Showing posts with label Dirty Tricks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dirty Tricks. Show all posts

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Trump Has Now Lied To The Public More Than 1,000 Times Since Taking Office

According to a report by The Washington Post, Donald Trump has passed the 1,000 lie milestone since being sworn in as President. Many of his lies have been repeated so often that a majority of his supporters actually believe them to be true, like Trump actually winning the popular vote. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.


IF TRUMP'S MOUTH IS MOVING, A LIE IS SPILLING OUT, IF HIS HAND IS MOVING, THE SATANIC 666 HAND GESTURE IS SHOWING YOU WHO HE WORSHIPS.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/08/22/president-trumps-list-of-false-and-misleading-claims-tops-1000/

Friday, August 25, 2017

How Bad Of A Businessman Is Donald Trump? Here’s How Bad.

How bad of a businessman is Donald Trump? Two experts, and one person impacted by Trump’s business deals, discuss his record.

Marvin Roffman, an analyst, took Trump to court after getting fired for telling the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s plan for the Taj Mahal was financially irresponsible. Trump settled the case and Roffman won financial compensation.

Prudence Gourguechon, past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, argues that Trump views his business partners and even the banks which lend him money as expendable, since he can just use them until he gets a better deal.

“Donald Trump’s handshake, his signature and his word mean absolutely nothing in Atlantic City,” says Paul Friel, whose father’s cabinetry business was never paid in full for the work it completed on Trump Plaza.

Trump is acting like he is running out of time



Former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman said Thursday that Donald Trump is acting in regards to the Russia collusion investigation as if he knows "time is running out."

"What we're finding is, as time goes on, we keep learning new, additional facts. But we don't know what [special counsel Robert] Mueller's staff knows. For all we know, we may just have the tip of the iceberg on this," Akerman told MSNBC's Ari Melber.

Akerman referenced a The Washington Post report that Trump had pushed back on legislation proposed in July that would block him from firing the special counsel investigating his campaign's ties to Russia without a federal judge's approval.

"Now it appears he's directly lobbying congress to try and ensure that he has a way to get rid of this investigation," Akerman said.

CNN reported this week that congressional investigators had unearthed an email from now-White House aide Rick Dearborn to campaign officials last year relaying information about a person who was trying to connect top Trump officials with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Federal and congressional investigators had already shown an interest in a meeting that Trump's eldest son Donald Jr. set up last summer between campaign officials and a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on his presidential rival Hillary Clinton.

"At the same time that we keep getting more evidence, we also learn that Donald Trump has consistently, from day one, tried to stop this Russia investigation," Akerman said.

Trump harshly criticized and later fired James Comey as FBI director amid the escalating Russia probe, and slammed Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the ongoing investigation.

"All of this comes down to one simple fact," said Akerman. "You have someone who is acting extremely guilty, someone who is acting in a way that he realizes that time is running out, and he's taking all kinds of desperate moves to try and stop this investigation."

Thursday, August 24, 2017

I was detained for protesting Trump. Here’s what the Secret Service asked me.






Melissa Byrne is a political strategist living in Philadelphia.

Trump at his Trump Tower news conference last week. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

Like many events that end up with a person in handcuffs, my story begins in a bar. I was in Atlanta earlier this month for Netroots Nation, the annual meeting of progressive organizers and writers, when I overheard friends discussing how to resist President Trump’s first visit to Trump Tower. I jumped into the conversation: “Well, you call me, of course.” Twenty minutes later, we had a rough plan that we would unfurl a banner inside Trump Tower the following week. I have been to many protests since the inauguration, and I was proud to do my part.

Together with Ultraviolet and the Working Families Party, we commissioned a painted banner that simply read “Women Resist White Supremacy.” Through sheer luck, not only would Trump be in Trump Tower during my act of resistance, but he would be giving a news conference about 3:30 p.m. I knew from my previous work as a campaign advancer that the Secret Service would begin sweeps to clear the space about an hour before he spoke, so the best possible time for the action was 2 p.m.

Unlike previous presidents, Trump’s home is in a public space. You don’t have to sneak into Trump Tower. You enter via an atrium next to a Nike store. Then you pass through airport-style security run by the Secret Service. I wore my banner as a slip of sorts under my flowy dress. It was made of fabric, so it didn’t set off the metal detector.



Protesters gathered outside Trump Tower in Manhattan on Aug. 14, as Trump arrived back for the first time since being inaugurated into office. (evilevestrikesagain/Instagram)

Like every good political operative — I worked for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) 2016 campaign and then the MoveOn super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton’s campaign — I run on coffee. Conveniently, the Starbucks inside Trump Tower is located on the second floor and overlooks an atrium — exactly where I’d want to hang the banner. I sipped a flat white and waited for the right moment, when uniformed NYPD wouldn’t be nearby. Then I unfurled the banner. A security officer grabbed it almost immediately. I ended up on the ground.

Since Starbucks is a public place and I was a paying guest, I knew I hadn’t violated any laws. At worst, I could be banned from the building. I expected from past protest actions that I’d be given a warning and a request to leave. I clearly and politely explained to the NYPD officers who detained me that the protest was done and I was heading out.

They had other ideas.

A detective grabbed my wrist and cuffed me. A gaggle of officers from multiple law enforcement agencies escorted me to a room near the atrium. A few chairs had Trump campaign materials plastered on them. Inside the room with me were more than 10 officers from the NYPD and the Secret Service.

Then the questions began, and they were bananas. A young woman from the Secret Service began the questioning; male NYPD officers tagged in and out. They never asked me whether I understood my rights, and I wasn’t actually sure at that moment what rights, if any, I had. I was focused on not getting put in a car and being whisked away.

It was clear right away that these officials wouldn’t see me the way I see myself: as a reasonably responsible, skilled nonviolent political operative who works on a mix of electoral and issues campaigns. To them, I was clearly a threat to national security. It felt like an interrogation on “Homeland.” Here are my favorite parts of the conversation, as I remember them.

NYPD: “Why would you come to the president’s home to do this?”
Me: “It was wrong for the president to support white supremacy.”
NYPD: “Don’t you respect the president?”
Me: “I don’t respect people who align with Nazis.”
Secret Service: “Do you have negative feelings toward the president?”
Me: “Yes.”
Secret Service: “Can you elaborate?”
Me: “He should be impeached and should not be president.”

They were concerned with who bought my train ticket, once they saw the receipt on my phone. The NYPD officers didn’t seem to believe me that some organizations work for justice and organize these legal protests. Each time they touched my phone, I said I don’t consent to the search of my phone. (They held my phone during the interview, and I can only hope they didn’t poke around it — although they wouldn’t have found much to interest them, unless they like Bernie GIF's.)

Secret Service: “Have you ever been inside the White House?
Me: “Yes.”
Secret Service: “How many times?”
Me: “Many. I was a volunteer holiday tour guide for the White House Visitors Center.”
Secret Service, eyes wide: “When was the last time you were there?”
Me: “December.” I explained that I probably wouldn’t be invited back until we have a new president.

The officers ran through a raft of predictable questions about firearms. (I don’t own any, and they seemed puzzled by my commitment to nonviolence as a philosophy.) They asked whether I wanted to hurt the president or anyone in his family. Obviously not. Then came the mental health questions.
Secret Service: “Do you have any mental health disorders?”
Me: “No.”
Secret Service: “Have you ever tried to commit suicide?”
Me: “No.”
Secret Service: “Have you ever had suicidal thoughts?”
Me: “No.”

I was trying very hard not to roll my eyes at the repeated questions when an NYPD detective suggested my protest could be charged as a felony. In the next second, the Secret Service agents asked me to sign Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act waivers so they could gather all my medical records. My mind was still focused on the f-word: felony. But I didn’t want to sign the waivers.

I meekly asked whether I should talk to a lawyer. I was told it was my prerogative but also that it might mean I’d be held longer. Being in a room with that many enforcement agents hurt my ability to reason dispassionately, and I was now looking at a criminal record from a basic, even banal, nonviolent protest. I signed the forms.

Trump was about to start his now-famous news conference, and the Secret Service needed to resume patrols. They let me go with just a ban from the building.


Trump on Aug. 15 said that “there’s blame on both sides” for the violence that erupted in Charlottesville on Aug. 12. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post) 

But a few days later, I heard they were canvassing my neighborhood, in West Philadelphia, looking for information about me, including from people I’ve never met. One woman they approached found my contact information online and told me about this exchange in a Facebook Messenger request. They asked her whether she knew me and whether I was a threat to the president. Since I live in West Philly, she replied that the only threat lives in the White House and that the president is racist.

Secret Service: “Do you know Melissa Byrne?”
Neighbor: “No.”
Secret Service: “Why would she protest President Trump?”
Neighbor: “Because he’s a fucking racist.”
Thanks, neighbor!

In the end, I couldn’t stop wondering why they were devoting so much time to me when they could be pursuing neo-Nazis. I was treated as a national security threat when all I’d done was exercise my First Amendment right to free expression. This isn’t normal, and it shouldn’t be how nonviolent protesters are treated by armed agents of the government.

Monday, August 21, 2017

Trump's Chaotic Four Weeks

CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on Friday had a priceless reaction to the news that Donald Trump has fired chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, reading headlines from the president’s “chaotic four weeks” that were so long she had to stop and drink a cup of water.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Donald Trump Responds To Barcelona Terror Attack With A Lie



Lawrence O'Donnell reacts to Donald Trump's newest lie about fighting terrorism, as well as top Republican senator Bob Corker saying Donald Trump lacks the "stability" and "competence" to be president.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Anti-Trump Site Under Seige From Justice Department

The Justice Department wants to know who’s visiting this anti-Trump website. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, the hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below. https://tytnetwork.com/join/



“The Department of Justice has requested information on visitors to a website used to organize protests against President Trump, the Los Angeles-based Dreamhost said in a blog post published on Monday.

Dreamhost, a web hosting provider, said that it has been working with the Department of Justice for several months on the request, which believes goes too far under the Constitution.

DreamHost claimed that the complying with the request from the Justice Department would amount to handing over roughly 1.3 million visitor IP addresses to the government, in addition to contact information, email content and photos of thousands of visitors to the website, which was involved in organizing protests against Trump on Inauguration Day.

“That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment,” DreamHost wrote in the blog post on Monday. “That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.”

When contacted, the Justice Department directed The Hill to the U.S. attorney's office in D.C. The U.S. attorney's office declined to comment but provided the filings related to the case.

The company is currently challenging the request. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Friday in Washington.”

Read more here: http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/346544-dreamhost-claims-doj-requesting-info-on-visitors-to-anti-trump-website

Hosts: Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian

Cast: Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian

Monday, August 14, 2017

Trump 'seriously considering' pardoning convicted racial profiler Joe Arpaio

According to a report from state news channel Fox News, Donald Trump is “seriously considering” pardoning Crooked Joe Arpaio, who was recently convicted of criminal contempt of court for his racist and illegal campaign against Latinos and immigrants in Maricopa County as sheriff.

He faces up to six months for his reign of terror.

Fox says that Trump’s interview took place on Sunday, which means that Trump prioritized speaking out about a possible pardon for Arpaio over finally saying that his KKK and Nazi supporters in Charlottesville, Virginia, were bad. Clearly, “bad hombres” will always defend “bad hombres” when it comes to terrorizing people of color:

“I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio,” the president reportedly told Fox News at his club in Bedminster, N.J. “He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He’s a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him.”

Arpaio is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 5 and could spend up to six months in jail. Though his attorneys are planning on appealing the conviction, a presidential pardon would be the swiftest exit from the case.

Trump told the network the pardon could come as early as this week.

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

The Alt-Right And Glenn Greenwald Versus H.R. McMaster

By

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Donald Trump and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump has scrambled the political spectrum in certain ways, and one of them has been to introduce a new set of players to the national scene. “Nationalists” or “populists” (as they now call themselves), or the “alt-right” (as they used to call themselves), have been vying with traditional Republicans for control of the Trump administration. The nationalists tend to be pro-Russia, virulently anti-immigrant, race-centric, and conspiratorial in their thinking. 

Their current project is a political war against National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, a conventional Republican who displaced the nationalist Michael Flynn. The nationalist war against McMaster has included waves of Russian social-media bots, leaks placed in the nationalist organ Breitbart, and undisguised anti-Semitism.

Most observers outside the nationalist wing have treated McMaster as the sympathetic party in the conflict. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald is a notable exception. Greenwald has depicted the conflict, much like the nationalists themselves have, as the machinations of the deep state to prevent the authentic, democratically legitimate populist representatives of Trumpism from exerting their rightful authority. 

Greenwald himself is not a nationalist, and is certainly not a bigot, but the episode has revealed a left-winger’s idiosyncratic sympathy for the most odious characters on the right.

Greenwald lays out his thinking in a deeply, if inadvertently, revealing column denouncing anti-Trump saboteurs in the deep state.

The foundation of Greenwald’s worldview — on this issue and nearly everything else — is that the United States and its national-security apparatus is the greatest force for evil in the world. “Who has brought more death, and suffering, and tyranny to the world over the last six decades,” he writes, “than the U.S. National Security State?” (This six-decade period of time includes Mao’s regime in China, which killed 45 to 75 million people, as well as the Khmer Rouge and several decades of the Soviet Union.) 

In Greenwald’s mind, the ultimate expression of American evil is and always will be neoconservatism. “It’s hard, for instance, to imagine any group that has done more harm, and ushered in more evil, than the Bush-era neocons with whom Democrats are now openly aligning,” he argues.

The neoconservatives have lined up against Trump, and many Democrats agree with them on certain issues. Since the neocons represent maximal evil in the world, any opponent of theirs must be, in Greenwald’s calculus, the lesser evil. His construction that “it’s hard … to imagine” any worse faction than the neocons is especially telling. However dangerous or rancid figures like Steve Bannon or Michael Flynn may be, the possibility that they could match the evil of the neocons is literally beyond the capacity of his brain to imagine.

A second source of Greenwald’s sympathy for the nationalists is their populism. The nationalists style themselves as outsiders beset by powerful, self-interested networks of hidden foes. And while their racism is not his cup of tea, Greenwald shares the same broad view of his enemies.

Trump “advocated a slew of policies that attacked the most sacred prongs of long-standing bipartisan Washington consensus,” argues Greenwald. “As a result, he was (and continues to be) viewed as uniquely repellent by the neoliberal and neoconservative guardians of that consensus, along with their sprawling network of agencies, think tanks, financial policy organs, and media outlets used to implement their agenda (CIA, NSA, the Brookings/AEI think tank axis, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.).”

It is certainly true that all manner of elites disdain Trump. What’s striking is Greenwald’s uncharitable reading of their motives, which closely tracks Trump’s own portrayal of the situation. 

Many elites consider Trump too ignorant, lazy, impulsive, and bigoted for the job. Instead Greenwald presents their opposition as reflecting a fear that Trump threatens their wealth and power. (This despite the pro-elite tilt of his tax and regulatory policies — which, in particular, make it astonishing that Greenwald would take at face value Trump’s claim to threaten the interests of “Wall Street” and its “financial policy organs.”)

The opposition to Trump naturally shares a wide array of motives, as would any wide-ranging coalition. Greenwald’s column consistently attributes to those opponents only the most repellant beliefs. He doesn’t even consider the possibility that some people genuinely believe McMaster is a safe, responsible figure who might help dissuade the president from doing something terrible.

Greenwald emphasizes, “Hank Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO and George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, went to the pages of the Washington Post in mid-2016 to shower Clinton with praise and Trump with unbridled scorn, saying what he hated most about Trump was his refusal to consider cuts in entitlement spending (in contrast, presumably, to the Democrat he was endorsing).” It is true that Trump promised not to cut entitlement spending. Greenwald’s notion that this promise placed him “presumably in contrast” with Hillary Clinton ignores that fact that Clinton also promised to protect these programs.

The passage about entitlements appears deep in Paulson’s op-ed, which Paulson began by lambasting Trump for encouraging “ignorance, prejudice, fear and isolationism,” among other flaws. Greenwald asserts that Paulson identifies Trump’s hostility to cutting entitlements as “what he hated most” about the Republican nominee, but nothing in the op-ed indicates this is what Paulson hated most.

Greenwald just made that part up.

The same concoction of motives is at work in Greenwald’s contempt for McMaster and John Kelly, the new chief of staff. The pair of former generals “have long been hailed by anti-Trump factions as the Serious, Responsible Adults in the Trump administration, primarily because they support militaristic policies — such as the war in Afghanistan and intervention in Syria — that are far more in line with official Washington’s bipartisan posture,” he writes.

Note that “primarily.” Greenwald is arguing that news coverage treating them as competent managers, as opposed to the amateurish nationalists, is propaganda by the elite plumping for greater war in Afghanistan and Syria. He is implying that if Kelly and McMaster took more dovish positions on Afghanistan and Syria, their public image would be altogether different. Greenwald supplies no evidence for this premise. In fact, McMaster’s most acute policy struggle has been his efforts to maintain the Iran nuclear agreement, one which has placed him on the dovish side, against an established neoconservative position. Greenwald does not mention this issue, which fatally undermines his entire analysis.

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The final point of overlap between Greenwald and the nationalists is their relatively sympathetic view of Russia. The nationalists admire Putin as a champion of white Christian culture against Islam, a predisposition Greenwald does not share at all. Greenwald has, however, defended Russia’s menacing of its neighbors, and repeatedly questioned its ties to WikiLeaks.

From the outset, he has reflexively discounted evidence of Russian intervention in the election. 

“Democrats completely resurrect that Cold War McCarthyite kind of rhetoric not only to accuse Paul Manafort, who does have direct financial ties to certainly the pro — the former pro-Russian leader of the Ukraine,” he asserted last year. (Manafort did have financial ties to that leader, a fact that was obvious at the time and which Manafort no longer denies.) Democratic accusations that Trump had hidden ties with Russia were a “smear tactic,” “unhinged,” “wild, elaborate conspiracy theories,” a “desperate” excuse for their election defeat, and so on.

As evidence of Russian intervention piled up, Greenwald’s line of defense has continued to retreat. When emails revealed a campaign meeting by Russians on the explicit promise of helping Trump’s campaign, Greenwald brushed it off as politics as usual: “I, personally, although it’s dirty, think all of these events are sort of the way politics works. Of course if you’re in an important campaign and someone offers you incriminating information about your opponent, you’re going to want it no matter where it comes from.”

This closely tracks the Trump legal team’s own defense of the Russia scandal, a fact that is probably coincidental. (There are only so many arguments to make.) Greenwald is not a racist, and is the opposite of a nationalist, and yet his worldview has brought him into close alignment with that of the alt-right. A Greenwaldian paranoid would see this quasi-alliance as a conspiracy. The reality of his warped defenses of Trump is merely that of a monomaniac unable to relinquish his obsessions.

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

How Racist Can The White House Get? (Answer: Very)

Posted by Rude One

The last couple of days have been banner ones for racists of just about every stripe, from backwoods yahoo country fucks to ostensibly educated white nationalist shit crumbs, from pandering politicians to true believers. Let's just run it down:

1. The Department of Justice is exploring whether the federal government should be "suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants." It's as if they believe that diversity on college campuses is a bad thing, probably because it makes people more sympathetic to people of other races. And how can you have a race war if that happens?

2. President Donald Trump announced his support for the RAISE Act, which is an anodyne acronym masking a shitty policy. It looks to cut in half the number of legal immigrants coming into the country, and it emphasizes skilled workers who can speak English. Oh, and only spouses and children can come over with immigrants.

When nutzoid hate-filled jizz goblin Stephen Miller, a senior policy advisor and winner of "Man Who Most Looks Like a Star Trek Alien" was asked about the racist implications of the proposal, he went into an outrage froth that coated the gathered reporters in a glistening film of saliva. It reached a spittle-flecked climax when Miller attacked CNN's Jim Acosta for daring to suggest that one purpose of the bill might be to bring in more white people, saying that "it reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree." Fuck's sake, "cosmopolitan" means you give a shit about the world. The opposite of "cosmopolitan" is, more or less, "xenophobic." Or it's just an anti-Semitic dog whistle (which is extra weird since Miller is Jewish). Either way, between that and a bizarro attack on the meaning of the Statue of Liberty, it was a fucking train wreck of an appearance.

3. The Washington Post printed transcripts of Trump's late January phone calls with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. While they are masterpieces of fuckery, dickishness, and doltishness, it's also worth pointing out how fucking openly racist Trump is willing to go when talking about refugees.

When Turnbull presses Trump on honoring a deal on at least vetting refugees to possibly take them into the United States, Trump goes twitchy with paranoia. He knocks Cubans: "You remember the Mariel boat lift, where Castro let everyone out of prison and Jimmy Carter accepted them with open arms. These were brutal people." Yeah, see only 2% of the 125,000 Cubans who came here in 1980 were deemed criminals who needed to be deported. The rest fucking made Miami what it is today. (Oddly, Miller brought up the Mariel boat lift in his remarks yesterday. These Trumpers are consistent in their assholery.)

Then, after Turnbull insists that the U.S. live up to its obligations, something Trump is well-known not to give a flying rat fuck about, the president says of the refugees who have been living in horrific conditions on islands off Australia, "I hate taking these people. I guarantee you they are bad. That is why they are in prison right now. They are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people...maybe you should let them out of prison." Who knows where all these milk jobs are, but Trump equates "refugee camp" with "prison," which would probably shock a lot of the little children who are there.

This shit is so blatant it'd make a robed KKK member say, "Whoa, a little obvious there, fella."

Look, we know Trump is racist. We knew it for years, from the Central Park Five to birtherism to the Muslim travel ban. It has been one of his most consistent traits. And we know that Trump has surrounded himself with racists, with people who are directly connected to white nationalist groups. And we know that Trump's supporters are racist (yeah, you are, fuck off).

And now we're seeing the policy implications of that. Trump used to ask various non-white groups, "What the hell do you have to lose?" in electing him.

It's pretty clear that the answer is "a future."

Saturday, August 5, 2017

The Making Of Donald Trump - Interview With David Cay Johnston

Randi Rhodes interviews David Cay Johnston, investigative journalist and author, a specialist in economics and tax issues, and winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting about his book - The Making of Donald Trump - Get the book here - every purchase supports the show: http://amzn.to/2cnN0z9

For the full show, get a commercial-free audio podcast at RandiRhodes.com and please subscribe to Randi's YouTube channel!




Randi Rhodes Number-one ranked progressive radio talk show host, political commentator, entertainer and writer. The Randi Rhodes Show, was broadcast nationally on Air America Radio, and Premiere Radio Networks from 2004–2014. Rhodes, represents aggressively independent media.

The Miami Herald described her as "a chain-smoking bottle blonde, part Joan Rivers, part shock jock Howard Stern, and part Saturday Night Live’s ‘Coffee Talk’ Lady. But mostly, she's her rude, crude, loud, brazen, gleeful self."

Rhodes and her show won numerous awards for journalism and broadcasting, including Radio Ink’s Most Influential Woman, Radio Ink’s Most Influential Women’s list (multiple years), TALKERS magazine’s Woman of the Year, and the Judy Jarvis Memorial Award for Contributions to the Talk Industry by a Woman.

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

FBI Horrified As Spy Says Russia Has Been Supporting And Cultivating Trump For Years

A "veteran" spy is alleging that Russia is cultivating, supporting and assisting Donald Trump and has been for at least five years. The spy said the response from the FBI was "shock and horror."

The report alleges that Trump and his “inner circle” have accepted a regular “flow of intelligence from the Kremlin and that Russian intelligence claims to have “compromised” Trump on his visits and could “blackmail him”.

http://www.politicususa.com/

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump/

Trump 'personally dictated' false statement about son's meeting with Russian lawyer

Trump personally dictated a statement that was issued after revelations that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 election. The Washington Post's Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig explain.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-dictated-sons-misleading-statement-on-meeting-with-russian-lawyer/2017/07/31/04c94f96-73ae-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html 

Saturday, July 29, 2017

The Past 5 GOP Presidents Have Used Fraud And Treason To Steer Themselves To Electoral Victory

By Thom Hartmann / AlterNet

People are wondering out loud about the parallels between today’s Republican Party and organized crime, and whether “Teflon Don” Trump will remain unscathed through his many scandals, ranging from interactions with foreign oligarchs to killing tens of thousands of Americans by denying them healthcare to stepping up the destruction of our environment and public lands.
  
History suggests – even if treason can be demonstrated – that, as long as he holds onto the Republican Party (and Fox News), he’ll survive it intact. And he won’t be the first Republican president to commit high crimes to get and stay in office. 

In fact, Eisenhower was the last legitimately elected Republican president we’ve had in this country.

Since Dwight Eisenhower left the presidency in 1961, six different Republicans have occupied the Oval Office.

And every single one of them - from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump - have been illegitimate - ascending to the highest office in the land not through small-D democratic elections - but instead through fraud and treason.

(And today’s GOP-controlled Congress is arguably just as corrupt and illegitimate, acting almost entirely within the boundaries set by an organized group of billionaires.) 

Let’s start at the beginning with Richard Nixon.

In 1968 - President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war.

But Richard Nixon knew that if the war continued - it would tarnish Democrat (and Vice President) Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election.

So Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend an upcoming peace talk in Paris.

Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he would give them a richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.

LBJ found out about this political maneuver to prolong the Vietnam war just 3 days before the 1968 election. He phoned the Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen – here’s an excerpt (you can listen to the entire conversation here):
President Johnson: 
Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he'll hold out 'til November the second they could get a better deal. Now, I'm reading their hand, Everett. I don't want to get this in the campaign.

And they oughtn't to be doin' this. This is treason.

Sen. Dirksen: I know.
Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon that Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

But by then - Nixon’s plan had worked.

South Vietnam boycotted the peace talks - the war continued - and Nixon won the White House thanks to it. As a result, additional tens of thousands of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, died as a result of Nixon’s treason.
  
And Nixon was never held to account for it.

Gerald Ford was the next Republican.

After Nixon left office the same way he entered it - by virtue of breaking the law - Gerald Ford took over.

Ford was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason.

The third was Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980.

He won thanks to a little something called the October Surprise - when his people sabotaged then-President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to release American hostages in Iran.

According to Iran’s then-president, Reagan’s people promised the Iranians that if they held off on releasing the American hostages until just after the election - then Reagan would give them a sweet weapons deal.

In 1980 Carter thought he had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr over the release of the fifty-two hostages held by radical students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor earlier this year, had successfully run for President on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

"I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign.... I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote.... Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking]."

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr's help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979. But Carter underestimated the lengths his opponent in the 1980 Presidential election, California Governor Ronald Reagan, would go to win an election.

Behind Carter's back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran's radical faction - Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini - to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election.

This was nothing short of treason. The Reagan campaign's secret negotiations with Khomeini - the so-called "October Surprise" - sabotaged Carter and Bani-Sadr's attempts to free the hostages. And as Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:
After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.
Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the “October Surprise,” which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.
And Reagan’s treason - just like Nixon’s treason - worked perfectly.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes.

And the same day Reagan took the oath of office - almost to the minute, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal - the American hostages in Iran were released.

And for that, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called "Iran Contra" scandal.

But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.

After Reagan - Bush senior was elected - but like Gerry Ford - Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan.

If the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980 - you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That's four illegitimate Republican presidents.

And that brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency - Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:

"The counting of votes ... does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election."

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida, did not constitute "irreparable harm" to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn't important that Scalia’s son worked for the law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (thus no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn't important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife worked on the Bush transition team and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida...which he did.  (No Thomas recusal, either.)

And more than a year after the election - a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount in Florida - manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year - and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story on purpose so that it would attract as little attention as possible around the nation.

Why? because the 9/11 attacks had just happened - and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation that was already in crisis.

And none of that even considered that Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s rolls just before the election.

So for the third time in 4 decades - Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances.  Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one.

And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.

Most recently, in 2016, Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters – most people of color – from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.  

Millions of otherwise valid American voters were denied their right to vote because they didn’t own the requisite ID – a modern-day poll-tax that’s spread across every Republican state with any consequential black, elderly, urban, or college-student population (all groups less likely to have a passport or drivers’ license).

Donald Trump still lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, but came to power through an electoral college designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.

You can only wonder how much better off America would be if 6 Republican Presidents hadn't stolen or inherited a stolen White House.

In fact - the last legitimate Republican President - Dwight Eisenhower - was unlike any other Republican president since.

He ran for the White House on a platform of peace - that he would end the Korean War.

This from one of his TV campaign ads:

“The nation, haunted by the stalemate in Korea, looks to Eisenhower. Eisenhower knows how to deal with the Russians. He has met Europe leaders, has got them working with us. Elect the number one man for the number one job of our time. November 4th vote for peace. Vote for Eisenhower.”

Two of his campaign slogans were "I like Ike" and "Vote For Peace, Vote For Eisenhower".

Ike was a moderate Republican who stood up for working people - who kept tax rates on the rich at 91 percent - and made sure that the middle class in America was protected by FDR's New Deal policies.

As he told his brother Edgar in 1954 in a letter:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history."

And Eisenhower was right - the only way Republicans have been able to win the presidency since he left office in 1961 has been by outright treason, a criminal fraud involving conflicted members of the Supreme Court, or by being vice-president under an already-illegitimate president.

And that's where we are today, dealing with the aftermath of all these Republican crimes and six illegitimate Republican presidents stacking the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.

And this doesn’t even begin to tell the story of how the Republican majority in the senate represents 36 million fewer Americans than do the Democrats. Or how in most elections in past decades, Democrats have gotten more votes for the House of Representatives, but Republicans have controlled it because of gerrymandering.  

This raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the modern Republican Party itself. 

They work hand-in-glove with a group of right-wing billionaires and billionaire-owned or dominated media outlets like Fox and “conservative” TV and radio outlets across the nation, along with a very well-funded network of right wing websites.
  
The Koch Network’s various groups, for example, have more money, more offices, and more staff than the Republican Party itself. Three times more employees and twice the budget, in fact. Which raises the question: which is the dog, and which is the tail?

And, as we’ve seen so vividly in the “debate” about healthcare this year, the Republicans, like Richard Nixon, are not encumbered by the need to tell the truth.

Whether it’s ending trade deals, bringing home jobs, protecting Social Security and Medicaid, or saving our public lands and environment – virtually every promise that Trump ran and won on is being broken. Meanwhile, the oligarchs continue to pressure Republican senators to vote their way.

Meanwhile, a public trust that has taken 240 years to build is being destroyed, as public lands, regulatory agencies, and our courts are handed off to oligarchs and transnational corporations to exploit or destroy.

The Trump and Republican campaign of 2016, Americans are now discovering, was nearly all lies, well-supported by a vast right-wing media machine and a timid, profit-obsessed “mainstream” corporate media.  Meanwhile, it seemed that all the Democrats could say was, “The children are watching!”
  
Fraud, treason, and lies have worked well for the GOP for half a century.

Thus, the Democrats are right to now fine-tune their message to the people.  But in addition to “A Better Deal,” they may want to consider adding to their agenda a solid RICO investigation into the GOP and the oligarchs who fund it.

It’s way past time to stop the now-routine Republican practice of using treason, lies, and crime to gain and hold political power.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and author of over 25 books in print.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Russian Mob Money Helped Build Donald Trump Business Empire - Trump’s Russian Laundromat

A stunning report in The New Republic alleges that, whether Donald Trump knew it or not, for decades he made a large portion of his personal fortune from Russian mobsters & oligarchs.



Trump's Russian Laundromat

John McCain Is The Perfect American Lie

John McCain Is Neither A Maverick Nor A Hero - He's A Coward


Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Another Big Republican Lie On The ACA: They Can Give You Something Better

Posted by Rude One

We know that Republicans have lied nonstop about the Affordable Care Act ever since it was passed into law by a Democratic-led Congress and signed by the Negro President.

We know that Republicans are stuck because the ACA is mostly based on Massachusetts's Romneycare and both come from plans from the conservative Heritage Foundation.

We know that Republicans lied and continue to lie about the effects of the AHCA and then the BCRA, the House and Senate versions of their "repeal and replace" bills.

But there is one more thing, one more set of lies, that is responsible for sticking a shiv into the GOP's dream of murdering a bunch of poor people so rich people can be richer.

See, Republicans keep trying to put the blame for the fix they're in on American voters. "We have to keep our promises to the American people," Republicans say. "We won the last three elections by promising to repeal and replace Obamacare," they whine like a dog that caught a cat only to realize it was a fucking mountain lion. Yeah, they're right. Voters did put Republicans in power over the promise of getting rid of the Obamacare horror and torture or whatever drama queen word you wanna use. But, and this is important, they only wanted to get rid of it because Republicans said they'd do better. Or, to put it another way, they lied about what they could do for people if the Affordable Care Act was overturned.

Senator after senator told you how you were enslaved by Obamacare and that the GOP would set you free. John McCain proclaimed, "Families in Arizona and across the country should have the power to make their own medical decisions – not Washington bureaucrats. This bill puts patients and doctors back in charge of their health care by fully repealing Obamacare and replacing it with a free-market approach that strengthens the quality and accessibility of care." John Thune promised, "It’s time to repeal this law and replace it with something that works. And that’s precisely what we’re going to do."

Others got even more explicit. For instance, here's Wyoming Senator John Barrasso (campaign slogan: "If you can't trust a man whose name includes the phrase 'bare ass,' who can you trust?"), from a speech he gave on the floor of the Senate in November, shortly after the election: "First of all, nobody is talking about taking people off of insurance without a replacement plan in place." Except that's exactly what they talked about. While Republicans will constantly mention how President Obama said, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" (which, to be fair, was an absurd promise), they simply aren't owning that they got voters all excited about this new fantasy health care plan where they wouldn't lose coverage despite repealing the very law that gave them coverage.

In fact, when you get to what President Donald Trump said, Republicans were promising something amazing. Put aside that Trump repeatedly said he wouldn't cut Medicaid and then, immediately after inauguration, put out a plan to cut Medicaid. Trump and his people consistently promised that Americans would have better health insurance coverage, that all Americans would be covered, and that it would cost them less in premiums and deductibles. He literally said this: "You will end up with great health care for a fraction of the price." And he told Americans that we would have a "beautiful picture" in the future of health care.

Republicans like to say that Democrats promise that they'll give people "free stuff" and that people on government programs like Medicaid are "moochers." But Republicans didn't win on the Obamacare issue because people didn't want free stuff. They didn't win because they said they would take away their health insurance. They won because they promised people more free stuff and better free stuff.

In other words, they lied. But voters believed them. They wanted to mooch more.

And the vast majority of Americans realize now that it was a lie because the Trumpcare plan that the Senate may vote to move forward tomorrow does none of the things they promised other than get rid of the health insurance they have now or make it worse and more expensive. So, of course, now we get articles like "These Americans Hated the Health Law. Until the Idea of Repeal Sank In." In that New York Times piece, Pennsylvania dumb shits who once thought Obamacare was the worst thing since the theory of evolution say things like "I can’t even remember why I opposed it" and "Everybody needs some sort of health insurance." One stupid fuck went from opposing the law to "Now that you’ve insured an additional 20 million people, you can’t just take the insurance away from these people. It’s just not the right thing to do."

But we knew all along that people liked the Affordable Care Act. They liked the elimination of spending caps and of pre-existing conditions determining premiums. They liked keeping their kids on insurance until age 26. And a shit-ton of people got to live because of the Medicaid expansion. Yeah, the ACA was fine. What they hated was Obamacare, which is exactly what Republicans wanted people to think of for a very simple reason:

Most Republican voters don't hate the ACA. They hate that their white asses were saved by a black man.

They resented the shit out of that fact. It put a lie to all the racism they've clung to for generations. The GOP used that racism for years. Now that the black man is gone, though, they're totally fine with the law and its benefits. They gave Republicans a chance to give them more stuff, but they don't want their stuff taken away. Especially when that "stuff" is the right to live a healthy life.

Be careful this week, dear dumb shits and dearer smart asses. Republicans are going to keep coming after the Affordable Care Act, no matter how many shivs you stick in it. Stay on the phones. Keep the pressure up on the few Republican senators who can make the difference. Don't let the liars win. It's life and death, motherfuckers, life and death.

And once we finally put this beast down, let's turn our attention to single payer.

(Fun extra part of Barrasso's speech: "Democrats promised that they would listen to other people’s ideas, and then they went behind a closed door in an office back there, and they wrote the law ignoring all of the suggestions by Republicans, and without any Republican support at all. We’re not going to make that same mistake. We will be looking for Democrats’ help, we will be looking for Democrats to work with. We will be listening to Democrats’ ideas, and we will be working very hard to win Democrat votes for any new law." Insert your own rolling-with-laughter emoji here.)

Trump's Been Laundering Russian Mob Money For Decades, Allegedly

Russian mobsters needed a lot of property from a sleazy businessman who never asks questions... Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down.

"In 1984, a Russian émigré named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City.

The 38 year old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself.

Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58 story edifice with gold plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.”

Read more here: https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate