TRUMP is seriously dangerous

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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby PufPuf93 » Fri Aug 18, 2017 12:58 pm

This is a very good piece of investigative journalism from the Bill Moyer website. Way to much to copy to RI.

Interactive Timeline: Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump

Explore our updated, comprehensive Trump/Russia timeline — or select one of the central players in the Trump/Russia saga to see what we know about them.

By Steven Harper | August 14, 2017

From the outset, Donald Trump has called the search for the truth about connections between his 2016 campaign and Russia a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Along the way, he has taken unprecedented steps to stop it. As President Trump foments chaos and confusion about what actually happened — and what continues to happen — this Trump/Russia timeline seeks to offer order and clarity.

Since we first launched it in February, the timeline has grown from 24 entries to more than 400 — and the saga is far from over. Reading it from start to finish is a daunting task, so we’ve added tools that enable users to narrow its content by individual. And, of course, we’ll continue updating it.

Are several congressional committees and special counsel Robert Mueller wasting their time on a “hoax” and a “witch hunt”? Review the timeline, follow updates as they appear and decide for yourself.


http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-russia-timeline/
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Aug 18, 2017 6:32 pm

Newly Leaked Emails Just Revealed Trump Family Implicated In $350 Million Fraud Investigation

By Grant Stern
Politics | Published on August 16, 2017

It’s beginning to look like Special Counsel Mueller will catch President Trump and his three eldest children committing the first ever reality TV show assisted financial crime, all collaborating in a $350 million dollar bank fraud related to the Trump SoHo Condominium Hotel.

The fraud-riddled Trump SoHo project ultimately failed and was foreclosed upon by lenders in 2014, but its legacy lives on in a byzantine web of lawsuits.

We’ve obtained leaked copies of those emails related to a key lawsuit related to the Trump SoHo – which are embedded below – that outline the Trump family’s complicity in a major financial crime.

They show that Donald Trump and his three eldest children participated in a cover up in order to keep borrowing massive construction loans on the hotel they pitched on NBC’s Apprentice from failing during the financial downturn. The Trump Organization earned $3 million dollars from the fraud just last year alone, even as the hotel’s fortunes have sunk post-election.

Three weeks ago, Bloomberg News reported that Mueller is focusing on the lower Manhattan Trump Soho Hotel deal and Vanity Fair reported recently that new emails reveal the Trump family’s participation in a criminal enterprise there.

Now, the newly leaked email chain also confirms a major German public television report (ZDF) on the Trump SoHo hotel.

ZDF interviewed an American national financial fraud expert Professor William Black, who was told the sordid tale of the Trump SoHo frauds without being told the names of the participants.

He concluded that based on their thorough reporting that the First Family participated in a business that was committing bank fraud in a pattern and a practice of illegal conduct which violated the federal racketeering laws known as the RICO Act.

RICO Act cases are subject to enforcement in both civil lawsuits with tripled damages and criminal law, with jail and restitution to the victims as the penalty.
Trump SoHo’s Developers Screwed Their Employees, So They Sued For Racketeering

A lawsuit by Trump’s former development partners Bayrock, the company led by a mafia associate & Russian-emigre Felix Sater, has already exposed a direct tie between Donald Trump’s New York City development activities at Trump SoHo and Vladimir Putin’s money.

Former Bayrock executive Jody Kriss sued his former employer and Sater – who was Trump’s business partner and longtime advisor – for operating a criminal enterprise (RICO), committing bank fraud and refusing to pay employee-related bonuses he had earned.

Bank obligations forbid loans to known felons or the companies they operate.

As both a manager and member of Bayrock’s limited liability company which borrowed the money, Felix Sater both owned and operated the Trump SoHo project.

Anyone in the transaction who knew participated in the enterprise and hid that material fact from the bank if they knew about it, becomes the party to a criminal enterprise.

In mid-December 2007, New York Times publicly revealed that Felix Sater had secretly entered financial felony plea deal in the late 1990s, and was also convicted of a felony assault against the mafia associate from a bar fight.

Hiding a Sater’s involvement in Bayrock and the Trump SoHo project is a form of criminal bank fraud.

Newly leaked emails from an attorney for one of the Bayrock partners named the Sapir Organization – documents an urgent “time sensitive and should not be pushed back” detail a meeting which all of the Trumps demanded with Sater and Bayrock on January 21st, 2008.

Donald Trump, his daughter Ivanka and sons Don Jr. and Eric collectively demanded and presumably attended the important meeting to chew out Bayrock about the project, and specifically Felix Sater about his felony past.

Instead of informing banks and buyers about Sater’s criminal past, as was the Trump Organization’s obligation, the Trump family proceeded to keep the felony secret as Sater engaged in a scheme to hide his interests in the deal.

We know because Sater wrote to Bayrock’s investors in Iceland (who laundered Putin’s money) complaining that his own company wanted to fire him over his felony convictions after meeting the Trumps.

Story continues below:

Here is the smoking gun email explaining that the Trump family and all partners in the venture wanted to attend the meeting (full chain embedded below) to discuss Sater’s felony past, which they then kept secret:
The Trump family’s urgent request for meeting is conveyed by lawyers for his partners in Trump SoHo, the Sapir Organization
Trump family’s urgent request for meeting is conveyed by lawyers for his partners in Trump SoHo, the Sapir Organization
The Trumps Stood To Benefit Financially From Participating In A Criminal Enterprise

Donald Trump had a lot to lose by removing his name from the SoHo project if the construction loans were canceled. Bloomberg reports:

The hook at Bayrock, for Trump, was an 18 percent equity stake in what became the Trump Soho hotel, a steady stream of management fees on all Bayrock projects and the ability to plaster his name on properties without having to invest a single dollar of his own.

So, instead of doing the right thing, the Trump family proceeded to squeeze their partner through Bayrock, Felix Sater, to take his financial stake in the deal. (email)

Sater’s after-action report was discovered in court in the form of a smoking gun email in Forbes that described the meeting with the Trump family in detail and cemented his involvement in a scheme to defraud using Trump SoHo.

The email message completely revealed Trump’s future Senior Advisor describing in great detail the finer points of his scheme to defraud the banks to his project’s Icelandic equity investors from Stodir (aka FL Group), who themselves went bankrupt only 9 months later.

Sater even intricately recounted the story of Bayrock’s General Counsel Julius Schwarz’s attempt to immediately force him out of Bayrock over the revelation of his felony conviction which he described as “damaging.”

The Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is America’s top anti-mafia federal law and the threshold for violating the law is merely participating in a business which engages in a pattern of illegal or fraudulent behavior.

New York state also has a RICO law, which is not subject to the powers of the Presidential pardon and could be enforced by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, alongside any federal investigation.

“The statute of limitations on RICO acts lasts for ten years from the last known act,” for RICO based upon bank fraud, according to lawyer Joshua Gold, who is licensed to practice in New York since 1999. “These emails are less than ten years old.”

Even though Trump’s participation in the project dates back to far more than ten years ago — and was far more than just licensing the family’s brand name — only criminal acts like hiding his partner’s felony count, start the clock ticking on the ten years a prosecutor could call forth a criminal case on the matter.
Hawking the Trump SoHo Hotel on NBC’s The Apprentice

During Season 5 of NBC’s “The Apprentice” Donald Trump awarded a job at the Trump SoHo Hotel to winner Sean Yazbek in February 2006.

Later, Donald Trump pitched the Trump SoHo Condo Hotel project on The Apprentice in early September 2007. He launched the boxy tower shortly thereafter according to the New York Daily News with “servers in masks pour champagne while Cirque du Soleil performed. The reigning Miss USA attended.”

Trump’s development group borrowed $350 million of the $450 million cost of building Trump SoHo from banks, they apparently couldn’t swallow their pride, risk a very high profile foreclosure, and tell their bank lenders the truth and suffer the consequences.

The following year two major Wall Street firms failed killing real estate lending markets for years, and Donald Trump stopped hawking the Trump SoHo deal on NBC.

Story continues below:
Trump SoHo Crashed And Never Recovered

By the end of 2009, the New York Times reported that the condotel market had been dead as far back as 2007, which would’ve given Donald Trump, even more of an incentive to conceal material information that would cause his lenders to repossess his tower during the crash.

Eventually, lenders did foreclose on the property and sold off the Trump SoHo condo after 2/3rds of the units remained unsold in 2014.

The information about Trump and Sater defrauding banks has come to light only because attorneys Fred Oberlander and Richard Lerner refused to back down. They filed and are litigating two of the civil cases against the Trump SoHo’s developers.

Federal judges and prosecutors threatened them with prosecution for revealing that Sater was given an illegally light sentence for his crime, in secret. The judges even issued an order that gagged them from telling Congress about the judges’ own misconduct, but the attorneys persisted and are pursuing a civil law claim against the developers of Trump SoHo.

The attorney Richard Lerner has since written an extensive, fact-checked article about the harmful effects of secret sentencing in Law360 based on his wild experiences in the Trump SoHo case with Sater, who became an FBI informant against his mafia partners in the scheme.
Conclusion

Special Counsel Mueller will have his hands full unraveling all of the Russian money connections to the Trump SoHo project.

It’s increasingly looking like there is substantive proof of criminal ties between the Trump family and Felix Sater, which may deliver the evidence of crime prosecutors seek to flip witnesses against larger targets.

Even worse for the Trump family, the criminal liability triggered by their ill advised bank fraud cover up can be prosecuted in both federal court – where the President could pardon his children – and in state court, where he cannot pardon crimes.

Theoretically, even Donald Trump’s children could turn into the state’s witnesses against their father, the President because he recklessly dragged them into the Trump SoHo bank fraud scheme and cover up of their shady real estate deal partners’ financial crimes.

Here are the two sets of smoking gun emails, with the exclusive email chain linked here:

Felix Satter Email Chain Shows Trump Family Met About His Felony Past by Grant Stern on Scribd

Smoking Gun Email From Felix Sater to Icelandic Bankers Describing Fraud Scheme by Grant Stern on Scribd

Add your name to millions demanding that Congress take action on the President’s crimes. IMPEACH DONALD TRUMP!
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Grant Stern

Grant Stern is an Editor-At-Large and Podcast host for OccupyDemocrats. He's also mortgage broker, writer, community activist and radio personality in Miami, Florida.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby Elvis » Sat Aug 19, 2017 3:05 am

I read this on the bus—never realizing it's by Naomi Klein! :lovehearts:

Until I read this I had no idea of the extent of Trumpf's involvement with professional wrestling. He even wrestled on TV eight times! (I never saw a Trump TV show aside from clips posted here.)

The kayfabe charactarization always made sense, but that's what he knows and it's really happening.

Funny, "kayfabe" isn't mentioned in the article, though she must have encountered it along the way(?).

From the September 2017 issue
W.W.E. the People

By Naomi Klein

By Naomi Klein, from No Is Not Enough, which was published in June by Haymarket Books. Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine, among other books.

The colonization of network television by reality TV at the turn of the millennium happened at a speed that few could have predicted. In very short order, North Americans went from deriving entertainment from scripted shows with the same characters and dramas week after week, season after season, to watching seemingly unscripted shows on which the drama came from people’s willingness to eject one another from whatever simulation of reality happened to be on display. Tens of millions were glued to their TVs as participants were voted off the island on Survivor, removed from the mansion on The Bachelor — and, eventually, fired by Donald Trump on The Apprentice.

The timing made sense. The first season of Survivor — so wildly successful that it spawned an army of imitators — was in 2000. That was two decades after Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher kicked the “free-market revolution,” with its veneration of greed, individualism, and competition as the governing principles of society, into high gear. It became possible to peddle as mass entertainment the spectacle of people turning on one another for a pot of gold.

The whole genre — the alliances, the backstabbing, the one person left standing — was always a kind of capitalist burlesque. Before The Apprentice, however, there was at least the pretext that it was about something else: how to live in the wilderness, how to catch a husband, how to be a housemate. With Donald Trump’s arrival, the veneer was gone. The Apprentice was explicitly about the race to survive in the cutthroat jungle of late capitalism.

The first episode began with a shot of a homeless person sleeping on the street. Soon the camera cut to Trump in his limo, living the dream. The message was unmistakable: You can be the homeless guy, or you can be Trump. That was the sadistic drama of the show: Play your cards right and be the one lucky winner, or suffer the abject humiliation of being berated and then fired by the boss. It was quite a cultural feat. After decades of mass layoffs, declining living standards, and the normalization of extremely precarious employment, Trump and Mark Burnett, the producer, delivered the coup de grâce: They turned the act of firing people into mass entertainment.

Every week, to an audience of millions, The Apprentice delivered the central sales pitch of free-market theory, telling viewers that by unleashing their most selfish and ruthless side, they were actually being heroic, creating jobs and fueling growth. Don’t be nice, be a killer. That’s how you help the economy and, more importantly, yourself.

In later seasons, the underlying cruelty of the show grew even more perverse. The winning team lived in a luxurious mansion. They drank champagne in inflatable pool loungers, zipped off in limos to meet celebrities. The losing team was deported to tents in the back yard, nicknamed Trump Trailer Park.

The tent-dwellers, whom Trump gleefully deemed the have-nots, didn’t have electricity, ate off paper plates, and slept to the sounds of howling dogs. They could peek through a gap in the hedge to see what decadent wonders the haves were enjoying. Trump and Burnett, in other words, deliberately created a microcosm of the very real and ever-widening inequalities outside the show, the same injustices that have enraged many Trump voters — but they played those inequalities for kicks. On one show, Trump told the tent team that “life’s a bitch,” so they’d better do everything possible to step over the losers and become a winner like him.

In this particular piece of televised class warfare, which aired in 2007, the pretense sold to a previous generation — that capitalism was going to create the best of all possible worlds — was completely absent. No: This was a system that generated a few big winners and hordes of losers, so you’d better make damn sure you’re on the winning team.

It’s worth remembering that Trump’s breakthrough to national celebrity came not from a real estate sale but from a book about making real estate sales. The Art of the Deal, marketed as holding the secrets to fabulous wealth, was published in 1987, at the peak of the Reagan era. It was followed up over the years with crasser variations on the same theme: Think Big and Kick Ass, Trump 101, and How to Get Rich.

Trump first started selling the notion that he held the key to joining the One Percent at the precise moment when many of the ladders that provided social mobility — such as free, high-quality public education — were being kicked away, and just as the social safety net was being shredded. All this meant that the drive to magically strike it rich, to win big, to make it to that safe economic stratum, became increasingly frantic.

Trump, who was born wealthy, expertly profited off that desperation across many platforms, most infamously through Trump University. And then there were the casinos, a large chunk of Trump’s domestic real estate portfolio. The dream at the center of the casino economy is not so different from the dream for sale at Trump University or in How to Get Rich: You may be on the verge of personal bankruptcy today, but if you (literally) play your cards right, you could be living large by morning.

Trump built his brand by selling the promise that “you, too, could be Donald Trump” — at a time when life was becoming more precarious if you weren’t in the richest One Percent. He then turned around and used that very same pitch — that he would make America a country of winners again — on voters, exploiting their deep economic anxieties with the reality-simulation skills that he had picked up on TV. After decades of hawking how-to-get-rich manuals, Trump understood exactly how little substance needed to be behind the promise if the desperation was great enough.

Well before Trump’s rise, elections had already crossed over into ratings-driven infotainment. What Trump did was exponentially increase the entertainment factor, and therefore the ratings. As a veteran of the form, he understood that if elections had become a form of reality TV, then the best contestant (not the same thing as the best candidate) would win. Maybe they wouldn’t win the final vote, but they would at least win wall-to-wall coverage, which from a branding perspective is still winning. As Trump said when he was contemplating a presidential run in 2000 (he decided against it): “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”

Since the election, we’ve heard a few mea culpas from media executives acknowledging that they abetted Trump’s victory by giving him such an outsized portion of their coverage. Yet the biggest gift to Trump was not just airtime but the entire infotainment model of election coverage, which plays up interpersonal dramas between the candidates while largely abandoning the traditional journalistic task of explaining how different candidates’ positions on issues such as health care and regulatory reform will play out in voters’ lives.

Trump didn’t create the problem — he exploited it. And because he understood the conventions of fake reality better than anyone, he took the game to a new level. He didn’t just bring the conventions of reality TV to electoral politics — he mashed them up with another blockbuster entertainment genre also based on cartoonishly fake performances of reality: professional wrestling.

It’s hard to overstate Trump’s fascination with wrestling. He has performed as himself (the ultrarich boss) in World Wrestling Entertainment appearances at least eight times, enough to earn him a place in the W.W.E. Hall of Fame. In a Battle of the Billionaires, he pretended to pound wrestling kingpin Vince McMahon, and then celebrated his victory by publicly shaving McMahon’s head in front of the cheering throng. He also dropped thousands of dollars in cash into the audience of screaming fans. Now he has appointed the former CEO of W.W.E., Linda McMahon (Vince’s wife), to his Cabinet as the head of the Small Business Administration (a detail that has largely been lost amid the daily scandals).

Like The Apprentice, Trump’s side career in pro wrestling exposed and endeared him to a massive audience — in stadiums, on TV, and online. Pro wrestling might be invisible as a cultural force to most liberal voters, but W.W.E. generated $729 million in revenue last year. And Trump did more than pick up votes from this experience — he also picked up tips.

As Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone, Trump’s entire campaign had a distinctly W.W.E. quality. He carefully nurtured feuds with other candidates, and handed out insulting nicknames (Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted). He played ringmaster at his own rallies, complete with over-the-top insult-chants (“Killary,” “Lock her up!”), and directed the crowd’s rage at the designated villains: journalists and demonstrators. Outsiders would emerge from these events shaken, not sure what had just happened. What had happened was a cross between a pro-wrestling match and a white-supremacist rally.

Reality television and professional wrestling are relatively new forms of mass entertainment, and they establish a relationship with reality that is at once fake and genuine. With W.W.E., every fight is fixed and rehearsed. But that doesn’t lessen the enjoyment. The fact that everyone is in on the joke, that the cheers and boos are part of the show, increases the fun. The artifice is not a drawback — it’s the point.

So Trump sees himself less as a president than as the executive producer :lol: :shock: of his country, with an eye always on the ratings. Responding to the suggestion that he fire his press secretary, he reportedly said, “I’m not firing Sean Spicer. That guy gets great ratings. Everyone tunes in.”

It’s with the same brash showmanship that Trump is now navigating — or failing to navigate — the promises that he would impose a “Buy American, hire American” policy, and thereby bring back the bygone days of booming factories and blue-collar jobs that paid middle-class wages. (Never mind that his own empire is built on exploiting outsourced labor.)

This posture is as authentic as the violence he enacted when he appeared to take on a W.W.E. wrestler in the ring, or when he was choosing among contestants on The Celebrity Apprentice. Trump knows as well as anyone that the idea of American corporations returning to 1970s-style manufacturing is a cruel joke. He knows this because, as his own business practices attest, a great many U.S. companies are no longer manufacturers at all but hollow shells, buying their own products from a web of cheap contractors. He may be able to bring back a few factories, or claim that he did, but the numbers will be minuscule compared with the need.

Trump’s plan, which is already under way, is to approach the unemployment and underemployment crisis in the same way he approaches everything — as a spectacle. He will claim credit for a relatively small number of jobs — most of which would have been created anyway — and then market the hell out of those supposed success stories. It won’t matter one bit whether the numbers support his claims. He’ll edit reality to fit his narrative, as he learned to do on The Apprentice, and just as he did on his very first day as president, insisting contrary to all objective evidence that his inauguration crowds had been historic.

So far it seems to be working, at least with his base. Some liberals have seized on this apparent tolerance for “alternative facts” to dismiss his working-class voters as “suckers.” But it’s worth remembering that a large portion of Barack Obama’s base was quite happy to embrace the carefully crafted symbols his administration created — the White House lit up like a rainbow to celebrate gay marriage; the shift to a civil, erudite tone; the spectacle of an incredibly appealing First Family free of major scandals for eight years. These were all good things, but too often these same supporters looked the other way when it came to the drone warfare that killed countless civilians; the deportation of roughly 2.5 million people; broken promises to close Guantánamo or dismantle George W. Bush’s mass-surveillance architecture. Obama positioned himself as a climate hero, but at one point bragged that his administration had “added enough new oil and gas pipelines to encircle the earth and then some.”

Of course, Trump’s successful attempt to sell his white working-class voters on the dream of a manufacturing comeback will eventually come crashing to earth. But what is most worrying is what Trump will do then. In all likelihood, he will double down on the only other tools he has left: bashing and blaming immigrants, riling up fears about black crime, launching fiercer attacks on reproductive rights and on the press. And then, of course, there’s always war.

Blood-sport reality TV is, after all, a science-fiction cliché. Think of The Hunger Games, with its reality-TV spectacle in which all but one of the players die. Or The Running Man, another film about a televised event where the stakes are life or death. Wilbur Ross, Trump’s commerce secretary, reportedly described the April bombing of Syria as Mar-a-Lago’s “after-dinner entertainment.”

Trump has only just started playing his version of the Mar-a-Lago Hunger Games, with the full arsenal of U.S. military power — and he is getting plenty of encouragement to keep upping the ante. When he launched Tomahawk missiles against Syria, the MSNBC host Brian Williams declared the images “beautiful.” One week later, Trump went for more spectacle, dropping the U.S. military’s largest non-nuclear weapon on a cave complex in Afghanistan, an act of violence so indiscriminate and disproportionate that analysts struggled to find any rationale that could resemble a coherent military strategy. There was no strategy — the megatonnage was the message.

Given that Trump ordered the use of a weapon that had never been deployed in combat before, and given that he did this just twelve weeks into his presidency and with no obvious provocation, there is little reason to hope he will be able to resist putting on the show of shows — the apocalyptic violence of a full-blown war, made for TV, with guaranteed blockbuster ratings. Well before Trump, we had wars that were fought as televised entertainment. The 1990 Gulf War was dubbed the first video-game war, complete with its own logo and theme music on CNN. And that was nothing compared with the show put on during the 2003 Iraq invasion, based on a military strategy called Shock and Awe. The attacks were designed as a spectacle for cable news consumers, but also for Iraqis, to maximize their sense of helplessness, to “teach them a lesson.”

That fearsome technology is now in the hands of the first reality-TV star president.

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/09/w-w-e-the-people/
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Aug 20, 2017 1:09 pm

Mentioning it would rather give away how much she'd cribbed from Eric Weinstein's great Edge Question essay so many years back. Weinstein is a very problematic commodity at this point, being associated with Thiel The Malevolent already, and on top it, his brother is behind that "Free Speech" flap at Evergreen College that got their campus shut down by students with bats doing safety patrols.

Fraught times, but it's been great for getting butts into the seats. I don't think professional wrestling has ever been enjoyed by so many Americans before.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby norton ash » Sun Aug 20, 2017 3:34 pm

Fraught times, but it's been great for getting butts into the seats. I don't think professional wrestling has ever been enjoyed by so many Americans before.


Wrestling's always been yuge for the mentally retarded intellectually challenged.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Sun Aug 20, 2017 3:57 pm

That's a little uncalled for norton.
The golden age of professional wrestling, from 1985 to around 1996,had a lot going for it in terms of physical performance and psychology.
The genre has many critics, and IMO has generally become shit these days, but I take your above statement a little personally.
Also, you're painting with a pretty wide brush.

Forbes speculated that WrestleMania 32 could break the WWE attendance record of 93,173 set at WrestleMania III at the Pontiac Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan. This record stood as the highest attendance for any indoor event until the 2010 NBA All-Star Game, also held at AT&T Stadium, drew 108,713.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby norton ash » Sun Aug 20, 2017 4:04 pm

I just can't with wrestling. I love fiction, sports, drama, opera and spectacle. Which is like saying I love honey, anchovies, sriracha, cream of wheat, and scotch whiskey. Maybe they just shouldn't be mixed together.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby 82_28 » Sun Aug 20, 2017 4:19 pm

This is from that Bill Palmer cat that sometimes gets linked to. I normally wouldn't repost him but this makes some sense, no?

Donald Trump’s Phoenix rally is already shaping up to be a staged debacle

By any rational standards, Donald Trump’s decision to hold a rally in Phoenix this week is inexplicable. The nation is coming off a tragedy and crisis in Charlottesville, and no politicians should be campaigning right now. Trump in particular is on thin ice, and should be focused on governing, not congratulatory pep rallies. And there’s a very real danger that his white supremacist supporters will show up and turn violent. And yet the inappropriateness of the rally may be Trump’s entire point. Scattered evidence says it’s already shaping up to be a staged debacle.

Last night one of Donald Trump’s own most prominent online supporters, Mike Cernovich, made this admission on Twitter: “I’m told some Trump supporters will be wearing ANTIFA attire and going undercover during Trump Phoenix rally” (link). And then today a Craigslist ad surfaced which supposedly shows the Trump campaign hiring minorities to show up to the rally and pretend to be Trump supporters (link). Neither of these assertions is independently confirmable as of yet, but the latter got the attention of MSNBC host Joy Reid, who retweeted it and added “Jesus, Mary and casting director.”

The scary part is that it’s entirely believable that Trump’s white supremacist fans would show up dressed as anti-Trump protesters so they can cause trouble and cause the protesters to get blamed. And no one will be shocked if it turns out Trump really is hiring people to show up and pretend to be his supporters; after all, he was caught hiring seat fillers for his poorly attended inauguration. And of course there’s the widespread speculation, which Trump has fanned himself with a recent retweet, that he might use the rally to issue a pardon to racist criminal former Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

This all comes at a time when the nation is supposed to trying to figure out how to heal from Charlottesville, and how to come together and rise above Nazi and white supremacist hate. Instead Donald Trump appears to be looking to put on a shitshow for the ages, which can only serve to make things worse for him and for America.


http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/tru ... acle/4417/
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun Aug 20, 2017 4:48 pm

Thanks for posting the Wash. Journal article, Robert. Here's the Forbes article from last October, written by Richard Behar:

Oct 3, 2016 @ 07:59 AM

Donald Trump And The Felon: Inside His Business Dealings With A Mob-Connected Hustler unveiling Sater's emails

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardbehar/2016/10/03/donald-trump-and-the-felon-inside-his-business-dealings-with-a-mob-connected-hustler/#75077c562282

And other coverage from Forbes since:

Mar 20, 2017 @ 07:45 AM

Inside Trump's Russia Connections: The Felon And The Pop Star

By Chase Peterson-Withorn

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2017/03/20/inside-trumps-russia-connections-the-felon-and-the-pop-star/#7596687c3a47

Fraught times, but it's been great for getting butts into the seats. I don't think professional wrestling has ever been enjoyed by so many Americans before.


Certainly not at this level of competition. That's what happens when it's aired on every channel 24/7.

What's difficult for me to understand is what exactly is evolving, as kayfabe becomes our history? Anyone see a future filled with greater freedoms than some of us now used to enjoy, like privacy?
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby 8bitagent » Mon Aug 21, 2017 3:30 am

Lost in all this hub bub about a reality tv star acting as world leader, fucking god damn Nobel prize worthy hero Chelsea Manning is now free.
Much as the neo-fascist regime of Trump and his cretin ogres want to see trans people wiped out, it was neo-con Obama and Bush regimes
who wanted Manning put away for life. Well Manning is out, and has a message for both the war mongers and neo-fascists...

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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby 8bitagent » Mon Aug 21, 2017 3:33 am

Astrologers believe the Total Eclipse may make President Trump even more crazy/or world events more crazy
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 580260001/
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 21, 2017 9:25 am

Eclipse of Reason

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon Aug 21, 2017 11:36 am

The eclipse is the Black Sun.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Aug 21, 2017 11:42 am

Iamwhomiam » Mon Aug 21, 2017 10:36 am wrote:The eclipse is the Black Sun.


My sense of the black sun is that it is external to our solar system and supremely disinterested in human life outside of some use it has for us.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon Aug 21, 2017 3:56 pm

I do agree, but a total eclipse I am sure is what initially prompted the "myth" in all its current derivations, Mayan to New Age Nazi. Radiating rays of light from a source hidden by darkness.

Of course, there are two points of view that must be considered when dealing with topics like The Black Sun.

six of one, half-dozen of the other, same ol' same ol'. Ying Yang.
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