Worst conspiracy theory ever.

[The Consul]

At some point what it is doesn't matter as much as how it appears. Regardless of factual provability (talking specifically Trump, not Manafort), right now Trump is losing the illusion war. His inability to steer clear of crazy attacks and his surrogates headline grabbing tripple downs, show a campaign that mentally is still in primary mode. The gift of his "non politician" attribute of late has not been serving him well & he has lost to Putin narrative and along with it damaged the anti- Islamic Terrorism brand candidate. Sad. Trouble now is if Donald says something sane it doesn't get the same push through a news cycle as the crazy shit he said in the last news cycle. The expectations do not at this time favor him. And lo, technically, Russia did not invade Crimea any more than we invaded Afghanistan.

[MacCruiskeen]

And lo, technically, Russia did not invade Crimea any more than we invaded Afghanistan.

Much, much less than that!

[Wombaticus Rex]

His inability to steer clear of crazy attacks and his surrogates headline grabbing tripple downs, show a campaign that mentally is still in primary mode.

Yes, but the primary/general dichotomy theory is, I would argue, a big part of why voter turnout keeps going down; the naked cynicism of that marketing approach, and the inevitable cycle of grassroots betrayal.

Trump is still in insurgency mode and I don't think it will hurt his momentum one bit.

When we're looking at electoral data in the weeks after November 8th, we're going to see Trump getting support from blocs who haven't voted in a long time. It's going to be one hell of a weird election, regardless of who wins.

[Code Unknown]

[Admit, however, that Trump immediately stepped into it like the total hate-moron he is. No one mind-controlled him into inviting Russian hackers to attack the Clinton e-mails by Twitter [correction: because I just saw the footage] speaking at a press conference!

False binary.

Random word generator? No problem.

Your implied binary of "Trump immediately stepped into it like the total hate-moron he is" vs. "No one mind-controlled him into inviting Russian hackers to attack the Clinton e-mails" is a false binary. There are other possibilities.

[Code Unknown]

I love this place because not only am I frequently tickled by the conspiracies people believe at times, but the ones they choose not to believe.

I'm no Hilary booster or apologist, either. She's got her puppet masters of course. But come on guys when even Slate is basically laying out a pretty cohesive mainstream conspiracy theory and people's rebuttals are, at heart, the very same reasons they like Trump are the reasons they like Russia Today, well it does make you go hmmm?, don't it? Don't it?

I agree this article is rather cogent, except for the unwarranted certainty of this sentence's opening:

Soon after the discovery of Russian intelligence hacking into Clinton servers, documents suddenly materialized on the web: a PDF of the DNC’s opposition research file and a trove of spreadsheets, including a list of donors to the Clinton Foundation.

[brekin]

Make America...a Russian Mafia state?

Donald Trump, Russian Mafia & US Intelligence Secrets

Donald Trump, will soon be entitled to regular briefings on some of the United States’ most sensitive intelligence secrets. Once Trump, becomes the Republican nominee for the White House in July, he’ll be entitled to updates based on the President’s Daily Brief, a compilation of top-level classified intelligence about global events.
It’s a prospect giving pause to some officials, who wonder how Trump will react to the information and whether he might inadvertently let some sensitive information slip out, according to several who asked not to be identified because they don’t want to be seen as taking sides in the political campaign.While every Republican and Democratic nominee since the 1950s has received such briefings, providing them to Trump is going to be a unique experience for intelligence professionals, said Michael Hayden, who served as director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009 and participated in the sessions for Democrat Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, Senator John McCain, in 2008.

This concern on part of the intelligence community maybe because of Trump’s long standing ties with the mafia.

Donald Trump and the Mob

Donald Trump’s glittering empire of New York skyscrapers and Atlantic City casinos have long had a darker side, allegations that the mob helped build them. Trump’s alleged ties to New York and Philadelphia crime families go back decades and have been recounted in a book, newspapers and government records.

As CNN reported in its article titled Donald Trump and the Mob,
“The mob connections of Donald are extraordinarily extensive,” New York investigative journalist Wayne Barrett told CNN in an interview.
Barrett, the author of the 1992 unauthorized biography “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall,” wrote that Trump’s life “intertwines with the underworld.”
To be sure, organized crime had ties to the New York and New Jersey construction industry in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, making contact between developers and mafia-controlled companies almost unavoidable at times.In Manhattan, Trump used the mob-controlled concrete company S&A to build Trump Plaza condos. Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, head of the Genovese crime family, and Paul Castellano, the don of New York’s Gambino family, controlled S&A, according to federal court records Barrett cited in his book.

Barrett noted that he built the Trump Tower out of concrete, instead of steel, at a time when the mafia controlled much the concrete industry.
In a Philadelphia Inquirer article from the time the book was published, reporter David Cay Johnston summed up Barrrett’s unauthorized biography, writing that it “asserts that throughout his adult life, Donald Trump has done business with major organized-crime figures and performed favors for their associates.”
Trump was a target of a 1979 bribery investigation and was questioned in a 1981 racketeering probe, but neither federal investigation led to criminal charges, Johnston wrote.
More recently, Johnston, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, wrote an article called “21 Questions for Donald Trump” where he asked, “Why did you use concrete instead of steel girders” to build the 58-story Trump Tower?

However, more important to this story are Trump’s connections to the international prostitution ring allegedly financed from questionable sources from Russia; sources close to Putin himself.

Trump & The Russian Mafia

In 2010 the founding chairman of Bayrock, Tevfik Arif, who has reputed Russian organized crime ties was charged in Turkey for smuggling underage girls into the country for prostitution. Another principal in the deal is Russian émigré Tamir Sapir, who also lives in Trump Tower.

As reported by Turkish News,

A New York real estate mogul with ties to Donald Trump is at the center of an international sex scandal – suspected of running a high-priced prostitution ring.
Tevfik Arif, 57, has been detained in Turkey on suspicion of setting up trysts between wealthy businessmen and Eastern European models – some underage – aboard a $60 million yacht once used by the nation’s founder, Mustafa Ataturk.


NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 19: Tevfik Arif, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump at the Trump Soho Launch on September 19, 2007 in New York City. (Photo by Mark Von Holden/WireImage)
Arif, whose Bayrock Group co-developed the Trump SoHo and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Fort Lauderdale, was among 10 people rounded up in Tuesday’s raid on suspicion of running a prostitution ring.

However the relationship between Donald Trump and Felix Sater, whose father is a reputed Russian Organized Crime boss, represents a rather direct link between the presidential candidate and Russian Organized Crime. The Russian émigré — a twice-convicted felon with ties to the Mafia — appeared in photos with Trump, and carried a Trump Organization business card with the title “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.” Trump was confused when asked under oath in a 2013 about his relationship to the Russian émigré.

As reported by the New York Times,

Mr. Sater was convicted and sent to prison in 1993 after a New York bar fight in which he stabbed a man in the face with a broken margarita glass. That was a matter of public record. However, what few people beyond insiders at Bayrock knew was that five years later, Mr. Sater was implicated in a huge stock manipulation scheme involving Mafia figures and Russian criminals — and that he became a confidential F.B.I. informant.Recently unsealed federal court records show that Mr. Sater helped the government disrupt an organized crime ring on Wall Street and deal with an unexplained national security matter involving his foreign connections. He was not the only F.B.I. informant in Bayrock’s offices. Another was Salvatore Lauria, an associate of Mr. Sater, who sometimes showed up to work wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor.Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin himself, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives.
It is this prospect of Donald Trump backed up by the Russian Mafia getting its hand on top US intelligence secrets that maybe a matter of concern for the intelligence community, although the FBI and CIA have already been tracking them since decades.


Ex-CIA director Hayden declined to speculate whether Trump can be trusted but said he would expect the Obama administration to give the Republican nominee the same briefings as his Democratic opponent.
It is President Obama who gets to decide how much and what kind of classified information the presidential candidates will receive. This responsibility has been delegated to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
Interestingly, this matter of withholding/protecting state secrets comes at a time when the FBI is investigating the matter related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for breaking the law because classified information was included in messages on her private e-mail system.

http://greatgameindia.com/donald-trump- ... e-secrets/

[JackRiddler]

perhaps coordinated messaging campaigns extolling a conspiracy theory across the entire spectrum of mainstream media -- even Slate! -- and sourced from off-the-record sources while based on no real evidence, should set off alarm bells rather than feel like an objective consensus.

https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+p ... ff&tbm=nws

True enough.

The plausibility is greater than zero, however.

It wouldn't be the first time that American propaganda was right about Russia, and Russian propaganda was simultaneously right about America. RAW wrote a comment to precisely that effect already back in the 1970s, I don't remember where.

Beyond the current accusations concerning manipulation of the U.S. election (does it consist of anything other than manipulation, one might reply), and beyond the question of Putin good or bad (I'm with bad, in case that's unclear), it is also clear at the moment that the U.S. neocon-neolib foreign policy mainstream is unhinged, has been unhinged for years, and seeks a flight into ever-greater general chaos and a patently insane, no-winners all-fronts confrontation with Russia, with Ukraine and Syria as the initial battlegrounds; while it is Putin who wants stability and spheres-of-influence politics, every tyrant motherfucker with his own backyard. That's a very old story within the imperial matrices of the past, dating back even before the Cold War. It makes analysis a lonely thing for those who engage in it.

One sick aspect is it's currently Obama who's probably the last restraining factor, and the last chance to live a vision of sorts (for the first time in his life) and actually sit down with Putin and settle boundaries for who gets to kill whom within which stable arrangment, without a wider or general war.

.

[OP ED]

Wrt: no hope:

You all do realize we're reentering a dark age, yes?

Just checking. On the one hand you have a lying manipulative spook, lying and manipulating and killing and probably all sorts of terrible other things that people witth a cause and/or no moral compass often feel inclined to do. On the other you have the guy who is probably just as evil, if inexperienced, but is so banally retarded that he thinks insulting a dead soldier's mom on tv is a good idea.

Dark ages. Cave canem.

Let the waters rise so we have a real chance to fix it. Some things, like your city, Jack, will likely be the cost.


Personally btw, I am still assuming that Trump and Putin are both on the payroll for Clinton's handlers.

[minime]

Let the waters rise so we have a real chance to fix it.

More weird sick shit.

[OP ED]

Let the waters rise so we have a real chance to fix it.

More weird sick shit.

We do what we can.

[brekin]

Trump + Putin = Vladimir Harkonnen



2016 the year Earth falls to House Harkonnen?

[American Dream]

[Sounder]

This is RI. Pathetic

[Elihu]

for his part, he's capable of some extensively vile imagery




















but you knew that

[Searcher08]

This is RI. Pathetic

Well, at least AD emerged from his Safe Space to post that searing visual critique of Russian CIS-gendered heteronormativity.


Sounder, have YOU deconstructed your learned biases today?