kurtster wrote:

Yes dear, I do understand that concept. I also remember that you posted 

"Try the fruit of the poisonous tree argument ? Didn't work for Trump, should not work for Biden either."

I'm just trying to get you to explain how you think that legal concept relates to the Bidens. If you want to go for extra credit, you might remind me when and how Trump tried to use that concept as a defense (but please don't feel compelled—one lunacy at a time, thanks). 

I think you're trying to claim that the Bidens can't use Smirnov's indictment to argue that "fruits of a poisonous tree" fatally taints all other and further investigation into their activities. If that's your claim, you seem to have a far greater belief in their guiltiness than...well, just about everyone right now. Comer and Gym Jordan excepted perhaps. 

Maybe we should stop sparring with each other for a while. This is getting pretty tired. For my part, I just shrug my shoulders when you hype the latest Democratic "scandal." 

 kcar wrote: 
So what part of the very well known legal doctrine of The Fruit Of The Poisonous tree do you not understand ?

It is not something that you smoke.

When I see an expression I do not understand, I usually highlight it and search google for that term and find out what it means.

You could have done the same and had a completely different conversation.

You chose a different path just to be obstinate.

 kurtster wrote:
Diddums, all you had to do was explain your screed a little more fully. When it comes to politics I don't have much faith in your ability to do the written equivalent of simple arithmetic so your mere presentation of Google search results doesn't further persuade me that you have anything to say that's acquainted with facts or logic. 

 Isabeau wrote: 
Hey Izzy !!

 kcar wrote: 


 kcar wrote: 

 kcar wrote: 
I guess when Ronald is your IT guy I have to cut you a little slack.

For the last time ... here's the link that scares you and Ronald so much.  I don't know how to fake anything like this ...

edit out borking link

Do you even know how to figure out the question being searched for ?  Hint it starts with q= and has some + signs.

We can all thank your cowardice and stupidity for the need of borking the thread by posting the full url.

And all of this because you were upset that a post not directed at you was beyond your comprehension.

Cheers !

 Isabeau wrote:

It's really gonna mess with everyone's minds when Trump gets fined out of existence/maybe jailed which drains the GOP coffers and Biden agrees to bow out at the last minute due to a flare up of something or another. It's gonna look like musical chairs when the music stops playing.

and the band played on...

 kurtster wrote:Why don't you simply put your cursor over the hyperlink and look at what shows up in your toolbar. That is if you have that skill. I always do that before clicking on anyone's links.

Saves a lot of time and trouble.

Perhaps I might be responding to you a little differently if you hadn't started out this current exchange by insulting my intelligence. Didja ever think about that ?

Nobody is as stupid as you are pretending to be.
The URL displayed by hovering can be faked very easily. I did hover on  your CLICKY and saw IIRC that it was a google.com page. At that point I figured that you could simply state your thought and explain your previous posted gibberish if you wanted to have a conversation. For the most part, I think you just want to yell (often repeating some idiotic pundtry you've read or watched) and proclaim once again that you've been Insulted! Patronized! Ignored and Dismissed! 

Lord you can be such a delicate flower.

I've given you far more respect and leeway than most people posting here. I keep encouraging you to provide evidence for your opinions so that people will take you more seriously. Recently you pretty much rejected that possibility and effectively declared yourself a believer in truthiness. I thought this country got over that with Dubya's reign of error but no it seems like Trumpers are willing to swill the Kool=Aid that Donnie is selling them. 

 kcar wrote: 
Why don't you simply put your cursor over the hyperlink and look at what shows up in your toolbar.  That is if you have that skill.  I always do that before clicking on anyone's links.

Saves a lot of time and trouble.

Perhaps I might be responding to you a little differently if you hadn't started out this current exchange by insulting my intelligence.  Didja ever think about that ?

Nobody is as stupid as you are pretending to be.

 kurtster wrote:
Sorry. I'm not clicking on an any more links thatyou post. The last time I did, my entire device locked up and crashed. 

If you can't briefly summarize the point of your posts then you shouldn't bother to type. 

BTW: for a 70+ year old man with considerable life experience, you are amazingly gullible. You believe every con job that the conservatives put out even after prior ones get debunked. How's that Obamagate investigation going? Is John Durham going to indict more people soon, Kurt? 

Nothing new under the sun.

 kcar wrote: 
I read it before posting.

Perhaps you are too busy to understand.

There are several people here who likely understand what I said.  It was more directed at one of them.

I doubt that they will comment for fear of being associated with abusing drugs as you so eloquently state.

FWIW, I prefer the Peyote Patch to the Pumpkin Patch.

Tell you what.  I'm gonna guess what you do not understand and give you some help.

CLICKY

Let me know if that helped ... If not, you need better drugs.

 kurtster wrote:
WTF is this supposed to even mean? 

Kurt, when the dope clears from your mind, try reading Steely_D's post placed just below yours. Come back to reality, Kurt, and stay out of the pumpkin patch. 

The ship has sailed well past what the disgraced FBI had for sale.  It is irrelevant now.

There is way too much documentation of such things as bank records and other testimony to ignore that stands up well all by itself.

Try the fruit of the poisonous tree argument ?  Didn't work for Trump, should not work for Biden either.

Heather Cox Richardson:
February 21, 2024 (Wednesday)
The centerpiece of Republicans’ case for impeaching Democratic president Joe Biden is the allegation that he and his son Hunter each accepted a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma when Biden Sr. was vice president. But in the last week, that accusation has revealed quite a different problem, one that implicates Republicans. 

The accusation that the Bidens accepted bribes broke into public channels on May 3, 2023, when Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray saying they had received “highly credible…whistleblower disclosures” that said the Department of Justice and the FBI appeared to have “valuable, verifiable information that you have failed to disclose to the American people.” 

Grassley and Comer claimed there was “growing concern about the DOJ and the FBI’s track record of allowing political bias to infect their decision-making process,” and so Congress would be conducting its own “independent and objective review of this matter.” 

Comer then issued a subpoena for the document containing the information, a so-called FD-1023, which is the form used by FBI agents to record “raw, unverified” information from confidential informants. In it, informant Alexander Smirnov made a number of allegations about the Bidens, including that they had accepted bribes. 

In July, Grassley and Comer got the document and showed it to others in a secure facility. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) saw it there, took pictures of it, and posted them on social media. She claimed that “Joe Biden is a criminal and is compromised” and that he was backing Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion because Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky “has proof of more Biden crimes.” “IMPEACH BIDEN,” she wrote.

Grassley also released it, suggesting that the Justice Department and the FBI were trying to cover up a “criminal bribery scheme” implicating the Bidens. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) jumped in, saying: “Every day, the evidence keeps mounting and the evidence that is coming in is number one, of a widespread bribery scheme of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and the entire Biden family, to extract bribes from foreign nationals.” 

The idea that Biden had accepted bribes was central to the House impeachment effort that then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced in September 2023.
That story fell apart a week ago, on February 14, 2024, when a federal grand jury indicted Smirnov for lying and “creating a false and fictitious record.” 

And the story became even more troubling yesterday, when Trump-appointed Special Counsel David Weiss of the Justice Department filed a document establishing that the informant, Alexander Smirnov, has “extensive and extremely recent” ties with “Russian intelligence agencies.” 

The filing revealed other, more recent, false allegations Smirnov had made, and concluded that “Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States continues…. What this shows is that the misinformation he is spreading is not confined to 2020. He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November.” 

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, told reporters today that “the impeachment investigation essentially ended yesterday, in substance if not in form, with the explosive revelation that Mr. Smirnov’s allegations about Ukrainian Burisma payments to Joe Biden were concocted along with Russian intelligence agents. And it appears like the whole thing was not only obviously false and fraudulent but a product of Russian disinformation and propaganda. And that’s been the motor force behind this investigation for more than a year.”

The Republican release of Smirnov’s allegations in July 2023 did not happen in a vacuum: they came right after the Republican-led House censured Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) for “misleading the American public and for conduct unbecoming of an elected Member of the House of Representatives,” including “spread false accusations that the <2016> Trump campaign colluded with Russia.”


But the Mueller Report concluded that “he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” and that “the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” The Senate Intelligence Committee Report found that “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence…the outcome of the 2016 presidential election” and that Trump campaign advisor Paul Manafort worked directly with Konstantin Kilimnik, “a Russian intelligence officer.” 


That effort continued in 2020, with the U.S. intelligence community assessing in March 2021 that “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US.”

That foreign countries try to influence elections is far less a surprise than that one of the two major U.S. political parties now appears to be, wittingly or not, working on their behalf.
That willingness to do anything to win—even working with a foreign dictator—seems a logical outgrowth of the process begun during the administration of President Richard Nixon, when his people deliberately appealed to voters’ emotions with a picture of traditional America under siege by antiwar student activists, people of color, and feminist women. 

To rally voters to their party in the 1970s midterms, Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew engaged in what they called “positive polarization.” Nixon’s speechwriter Pat Buchanan wrote a memo to Nixon warning: “We are in a contest over the soul of the country now and the decision will not be some middle compromise…. It will be their kind of society or ours.” The theme that the Republicans' opponents were dangerous socialists out to destroy the country became the centerpiece of Republican rhetoric. From President Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, who was scamming the system and thus taxpayers, through talk radio host Rush Limbaugh’s “feminazis,” to Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” the party has defined itself as “true America” standing against enemies.

And if you believe you are fighting for the right, it only makes sense to do whatever it takes to win.

Meanwhile, that belief has now overlapped with the evangelical base that supports what it considers traditional values so that, as Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybyla outlined in Politico yesterday, the party is now advancing plans to impose Christian nationalism on the country. Leaders of the Christian nationalist movement incorrectly believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, so they intend to rest the government and public life on what they consider to be Christian values. 

In December, Trump promised: “Upon taking office, I will create a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias to be led by a fully reformed Department of Justice.” What that might look like became clear this week when the Alabama Supreme Court decided in a wrongful death suit resulting from the accidental destruction of embryos that were part of an in vitro fertilization (IVF) process, in which doctors artificially fertilize eggs outside the womb and then transfer them into a person, that fertilized human eggs have the same status as children. Chief Justice Tom Parker declared in a concurring opinion that the people of Alabama have adopted the “theologically based view” that “life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”

About 2% of U.S. births are a product of IVF. Today the largest healthcare system in Alabama has announced it is halting its IVF program out of fear of prosecution. Reworking the nation to impose Christian nationalism requires minority rule, which aligns with the ideology of authoritarianism, enabling Trump and those who share his views to praise someone like Vladimir Putin. And, it seems, to accept his help winning elections.

 Red_Dragon wrote:

and Gawd shall prevail when I run outta rounds.

etc.

Oh, good grief, this is brilliant. A poisoned mouse trap for the MAGA folks. Invite them in, take their money while they look at the posters, and then give them awful food.

My favorite comment is the one about Meow Wolf, because they're exactly right.

Meanwhile we have Friedman lecturing us about Middle Eastern parasitic vermin...

A time-honoured tradition.