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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAnd then there is this from a feckless jerk making $187,000 taxpayer dollars a year
GOP senator suggests DC cops are to blame for turning festive Trump crowd into a violent mob
By Sky Palma
Published February 23, 2021
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During a Senate hearing this Tuesday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) suggested that provocateurs and D.C. police officers were the real cause of the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
Johnson started out his questioning of ex-Capitol police chief Steven Sund by referencing an article published at conservative news outlet The Federalist last month that claimed "fake Trump supporters" were present at the Capitol riot, who the author "presumed to be Antifa or other leftist agitators."
Johnson cited the article's author, J. Michael Waller, who claimed that the crowd was mostly "positive and festive" and not an angry mob with the intention to commit violence. Johnson then read aloud a section of the article that suggested Capitol police were negligent in their response to the violence and incited the crowd by firing tear gas.
https://www.rawstory.com/ron-johnson-2650724879/
What station were you and this waller federalist "guy" watching, the cartoon network .............
And then you preference your remarks to want to thank men and woman for there service and then say the cops are to blame .............
speak easy
(9,171 posts)turbinetree
(24,683 posts)and they are just two of many dangerous right wing people inside the government saying this stuff..........
Hassler
(3,366 posts)Kid Berwyn
(14,788 posts)Spent Fourth of July together and then said Russian election interference is overblown.
stillcool
(32,626 posts)Predictably, the Russians are gloating over the fact that GOP lawmakers met with their Russian counterparts in a secret room.
@SenJohnKennedy (LA)
@SenShelby (AL)
@SteveDaines (MT)
@SenJohnHoeven (ND)
@SenJohnThune (SD)
@JerryMoran (KS)
@RepKayGranger (TX)
@SenRonJohnson (WI)
Red Paul: The Senator from Kentucky is Now Working for Vladimir Putin
Greg Olear
https://medium.com/@gregolear/red-paul-the-senator-from-kentucky-is-now-working-for-vladimir-putin-5ecad382f623
Jan 1, 2019
The dissemination of Putinist propaganda is bad enough. But let us not forget that Rand Paul has served as a Trump/Russia intermediary, on one occasion flying to Moscow to deliver a handwritten letter from the president to Putin
Kid Berwyn
(14,788 posts)Campaign finance reports show troubling connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to Trump and top Republican leaders.
By Ruth May|Contributor
The Dallas Morning News, May 8, 2018 CDT
Editor's note May 8, 2018: This column originally published December 15, 2017. New allegations about $500k in payments from a Russian oligarch made to Trump attorney Michael Cohen have placed it back in the news.
As Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team probes deeper into potential collusion between Trump officials and representatives of the Russian government, investigators are taking a closer look at political contributions made by U.S. citizens with close ties to Russia.
Buried in the campaign finance reports available to the public are some troubling connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to President Donald Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. We have allowed our campaign finance laws to become a strategic threat to our country.
An example is Len Blavatnik, a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik's family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the U.S.S.R. and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s.
Data from the Federal Election Commission show that Blavatnik's campaign contributions dating back to 2009-10 were fairly balanced across party lines and relatively modest for a billionaire. During that season he contributed $53,400. His contributions increased to $135,552 in 2011-12 and to $273,600 in 2013-14, still bipartisan.
In 2015-16, everything changed. Blavatnik's political contributions soared and made a hard right turn as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.
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https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/05/08/how-putin-s-oligarchs-funneled-millions-into-gop-campaigns/
Funny how ABCNNBCBSFAKENOISENUTWORKS seem to have dropped this story down the Memory Hole.
stillcool
(32,626 posts)maybe if I could forget half the shit that's gone on, I'd be a kinder, nicer, person. I'm turning into a very angry old-ish lady. Watching history being rewritten sentence by sentence is infuriating.
Kid Berwyn
(14,788 posts)As We May Think
Consider a future device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
Vannevar Bush
The Atlantic, July 1945
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. THE EDITOR
This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next?
For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there can be little indecision, for their war has hardly required them to leave the old paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their war research in their familiar peacetime laboratories. Their objectives remain much the same.
It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride, who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated assignments. They have done their part on the devices that made it possible to turn back the enemy, have worked in combined effort with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now, as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy of their best.
Snip...
2
A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted. Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography, followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of modification and extension.
Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera, which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination. There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It may well be stereoscopic, and record with two spaced glass eyes, for striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the corner.
The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken. On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic? The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many pictures as would result from its use.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
Destructive Gadgets. Hah! Thankfully, we have Them beat, stillcool! We still dream.