45th President of the United States, Donald Trump (Vol. 7)

[Byker28i]

AG Bill Barr says “he personally reviewed security footage that confirmed that no one entered the area where Epstein was housed on the night he died.”
https://apnews.com/4ff27f28f32d446795b65ac7dd8cc4a...

two cameras were broken
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-people-jeffrey-e...

that the footage was unusable
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/...

So he could only check the footage on entry to the wing because the cameras were broken
The entire night, from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., security cameras showed that nobody entered the wing where Mr. Epstein had been left alone in his cell, the indictment said. The guards, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, only discovered Mr. Epstein was dead when they went in to give him breakfast.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/nyregion/epstei...

[Byker28i]

Lev Parnas attorney...


Joseph A. Bondy
‏ @josephabondy

Thank you, Jack. It’s actually other people’s problem. Lev has no criminal record, the evidence of #POTUS knowingly interacting with him is beyond cavil, and he has hard—HARD—first-hand evidence. So, #LetLevSpeak

https://twitter.com/josephabondy/status/1197758060...

[P1ato]

I was at University with Fiona Hill - she was ambitious and political but a lot of fun too.

I remember she'd talk about her school not being able to afford textbooks, and how she felt her background was very different to most other students.
However, she was always great company, totally open and honest, and has a huge smile on every photo from those days.

[Blackpuddin]

Not surprised to hear that, she puts out a good vibe.

[Byker28i]

trumps phoned nto Fo and Friends this morning. Spouting the usual conspiracy theories
https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-fox-friends-de...


He spent an hour on the phone


“They gave the server to Crowdstrike,” “Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”
Remember: "I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests," Fiona Hill testified. "I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary."

Claims he doesn't know people: “Volker, I don’t know him. Sondland, I hardly know him,”
Still claiming about Ambassador Yovanovitch. :“She said bad things about me” and “wouldn’t hang my picture in the embassy” in Kyiv, This was proven false in testimony this week.

“Why did Shifty Schiff, a crooked politician, make up my transcript?” Erm he provided it...

https://twitter.com/W7VOA

[anonymous-user]

Fiona Hill is ace, but it seems a bit odd that she thought Oxford too posh when she applied, and then went to, er ... St Andrews followed by Harvard. Neither is exactly Dave Spart Poly. She perhaps applied to the wrong college, as in the 80s there were plenty of opportunities for kids from comps to get on OK at old universities. Then as now, don't apply to certain colleges, and you won't be swamped by braying Henries and Fionas. The remaining posho colleges need to straighten up and fly right.

[Byker28i]

Bolton has now tweeted: “We have now liberated the Twitter account, previously suppressed unfairly in the aftermath of my resignation as National Security Advisor. More to come.....”

It appears team trump claimed the account didn't belong to him but to the administration. Apparently the same happened to Nikki Haley and she lost.

[Down and out]

Whats happened with Stormy? Have I missed something? Thought that was the end of Donald.

[RobDickinson]

Down and out said:

Whats happened with Stormy? Have I missed something? Thought that was the end of Donald.

Should have been. Cohen went to jail on 2 felonies implicating trump as instigator of both


But GOP.

[Tampon]

Down and out said:

Whats happened with Stormy? Have I missed something? Thought that was the end of Donald.

You willfully miss alot.

[Prolex-UK]

Been a good week for people wanting the orange turd brought to book.

Can you see a british party standing by a leader si manifestly corrupt ?

[bitchstewie]

Prolex-UK said:

Been a good week for people wanting the orange turd brought to book.

Can you see a british party standing by a leader si manifestly corrupt ?

Frankly yes.

[Slaav]

bhstewie said:

Prolex-UK said:

Been a good week for people wanting the orange turd brought to book.

Can you see a british party standing by a leader si manifestly corrupt ?

Frankly yes.

Are there not an awful lot of people comparing our own BoJo to 'The Donald'??? In many ways..... too many in fact to make me comfortable enough to ignore it! (He is nowhere near but there are parallels?)

[Slaav]

RobDickinson said:

Down and out said:

Whats happened with Stormy? Have I missed something? Thought that was the end of Donald.

Should have been. Cohen went to jail on 2 felonies implicating trump as instigator of both


But GOP.

I am at a total loss to understand how DT has dodged this one....

My limited understanding is that a Court of law found Cohen guilty of doing stuff that has (obviously) stuck him in jail. He did those crimes at the bequest of his 'boss' DT. He was repaid the illegal money he paid on behalf of DT but DT has dodged even the possible flesh wound he deserved? He actually deserved his own jail time but.....

How is this even possible??

[Castrol for a knave]

Slaav said:

Are there not an awful lot of people comparing our own BoJo to 'The Donald'??? In many ways..... too many in fact to make me comfortable enough to ignore it! (He is nowhere near but there are parallels?)

I watched Gove earlier this week, being interviewed by Ciaran Jenkins on C4.

Jenkins was reading Gove's out the "Factcheck" page, and Gove's own tweets and statements to him, and Gove was accusing him of polemic and of lying of presenting a false narrative. Straight of out the Trump playbook.

I expect this will be the way forward - double down and make the non Murdoch media the enemy.

[Tartan Pixie]

Byker28i said:

Netanyahu's been indicted on fraud, breach of trust and bribery charges. They do not require him to resign, but is expected to raise pressure on him to step down; after 2 elections and 3 attempts, Israeli lawmakers have been unable to form a new government

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-prime-minister...

Is trump going to stop all aid to Israel, seeing as he's so concerned about corruption?

Interesting to note that Israel's attorney general Avichai Mandelblit is a long time likudnik and supporter of Netanyahu, so when he says he made the decision to indict based on the law and the facts in front of him we can be pretty sure he means it. Perhaps it's Mandelblit's military background but when it came to the crunch he chose duty and the rule of law over party and politics.

Wonder what AG Barr makes of that.

[Byker28i]

Team trump, trump and Nunes are pushing the Ukraine angle, despite American intelligence officers informing the Senate in recent weeks about a years-long Russian intelligence campaign to promote allegations of Ukrainian meddling in 2016. The same accusation Fiona Hill made Thursday

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/us/politics/ukr...

[Tartan Pixie]

Castrol for a knave said:

Slaav said:

Are there not an awful lot of people comparing our own BoJo to 'The Donald'??? In many ways..... too many in fact to make me comfortable enough to ignore it! (He is nowhere near but there are parallels?)

I watched Gove earlier this week, being interviewed by Ciaran Jenkins on C4.

Jenkins was reading Gove's out the "Factcheck" page, and Gove's own tweets and statements to him, and Gove was accusing him of polemic and of lying of presenting a false narrative. Straight of out the Trump playbook.

I expect this will be the way forward - double down and make the non Murdoch media the enemy.

From a systems analysis perspective Trump and Johnson (and Farage) perform an almost identical function in that they have a rhetorical gift that allows them to present the needs of transnational capital as if they were the needs of the voter. It is not coincidence that they are financially supported by hedge funds and dodgy Russians plus given positive media coverage by outlets owned by tax exiles and foreign intelligence services.

To give one example would be the often cited lie that left wing governments will tax us out the wazoo and turn us in to the next Venezuela Denmark. The lie does somewhat ignore the fact that the last few decades have seen one of the largest increases in personal taxation in history driven almost exclusively by conservative "low tax" agendas:



The story is the same in the UK and the rest of the OECD. Countries are losing their ability to tax transnational capital and so must either tax individuals or let the country deteriorate. Companies that have no ability move their brass plaque abroad similarly get hit through business rates etc. Anything that isn't income tax is fair game because apparently people have a blindness to money being taken out of their pocket provided it isn't explained to them like an episode of sesame street.

The only way to see your personal taxes go down is to vote in a government who are serious about tackling tax havens and entering in to multinational agreements on tax in order to limit the ability of transnational capital to exploit the healthcare, education and security resources of advanced economies without paying for them.

Note that while there are economic arguments for lower taxation that's not what we're seeing here. Countries are losing their sovereign ability to levy tax so are increasingly taxing you and I because if you add up health, defence, education, transport, etc it will come to about 40% of GDP and no amount of ideological hot air from your favorite politician is going to change that.

<><><>

As recently as the 90's if you had an interest in politics then you'd probably be reading a news source edited by someone who came from within a very small group of people who together formed the fleet street consensus. Telegraph, Guardian, BBC, Economist and Channel 4 with Private Eye as the spoiler. America has its equivalents.

Today however we can pick and choose from a wide variety of sources. As Slaav noted if you only read the president's twitter feed you could be excused for thinking that the man had nothing to hide and it's all a witch hunt, however the problem is that it's not only the president's twitter feed, it's a whole ecosystem of media outlets and websites creating a narrative and if I've learned anything about the human brain then it's that narrative is of huge importance because we all have one, an internal narrative about who we are and how the world works that defines our outlook and how we interact with the world.

In the days of the Fleet St consensus it was kinda ok for politicians to lie because there was nowhere else for the populace to go, no other narrative for voters to gain regular access to so even at the height of the miner's strikes and poll tax riots the narrative sat within a defined set of parameters. This is no longer the case.

With the plethora of information available to us these days we are all free to indulge our personal narrative, not the narrative that comes from politicians and journalists but the one that comes from inside of us, the narrative that defines who we are.

This move towards alternative news is not without justification, polls have consistently put politicians and journalists at sub 20% trustworthiness which was fine when there was no one else to listen to but doesn't cut it today. What we're seeing is people getting lost in a circlejerk of their own personal narrative which if allowed to be skewed towards the negative allows special interests to do whatever they want (note - I include myself in this).

EG. "I do not want immigration!!!" Ok great you don't want immigration, however by concentrating on 'I do not want' you have also conveniently forgotten to express anything that you do want so those of us in charge are going to make all those decisions for you. Hope you don't mind

This is the system democracy has become, convince people that the lefties are going to ruin us all or that the righties are baby eating mentalists intent on destroying the poor and the entire decision making space for how we move forwards becomes vacated by popular opinion, after all no one has said what they want, only what they don't want.

Boris, Farage and that tit across the pond exploit this to the full, hence the rhetoric about owning libs and defining the ability to eat a bacon sandwich as an electoral issue. It's all about creating an image of your enemy as a caricature of what your personal inner narrative dislikes and then getting that person to hate the projected image so much that they never bother you with little details like the things they'd actually like to see happen within their democracy.

Here's a thought. It's exceptionally rare to meet someone who doesn't want to make the world a better place so how about we make politics about what we do want, because defining our political space by what we don't want is removing our democratic ability to define the things we do want.

Edited by Tartan Pixie on Saturday 23 November 01:57

[DeltonaS]

Slaav said:

RobDickinson said:

Down and out said:

Whats happened with Stormy? Have I missed something? Thought that was the end of Donald.

Should have been. Cohen went to jail on 2 felonies implicating trump as instigator of both

But GOP.

I am at a total loss to understand how DT has dodged this one....

My limited understanding is that a Court of law found Cohen guilty of doing stuff that has (obviously) stuck him in jail. He did those crimes at the bequest of his 'boss' DT. He was repaid the illegal money he paid on behalf of DT but DT has dodged even the possible flesh wound he deserved? He actually deserved his own jail time but.....

How is this even possible??

Really ? hello, wake up.

From day one:

- Trump involves members of his family into his presidency, his son in law and his daughter were all given formal jobs in which they represent the USA (it's what dictators do).
- Trump gives jobs to his political sponsors, Sondlond was given an US ambassadorship of the EU (formal jobs are for sale in the US, when the price is right, it's what dictators do).
- Trumps sacks people around him whenever they do not follow his line of thinking (collecting yes men, it's what dictators do) .
- Giuliani, Trumps personal lawyer, seems to have a role, not just in his presidency but as part of the US Foreign Affairs (it's what dictators do)
- Trump organizes congresses and formal government meetings at his own resorts (it's what dictators do).
- Trumps questions an ridicules the free press on a daily basis, making them suspect. So much so they even are exposed to hostility and violence.(it's what dictators do).
- Trump lies and tweets the most ridiculous nonsense on a daily basis.

Every individual line of the above (and I'm probably forgetting something) would've been enough to be removed from office in every Northern European democracy.

The basic foundations of the (appearance) of a conflict of interest, integrity, professionalism and respect for the constitution, Trump doesn't give a fk. Trump is a mobster, although I doubt he even understands most of it.

From whatever political background one may be, the US political system is partisan and rotten to the core.

Edited by DeltonaS on Saturday 23 November 14:23

[Prolex-UK]

2 cracking posts above.