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CaptHaddock
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Posts posted by CaptHaddock
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7 hours ago, Global Guy said:
Why would he resign? He can't be bought and paid for like typical politicians in Washington.
It could hardly be any clearer that Putin bought Trump and paid for him.
Trump will quit because it will be the only way he will stay out of prison. The noose is tightening.
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10 hours ago, Opl said:
"The President’s own son is admitting that his father is depressed, mentally unstable, and can’t handle the criticism that comes with the presidency. It wasn’t an accident that Eric Trump referred to depression and suicide. Trump has made it well known that he hates the White House and misses his old life. "
"Here are 8 reasons Jared and Ivanka are as useless and detestable as anyone in Trump’s White House. “When they decide it’s more important to protect their own and their children’s reputations than it is to defend their indefensible father’s, that’s a sign the end is near,”
This is the first I have heard about a suicide option. I would definitely vote for that.
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Politico has a story about Mueller sharing information with the NYAG Schneiderman. I am guessing that the story appears now as a warning to the targets of Mueller's investigation that even if Trump gives them a federal pardon they will remain on the hook for crimes in NY state and possibly in other jurisdictions.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/30/manafort-mueller-probe-attorney-general-242191
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7 hours ago, selftaopath said:
If 45 doesn't finalize his coup before then. Look at the "key positions" that he has garnered. Hell now the head of the CIA has politicized this position along with others necessary to stop him. I'll say one thing fol 45. He is a criminal mastermind, but not one redeeming quality.
Yes, Pompeo is a Trump stooge, but it can be inferred from the statements of "former" CIA officials that substantial portions of the organization oppose Trump, which is true of the FBI and probably of much of the rest of the spook community. So, while Pompeo is kowtowing daily to Trump, other parts of the CIA could well be supplying Mueller with information against Trump.
Something like that is alleged to have happened to both Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, both of whom fired a lot of CIA people and subsequently did not have a second term. With Nixon the means to remove him was Watergate while with Carter the claim is that the CIA had a hand in instigating the second oil crisis.
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12 minutes ago, boomerangutang said:
In your 2nd paragraph is on the mark.
However, your opening paragraph mentions; "The question is not whether the hotel got built, but whether Trump got paid."
I don't agree. The question is; whether there was a 'quid pro quo' agreement between Trump operatives and Russian manipulators - relating to the 2016 election. It's not important whether Trump made biz deals and/or whether he got payments for those. The important issues, as they relate to the investigation and Trump's presidency, are; to what extent Russia was aiding Trump get elected, and whether there were trades (money, properties, promises, sexcapades) involved.
Note: in order for someone to break the law, they don't have to pay or receive money. Just proof of PLANNING to do an illegal act, is grounds for prosecution.
Example: if my house is raided, and cops find detailed plans/intentions for robbing a bank, ..... I don't have to have engaged in the bank robbery to be found guilty of breaking the law.
Of course, you're right that legally whether there was an actual payment is immaterial. But I was thinking of the political significance. It makes a big difference whether Trump can be shown to be in the pay of Putin or whether he has merely commit what may seem to many as a technical violation of the law. In order to get any Republican support in the Congress for action against Trump, he must be shown to have done something that is undeniably wrong, like Nixon's obstruction of justice.
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The article says that the hotel in question was never built, but Trump was never going to build any hotel in Russia, he was only going to collect a payoff that would nominally be for licensing his name. The question is not whether the hotel got built, but whether Trump got paid.
An earlier payoff to Trump by the Russians was the sale by Trump the oligarch Rybolovlev for $95 million of a white elephant Trump had purchased for $41.5 million. Rybolovlev has never lived in the house and plans to tear it down. We'll wait for Mueller's report, but it certainly has every appearance of a payoff from Putin to Trump.
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29 minutes ago, boomerangutang said:
Dems in Congress will not actively push for impeachment proceedings because they know there are enough Reps there who will vote against it out. Party loyalty, among Reps, will trump doing what's right for the country. Sad, for Americans and others ww. If you want to know which Reps will put Party above country, look no further than the cheering Republican Congresspeople who greeted Trump at his State of the Union address in January.
Someone, someday, will tally up the expenses in $$'s and hours - it has taken to get Trump's crooked butt out of the Oval Office. The tally will be hundreds of millions of $$'s, much of that in lawyer-related fees.
29 minutes ago, boomerangutang said:Yes, that's true, but the hope is that at some point it could change. That point would be when it looks like Trump will either cost them their re-election or threaten their institutional prerogatives. There has been increased pushback from the Congress on Russia sanctions, on their attempts to protect Sessions and Mueller from being fired, and on the stupid wall.
So, if Trump's polls drop into the 20's and there is a pretty clear case for money-laundering, obstruction of justice, and collusion up to and including treason, then enough Republicans might be shaken loose.
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12 minutes ago, Oxx said:
And, of course, all websites are immediately updated every time something changes.
Take time before you jump to conclusions.
At a guess I would say that the Interpol website is the means that notices are delivered to police departments around the world. So, that if the Red Notice is not available on the website, it doesn't exist.
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14 minutes ago, iReason said:
Felix Sater's Bayrock:
WHY ROBERT MUELLER HAS TRUMP SOHO IN HIS SIGHTS
"Bayrock has been enmeshed in legal imbroglios since 2010, when its former finance director, Jody Kriss, and another Bayrock employee, Michael Ejekam, sued the company and its principals for $1 billion."
"His complaint alleged that Bayrock was “covertly mob-owned and operated,” “backed by oligarchs and money they stole from the Russian people,” and “engaged in the businesses of financial-institution fraud, tax fraud, partnership fraud, human trafficking, child prostitution, statutory rape, and, on occasion, real estate.”
"The suit claimed that Bayrock had defrauded Kriss and Ejekam and “never intended to honor” promised payments, instead the real purpose of the company, [it said]; in addition to marketing expensive condos bearing the Trump brand, was “to launder many millions of dollars and evade taxes.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/why-robert-mueller-has-trump-soho-in-his-sights
State crimes.
I certainly hope an investigation by the NY AG results, but it makes me a little uneasy to ask why isn't Schneiderman investigating it right now?
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26 minutes ago, Thakkar said:
At this point in Obama's term, he was being relentlessly hounded by Fox, Glen Beck and right wing radio for having the temerity to order fancy Dijon mustard, that la-di-da black criminal.
What I like to point out as possibly the only positive aspect of Trump's elevation is that the image he presents is an accurate picture of America. Not all Americans, of course, but enough to sustain Fox News and Breitbart and to elect people like Arpaio and now Trump.
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1 hour ago, boomerangutang said:
Trump and his lawyers are almost comical: every time they hear of Mueller's team getting close to something meaty (Trump's laundering oligarch money, for example), Trump and lawyers start yelping like stuck pigs. It's like they're holding up giant neon signs saying "that's where the most damaging info is! Don't open that drawer!"
The brazenness is pretty remarkable. Can you imagine an innocent man warning Mueller that investigating his financial activity is out-of-bounds? It's actually shocking that Trump wasn't hounded out of office for that statement alone.
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1 hour ago, Silurian said:
Yeah, Donny John can just pardon anyone that either gets convictions or even is found in contempt. People can now refuse to show up or to even give any testimony. Donny John can just pardon all their actions point blank. With the pardon power Donny John can effectively shut down Mueller's investigation without even firing him as any outcome will just result in a pardon. Even Senate and House investigations can be glossed over with pardons as well. There is no longer any teeth in any investigation. Everyone involved can go free and a Republican controlled house and senate will just let it all happen.
Well, a presidential pardon does not have any effect on state investigations or convictions in a state court. The NY Atty General, for example. can investigate and bring charges for crimes that occurred in Manhattan, where many of Trump's crimes did take place.
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I have been expecting Trump to fire Mueller and thereby provoke a constitutional crisis, but now it looks like he may just pardon Flynn, Manafort, and all the rest of the scum he has collected. That would also be an abuse of power for which he could certainly be impeached, but would the Republicans impeach him even then?
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24 minutes ago, ianf said:
Not at all. Thaksin found out that he could make a heck of a lot of personal money by exploiting the poor under the guise of "supporting" them. The Rice scheme was no differet from many of his other failed and dishonest scheme. I have no idea why rational farangs do not understand that Thaksin is a manipulative sociopath and succeeded in getting his "sister" into a big mess as well as the country. To me the whole Shin era is so transparent .....to support him is to bend to ideology instead of taking a balanced view of all the events and understanding the fundamental dishonesty that lays behind them. And before you or anyone claims that I support the military...No it's nothing to do with supporting one side or another. To take an entrenched position is to deny the facts as they are. And your understanding of the Chew on Leek Pie policies is incorrect.
Rather than rely on your feelings about the matter, let's look at some data. Here's a graph of the Gini Coefficient, a measure of income inequality, for the regions of Thailand for three periods including the Thaksin period. We can see that the period of the Tom Yum Goong Crisis in the late 90's caused a spike in inequality in every region of Thailand. From 2000 to 2004, roughly the initial Thaksin period, inequality dropped by a considerable amount especially in the North, the Northeast and the South, but not in Bangkok.
Thaksin certainly pursued personal gain, but he also made promises to the poor Thai majority and kept those promises more than any Thai politician in history. It is on this basis and not some mistaken notion that he was a kind of Gandhi that many observers regard the destruction of Thai democracy as an atrocity. The improvements in their standard of living for the Thai majority were not a fraud. Although Thai can be criticized for much, including human rights abuses, he did not seize power and stop elections. The Shinawatra governments were legitimately elected.
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46 minutes ago, craigt3365 said:
Gorbachev disagrees with you. This comment seems to come from Putin. And it's not correct.
He claims that NATO took advantage of Russian weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union to enlarge to its east, in violation of promises allegedly made to Moscow by Western leaders. But no such promises were made—a point now confirmed by someone who was definitely in a position to know: Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union.
It is a matter of dispute. Here's an article that takes the opposite view, which I find persuasive.
In early February 1990, U.S. leaders made the Soviets an offer. According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow on Feb. 9, then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation on Germany, U.S. could make “iron-clad guarantees” that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shifrinson-russia-us-nato-deal--20160530-snap-story.html
However, even in the unlikely event that no promise not to expand NATO in the East was actually made, the actual NATO expansion right up to Russia's border remains an undeniable act of aggression and provocation. Do you imagine the US would have no response if the Russians made a treaty with Mexico and put troops there?
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19 minutes ago, Nilats said:
This is the last time I'm replying, I will put you on ignore after this. In all these cases Russia is simply quoting its own military doctrine - and each country already has a copy of it - it's like saying Russia has a military doctrine - and therefore it's a threat... Russia does not have a preemptive strike but can potentially use them if Russia's sovereign territory is invaded - so this is not really a threat... Rather a deterrent because NATO's build up is obviously threatening Russia's sovereign territory. They have guns missiles pointed at Moscow and other Russian cities, and troops ready to be deployed on Russia's territory. I don't understand how Russia telling them not to invade its territory can be interpreted as a threat directed at them.
All true. What the US did with NATO is what it has always done with Russia: renege on its agreements. Bush I promised Gorbachev not to expand NATO up to the Russian border. Later the Americans turned around and did exactly what they promised not to do, marching NATO right up to the Russian border.
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6 minutes ago, Ricardo said:
So just supposition & opinion then.
Not that you're necessarily wrong, but we just don't know, do we ?
You don't have to know for sure. You just have to look at the odds. Especially since it was a trumped up case to begin with. Of course, if you refuse to see the obvious, then no one can make you.
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8 minutes ago, halloween said:
How did she know? ESP perhaps? Their sentences were to be read at the same time, but as they were both obviously guilty.............
I knew. Didn't you? Be serious. What other country has threatened a former PM with a "criminal negligence" sentence of ten years?
It would seem to take a lot of willful ignorance not to see the obvious.
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1 minute ago, Artisi said:
Boonsong isn't Yingluck, they move in different circles.
Boonsong, his deputy, and eighteen others sentenced to long prison terms and fines related to the same rice pledging program. Writing on the wall seems clear to me and apparently to Yingluck also.
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On 8/25/2017 at 7:59 AM, Nilats said:
The Soviets were the one's who forced Japan to surrender in 1945. The Soviets destroyed( literally annihilated) the Japanese Kwantung 1 million strong Army in Manchuria in 1945. The impact on the Japanese moral after the complete annihilation of their one and only army which was sworn in by the Samurai code to fight to the death for the Emperor was equivalent to 100 Hiroshima bombs. So the Soviets inflicted more material damage to Japan in just 2 weeks than the Americans did in 4 years. A few days after that Japan capitulated. Just in case if some of you smart ass kids didn't know about this :)
The Kwantung Army by the summer of 1945 was stuck in China without transportation to return to Japan. No doubt the Japanese leadership was surprised at now quickly and completely they collapsed when the Russians came into the war, but the surrender was inevitable even before then. The Americans had completely destroyed the Japanese Navy and Air Force along with more than sixty cities even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war the US Strategic Bombing Survery, an investigation conducted by the US Air Force, concluded that Japan would have surrendered soon even without the a-bomb attacks or the Soviet declaration of war.
In fact, in June, 1945 the Japanese, communicating through the Soviet government with which it was not yet at war, indicated to the Americans that it was willing to surrender as long as the emperor system could be maintained. Truman, against the advice of nearly all of his advisors, refused claiming that only unconditional surrender was acceptable. Then, in August Truman accepted the Japanese surrender on the condition that the emperor be retained. There is a lot of evidence that, rather than saving American lives, the atomic bomb attacks increased US casualties since Truman kept the war going long enough to drop the two bombs, which, at the time, constituted 100% of the US nuclear weapons inventory. The reason the US dropped the Nagasaki bomb so quickly after Hiroshima was that they wanted to use the plutonium bomb quickly before the Japanese could organize a surrender.
Truman was eager to demonstrate the power of the a-bombs so that he could threaten Stalin with them which he was doing by March, 1946. And the Americans have been threatening ever since.
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19 minutes ago, Artisi said:
Were "they".
They sentenced Boonsong to 42 years in prison.
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3 minutes ago, impulse said:
Inauguration Day, 2025.
If Bush 43 got 2 terms after Iraq....
So, you don't think Trump will quite be able to manage the President-for-Life thing?
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4 hours ago, Opl said:
"Robert J. Lifton, warned that malignantly narcissistic leaders can shift and distort reality for an entire society, a process he called “malignant normality.” The abnormal becomes normalized and alternate facts, conspiracy theories, racism, denial of science, and delegitimization of the free press become not only acceptable, but the new normal. Trump has the power to impose his madness on the populace"
http://www.salon.com/2017/08/24/what-donald-trumps-tweets-reveal-about-his-mental-health/
Robert J. Lifton is still at it?
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7 hours ago, Denim said:
It will be interesting to hear what she herself says when she reaches her destination.
She has left the country before and returned so what changed to make her leave now. She knew from the start she was not going to be found innocent of all charges so why did she return on previous occasions ?
This is the perfect result for the coup makers but it does leave the question of what is was the straw that broke the camels back ?
You're joking, right? They were going to put her in prison for ten years.
Top advisers in more displays of disagreement with Trump
in World News
Posted
I think you have to count the Kennedy assassination as a coup d'etat. Also, Zachary Taylor, who was blocking the Compromise of 1850, was probably assassinated, unless you believe the story that he was the first person in history to die of cherries and milk while exhibiting the symptoms of arsenic poisoning.
American exceptionalism dies hard.