Free Republic

For all those who are steamed up over the strike in Syria, just remember HHS loses that much money in accounting errors every month. $100 million for 105 cruise missiles. As for their actual impact, 105 cruise missiles are no more a deterrent for Assad, nor provocation for Russia, than the 59 cruise missiles last year. It's apparent Russia turned off their S400 systems and let the US have a fireworks display. Nobody believes it changes anything in Syria. Or the calculus employed in Iran or Norklandia.

"The US state department said it is monitoring the "very disturbing" reports, and that Russia - which is fighting alongside the Syrian government - should be held responsible if deadly chemicals had been used."

Russians spent some money buying Americans to demonstrate? Or just found kindred spirits online to do it free? Or, horror of horrors, Russians lied on their visa applications? Or, Americans cheated on their tax returns? Or, Americans made “false statements” to FBI investigators when, as in the Flynn debacle, the bureau had already said there were no lies? That’s the output thus far from Team Mueller with regard to their mission to investigate whether there was Russian meddling in our presidential election in 2016, and whether Americans “colluded” with the Russians in such endeavors. So far, we haven’t seen anyone...

One of the revelations in Friday’s indictment handed down by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was that alleged Russian attempts to sow disunity in 2016 included the organization of both pro- and anti-Trump rallies in New York City on the Saturday after Election Day. A check of their November 12 coverage showed both CNN and MSNBC gave enthusiastic coverage to the Russian-organized anti-Trump rally that day, with live reports every hour. Correspondents celebrated the idea that it was “a love rally,” and repeated the marchers’ anti-Trump mantras, such as: “We reject the President-elect.” While the two liberal anti-Trump networks offered heavy...

[snip] The aim of the factory’s work was either to influence voters or to undermine their faith in the U.S. political system, the 37-page indictment states. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday that while the indictment focuses on “Russian nationals,” it gives “no indication that the Russian government was involved in this in any way.” Peskov reasserted that Moscow did not interfere in the U.S. election. Mindiyarov, who failed the language exam needed to get a job on the Internet Research Agency’s Facebook desk, where the pay was double than the domestic side of the factory. The sleek operation...

A large number of people who read the Mueller 13-person Russian Indictment released on Friday noted a transparent lack of actual substance. Today the absence of substance turns toward the hilarious. Much like the heavily touted sketchy 2017 Joint Analysis Report (the infamous “14 U.S. intelligence agencies report“) was really only three political intel agencies, FBI (Comey), CIA (Brennan) and ODNI (Clapper), Friday’s Russian indictment had a lot of pages and citations but in the aggregate was an assembly of nothing-burger reporting of various insignificant social media events. Today the absurdity of the report becomes even more laughable. As Gateway...

Did you know that the Russian trolling during the 2016 election was so horrible and transformative that it compares to...the attack upon Pearl Harbor? While you chuckle over that observation, keep in mind that the absurd comparison was made by Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post.   Tumulty's hostility towards the president comes out in the very title of her laughable February 18 premise, We’ve just hit a new presidential low:

“Facebook vice president of advertising Rob Goldman slammed the media for what he said was misleading coverage of Russia’s meddling in American politics. “ “Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 US election. I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal,” Goldman said.

After 18 months of Russia, Russia, Russia, we finally meet a cast of real Russians. But par for the convoluted course, they were pretending to be Americans. The indictments obtained by special counsel Robert Mueller on Vladimir Putin’s attempts to create discord in the 2016 election and eventually support Donald Trump are important both for what they say and what they don’t say. They offer huge victories for Trump — and thus more defeats for Hillary Clinton — but they don’t close the books on everything about 2016. The very good news for the president is that the indictments are...

Russian-linked bots on Twitter are pushing for the House Intelligence Committee to release a classified report written by committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). Some Republicans believe the report shows political bias in the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. #ReleaseTheMemo is the top trending hashtag among Twitter accounts believed to be operated by Kremlin-linked groups, according to Hamilton 68, a website which tracks Russian propaganda online.

Between Sept. 14-20, the Russian armed forces will conduct a major exercise, ZAPAD 2017. Employing forces from various Russian commands, the exercise will test the military's ability to conduct a combined arms offensive. That's exactly the kind of operation Russia would use to invade Europe. While there's nothing new in the Russians carrying out a military exercise, this situation is different due to the scale and location of the forces involved. Russia claims under 10,000 personnel will be involved but as many as 100,000 Russian soldiers are actually expected to deploy. Their number will include armored and artillery units, and...

You know with all the rising temperatures caused by Rep. John Lewis’ (D-GA) remarks about President-elect Donald Trump not being a legitimate president, we forgot about liberal economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman who first said that Trump’s win was illegitimate. Now, Krugman says that calling Trump an illegitimate president is a form of patriotism (via NYT [emphasis mine]: Now Mr. Lewis says that he won’t attend the inauguration of Donald Trump, whom he regards as an illegitimate president. As you might expect, this statement provoked a hysterical, slanderous reaction from the president-elect – who, of course, got his start in...

At the same time that Russia is condicting its latest massive military drill on the border with Ukraine, and one day after the latest stark warning by Ukraine' president Poroshenko that the simmering conflict with Russia may be set to explode again when he said on national TV that “the probability of escalation and conflict remains very significant" adding that "we don’t rule out full-scale Russian invasion", Russian president Putin made a not so subtle point that Crimea will not be relinquished when he flew into contested territory on Friday, one day after staging war games there, and said he...