Archives for November 2018

Day 693 Friday November 30, 2018    898 Days to Go

Yesterday, I said I thought we were entering a new phase of the Trump presidency and today it arrived.

This clearly shows I am a genius.

So today I have a modest proposal (thank you Mr. Swift.)

If you are still a Trump supporter after hearing yesterday’s news I suggest you and Mr. Trump and his whole gang pack up and go join Mr. Snowden and Mr. Seagal in the country that has embraced them. In this way you’ll make room for all the people at our border who actually want to live here and will learn about citizenship as a part of their entering this country and will be loyal to the United States, unlike the current president.

Yesterday we learned that Donald J. Trump while candidate for president was attempting to secretly bribe Vladimir Putin with a $50,000,000.00 gift* and in exchange Trump would build a tower with money from a Russian bank that was sanctioned by the U.S. government. (That means a U.S. business can’t do business with that bank. And – oh by the way – it is tightly tied to Putin.)

*okay, it’s was to be a luxury apartment in Trump Tower Moscow and probably only worth half a million but the claim was fifty.

So let’s list Trump’s CV shall we?

Businessman with four bankruptcies and broke in the 1990s,

Liar,

Fraudster,

Scammer,

ForeFlusher,

Traitor,

…

This is a guy that has surrounded himself with people of questionable character all his life.

This is a guy who has only run one public company and it failed (“But I made a lot of money.”)

This is a guy who as a business practice stiffs the people he hires, be it tradesmen or lawyers.

This is a guy who is described by his own lawyers “as incapable of telling the truth.”

Oh, so what did we learn yesterday?

Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. He told Congressional Committees that the Trump Tower Moscow deal was over and dead in January of 2016 when in fact negotiations went on until June of that year.

The timing is interesting. On June 6^th 2016 was the famous Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and the Russians. On June 14^th the Trump Tower deal was dead.

Is there a connection?

You bet you ass there is.

Trump had been trying to build a tower in Moscow for years. It looked like this time he was close to accomplishing that with the help of Michael “I’d take a bullet for Trump” Cohen and Felix “break martini glass and shove stem in your face” Sater. Sater was negotiating directly with Putin’s spokesperson and offered a $50M penthouse in the yet to be built Trump Tower Moscow to Putin. Just to be clear, in case anyone doesn’t understand, this is bribery. It is called bribery. It is bribery. Bribery is a crime. People go to jail for bribing or being bribed. 

People also go to jail for doing business with sanctioned banks.

What’s the connection? (Sorry, I got distracted.) Well, it seems the purpose of the June 6^th meeting, as far as the Russians were concerned (and by this I mean Putin) was to signal that they were no longer interested in dealing with Trump on a business basis but rather they wanted to start dealing with him on a political basis. (“You want I steal email? I steal email. Okay?”)

It turns out the big bald dumb Matty Whitaker was informed that this was coming down. He didn’t or wasn’t able to muck it up.

He won’t be long for that job if he keeps that up. Hurry up Mat climb aboard the boat bound for Russia, you putz.

We still don’t know what will happen next. There is much talk about Trump going to the G20 and whether he’ll met with Putin. (He will take the meeting. Maybe, Trump will say something like, “Hey, I bumped into him in the hallway. What was I supposed to do? Not take an unscheduled 90 minute meeting with no one there but Putin and his Russian translators?”)

What will be said in the meeting? Many will report that we won’t know, but you my readers, you will get the first transcript of sound bites from that meeting (“There was no meeting”) meeting (“Well, we bumped into each other. That’s it. No meeting.”) meeting.

With my unique “Forward Listen Ahead Sound Detection System” (FLASDS – pronounced “Vlads”) I can now give you some sound bites from the soon to be held meeting (“There was no meeting!) meeting.

Donald Trump (DT) – “This looks bad.”

Vladimir Putin (VP) – “No worry. You doing great job.”

DT – “You think so?”

VP – “You doing great. Trust me.”

DT – “I don’t know. Michael …”

VP – “You want maybe he should have unfortunate accident? It can be arranged.”

DT – “What? No. You can do that?”

VP – “Of course. It happens all the time. Very unfortunate.”

DT – “No. Better not. Not after MSB.”

VP – “You mean MBS?”

DT – “Whatever. It would look bad.”

VP – “You worry too much. You doing great.”

DT – “You think so?”

VP – “Trust me.”

Communication lost. 

898 Days to Go

PS Getting Squeezed

Day 692 Thursday November 29, 2018       899 Days to Go

I believe we are entering a new phase of the Trump presidency. One thing I can say for sure, we humans are bad at predicting the future. However, there is some history that can help to show what happened in the past.

First, let me review the recent events that have led me to my conclusion:

1. Jerry Nadler (D NJ) was on one of the morning shows the other day and he said, “There are impeachable offenses that are not crimes; and there are crimes that are not impeachable offenses.” There are, of course, crimes that are impeachable offenses. 

2. We just had a mid-term election where the Democrats had the largest victory in history and have taken control of the House of Representatives.

3. Big Donnie Trump finally got around to doing his homework and answered the Special Prosecutor’s questions.

4. Paul Manafort’s plea deal fell apart. He via his lawyer was giving information about what Mueller was doing to Trump and Trump’s lawyers. Something that Trump’s lawyer, Rudi Giuliani admitted. Manafort was acting as a double agent ostensibly to get a lighter sentence from Mueller and to get a pardon from Trump. Trump has said that a pardon for Manafort is “not off the table.”

5. Trump fired his AG and put in place a man who is unconfirmed by the Senate. This is a no-no, especially in light of the fact that this man has admitted he wants to shut down the Mueller investigation or starve it of funds.

6. Evidence and news reports have linked the Russian GRU to Wikileaks’ Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and to Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and James Corso. Thus showing a path between the email dumps of the Russians via Wikileaks and the Trump campaign and showing that Corso and Stone had advanced knowledge of the Wikileaks dumps. 

7. There is the infamous Trump Tower meeting in which Don Jr. and many high level people in the Trump campaign were in attendance with Russians, some of whom had direct connection with the GRU. Right after that meeting Don Jr. made a phone call to a blocked number. Trump Sr. has a phone whose number is blocked and he took a call about that time. Remember prosecutors don’t believe in coincidence.

Okay so that’s what’s been happening in terms of this administration but also interestingly there are some investigative reporting and ancillary stories, which lead us to speculate as to what will happen next, and in an unbelievable tidbit that no one has mentioned yet the kid (that’s me) will reveal a revelatory little sumtin’-sumtin’, which on it’s face isn’t much, until you link it into the rest of the historical record.

A. Rachel Maddow has a seven part podcast called “Bag Man,” which tells the story of Spiro Agnew and his extortion schemes that led to his resigning as VP ten days before the “Saturday Night Massacre,” which was the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency. (Interestingly, the AG at the time was Elliott Richardson who resigned rather than do the President’s bidding that Saturday night. Ten days before he forced the Vice-President of the United States from office. The man who eventually did the dirty work for the President was Robert Bork, and it was that action probably more than any other that scuttled his becoming a Supreme Court justice.)

     Although Agnew pled nolo contendere (Latin “no contest”) to one count of tax fraud there was a forty page summary of all the crimes he had committed.

B. Nixon was forced from office by a memorandum that went on page after page listing his crimes associated with Watergate. These included collusion, obstruction of justice, interfering in a criminal investigation, bribery, and witness tampering. Aside from his crimes listed in that memorandum it has also come to light that he committed treason.

Now we get to Trump and what’s going on with him, his lawyers, and his administration. One opinion writer said last night that his lawyers seemed to suffer from “Incompetence and Hubris.” I’d throw in ignorance but maybe I’m splitting hairs because incompetence and hubris may well be another way to say ignorance in this case.

But before we get to all that let’s look at one – no two – little tidbits of legal wrangling.

Tidbit 1 – A local DC bar lost its complaint that they can not fairly compete with a bar in a hotel own by the President of the Untied States. They lost the argument because they couldn’t show direct harm. (Just suspicion?)

Tidbit 2 – (My sumptin’-sumptin’) This reminded me of a case ten or twenty years ago involving a golf driving range. It was along the Dulles Access Road corridor. The local government opened a similar facility and the plaintiff argued that they were doing things to give themselves preferential treatment and he could not fairly compete. He quoted one of the clauses from the Magna Carta as part of the basis of his complaint. 

Tidbit 3, (tying together Tidbit 1 & 2, with the today and the history of Agnew.) When Agnew pled guilty to tax evasion he walked out of court a convicted felon but otherwise free. Some folks were outraged. Where’s the jail time? Why didn’t he have to repay the money he got?

One group so outraged were some law students who with their professor brought a civil complaint in Maryland against Agnew. They demanded he repay the money he got while Governor. They won and Agnew had to write a check for $268,482.00 ($147,500 in kickbacks and $101,235 interest.) Because of that trial his personal lawyer had to testify, and said that he knew years before of the scam because Agnew had told him. (They had asked the then Governor, Marvin Mandel, to bring the suit, but he refused. It was later found that he too had been on the take.) To bring the case they had to find a basis and they dug through the laws and found a principle of British common law (much like the golf course owner.) A legal principle that said a plaintiff could bring a suit even if they did not have the government’s support. They found taxpayers to be their plaintiffs.

So where are we? What will happen next? What have we got?

Here’s where predicting the future comes in, and doing so is terribly fraught.

In Donald Trump we have a man who has openly committed crimes. Let’s take a simple straightforward one, bribery. Bribery is defined by Black’s Law as “offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an individual or other person in charge of a public or legal duty.”

Therefore dangling a pardon to influence a witness or defendant is bribery. It was one of the crimes Nixon was accused of doing. Trump has said that pardoning Manafort is not off the table. Is that bribery? Yes. Others say no, it was just the president expressing what his Constitutional powers are, to which I say, “bull shit, it’s bribery.”

Having Manafort report what he’s learned about the Mueller investigation to Trump via his attorney while under a plea deal is collusion (excuse me, it’s conspiracy). Yet, here is Giuliani. Trump’s lawyer saying in public, oh yeah, Manafort was telling us what was going on. Trump’s lawyer is openly admitting that they colluded (excuse me “conspired”) with each other.

These people, Trump and his gang, are committing the most outrageous acts and crimes against our government and yet those in his own party are mute about it. How bad does it have to get? How much worse can it get?

What is surprising about Trump, and really shouldn’t be anymore, is that just when you think things have gone as low as they can he goes lower. 

I guess to misquote Michelle Obama, “When we go low, we go lower.”

Egads.

Another little tidbit, it has been pointed out that Nancy Pelosi won the nomination of her party to be Speaker of the House with more votes and fewer dissenting than Paul Ryan did when his party elected him Speaker. However, the headlines – then and now – paint a different picture. While the Ryan headline just says he was nominated; the Pelosi headline mentions dissension.

  899 Days to Go

PS Lamanai, Belize

Day 691 Wednesday November 28, 2018     900 Days to Go

Late breaking news last night pointed out to me the very tough job Robert Mueller has and how life imitates art and vice versa. 

Back in the days of black and white TV there was a show called “The Outer Limits.” It conceptually ripped off the much better Sci-Fi show called “The Twilight Zone,” and because of that I rarely watched it. However, there was one episode that was very clever and I remember to this day. It starred Andy Devine who had the best and most outrageous kids/adult Saturday morning TV show. According to Imdb the episode was called “Hocus-Pocus and Frisby” and the teleplay was written by Rod Sterling, creator of the Twilight Zone! (No wonder it was so good.) The Imdb write up says, “A rural gas station attendant given to telling tall tales about himself is kidnapped by aliens who believe him to be one of Earth’s leading intellects.”

 Exactly right. So Andy as Somerset Frisby has been telling tall tales all his life. The aliens have been monitoring the humans and take what he says as true and therefore decide to take him back to their planet because he’s the most accomplished human they have studied. They abduct him. He’s in their space craft about to blast off when Frisby pulls out his harmonica and starts playing it. The music drives the aliens crazy. They can’t stand it and Frisby escapes. The space ship takes off and our rural hero walks back into town to be greeted by a huge birthday celebration. He says to them, “You aren’t going to believe this but …” 

They all laugh, slap him on the back, and say that story is the best one yet.

So now we have a bunch of little tidbits that seem to be related and we have a block buster piece of evidence that shows the Trump campaign was colluding. But here is Mueller’s problem, the one I think he has been working on for some time – “How do you figure out what is true and what is not when you are dealing with serial liars?”

Imagine the case with Somerset Frisby was one of a crime and you as the prosecutor had to depend on what he said to convict whomever was guilty. 

Okay, so here we are. Drum roll please. Let’s introduce the cast of characters and the parts they play, the actions they have taken, and the things they’ve said (and not said, and denied …):

Jerome Corsi – a man who makes his living by alleging that we didn’t land on the moon, that Barrack Obama was not born in this country, and the list goes on and on. He is politely referred to as a conspiracy theorist.

Roger Stone – a Republican political hack and liar who is friends with Donald Trump, the madam of a new York sex ring and scandal and, my favorite, a former rising star in the party until it was discovered he published pictures of himself advertising in a swingers magazine.

Julian Assange – Wikileaks founder, who sold out to the Russians turning over the digital keys to his kingdom to them. He’s been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for years avoiding prosecution. He dumped a lot of DNC emails just before the election. It is known that he got the emails from the Russian military intelligence unit the GRU. (The most amazing thing about the dump of the emails was how bland they actually were. There was no dirt. It was all routine kind of political stuff that any political campaign might have, yet here we are still talking about them as if there was something nefarious in them.)

Paul Manafort – Campaign manager for Donald Trump; friend, business associate, and political pal of Roger Stone. Paul has run a number of slimy campaigns for the dictator of Ukraine. He has been shown to have laundered money from said dictator and others. He is also in hock to at least one Russian oligarch tied to Putin, and is currently in jail facing sentencing on a bunch of tax evasion, and false financial claims. He agreed to a plea deal with Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel office.

Okay so what happened yesterday?

Robert Mueller has said Paul Manafort broke the terms of his plea deal and therefore the deal is withdrawn. The reason? Lying.

James Corsi was given a plea deal which he says he turned down. That paperwork got released to the press.

The Guardian in London reported that Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange in London at the Ecuadorian Embassy shortly before the release of any emails. 

Furthermore, there is evidence that Corsi was asked by Stone to find out what emails Assange had. Corsi got a local London guy to make the inquiry and fed that information back to Corsi who told Stone who told Manafort who told Trump.

Naturally, everybody denies everything.

Imagine if you are Mueller and you have to figure out if the liars are telling the truth?

If this all turns out to be true then we have the first definite link between the Russians and the Trump campaign. The above chain of who told who is subject to speculation on my part as you get further down the list to Trump, but it seems hard to believe that if Manafort knew something that he didn’t tell Trump.

Why?

Well besides the logic there is also Manafort’s reputation and manner. Manafort liked to boast about his connections, about what he could do, who he knew. One person on the other day said he had a meeting with Manafort and it was the most surreal meeting he had ever had, because of this “I know a guy” stuff. The “guys” he mentioned were these dictators in Eastern Europe. The fellow reporting this said it felt like he was in a meeting with a mob boss and he couldn’t get away fast enough.

It turns out that the probable reason Manafort was booted out of the cooperating witness agreement was that he was reporting what he knew to Trump. It would explain how Giuliani knew so many little details of the Mueller investigation. So Manafort was then being a double agent: acting like a cooperating witness to Mueller, yet working for Trump with the possibility of getting a pardon.

These are not normal times. Some make the mistake of thinking that we are and that things will go the way they should or are supposed to, don’t be fooled this is an international criminal conspiracy that will test our democratic principles to their core.

900 Days to Go

Oh yeah, surprise, the racist won in Mississippi, just what we need in the Senate.

PS Great Job!  

Day 690 Tuesday November 27, 2018    901 Days to Go

Let’s get to it.

Paul Manafort has lost his plea agreement because the Special Prosecutor says he lied and continues to lie. Manafort’s lawyers say that’s not the case and both parties want to go ahead with sentencing. What? Speculation is running high that Manafort is holding out for a pardon. There is also news that Manafort met with Julian Assange in London at the Ecuadorian Embassy before the release of the Hillary emails. Shockingly, both sides deny this claim. 

The election is going on in Mississippi for the Senate seat there. Trump went down to stump for the segregationist, racist, “I want to sit in the front row of a public hanging” and “I’m sorry if my comments offended anyone”, Republican candidate seen in photos in Confederate soldier garb. Her opponent is a black man, well known in the state because of his family’s long history in the state of helping black people and creating businesses that catered to black people and gave them opportunity where none existed before. Mr. Trump was, of course, unaware of any of this. The race is a toss up, and probably leans toward the racist.

What else? The U.S. fired tear gas into Mexico. Can you imagine what would happen if they did that to us?

Trump said the people seeking asylum got violent. The pictures tell a different story.

But here is the most interesting tidbit. A woman on a morning news show asked the question, What would happen if Mueller exonerated Trump? She went on. If Trump thought himself truly innocent the only man who could exonerate him is Robert Mueller. Therefore, if he were truly innocent he would want Mueller to continue so as to exonerate him. The fact that Trump is not doing that shows he is guilty and knows it.

Jim Comey said today that Mat Whitaker “is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

GM is closing a bunch of U.S. plants and giving up on several vehicles including the Chevy Volt. Trump is pissed. Why is he pissed? He was told that the China tariffs would hurt GM and he didn’t care then. Now that GM is forced to close plants in the U.S. he wants to punish them for what they told him would happen if he went through with the China steel tariffs. 

Also, revealed:

The creator of SpongeBob SquarePants has died.

The Siberian Unicorn died due to climate change. (That happened a while ago, like several thousands of years.)

The White House is going to hold a press briefing. (Whoo – who, we get the truth from Sarah Sanders!)

Melania Trumps 2018 Christmas decorations are unveiled and are described as “a horror meme yet again.”

Some thought they were straight out of The Shining. I thought more like The Handmaid’s Tale, but then again maybe that was a meme with the white hats inserted on top of the red trees. 

Remember the good old days when the far right was yelling that Obama wore a brown suit?

Don’t you kinda wish for those times to return?

Oh yeah, Mexico, immigrants, the border and all that. Why don’t we have our ambassador to Mexico handle the situation? What? We don’t have one? Oh. Carry on.

901 Days to Go

PS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank god I’m here to document this.

 

Day 689 Monday November 26, 2018  902 Days to Go

Let’s talk Nancy Pelosi for a second.

Dave Brat loved to say, “the radical agenda of Nancy Pelosi and the limousine liberals.”

But let’s be clear, Nancy Pelosi grew up in Baltimore. 

Her name was D’Alesandro then.

Her father was a five term Congressman and Mayor of Baltimore.

Her brother was Mayor of Baltimore.

She grew up in Baltimore’s Little Italy.

The house was always full of people needing a meal, a job, a favor; it’s in her blood to help people.

She has been the most effective Speaker of the House in the modern era. She is the one who got the ACA through Congress. Health care is something the Democrats have been trying to provide for people since the end of WWII. She did it.

Aside from that here are the political items Wikipedia lists for her:

4 Political positions

4.1 China

4.2 Colombia

4.3 Cuba

4.4 North Korea

4.5 Iran

4.6 Turkey

4.7 Russia

4.8 Use of government aircraft

4.9 Abortion

4.10 Gun laws

4.11 Infrastructure

4.12 Fiscal/monetary policy

4.13 Civil liberties

4.14 Confederate monuments

4.15 Contraception

4.16 Disaster relief

4.17 Education

4.18 Environment

4.19 Health care

4.20 Immigration

4.21 Iraq War

4.22 Israel

4.23 First Gulf War

4.24 LGBT rights

4.25 Marijuana legalization

4.26 Military draft

4.27 PRISM

4.28 Syria

4.29 Waterboarding

4.30 Donald Trump

Yeah, she’s actually done something and she’s taken positions and expressed them. She is also the one that stopped the effort to impeach W after the Iraq War fiasco.

Would I like to see some new fresh faces? You bet. I hope Nancy will train them.

She is unpopular among conservatives because she is effective and stopped them from carrying out their more heinous agendas. She’s unpopular among progressives because they want her to go farther left, and she’s unpopular generally because the right wing media machine has been relentlessly attacking her with vague smears, much like they did Hillary.

This got me to thinking about civilization and myth. (Huh? What? Hang on.)

Civilizations are built on a set of ideas. Those ideas are grounded in myth. By that I mean, eventually you get to the point that you really can’t explain what or why, but you are asked to accept it. The western world is founded on various religious traditions and Greek/Roman ideas and science.

Our country is founded on that background and on the ideas of deists (ie people who believe in a creator), as well as men who wanted to avoid mistakes in forming a government they had seen in the past.

What makes a civilization go away? Here are a few reasons: force, disease, inferior technology, inability of the governing system to continue to work effectively under changing conditions, ideas that no longer work.

What erodes a civilization? The abandonment of a particular set of myths, ideals, ideas, and methods of governance.

I am not trying to say this is an exhaustive list, but it’s enough to illustrate my point about Nancy Pelosi.

Why is she unpopular?

Because there has been a constant drumbeat from the right and the left against her. Eventually, that becomes part of the story, part of the myth, and people believe – rightly or wrongly – in the statements that have repeatedly been made negatively about her.

But let me ask this, if you wanted to get something passed in the House of Representatives who would you want to head up that effort?

It comes down to that simple question. No one, and I mean no one, has been more effective in the modern era than Nancy Pelosi.

902 Days to Go

PS 

1 – Russia seized three Ukrainian boats. Trump has been silent.

2 – We used tear gas on migrants at the border, after we closed the border.

3 – Photo – Kite Cover  by Tiezo Hashimoto