62 Comments

Will we abandon Ukraine, and thus empower Putin and Xi to start a third world war in Europe and Asia? Or will the American people speak out loudly against such disastrous folly?

Not just Ukraine. Russia attacks us.... In 2016 Russians tried to hack Dems. Lots of proof. Hacked Little Marco Rubio. This is deja vu all over again.

DOJ identified the Russians early on. On September 4, 2024, the United States publicly accused Russia of interfering in the 2024 election and announced several steps to combat Russian influence including sanctions, indictments, and seizing of Doppelganger-linked web domains used to spread propaganda and disinformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2024_United_States_elections#:~:text=On%20September%204%2C%202024%2C%20the%20United%20States%20publicly%20accused%20Russia,to%20spread%20propaganda%20and%20disinformation.

In reality, Russia should nor be a major power. Trump has been elevating their status. Like I said yesteerday, Mueller convicted national security advisor Michael Flynn and the chair of the Trump presidential campaign, Paul Manafort. The investigation resulted in charges against 34 individuals and 3 companies, 8 guilty pleas, and a conviction at trial.

Mueller did not reach a conclusion about possible obstruction of justice by Trump, citing a Justice Department guideline that prohibits the federal indictment of a sitting president. That pisses me off. It's uo to a jury to determine whether there was complicity. I thought that Mueller was farblonget and Weissman, who MSNBC has elevated to expert, should, at least have preserved Trump's testimony,

We continue to sanction Russia. https://www.state.gov/ukraine-and-russia-sanctions/ Putin, now in charge, will get relief as soon as Trump assumes the role.

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Putin has very cleverly framed his own imperialistic colonialism as anti imperialism and anti colonialism thus sucking in many on the left, and the result is a horseshoe with the ideological scale of the extreme left meeting the extreme right.

An example is the poster who claims to be a Jewish ostepathic doctor, and dissembles in favor Putin

The Hasidic/Chabad Algemeiner has exposed him quite well https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/06/06/antisemitism-and-anti-zionism-thrive-in-russia-is-putin-on-a-collision-course-with-israel/

Using trigger words that cause a reaction in leftists like anti colonial and anti imperial, Mr Imperialist Colonialist Putin has managed to twist the ideological spectrum into a horseshoe

where extreme left meets extreme right.

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Stop them, Harris must.

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George Washington said in a speech to Congress in 1790, "To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." In the context of a world full of autocrats that feel threatened by democracy's existence, continual vigilance is necessary, without and within.

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Yes, and a response to all those enemies of democracy who do Putin's work by complaining about the military industrial complex, yes there is abuse, yes there is profiteering, but without it the U.S.A. would not be what it is today, nor would there be democracies in the world.

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"Sometimes, as we learned in World War II, it’s necessary to go to war to stop dictatorial madmen whose wars and territorial conquest won’t be otherwise stopped."

I'm no fan of war, but confronting Putin in a language he understands - overwhelming force - is the only tool left in our bag. I fully support any and all efforts to do so.

Sometimes decent people are morally bound to do ugly work

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It seems to me that we can get the most bang for our buck right now by declaring open war on the rich, the corporations and monopolies, and the right-wing fanaticism that is feeding the fascist tendencies and ideology. Opulent wealth and delusional images of superiority and capability are our worst and most aggressive enemies.

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Oy. Baby with bathwater......

Our best bang would be a hand recount where there have been inconsistencies. In 2020 Trump alleged a "steal." In 2024, based on the circumstantial evidence, with Russian and Musk help, he executed one.

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It looks like another stillbirth to me and that isn't bathwater. It has been clear all along that foreign influence and outrageous lies spread with the billionaire manure spreader, voter suppression, and gerrymandering were fixing the election. To show the proof is probably an exercise in futility. War has been declared on the people and they will bring out the real guns if the win is challenged. I'm not holding my breath.

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If we can show we have the votes and they bring out real guns they will lose. There's more of us than them, we have them surrounded, and the military will defend the constitution.

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War is already here withe Trump hostile takeover regardless of votes.

Dems just need to face it and get tough. Since Hastis in still i the WH she can deal with this.

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Actually, it seems pretty easy for leaders of Democratic countries to lie their way into war. Not sure about Xi, but Putin does not necessarily have a free hand. He needs troops but dare not call for a general mobilization or his citizens will be very unhappy. If America brought back constription ie the draft, I think they would see much less military involvement but I may be wrong.

I guess it is inevitable that every good substack has a built in troll, in this case Tim Cantrell. I depend on William Farrar's wisdom.

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A problem with lying politicians is that when the Democrats said Trump is a fascist, many thought it was just the usual mudslinging and stopped listening. And yes, I also depend on William Farrar's wisdom.

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These missiles are short range, not long range. Not a small point.

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Given that Trump is not going to lift a finger to aid Ukraine and probably not NATO either, I don’t understand why Europe is not sending actual troops to fight in Ukraine. Don’t they know Putin will never stop with Ukraine? Now that Putin has brought in another country, North Korea, it’s time for Europe to step up.

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The problem Linda is that there has been almost 80 years of peace in Europe, All of the damage of WWII has been covered up by new structures. The generations that live, have not dealt with war as far as their memory can recall. I was born before WWII, but the only thing I know about the war is what I first read in Time Life books, in libraries, and because of one poor neighbor the kids called shocky, because he had a metal plate in his head (bastard kids, I got shit for defending him)

The peace dividend has been conversion of munitions and armament factories to making stoves, toys, clothes and fertilizers.

Even in America we are depleting our stores of munitions and weapons. What we really need is an armaments program like FDR initiated in the 1930's. Russia has the same problem, but Putin has a better handle on it, because he is in charge of essentially a command economy.

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Linda, good question.

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Gloria you might want to look at my response to Linda. Immediately above.

Be advised, I am not defending or advocating for a run a way, no hold barred MIC., but we are not in the position to defend our own shores from a serious incursion, especially through Canada. (Of that I know more than a little)

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We must keep Harris in power however done.

Did Putin warn Harris of Nukes if she takes power or finds out she actually won?

Call his bluff.

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In response to several posts hinting at somehow preventing Trump's take over, can anyone say why Greg Palast is failing to be heard when he seems to have proof that Vigilante Inc prevented hundreds of thousands of votes by "challenging" the voters, especially blacks in swing states? In a U Tube interview he claims that mainstream media won't print the data he has. Can the Hartmann Report at least quiz the press about it?

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In addition to building cases for war on mountains of lies, each one of the American leaders cited had a complicit press to thoughtlessly amplify their claims. We've already seen what kind of "reporting" the corporate press provided during the presidential election. Besides our own skepticism, it will take a lot of heavy lifting to awaken our fellow citizens, while battling all three branches of government and a rabidly cooperative press to convince them. It's not impossible but the task is daunting.

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From this article:

Thus, Bush and Cheney had to engage in industrial-scale lying to the American people to gin up support for a phony war that was really being fought as a reelection stunt in advance of their 2004 contest against John Kerry.

That was my immediate reaction when Dubya gave his triumphant MISSION ACCOMPLISHED speech, standing in front of that banner. OMG, I thought, horrified. The mission he just accomplished was ensuring his reelection! Who cares if a couple hundred thousand Iraqis die in the process.

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Truth be known Tony is that people really don't care, they really don't, about the pain and suffering of others, empathy has limits. But the pain and suffering of others is an excuse to advance an agenda.

People waste their time, energy, and emotions on people at a distance, when those people at a distance are also people who inflict harm and suffering on others.

Take,for example, Feminists and Queers for Palestine. The people behind the sign wouldn't last 24 hrs in Palestine, Gaza or any Muslim country.

No one is more oppressed that females in Afghanistan, but you don't hear any whining or kvetching about poor oppressed Afghan females do you.

And you don't see any popular movement about the millions of Sudanese that are being starved and ethnically cleansed by the Sudan government.

A hundred thousand dead Iraqi's are an excuse.

By the way I marched against the 1st gulf war, because I knew it was a specious fraud.

There is no difference between the Kuwaiti's and Saddam, six of one half a dozen of the other, that was an internecine quarrel, and we had no business interfering, in fact were it not for the 1st Gulf war, there would have been no 9/11, no Iraq War and all that followed

One thing has led to another, this time a real domino scenario..

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Just wipe Putin off the map and then be happy.

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Breaking news. As I predicted Gaetz has withdrawn his nomination as AG

It has been a ploy, Kabuki theater. Now he will be sworn into the 119th Congress since he won an election, Rhonda Santis has no intention of having an election to replace him and there is not enough time, the winner would be out on Jan 2nd anyway.

Trump will throw his weight behind him being the Speaker of the House, it was all gamed planned on that airplane ride.

Mike Johnson's only hope of retaining speakership in the 119th Congress is to realize the findings of the ethic committee, but he surely knows that is a forlorn hope, because sex crimes, rape, molestation and abuse are not a crime in the Trump administration, not when the president is a serial offender.

Mike Johnson won't release the results of the ethnics committee because he knows that Gaetz will replace him and is afraid of the wrath of Trump.

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I'm eager to see if your predictions will be realized.

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One already has been. I am not at all eager though. I just don't accept things at face value. There is such a thing as critical thinking. Trump selecting Gaetz as AG was obviously a ploy. Trump wants an AG of the caliber of Barr, who knows his way around the barn, how to groom and saddle a horse, who to milk a cow. Not some ignoramus podunk. Trump has an ambitiious agenda, with a lot of pitfalls and obstacles and he needs an AG that knows where the pitfalls and obstacles are and how to get around them.

There are many skilled, right wing, theocratic lawyers who will be of great help in shredding the constitution. Maybe one of the ones that were convicted and will be pardoned., Kenneth Cheseboro comes to mind, in any event there is a long line of them that are well established and practiced in the workings of DC. It will be a right wing constitutional lawyer.

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From my perch on the wire, it seems almost a certainty that Trump will cut a deal with his buddy Putin that will stop the war, give Putin Crimea and exclusive reign over the Black Sea, rescind Ukraine's NATO invitation, disband their army, and return the country to being another Russian satellite. Trump will then beat his chest as America's Deal-maker and I-told-ya-so, peacemaker while mocking the Democrats a impotent war mangers. Nobody in the MSM is likely to point out what the US has already invested in Ukraine except to call it a waste of tax dollars.

Of course, Trump will surely start a war someplace during his 4th year in office so he can use it to "Bush"-whack any efforts to deny him a 3rd term in office. It's the MAGAlorian Way.

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Crimea doesn’t belong to Trump to give away .

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I have not seen where Trump is "taking Russia's side." That is literally a "red line" for me -- "a point of no return!"

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“Take russia’s side?” He has been Putin’s puppet going back to before he became president in 2016. Putin helped him take this election.

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Don't bother, Manuel, wasting your time providing "proof" to Tim. That's just his standard response whenever he disagrees with something. Many legitimate news sources over many years have documented in excruciating detail that Trump is absolutely Putin's puppet, someone he publically admires as a great leader, whom he faithfully defends, even at the expense of America's strategic interests, and is unabashed in admitting so. If right-wingers refuse to take responsibility for alleviating their ignorance by consistently failing to investigate subject matter for themselves, taking advantage of reliable and objective sources, especially news that has been so widely reported on, then they certainly are not going to accept what someone says in a tiny comment section of a blog. But more power to you if you try.

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I would like to see proof of that.

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Come on … surely you aren’t condemning Marx’s materialist dialectic over Hegel’s idealist dialectic. Marx’s historical materialism informs a great deal of the best political economy, sociology, philosophy, history …. Art criticism. It’s just not ok … in this crisis moment … to have such a simple “oh that Marx guy … he abused Hegel.”

The base/superstructure, ruling class/working dichotomies are not the stuff of contemporary Marxist analysis.

I know of no serious Marxist scholars today who subscribe to the rigid orthodoxy of the Stalinist International Publishers version of Marxism.

Finally, if you think neoliberal economics is Social Darwinism + math, then there’s no other economic theory out there that can offer a 360’ theory of capitalist dynamics. Keynes’ aggregate demand management is Marx’s underconsumption by another name.

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Marx was a proto libertarian.

When Marx wrote Das Kapital there were no words like lower class, middle class, upper class.

For lower class and lower middle class he used the word proletariat, and called the middle middle class and upper middle class the bourgeoisie.

In his scathing critiques he committed the ruling class, the upper class and for good reason it was they in the form of the League of Just Men that funded him

He was a free trader, and excoriated the British for their Corn Laws, a tariff on imports

While he rightfully preached the labor theory of value, he also claimed that the standard ofvalue was gold, and the Soviet Union, in faithfulness to Marx, tagged the ruble at .981 grams fine gold, and thus created a perpetual depression, because the quantity of rubles in circulation had to equal the amount of gold on hand.

The 19th Century economist Arthur Kitson, deconstructed this ideation of gold as a standard of value in A Fraudulent Standard.

Marx wrote letters to the editor of southern papers, imploring them to free the slaves and hire them back at market cost.

His partner Frederick Engels had inherited a textile mill, and because southern cotton was so expensive (slavery is not free labor, they have to be purchased, clothed,housed, fed, brainwashed, and overseen), found himself buying the inferior but cheaper Egyptian cotton.

Ideologues are the bane of humanity, and the love of the lazy, those who want easy answers to complicated questions. Ideologies are secular and sectarian.

I give up hope that mankind will ever recognize the difference betweena problem and a difficulty.

Propblems have solutions. Identify the problem, apply the solution. But that which ails mankind for the most part are not problems, but difficulties.

Difficulties have no solutions Treat a difficulty like a problem, apply a solution and you only exacerbate the problem. affirmative action quota's are an example.

All you can do with a difficulty s to ameliorate the harmful effects.

There is no crime problem, because there is no solution to crime, it is a difficulty and we enact laws and remedies in an attempt to ameliorate the difficulty.

A solution to the problem of crime is the extinction of the species, which it appears is already underway.

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Crime is what we call it. If stealing is a crime, is stealing food when you have no food a crime? Semantics.

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Agree, but in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan you can lose a hand for the "crime" of stealing bread. And there was a time in the Anglo Saxon world, that stealing bread could put you behind bars.

The hero or Les Miserables, Jean Valjean, was sentenced to a press gang for stealing bread. The book was fiction, the crime and punishment were fact.

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Ms. Maloney, a crime is an act which violates a written statute that prohibits that act. The fundamental cause of crime is a legislator with pen and paper. You are correct, in a sense "crime is what we call it" More accurately crime is what the legislature calls it.

Most people believe that any act which is harmful to the community is a crime. This is not so.

Most people believe that crimes are acts which are harmful to the community. This is not so.

Most people believe punishment deters crime. This is not so.

Among hose who have not looked into it, Criminology is the most misunderstood topic in the country.

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