|
Post by questa on Jul 31, 2020 13:12:52 GMT
It might have been the taxpayers money, but now it is feeding the security man's family and they hope he won't get to stop a bullet meant for someone else..
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on Jul 31, 2020 18:55:49 GMT
Just watching the snooker world championships and the two players are Trump and Ford.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 3, 2020 20:38:18 GMT
I see that Donald Trump wants a commission from Microsoft if they manage to make the purchase of TikTok. He really has no shame, does he?
I am a bit surprised that he approves of this transaction since it will means millions or perhaps billions of dollars going into the pockets of Chinese people he does not seem to like.
Perhaps he has been afflicted with the Trump virus?
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Aug 3, 2020 21:17:02 GMT
I see that Donald Trump wants a commission from Microsoft if they manage to make the purchase of TikTok. He really has no shame, does he? Not just no shame, what possible logic could there be behind his getting a commission?
|
|
|
Post by onlyMark on Aug 4, 2020 6:09:39 GMT
It doesn't mean him personally, but the Treasury? That's how I understand it.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 4, 2020 20:11:00 GMT
|
|
|
Post by nycgirl on Aug 5, 2020 2:56:25 GMT
That was painful to watch. I don't know how any Trump voter isn't mortified that they voted for him. So much to unpack here: Trump clutching a stack of graphs that he doesn't seem to comprehend and that do nothing to bolster his claims, sending his best wishes to alleged child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, diminishing the achievements of John Lewis and complaining that he didn't attend his inauguration... This POS can't leave soon enough.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Aug 5, 2020 3:32:40 GMT
That was painful to watch. I don't know how any Trump voter isn't mortified that they voted for him. I'm mortified that he is of supposedly the same species as you and I. Poor Jonathan Swan. He had to sit there in front of that pink-eyed devil and attempt to carry on adult discourse -- sit there and watch the dim psycho playing in his own shit.
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on Aug 5, 2020 6:24:03 GMT
He tried to justify it with a couple of graphs that looked as if he'd knocked them up at school.
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Aug 5, 2020 9:28:09 GMT
Trump's 'cogent' comment on the horrific explosion in Beirut:
President Donald Trump fuelled the confusion swirling in the hours following the explosion by referring to it in off-the-cuff remarks as “an attack”, adding that “some of our great generals” had told him “it was a bomb of some kind”.
Two US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was unclear from where Trump was receiving his information but that initial information did not appear to show the explosion was an attack. Guardian, 5 August 2020
|
|
|
Post by whatagain on Aug 5, 2020 10:01:50 GMT
And lebanese officials ask that US refrain from saying it was an attack...
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Aug 5, 2020 10:35:59 GMT
Yes, they are investigating possible causes and deliberately not drawing conclusions in advance. For those here who read French, L'Orient le Jour has temporarily removed its paywall. I also went to their English language site but it is not up to date - there is nothing about the explosion. www.lorientlejour.comI suppose we should start a new topic on this explosion; The Levant goes in Asia, where I hope it doesn't get swamped by topics on the much, much larger Asian countries.
|
|
|
Post by cheerypeabrain on Aug 8, 2020 7:41:04 GMT
this came up in my fb 'memories' a post that I shared 12 months ago..thought it was pretty apt...I guess that a large proportion of the American public feel the same
Someone asked "Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?"
Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England, wrote this magnificent response:
"A few things spring to mind.
Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.
For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace - all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing - not once, ever.
I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility - for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is - his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults - he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.
Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.
And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.
Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.
He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.
He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.
That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.
There are unspoken rules to this stuff - the Queensberry rules of basic decency - and he breaks them all. He punches downwards - which a gentleman should, would, could never do - and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless - and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority - perhaps a third - of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think 'Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that: * Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are. * You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.
After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.
God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.
In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws - he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:
'My God… what… have… I… created?
If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set."
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on Aug 8, 2020 7:51:41 GMT
Briliant!
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Aug 8, 2020 8:39:39 GMT
I remember reading that before, and it's still accurate -- no improvement in the man in the past year. It's scary to think that so many people are still ready to vote for him.
|
|
|
Post by questa on Aug 9, 2020 1:38:43 GMT
Magnificent use of the English language! Unfortunately most of the Trump voters would have trouble understanding concepts they have never considered before. e.g. bullying and fighting fair. How would a thinking, educated person who voted for Trump last time think of him after this article .
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 20, 2020 14:07:01 GMT
So, now that Steve Bannon has been arrested for fraud in collecting border wall money, how will the POTUS save him?
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Aug 20, 2020 16:18:47 GMT
|
|
|
Post by htmb on Aug 20, 2020 16:45:37 GMT
It’s party day at my house, too.
|
|
|
Post by Kimby on Aug 20, 2020 16:45:55 GMT
“After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.”
OMG. Best. Trump. Takedown. Ever.
|
|
|
Post by patricklondon on Aug 20, 2020 17:19:25 GMT
So, now that Steve Bannon has been arrested for fraud in collecting border wall money, how will the POTUS save him? He probably won't, just deny ever having met him. Which T may come to regret.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Aug 20, 2020 19:16:07 GMT
Following on the heels of Bannon's arrest, the Washington Post published this article online. The headline is clickable, but if you're unable to get into the firewalled article, the text is included in the Spoiler below. Bannon’s indictment raises more uneasy questions about William Barr’s SDNY gambit Aaron Blake is senior political reporter, writing for The Fix. A Minnesota native, he has also written about politics for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Hill newspaper. [The Fix is the analysis section of The Washington Post.] {Spoiler}August 20, 2020 at 11:13 a.m. CDT
Two months ago, Attorney General William P. Barr launched a hasty, questionable and haphazard effort to get rid of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman at the Southern District of New York and install a new acting head of his office. Critics suggested it was a thinly veiled effort to get rid of the man whose office investigated allies of President Trump, including Rudolph W. Giuliani — the latest in heavy-handed and seemingly political actions by Barr to protect Trump.
It turns out the office was about to indict another Trump ally: Stephen K. Bannon. And the person responsible for charging the former top Trump aide is the acting U.S. attorney whom Barr tried and failed to bypass.
Acting U.S. attorney Audrey Strauss on Thursday indicted Bannon alongside three others for an alleged fundraising scheme involving Trump’s border wall. He becomes merely the latest former top Trump aide to run into legal trouble — a list which includes the campaign chief that Bannon effectively replaced, Paul Manafort, Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone and Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn.
But apart from the increasingly ugly picture it paints about the people with whom Trump has surrounded himself, it reinforces unanswered questions about precisely what happened — and why — two months ago.
Barr’s explanations for the effort to remove Berman don’t make sense, to this day.
At first he claimed Berman had stepped down, but Berman disputed that. In an extraordinary statement, Berman said he intended “to ensure that this Office’s important cases continue unimpeded” — which some read to suggest he thought Barr might be trying to stifle specific cases, including that of Giuliani.
At the time, Barr had said that he planned to install a new acting head, Berman’s fellow U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito, and that Trump would nominate a full-time replacement for confirmation, Securities and Exchange Commission head Jay Clayton. Barr and the White House would later claim that the effort was simply about finding a new job for Clayton, whom the administration liked and who wanted to move back to New York.
But there was a sizable problem with that: Barr didn’t need to immediately remove Berman to nominate Clayton. In fact, Berman could just as well have been allowed to serve through Clayton’s confirmation.
There would have been one actual and obvious benefit to Berman stepping down, though: It would have allowed Barr to bypass his deputy, Strauss, and immediately install someone else — in this case, Carpenito. But Berman’s resistance meant that he forced Trump to fire him, in which case Strauss was legally required to get the job.
In later Congressional testimony, Berman explained that this was his goal in resisting Barr’s entreaties. He said that knowing Strauss would take over rather than someone Barr selected — which Berman said would have been “unprecedented, unnecessary and unexplained” — convinced him to accept his termination.
The plot thickens on Attorney General William Barr’s removal of a prosecutor who probed Trump
“With that concession, and having full confidence that Audrey would continue the important work of the Office, I decided to step down and not litigate my removal,” Berman said.
On Thursday, Strauss’s “important work” led to the indictment of Bannon, the 2016 Trump campaign chief executive and former chief White House strategist.
There is still no firm evidence that the removal of Berman and the effort to install someone besides Strauss was explicitly tied to an effort to curtail investigations Barr didn’t like. Barr denied this in Congressional testimony in July, saying it was “nonsense.” He added that “anyone familiar with the Department of Justice would say that removing a component head is not going to have any effect on any pending investigation.”
But building a case like the one indicting Bannon takes many months, meaning it likely would have been ongoing two months ago. That would mean that the Southern District of New York appears to have been investigating not one but at least two Trump allies when Barr so hastily launched his gambit.
(According to Berman’s testimony, they spoke about the matter twice on June 19 and were set to follow up in the coming days. But then Barr, that night, falsely announced Berman had stepped down, and Trump fired Berman the very next day — a sequence of events that lasted only about 24 hours.)
SDNY was also the office responsible for former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s guilty plea, in which Cohen and the office implicated Trump in the illegal hush-money payments made to women who accused Trump of affairs.
Even Giuliani himself has suggested Berman’s removal might have been tied to pursuing what Giuliani deemed to be baseless investigations.
The speed of the removal and Barr’s continually illogical and incomplete explanations for it mean we still don’t seem to have the real explanation for why it went down. When the very same office indicts such a high-profile former Trump aide so soon after these strange scenes went down, it would sure seem to warrant further explanation. Unfortunately, Democrats weren’t able to get Barr to shed much light in his testimony.
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Aug 21, 2020 18:52:27 GMT
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 26, 2020 20:19:30 GMT
I read that 6 of the 12 principal speakers at the RNC were members of the Trump family. Nepotism anybody?
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Aug 26, 2020 20:58:24 GMT
Well, it's not as though they could get a bunch of real human beings.
I think my favorite of the line-up was Kimberly Guilfoyle ~ "And now to tell you why I should be re-elected, here is my son's girlfriend!"
|
|
|
Post by htmb on Aug 26, 2020 21:21:19 GMT
This might be old news, but her former husband is Gavin Newsom, the current governor of California.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 26, 2020 21:25:42 GMT
Oh, American politics is just getting too complicated for me.
|
|
|
Post by mossie on Aug 27, 2020 6:51:55 GMT
How about Nero fiddled while Rome burned, to tie this into the George Floyd saga
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Aug 27, 2020 14:19:46 GMT
Donald Trump doesn't look quite as orange as before. Perhaps someone managed to get him to change his brand of makeup.
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Aug 27, 2020 15:46:25 GMT
Yes, and his dye job. Frankly, a person his age looks better grey/silver/white. But that is the least important factor in how utterly disgusting he is.
|
|