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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • That gas line goes right into Ukraine, they could have blown it up anytime they wanted safely in their own territory. So I’m not sure that makes much sense. They have not done this previously to avoid angering EU allies funding them, as some still rely on it.

    I think more likely explanations are it helps make it easier to strike and and shut down a very important rail route for Russian re supply, it brings the war to the Russian people in a way they can’t ignore, makes Putin look weak, draws Russian troops away from other fronts, and if the land is held gives Ukraine a bargaining chip in any future negotiations with Russia.








  • Following the CNE’s announcement that Maduro won the election, the Venezuelan opposition has concentrated its efforts on digitizing and publishing on the internet the voting records showing that González won with nearly 70% of the votes, documents that the regime has so far been unable to produce.

    Literally what the opposition is trying to do right now as Maduro hunts them across the country, trying to imprison them all or worse. Over 1,000 people from the opposition the regime Maduro has imprisoned. Meanwhile Maduro hasn’t released any documentation that backs up his ridiculous results, results that conflict with numerous independent exit polls that show a landslide victory for the opposition. The election monitors Maduro himself invited, the Carter Center, have widely condemned the election. Leftist leaders in Colombia and Brazil are condemning him.

    https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-presidential-election-maduro-machado-edmundo-results-3ec88b273cabfee8e5696ff67d24186d

    The mission, led by the Carter Center, a pro-democracy organization, said late Tuesday that the election violated Venezuela’s own laws and the government’s failure to release a vote count was a “serious breach of electoral principles.”

    Maduro has all the results immediately available to him and all the many recourses of an entire country’s government but won’t release. Meanwhile he’s busy hunting and jailing opposition members who are trying to go individually from polling station to polling station across the country to try and get copies of receipts while the government does everything in their power to prevent their release.

    Boggles my mind anyone could try and defend Maduro.

    Oh and if you want to see what the opposition has been able to publish online so far look here:

    https://supervisiondev2.metabaseapp.com/public/dashboard/6b2f7b3b-16ec-4af6-84c7-69c39ee2139d?tab=16-english

    The only one trying to block transparency here is Maduro.




  • It’s mostly been conservatives that have a problem with this, not progressives for the most part. I mean sure some progressives are against but they’re by far the minority.

    I know progressives and democrats, and conservatives and Republicans, aren’t the same thing, but you get the picture. I think most on the left would prefer to stand up to authoritian genocidal governments, whereas many conservatives crazily see a lot they like in Russian government and want the US to embrace them.


  • The president already was protected from all civil lawsuits due to previous rulings. This ruling was only about criminal prosecutions.

    He has absolute immunity for any use, for any reason, of his core presidential powers include anything listed in article 2 (the military, pardons, firing or hiring officials within the executive department). There is no determining if those are an official act or not. Anything the president does with an article 2 power is an official act with absolute immunity now. Motives or reason for using that power or the outcome of that cannot be questioned. It is legal for the president to accept a bribe to pardon someone right now. The fact that it happened couldn’t even be mentioned in court.

    Only when the president is doing something not listed in the constitution can it be determined if it’s an official or unofficial act by the courts and should be immune. And again it’s the action, not the motive or the result or purpose of the action, that determines whether it is official. The only example they gave was talking to justice department officials is official. So if he is talking to justice department officials to arrange a bribe or plan a coup? Legal, immune, can’t even be used as evidence against him. It doesn’t matter why he was talking to the justice department, the fact that he was makes him immune from any laws he breaks in the process of doing so. They aren’t determining if a bribe or coup is an official act, they’re determining if talking to justice department officials in general is. It doesn’t matter what he’s actually doing it for, arranging a coup? That’s perfectly okay. Oh someone found out, pardon everyone else involved in the conspiracy who wasn’t already immune. Now it can’t even be brought up in court.

    In the example you gave of ordering an assassination, if it used the military to do the assassination that is a core power, cannot be questioned. The supreme court ruling placed no limits on what can be done with his article 2 powers. Only a nebulous official vs not official test for things not listed in article 2. There’s also a very worrying core power in article 2 about “ensuring laws are faithfully executed” that even Barrett thought was too much in her concurrence as it could apply to seemingly anything. Basically, as long as the president is using the levers of government to commit crimes, legal now.

    Impeachment is the only recourse now as you say, but even if impeached and removed from office by some miracle, they still wouldn’t be able to be held criminally liable afterwards for that.

    Everyone panicking in this thread is right to do so.








  • France, Germany and the ECB worry about Russian retaliation targeting European assets, and also the potential impact on financial stability and the euro’s status as a reserve currency. There’s concern that depositors from emerging economies may be encouraged to pull money out of western banks, fragmenting the global financial system.

    US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen downplayed such risks in February, arguing that “there are not alternatives to the dollar, euro, yen.” She said that if the G-7 acted together then the group would be representing half of the global economy and all of the currencies that really have the capacity at this point to serve as reserve currencies.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-seizing-russian-assets-to-fund-ukraine-is-fraught/ar-BB1jHeKz

    I agree with you, they should just be able to tap the assets directly. Basically some European countries are worried about the effects seizing assets could have on the Euro. Most of these assets are held in Europe as euros. The loan is actually an improvement over the original proposal though. Originally France Germany, etc were pushing only for the 3 billion in interest a year on the assets to be given to Ukraine. The loan solution was pushed by other countries who wanted to give them more cash from the Russian assets as a way to give $50 billion in cash immediately, with those yearly interest payments from Russian assets being used to pay off the loan.