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Master Thread Dance Your Cares Away/Fraggle/Law Abiding Citizens
- Thread starter Bryan74b
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Master Threads
Interesting details via NYT on why the Trump admin decided to not back María Corina Machado as Nicolas Maduro's replacement, and it has nothing to do with her winning the Noble Peace Prize:
-Trump was persuaded by arguments from senior officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said that if the United States tried to back the opposition, it could further destabilize the country and require a more robust military presence inside the country. A classified C.I.A. intelligence analysis reflected that view
-Senior U.S. officials had grown frustrated with her assessments of Maduro’s strength, feeling that she provided inaccurate reports. They also grew skeptical of her ability to seize power in Venezuela.
-Richard Grenell, Trump’s envoy, met with Machado’s representatives and asked them to arrange an in-person meeting with Machado in Caracas and for a list of political prisoners they wanted liberated. But the in-person meeting never happened. Machado, despite promises from the American delegation that she would be protected, refused to meet with Grenell.
-Over time the relationship deteriorated, according to people briefed on the interactions. Machado and her team ignored the request for a list of political prisoners
-Grenell repeatedly pressed Machado to outline her plan for putting her surrogate candidate, Edmundo González, into office after she was barred from running. He grew frustrated when she expressed no concrete ideas of how to put the democratically elected government into power.
-Machado was upset that Grenell did not forcefully denounce Maduro as illegitimate. Grenell told colleagues that such a statement, while true, would have undercut his diplomatic outreach.
-Categorical rejection of any talks or contact with Maduro’s government has been a bedrock of Machado’s political strategy, but it has crippled her ability to build a broader coalition capable of enabling her bid for power.
-Machado’s unequivocal support of sanctions has destroyed her relations with Venezuela’s business elite, which had built a modus vivendi with Maduro to continue working in the country after a quarter-century of his government’s rule.
-Machado’s economic advisers have argued that every dollar going into Venezuela was a dollar for Mr. Maduro, a radical stance that had alienated many members of Venezuela’s civil society working to improve living conditions in the country. Her message had increasingly begun to mirror the views of the diaspora and deviated from the realities of people who remained in Venezuela.
-Machado’s team and allies in exile took to social media to attack and discredit public figures whose work deviated from their views. These actions cost Machado the support of members of the Democratic Party and many businesspeople, American and Venezuelan, who had interests in Venezuela and influence in Mr. Trump’s orbit.
-Orlando J. Pérez, a professor of political science at the University of North Texas at Dallas, said of Machado and her allies: “They don’t have the levers of power. They don’t have the institutions, and without us over assistance, they’re not going to get back into power in Venezuela.”
https://x.com/RyanSaavedra/status/2008407595539898738/photo/1
The drug on Zelensky’s table is “Mili Nosik” drops.
These are children’s drops with phenylephrine — a sympathomimetic aminophylline-type substance that causes constriction of blood vessels in the nose.
Constriction of the blood vessels reduces blood filling of the nasopharyngeal mucosa and thus causes a prolonged reduction in the severity of its swelling.
Swelling occurs both from chronic rhinitis and from the use, by nasal inhalation, of substances of Venezuelan origin.
This drug is well known and extremely popular among cocaine users; they explicitly recommend it because it is very convenient — it is not dripped into the nose, but into the mouth.
Thus, one can sniff and drip at the same time. This is simply food for thought.
One thing I have not seen a lot of discussion of is why Amy Klobuchar would consider leaving the Senate to run for governor when she is a top contender to replace Chuck Schumer as the leader of the Senate Democrats.
Klobuchar is the only political figure in Minnesota popular enough and powerful enough that her entrance into the race can prevent a contested Democratic primary, which would be a disaster for the Democrats.
Somalis hold power in Minnesota Democratic politics wildly disproportionate to their numbers, because they are nearly all Democrats and they have a very high turnout in primaries where turnout is generally pretty low.
This makes sense; politics are extremely important to a group who are much more likely than average to be dependent on the government for their income, whether as beneficiaries of welfare programs or as owners of businesses that get most or all of their revenue from the state.
The success of Somalis in Democratic primaries is why Ilhan Omar is in Congress and why Omar Fateh secured the DFL nomination for Minneapolis mayor. It is very difficult to secure a Democratic nomination in Minnesota without the support of the Somali bloc, and, since the state has a strong leftist faction, there will be a DSA-aligned candidate in the race pushing the field to the left.
In a contested Democratic primary, there will be only one acceptable line on the Somali fraud scandal: That Somalis are the lifeblood of Minnesota and that the state government must protect their daycares and healthcare businesses from racist and Islamophobic federal investigations.
This is, to put it mildly, not a winning argument for the general election, where the kinds of voters who do not typically show up for Democratic primaries will be upset about Somalis who own daycares and soup kitchens funded by the state shipping money to Africa in suitcases and buying Porsches with cash.
Klobuchar is the only Democrat in Minnesota who can win the Democratic nomination for governor while taking a position about Somali fraud that is remotely palatable to the broader electorate. In short, she is the only Democrat with a base of support wide enough to win without being the handpicked candidate of the Somalis and beholden to their interests.
The fact that she needs to run for this office demonstrates how effectively a population that wasn’t in the United States 30 years ago was able to move in, obtain US citizenship en masse, and then distort Democratic politics in order to funnel public money to themselves.
What has happened to Minnesota makes the case for Trumpism.
Tim Walz is the "Canary in a Coal Mine".
The issue is the "Waivered" social welfare programs masquerading as "health care" under Medicaid. The programs at issue in Minnesota were given "waivers" from normal Medicaid regulations both before and after COVID -- that means by both the Trump 1.0 and Biden Admin.
But it was during the Biden Admin. that all the fraud controls were simply abandoned by blue states, allowing them to serve as a mechanism to pump billions of dollars into left-wing social welfare programs -- simultaneously bringing them votes and employing the vast legions of left-wing NGO activists while building that network even further.
But you need a population to service for this to all take root, sprout, and grow.
Hence, open borders. The Trump DOJ 2.0 does not have anywhere close to enough lawyers to peel back the layers of this vast network throughout Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois... and every other state with a Democrat Gov.
The Gov. controls the administrative state within a state, which is where these "waivered" programs are created and operated. The Biden Admin shipped them bodies with the "open borders" policy, and then turned on the funding firehose.
dirtytoeddawg
Legendary
Setting the table
Complaint sent in against
@SenMcConnell
to the FEC for Smurfing $15,840,454 into his campaigns. Double bonus surprise ending!!!!
Smurfing is criminal money laundering; it also involves McConnell stealing the identities of senior citizens. They are called Smurfs (victims).
Look at one of McConnell's victims, a Ms. Taft out of Michigan. See image below next to crooked McConnell. Per the FEC she made close to 30,000 political donations (nope, she did not really make all those).
One day in particular, she made 468 donations totaling $17,197.00. Just normal human behavior....to make 468 political campaign donations in one day, then hundreds the next, and next, and next, and next (again nope, she didn't really make all these).
Political Committee C00193342, MCCONNELL SENATE COMMITTEE has accepted 308,411 Smurfed donor transactions totaling $15,840,454 from 20,726 unique Smurfing donors. That these transactions encompass 68.7% of the 449,013 available committee transactions and also being 34.7% of the $45,664,610 full committee transaction valuation.
1st surprise: Mitch McConnell's campaign committee Treasurer, Lisa Lisker, is also
@SpeakerJohnson 'campaign committee Treasurer. Lisker is named in both FEC complaints I filed against the committees of McConnell and Johnson. I'm referring her,
@MikeJohnson
and McConnell for criminal prosecution. Some of the Smurfing money is coming from the US Treasury.
2nd surprise:
@WinRed
is named in the complaints also. They are big time Smurfing into RINO campaigns. Stealing elderly citizens' identities also.
Canada is finally waking up to a hard reality it has long tried to ignore. Bay Street is now awakening as well. After decades of cheering on or excusing Ottawa’s performative policies, and virtue signaling, the realization that sanctions on Venezuelan oil can be lifted and those barrels can flow back to the U.S. Gulf Coast is a cold slap in the face for an economy that has squandered its natural resource advantage. Canada should be a global economic powerhouse; instead, it has become a case study in squandered potential.
Years of virtue signaling, regulatory overreach, and chronic underinvestment have left a resource‑rich country economically adrift. Now, as foreign supply options reopen and global capital looks elsewhere, the financial commentariat is suddenly converging on the same belated conclusion: Canada’s position is far weaker than advertised. Yes, Canada needs pipelines; the only real question is when the dithering will end and concrete action will finally begin.
Too many Canadian pundits insist it will take years for Venezuelan oil production to rise, as if that were the decisive variable. That entirely misses the point: Venezuelan barrels are already a functional substitute and can displace Canadian supply at the margin today. Canada has failed to secure sufficient, durable offtake capacity for its own production, leaving it exposed as cheaper Venezuelan crude steps in to fill demand. In a country that once prided itself on sober policy analysis, even basic economics has become strangely scarce.
This may be one of the most important things you can read today, lays out what is about to happen and what that will look like….IMO
Should have been banned forever wearing stupid masks.
Greed is the most motivating characteristic Congress empowers for itself and its donors. No bueno for everyone else.
Hopefully it starts with perp walks of Chief Executives of state, county and local offices. But, I'm dreaming.
This is how you geopolitic.
He and wife had probably racked up more than $100MM in corrupt funds by then. That’s a lot of blackmail material.
Would have been simpler to say women have no place in politics.
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Some great articles being posted this morning.
Cliffs? Is it about to collaps?
Goldhedge
Legendary
Is 'what' about to collapse? Gold & Silver? No, back up de truk!
While the world watches Venezuela, the real story might be next door in Guyana, where the world's most important new oil frontier was under direct threat.
Maduro's claim to two-thirds of Guyana's territory (Esequibo region) aimed to seize over 11 billion barrels of onshore and offshore oil, creating a massive geopolitical risk.
The most immediate outcome in capture of Maduro is to neutralize this threat and secure the operating companies stakes in Guyana, as well as Western Hemisphere's energy security. By stabilizing Guyana's production, which is set to hit 1.7 million barrels per day, the intervention guarantees way more oil flow in near term than reviving Venezuela's aged infrastructure and heavy sour oil.
This move protects billions in U.S. investment and positions Guyana producers as the ultimate winners.
Greenland - As viewed from a proper map
Why Greenland? Well because Moscow bases almost all of their strategic military assets on the Kola Peninsula next to Finland. This is where the Russian ICBM silos, submarine bases, and their strategic bombers are.
If you look at the flight path (ballistic or powered) from Kola to anywhere on the lower 48, then everything goes over Greenland.
Greenland is the theatre where any strategic exchange between Washington and Moscow is contested. If you want to intercept a ballistic missile, the best point to do so is at the apogee, at the top of the flight path. The shortest route for an interceptor to get to an apogee is from directly below the apogee. That’s where Greenland is.
So, without stating what should happen here, this is **why** the Trump administration says they **need** Greenland for national security.
The other thing that is happening is that the Northern Passage through the Arctic is opening up, and soon there will be Chinese cargo ships sailing through the Arctic to Rotterdam. It’s faster than the Suez and the ships aren’t limited to Suezmax size so China and EU trade is going to accelerate a lot.
This means Chinese submarines will also be venturing under the Arctic into the Northern Atlantic, IF THEY AREN’T ALREADY DOING SO.
Hence, the North East coast of Greenland serves not 1 but 2 critical strategic security objectives of US national security.
If this wasn’t clear to you, please understand that the Mercator global map projection is for children and journalists only. It is not a useful guide to where any countries or territories actually are in the real world that we live in. No self respecting adult should be using Mercator for their worldview. Anyone saying “there must be some other secret reason for Trump being interested in Greenland” is a certified ignoramus.
I now have the identity of the woman in the photos from the most recent Codel to Qatar attended by several GOP Reps, including
@SenMullin
who called me a conspiracy theorist for saying Qatar funds Hamas.
Her name is Stefanie Altman-Winans, and she is the Chargé d’Affaires, a.i. at U.S. Embassy Doha and a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. She is a big Democrat and the top diplomat at the US Embassy in Doha.
So not only are tons of GOP reps rubbing elbows with the funders of Hamas in Qatar, but they are also meeting with hardcore Democrat Biden appointees.
Only Democrats could get away with this
- Charged will stealing firearm
- Provided a false address to run for seat
- Lied about the address & reasoning
- Address given was condemned and raided for drugs
- He also currently sits on Lewiston School Board
Only because the 1st world is extending open arms to the 3rd world and imprisoning those who dare to object.
This man makes an EXCELLENT point, and it’s a warning about Democrats like Zohran Mamdani“
With Nicolas Maduro falling is a good time to remind people that Venezuela became a heavily socialist country with Hugo Chávez in 1999. And a lot of people forget that when Hugo Chávez came into power, Hollywood movie stars and left-wing liberals like were just drooling over themselves about how great this was going to be, how Venezuela was going to show the world a way forward with socialism. I mean, Sean Penn, Danny Glover, Kevin Spacey, you name it, Oliver Stone, Jesse Jackson, Jimmy Carter our old president, Susan Sarandon, just name after name was just drooling over Hugo Chávez and how great he was going to transform the world.
And yeah, he turned Venezuela into a shithole and Maduro just took what he handed him and continued that process times 10.
And so the Venezuelans even got to the point where they were eating their pets and like a third of them had to run away from their country just to find food. To put that into perspective, guys, that would be over 100 million people in America running away from America just to find something to eat. That’s how badly their country got screwed by socialism. And all these famous people drooling over him. Does that sound familiar at all?
Does it kind of sound like Zohran Mamdani in New York? Yeah, it should, because the same thing is happening. Now, Zohran Mamdani, fortunately, doesn’t have a whole country to screw over. He just has a city, and I’m kind of willing to let it burn because if they’re not gonna learn their lesson, they kind of get what they deserve”
Have Britain and Europe's leaders actually read the US National Security Strategy?
Washington has already assessed Europe’s hard-power deficit. They know we lack the energy, industrial depth, and manpower to stand up to Russia on our own, let alone the US.
Trump has been explicit: Europe needs to be strong again and take responsibility for its own security. That suits US interests, including freeing finite resources for dealing with China, but it also reflects a belief that a strong West matters.
These sorts of communiqués won’t get us there. This isn’t a “comms” problem. It’s physical. If humiliation is what it takes to snap Europe out of complacency, Trump seems prepared to apply it.
Trump’s message really isn’t that complicated. Rearm. Secure your borders. Defend core Western values. Abandon Net Zero and the de-industrialisation that has left Europe strategically exposed. And if Europe truly believes the material foundations of hard power (i.e. energy, industry and armed force) no longer matter, then it should test that theory by standing alone.
Let's see how long the pretence survives.
Quote
Alex Wick
Too bad so sad Danish PM. Your participation in NATO and your security system is barely in existence due to your lack of funding and opening your borders to millions of people.
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Nigga Frank was one of my favorite people ever.surebhe was a dumb nigger- Latest: ChingChongDingDong
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