This is an extraordinary paragraph from McMaster and Cohn's op-ed, and I don't mean "extraordinary" in a good way. https://www.wsj.com/articles/america...e-1496187426#…
Trump blasts Russia probe, touts ex-adviser Page over FBI, CIA
http://reut.rs/2qBNg4I
Donald J. TrumpU.S. President Donald Trump sought to insert himself into congressional investigations on Russia on Wednesday, urging lawmakers to hear from one of his former advisers, Carter Page, to counter testimony by directors of the FBI and CIA.
Trump has been dismissive of probes by the FBI and several congressional panels into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and potential collusion with his presidential campaign.
In a series of morning tweets, the Republican president quoted a Monday letter from Page in which he asked to address the House Intelligence Committee promptly and referred to faulty testimony from U.S. intelligence officials.
Trump accused Democrats of blocking Page's testimony, without citing evidence but referring to an unidentified report.
"So now it is reported that the Democrats, who have excoriated Carter Page about Russia, don't want him to testify. He blows away their case against him & now wants to clear his name by showing 'the false or misleading testimony by James Comey, John Brennan...' Witch Hunt!" Trump wrote on Twitter, referring to the former directors of the FBI and CIA.
Trump's early morning tweets came as his advisers are planning to establish a "war room" to combat mounting questions about communication between Russia and his presidential campaign before and after November's election.
However, the president's penchant for tweeting could complicate White House efforts to tamp down the scandal if the messages appear to address the investigations.
Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, swatted back at Trump on Twitter with a reference to the president's acknowledgment to NBC that he was thinking of "this Russia thing" when he fired Comey on May 9.
"@POTUS, appreciate suggestion on witnesses but feel you may not have probe's interests at heart. Ex: Firing FBI Dir because of Russia probe," Schiff wrote.
Democrats say Comey's dismissal was aimed at hindering the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Russia investigation, which has since been taken over by a special counsel, Robert Mueller, himself a former FBI director.
'STOP TWEETING ABOUT IT'
Trump's fellow Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have urged him to tweet less and more wisely. U.S. Representative Sean Duffy said on Wednesday the Russia investigations were becoming too much of a distraction in Trump's 4-month-old presidency.
"I think the president should step aside from any comments, any tweets on the investigation and focus on the agenda that he ran on," Duffy said on CNN. "Stop tweeting about it, stop talking about it and get about the business of your agenda."
Page, who provided a copy of his letter to Reuters, said the committee postponed an appearance scheduled for next week without giving a specific reason.
Schiff said he and the Republican overseeing the committee's probe, Representative Mike Conaway, want to review documents before interviewing witnesses.
Comey to confirm Trump pressured him on Flynn investigation: CNN
"While we anticipate interviews to begin shortly, we have agreed that the pace of those interviews will be dictated by the needs of the investigation and not the preferences of outside parties," he said in a statement.
Republicans control both the House and the Senate.
Page, a businessman who worked in Russia at U.S. investment bank Merrill Lynch, advised Trump during his presidential campaign.
Russia has denied U.S. intelligence agencies' conclusion that Moscow interfered in the election campaign to try to tilt the vote in Trump's favor. The president has denied any collusion.
Congressional committees have contacted a parade of Trump associates and advisers, as well as former White House officials, to request information in their probes.
They include former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, Trump, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, former White House press officer Boris Epshteyn, personal lawyer Michael Cohen and informal adviser Roger Stone.
#@realDonaldTrump
So now it is reported that the Democrats, who have excoriated Carter Page about Russia, don't want him to testify. He blows away their.......case against him & now wants to clear his name by showing "the false or misleading testimony by James Comey, John Brennan..." Witch Hunt!
The word "Witch Hunt" is also being used by Putin.....in his recent press conference.....
BLUF...Carter Page is also under investigation WHICH Trump does not tweet about....
Carter Page a consultant at Gaz Prom is under federal investigation for Russian ties.
http://thinkprogress.org/feds-invest...3b#.a4na5ijkv#
Trump campaign likely did not save documents key to Russia investigation: report
http://hill.cm/keWih4u
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 05-31-2017 at 07:26 PM.
This is an extraordinary paragraph from McMaster and Cohn's op-ed, and I don't mean "extraordinary" in a good way. https://www.wsj.com/articles/america...e-1496187426#…
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
https://memegenerator.net/instance/6...n-my-cellphone
Last edited by Azor; 05-31-2017 at 07:07 PM.
NOW go back and recheck the NATO 2014 decision as to when each country has to met the 2%......check...2026....
Sean Spicer bemoans "fake news" and then immediately lies about the success of Trump's foreign trip, claiming he strengthened NATO ties:
China Sees an Opening in Rift Between Trump and Germany
https://nyti.ms/2roLfMG
Fox News has to retract another conspiracy story about the nonexistent "Obama surveillance scandal."
Fox could not substantiate anything in the report that they carried on the program...thus were force to admit it...
Trump Aides ‘Dreading’ a Return of ‘Trainwreck’ Corey Lewandowski
Current White House staff predict Corey Lewandowski would make a hellish work environment worse.
BUT WAIT he is also under investigation for a number of business deals with Russians....
Go back to 2006...
From the NATO spox: http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2006/s060608m.htm
So why is Germany further from the 2% target in 2016/2017 than it was in 2005/2006? Merkel "committed to endeavour" in 2006, and yet her actions contravened this commitment.Finally, I should add that Allies through the comprehensive political guidance have committed to endeavour, to meet the 2% target of GDP devoted to defence spending. Let me be clear, this is not a hard commitment that they will do it. But it is a commitment to work towards it.
Last edited by Azor; 05-31-2017 at 08:20 PM.
Man...stay current...go to the 2014 meeting where the target date of 2026 was in fact accepted by all 28 members....
Stop comingling facts....
NOTICED you failed to respond to the simple fact that the per captia meaning what a nation state pays for evry single taxpayer with the US at under 2USDs and say Germany, France and UK far higher....
Seems you simply forgot that by saying one thing and in reality it has moved on....
If you have read the German underlined in German article you will notice German comments meaning the figures have to be crafted into their projected yearly tax and spend plans....
Something totally not known in the US....setting a financial budget and holding to it....
That is what angers the weaker EU members.....Germany does not live over its means..something we see daily in the US...
Go back and check your figures....
Your comments on "some will not like Germany leading" tend to fly by reality...if you read and again in foreign languages...an interesting number of Central and Eastern European countries want Germany to led...VS say the original smaller members of the EU....which has always been an issue even from say 1980...
You might have noticed that while many worry about UK leaving EU...Ukraine replaces UK far a factor of 4 in size, potential economic development and what it can export to EU and outside EU....
Again check the latest grain export figures......an increase of 26% in agricultural exports in just one year under the association agreements..not even matched by UK and other member states....and notice how the exchange rate is coming daily steadying down against the USD...
BTW...now go back and check the Trump comments about making US strong again in exporting and levelling the playing field....the USD has basically under Trump weakened by 9% making US products cheaper BUT not resulting in an increase in exports...
WHY is that??
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 06-01-2017 at 05:07 AM.
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/s...96329007038464
How Jared Kushner built a luxury skyscraper using loans meant for job-starved areas
JERSEY CITY — Jared Kushner and his real estate partners wanted to take advantage of a federal program in 2015 that would save them millions of dollars as they built an opulent, 50-story residential tower in this city’s booming waterfront district, just across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan.
There was just one problem: The program was designed to benefit projects in poor, job-starved areas.On the south side of Jersey City, which has some of the most entrenched poverty in the New York City region, many people interviewed one day last week were surprised that their neighborhood’s troubles were part of the reason that 65#Bay Street got cheap financing.
“That’s very sad,” said Pastor Shyrone Richardson of the World Outreach Christian Church in the struggling Bergen-Lafayette section of Jersey City. “Unfortunately, the people who are benefiting from this are not the people in this area.”
Richardson’s church is in a five-block area where nearly 1 in 5 were jobless and three fatal shootings occurred in 2015, according to an analysis of crime and census data.
So the project’s consultants got creative, records show.
They worked with state officials in New Jersey to come up with a map that defined the area around 65 Bay Street as a swath of land that stretched nearly four miles and included some of the city’s poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods. At the same time, they excluded some wealthy neighborhoods only blocks away.
Continued....
His neighborhood seems a world away from the gleaming office towers and trendy cafes that surround 65#Bay Street. The Jersey City waterfront saw a building boom after 9/11 that transformed the area into one of the hottest real estate markets in the New York metro region, drawing residents from Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Apartments in the Bay Street building, marketed as Trump Bay Street, rent for up to $4,700 a month and offer sweeping views of Lower Manhattan. A nearby commuter train shuttles passengers to the World Trade Center within minutes. The area within a roughly three-block radius around the building had an unemployment rate of just 2.6#percent in 2015, according to census data.
This is interesting as it ties into these Trump bot "Followers"....
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/politi...cid=spartandhp
Something I have pointed out in previous comments....Reports have zinged around the Internet this week about a sudden and mysterious surge in President Trump’s Twitter following, along with dark musings that something nefarious may be afoot.
The wildest of these claims — including the suggestion that Trump had gained up to 5 million followers in just a few days and that nearly half are “fake” — are clearly overblown, analysts say. But several researchers who study social media have also reached the conclusion that something fishy may be going on with Trump’s account.
That something fishy may involve the mass creation of “bots,” a catch-all term for accounts that are automated, meaning a single individual or a team can run hundreds or thousands at time. This is something Trump’s supporters have a history of doing well, far better than his political opponents, according to work by several researchers.
“In my expert opinion, something strange is going on,” said #Samuel C. Woolley, research director for the Computational Propaganda project at Oxford University. “It’s consistent with other strange things that have gone on before with this politician’s Twitter feed.”
First, a few facts: Trump’s Twitter following, which is one of the largest in the world, has been surging since his inauguration in January, rising this month alone from 28.6 million to more than 31 million, according to Twitter Counter, a tracking site. That’s an increase of 2.4 million in May, for an average of nearly one each second of every day, around the clock.
That would be extremely impressive for most people but less so for one of the world’s most famous men, not to mention one known to use Twitter to convey some of his bluntest and newsiest utterances. Bear in mind, for perspective, that the Twitter feed for Trump’s predecessor, @BarackObama, has more than 89 million followers, including a substantial percentage of bots, according to various reports.
But here’s the catch: There is a strangely large percentage of Trump’s followers — and especially his newest followers — that have only the most rudimentary account information, with no profile picture, few followers and little sign that they have ever tweeted. These are so-called “egg followers” because instead of a profile photo they traditionally carried the image of a blank egg on Twitter account pages.
And that, say some researchers, is odd.
“This is very, very obvious when you just go and click on the newer followers,” said Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. “The quality of the new followers is pretty bad.”
SocialRank, a New York-based analytics company that works with Southwest Airlines, L’Oreal and the NFL, reported this week that as Trump’s number of followers surged from 24.1 million in February to 31 million in May, his number of “egg followers” grew sharply as well, from 5 million to 9.1 million. Of that group, more than half have never tweeted and only 4 percent have 25 or more followers; 927,000 of Trump’s egg followers opened new accounts in May, according to SocialRank’s analysis posted Tuesday.
That doesn’t necessarily make the accounts “fake,” as some reports have claimed. Most academic researchers say that determining what percentage of followers are actual individual humans can be extremely difficult — and almost impossible with an account with as many followers as Trump’s. Twitter itself has acknowledged that as much as 8.5 percent of all of its accounts are likely automated, though independent researchers say the number may be twice as high. (The company also has a team that searches for bots and, when found in violation of Twitter policies, shuts them down.)
There another possible explanation for Trump’s mysterious follower surge. Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio said that newer users often appear without profile photos#because they have not yet developed their accounts fully. The company’s most recent earnings report shows that the number of Twitter accounts overall grew by around 9 million in the first quarter of 2017, up to 328 million, meaning plenty of newcomers may be using the platform merely to browse what others are saying. (In March, Twitter abandoned the egg image for users without profile pictures, but the term "egg followers" has endured among researchers).
Alexander Taub, chief executive of SocialRank, said that both theories may be true. Trump may be drawing an unusual number of new — but real — egg followers. And he may also be benefitting from an aggressive new campaign of bot creation.
“It’s probably a combination of both,” Taub said, “but there’s something fishy.”
Here’s where a little history may help sharpen the picture. Last year, during the election campaign, several academic researchers tracked the use of Twitter bots supporting either Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. They reported that the bots supporting Trump massively outperformed the bots supporting Clinton, by a margin of 5-to-1# in the final days before the vote.
Among accounts that researchers had identified as “highly automated” — meaning likely bots — 81.9 percent carried at least some messaging supporting Trump, according to a November paper written by Woolly and two colleagues, Bence Kollyani of Corvinus University and Philip N. Howard of Oxford.
It’s that history, in part, that makes Woolley suspicious that Trump’s surge may benefit from aggressive bot development. “There’s a legacy of this.”
But even Woolley and other researchers skeptical of Trump’s total say there is no definitive way to determine who is behind making Twitter bots, nor is there any plausible way to determine their motives.
Descriptions of how to build Twitter bots are widely available on the Web, and they can even be purchased en masse from companies that specialize in developing them. Spoofing location, language, profile pictures and other information for Twitter accounts is also easy, making it hard to get clear answers, said University of Southern California researcher Emilio Ferrara.
“A 13-year-old kid with access to Google can figure out how to create a smokescreen,” Ferrara said.
Twitter needs to fight bots by ending anonymity as Facebook has done BUT Twitter also has one of their largest individual investors a Russian oligarch who sits in Twitter Hdqs Ireland....he invested over 18M USDs into Twitter several years ago when they had a sudden cash flow problem....
How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/t...ore-ipad-share
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 06-01-2017 at 11:10 AM.
Wow...that was really quick for the Trump WH.....Putin in his last press conference demanded they be returned....if not he would close US facilities...BUT WAIT there are no private US Embassy facilities inside Russia as they are all monitored by Russian intelligence...
WAPO #BREAKING: Trump administration moves to return Russian compounds in Maryland and New York
Pitin demanded Trump jumped...how strange is that???
1988 Feds investigate Trump for helping mobster Robert Hopkins launder money by buying 2 apartments in Trump Tower
A quick review of 40 years of investigations into Donald Trump and his businesses
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.fd617e48b546
Per @RyanLizza the day after Trump tweeted that he wasn't in touch with Roger Stone, he called Roger Stone.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-l...o-roger-stone#
BUT it "ain't us it is those little Green hacking men" and just because they sit inside Russia does not mean they work for the Russian government.....
Putin virtually admits to hacking the US..but not at the state sponsored level...this was the same "little Green men seen in Crimea and eastern Ukraine" where Putin even stated "maybe they were on vacation and just happened to take their tanks with them"..........
https://apnews.com/281464d38ee54c6ca...&utm_medium=AP
NOTICE Putin did not mention directly the Russian state hack on the current French President Marcon.....which used Wikileaks to leak the hacked emails....just as they did in the US election...ST.PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) — President Vladimir Putin says the Russian state has never been involved in hacking.
Speaking at a meeting with senior editors of leading international news agencies Thursday, Putin said that some individual “patriotic” hackers could mount some attacks amid the current cold spell in Russia’s relations with the West.
But he categorically insisted that “we don’t engage in that at the state level.”
Putin also said that “no hackers can influence election campaigns in any country of Europe, Asia or America.”
U.S. intelligence agencies have accused Russia of hacking into Democratic Party emails, helping President Donald Trump’s election victory.
Irrelevant. The point is that German defense spending as a percentage of GDP did not rise from 2006-2014 or from 2014 to present. In fact, it is lower now than in 2006.
Merkel deliberately refused to uphold her commitments.
It seems that Schnapps assisted with the writing of the above paragraph...
We'll see how Germany lives if the EUR trades more like a new DM. It must be nice to make the world safe for German products and banking whilst not having to defend oneself or one's allies.
You can't refute a single one of my arguments and going off-road is just making me feel embarrassed for you.
At least Trump's election provoked Berlin to commit to raising defense spending, which is surprising given that you claimed all of this was resolved in 2014 in Wales...
Now that is one impact of Trump on policy that I can get behind.
It is interesting that both the Republcian Party in Congress and Trump and the entire Trump WH tries to deflect from the FBI Russian investigation....
Russian Propaganda works on the 6Ds Principle.....
Deflect....Distort...Distract...Dismay....ALL designed to create Doubt and Distrust....
Knowing the above 6Ds what is Trump using in this particular tweet of his?????
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
The big story is the "unmasking and surveillance" of people that took place during the Obama Administration.
DEFLECT....DISTORT....DISTRACT...DOUBT and DISTRUST....
FIVE out of the 6Ds.....
IMPORTANT..this same exact "myth" theory was pushed by FOX News which was forced this week to admit the story was indeed "FAKE NEWS"
NOTE this tweet also is a major indicator that both Trump and the Republican Party in Congress do not know understand the classification and declassification process of NSA and the entire IC...
BREAKING
@CNN reports @SenFranken & @SenatorLeahy asked #FBI to investigate SESSIONS for meetings w/#Russia at #Mayflower + others
BREAKING: Senators asked Comey to investigate whether AG Jeff Sessions committed perjury
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/01/po...ter/index.html
Almost immediately after this request for the FBI to check for Sessions possible perjury Comey was fired by Trump
REMEMBER Sessions lied about his meetings with the Russian US Ambassador during his Senate hearings THUS he recused himself from the Russian investigation reach he has not actually done....
NOW it appears that he also lied to the Senate about these meetings as well....
REMEMBER when asked specifically by Sen. Franken "have you had any meeting with Russian officials...he stated no" ....Franken repeated the same exact question a second time to avoid any confusion and the answer was again "no".......
WHEN confronted..."suddenly he remembered something and then he stated he had misunderstood the question"...
REALLY...misunderstand a clear and concise question????
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 06-01-2017 at 04:17 PM.
In November, the same ex-Breitbart employee warned that Breitbart was becoming "the propaganda arm of the Trump WH."
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/ex-b...white-house/#…
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