American Politics 3.0 - Back to Brunch

[Monahammer]

Originally Posted by HockeyIlliterate

I know this sounds crazy and Tim-foil hat-ish, but....

Maybe a good portion of the higher-ups in government really are involved in some nefarious matters and various spy agencies around the world keep everything in check by having compromising material on everyone else?

I’m still a bit suspicious about Epstein and some people who allegedly were around him—Bill Richardson, Clinton, Trump, Prince Andrew, the Victoria Secret guy, etc.

Maybe Epstein really was an Israeli spy and he/they used jailbait to control people? And maybe Epstein simply got caught or crossed the wrong guy? And who is to say that Israel, or the US, or Russia, China, or the UK, etc isn’t doing the same thing now?

[Senator Clay Davis]

Were you hoping things would get even weirder? Ok then!



https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...c09_story.html

[Robo]

Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis

Were you hoping things would get even weirder? Ok then!



https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...c09_story.html

Wow national treasure 3 has a f##### up plot

[TorqueDog]

This video is from a year ago and yet has only grown more relevant.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1273778173969182720

[activeStick]

And in other unshocking news...

https://twitter.com/user/status/1377325472049213444

https://twitter.com/user/status/1377407964869320709

[Sluggo]

Choose your United States adventure: Pay 7 figures to an accountant and pay no taxes or pay 6 figures to a lawyer and diddle children; Rules mean nothing, its just money now...

[Matata]

Originally Posted by Monahammer

It honestly blows my mind that people think that the US empire, which has ran wild all over the world for the last 70 years is being run by well-meaning, incompetent, mildly-corrupt politicians. Military intelligence running the politicians sounds about a thousand times more plausible to me.

[ResAlien]

I’m with it. Shadow cabals and military industrial complex puppet masters are far more interesting than just believing any old moron who manages to get themselves elected can influence the world.

[Red Slinger]

Why not both?

There's plenty of evidence that throughout the history of the US the military has had an outsized influenced on US international policy. A lot of this is a hangover from WWII and the Cold War.

The thing is that nowadays none of this is done in the shadows. Lobbying from defense contractors and foreign governments are out there for all to see. So you can have:

• an elected official that is even mildly corrupt and is influenced by lobbyists

• an elected official that is dogmatic and truly believes in American Exceptionalism and it's necessary spread throughout the world

• an elected official that is more interested in domestic policy and lets the bureaucrats and advisors largely determine foreign policy

• an elected official who is well-meaning but succumbs to public and media pressure to ensure the country is safe or at least feels safe

All of these can (and likely would) lead to a foreign policy that seems like it's run by those in the shadows.

[troutman]

Multiple stories breaking on Gaetz - should be a bad weekend for Matt . . .

#GaetzGate

[Senator Clay Davis]

I'd say he's totally ####ed, but more than likely he just became the overwhelming favorite to be the 2024 GOP nominee.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1377747362295209985

https://twitter.com/user/status/1377752634862362627

[Monahammer]

Trump's bumbling of everything is proof that the cabal is all just blustering influence. No doubt the military industrial complex influences global geopolitics to a far greater extent than is publicly known, but In the end the baboon in the chair gets to pull the levers.

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

I know a guy who once set up an SCCM collection that was meant to be for imaging workstations with Windows 7 and accidentally added every server in the org. into it, including the Exchange servers of which an ex-colleague of mine got phoned at 3 AM to come fix it.

Was this at Devon? There was a "fun" couple of weeks there because of something similar.

[TorqueDog]

I can't confirm nor deny, but it's fair to say such occurrences are rare enough that one could draw their own conclusions.

[transplant99]

Just pure scum.

Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.

It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.

What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”

But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.

Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.

As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/u...donations.html

[Coach]

Villainy in it's purest form. Throw that f*** in jail for good.

[MoneyGuy]

That was a disgusting thing to do by an alleged billionaire to an ailing person with no money.

[Flashpoint]

Totally unsurprising. A con man was chosen by rubes, and enabled by the GOP.

He then conned the rubes, and lost the house senate and presidency for the GOP, while killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.

I don’t feel bad at all for the racist morons who were taken in. They f-ed all of us, and they should have pay more for it.

Stacey Blatt can go suck a bag of dicks.

[HockeyIlliterate]

Originally Posted by MoneyGuy

That was a disgusting thing to do by an alleged billionaire to an ailing person with no money.

Huh?

Trump didn’t “do” anything to the “ailing person with no money.”

Trump didn’t make the donors give money. He didn’t hand them a laptop and hold a gun to their head and tell them to hit the donate button.

The donors voluntarily decided on their own to give.

That they failed to read through the fine print, or double check what they were donating and doing, or look carefully at the website isn’t Trump’s fault.

It is the fault of the idiot that decided to donate.

And, honestly, it is rather fitting for them. They fail to do the due diligence, on both the candidate and their website and on the donation itself, and get burned as a result. Oh well.

Besides, don’t a lot of Trump voters think that there should be less government regulation? Now they get to experience what that really means.

[Coach]

Originally Posted by HockeyIlliterate

Huh?

Trump didn’t “do” anything to the “ailing person with no money.”

Trump didn’t make the donors give money. He didn’t hand them a laptop and hold a gun to their head and tell them to hit the donate button.

The donors voluntarily decided on their own to give.

That they failed to read through the fine print, or double check what they were donating and doing, or look carefully at the website isn’t Trump’s fault.

It is the fault of the idiot that decided to donate.

And, honestly, it is rather fitting for them. They fail to do the due diligence, on both the candidate and their website and on the donation itself, and get burned as a result. Oh well.

Besides, don’t a lot of Trump voters think that there should be less government regulation? Now they get to experience what that really means.

Yeah, it's hard to feel bad for the people getting conned here, but it shouldn't be allowed to happen.