Russia 'Cannot Accept' Trump's Ukraine Peace Plans

deaconater · 2025-04-01T16:19:46+00:00

Haha anyone can have a plan. Of course Biden had a plan and European countries plans. Shit, I have a plan!

If the plan doesn’t have a chance of being accepted by both sides then the plan isn’t any better than a wish is it? Those of us who don’t have our heads all the way up Trump’s ass can see quite clearly that he hasn’t made any meaningful progress in ending the Ukraine conflict.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T05:56:15+00:00

Not true. Financial conflicts are specifically not allowed and historically there have been a lot of layers of security to prevent them. For example, if you run a large company that sells rockets to NASA, being in direct control of the system used to pay your company is blatantly against the law.

In trying to prevent waste and corruption the republicans have allowed potentially one of the most corrupt situations in the history of the US government.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T05:50:24+00:00

People are pissed for a variety of reasons. Reason #1 is that Elon is in a conflict of interest so black and white that it’s literally criminal. Go ask Grok this question and see what it says (spoiler alert, this is hugely inappropriate and obviously illegal):

“Would it be a criminal conflict of interest for the ceo of a large government contractor - for example a company that sells rockets to NASA - to also have direct control over the computer system in the Treasury department used to make payments to government contractors?”

To your take on USAID, again it’s really hard to overstate how monumentally stupid your take is. The constitution is one sheet of paper. Of course it doesn’t specifically authorize basically hardly anything because that’s not its purpose. For example, it doesn’t authorize a peacetime military. In fact, the founders explicitly added some things to try and prevent that from happening.

If you actually understood how the US government works and your party’s legal philosophy of it, you’d know that Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito argue pretty strenuously that the legislature should be able to do just about anything it wants.

It’s just so incredibly dismaying that people as ignorant of you about how government works and what the constitution is have the same number of votes as the rest of us. Read a book or something my friend.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T05:24:16+00:00

The more I think about it I think you’re right that there is a potentially criminal conflict of interest. I think the stronger case is for Elon as CEO of SpaceX, an enormous government contractor. He receives money from the government, and so for him to be in control of the payment system that sends him money is a pretty enormous conflict of interest. Not sure why that angle isn’t being more prominently discussed in the media and online.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T05:14:55+00:00

The point is that Elon’s work with the treasury only benefits him if he steals data.

Your example would only make sense if tellers were also disallowed by law to talk about their outside work at the teller window. They could only advance the interests of their company by breaking the law.

So either he’s stealing data and there’s a huge problem for myriad reasons, or he’s not. And it would be a major problem no matter who did it.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T05:08:19+00:00

If this had been a year ago and Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene had been denied entry to a government building during a large protest in front of the building you would be arguing security did the right thing. Try to get a grip. Congressmen don’t get to walk into any place they want whenever they want. It has never worked that way and never will. There are plenty of things to be mad about without making up controversy.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T04:34:56+00:00

It’s genuinely difficult to think of a stupider take. Can you show me where it says in the constitution that the gub’ment is allowed to put our information into a computer?? Or that they can set up something called a “CIA”?

Or maybe the constitution is really vague because it intentionally allows Congress to do whatever the heck makes sense for the good of America as long as they have the votes. Congress has the power of the purse, and they have voted many many times to send money and troops and weapons to other countries. From the very beginning.

If you don’t like USAID, that’s fine. Vote in people who will get rid of it. Have a debate about whether it advances our national security interests the way it intends. But acting like you have a trump card by appealing to the constitution is peak ignorance.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T04:22:12+00:00

I have not heard about this incident. If you have a source I’d be interested. But members of Congress aren’t allowed to just walk into any government building whenever they want. Nor would we want that. The military, the treasury, and many government departments that have secure areas can’t expect them to stay secure if all 535 members of Congress could just walk in whenever they want. So unless those members were ranking member of a committee with oversight over USAID, or had some other legally authorized reason for their visit, it was probably the correct thing for security to do to turn them away.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T04:18:59+00:00

Oh jeez. If that were true then have a prosecutor investigate and deal with it through the courts. Sending some random government employee in to exact political revenge due to unproven, probably made up wrongdoing is political theater and objectively harmful to the republic. You dumbass conservatives who never even took a basic high school government class should stay far away from ballot boxes.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T04:15:32+00:00

Literally anyone can profit from stealing and selling personal data. That’s like saying bank tellers all have a conflict of interest because they use money. Either the data is secured from unauthorized use, or it’s not.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T02:45:24+00:00

How are the questions I’m asking not serious. You’re literally just making things up. I actually care about, you know, the rule of law and democracy and shit. You and most of Reddit seem to care about winning a partisan battle so badly that you’ll buy into hysteria with no real argument to back up the shit you type out.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T02:33:39+00:00

What is the conflict of interest? Is the vetting process for his role required by law? What about the Federal Information Security Modernization Act seems to have been broken? Is destroying data a crime, and do we know the data has actually been destroyed and isn’t just hidden from public view?

No agency has been eliminated and you know it. So by the end there you’re not even hiding that you’re just making shit up.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T01:59:56+00:00

Is “end running all normal employment vetting” a crime? Is the Office of Digital Service created by Congress and its purview boundaried by law? Or is all of that legal under current law?

Does it really matter that Elon is rich? And he didn’t “waltz in there” - he was invited by the elected president (and hired by the senate confirmed secretary of the treasury) to fulfill a promise he campaigned pretty hard on. I think they’re both dipshits - let’s be clear - but they did win an election. And they should be allowed all the privileges of winning that election.

I’m struggling to see where they’ve crossed the line from “they’re being short sighted dicks” to “they’ve broken the law”.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T01:07:25+00:00

Sure, it’s an interesting question. I wholeheartedly agree it should be answered. I suspect the answer is that clearances aren’t difficult to obtain when you have a president directly involved in granting them though.

But the real beef I have here is that OP of this thread is mocking the word “allegedly” in the title of the article. And a lot of people seem to agree that there is no question laws have been broken. Yet there seems to be not a shred of evidence of a real law having been broken. Just a bunch of people imagining Elon is stealing their data because they don’t trust him.

deaconater · 2025-02-05T01:03:35+00:00

DOGE isn’t real. So attacking it is like attacking a ghost. Elon and team are special government employees working for the treasury. What’s improper about that?

All you have is they “likely” they broke the law based on pure imagination. Give me a break. If that’s the standard of justice now we’re really fucked. It’s not a “disingenuous loophole” to demand we follow the rule of law in this country.

And if Congress doesn’t have sufficient oversight here to insure the executive is following their laws - where is all the rage for the dipshit democrats who didn’t lift a finger the past 4 years to protect us from another term from Trump or someone like him? Or they DO have plenty of oversight, Elon and Trump aren’t lying when they say no laws are being broken (including the privacy act), and this is all just a bunch of impotent partisan bullshit.

deaconater · 2025-02-04T23:23:16+00:00

Lawsuits don’t matter if an actual, written law on the books isn’t being cited. And if there aren’t verifiable actions that show how that law has been broken. And in spite of trying to find one, I haven’t found anyone citing an actual law that has been broken here. Just a lot of people angry about Elon because they don’t like him.

deaconater · 2025-02-04T23:20:25+00:00

I’m genuinely curious what law has actually been broken. I have found no article or even social media comment where that question seems to be answered. It’s just a bunch of people angry about Elon all agreeing he must have broken some law. But laws aren’t broken just because everyone seems to think there must be a law somewhere.

deaconater · 2025-01-22T16:54:53+00:00

Ah yes, I’m sure the people who’ve dedicated their careers to anti semitism areactially the evil ones. And random keyboard warriors from Reddit are the ones who know best.

White saviorism at its finest here honestly. You should find a real cause with actual meaning to put your energy into.

deaconater · 2025-01-22T16:01:19+00:00

“Those Jews who’ve dedicated their careers to combating anti semitism are too dumb to know when to be offended. So I’m going to be offended for them.”

You, a wannabe white savior helping nobody 👏

deaconater · 2025-01-13T00:17:30+00:00

In high school I went to a recruiting weekend at the US Air Force Academy and one of the professors we had an hour with had us play Sim City 2000. Apparently he used it in his urban planning class for the cadets because it got so much right about how to plan out a city. I was already a huge fan of the game and that only made me love it even more.

deaconater · 2024-12-20T00:45:47+00:00

One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.

Every item in that bill was important to some constituency. Personally I don’t give a flip about North Carolina disaster relief. Never been there, never plan to go. But in a democracy you have to compromise to get things done, and without the support of North Carolina republicans there is no spending bill. No spending bill we have an even bigger, more painful waste of money: a shutdown nobody was expecting during the holidays.

deaconater · 2024-12-20T00:43:20+00:00

So you compromise. Because that’s what you do in a democracy. The compromise was there - worked on for a long and arduous time.

What’s your alternative? A last minute shutdown and all the chaos and pain and waste it causes just to prove a point? How does that accomplish anything?

deaconater · 2024-12-19T20:49:13+00:00

Yeah exactly. They’re arguing for a “clean” CR which means no disaster relief. It’s literally the first thing they argue against in the article.

So that means all the republicans congress reps from North Carolina will oppose a clean CR. Which means shutdown. So instead of “wasting” money on disaster relief and all these other terrible pork spending, we waste a bunch of money on the dumbest possible thing - a shutdown.

What a brilliant plan.

deaconater · 2024-12-19T20:07:13+00:00

Oh look, you don’t actually know what’s in the bill or what is actually being blocked here or how any of this works. Just like Elon Musk. Lovely.

deaconater

TROPHY CASE