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Month: November 2017

Trump and the turkeys

Published by digby on November 21, 2017

Trump and the turkeysby digby

Surprisingly he didn’t name the turkeys Manafort and Flynn.
Trump pardoning the turkey today was strange. He’s just not good at the ceremonial stuff. He barely looked at his 11 year old son standing next to him. (Their relationship is strange.) And he “joked” that he had reversed many of his predecessors actions and had looked into reversing the pardons of the turkeys last year but was told he couldn’t do it.

So, much as he’s taking credit for saving the elephants he had planned to be killed, he acted like he was some kind of benevolent dictator for not executing Obama’s turkeys which he joked that he wanted to do. I think that speech was written by Mike Huckabee. It’s his kind of nasty…

There is only one turkey pardon ceremony ever worth watching:

Update: by the way, dressing your 11 year old kid in a suit all the time is weird. It lends credence to this story:

I was hanging out in a freshman dorm with some friends, next door to Donald Jr.’s room. I walked out of the room to find Donald Trump at his son’s door, there to pick him up for a baseball game. There were quite a few students standing around watching, trying to catch a glimpse of the famed real estate magnate. Don Jr. opened the door, wearing a Yankee jersey. Without saying a word, his father slapped him across the face, knocking him to the floor in front of all of his classmates. He simply said “put on a suit and meet me outside,” and closed the door.

Psycho-dad.

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The Foreign Relations Committee is working for the Resistance.

Published by digby on November 21, 2017

The Foreign Relations Committee is working for the Resistanceby digby

I wrote about one little pocket of bipartisan resistance in Washington for Salon today:
President Trump has been back from his embarrassing Asian trip for a week now and is still embarrassing the nation by declaring that he should have left some American athletes in jail in China because one of their father’s failed to show him proper personal fealty:

Trump has always been petty, but this was particularly obnoxious. He had already demanded gratitude from the players themselves, and they had thanked him publicly for speaking to the Chinese president on their behalf. He simply couldn’t rise above his voracious need for approbation to let LaVar Ball’s criticism go and behave like a mature statesman. Worse, he showed foreign leaders once again that he can be manipulated through even the smallest slights or granting of favors. The man simply cannot play it cool.

His trips overseas have shown that he knows nothing of diplomacy and has no natural instinct for it. He’s been rude and aggressive toward America’s European allies until they figured out that he needs to be treated like a spoiled dauphin and treated to big spectacles, as French president Macron did when he invited him to the Bastille Day celebrations in July.

The British had originally planned for him to come for the traditional state visit but had to rescind the invitation after Trump demanded to ride in the golden carriage with the queen and security measures became too onerous. (The British people largely hate Trump and massive protests were expected.) But Middle Eastern and Asian leaders had his number from the beginning. They fêted Trump with parades and pageants and had him eating out of their hands.

But our president isn’t just clueless when it comes to diplomacy and statesmanship. He’s clueless about all of foreign policy and national security. The Washington Post reported last week that many Europeans now believe that “President Trump in person is no longer the voice of the free Western world” because “the problem is that people don’t know anything. They are quite open about it. . . . It doesn’t matter what level. It is all levels.”

As we already know, last summer Secretary of State Rex Tillerson became so exasperated by Trump’s unwillingness to listen to anyone who knows anything that after a particularly frustrating meeting — in which the president expressed a desire for what would amount to nearly a tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal — Tillerson told some of the people in the room that the president was a “f***ing moron.”

Not long after that, Sen. Bob Corker began to speak out about the president’s behavior, saying that Trump had “not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.” Corker later told The New York Times that he feared Trump was in danger of starting World War III. On Monday, BuzzFeed reported that during that same period, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster called the president an “idiot” and a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartener,” at a private dinner.

Corker is the only one of these people who’s on the record. Tillerson has refused to comment on what he did or didn’t say, and McMaster has denied the BuzzFeed report. But the reason people believe this so easily is because the reported comments are so obviously accurate. The president is clearly way in over his head.

Susan Glasser at Politico magazine reported on Monday that this has brought about what she terms “an example of a surprising and unintended side effect of Trump’s disruptive approach to the world”: bipartisan agreement. Granted, that is only manifesting itself on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but that may be where it’s most needed to deal with the national security challenges posed by Russia, North Korea and Iran, all of which are being bungled by Trump in dangerous ways.

Corker is the committee chairman, and as mentioned has been vocal in his concerns about the president’s ability to deal with these problems. Glasser interviewed Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the committee, who listed a number of issues on which the panel has achieved consensus in opposition to the Trump administration. These include the mandatory Russian sanctions in response to the election interference, which passed the Senate 98-2; insisting on diplomatic efforts in North Korea; and maintaining the Iran nuclear deal, all of which have been opposed by the president.

Glasser notes:

In more than two decades of observing Capitol Hill, I can’t remember a comparable moment when the generally staid Foreign Relations panel has been so assertive toward the president, especially given that Congress and the White House are controlled by the same party. To do so, you’d probably have to reach all the way back to the Vietnam era, and the skeptical hearings about the war held by the late, legendary Chairman William Fulbright.

This is, to say the least, unusual in our current state of polarized partisan warfare.

This does not mean that the Congress can easily reverse the effects of decades of abdication of its duty to participate equally in the national security policy of the country, however. The presidency is now tremendously powerful in these matters, and it has more often than not been true that the “foreign policy consensus” in Washington led us down the path to bad wars and immoral policies. But in this case, it is a welcome exercise of what power they have, which can perhaps mitigate Trump’s worst instincts.

The committee sent a loud message last week when it convened a hearing on the president’s authority to order a nuclear strike. Cardin told Glasser that this was meant as a “senatorial rebuke” of the president’s reckless “fire and fury” rhetoric. He said, “Congress is looking for a way to assert itself in that regard.”

Trump has told the press that he listens to everyone, but his decision on North Korea is the only one that matters. That’s actually not true. Last weekend, the man in charge of carrying out the order to launch a nuclear strike, Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of Strategic Command, said that he would tell Trump he couldn’t carry out an illegal strike. Lawmakers haven’t spent much time in recent years contemplating the possibility that an unstable, temperamental president would launch a first strike. Now that we have one, they have no choice.

A strong bipartisan message that Trump does not have unlimited power to start a nuclear war isn’t really meant for him — it’s meant for the general who must decide whether or not he’s been given a legal order. For the sake of the planet, he needs all the clarity he can get.

It’s on by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 21, 2017

It’s on
by Tom Sullivan


“We are engaged in class warfare. My side is winning.” — Warren Buffett

Reading the details of the GOP tax plan is like watching that Volkswagen commercial where people look at zero scores and ask, “Really?”

Politicians who complain Americans are not competitive enough in the global marketplace want to tax tuition waivers for graduate students. Ben Miller of the Center for American Progress explains in Fortune that the bill eliminates credits and deductions for tuition, retraining and post-doctoral work to help pay for seven years of reduced taxes for millionaires and billionaires. And for the tax-free inheritances of the children of Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Really?

By 2017, families annually earning between $10,000 and $75,000 will face increased taxes while those earning much more see their taxes go down. The mortgage interest deduction families use to pay for their homes and build wealth (supposedly a virtuous practice in the Conservative faith) goes away, as do deductions for state and local taxes that help families keep them, particularly in bluer states.

Really?

Tax cuts for workers are temporary. Tax cuts for corporations are permanent, and paid for in part by hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over 10 years.

Really?

Stan Collender at Forbes calls it “the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history.” Not to put too fine a point on it.

Collender continues:

There’s no economic justification whatsoever for a tax cut at this time. U.S. GDP is growing, unemployment is close to 4 percent (below what is commonly considered “full employment“), corporate profits are at record levels and stock markets are soaring. It makes no sense to add any federal government-induced stimulus to all this private sector-caused economic activity, let alone a tax cut as big as this one.

Nevertheless, the GOP is forging ahead with no idea what the impacts will be on the economy other than the unicorns and rainbows of trickle-down economics. No, the sitting president’s alma mater isn’t buying it either.

The details themselves can be distractions. Forest for the trees and all that. One thing not to be distracted by is the pearl clutching at the mention of “class war” by the people winning it.

Ryan Cooper writes at The Week, that if the “Republican donor class and their employees” want a class war, it’s on:

It’s honestly quite surprising to me that Republicans didn’t just figure out the biggest deficit increase they could get away with, hand almost all of it to the top 1 percent, and throw a couple of pennies to everyone else to claim it’s a “middle class tax cut.” That was the George W. Bush political formula, and it worked quite well.

The only possible conclusion is that the plutocracy is no longer satisfied with taking almost all the income growth. They now want to diminish everyone else’s share; as George Carlin once said, “they want more for themselves, and less for everybody else.” The most notable victims reflect the cultural enemies that the Republican Grievance Industrial Complex has been whipping its base up in a frenzy over for decades — college students, coastal elites, and comfortable liberals — but the pain will be broadly shared. As Mike Konczal details, in broad terms it is an assault on workers to benefit capitalists: people who own things instead of working.

Once asked why he was bothering to steal a few barrels of oil out from under Native Americans in trailer homes, Charles Koch reportedly said, “I want my fair share – and that’s all of it.”

I’ve heard enough. So has Cooper:

Some of the wealthiest and most privileged people who’ve ever existed are attempting to loot the pockets of penniless grad students so they can have even more money to spend on stuff like $450-million paintings. They’ve forfeited any right to deference or consideration.

Now that they have a rich, industrial-grade dupe in the White House and control of both houses of Congress, Collender believes Republicans are committing the economic equivalent of dousing the Capitol and themselves in gasoline and setting it all alight to watch it burn. In the 1960s, the tools of such people were turning fire hoses on black people. Time to return the favor.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

How to keep the toddler amused

Published by digby on November 21, 2017

How to keep the toddler amusedby digby

The baby wants his good polls or he’s going to have a tantrum:

As a TV host, Donald Trump loved ratings. As president, he loves polls — as long as they show him on the upswing.

He crowed on Twitter hours after landing back in Washington from his 12-day Asia tour about his Rasmussen number — 46 percent — noting it was “one of the most accurate” in 2016, and decried “fake news” polls showing his approval in the 30s while also suggesting, with no evidence, that “some people” think his numbers could be in the 50s. (The Rasmussen poll sank to 42 percent on Friday.)

Aides in the White House often show Trump polls designed to make him feel good, according to aides and advisers. Usually they’re the ones that focus just on voters who cast ballots for him in 2016 or are potential Trump supporters —Trump’s base — but occasionally include public polls like Rasmussen, depending on what the numbers say.
[…]
Concerns grow in the White House when the support slides among voters who picked Trump in 2016, several senior aides and advisers said. Aides in Trump’s political affairs shop shrug off public polls that survey the general public. Most of the public pollsters are seen as “not understanding him,” one senior White House official said, a position carried over from the campaign, when many polls underestimated support for Trump and showed him losing in key counties that he won.

Adviser Jared Kushner often tells Trump not to trust traditional data, while former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon used to tell Trump to focus only on the 40 percent or so of Americans who make up his base.

John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, has limited interest in polling data and doesn’t get deeply involved in parsing it, aides said.

Yet several senior officials said they don’t trust the internal polls because they are “delusional” or “just not accurate,” in the words of two officials. The numbers Trump are shown are almost always higher than his public polling numbers. “I wouldn’t trust our polling on that,” one senior aide said, after ticking off numbers on health care earlier this year.

I wonder what they think that big poll on election day across the country this month told them? Fake returns?

He needs to be coddled and feted as a winner or … what? The staff seems to have convinced themselves that this is a smart way to slice and dice the data for the purpose of getting congress to vote in their alleged best interest. But members of congress know what the poll numbers are. They don’t need Trump’s phony polling about the base to see what the stakes are. And they also know that mid-terms are referendums on the president and he is a huge orange albatross around their necks.

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So many Russians so little time

Published by digby on November 20, 2017

So many Russians so little timeby digby

Here’s a list of Trump associates’ Russian contacts during the campaign.  Well, the ones we know about anyway:

October 2015: Russian developer Giorgi Rtskhiladze emails Michael Cohen hoping to begin a development deal with the Trump Organization. Cohen passes, because the organization was already working on a project in Moscow.

Dec. 10: Michael Flynn, an early Trump supporter who would eventually be named national security adviser, travels to Moscow for an event honoring the Kremlin-backed news outlet RT. There, he participates in a banquet during which he shares a table with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

January 2016: Cohen emails Putin’s spokesman seeking help with the real estate development project in Moscow. That project is eventually abandoned.

March 24: George Papadopoulos, recently tapped by the campaign to serve as a foreign policy adviser, meets in London with a Russia-connected professor and a woman introduced to him as “Putin‘s niece” — in reality, a student named Olga Polonskaya.

April 11: Paul Manafort emails Konstantin Kilimnik about leveraging his position with the campaign.

April 18: Papadopoulos is introduced to Ivan Timofeev of the Russian International Affairs Council. Over the next few weeks, Timofeev and Papadopoulos try to work out a meeting between Trump and Putin.

April 26: Papadopoulos is told that the Russians have “dirt” on Clinton in the form of emails.

April 27: Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, meets with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at a campaign event at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. Jeff Sessions, then a senator and eventually Trump’s attorney general, may have greeted Kislyak as well.

May: Alexander Torshin, a senior official in the Russian central bank, expresses his desire for a Trump-Putin meeting by asking a friend to contact the campaign. The emailed offer is titled, “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite,” and includes an invitation for Trump to meet Torshin at an NRA convention in Louisville, later in the month.

Kushner rejects the overture, reportedly writing: “Most likely these people then go back home and claim they have special access to gain importance for themselves. Be careful.”

May 20 or 21: Donald Trump Jr. sits next to Torshin at an event associated with the National Rifle Association convention.

May 21: Manafort forwards an email from Papadopoulos about a Trump-Putin meeting to his colleague, saying that any such trip “should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”

June: Cohen is invited to attend an economic forum in St. Petersburg, where “he could be introduced to Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian prime minister, top financial leaders and perhaps to Putin.” He declines.

June 6: Trump Jr. may have spoken by phone with Emin Agalarov, a musician and developer who worked with the Trumps on the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Trump Jr. and Agalarov each claim not to remember speaking, but the following day a meeting is set up between Trump Jr. and other campaign staffers predicated on the sharing of information detrimental to Democrat Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.

June 9: That meeting happens. It includes Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort. They meet with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer linked to the Russian government, and Rinat Akhmetshin, who has ties to Russian intelligence.

July 7: Manafort offers to brief Deripaska.

July 7: Carter Page, identified by Trump as an adviser on foreign policy, travels to Moscow — with the campaign’s blessing — for an event.

July 18: At an event at the Republican National Convention, Sessions and Kislyak greet each other.

July 20: At another convention event, Page and Kislyak talk.

Sept. 8: Sessions and Kislyak meet again, this time in Sessions’s Senate office. At some point, Sessions and Kislyak apparently discuss the campaign.

Oct. 11: Trump Jr. gives a speech in Paris to a group linked to Russian interests. One of the organizers later briefs the Kremlin on the event.

Dec. 1: Flynn and Kushner meet with Kislyak at Trump Tower. At this meeting, they allegedly discuss setting up a secret communications system between Trump’s team and Moscow.

Dec. 8: Page again travels to Moscow for an event.

Dec. 13: Kushner, apparently at Kislyak’s urging, meets with Sergey Gorkov, head of the Russian bank VEB, which is under sanctions. The next day, Gorkov travels to Japan, where Putin was visiting.

Dec. 25: Flynn texts Kislyak.

Dec. 29: Flynn speaks with Kislyak multiple times, apparently discussing the imminent imposition of new sanctions by the U.S. government, partly in response to Russian meddling in the campaign.


Click over to the article to see an excellent chart showing all this.

We don’t know the extent to which the campaign was in on the various Russian propaganda and hacking operations. But it’s very clear that they were in contact and that Russian actors were eager to work with them on something.

Also, keep in mind that Trump himself simply cannot say a bad word about Putin or indicate that there was anything wrong with what happened in 2016. Some of that can theoretically be attributed to ego and vanity — but the Putin worship was there from the beginning of the campaign and he has never deviated from it even a little.

Just saying.

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They can say he didn’t say it, but it’s true nonetheless

Published by digby on November 20, 2017

They can say he didn’t say it, but it’s true nonethelessby digby

I’m talking about this report that H.R. McMaster said his boss is dumb:

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster mocked President Trump’s intelligence at a private dinner with a powerful tech CEO, according to five sources with knowledge of the conversation.

Over a July dinner with Oracle CEO Safra Catz — who has been mentioned as a candidate for several potential administration jobs — McMaster bluntly trashed his boss, said the sources, four of whom told BuzzFeed News they heard about the exchange directly from Catz. The top national security official dismissed the president variously as an “idiot” and a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner,” the sources said.

A sixth source who was not familiar with the details of the dinner told BuzzFeed News that McMaster had made similarly derogatory comments about Trump’s intelligence to him in private, including that the president lacked the necessary brainpower to understand the matters before the National Security Council.

Both Oracle and the Trump administration heatedly denied the comments that Catz later recounted.

“Actual participants in the dinner deny that General McMaster made any of the comments attributed to him by anonymous sources. Those false comments represent the diametric opposite of General McMaster’s actual views,” said Michael Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

I could easily see him saying it. I could just as easily see someone lying about it to cause a rift between McMaster and Trump. But it doesn’t really matter. He is an idiot and a dope who has the intelligence of a kindergartener and he does not have the necessary brainpower to understand matter before the NSC. Nobody needs McMaster to say it privately. He’s a fucking moron and everyone knows it.

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QOTD: Kellyanne

Published by digby on November 20, 2017

QOTD: Kellyanne
by digby

She truly is soulless. A week ago she said, “there is no Senate seat worth more than a child.”
Now she’s changed her mind:

Conway: Doug Jones in Alabama, folks, don’t be fooled. He will be a vote against tax cuts. He is weak on crime. Weak on borders. He is strong on raising your taxes. He is terrible for property owners —

Kilmeade: So vote Roy Moore?

Conway: — Doug Jones is a doctrinaire liberal, which is why he is not saying anything and why the media are trying to boost him.

Kilmeade: So, vote Roy Moore?

Conway: I’m telling you that we want the votes in the Senate to get this tax bill through. And the media — if the media were really concerned about all these allegation, and that’s what this is truly about, and the Democrats, Al Franken would be on the heap of bygone half funny comedians. He wouldn’t be here on Capitol Hill. He still has his job. What’s Bob Menendez doing back here? That’s the best my state of New Jersey can do huh, Doocy? You live there. Let me tell you something, this guy, Doug Jones, is a doctrinaire liberal.

There you have it. No word on how much fun it is to work for the admitted pussy-grabber in the White House. But he’ll sign tax cuts so it’s all good.

I wish I believed that this would finally end the right’s self-righteous blather about “family values” and “honor and dignity” but it won’t. You can see how that works with Conway blithely saying that Franken and Menendez should be drummed out of the Senate in the same breath that she defends a former district attorney and judge who preyed upon underage girls so blatantly that the people at the mall were warned about him. And, again, she works for the man who was credibly accused of the same kind of physical assault he bragged about on tape by at least 16 women.

None of this will change their sanctimonious attacks on liberals in the future. They are unconcerned with being called hypocrites. It’s simply a weapon they use to bludgeon the other side which does care about hypocrisy. This has been obvious for many years but this episode illustrates their game in living color. They are able to twist their opponents into pretzels with this sort of thing.

I’m sure Trump laughed when Kellyanne did her little projection jiujitsu this morning and gave her a big kiss when he saw her. She was talking directly to him.

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Ivanka’s shady dealings: the first daughter has legal exposure too

Published by digby on November 20, 2017

Ivanka’s shady dealingsby digby

I wrote about the first daughter’s shady business dealings for Salon this morning:
Social media had a bit of fun this week-end making fun of this Thanksgiving table tweet from Ivanka Trump’s “lifestyle” brand:

It is a bizarre looking display and twitter went to town:

But in all the merriment about Ivanka’s questionable taste and the juxtaposition between the tax cuts for the wealthy she’s helping to sell and the lives of all those blue collar workers her father supposedly represented with his allegedly “populist” campaign, few people have stopped to ask how it can possibly be that a top adviser to the president still owns a “lifestyle” company in the first place. We have become so inured to the outright corruption of this White House that we simply accept the tact that all the Trumps and Kushners have merged their business interests with their jobs working for the president.

It’s not just the first family either. The NRCC is just coming right out and putting money directly into Donald Trump’s pocket now:

In case you were wondering, the Trump Hotel is doing very, very well what with lobbyists and foreign dignitaries spending huge wads of cash there over the past year. Imagine that.

Scions Don Jr and Eric are handling the business with Trump himself looking over some quarterly reports while Ivanka has supposedly withdrawn from day to day involvement with the family business and her own company. Nonetheless, Ivanka’s brand is everywhere and she is still looked upon by the media as the quintessential Trump woman: a beautiful, brilliant businesswoman with great style and exceptional savvy.

But it turns out that her brand, like her father’s, is more hype than substance. She is beautiful and and her style is admired by many. But her business history is nothing to be proud of. Recent investigations into the Trump real estate empire show that she had been involved in the company’s most suspicious dealings with shady oligarchs and mobbed up money launderers. If Donald Trump is in the crosshairs of federal investigators for nefarious financial transactions with disreputable characters, his daughter will inevitably be caught in that same net.

Reuters and NBC reported over the week-end on a particularly unsavory deal in Panama called the Trump Ocean Club, which Donald Trump dubbed Ivanka’s “baby.” It was the Trump organization’s first international hotel venture in 2007 and she was the lead family member on the project working closely with a Brazilian development broker named Alexandre Ventura Nogueira.  He put together much of the financing for the deal and let’s just say it wasn’t exactly on the up and up.

Involved in Ivanka’s “baby” was a money launderer from Colombia, currently in jail in the US,  a Ukranian human trafficker and a Russian investor who was jailed just a few years before for kidnapping and threatening murder in Israel. Noquiera himself was arrested in Panama on unrelated fraud charges and fled the country and there are still four criminal cases pending over the Trump project. Ivanka claims to not remember the man despite the fact that she even made a promotional video with him.

Another notorious Ivanka project was the 2014 Trump Tower Baku in Azerbaijan which she personally oversaw. This was the project that the New Yorker reported a few months ago was partially funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and served as a cash laundromat for the country’s dictatorship. And this was no hands-off arrangement. She and the company were heavily involved in all the details from the type of wood paneling to be used to the landscaping. According to experts this was unusual for this sort of deal and indicates a level of personal attention that exposed the Trump organization to serious legal trouble.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act requires that American companies not make profits from illegal activities overseas and simply saying you didn’t know where the money was coming from isn’t good enough. They have put people in jail for doing business with money launderers in Azerbaijan in recent years. The courts have held that a company needn’t be aware of specific criminal behavior but only that corruption was pervasive. It’s not reasonable to believe that the Trumps were unaware of the business culture in the country. Neither is it likely that they were unaware that the family they were in business with were known as “The Corleones of the Caspian.” After all, as the New Yorker reported:

In May, 2012, the month the Baku deal was finalized, the F.C.P.A. was evidently on Donald Trump’s mind. In a phone-in appearance on CNBC, he expressed frustration with the law. “Every other country goes into these places and they do what they have to do,” he said. “It’s a horrible law and it should be changed.” If American companies refused to give bribes, he said, “you’ll do business nowhere.”

Clearly, he knew exactly what kind of assignment he’d given his daughter.

Several Senators have called for an investigation into this project, which was finally shelved after Trump was elected. According to Think Progress, “at some point earlier this year, Ivanka removed all information about the Azerbaijan project from her website, although it remains available via Internet Archive.”

When you look into the rest of her history in business the story repeats itself over and over again. The company has licensed the Trump name in places known for networks of money launderers and as the anti-corruption watchdog Global Witness reported, “the result is that Trump’s current wealth has depended in part on securing significant infusions of untraceable foreign funds.”

It’s very difficult to believe that the Trumps didn’t know that they were involved in these massive corruption schemes. The evidence was right in front of their eyes. And now that evidence is right in front of an investigative team that has a mandate to go wherever the evidence takes them and Ivanka Trump is as legally vulnerable as her husband and the rest of her family.

From the “I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue” files

Published by digby on November 20, 2017

From the “I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue” filesby digby

Good morning!

Just put your fingers in your ears and sing “lalalalalala” and everything is fine.
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Shooting gallery America by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 20, 2017

Shooting gallery America
by Tom Sullivan

Yemen has the second-highest per capita firearm ownership in the world. The country with the highest in the world is the U.S. Us.

Researcher Adam Lankford of the University of Alabama examined databases for mass shootings across the world starting with the University of Texas clock tower shooting in 1966. The criminologist wanted to verify which country had the most mass shootings. He defined them as acts by individuals, not groups, who attacked others in public with firearms, “killing not only someone they had a grudge against, but also random strangers or bystanders.” Organized terrorism or acts of genocide fall outside the definition.

As one might expect, the United States came in first. Lankford spoke to Public Radio International’s “The World”:

“We had 31 percent of these offenders, despite the fact that we only have about 5 percent of the world’s population. So, we have well more than our share. And of course, that’s very concerning for a variety of reasons.”

Lankford says comparing the US with other large countries shows how serious America’s gun problem is: “China and India would be two clear examples, and yet they don’t have anywhere near the public mass shooter problem that we do.”

Lankford’s research is contained in his report, “Public Mass Shooters and Firearms: A Cross-National Study of 171 Countries.” Examining homicide rates, GDP, level of urbanization, and other factors didn’t produce a correlation between the countries with the most mass shootings. Per capita firearm ownership did:

“I was a little surprised that it wasn’t attributable to other things, like homicide rate or suicide rate. So, if you look at this on an individual level, these people are committing acts of homicide and they’re often committing acts of murder-suicide and they’re using firearms. But if you look cross-nationally, there are a lot of countries with more homicides and suicides than we have. And yet, they don’t have this problem. It really was the firearms, and I was surprised at the strength of that statistical association.”

Yemen ranks second in the rate of gun ownership, but with half the U.S. ownership rates. Yet the 11 mass shootings Lankford counted are not only different in number, as reporter Tik Root explained:

“The shootings that happen seem to have more relation to either tribal conflict or an ongoing dispute with something,” Root says. “The shootings that I heard about or saw in Yemen usually had maybe more of an explanation than they do in the US. You didn’t hear the mental health argument as much as usually a clear reason why somebody had used their gun.”

Root had lived in Yemen before civil war broke out in 2015, and told “The World” at open-air gun markets, one could buy most anything “from pistols to automatic weapons to [rocket-propelled grenades] RPGs. I saw tank shells and I’m told if you ask the right person you could get a tank itself.”

There is something else that makes the U.S different from other countries Lankford studied, something he didn’t mention on air: the National Rifle Association. Yemen sounds like an NRA wet dream.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.