Pamela Anderson: "How could you Equador?"

Really? Over seven years they put up with that slovenly, messy, houseguest. But more importantly, he's a rapist and politically there's much not to like about Julian Assange from just about every angle. Not to mention he should have a chat, if it's not too late, with Robert Mueller.

Wikileaks' "most recent transgression" was actually releasing a trove of emails hacked from the personal account of the Ecuadoran president. Handy practice tip: If someone grants you political asylum in their house, don't take a dump on the living room floor.

@2: You can't blame and denigrate a man for having principles. In this particular instance, he should be applauded for continuing to expose government corruption and evil even though it could cause him massive harm.

The world needs people like Assange. I find it extremely depressing how many people were cheerleading Assange as a crusader for justice when he was exposing Bush's dirty laundry, but as soon as power shifted and he was exposing the Obama administration, he became evil incarnate.

Wikileaks has never had to retract a story, and despite being sued many times, every single time the truth of their reporting has held. What other news organization can make this claim?

Another way to think about it: this is a foreign reporter being held and extradited for breaking the law of a nation he has no citizenship with. How many of you would want an American reporter treated this way for breaking Chinese laws while exposing massive corruption from the Chinese government? Should the American reporter be extradited to China for breaking Chinese laws?

That being said, Ecuador has every right to deport him, as sovereign nations have an explicit right to decide who is allowed to stay there or not, and can set whatever citizenship policies they wish.

The woman with the shears should be caned for destroying someone else’s property.

@1: Should have said "accused of rape"

Journalism jobs are rare and treasured. The slog needs to find someone that can manage to pay the morning news by 8

The Carbon Panic candidate is running less than 1%. And that’s before we have yellow vests rioting.

@ 3,

Funny how Assange’s interests always aligned with Trump, Putin, and the Republican party.

He helped carry out their ongoing white supremacist terrorist attack against the decent people of this deeply fucked up country, and he can fry in hell along with all of their other collaborators, enablers, and sympathizers.

One of the kids asked Jay if he felt like Boeing's Bitch after he gave them $8 Billion in tax breaks and they shipped jobs out anyway.
Jay whined about being extorted.
Jay tried to crack jokes all evening but most of them went over the little nerds' heads...

@13 -- Bravo, Teddy.

I believe Great Britain cannot, legally, hand over Assange to the USA if the Death Penalty may be applicable. If I know Trumpfy, somebody'll inform him we're At War, therefore it's "legal" to execute Assange. And surely he'll go for it, Cadet Bone Spurs's Authoritarianist bent DEMANDS it; probably Trumpy'll offer to do it himself, pro bono (long as HE gets the TeeVee rights), but, being such a Peace-Loving man, will have the dick CHENEY take care of it. In Dick's own, sweet time....

Moving on -- "... One man spent 13 months in solitary confinement in a Chelan jail before he was determined to be unable to stand trial and was referred to a psychiatric hospital."

WTFF -- we punish people whose brains are sick with Solitary fucking Confinement. Torture. A fucking Crime against Humanity.

Where the FUCK are the "Right-To-Lifers"?
Compassionate Conservatives?

@3, not 13

I've seen racier Easter displays at Target. Also, in my backyard this morning where one Easter bunny (a jackrabbit, but close enough) was chasing another Easter bunny with fairly clear intentions of making baby Easter bunnies.

@9: I know this is an exercise in hilarious futility, but in plain language, how was his exposure of some of the excesses of Bush's war in Iraq helping Trump and the GOP?

Same bullshit I highlighted above. "He is a hero when he exposes the other guys, but when he exposes my guys, he becomes evil." This is baby-level thinking.

I think most people don't like him because he is an alleged rapist. I don't know about the rest of yall but if someone does something I like then they rape someone I simply reconsider my support for that person.

@7 -- "The slog needs to find someone that can manage to pay the morning news by 8" --@9:25 am.

It's 9:25 og, and you're not yet making sense?
Why on Earth do you want Them to be up and running, pre-sunrise?

They're Journalists, for christsakes, and Need their beauty rest. Don't we all....

@ 17,

That served Putin’s interests in undermining the US more than exposing war crimes and injustice, accountability for which never occurred.

The Republican party’s emails also were thoroughly hacked at the same time the DNC’s were, and Assange zealously refused to release them because...?

Like @21 says, Assange is being charged with helping crack a DOD password not with releasing information.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/assange-lawyers-indictment-blow-press-freedom

His defenders claim that this is a blow to press freedom but Trump has been a much greater threat to the press.

Also, now that he no longer has asylum, at least one lawyer for the (alleged) rape survivor in Sweden is seeking to reinstate charges against Assange.

@23: By that logic, literally anything that negatively impacts America is "serving Putin's interests."

Nonsense.

@ 26,

Undermining US interests leads to voters’ disillusionment, apathy, and learned helplessness, which always benefits Republicans by reducing turnout.

Again, why would he refuse to ever release anything detrimental to Trump and the GOP? Well?

Pamela Anderson has been for decades synonymous with the term bimbo, and yet displays a greater understanding as to how the world works than most of the people who actually run it.

Which in itself is a bit of s statement on how competent world leaders are today.

Assange has charted a course that has placed him at odds with those whose hands rest upon the levers of power the world over for a long time now. It was inevitable that today’s events would unfold the way they have. No act can be described as brave unless there is actual risk involved. He seems to have understood this from the beginning. He held on as long as he could, to sustain the work he was performing for as long as possible.

While we are all taught cloying slogans about how each of us, individually, changes the world, it is rare that any lone individual can or does. Those who do, such as Gavrillo Princip, accomplish one major change before the powers that be shut them down immediately. Assange managed to hold on much longer, resulting in sweeping changes from South Korea’s Blue House to the Panama Papers.

He made some huge mistakes along the way, and was by no means a saint. However, he did, for the time Wikileaks functioned , decentralize information to the governed about how the governments they elect operate. For this, he has been demonized by the political right, center and left. He set himself against the entire world.

I am reminded of the legend of Cu Chulainn. Now, we watch as he is tied to the tree, and the archers draw their bows. Te cowards are too frightened to take him on in a fair fight.

@28: He did, it is part of what we are talking about. You can't just pretend some things happened and others did not, or that there is some arbitrary time frame here.

Wikileaks actually released a statement about this issue, basically saying that anything they found that would be questionable was already something that Trump himself admitted to/referenced, or was already basically common knowledge about the campaign. Furthermore, Clinton was the Secretary of State. Of course her dealings were of more interest/content than some loudmouth reality TV businessman.

https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/293453-assange-wikileaks-trump-info-no-worse-than-him

Believe them or not, but that is what they claim.

@32: I don't believe it either, to be honest, just noting that they have not been silent about it.

Wikileaks (whether or not that is Assange or some other management) seemed to prefer Trump, as they thought Clinton's past hawkishness would lead to increased American military engagement overseas.

That being said, it should also be readily apparent that the inner dealings of a secret illegal email server run by the Secretary of State was of more interest than whatever Trump was talking about at the time.

Unlike other media outlets, you can trust the information Wikileaks puts out, but like all other media outlets, you can never trust their motives.

I always thought he was a egotistical twerp, and I was tickled to see him get carried out of that embassy. The fact that he looked like Mr. Burns from season 5 episode 10 of the Simpsons, that is just icing on the cake.

@ 31/33 That’s total bullshit, and it still doesn’t explain why Wikileaks refused to release the GOP/NRCC’s emails when they released the DNC’s.

Assange is Putin’s stooge, and they both indirectly support the Republican party because the GOPnazis are doing their dirty work for them by delegitimizing the US government through their gross incompetence, insatiable greed, nauseating lies, authoritarianism, open kleptocracy, and blatant racism. They’re financially, politically, and morally bankrupting the US from the inside, so naturally they’re the defacto allies of the Russian dictatorship, since they share the same goals.

Pamela Anderson is why we have Measles and Polio epidemics.

Just saying.

I'm agnostic on the value of Pamela Anderson's art or her role in legitimizing vaccine hysteria.
But "How could you Ecuador?" is a pretty great line.

Not a world about the last election in Israel by any of the commenters. I guess no one cares that country gets at least 3B of military gear per year as a present from all of you tax payers.
You probably don’t give a shit either that this ongoing “support” managed Israel to be held unaccountable to its ongoing occupation while becoming an increasingly intolerant nationalistic-theocratic society.

Thanks!!!

@13- Trump would be wise not to make out a case that we are at war with Russia in order to put the death penalty on Assage, because that would turn the underhanded collusive shit that he himself did into treason. Maybe we could have a double hanging.

30,

Well, yes, and this just goes to prove how prescient Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy was.

The only thing he got wrong is, Idiocracy was set several hundred years into the future. It did not, as Judge asserts in the beginning of the film, require many generations of devolution to arrive at our current state. It took a decade and a half from the film’s release to get to this pathetically reduced state where Bimbosity incarnate and a loudmouth with an internet connection have indeed become our ubermench.

Chris Hedges on Assange's arrest:

"The arrest Thursday of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments, in the seizure of Assange are ominous.

They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by corporate states and the global ruling elite will be masked from the public.

They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement.

They presage an Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and entertainment. The arrest of Assange, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives."

More at
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-martyrdom-of-julian-assange/

@36 - America loves bimbos like Pam and Jenny McCarthy. Unless, apparently, they are in a dentist's front yard.

Oh. For fuck sake. This Teddy guy is so so stupid.

Mueller has the email exchanges between Roger Stone and Assange specifically discussing delivering DNC emails hacked to the Trump campaign.

Assange was never a “whistleblower” and was always just rabidly anti-American, politically a fascist sympathizer, and allied himself with whoever furthered those ends.

JANUARY 25, 2019
Mueller Indictment: Roger Stone Communicated With Senior Trump Campaign Officials About WikiLeaks

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/01/mueller-indictment-roger-stone-communicated-with-senior-trump-campaign-officials-about-wikileaks/

"The Stone indictment contends that starting “in or around June and July 2016” Stone informed the Trump campaign that WikiLeaks possessed documents that could be used as ammunition against Clinton. Stone “spoke to senior Trump Campaign officials about” WikiLeaks “and information it might have had that would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign,” Mueller alleges, noting that Stone was also “contacted by senior Trump Campaign officials to inquire about future releases by” WikiLeaks. The New York Times has reported that Stone traded emails with Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon in October 2016 concerning a press conference by Julian Assange, during which many expected the WikiLeaks founder to announce the release of Clinton documents. The indictment suggests that, in addition to Bannon, other high-level campaign officials were in contact with Stone about WikiLeaks. And it contends that, after WikiLeaks July 22, 2016 release of records hacked from the Democratic National Committee, “a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton Campaign.” This raises the obvious question of who told the campaign staffer to reach out to Stone."

Which is why:

"Text Messages Show Roger Stone Was Working to Get a Pardon for Julian Assange"
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/10/text-messages-show-roger-stone-was-working-to-get-a-pardon-for-wikileaks-julian-assange/

"...“I am working with others to get JA a blanket pardon,” Stone wrote, in a January 6 exchange of text messages obtained by Mother Jones. “It’s very real and very possible. Don’t fuck it up.” Thirty-five minutes later, Stone added, “Something very big about to go down."..."

Fun fact: NBC News tallied that Trump had cited WikiLeaks 141 times at 56 events in the last month of the campaign.

“WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” he said at one such event. “This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove,” he said at another. “I love reading those WikiLeaks,” he said at yet another event, relaying that he had been delayed in arriving because he had been reading the latest batch of emails that WikiLeaks had released.

Today after Assange's arrest: “I know nothing about WikiLeaks,” Trump told reporters. “It’s not my thing."

43
Xman

Well, who could argue with that?!
Well played.

Let me get this straight: Assange was an agent of Putin who helped to elect Trump. But now Trump wants to extradite Assange to stand trial in the US, where Trump officials are on record as wanting to kill him.

Please explain Putin's rationale for ordering Trump to take this course of action.

When did Inslee "Stick The Landing?" Was it when he was asked what ideas he had to fix our broken recycling system and he admitted he had no idea? That landing sticking?

I don't think Jay is actually running for the W.H. I think he is setting himself up to be some kind of liberal wet dream Interior Secretary or be appointed to be some kind of "Climate Czar."

@52 -- OR he's running for '24 or '28. Those kids're gonna Remember Inslee -- he picked their biggest existential threat. Well, a very sick Biosphere, and Republicans.

He'll be their Champion.

But, sadly (for Jay's Presidential Hopes and Dreams), by that time it's gonna be all Women at the top of the Ticket...

Or they'll all be Handmaids.

50,

I donated heavily to the Green Party’s effort to recount the ballots in 3 states. And while I’m certain there was electoral dysfunction at the ballot box, I was and am still amazed at where the media went with this thing.

Even though the Clintonites got burned by James Comey the FBI guy, they made Bob Muller the FBI guy out to be their personal lord and savior. I guess corporate centrists don’t have the same experience the Left has had with COINTELPRO, MKULTRA and infiltration/surveillance of every group from CPUSA to the Catholic Worker Movement. They think the FBI and te CIA are the good guys. Hey, do you know who their boss is? The POTUS. Now, I realize that Trump runs around screaming “Deep State” every chance he gets, but that’s a ruse. The Intelligence community works for him. He appoints their leadership, and can fire anyone of them he doesn’t like, and he doesn’t need a reason to, he can just send them a letter saying “don’t come in to work today”. So they’re not really trying to undermine him.

Watching centrists praise the Intelligence community every time Malcolm Nance appears on Bill Maher, but these are not the good guys. If you think they are, that makes it even easier for them to manipulate you. Their job is to control people for the purpose of strengthening the government, the head of which happens to be Donald Trump.

Also, what party has Muller been a member of his entire life? He’s not a Democrat. He joined up under Nixon. Politically, he defines himself as being not on your side. So guess what? He’s not gonna save you. His report is gonna exonerate his boss, even if Trump is guilty as hell.

Y’all were dumb under Obama for appointing Comey in the first place. Every time you reach across the aisle, it’s like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy’s football. You can’t help it though. Every time they pull it away, you get up and try to kick it again.

Let’s stop this stupid bullshit. Enough with bipartisanship. Appoint Democrats to head the FBI, not Republicans. Unless you’re admitting that you have no good ideas of your own when it comes to law enforcement. Stop splitting your own party out of sheer spite for Bernie. This is serious, your stupid games lost you the election in 2016, and you’re gonna lose again in 2020 if you keep it up. Instead of flying into red states like Arizona, in the weird hope that you’ll carry a state formerly headed by Jan Brewer, fly to Wisconsin, and talk to the union people. You might actually win something for once in spite of yourself.

This easter is gonna be smoky and sticky but probably not that sexy. 420 blaze it, amirite?

@19: "I don't know about the rest of yall but if someone does something I like then they rape someone I simply reconsider my support for that person."

That's the kind of dangerous thinking pushed by local prosecutors and police to undercut all our civil rights.

"This guy's a really, really bad person because we say so, so we need to go ahead and ignore the Constitutional just this once!"

I've come to expect that argument from the Seattle Times and I expect their readers to swallow it, but I expect a little more from The Stranger and it's readers.

The first amendment is not there to protect the guilty despite what those like Dan Satterberg would have you believe It's there to protect the innocent because without it we are all guilty simply for expressing ideas that are unpopular to the majority.

...And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down...d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.”
― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

FYI , MotherJones is not a credible source, its a dispicable piece of printed toilet paper. Assange provided the World and American citizens confirmation that our government is riddled with corrupt businessmen/women colluding us into unjust wars to benefit our Military Industrial Complex. The Russian narrative was choreographed by state actors to keep us distracted from the real issues. Used your gray matter and think...if Russian hacked our elections, why will no politician except Tulsi Gabbard and a few others offer up a solution, like paper ballot backups to secure our vote. Interesting that you Resist camps are all for a unconstitutional kidnapping of whistleblowers under the Trump administration...it doesn't get more authoritarian than that! Mind boggling, that you can abandon your hatred of him so quickly over Assange--what principles do you stand for? Other than the ones the MSM has provided to you? Again, you are Sheeple, you just belong to different political party.
FREE ASSANGE
FREE CHELSEA MANNING