Chelsea Manning ordered to be released [pdf]

Nope. I made the move and put away 2x my entire Canadian salary in savings each year.

From my understanding this whole ordeal appears to be vengeful and a complete miscarriage of justice. It's almost as if it's being done to make an example and have a chilling effect on future whistleblowers.

Based on reading the news over the years it seems like the US DOJ has had quite a poor track record in general.

The Aaron Swartz case, the attitude towards Assange/Manning and a record number of prosecution of whistleblowers, doctoring of emails to obtain FISA warrants, running guns to Mexico. An attorney general was held in contempt at the time, and it looks like the current one might be too, someday, if not worse.

Incidentally I also read the recent OIG memo about rampant supervisor-subordinate romantic relationships in the DOJ, violating all sorts of workplace protocol.

I am sure there is plenty of great work coming from the department that you never hear about but all this stuff makes it seem like in some ways the department has been run very unprofessionally for at least 10+ years now.

Also disappointing has been the apparent timidity of the American news media who, until William Barr, seemed to be very soft on the DOJ.

So the key to beating Trump is apparently engaging in discussion with Trump supporters to find out what they really care about.

And right here, in this thread, we are playing "guess my motive".

Jimmy Dore, Tim Pool, and hundreds of others on the left have explained so well what was happening and is still happening. People who talk to people, not people who sit in high rises offices in major expensive cities and listen to themselves on Twitter all day which is a fraction, of a fraction of the population (majority of people don't even have time to tweet or care if they did, the loudest voices there are not representative of political thought for the majority of Americans). DNC has doubled down and moved further in the direction that lost them the last one. People have missed that Republicans have moved left or more center cause of Trump, gay marriage is something Trump doesn't care about at worst and supports at best, same thing on marijuana legalization. People who voted for Obama voted for Trump, the Christian right vote for Trump or don't vote at all because who else are they going to vote for.

In my state, NAFTA fucked over a lot of people, people working factory jobs are now working two jobs, Clinton's brought that into reality, and she still advocated for that and other trade deals like TPP. Bernie might have had a chance then, because he stood against it, he's since said things like "white people don't know what its like to be poor", turning it into a race issue instead of a class issue, stopped talking about worker rights, he sure doesn't now, even without the DNC's help, people watched how the DNC played Bernie and rigged things against him, changed the rules and sacrificed their morals to let billionaire in and keep saying anyone they don't like, even on their own side, is a Russian asset, they know they're just as dishonest. They see rich white people at the top of the DNC, the people the DNC says we're supposed to hate, and recognize the sheer hypocrisy of it all. In the last 4 years they've sinked to Trump's level, and got down in the mud with him.

I have heard reports that US officials, including Senator McCain and Asst. SoS Victoria Nuland, supported the 2014 protests and transition of power in Ukraine, which culminated in Russia's annexation of Crimea and the Donbas war. While there is another conspiracy theory out there floating around about some contracts with a small Ukrainian gas company, a reasonable person might feel more negatively about Obama's foreign policy after learning of this risky bet that went bust. This is relevant to the current election since Joe Biden, Trump's likely opponent, was VP and was involved in policymaking in Ukraine.

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/americas-ukrain...

>Despite his leadership defects and character flaws, Yanukovych had been duly elected in balloting that international observers considered reasonably free and fair—about the best standard one can hope for outside the mature Western democracies. A decent respect for democratic institutions and procedures meant that he ought to be able to serve out his lawful term as president, which would end in 2016.

>Neither the domestic opposition nor Washington and its European Union allies behaved in that fashion. Instead, Western leaders made it clear that they supported the efforts of demonstrators to force Yanukovych to reverse course and approve the EU agreement or, if he would not do so, to remove the president before his term expired. Sen. John McCain (R‑AZ), the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, went to Kiev to show solidarity with the Euromaidan activists. McCain dined with opposition leaders, including members of the ultra right‐ wing Svoboda Party, and later appeared on stage in Maidan Square during a mass rally. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Svoboda leader Oleg Tyagnibok.

It seems like the Republican strategy both with Ukraine and Libya has been to talk about some obscure and distorted side-issue (Burisma and Benghazi respectively) which deprives the Democrats of a chance to respond substantively to the real issue, which was the foreign policy decisionmaking at the top that led to the greater situation becoming so dire in the first place.

In a way, it's a form of propaganda that uses disinformation to target well-informed people. It's kind of fun to think about when it's not pointed at you. (Republicans are hypocrites here -- nearly all of them supported Ukraine intervention at the time. But that didn't stop Democrats from running against the Iraq War in 2004 :p)