US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1389

On April 26 2019 06:55 farvacola wrote:
The reporting on it is spotty so far, but it appears that Biden will be kicking off his campaign with a fundraiser hosted by Comcast's top in-company lobbyist and a ticket cost of $2,800.00 a head. Some of the other, less mainstream sources detail additional non-political attendees, like a Blue Cross insurance lobbyist and a leader in anti-union policy implementation. In any case, Joe clearly ain't woke.

Source

On April 26 2019 06:55 farvacola wrote:
The reporting on it is spotty so far, but it appears that Biden will be kicking off his campaign with a fundraiser hosted by Comcast's top in-company lobbyist and a ticket cost of $2,800.00 a head. Some of the other, less mainstream sources detail additional non-political attendees, like a Blue Cross insurance lobbyist and a leader in anti-union policy implementation. In any case, Joe clearly ain't woke.

Source

On April 26 2019 09:27 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
I really don't even like Biden's announcement video. To beat Trump, this election cannot be about "Don't vote for Trump because he's a bad guy and you're a bad person if you vote for him... so vote for me instead". It has to be about promoting liberal and progressive platforms that are supported by everyone, and it has to be about substance. This is not the way to announce a presidential run, and although Biden is currently polling high because of his familiarity and centrism, I'm really worried about the Democrats' chances for a victory against Trump if Biden wins the primary.

On April 26 2019 09:27 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
I really don't even like Biden's announcement video. To beat Trump, this election cannot be about "Don't vote for Trump because he's a bad guy and you're a bad person if you vote for him... so vote for me instead". It has to be about promoting liberal and progressive platforms that are supported by everyone, and it has to be about substance. This is not the way to announce a presidential run, and although Biden is currently polling high because of his familiarity and centrism, I'm really worried about the Democrats' chances for a victory against Trump if Biden wins the primary.

Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn’t resist the temptation last year to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor.

In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to Kiev , Ukraine, on Sunday for a series of meetings with the country’s leaders, one of the issues on his agenda was to encourage a more aggressive fight against Ukraine’s rampant corruption and stronger efforts to rein in the power of its oligarchs.

But the credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.

Hunter Biden, 45, a former Washington lobbyist, joined the Burisma board in April 2014. That month, as part of an investigation into money laundering, British officials froze London bank accounts containing $23 million that allegedly belonged to Mr. Zlochevsky.

Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, an independent government agency, specifically forbade Mr. Zlochevksy, as well as Burisma Holdings, the company’s chief legal officer and another company owned by Mr. Zlochevsky, to have any access to the accounts.

But after Ukrainian prosecutors refused to provide documents needed in the investigation, a British court in January ordered the Serious Fraud Office to unfreeze the assets. The refusal by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office to cooperate was the target of a stinging attack by the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who called out Burisma’s owner by name in a speech in September.

As Donald Trump began his meteoric rise to the presidency, the Obama White House summoned Ukrainian authorities to Washington to coordinate ongoing anti-corruption efforts inside Russia’s most critical neighbor.

The January 2016 gathering, confirmed by multiple participants and contemporaneous memos, brought some of Ukraine’s top corruption prosecutors and investigators face to face with members of President Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), the FBI, State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ).

The agenda suggested the purpose was training and coordination. But Ukrainian participants said it didn’t take long — during the meetings and afterwards — to realize the Americans’ objectives included two politically hot investigations: one that touched Vice President Joe Biden’s family, and one that involved a lobbying firm linked closely to then-candidate Trump.

Telizhenko, who no longer works for the Ukraine embassy, said U.S. officials volunteered during the meetings — one of which was held in the White House’s Old Executive Office Building — that they had an interest in reviving a closed investigation into payments to U.S. figures from Ukraine’s Russia-backed Party of Regions.

That 2014 investigation was led by the FBI and focused heavily on GOP lobbyist Paul Manafort, whose firm long had been tied to Trump through his partner and Trump pal, Roger Stone.

...

Kulyk said Ukrainian authorities had evidence that other Western figures, such as former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, also received money from Yanukovich’s party. But the Americans weren’t interested: “They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else.”

...

The other case raised at the January 2016 meeting, he said, involved Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company under investigation in Ukraine for improper foreign transfers of money. At the time, Burisma allegedly was paying Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, as both a board member and a consultant. More than $3 million flowed from Ukraine to an American firm tied to Hunter Biden in 2014-15, bank records show.

Telizhenko said U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. But then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Ukraine’s chief prosecutor in March 2016, as I previously reported. The Burisma case was transferred to NABU, then shut down.

On April 26 2019 06:11 Mohdoo wrote:
By being disliked by every single other candidates followings, everyone is laser focused on stomping Biden.

What do Beto/Yang/Bernie/Warren fans all agree on? No Biden.

On April 26 2019 10:49 JimmiC wrote:
Arrest him. Get all the corrupt fucks out of office. I don't care what "team" they are on.

On April 26 2019 11:22 Ayaz2810 wrote:


Seconded. One thing I've noticed about the left vs the right: we are willing to hold our folks accountable. Lock every law-breaker up. I don't care if it's a D or an R.

On April 26 2019 06:55 farvacola wrote:
The reporting on it is spotty so far, but it appears that Biden will be kicking off his campaign with a fundraiser hosted by Comcast's top in-company lobbyist and a ticket cost of $2,800.00 a head. Some of the other, less mainstream sources detail additional non-political attendees, like a Blue Cross insurance lobbyist and a leader in anti-union policy implementation. In any case, Joe clearly ain't woke.

Source



I contemplated typing out a screed in which I discuss how GH's connection of wealth with particular kinds of personality disorders implicates a materialist take on how desire and its constituent drives are bound up in the animating vectors of active social and commercial transactions, but meh, I'll concede that I could have left that bit out of my original post.

On April 26 2019 10:53 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:

Trump was the same.
Interested to see polls after his announcement, he’s shot past Bernie i’m guessing.

On April 26 2019 14:06 IgnE wrote:


so what you are saying is that we need some Lacanian theorizing to temper GH's vulgar materialism

On April 26 2019 17:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Trump got the biggest free media coverage in history because some big media thought he was entertaining.