Exactly.
I like it!
Naw, this is a big deal because the Foundation was a key piece of his money-laundering. Donate $ to the Foundation, have your money used to buy a lavish lifestyle for Don Jr, nice trinkets for Individual-1, etc.
No, he won’t be able to set up another Foundation. Especially not with the same Directors and Officers. Remember, this was the main source of Don Jrs income.
The criminal investigation into the Trump Foundation is not abated. It will continue.
Moreover, the NY AG is seeking to prevent Trump and any of his family members from ever sitting on another board of directors for any charitable organization ever again. So no, not another foundation. Ever.
Remember when he told the cops on Long Island that perps should have bad things happen to them?
I say we give Trump his wish and go back to the good old days of policing. We can start with Mueller’s people shining a bright light in his face and working him over with a rubber hose until he talks.
Here is a funny take on ‘bad things’, summarized in an editorial cartoon.
I think the fact that Trump caved on funding the wall / shutting down the government is a pretty good sign that he’s heading into lame duck territory, particularly given that he’s looking at firing everyone associated with John Kelly (which would include Kirstjen Nielsen) and could conceivably fire Mulvaney for badmouthing him in 2016. The White House is about to be even more human resource strapped than it already is, and reliant on the Senate to appoint many of their replacements. We can probably expect the Senate to start taking the lead on running the country, which means dialing down the trade war, lifting the tariffs against the EU, fewer restrictions on foreign labor in farms, restaurants, and hotels, etc.
Obviously, you are all free to ignore financial advice from some random guy on the Internet (and I bear no blame should you choose to do so), but I suspect that the market will start to head up again.
Buy the dip.
What really needs to happen is for the cantaloupe cretin to look in a mirror and fire himself.
A blind, wormlike amphibian that burrows underground has been named after Donald Trump:
The ban for Trump would be 10 years and only 1 year for his kids.
Put me down on the “got off disappointingly lightly” side of the aisle.
So what did corporations do with their little tax breaks that most of the rest of us will have to pay for? They hired more people to work shit jobs and they bought back a record amount of stock.
And yet that record amount of stock that they’ve been buying back can’t spare us the worst stock market performance for the month of December since…1931.
Now, what happens when corporations stop buying back stock? What happens when people notice the massive amounts of private sector and public sector debts that rae beginning to pile up?
Fun times ahead.
I can’t get over the fact that the president has a charity that was shut down yesterday because he and his family were stealing from it, and it’s barely a blip on the radar.
Apologies for copying from my blog but…
Trump announces that he will pull out of Syria
For those not keeping track of the situation the general course of events over the last two years are that:
- Jared Kushner, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Mohammed bin Salman set up a deal to join forces, oppose Iran, and push Palestine into capitulate to the Israelis.
- Just as they are about to pull this off, President Trump scuttles it by announcing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, angering everyone in the Middle East.
- During that time, Iran starts moving troops into Syria and sets up lots and lots of bases.
- Also during that time, Turkey starts moving troops into Syria, claiming a chunk of it in the North for themselves. Given that Iran has to go through either Iraq or Turkey to get into Syria, it’s likely that they were moving through Turkey.
- Netanyahu and Putin have a wide variety of meetings. Putin convinces Netanyahu that everything is cool and that he’s on their side.
- Saudi Arabia commits a crime on Turkish soil. The Turks publicize this and make a strong and concerted effort to use this as a wedge between the US and Saudi Arabia, going so far as to leak details about their recordings to the press.
- Meanwhile, it becomes apparent that the Iranian bases in Syria are being protected by Russian jets.
- Trump announces that he’s leaving Syria.
What each party wants to achieve:
Russia wants to preserve a chaotic Middle East. They don’t want Iran to win and take everything over, Israel to rid themselves of the Palestinians, or anything else that might achieve regional stability. They are largely happy with the status quo. But they are willing to let their allies take over Syria, since the country has collapsed and isn’t useful to anyone anymore, and it brings Turkey into the fold.
Kushner & Netanyahu want to force Iran to reform and bring peace to Israel, and are willing to play hardball and cut favors with Saudi Arabia in order to make that happen.
Mohammed bin Salman wants to expand Saudi influence into the other countries in the Middle East while reducing the influence of Iran.
Trump has made a strong point to stay friendly with Mohammed bin Salman in terms of what he says, but at all points in terms of what he does he has scuttled Kushner’s work and moved the US in such a way as to aid the Russian interests.
Obviously, that could be happenstance. But there is no apparent reason for Trump to have declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel when he did. None of our allies wanted it at that moment in time, since it would ruin what they were trying to do. No one in the US was asking for it. There was no apparent precipitating event, unless we presume that the goal was explicitly to act in the favor of Russian interests.
Because this shit has been happening every fucking day for two years. The right doesn’t give a shit that they are crooks.
But don’t you forget that Hillary was completely “pay to play!” Can you imagine if she was elected?
He campaigned on it and it was red meat for the base, who really loved it and who have been clamoring for it for god knows how long. This particularly bit of conspiracy feels like a stretch, to be honest.
Why at that moment? I’ll also note that he promised thousands of stupid things. The big ones, like the Wall, were well-reported and he sort of has to stick to them. I don’t think anyone bothered to note this particular promise.
Just yesterday:
MAGAbot sez: oh yah?! Well hillary klinton murdered seth rich and vince foster!!!
Okay, so I saw this post and thought to myself, “Hang on, that can’t possibly be right…” So I went looking.
It’s not on the nytimes website front page. Or CNN. MSNBC has it, if you look; they seem to have their priorities straight, as the line one item is Flynn’s no-good very-bad day in court. ABC doesn’t have it. Not on CBS. I’m not even going to check Fox; I think we can all guess how that’d go. The Washington Post has it… as a podcast, under the headline, I shit you not, “Why President Trump is shutting down his charity”.
…What the fuck. What the actual fuck. How?! Like, y’know how the right keeps working the refs, and complaining about (mostly nonexistent) bias? It’s tasteless and bullshit. But at this point, we need that kind of thing just to ensure the news media actually covers the most important shit going on right now. “Donald Trump’s charity shut down due to ‘shocking pattern of illegality’” should absolutely be front page news over the latest news from the fucking Boring Company.
This one really mattered to his evangelical base, which both needed a good excuse to support him despite his behavior (and got it in this) and basically makes up the core of republican strategy. This was a “big one”.
I’ll be honest, I can’t explain the timing. But I don’t know that it really needs explaining - sometimes, Trump just does stupid shit.