Notice how you conserve-ys suddenly get all Sherlock Holmes-y only when your preferred outcome is receding into the horizon.
Would you like some articles to read? I can go pull up the ones posted upthread for you. But regardless you seem to have missed my question. Let’s assume the FBI and DOJ are correct. Let’s assume the Republican congressperson from Colorado is being truthful and Comer and Gym Jordan knew Smirnov was a Russian asset and willingly continued to act on behalf of Russian intelligence to attack the president of the United States. Is that something you would have an issue with?
I’m predicting we won’t get an answer until the day after Tucker or Dan Bongino or Bannon figure out what the talking points are and pass them either directly to the kid or to those other YouTubers he gets fed his ‘information’ from. Notice how allergic he is to reading actual news stories about it?
Not by any meaningful definition of the term "inflated" such that it has any relevance to a discussion of the sort of fraud involved here. Yes, value can be at least somewhat subjective, and yes, the car dealership will generally increase the price over what their cost is. But almost by definition, the increase in the price has some reasonable relationship to the actual value of the car to the dealer, the buyer and the general market. A dealer who routinely tried to claim his cars were worth 10-25 percent more than he is actually willing to sell it for isn't inflating the value of the car in any way analogous to what Trump was doing. For it to be comparable, the car dealership would have to be claiming its compact cars were SUVs when taking out loans against the business and claiming its revenue streams were therefore much higher than they actually were. At the same time, when it was paying its taxes, it would be claiming that its sales were down, its inventory was bare and the business was on the verge of bankruptcy. Again, there are marketplaces for all these things that make it so there are comparable values that would prevent someone from trying to sell a house o a good on eBay for an arbitrarily high price. Someone asking for three times the asking price of a house or an item for Buy It Now, they are probably going to having a bad time. These markets still can be affected by fraud. If you don't meet the rules of eBay and get caught, bad things are going to likely happen to you. Speaking from a non-libertarian perspective, I would tend to doubt if even most libertarians would be OK with the attitude of "let the buyer beware" across the board, no matter how pronounced the deception was by one business. To the extent that some might be, well, that's something I'd have to agree to disagree with them on.
Deposition transcript released. https://news.yahoo.com/news/look-eye-hunter-biden-turns-154251115.html The problem with living in your own media bubble is that you can start getting high on your own supply. You convince yourself that Biden is an idiot so his son must be too. You think that because he was an addict he must be one now. Have fun in the open hearings!
Man, Parnas went full out: “The American people have been lied to, by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and various cohorts of individuals in government and media positions,” Parnas said in his opening statement. “They created falsehoods to serve their own interests knowing it would undermine the strength of our nation." “Congressman Pete Sessions, then-Congressman Devin Nunes, Senator Ron Johnson and many others understood they were pushing a false narrative,” he said. “The same goes for John Solomon, Sean Hannity and media personnel, particularly with Fox News, who use this narrative to manipulate the public ahead of the 2020 elections. Sadly, they are still doing this today as we approach the 2024 elections.” And from here: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/jo...tifies-allegations-bidens-are-fals-rcna144250 Throughout his testimony, Parnas insisted Giuliani understood the origins of the information they were receiving in their efforts to find dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden. He said he had tried to warn Giuliani about the lack of credibility of those sources of information, and that Giuliani agreed with his take but continued to work with those individuals. America's mayor may end up in a jail cell too.
Hunter's attorneys have put FOX on notice that he intends to sue them over coverage about the laptop. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/lawyers-hunter-biden-plan-sue-fox-news-rcna149707 Considering how the Dominion lawsuit went, I would think that FOX's attorneys would not be psyched about what incriminating e-mails and texts there might be between Giuliani and the rest of the Trump camp and them, as well as the internal e-mails/texts.
I just noticed this about Hunter's legal team. Biden has hired attorney Mark Geragos and his firm to represent him in the Fox litigation efforts. You don't go rabbit hunting with an elephant gun. Fox better get ready to start writing more checks.
This is something the righties just can’t seem to comprehend: Hunter was an addict NOT an idiot. Family names can help you get in but Georgetown undergrads and Yale JDs aren’t just handed out.
I think in both the case of the lawsuit and the show, FF will mindlessly bleat out whatever is said about the case on the Internet, regardless of what the reality of the situation might be.
I mean, they get the concept that Hunter has credentials, I think. And they even get the concept that people trade on the names of their relatives to get jobs for which they might not otherwise be considered. See the multiple Bushes, Rona Romney, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Megan McCain, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and in the interest of equal time, Chelsea Clinton, various Kennedys. It's just that attacking Hunter as corrupt is a step toward attacking Joe and since most of the standard lines of attack against a Democrat are not really going to fly even despite needing only a tenuous connection to reality (can't really attack him for being a communist/Marxist when he's had 30 years in public service as an obvious centrist, can't really attack him for his godlessness when he's a devout Catholic, can't really attack him as an anti-white racist when he's so middle of the road, can't really attack him as to his policies because he pretty much only supports middle of the road popular ones,) About the best you got from the right are his family's bad and criminal, he's a sleepy old man in cognitive decline, he's not able to stand up to the leftists, and now the he's behind all these prosecutions that I'm facing because he can't beat me straight up.
It's interesting, to me, anyway: Assuming for argument's sake that FOX would want to settle rather than go through a repeat of Dominion, what can they reasonably settle for? Would Hunter, who presumably is a millionaire a couple times over, ever be willing to settle? The Giuliani defamation case resulted in a $148 million verdict. In some ways, those plaintiffs had things better and had things worse. I would imagine that there are objectively fewer stories about them that were printed than there were stories about Hunter on FOX and elsewhere. And they were depicted as having committed crimes that they clearly did not. But does Hunter fall as a quasi-public figure because of his dad? Did Hunter receive death threats like those women did? Hunter presumably has some level of Secret Service protection to give him peace of mind over threats, and to a certain extent, threats were going to come his way even if the laptop story hadn't been overhyped. The way FOX works, its incessant coverage led to people parroting the information about the laptop far and wide, convinced that there was something there. Plus, there is the aspect that FOX here broadcast materials it had every reason to believe were taken without Hunter's permission, as well as (likely) having gotten express warnings from the FBI as to whether or not some of the laptop's contents were disinformation.
So referring back to my addict statement I’m not sure Hunter is still a multi millionaire. Remember Comer making a huge deal out of Hunter having sent 3 checks of 10k to Biden but it ended up just being repaying for Joe fronting the down payment on his truck loan? I’m reminded of one my favorite soccer players who when asked by a BBC interviewer why considering he had been the highest paid athlete in the world why the NHS and the British public should have to pay for his liver transplant responded with ‘I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I squandered.’ So yeah. Not sure how much money he has. But he is smart enough to get more which it looks like he will. (Birds is British slang for women.)
The American version: "I spent most of my money on wine, women and song. The rest of it, I pissed away." Tug McGraw
Googling suggests Hunter's net worth is $1 million, and he had an overdue tax bill in the millions. And yes, while he has opportunities to make more money, it seems to me like he has a more tangible case for damages than E. Jean Carroll or the poll workers in some respects. I think better lawyers than the ones Trump had could possibly have sold the notion that E. Jean Carroll may have been harmed by the defamation but she could have mitigated the damage somehow, or that she wasn't harmed to the tune of multi-millions. But Hunter probably can point to a lot of business prospects that he lost against all the negative reporting. It makes sense to me that a lot of people would decline to do business with him against the backdrop that he was so incessantly being targeted by FOX and the right wing. .
It is amazing how much of a force Rush was while he was at his peak, and how little impact he has had since he left the airwaves and passed on.
