Month: September 2019

Running the military like a business. How much are the Saudis paying?

by Spocko

The Sunday morning shows are targeted at the beltway insiders and lobbyists. Especially military lobbyists. Military contractors are their primary sponsors. It would be fun if the hosts asked questions that would make the sponsors happy, like:

 “How big is the Saudi protection contract? How long will it last? Which branch will make the most money?” 

U.S. anti-missile weapons, such as the Patriot air defense system pictured here, are being deployed to Saudi Arabia in the wake of an attack that’s been blamed on Iran. (Sebastian Apel / U.S. Department of Defense)

We always hear that Trump thinks of things transactionally. So he will think of the Saudi protection contract as a “new business” contract that he got for the Pentagon. He expects the Pentagon will make money off the deal, after all, “They pay cash!”

With the recent deal that let him move money from military programs to The Wall, Trump can now see the military budget as just one big pool of money–that he just added to by signing a long term protection contract with “The Kingdom”

Trump will now expect the generals and the contractors to be grateful to him. He’s a good earner for them. The Wall money, from the military budget, is now rightfully his. After all, he got them the big contract. When he didn’t go after MBS for the murder of Khashoggi, he was protecting a huge revenue stream to the military.

When the Pentagon makes money, Trump expects to get some of that money.  (I believe in the mob world they call that “kicking up” or “getting a taste.” All my mob knowledge comes from the Sopranos, so I could be wrong on the lingo.)  Trump already got cash with Saudi hotel stays and their purchase of the 45th floor of his building.

What this means is that Fox News Sunday @FoxNewsSunday with Chris Wallace should be asking about the size of the deals and how long they will last, because the Pentagon is now a subcontractor for Trump, who is working for the Saudis. This would make Trump happy. And that is the job of Fox media, making Trump happy.

The other morning show are supposed to keep the military sponsors happy. No anti-war talk! When was the last time you saw a peace activist on the morning shows?

Final thoughts: 
I wonder if the Saudis put out an RFP on the protection contract? Wouldn’t that be fascinating to see? 

(Did Erik Prince bid on this?  Was the US military the low bid?)

I’d love  to see it broken down by line items, like those crazy hospital bills in our for profit Healthcare system.

• X drones plus support team of 22 people each. 19 million each. 
• Y satellite time $59,000 an hour 24 hours for 7 days. 
• Z planes flying over Yemen 59 million each. NOTE: Fill up with gas at an airport close to  Trump properties $11 million dollars per quarter. 

To help Americans oppose wars, we often talk about the people who might die, the “boots on the ground.”  I wonder how much do mercenary outfits charge when one of their people is killed? More or less that the US military?

When US military die working on the  Saudi’s oil protection contract, do the generals say to their families, “It was nothing personal, it’s just business.”?

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Fool me twice?
by Tom Sullivan

Image via Third Way

Third Way and I finally agree on something.

The center-left think tank has released a report examining 99 Democratic-held House districts where turnout there could determine the winner of the 2020 presidential contest. From moderate Ron Kind (Wis.) to first-term liberal Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Democratic performance in these districts can make the difference in whether Donald Trump or the Democratic nominee wins the White House. Turnout in key districts could also be determinative in 2020 Senate races, the Washington Post’s Paul Kane explains:

Kind, for example, sits in a district that flipped from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to backing Donald Trump in 2016, a year in which Wisconsin narrowly sided with the GOP nominee. And poor turnout in Tlaib’s hometown helped Trump put Michigan in his win column.

Even as Kind, 56, and Tlaib, 43, presumably cruise to reelection next year, the margins they run up might prove decisive to their states’ critical total of 26 electoral votes. They have the potential to help boost, or deflate, the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, a sign of how Democrats need to push to get every vote possible next year.

Third Way ranked the congressional districts based on five factors: 2018 House Flip (43 seats), 2018 Close Call (win margin in single-digits – 40 seats), Trump District (with Democratic incumbent – 31 seats), 2020 Presidential Battlegrounds (70 seats), and 2020 Senate Battlegrounds (39 seats).

Kane continues:

Down in North Carolina, Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D) has easily won for 15 years, but the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus has a district that might be key to tipping the state’s 15 electoral votes to Democrats.

Perhaps more importantly, Butterfield could help the Democratic nominee for the Senate race against Sen. Thom Tillis (R), a contest that could serve as a tipping point for control of the Senate.

“The point of this analysis is not to say that only 99 Members or districts are important, concludes study author David de la Fuente. “But it does show that in the vast majority of Democratic-held House seats, one can turn a blue place bluer, but it wouldn’t accomplish much either there or statewide when it comes to helping Democrats gain power.”

I might argue with the selection of ranking criteria, but we agree on the importance of district races. Congressional districts, however, are not the only ones that matter for Democrats gaining power. State-level power is also on the line in 2020 and for the next decade.

Too many voters view elections through the lens of statewide races – for president, for governor, for Senate. Those campaigns set the agenda and budgets for get out the vote efforts. Statewide candidates seek votes in bulk and concentrate their resources in places where they can easily find them: big, blue cities. That’s where the national campaigns focus their efforts in battleground states.

But while running up the score in metro areas may help statewide candidates, it doesn’t win extra seats in state legislatures. Democrats don’t just need votes in bulk, they need them out where state House and Senate seats are drawn. Picking up seats outside Democrat-friendly population centers will determine control of 2021 redistricting in most states. Those of us who dream of ending gerrymanders that result in “Democrats winning more votes [and] Republicans holding more seats” are painfully aware of the damage the Republicans’ 2010 Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) wrought across the country.

David Daley explained their 2010 strategy for micro-targeting state legislative districts:

The party would target control of state legislative chambers that either party held by five or fewer seats. They’d double down on states where the governor had veto power over the maps. And there would be plenty of money to fund key campaigns, upgrade technology, recruit and train candidates — and then to guarantee that every state legislature had a redistricting lawyer and litigator.

Republicans began fundraising for the effort in early 2008, documents reveal.

Even with REDMAP architect Thomas Hofeller, lately of North Carolina, gone to his reward, there will be a 2020 version of REDMAP in play. The unpopularity of the enfant terrible currently mismanaging the executive branch may dampen its impact some, but Democrats fixated on defeating Trump cannot afford to be blind-sided again. Should Trump look like a sinking ship next year, Republicans won’t abandon him. They’ll double down on holding onto power where they gained it in 2010 – in the states.

Saturday Night at the Movies

Where the deer and The Meat Puppets play: “Desolation Center” (***)

By Dennis Hartley

“If people stand in a circle long enough, they’ll eventually begin to dance.”

– George Carlin

From sacrificed spearheads to Burning Man, the one constant for humankind is the need for ritual. Ceremonies, whether somber or exultant, reinforce our sense of group identity.

In short, you gotta fight for your right to party. Even if it’s in the middle of the desert:

The promoter of an event set up around the “Storm Area 51” internet craze in the remote Nevada desert pulled the plug due to low attendance, but the host of a festival for several thousand people in the tiny town of Rachel said her show would go on.

“Area 51 Basecamp” organizer Keith Wright said that after drawing just 500 attendees at a Friday event planned for 5,000 at the Alien Research Center souvenir shop in Hiko, he had to pull the plug.

“We put on a safe event for the people that showed up,” Wright said. “But we had to make the decision today because it costs tens of thousands of dollars to staff each day.

“It was a gamble financially. We lost.”

Several dozen campers still at the site could stay until Sunday, he added.

In Rachel, Little A’Le’Inn owner Connie West said she was sad to hear the Hiko festival didn’t succeed. In a voice hoarse from stress and lack of sleep, she said a noon-to-midnight slate of “Alienstock” event musical entertainment would continue for the several thousand revelers camping on her property and nearby federal land. 

“This is the most fabulous time,” West said. “I’m just so grateful that people came. This is their event as much as it is mine.”

Lincoln county sheriff Kerry Lee said it was “pretty calm” early on Saturday in Rachel and Hiko. In Nye county, Sheriff Sharon Wehrly said no one showed up at a main entrance and an auxiliary gate at the once-secret Area 51 US air force facility.

Wehrly revised to 100 each the number of people who appeared at each of those gates early on Friday near Amargosa Valley, a 90-minute drive west of Las Vegas.

Lee, about a two-hour drive north of Las Vegas, said revelers gathered until about 4am at two gates between Hiko and Rachel, and said about 20 people broke from among revelers and “acted like they were going to storm but stopped short”. 

Lee and Wright reported one arrest, for disorderly conduct, at the “Area 51 Basecamp” event.

Earlier, officials reported five arrests, including one man treated for dehydration by festival medics in Rachel.

Lee said a man reported missing on Friday morning after heading Thursday from a festival campground in Hiko toward an Area 51 gate was found safe in the evening.

The mood among the assembled remained mostly harmless. While costumed space aliens were a common and sometimes hilarious sight in events that began on Thursday, no one had reported seeing actual extraterrestrials or UFOs.

“Mostly harmless”. LOL. Somewhere out there in the ether, Douglas Adams is spinning.

The “Storm Area 51” meme may have fired the imaginations of millions earlier this week, but by Friday night it fizzed into several hundred disappointed people, standing in a circle somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert…who eventually began to dance.

I only bring this up because I watched a documentary Friday night that oddly mirrors the Area 51 gathering. While there’s naught to do with UFOs or government cover-ups, Stuart Swezey’s Desolation Center does involve rituals, desert gatherings…and dancing.

Swezey, a scenester in the early 80s L.A. punk explosion, founded “Desolation Center”, a performance venue with no fixed geographical address. Desolation Center was an umbrella Swezey used for a series of guerilla music and art performances he organized in warehouses, lofts, and rehearsal spaces (think of it as a pre-internet “flash mob” concept).

According to one of the interviewees in the film, one of the main “inspirations” for the clandestine events was notoriously fascistic Chief of the L.A.P.D. Daryl Gates. Gates was no friend to the burgeoning punk scene; he deployed his officers to shut down club shows and generally harass punk fans whenever possible (never mind that despite the “in your face” posturing of the music and fashion, most of the kids were just having harmless fun).

Eventually, Swezey get the bright idea that if he staged his events out of town…like way out of town where Jesus lost his shoes, the performers and the audience would be free, free to ride without getting hassled by The Man. So it was that in April of 1983, he approached the LA band Savage Republic about doing a show in a dry lakebed near Joshua Tree. They were in. Once he talked The Minutemen into coming aboard, “The Mojave Exodus” was on. Swezey hand-crafted 250 cardboard tickets ($12.50 admission).

He distributed the tickets to record stores around LA; to his surprise they sold out. Using the money, he rented 3 school buses, a PA and a generator. In the film, Mariska Leyssius (a member of the band Psi Com) recalls how she assisted Swezey in organizing the event, as well as helpfully advising ticket holders to “keep your drugs and liquor below the line of the window” of the bus, in case they ran into cops during the road trip to the event site.

The event was a smashing success for all concerned, even if it failed to set the world on fire. The film documents The Mojave Exodus, as well as its follow-up, “The Mojave Auszug”, which took place in an isolated spot near Mecca, California in March of 1984.

The German influence was the result of a sabbatical Swezey had taken to explore the scene in Berlin, where he befriended the experimental industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, who ended up headlining that second event. In addition to musicians, a small group of performance artists known collectively as Survival Research Lab also appeared. Aptly named, their act included blowing up refrigerators and shooting objects with a Gatling gun (have I mentioned none of these desert events involved obtaining a permit?).

The recollections by participants are alternately hilarious and harrowing (let’s just say there was some acid). My eyes did start to glaze over when the anecdotes became tantamount to getting cornered Monday morning by a co-worker who insists on sharing details of how fucked-up he got at that party Saturday night, but for the most part it’s a fascinating look at a little-known chapter in alternative culture history. The film also connects the dots between these obscure little desert bacchanals and the massive like-minded festivals we have nowadays like Burning Man, Lollapalooza, and Coachella.

“Behind the music” archives at Den of Cinema
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President Blabby no longer believes he has to restrain himself in any way

by digby

I am at the point at which I often put on the closed captions when he comes on because the sound of his voice triggers overwhelming anger and anxiety in me. But I have felt recently as if I’m being tortured more than usual.

And no, I don’t think it’s all because the “adults in the room” have all been disposed of. It’s because he realizes that he can say and do anything and nobody will even try to stop him. His gambit with Ukraine happened after the Mueller testimony. He is liberated:

For better or worse, we’re getting more Donald Trump these days.

If you feel like you are hearing the President’s voice all the time, you are not imagining things. Trump is talking and tweeting more in 2019 than he did in 2018 — which was, in turn, far more talking and tweeting than he did in 2017.

Trump has been posting more of his own tweets and more retweets of others. His campaign rallies have been longer. He has spent more time talking to reporters before his helicopter and plane flights. And he is just talking more in general — about 25 minutes a week more on camera this year than through the same time last year.

The White House did not respond to our request for an explanation, but it’s not hard to see what’s going on. The increases have come as Trump has rid himself of most of the advisers who reportedly tried to constrain his impulses, like chief of staff John Kelly and defense secretary James Mattis, and as he has appeared to become even more comfortable behaving as he wishes. This is Trump unleashed.

All of the data below is courtesy of Bill Frischling of Factba.se, an indispensable website that tracks Trump’s every utterance.

Trump has averaged about 83 tweets per week in weeks beginning in 2019 — a 43% increase from 2018, when he posted about 58 tweets per week, and a 91% increase from 2017, when he posted about 44 per week.

There has been an even more dramatic spike in Trump’s retweets, though he acknowledged in early 2018 that “when you do those retweets, they can cause problems.” He has averaged about 38 retweets a week so far this year, up a whopping 326% from about nine tweets a week in 2018 and six tweets per week in 2017.

Longer rallies

In 2017, Trump’s rally speeches averaged just under an hour, at about 59 minutes. Last year, that increased to an average of about 1 hour, 5 minutes. So far this year, Trump’s rally speeches have averaged about 1 hour, 22 minutes, a 26% increase from 2018.

What’s more, seven of the 10 longest rally speeches of Trump’s presidency have come in 2019. That is especially notable because Trump has had only 11 rallies in 2019.

In other words: seven of Trump’s 11 rallies this year have made his top 10 — compared to just three of the 56 rallies he had in 2017 and 2018.

Trump’s three longest rallies have all come since mid-July: his rally in New Mexico on Monday (1 hour, 35 minutes); his rally in North Carolina in July (just over 1 hour, 31 minutes); his rally in New Hampshire in August (just under 1 hour, 31 minutes).

We should note that some of Trump’s 2018 rallies were shortened by travel requirements: he had multi-rally, multi-state weeks during the midterm campaign, so he couldn’t linger too long in one place. Regardless, the 2019 increase is significant.

“Chopper talk” runs longer

Trump has lengthened his interactions with journalists before or after his flights on Marine One or Air Force One. Most of these exchanges have happened before he boarded Marine One, prompting CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert to label them “chopper talk.”

In 2018, Trump’s pre-flight or post-flight exchanges averaged 7 minutes, 5 seconds. So far this year, they have averaged 12 minutes, 37 seconds, a 78% increase.

A spike in camera time

Trump is just talking more, period.

Through the second week of September, Trump averaged about 2 hours, 37 minutes per week of on-camera speaking in 2019. (That excludes, for example, newspaper interviews that weren’t videotaped.)
That works out to about 25 minutes more talking per week compared to the same time last year, a 19% increase, and 55 minutes more talking per week from the same time in 2017, a 54% increase.
There’s one caveat here. If you compare how much Trump talked for the full year of 2018 to his average week so far in 2019, he’s actually down four minutes this year from last — from about 2 hours, 41 minutes to about 2 hours, 37 minutes.

But comparing all of 2018 to the first 9.5 months of 2019 is not an apples-to-apples comparison: Trump’s 2018 average was skewed upward by his frenetic midterms campaigning in October and November of that year, when he held 26 rallies in just over a month.

More talking, more lying

Trump has spoken more during a period in which his White House has been speaking less, having ended the tradition of daily briefings from the press secretary.

It’s important not to mistake Trump’s own accessibility for transparency. As we documented in August, his lengthy exchanges with reporters in July and August were littered with dozens of false claims.

In general, there has been a strong correlation between how much Trump talks and how many false claims he makes. As his speaking time has increased over time, the frequency of his dishonesty has generally increased with it.

One way to visualize all this: it took Trump 343 days to make his first 1,000 false claims as president — then just 197 days to make his second 1,000, just 93 days to make his third 1,000, and just 75 days to make his fourth 1,000, Toronto Star editor Ed Tubb found when we worked for that newspaper. Trump then slowed a little after the midterms, taking 125 days to make his fifth 1,000.

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The paradigmatic case for impeachment


by digby

I’m sure we’ll one day hear the whole story of George and Kellyanne Conway and I’m sure they’ll somehow end up being Village heroes despite the fact that Kellyanne is daily enabling this lunacy. (Why is Trump ok with her husband’s public hostility, I wonder?)

Nonetheless, there is some utility in husband George teaming up with Neal Katyal to call for impeachment. 

Among the most delicate choices the framers made in drafting the Constitution was how to deal with a president who puts himself above the law. To address that problem, they chose the mechanism of impeachment and removal from office. And they provided that this remedy could be used when a president commits “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

That last phrase — “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” — was a historical term of art, derived from impeachments in the British Parliament. When the framers put it into the Constitution, they didn’t discuss it much, because no doubt they knew what it meant. It meant, as Alexander Hamilton later phrased it, “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

Simply put, the framers viewed the president as a fiduciary, the government of the United States as a sacred trust and the people of the United States as the beneficiaries of that trust. Through the Constitution, the framers imposed upon the president the duty and obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and made him swear an oath that he would fulfill that duty of faithful execution. They believed that a president would break his oath if he engaged in self-dealing — if he used his powers to put his own interests above the nation’s. That would be the paradigmatic case for impeachment.

That’s exactly what appears to be at issue today. A whistleblower in U.S. intelligence lodged a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general so alarming that he labeled it of “urgent concern” and alerted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Though the details remain secret, apparently this much can be gleaned: The complaint is against the president. It concerns a “promise” that the president made, in at least one phone call, with a foreign leader. And it involves Ukraine and possible interference with the next presidential election. The complaint is being brazenly suppressed by the Justice Department — in defiance of a whistleblower law that says, without exception, the complaint “shall” be turned over to Congress.

We also know this: As he admitted Thursday night on CNN, the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has been trying to persuade the Ukrainian government to investigate, among other things, one of Trump’s potential Democratic opponents, former vice president Joe Biden, and Biden’s son Hunter about the latter’s involvement with a Ukrainian gas company.

Trump held up the delivery of $250 million in military assistance to Ukraine, which is under constant threat from neighboring Russia. He had a phone conversation on July 25 with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian government, the call included a discussion of Ukraine’s need to “complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA.”

So it appears that the president might have used his official powers — in particular, perhaps the threat of withholding a quarter-billion dollars in military aid — to leverage a foreign government into helping him defeat a potential political opponent in the United States.

If Trump did that, it would be the ultimate impeachable act. Trump has already done more than enough to warrant impeachment and removal with his relentless attempts, on multiple fronts, to sabotage the counterintelligence and criminal investigation by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and to conceal evidence of those attempts. The president’s efforts were impeachable because, in committing those obstructive acts, he put his personal interests above the nation’s: He tried to stop an investigation into whether a hostile foreign power, Russia, tried to interfere with our democracy — simply because he seemed to find it personally embarrassing. Trump breached his duty of faithful execution to the nation not only because he likely broke the law but also because, through his disregard for the law, he put his self-interest first.

The current whistleblowing allegations, however, are even worse. Unlike the allegations of conspiracy with Russia before the 2016 election, these concern Trump’s actions as president, not as a private citizen, and his exercise of presidential powers over foreign policy with Ukraine. Moreover, with Russia, at least there was an attempt to get the facts through the Mueller investigation; here the White House is trying to shut down the entire inquiry from the start — depriving not just the American people, but even congressional intelligence committees, of necessary information.

It is high time for Congress to do its duty, in the manner the framers intended. Given how Trump seems ever bent on putting himself above the law, something like what might have happened between him and Ukraine — abusing presidential authority for personal benefit — was almost inevitable. Yet if that is what occurred, part of the responsibility lies with Congress, which has failed to act on the blatant obstruction that Mueller detailed months ago.

Congressional procrastination has probably emboldened Trump, and it risks emboldening future presidents who might turn out to be of his sorry ilk. To borrow John Dean’s haunting Watergate-era metaphor once again, there is a cancer on the presidency, and cancers, if not removed, only grow. Congress bears the duty to use the tools provided by the Constitution to remove that cancer now, before it’s too late. As Elbridge Gerry put it at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, “A good magistrate will not fear [impeachments]. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them.” By now, Congress should know which one Trump is.

If this doesn’t do it, I suspect he truly believes that he literally could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and the Democrats wouldn’t do anything about it.

Imagine if the worst happens and he “manages” to eke out a victory in 2020.  That’s what he’s committing impeachable offenses right now to engineer.

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One lone Fox News commentator tells the truth


by digby

John Amato caught the one Fox News apostate telling the real story. Do any of them hear him?

Shepard Smith began his Fox News program by blistering Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump over their calls to investigate the Biden family.

Before William Barr came along, Trump and his bagmen tried to hide their dealings with foreign governments who they tasked with doing the wet-work they need against his political rivals, but now it’s all out in the open.

Smith said, “President Trump says it doesn’t matter if he talked to the president of Ukraine about investigating Joe Biden. A whistleblower reportedly says the president made a promise to a foreign leader. A watch dog calls it of urgent concern, but Congress is still trying to find out what the whistle-blower knows.”

He continued, “A report from the Ukrainian government reads in part, Donald Trump is convinced that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve images of Ukraine, complete investigation of corruption cases which inhibited the interaction between the Ukraine and the USA.”

Smith reported that all the indications are the whistle-blower’s complaints stem from Trump’s direct conversation with the president of the Ukraine.

Smith then played video of Rudy Giuliani admitting vociferously that they wanted the Ukraine government to investigate the Bidens at Trump’s behest.

After the crazed interview of Rudy finished, Smith said, “The subject matter about which they were speaking is a debunked conspiracy theory.”

In roughly 3 minutes Shepard Smith encapsulated the entire conspiracy between Trump, Rudy Giuliani and the Ukrainian government.

And it’s one in which impeachment proceedings should begin immediately if the evidence tells us this is what happened.

That’s how you put a bow on a story, Shep.

They pay cash

by digby

“Saudi Arabia…they buy apartments from me, they spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”

This is why @realDonaldTrump is protecting the Saudi Crown Prince from murder. It’s also the reason Trump needs to be removed from office. pic.twitter.com/2sk6p83HiW

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) November 19, 2018

While we were all talking about Ukraine, this happened too:

President Trump has approved the deployment of additional U.S. troops and air defense assets to Saudi Arabia, in a muted military response to last week’s attack on Saudi oil facilities.

At a news conference late Friday following a White House meeting with Trump, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper emphasized that the deployments were defensive in nature, and in response to requests from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to help protect “critical infrastructure” from further attacks by Iran.

Recall this from Trump a couple of weeks ago:

We have to sit down with the Saudis and work something out. And the Saudis want very much for us to protect them, but I say, well, we have to work. That was an attack on Saudi Arabia, and that wasn’t an attack on us.

But we would certainly help them. They’ve been a great ally. They spend $400 billion in our country over the last number of years. Four hundred billion dollars. That’s a million and a half jobs. And they’re not ones that, unlike some countries, where they want terms; they want terms and conditions. They want to say, “Can we borrow the money at zero percent for the next 400 years?” No. No. Saudi Arabia pays cash. They’ve helped us out from the standpoint of jobs and all of the other things. And they’ve actually helped us.

His childlike understanding of global politics is entirely based upon his experience as a money launderer.

Oh, and when he says “they pay cash” he’s talking about all the money they have paid him personally over the years — including during  his time as president.

Air Force crews are not Turnberry’s only conspicuous guests. Earlier this summer, according to a resort staffer, a group of Saudi royals stayed at the resort for about a week, bringing a party of 25 people. https://t.co/WXcP6f9Mb3

— POLITICO (@politico) September 18, 2019

Also, Trump Hotel.

And:

Trump’s financial dealings with Saudi Arabia have been anything but small change. In 2001, he sold the entire 45th floor of Trump Tower to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for $4.5 million. The fact that Trump is the 45th president serves as further proof that the universe has a gruesome sense of humor.

“The five apartments included 10 bedrooms and 13 bathrooms at the time of the sale,” reports The New York Daily News, “and had yearly common charges of $85,585 for building amenities, documents obtained by the Daily News show. If those common charges remain the same, Trump was paid at least $5.7 million by the Saudi government since 2001.” In 2008, that entire 45th floor of Trump Tower, according to the Daily News, “became part of the Saudi Mission to the United Nations.”

Shorter version: The government of Saudi Arabia is literally living in Trump’s house today, right now, and is paying him for the privilege.

Now he’s sending them some troops. They get what they pay for.

*And note that when Trump makes that (wildly exaggerated) claim at his rally in the video above all his little ans laugh and think he’s very clever.  They have no problem with it.

Seeing Trump through a foreigner’s eyes

by digby

For whatever reason, I have never lost the feeling of shock and disbelief that someone as illiterate and incoherent as Trump could be president. But there has been substantial normalization among the American press where we can often see an “oh that’s just Trump being Trump” attitude.

Here’s how it looks to a reporter who isn’t subjected to him unfiltered every single day:

As a regular news reader I thought I was across the eccentricities of the US president. Most mornings in Australia begin with news from America – the bid to buy Greenland, adjustments to a weather map hand-drawn with a Sharpie or another self-aggrandising tweet. Our headlines and news bulletins, like headlines and news bulletins everywhere, are full of Trump.

As a political reporter for most of the last 30 years I have also endured many long and rambling political press conferences with Australian prime ministers and world leaders.

But watching a full presidential Trump press conference while visiting the US this week I realised how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.
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The press conference I tuned into by chance from my New York hotel room was held in Otay Mesa, California, and concerned a renovated section of the wall on the Mexican border.

I joined as the president was explaining at length how powerful the concrete was. Very powerful, it turns out. It was unlike any wall ever built, incorporating the most advanced “concrete technology”. It was so exceptional that would-be wall-builders from three unnamed countries had visited to learn from it.

There were inner tubes in the wall that were also filled with concrete, poured in via funnels, and also “rebars” so the wall would withstand anyone attempting to cut through it with a blowtorch.

The wall went very deep and could not be burrowed under. Prototypes had been tested by 20 “world-class mountain climbers – That’s all they do, they love to climb mountains”, who had been unable to scale it.

It was also “wired, so that we will know if somebody is trying to break through”, although one of the attending officials declined a presidential invitation to discuss this wiring further, saying, “Sir, there could be some merit in not discussing it”, which the president said was a “very good answer”.

The wall was “amazing”, “world class”, “virtually impenetrable” and also “a good, strong rust colour” that could later be painted. It was designed to absorb heat, so it was “hot enough to fry an egg on”. There were no eggs to hand, but the president did sign his name on it and spoke for so long the TV feed eventually cut away, promising to return if news was ever made.

In writing about this not-especially-important or unusual press conference I’ve run into what US reporters must encounter every day

He did, at one point, concede that would-be immigrants, unable to scale, burrow, blow torch or risk being burned, could always walk around the incomplete structure, but that would require them walking a long way. This seemed to me to be an important point, but the monologue quickly returned to the concrete.

In writing about this not-especially-important or unusual press conference I’ve run into what US reporters must encounter every day. I’ve edited skittering, half-finished sentences to present them in some kind of consequential order and repeated remarks that made little sense.

In most circumstances, presenting information in as intelligible a form as possible is what we are trained for. But the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the editing does our readers a disservice.

I’ve read so many stories about his bluster and boasting and ill-founded attacks, I’ve listened to speeches and hours of analysis, and yet I was still taken back by just how disjointed and meandering the unedited president could sound. Here he was trying to land the message that he had delivered at least something towards one of his biggest campaign promises and sounding like a construction manager with some long-winded and badly improvised sales lines.

I’d understood the dilemma of normalising Trump’s ideas and policies – the racism, misogyny and demonisation of the free press. But watching just one press conference from Otay Mesa helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.

• Lenore Taylor is the editor of Guardian Australia.

Yes, he isn’t just a person of terrible character. He’s really, really dumb as well.

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