Proclivities wrote: 
Manafort is facing charges in more than one court.  From what I understand Podesta would testify in a separate case in a DC federal court, not this one in Virginia. 

Manafort is currently in "protective" solitary confinement while awaiting trial(s).  

 kurtster wrote: 
Limited immunity, if you believe Tucker Carlson and/or his "anonymous sources".  I guess we'll find out.

 R_P wrote: 
This is not good.  His asylum could not last forever.  On the bright side, we might finally find out who his source for the Clinton / DNC emails really is.  Assange has said all along that it was not the Russians.  He has a 100% accuracy rate standing on his behalf.

Also oddly timed is what appears to be Mueller granting Manafort's partner Tony Podesta, brother of DNC official and Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, immunity from prosecution if he rolls over on Manafort.  Podesta also failed to register as a foreign agent just as did Manafort.  But Podesta is a democrat and a well connected one at that ...

Ecuador Will Imminently Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over to the UK. What Comes Next?

 R_P wrote: 




lol I love WikiLeaks. Funny how politicians on both "sides" whatever that is either praise or condemn WikiLeaks depending on whether the information helps or hurts them. Keep on keeping on WikiLeaks!

Trump’s CIA Director Pompeo, Targeting WikiLeaks, Explicitly Threatens Speech and Press Freedoms (Greenwald)

In February, after Donald Trump tweeted that the U.S. media were the “enemy of the people,” the targets of his insult exploded with indignation, devoting wall-to-wall media coverage to what they depicted as a grave assault on press freedoms more befitting of a tyranny. By stark and disturbing contrast, the media reaction yesterday was far more muted, even welcoming, when Trump’s CIA Director, Michael Pompeo, actually and explicitly vowed to target freedoms of speech and press in a blistering, threatening speech he delivered to the D.C. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.

What made Pompeo’s overt threats of repression so palatable to many was that they were not directed at CNN, the New York Times or other beloved-in-D.C. outlets, but rather at WikiLeaks, more marginalized publishers of information, and various leakers and whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

Trump’s CIA Director stood up in public and explicitly threatened to target free speech rights and press freedoms, and it was almost impossible to find even a single U.S. mainstream journalist expressing objections or alarm, because the targets Pompeo chose in this instance are ones they dislike – much the way that many are willing to overlook or even sanction free speech repression if the targeted ideas or speakers are sufficiently unpopular.

Decreeing (with no evidence) that WikiLeaks is “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia”  a belief that has become gospel in establishment Democratic Party circles – Pompeo proclaimed that “we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.” He also argued that while WikiLeaks “pretended that America’s First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice,” but: “they may have believed that, but they are wrong.”

He then issued this remarkable threat: “To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.” At no point did Pompeo specify what steps the CIA intended to take to ensure that the “space” to publish secrets “ends now.” (...)

 Lazy8 wrote: 

Any defense budget reductions during the Ford years were because of a Democratic Congress. Ford, because of the high inflation rates and unemployment at the time, had proposed non-defense cuts. Then by his 1977 budget much of that previously lower defense spending was being clawed back.

"The initial goodwill toward Ford steadily eroded as the numbers turned sour. Unemployment went from 4.8% in 1972 to 8.0% when he took office; consumer price inflation jumped from 3.4% to 11.0%. Unexpectedly high inflation, fueled by soaring oil prices, made it difficult to plan for the future; cheap imports from Germany and Japan for the first time became a threat to autos and electronics; high unemployment troubled industrial areas. By early 1975 the jobless rate was the worst since the Great Depression. Ford insisted that inflation was the greater problem. He sought to slow it, as Nixon had, by severe restraints on government spending for social programs. He also tried to curb private spending by asking Congress to raise the taxes on personal incomes. But the Democratic majority refused, and in congressional elections in November 1974 Democrats increased their majorities to three-fifths in the Senate and two-thirds in the House. In January 1975 Ford finally yielded to liberals' demands for a program to stop the economic slump and promote hiring. He proposed personal income tax rebates, especially to higher-income people, who might spend extra money on durable goods such as automobiles. Liberals criticized Ford's proposal for offering little relief for the poor, so they pushed through Congress a modified, though modest, tax rebate bill favoring lower-income people. Ford signed it reluctantly. He continued to resist liberal demands for massive public works spending to employ the jobless, and vetoed many bills.

Ford also wanted to make the domestic energy industry more profitable, even at the cost of inflation, in order to encourage more private investment in it and thereby reduce the dependence on oil from abroad. He proposed huge public subsidies for developing new energy sources.

Deregulation - that is, the removal of the old New Deal controls on transportation, communications, finance and other businesses - began under Ford (Nixon was more of a New Dealer who liked federal regulations), ..."

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford

So we had the typical Republican playbook - Ford's "subsidies" (corporate welfare) to energy companies, corporate deregulation, along with austerity for the working class or lower incomes, advocating raising taxes on personal incomes but income tax rebates for higher incomes, and at the end of his term an increased defense budget.

 LowPhreak wrote:
Vietnam war spending peaked in 1967 and declined for the following 10 years. US involvement in the war (other than evacuating embassies and such) ended in 1973. The 1977 budget represented a rearmament that began in the final year of Ford's term, continued under Carter, and peaked on Reagan's watch.

 aflanigan wrote:

 
Indeed.

Often references are made to guard against the military-industrial complex, but many of those who cite to that admonition from Ike are conspicuously silent when the Trump administration proposes big increases in defense spending while proposing massive cuts for other programs.       

 LowPhreak wrote: 
Context is everything, eh?

 kurtster wrote: 

The term "big government" is so nebulous as to be meaningless. It's mostly used by those on the right to justify cutting of social and public works, while they rarely include excessive military & security spending or corporate welfare schemes and tax giveaways in their "big government" complaints.

For example, since Vietnam was largely over by the time he was installed in the White House, did Gerry Ford ever cut the defense budget as he should have advocated for? Not that I'm aware of.

"..the President has submitted a defense budget for 1977 which provides a real increase of $7.4 billion in total obligational authority in defense spending..."

Let's remember too that he had uber-hawks (and career ne'er-do-wells) like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney shoved so far up his ass he couldn't see straight. So, Ford should be the last one to rattle on about "big government taking everything you have."

 LowPhreak wrote: 
Yep.  Its foolish to think that you can trust the government; its your friend and does not have the capabilities that you can imagine.  You can't, it isn't and does have the toys.  If you can imagine some kind of snooping technology, some one has more than likely already made it reality.  Problem is, that most of the things this stuff is designed to corrupt and infiltrate is not being used by the bad guys.  They mostly use old style burner dumb phones (yeah, San Bernardino, but ...) and are unlikely to have a smart TV or appliance hooked up to the net to watch their latest shows or to tell Alexa what to do.  But the good guys, us, do.  This stuff is designed to watch us under the pretense that they are watching "them", those bad guys.

The CIA was already caught once doing domestic spying in my lifetime.  This is the second time.  Once was one time too many.

Once again its time to trot this old one out ...

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
Gerald Ford, 38th POTUS.
 

 black321 wrote: 
 
Not to worry, our true enemies (whomever they may be...real or imagined) already know that this is how the CIA and other Western intel agencies operate. Don't kid yourself with the establishment bullshit story; this Wikileak reveal is informative for the general public mainly and that's what the gov't hates the most here, not that they're somehow giving away state secrets to so-called enemies.

The creation of the deep state, and its staggering breadth and scope, is hardly news.

Given the massive potential for abuse, it is good that we have reporters doing what they can to keep tabs on it. Sunshine can be a powerful check on abuse.

However, given Assange's obvious political bias and apparent sycophantic relationship with Russia, I would take things coming from Wiki Leeks with a grain or two of salt.

 miamizsun wrote: 
Here's what happens when you bring this level of opinion/analysis...into a political discussion.  It's like if you were to interject between two baseball fans, a yankee fan and red sox, fan arguing over which is the better team, and exclaim, neither team is "better" because they both cheat.  Both teams players juice up, the managers take bribes from vegas odds makers, and the refs are paid off too.  What's left to argue over?   

 miamizsun wrote: 
Though generally appalled at what is revealed in these "leaks," at the same time I am increasingly concerned about the level of information that is being so easily funneled to our true enemies.  It would seem there should be a less threatening means of "leaking" this type of information, rather than through wholesale disclosure. 

 miamizsun wrote: 
I went to the link you put up in the Trump thread.  I am now so fucking depressed.  Its no surprise regarding the CIA's 'new found' capabilities.  Its silly to assume that they don't have the capabilities.  Its just that its officially out there now.

Changes nothing in my mind.  The question is will it change anyone else's and what will they do about it ?

 

oh my, from the bowels of the innernets...the mother lode of confirmation bias/evidence 

wiki via zero hedge

Wikileaks Unveils 'Vault 7': "The Largest Ever Publication Of Confidential CIA Documents"; Another Snowden Emerges

WikiLeaks has published what it claims is the largest ever release of confidential documents on the CIA. It includes more than 8,000 documents as part of ‘Vault 7’, a series of leaks on the agency, which have allegedly emerged from the CIA's Center For Cyber Intelligence in Langley, and which can be seen on the org chart below, which Wikileaks also released:

A total of 8,761 documents have been published as part of ‘Year Zero’, the first in a series of leaks the whistleblower organization has dubbed ‘Vault 7.’ WikiLeaks said that ‘Year Zero’ revealed details of the CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” including “weaponized exploits” used against company products including “Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”

WikiLeaks tweeted the leak, which it claims came from a network inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.

Among the more notable disclosures which, if confirmed, "would rock the technology world", the CIA had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

Another profound revelation is that the CIA can engage in "false flag" cyberattacks which portray Russia as the assailant. Discussing the CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group, Wikileaks' source notes that it "collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

 

 

"With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques."

As Kim Dotcom summarizes this finding, "CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE"

CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) March 7, 2017

Glenn Greenwald on Wikileaks, Russian Hacking, and Distrusting Legacy Media and U.S. Intel (Reason Podcast)

The co-founder of The Intercept doesn't like Donald Trump but thinks the new president may just wake liberals up to reining in the government.

Listen or download here

about 43 minutes and worth your time

i especially paid attention @ the 30 min mark

regards