sofa king
sofa king's Journal(Sometimes, sofa king is a fool)
Forgive me for my silly and confusing error. You can still see it by clicking my edit history below.
Carly thinks he's the remuneraTED one.
Like I said before, none of this makes any sense unless they're planning to bounce out as a third party right away.
Within a month the filing deadlines begin to close, so they have to move soon--within days or weeks--to get signatures.
They aren't going to get a convention, so they make the running-mate announcement now while Cruz still still has a dedicated press corps.
The idea of Cruz and Fiorina together is terrible, no doubt, but they're not running to win.
They are running to make sure that nobody wins.
They run as ultra-conservatives, hoping to bag Texas and the deep south.
Trump, in the meantime, tacks hard-left, steals some of Bernie's campaign, and aims for the mid-atlantic and former industrial states.
If, between the two campaigns, and with the help of the entirety of the Republican election-theft mechanisms, they can bag 270 electoral votes, then nobody wins. It becomes a contested election. The presence of a strong third party screws up the statistical studies, obscuring the election theft.
The contested election goes to Congress. Republicans in Congress are told to protect themselves by not permitting the question to come to a vote.
Nobody is elected President, Republicans in Congress are held relatively blameless, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan inherits the White House as per the line of succession delineated in the 25th Amendment.
Ted and Carly get to pocket millions and millions in campaign cash, and maybe President Ryan throws them a bone.
It's a good plan; I've been talking about it since last year. The only thing that can realistically stop it, should the smears against Mrs. Clinton finally begin to work and it gets close enough to steal, is to vote out every damned Republican in the House of Representatives so that it's the Democrats who choose whether or not to hold a vote, or give it to their Speaker. Don't see that happening if they're already rigging the Presidential election.
Of course, it won't work at all if Hillary can stay far outside of the margin of error, as Senator Obama did, and win an overwhelming victory.
Let's take this Saudi business step-by-step.
What was really going on is the Republicans and their allies the Saudis were trying to toss a wrench into the US economy in an election year.
But they didn't get away with it and the proof is in the headlines right now. The short version is this:
* The Saudis were (among other objectives) trying to pressure Russia out of Syria by overproducing oil, making Russian oil unprofitable.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Did-The-Saudis-And-The-US-Collude-In-Dropping-Oil-Prices.html
* The Russians declared victory and made preparations to pull out.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/15/world/russia-syria-withdrawal/
* As soon as they did, the Saudis agreed to an emergency OPEC meeting, to discuss a production freeze, so they can go back to making money.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-01/saudi-arabia-will-only-freeze-oil-production-if-iran-joins-plan
* In the meantime, Republican election success depends directly upon oil prices, so whatever they're saying publicly, privately they're rooting for the Saudis to freeze production.
https://www.texastribune.org/2016/03/16/oil-prices-depress-texas-campaign-donations/
* Republicans also depend upon economic instability to get close enough to steal it, and raising fuel prices is all they need.
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/what-would-another-recession-mean-2016
* Recall that this is exactly the game they played in 2000 to let GW Bush get close enough to steal it.
http://articles.latimes.com/2000/sep/23/news/mn-25321
* So the moment the Saudis opened the door to an emergency meeting, President Obama started to consider declassifying reports that would surely implicate the Saudis and the Republican Party in the 9/11 attacks. At the same time, a bill floated which would allow the families of 9.11 victims to sue the Saudis.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/11/obama-under-pressure-to-declassify-the-9-11-report-s-secret-28-pages.html
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/276680-clinton-sanders-back-bill-allowing-9-11-victims-to-sue-saudis
* The Saudis didn't like that at all, and quickly resorted to extortion.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3543702/Saudi-Arabia-threatens-pull-750-billion-U-S-assets-Congress-passes-bill-making-government-liable-9-11-related-lawsuits.html
Then the President dropped in on the Saudis, paying them a nice, cordial-like visit. There was a discussion, about what we do not know, and all of a sudden things changed. Now:
* The Obama Adminsitration wants to squelch the right of families to sue the Saudis.
http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/bipartisanship-breaks-block-911-bill
* The Russians are moving around artillery in Syria, rather than pulling it out.
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-moves-artillery-units-syria/
* And the Saudis won't freeze oil production.
http://www.businessinsider.com/no-deal-iran-sits-out-the-biggest-oil-meeting-in-decades-2016-4
Here's what I think we can conclude from all of this. The Republicans and their allies the Saudis were up to their usual election-year trick of destabilizing the US economy, in order to help the Republicans. President Obama in turn began a double counterpunch, legislatively and through executive action, threatening to reveal the Saudi (and therefore Republican) role in the 9/11 attacks.
The Saudis freaked the f&^% out about it, went straight to the armageddon threats, and quietly rolled over on halting oil production. This pissed the Russians off and now they're not leaving Syria, but hell with them right now, say both the Saudis and the Americans.
The deal, obviously, is that the Obama Administration will keep up the usual 9/11 charade for another six months, in return for which the Saudis will continue to overproduce oil for another six months.
In the United States, the economy will continue to improve, unemployment will continue to drop, and the Republicans are going to get totally stomped, losing the White House, the Supreme Court, and probably Congress as well.
All because the Republicans and the Saudis have colluded to cover up whatever criminal role they both had in the September 11 attacks. We know this for certain, logically, because the cover-up itself was felonious and the cover-up always conceals a larger crime.
In other words, for the first time, the United States has begun to use the 9/11 attacks against the beneficiaries of the attacks, and it scared the ever-lovin' crap out of Saudi Arabia, which tells us a lot about their role in it.
It might just destroy the Republican Party forever.
I love "glass house" stories like this.
So Utah politicians are declaring pornography a health crisis, eh? Let's take one guess about who that's gonna hurt.
Thanks to the law of conservatism which states that conservative leaders are very likely to be secretly doing the things which they are trying to ban, we will discover that they are filthy horndogs.
Someone is sure to break into their computers and leak their Internet browsing habits and the attachments they email to one another, and it will be sordid and amusing, and probably also timed to impact elections since they have provided the opportunity.
Some of them will probably have crossed the line into the criminal, as well, so Utah politicians really are providing a public service--by drawing attention to themselves and the fact that the public health crisis of pornography is greatly exacerbated by electing Republican politicians.
I don't trust 'em.
Let me be the first to note that I am a hypocrite. Not only was I (and just like I am an alcoholic, I still am a) nicotine addict, I was a professional addict, actually getting paid to review cigars for a while.
I got lucky and finally beat it by getting sick enough to go 72 hours without dipping or smoking. Then it was six long and painful months as I adjusted.
Here is what bothers me with e-cigs: they use propylene glycol as the vapor mechanism. If you knock a single carbon atom off of that propylene glycol, like say with the heating element in the e-cig, you get ethylene glycol, or antifreeze, inhaled directly into the lungs. Similar chemical changes can apply to the flavorants, to the plastic in the design of the device, to the degradation of the heating element, and so on.
Therefore I don't trust them to be safe. I do trust that the industry will deceitfully hide behind the fact that most e-cig users are former smokers, and blame the prior habit for whatever health consequences result from vaping--for decades to come, no doubt.
Several people have thanked me for pointing out one simple truth about nicotine addiction, which I will share with all of you in hopes that one of you will take it to heart. The pang of addiction that you feel when you quit is the exact same feeling you experience just before you pull out that cigarette or vaporizer.
The miracle is that quitting eventually reduces the intensity and frequency of those pangs. In other words, if you smoke or vape right now, you already experience the misery of quitting dozens of times a day, more often than you would if you can just quit and stick to it for about a month. After that length of time, the pangs lasted less time than it took to smoke, and occurred less often than when I smoked. It's a shitty measure of success, I know, but success it is.
Consider putting that theory to the test next time you are sick or broke, and maybe you'll get lucky and break away, like I did.
Oh, they will ignore him, all right.
This sounds like a small thing, but it is already being writ large in Cruz's book:
Ted Cruz has violated the rules of comity in the Senate.
I know what you're thinking: why in the hell would Republicans care about courtesy and consideration for others? They haven't publicly shown such behavior since Richard Nixon.
But privately, it counts for a lot, maybe even everything in the Senate. Jesse Helms was an asshole, and as a result never got a bill of his own passed in thirty years.
Whatever Ted Cruz has been doing behind the scenes at the Senate suggests that he has already been similarly ostracized.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dead-ted-bounce
Violating comity is what triggered the nuclear option in 2013, which has FUBARred Republican plans to control the judiciary. It forces a-hole Senators to build their own self-sustaining campaigns, term after term. Nobody stumps for them, nobody asks them to sign on to populist bills that make people happy, they don't get Christmas cards, and other Senators do not lend qualified staff members or donor networks to their national campaigns.
Basically, by being a knuckledragger, Ted Cruz has guaranteed that his campaign will be run by knuckledraggers. His donors are knuckledraggers, his supporters are knuckledraggers, and so on. He will never be able to properly react to the curveballs that Democratic Senators would throw at him in support of either one of the very accommodating Senators who are in the same race right now. They will make him look like an asshole in the Senate, they'll make him look like an asshole on the campaign trail, they'll make him look like an asshole everywhere he goes.
And the only people who vote for him will be the assholes who didn't fall for Donald Trump--basically nobody. If he wins the nomination (and Trump doesn't go third party) some Democratic elector is going to have to defect and vote for George Washington to protect that President's clean-sweep electoral victory.
My money is on Biden as the 1st 3-term VP
He's a vigorous and persuasive campaigner and he's hammered the formerly ceremonial office of President of the Senate into a powerful position that has turned Republican obstruction in the Senate against itself.
Unless he wants to retire, I expect him to be the first person either of the two candidates approaches, to continue his job as the most important Vice President in American history.
(Yeah, Dick Cheney ran the White House--but only for four years. After that Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld maneuvered him out to pasture and other evil geniuses continued to destroy America in GWB's name. Joe Biden has shepherded at least five Democratic budget proposals to passage (or rather, "continuance"
without Democratic control of Congress, something which may never again be repeated without his efforts.)
This is really important!
We saw the sneak-up-from-the-right move take out Eric Cantor in the primaries, so we know it can work. But this time it's for all the marbles.
For a couple of months now, I've been pointing out that Republican movement at the top seems to be in the direction of a far different kind of election theft than that to which we have already seen... often.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=7696342
The short version is this:
1) Steal the nomination from Trump or find a powerful third-party candidate to run against him; either way they need two powerful candidates running against the Democratic nominee;
2) Use unlimited funding and vote-theft mechanisms to disperse electoral votes so that NOBODY wins a majority of EVs. In a tight enough race it could be a simple matter of pushing Ohio over to Kasich, for example;
3) With no electoral vote majority, the election gets tossed into Congress, where Republican majorities will prevail at least through the end of this Congress (up to about January 3, 2017);
4) To protect themselves against the vicious backlash that will result from stealing the election, the Republicans will not hold a vote on selecting the next President, which means the real election for President will come when the next Speaker of the House is chosen by the House a couple of days after January 3;
5) The Speaker of the House will therefore become the next President on January 20, by default and without a single vote.
The better part of two decades of gerrymandering guarantees that the Republicans will control the House of Representatives after this election. But if you sneak up on Paul Ryan and kick him out, all of a sudden there is a frightening new wrinkle to the election theft problem. Without Ryan and the support of the vast majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives, suddenly the race for President becomes another clown-fight, this time in Congress in January, as the 115th Congress selects its leadership. Whichever Republican wins the internal election for Speaker becomes President by default.
One of the best ways to ensure this can't happen is through an all-out assault on the House of Representatives, ideally by running a Democrat in every district but also by threatening House leadership through primary challenges. The Republican Party has relied upon extra-legal tactics to control Congress for this entire century so far; they don't have a hell of a lot of actual talent in their staves, and if leadership is holding on to their talent to fight off internal dissent then it is far more difficult for Republicans to make additional gains in the House and the Senate.
This move against Ryan may in fact be the beginning of a well-orchestrated 50-state plan to take Congress away from the Republicans (or thin their margin of control) before they can steal the White House from the American people, again. They're not backing whatever yahoo is running against Paul Ryan, but we probably did our best to smooth the way for him, you know?
If the object is to exhaust judicial remedies...
...If the object is to exhaust all judicial remedies before releasing the documents, is the intent, then, to place the question before a Justice who is certain to deny the appeal?
And is that why Sibley has chosen Clarence Thomas? Because Sibley knows Thomas is sure to deny it?
And if so, why is Sibley sure Thomas will deny the appeal to release the DC Madam's records, hmmmmmmmmmmmmm?
This is a red herring.
Its purpose is to keep Ryan's name in the news and smooth the way for his Presidency.
But he won't accept the nomination in Cleveland, and he's not going to be elected President.
Instead, they're going to run a third party if Trump wins, or steal it from Trump so that he runs as a third, then use the corrupted voting system to make it a contested election where nobody wins a majority of electoral votes.
Then, the election goes to Congress. Congress protects themselves by not voting for the new President, and Speaker Paul Ryan takes over by default, without a single vote.
They are trying to smooth Ryan's accession to the Presidency, not his election.
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