He’s referring to Michael Jackson being $millions in debt, I believe.
How is that relevant to Trump?
[Airplane!]Excuse me, I speak Sage Rat[/Airplane!]
Tom Barrack is a man who:
- Took control of Jackson’s assets via a debt consolidation loan (for all intents and purposes)
- Is now a close confidant of another man who constantly gets into debt problems (you won’t guess who it is!)
Sorry, I realize that the media was never able to get out of its fixation with Russia, to the exclusion of all else, but I thought that the people on the SDMB were aware of most of everything else to do with Trump.
As I’ve pointed out before, collusion was never the issue, it’s Kompromat. That’s what Steele’s dossier was about and it’s a far greater concern than whether or not Trump helped the Russians to target ads on Facebook.
Benedict Arnold, for example, was a risk because he was in debt to England not because he did anything (initially) to aid the British. Most people who are compromised are people with a shameful problem that can be exploited: Alcoholism, homosexuality (pre-1990), gambling addiction, debts, etc.
There is much suspicion that Trump is in debt to lots of foreigners. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that even his tax returns would contain that sort of information.
But…we can guess that he’s in debt in much the same way that Michael Jackson was in debt. He’s a living golden goose. He has a talent for self-promotion and scouting out new suckers. His name is useful for selling property in former Soviet-bloc countries. If you can get Trump in debt to you, you’re not really going to be concerned about losing out on him - you just need to charge high enough interest for it to be worth it; same as a payday loan.
Tom Barrack seems to be in that business.
Barrack set up Trump with Paul Manafort. He set him up with George Nader - who went on to broker the secret Seychelles meeting with Eric Prince and Steve Bannon that they both deleted all of their text messages for. Barrack was all set to build Trump’s Wall along the Mexico border, that the Republican party decided to pass on. Barrack convinced Trump to refrain from pointing out that Hillary Clinton had received millions of dollars from the Middle East, on the campaign trail, and to switch from talking about how the Saudis killed hundreds of his friends on 9/11 to defending them even when they saw apart a man under US protection.
We don’t know conclusively that Trump has debts. But we do know conclusively that Barrack is in the payday loan business for the powerful and famous.
Post #32153:
[my bold]
**Sage Rat **compared bank loans to Trump to bank loans to Jackson.
My take was that it’s a sunk cost fallacy thing.
Seems like an effective spin. I don’t see a very effective and strong response from anyone else.
Kushner is smart.
Notably, however, he’s been silent until now. That he’s going on the offense is as telling as it was that Trump wanted to stay silent when it came to the question of the Veselnitskaya meeting, despite his tendency to dive into any attack with glee.
He’ll have help from the propaganda arm of the Trump admin:
Polling shows Fox News has been amazingly effective at shaping opinion on the Mueller report
Viewers are buying the pro-Trump spin the network is selling them
Good point.
I’ll rephrase it to mean “rich” as in having access to cash. He never had to earn any money on his own - always got loans from dad, so that has always been what “rich” has meant in Donald Trump’s mind. Except that now instead of trying to hit up his dad for cash, now he hits up fools dumb enough to lend him money. In Russia’s case, they’re not fools. They know why they fund Trump - he offers Russian oligarchs ways to effectively launder their money.
And by helping to elect him, and giving him deals and special consideration, they have the strings attached to their puppet.
Win, win for the Russians.
God damn these people are vile.
“US immigration officials looking at housing migrant children at Guantánamo Bay, report says”
Trump takes another hippety-hop toward dictatorship:
Trump apparently has decided that there is “no reason” to comply with Congressional investigations:
So, I guess maybe we’ve finally achieved the full-blown constitutional crisis some here have been predicting. Seems like we’re on the road to some melodramatic scenario that ends with the White House surrounded by tanks; the only question is which way the guns will be pointing.
Not at all surprising: this is exactly where we’ve been headed for a while. He can simply decide not to cooperate with investigations, and now that he has hired the Attorney General to be effectively his own arm of White House counsel, the rule of law in this country is now in very serious question. Bill Barr’s expansive, borderline totalitarian view of the Executive Branch in this country is some very, very serious shit.
Remember, according to this administration, they are not migrants; they are “invaders”. And that is how they will pitch it to their political fanboys. The Trump administration may or may not actually go through with this idea, but they definitely want headlines so that people like us can react to them. These pigs live to troll ordinary people so that they can divide us into hyper-partisan tribes, which works to their advantage - at least in the shorter term. They benefit from hyper-partisan warfare because they want to incite an over-the-top reaction that will further justify extreme action and extreme policies.
Luckily, the Supreme Court will protect us. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh seem like a pair of upright fellows.
OK, so I’m a foreign limp wristed Yuropian, so bear with my ignorance : what’s the constitutional provision and/or the Founding Father™(r)(c) posited remedy should the executive go “I’ve got your checks and balances right here, fuckmook ! grabs crotch (hopefully own, but with that guy you never know)” ?
In theory, Congress can end this pretty quickly. But the Senate is controlled by Republicans.
The most likely remedy appears to be a Contempt of Congress citation for any person (except maybe the President himself) who refuses to respond to a Congressional subpoena. The law provides for up to a year in prison and/or up to $100K on fines for each occurrence. Enforcement is a bit convoluted but apparently is carried out via the US Attorney for the District of Columbia.
This is being discussed as a potential charge against the White House staffer responsible for approving the security clearances of various trump appointees, who has declined to testify before Congress.
More:
The checks and balances only work if the other branches choose to enforce them, and also care about the Constitution. This is not currently true of the Senate leadership.
This. To the max. The Pubbies no longer care about the law. And no one (currently) can make them care.