investigation.

 

If you don't like the hack's story, here's one from May 2019 stating that the investigation had already been restarted at that point in time.

 

https://112.international/article/biden-brought-his-people-in-ukraines-prosecutor-generals-office-to-cover-his-sons-business-shokin-39549.html

 

Either of those news stories is long before Trump sent Guiliani to make first contact with Ukraine over the matter, much less before the Trump phone call.

 

 

I'm saying, impeach Trump over enriching himself at the taxpayer's expense while in office. You can point to multiple incidents of Trump directing business to his companies while in office. That's illegal.

 

In contrast, this Ukrainian phone call thing while useful for grabbing headlines and getting some Democrat officeholders off of the fence is going to get ripped apart like tissue paper if anyone cares to give a substantive defense.

 

The investigation already being in progress for months before the threat of withholding money mitigates the claim that Trump was somehow forcing Ukraine to do something that it didn't want to do.

 

Threatening to withhold money unless a foreign leader does what you want, even if you think you can find that in the transcript...that happens in Washington all the time. I just posted a video of Biden bragging that he'd threatened this same Ukrainian leader that he'd withhold money unless that Ukrainian leader fired a particular prosecutor (who just happened to be in charge of the investigation into a company where Hunter Biden sat on the board).

 

Threatening to withhold money from a foreign country unless it does what we want has been the main way the US has motivated foreign cooperation since WWII.

 

For the threat to be relevant in any manner in an accusation against Trump, you'd have to prove some underlying crime. Because threatening to withhold money unless a foreign country does what we want isn't itself a crime.

 

 

 

[Hermit]

Okay. Trump gets impeached, and Biden steps down from running ...fair trade to this Warren/Sanders supporter ;)