johnzo

Also, this gem from the recusal press conference: heh.

Me too. It's not outside the realm of possibility that this is some deep weird conspiracy intended to dismantle the Trump administration. There's no public smoking-gun evidence. Everything is a leak. But ... Manafort resigns. Flynn walks the plank. Sessions runs away from the investigation. Trump is a guy who prizes loyalty, why are all his guys being cast aside like that? Why are the Senate, the House, and the FBI all investigating? What's under all that smoke? Is it a burning dumpster full of tires or just a guy who doesn't know how to cook his steak? Where I stand is that these claims need to investigated fully and fairly by someone who isn't a partisan hack, if such a unicorn exists. And in past administrations, the bar for investigating the administration and/or its officials, was not terribly high, so that doesn't seem like a lot to ask. This is the standard partisan hack response to this stuff. "It's just the DNC causing trouble." Respectfully, this is a pretty dumb thing to say. Remember that the DNC are the people who can't keep their email secure and who lost to a complete buffoon ... and yet somehow they are masterminding a giant conspiracy aimed at taking down an entire administration. Even more strangely, that administration is playing along by firing and dismissing their targets, instead of standing by them. Stranger yet: prominent repubs like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Jason Chaffetz, Darrell Issa, Marco Rubio, and the Bush 43 White House counsel have all called for an independent prosecutor to get to the bottom of this Russia stuff. These people are not quite the kind of people who can be relied upon to stand beside the DNC during its troubled times. Chaffetz was the November Surprise email guy, remember? Furthermore, any kind of stress they put on the Trump administration endangers the passage of the GOP tax and healthcare agenda. I suppose it's possible that these republicans have been replaced with convincingly human drone units ... they could be piloted from the DNC helicarrier, or from Harry Reid's secret desert fortress....

Sessions has recused himself from any DoJ Trump campaign / Russia investigations.

There were a couple exchanges re: Russia during Sessions' confirmation hearings. FRANKEN: If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do? SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it. Note how Sessions doesn't even answer Franken's question, he just straight-out jumps into a denial that he personally had communications with the Russians. There's some bad optics!

The issue isn't whether Russian interference changed the outcome of the election. No one can assert that. The issue is that there is evidence mounting that the Trump campaign conspired to receive aid from the Russian government during the election, and that the Trump government may be compromised in its dealings with Russia due to that. I am not a political science major, so correct me on this, but I do believe that most governments have laws discouraging their leaders from being personally indebted to foreign powers. Note that there's enough fire to the Sessions story for Republican leaders to be calling for Sessions to recuse himself from further investigation. Jason Chaffetz, the chair of the House Oversight committee and a member of the Justice committee .. he's the guy who ringmastered the eight fruitless Benghazi investigations, so you know he's a pretty devout Republican ... he is telling Sessions to step aside. If all the Russia stuff is a big nothingburger then why are GOPers admonishing their own?

Sessions' story is migrating all over the place -- first he didn't meet with the Russians, and then maybe he did, but he didn't remember, and then, yes he did, as an armed services committee member. At first, he didn't remember what he and the Russian ambassador talked about, then he remembered it was only superficial things. First they talked on the phone, then they met at his Senate office. C'mon people. At least get your story straight before you take it public. "Random and evasive" is not the look of innocence.

I suspect the latest leak is gonna blow the "oh but he so presidential!!1" story away, and I suspect it was timed just so it would do that.

Latest WaPo leak: Atty General Sessions had contacts with Russian ambassador during the Trump campaign. (Sessions was a surrogate and insider on that campaign.) This complicates things because under normal circumstances, Sessions' FBI is the bunch that would investigate all the Russia stuff. I would like to learn soon whether this is just spooks ******* with an idiot boss or whether we're gonna get into some real hot scandal action. You know the House really really really really doesn't want to investigate their president. Which is probably just as well, considering how useless their repeated investigations of HRC were.

All you people who are down on Richards, who should we bring to training camp instead? Names, please. heh.

It's definitely a horror movie.

We saw Get Out. It was good!

No, censoring all conservative news sites nationwide would be like Chris Jones level stupid. Law enforcement is quite capable of narrowly focused breakups of terror plots. In the last month, the FBI has busted at least two terrorist conspiracies, one an ISIS loon and the other a guy who wanted to restage the Charleston black church massacre, the Dylan Root killings. http://heavy.com/news/2017/02/robert-hester-jr-isis-kansas-city-missouri-facebook-army-terrorist-photo-presidents-day-islamic-state-muslim-lorenzo/ http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2017/02/fbi_white_supremacist_convicte.html Yet National Review and Breitbart and Al-Jazera in America are still publishing their stuff. So I think that "we can't fight radical right-wing terror because we can't shut down all conservative media" looks like a straw man to me. Steve Bannon, his chief of staff, has written a lot of stuff that I'd consider to be white supremacist. He's a clash-of-civilization kind of guy who sees the world as whites vs. everyone else. Your mileage may vary on whether that's white supremacy or not. Your second question: there have been dozens and dozens of threatening phone calls and bomb threats to Jewish and Islamic community centers in 2017. Here in Seattle, an Islamic center was just burned by an arsonist and two mosques have been similarly burned in Texas in the past couple of months. The President can use the bully pulpit to condemn these attacks and direct his attorney general to investigate them. But the focus of the administration is not on domestic white terrorists, it's on Muslim terrorists. The president has directed that a Homeland Security program named Countering Violent Extremism which (from my reading) is a touchy-feely program about de-radicalizing communities, should be explicitly focused on Muslim communities. (gonna get back to the rest of your post in a bit, esp the Goddard stuff, which is very interesting. I've gotta train to catch. and thanks again for the response)

“You don’t get to tell us what to do any more than Barack Obama did,” Wallace said after continued arguments with Priebus. “Barack Obama whined about Fox News all the time, but I got to say, he never said that we were an enemy of the people.” - Chris Wallace, Fox News anchor.

Speaking of Calvillo, looks like he took a demotion this year, last year he was the OC, this year Chapdelaine is the OC and AC is the QB coach. Which is a weird change from the normal Alouette way ... parachuting high-profile people into jobs they can't do / are not ready for.

That Popp/Trestman team was pretty awesome -- well coached and loaded with talent. The wheels didn't come off the Als until Trestman left and Popp decided he was a full-time coach.

Me neither. Teams need to be able to start a lot of different import WR's over the course of a season ... we used nine last year, the Riders used eight. Might as well have as many veterans in camp as you can, especially when some of them are cheaper free agent acquisitions (I'm guessing Grant wasn't a super spendy signing, given that he took about a week to land in Regina)

Tate made those comments in 2014, so it's amazing that he lasted two more full seasons after calling out his OC, who is now his HC.

I wish we'd kept Mayo. He pro-rated to be a 1000-yard receiver last year. (I know, I know, pro-rating is stupid, but the guy showed lots of promise and was really key in one of our early turnaround games)

Whoever is hurt that week?

It's not so much the actual number, it's that Fox News is reporting bad news about the president. Will they wind up on the enemy-of-the-people list with the other failing news outlets?

Copy and paste this post! Don't quote it!

Holy ****, Marco Rubio has tweeted that the bipartisan Senate investigation of Trump/Putin is on like a bomb. And Fox is putting Trump at 39% approval. Fox reporting bad news about a republican president is like Nixon going to China. Perhaps the GOP is sick of how the Trump circus is distracting from their tax cuts for the 1% / kill Obamacare agenda. The long knives may be out. Interesting times, man.

oh, and further on the National Guard thing this morning: the AP says that they reached out to the White House for comment before publishing the report, and the White House did not respond. As I understand it, this is SOP for journalists: if you're writing about someone, you usually contact them for comment before going to press. The National Guard story would've stopped there if Spicer had cared to stop it, but it's politically useful to be able to howl "fake news!" Also, the head of the DHS has confirmed that the memo is real, but represents an early policy draft that was not followed up on. So, does anyone still consider this news fake?

Hate the player. Don't hate the game. Gif threads are good for me because I think I've killfiled the most egregious gif spammers. (that's how old I am, son, I say "killfiled." shoutz to my fellow internet nerds of the eighties.)

Also, Denmark hell yeah. #cornerroute