Politics | 2017 | Decent human being defeats literal pedophile and piece of shit in a close senate election, signaling hope to America

By blackace Go To PostWe out there now…USS Carl Vinson

By DY_nasty Go To PostWe always out everywhere tho

By reilo Go To PostWait, we dropped a MOAB in Afghanistan? What the fuck. What decade is this?

Apparently that thing costs over $300mil to deploy. Wow.

By Enron Go To PostThe 300 million figure is, unsurprisingly, wrong. people all over twitter are willing to believe anything so long as it fits their outrage.

300 million is what the entire MOAB production run cost. Each MOAB is 16 million.

By Zeus Ex Machina Go To Postoh just 16 mil that is a much more cost effective WMD /s

By Enron Go To PostEach MOAB is 16 million.

By livefromkyoto Go To PostFuck, that's almost as expensive as dropping Evan Turner on Afghanistan.

By blackace Go To PostI shouldn't laugh

By DY_nasty Go To Posthe didn't visit the troops in japan!?

those poor sons of bitches

By DY_nasty Go To PostNK wouldn't last a week.

low thousands though? naw breh. There's still WW2 era stuff getting plenty of action all over the world. Artillery? That shit is just as effective as ever too. Anything less than 50k dead South Koreans would be a miracle.

And then there comes the 30 year project that'll be resolving NK which will be an entirely new kind of clusterfuck.

By s y Go To Post
NoKo coming strapped with dem DICKS, Trump might have to drop some thangs.

By Phoenix RISING Go To PostROFFL

This looks like a screen cap from an old Command &a Conquer: Red Alert video, with NK's iconography superimposed on all the hammer and sickles.

By blackace Go To Post

By Phoenix RISING Go To Post

https://twitter.com/shane_bauer/status/853401175353204736

I just don't understand.

By Kidjr Go To PostIs thread just for US politics?

The power brokers behind Brexit: Nick Timothy and Martin Selmayr



Martin Selmayr is notorious and he loves it. While his influence is currently most keenly felt within the Brussels Beltway, the German lawyer, 46, sitting in an office festooned with euro memorabilia, jelly sweets and bumper crisp packets, is about to play a pivotal role in Brexit. Viewed by some in London as a dark force and in Brussels as possessing almost mystical powers, few doubt his crucial role in the talks that will reset Britain’s future.

A half-smile crosses Selmayr’s lips as he is asked about his fearsome nicknames, which range from Rasputin to “the monster”, an affectionate moniker from his boss, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. “If you look into the history of Rasputin, that can be both flattering and not — Lenin can be flattering or not,” he says. “If it means there is an efficient manager, somebody who is not a wimp, I’m OK with that. You can’t run the European Commission like a Montessori school.”

When the history of Brexit comes to be told, Selmayr — an official who rose spectacularly through the Brussels ranks to become Juncker’s all-powerful chief of staff — will be a central figure. “Do you know the difference between Selmayr and God?” Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s veteran finance minister, once joked. “God knows he’s not Selmayr.”

Brexit was a body blow to the EU, but Selmayr sees the “tragedy” as a jolt that will re-energise his cherished European project and reforge it without Britain, its most reluctant member. He is confident Britain will pay a price for leaving. And his bossy, whip-smart legalism has come to embody all that No 10 loves to hate about Brussels.

Martin Selmayr with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, Brussels, October 2016 © EU
But as negotiations begin and the clock counts down to Britain’s scheduled departure in March 2019, Selmayr may be about to meet his match. If the clean-cut German has been compared to Rasputin, Nick Timothy actually looks the part. Standing at six foot, with hooded eyes and a beard that, in the words of Paul Goodman, the executive editor of the influential ConservativeHome website, makes him look like “a Greek Orthodox archimandrite”, he oversees a Downing Street regime every bit as centralised as the Selmayr machine. Ministers and officials alike have learnt not to cross him.

While Selmayr sees Brexit as a case study in the essential value of the EU, Timothy sees it as a chance to grab back sovereignty and remodel his country in favour of working people. Brussels symbolises everything the grammar-school boy from Birmingham despises: remote elitism that has failed to deliver for the people. 

Being called Rasputin? I’m OK with that. You can’t run the European Commission like a Montessori school Martin Selmayr
Timothy, 37, is Theresa May’s co-chief of staff, working alongside Fiona Hill, a former journalist. Both are paid £140,000 a year, almost the same as cabinet ministers — and deploy more power than most of them. They are ferociously loyal, demand total control and, behind the scenes, are helping to set the terms of Brexit. “They don’t stop at anything,” says one Tory staffer. “They are streetfighters.”

Timothy and Hill work as a team on everything, constructing a fortress around May. But in the context of Brexit, it is the softly spoken Timothy who commands attention. While Hill supported Remain in last year’s referendum, he voted to take Britain out of the EU. 

It was Timothy who crafted the speeches that articulated May’s world view, including January’s key Brexit statement at Lancaster House. Timothy was attracted to Brexit principally by the idea of restoring national sovereignty. “I am not altogether comfortable with our participation in the Ryder Cup team,” he once joked.

Timothy and Selmayr sit on top of extraordinarily centralised bureaucracies. They are not the official negotiators for Brexit and ultimately it will be their bosses — frontline politicians — who make the decisions. But the clout of these back-room svengalis and their crucial role in the big strategic calls is in little doubt. They are two of the youngest and most powerful characters to serve in their chief of staff positions. Both wield great influence over their bosses, have survived attempts to bring them down and are not afraid to dish out punishment. Both are classic insiders who break the mould. Their political destinies are bound up with Brexit. 

Remarkably they have never met, at least not formally. Selmayr thinks he saw Timothy, pre-beard, years ago at a meeting in Brussels on home affairs; Timothy is well aware of Selmayr but insists they have never encountered each other. 


"Vote Leave" demonstrators outside the Houses of Parliament in London, ahead of the referendum vote in June 2016
“It’s a pity that the key people in Downing St were never here in Brussels to talk to us,” Selmayr tells the Financial Times from his office, facing that of his boss, Juncker. “So it’s very difficult to judge how they see things.”

To get a sense of how Timothy sees things, one has to start at Tile Cross, a suburb east of Birmingham, named after the quarry from which tiles were hewn. There is nothing especially remarkable about it. Timothy’s father worked for Allied Steel and Wire, his mother as a school assistant. Timothy went to a local primary and then to the state grammar in Aston: he is a devout supporter of Aston Villa. He tells friends his background is resolutely “normal”, yet it defines his political outlook. He refused a request to be interviewed for this article.

The normality of Timothy’s upbringing is only remarkable when seen in the context of the Cameron era. Out of the five people principally involved in writing David Cameron’s 2015 manifesto, four attended Eton College; George Osborne, the fifth, attended the elite St Paul’s school. Theresa May’s arrival in Downing St marked a brutal purge of this old guard, with Timothy and Hill in the vanguard.

“Nick is anti-establishment,” says one Tory MP. “He sees himself as a challenger to their values, whether it is on Europe or whatever else.” It was Timothy — who delivers his onslaughts on elites with a twinkle in his eye — who devised May’s Tory conference attack on “citizens of the world”.


Timothy with Theresa May during the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, September 2016 © Reuters
Visitors to Downing St are confronted in the waiting room with the text of May’s speech upon arriving at No 10 last July. Crafted by Timothy, it declared a new set of priorities. “If you’re from an ordinary working-class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise,” May said.

Timothy’s hero is Joseph Chamberlain, the can-do Liberal mayor of Birmingham, who focused on raising working-class conditions.

Yet Timothy has spent his entire working life in Westminster’s orbit. After obtaining a first in politics at Sheffield University, he worked as a researcher in Conservative central office, then with Hill at the Home Office, steering May away from danger, dispensing with enemies and playing a long game. 

He is defined by what Goodman calls his “contra mundum” spirit. “There’s a lot of anger,” says one former Home Office colleague. “He defines himself by his battle with others.”

Compared to Timothy, Selmayr’s background is more peripatetic. He was born to a bookish family. His father Gerhard, also a lawyer, advised the German president Karl Carstens before a prominent career running universities. Selmayr criss-crossed the country through his youth: Bonn, Berlin, Munich, Karlsruhe, Passau for his studies.

It was in London, where he studied briefly at King’s College, that he had one of his formative political experiences, encountering authentic British Euroscepticism in the form of Margaret Thatcher. She was billed to promote her memoirs at the Barbican theatre. What Selmayr witnessed was more a political assassination, as Thatcher “basically blasted” her successor John Major and the European project to which he had surrendered. “Alone among the countries of Europe we have not been invaded for over 1,000 years and we have developed the taste for running our affairs,” she said. “I do not wish it to go any further.”

There is a lot of anger,’ says one former Home Office colleague. ‘[Timothy] defines himself by his battle with others
To an inquisitive twentysomething, this was a moment to remember. He queued for a signed copy of the book, and took from that day an understanding that British politicians had a different perspective. “I saw that there is a big misunderstanding between Britain and the rest of the EU,” he says. “For the Germans and French it is unthinkable to see the European project only as a market; the market is an instrument to achieve something more.” 

To pinpoint that “something more”, you can look back to a teenage Selmayr’s visit to Verdun with his war-veteran grandfather, or the bomb-shelter tragedies witnessed by his grandmother. But whatever the motivation — peace, social harmony or just a fascination with power and politics — it is this “higher political purpose” for Europe that Selmayr has turned into something of an obsession.

After two years at the European Central Bank’s legal service while completing his doctorate on euro area law, Selmayr spent three years in Brussels with the media group Bertelsmann, where he worked with his political godfather Elmar Brok, an influential if at times bumptious German MEP. Finally, in 2004, aged 34, he entered the Commission as a spokesperson for Luxembourger Viviane Reding. 

There, with a touch of bureaucratic alchemy, Selmayr turned a job handling press for a telecoms commissioner into a perch of huge influence. Championing populist causes such as capping mobile roaming fees, he showed little respect for orthodoxy. Selmayr understood how to bring the limelight to Reding, shoving aside veteran bureaucrats. Within a year he was all but running the show.

“There was something implacable about him, perhaps slightly intimidating,” recalls Kip Meek, a British regulator who worked closely with Selmayr in Brussels. “He did not threaten. But he was totally in control. Politicians can be like that. Martin was an official but he played it like a politician. He knew how to use power.”

But, like Timothy, he is also an insider who doesn’t quite fit. When he left for the ECB, his father complained he was part of an anti-Deutsche Mark conspiracy. Selmayr has channels into Berlin but he is no creature of German politics; he readily admits Chancellor Angela Merkel was unhappy about his appointment. The Brits and many other Europeans worry that he is too German, too hardline and too integrationist; the Germans worry that he is not German enough. 

Brussels has long made legends of its master bureaucrats. The doyen is Emile Noël, a man who ran the executive for its first 30 years. Colleagues called him “a secular European monk”. Over the years power has concentrated in the chef de cabinet, the political right hand of Commissioners and occasional purveyor of the dark arts. Some have been known for all the wrong reasons: one serving president’s chef was murdered with a hunting rifle by his estranged Italian wife. 

If Selmayr is not the most powerful chef in Brussels history, he is certainly the most high profile. He has become a public figure in his own right, memorably tweeting in May last year that a G7 meeting with “Trump, Le Pen, Boris Johnson and Beppe Grillo” would be “a horror scenario that shows well why it is worth fighting populism”.

Selmayr, like his predecessors, is ultimately an aide who can be overruled. But he differs from the chefs of old in one important way: he helped to make Juncker president. He pushed the novel Spitzenkandidat idea, which successfully tried to co-opt European elections to directly elect a Commission president (most EU leaders didn’t want help picking presidents). He ran Juncker’s campaign, and when his chances were looking wobbly, he helped work German politics so Angela Merkel was forced to drop her objections.

There was something implacable about [Selmayr]. He did not threaten. But he was totally in control

It was an improbable feat. At a private lunch in January 2014, Selmayr “99 per cent” predicted that Juncker would be president. It seemed a delightfully eccentric bet; the Luxembourger had not even declared his interest. Months later, Downing St still scoffed at the idea. Yet Selmayr was right. With others, he outwitted not just Cameron, who opposed Juncker, but the German chancellor.

Timothy and Hill played an equally crucial role in protecting May at the Home Office — a politically precarious posting — and positioning her so that she was the obvious choice to succeed Cameron when he lost last year’s EU referendum. May’s lukewarm, virtually invisible support for Remain was a tactical masterstroke.

In some ways, May’s ascent is as improbable as Juncker’s. She does not play the Westminster game or have a coterie of admirers. When she makes policy speeches, they have usually been penned by Timothy. But those in Downing St insist that Timothy is not pursuing his own agenda. Indeed, May set the tone for her centrist Conservative agenda in 2002 — while Timothy was barely out of university — when she urged the Tories to shed their “nasty party” image.

Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s former ambassador to Washington, is a friend of Timothy’s and says: “I don’t believe for a second that Theresa May is a blank sheet of paper. He and the prime minister have a symbiotic relationship. She influences him and he influences her. It’s a two-way street.”

Both Selmayr and Timothy know how to use power: it is to be held centrally and deployed ruthlessly. According to one figure who has observed them at work, their operations foster “paranoia and mistrust”. Politicians and officials in London and Brussels have noted how grudges are borne, scores are settled.

Norman Baker, a former Liberal Democrat home office minister in the coalition government, wrote about his experiences of working with Timothy in his book Against the Grain. He says: “There was a climate of fear. Everything had to go through Nick and Fiona, and woe betide you if you didn’t do what they wanted. He shouted at my civil servants in my office. I had to complain to the permanent secretary.”

Nick Timothy with his fellow co-chief of staff Fiona Hill at the Conservative party conference, Birmingham, October 2016 © Reuters/Toby Melville
A number of ministers — Lib Dem and Tory — have observed that Hill was often seen as the more reasonable of the two. “She’s as hard as nails but you can do business with her,” Baker recalls. Timothy, by contrast, rarely broached disagreement. One Tory staffer says: “Nick is quite a shy character in some respects. Often the people who make their presence known least are the most scary because they are unknown quantities.”

Timothy defended Home Office territory from incursions from Number 10 but was eventually ousted by Cameron’s team in a row over whether he should — as a publicly funded official — be allowed to campaign for the Conservatives. He was barred from the party’s candidates list for the 2015 election. However, the May operation bided its time. The “demobilisation of the Cameroons” — as it was labelled by Cameron’s former policy chief Oliver Letwin — was only the most high-profile piece of score settling. Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s EU ambassador to Brussels, quit shortly after anonymous government figures briefed the BBC that he was being too gloomy about Brexit.

May’s centralised form of government leaves some ministers feeling diminished. “It will destroy her,” says one. Timothy and Hill vet press releases, ministerial trips and even political appointments. To some Timothy is a distant and intimidating figure, yet his unerring ability to know May’s mind is seen as an invaluable asset by others.

Even enemies of Timothy recognise his standout qualities. “He’s a seriously bright bloke — we would be worse off without him,” says one usually unsympathetic Tory staffer. “He knows what his boss thinks and he’s usually right. In meetings with him there is no pissing around.” Meyer says: “He has a steely determination. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. You have to have people in Downing St who are enforcers.”

Even his enemies recognise Timothy’s standout qualities. ‘He’s a seriously bright bloke,’ says one usually unsympathetic Tory staffer
Selmayr has also survived political assassination attempts. European Commissioners have complained about him to Juncker on various occasions since 2015, as did Cameron to other EU leaders, blaming the German official for being a roadblock in his attempt to renegotiate a better EU deal for Britain. Those who cross Selmayr fear the worst: he seems to have an ability to sniff out plots, seeing patterns everywhere. Nothing is accidental.

A master of detail, he asserts control through dominating process and access to Juncker. He pays no attention to rank or protocol and his work rate is prodigious: he once said, “I do not understand the notion of a weekend.” Faced with any hint of rebellion, he will take hostage unrelated policies, cherished priorities or travel plans. Other chefs call their Monday meeting “the weekly humiliation”. One of his foes says: “Selmayr would be a great chess player — even without the cheating.”

“Juncker is the good guy and I’m the bad guy. That’s how it is,” says Selmayr. In the college the 27 European Commissioners — made up of former prime ministers, finance ministers, foreign ministers, even a gulag survivor — have been cowed. Resentment runs deep. One member called him “the tyrant upstairs”. Another wondered whether Selmayr could distinguish truth from fiction.

“People talk about him in this way because they fear him,” says Jan Philipp Albrecht, a Green MEP who knows Selmayr well. “Old ministers arrive in Brussels thinking they can lie back and talk about a bright future for the EU. They’re not here to play hard, and they are surprised when someone does. He’s effective. He takes it seriously and he does it for a reason.”

For the first time, Timothy and Selmayr are about to go head to head. While other figures will grab the headlines as talks progress — notably the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier and Britain’s Brexit minister David Davis — the two chiefs of staff will be directing strategy behind the scenes.

“[Timothy] is arguably the most important man in government, despite never having been elected, on Brexit and on nearly everything else,” says Paul Goodman. 

“You cannot get around Martin Selmayr,” says a northern European “sherpa” — one of the officials doing the Brexit donkey work. “He will be taking the decisions, he’s the most important voice in there. They can convince themselves it is Barnier, but they neglect Martin at their peril.” 

Selmayr pays no attention to rank or protocol and his work rate is prodigious. He once said: ‘I do not understand the notion of a weekend’
But one Brit who knows them both warns: “When it comes to the EU, there is one big difference between Martin and Nick. Martin knows what he is talking about.”

That is a worry for those in London who believe Selmayr stymied Cameron last year in trying to secure better UK membership terms to present to British voters. Cameron blamed the “ideologues and theologians” in Brussels. But a few on the EU side think more was possible, had the Commission approached the British negotiation in political terms, rather than as a legal puzzle. Selmayr “sat on his hands”, says one EU official.

Selmayr argues there was “nothing more in the drawer” for Cameron; the patience of member states was pushed to the limit. Others closely involved insist there was no ulterior motive. “I reject the notion that he tried to sabotage the deal, that he thought the union was better off without Britain,” says Jonathan Faull, the official leading those negotiations with Cameron.

Like most EU leaders, Selmayr believes that Britain cannot enjoy a better deal outside the club. He also wants the EU to move ahead quickly after Brexit. Selmayr himself says it would be “foolish” to see Brexit as a good thing for Europe: “Everybody is sad about this. But it confronts us with a choice; now we can’t do anything else but move on.”

As for Timothy, he may turn out to be surprisingly pragmatic. He was a strong Brexiter but no ideologue: he tells colleagues that Euroscepticism is not the reason he entered politics. Nor is he a classic Little Englander: before the Tory leadership contest, he was learning German in honour of his fiancée Nike Trost, who works for Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority and hails from Wuppertal.

At the Home Office, May took on the Eurosceptics by deciding to remain part of the EU’s crime-fighting apparatus, including the European Arrest Warrant. Timothy is not remotely attracted by the idea of Britain crashing out of the EU without a deal in the hope that a clean break might allow it to become a kind of libertarian paradise with low taxes and light regulation. He wrote the line in May’s Tory conference speech: “Remember the good that government can do.” It is just that he wants British politicians to be in charge, whether controlling borders, redirecting regional spending or being more interventionist in foreign takeovers.

If Selmayr wants to use Brexit to push on with the European project, Timothy sees it as accelerating the need to make Britain globally competitive. Both accept that Brexit is perhaps the biggest task they will face, but they do not want to be defined by it. Perhaps they have more in common than they think. “Why would you want to have a no-deal scenario when you can work together for something better?” Timothy asks colleagues.

Sir Christopher Meyer says that Timothy does not see his role as doing “the diplomats’ job” but Selmayr says the invitation is always open for Theresa May’s chief of staff to come to Brussels. They would have a lot to talk about. “In London it’s like a bunker, it was a bunker in the Cameron times and it’s a bunker now — it’s even worse now,” he says. “It’s difficult to communicate and understand each other if you don’t come out of your closet.”

By FortuneFaded Go To PostMelania hand to remind Donald what to do during the national anthem:

By Enron Go To PostJohn Ossoff can go to hell. Doesn't live in the 6th, hasn't lived here for a while, and 98% of his money is from out of state. He can't even vote for himself. Completely ridiculous.

By Enron Go To PostJohn Ossoff can go to hell. Doesn't live in the 6th, hasn't lived here for a while, and 98% of his money is from out of state. He can't even vote for himself. Completely ridiculous.