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by 82_28 » Wed May 25, 2016 1:10 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed May 25, 2016 1:16 pm
Trump’s Top Campaign Advisor Made Millions From Arms Dealers, Warlords, Dictators and Oligarchs
Report: “Manafort was responsible for representing some of the world’s most unsavory clients.”
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet May 25, 2016
Donald Trump’s top presidential campaign advisor is a world-class thug.
Paul Manafort, who Trump brought on in March as his Republican Convention strategist and recently elevated to campaign chairman, has worked for notorious arms dealers, warlords, dictators and international tycoons who have left trails of unrest mayhem and death or looted their country’s treasuries, according to a new report by the American Bridge 21st Century PAC, which is primarily funded by a who’s who of Democratic donors including George Soros.
“In 1981, the Trump Organization had employed Manafort’s lobbying firm Black, Manafort, and Stone – which included Trump accolyte Roger Stone – making it one of the firm’s very first clients,” said the PAC’s research summary. “There and on his own, Manafort was responsible for representing some of the world’s most unsavory clients on behalf of what the press called the ‘Torturers’ Lobby.’
The PAC then gave more than a dozen examples from the past three decades of Manafort’s career as a lobbyist, influence peddler and deal-maker, starting with being an international arms dealer to pocketing millions from eastern block clients who sought to park their assets in the West.
What follows is American Bridge’s research summary:
• Manafort represented Middle Eastern arms dealer Abdul Rahman El-Assir in the 1990s and even used his house as collateral in 2004 to secure a loan from El-Assir. Manafort claimed to French investigators that he received payment for advising the 1995 French presidential campaign of hopeful Édouard Balladur from the bank account of El-Assir. El-Assir was the middleman in the sale of French submarines to Pakistan.
• Manafort also claimed that his translator while advising Balladur was Ziad Takieddine, who was also involved in the arms deal. As of 2013, Takieddine was in prison for trying to procure a false passport. To the knowledge of American Bridge, the nature of Manafort’s translator has not been reported in the American press.
• Manafort’s firm represented Angolan guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi, making over $600,000 in 1985 alone. Savimbi and his UNITA army engaged in a decades-long civil war that terrorized and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, with UNITA engaging in bodily mutilations, sexual slavery, child kidnapping, and witch burning. Sambivi funded his role in the gruesome civil war with proceeds of smuggled diamonds, aid from apartheid South Africa, and aid from the United States.
• Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko retained Manafort’s firm in 1989 for $1 million annually to help address his PR issues: at the time, he was one of Africa’s most corrupt leaders, he had one of the worst human rights records, and his regime regularly engaged in torture, detainment, and rape.
• Manafort’s firm was hired to lobby on behalf of Nigeria and Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha in 1998. Manafort signed the contract himself and personally handled the account of President Abacha. His role was to present Nigeria as an emerging progressive democracy to American influencers in order to improve bilateral affairs between the countries, but just the year before, the U.S. State Department had outlined how the Abacha regime had engaged in persistent torture and abuse of detainees.
• Manafort’s firm represented the Kenyan government from 1990 to 1993, a period during which it received $38.3 million in U.S. aid. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kenya’s dictatorial president Daniel arap Moi had silenced political opponents who supported a multi-party democracy with sham trials, torture, and indefinite detention. He also forcibly relocated thousands of people from an ethnic minority. The U.S. government briefly froze military aid in response to human rights abuses in 1990, but ultimately restored that aid by 1991, leading a State Department official to admit that “we compromised our human rights policy in Kenya somewhat.”
• Manafort had lobbied on behalf of Saudi Arabia, ultimately receiving what would in 2016 be worth $1.5 million. One of Saudi’s legislative priorities on which Manafort personally lobbied was to keep the U.S. Embassy in Israel from moving to Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Today, Trump has announced his belief that the embassy should in fact be located in Jerusalem.
• Paul Manafort’s lobbying firm had a $900,000 contract on behalf of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos to sell a more democratic image to Americans and ultimately help Philippine elites better influence American foreign policy. Manafort dropped the contract on the advice of the Reagan Administration just two hours before it announced it was pulling its support for the Marcos regime.
• By 1992, Manafort’s firm was making $450,000 per year from now-deposed Somalian dictator Said Barre, whose official ideology of “scientific socialism” was responsible for numerous human rights abuses and had left the country on the edge of mass starvation by the time of his ouster.
• Manafort’s firm represented Argentinian politician Alberto Pierri in 1997. In 1993, a number of journalists were beaten or received threats within days of publishing articles alleging that Pierri had recruited armed groups from gang members to act as “political thugs.” Pierri also called a journalist who wrote an article criticizing his role in drug money laundering in Argentina a “lousy Jew” and a “Jewish flea-bag” in 1994.
• Under Argentinian President Menem, Spain’s Gas Natural Co. was granted one of eight distribution zones when it broke apart the Gas del Estado. Pierri was a close ally of and powerful figure in the Menem government. In 1993, Spanish newspaper El Mundo accused Pierri of trying to extort executives at Gas Natural Co.’s Argentinean branch. An official at Gas Natural confirmed that there had been “some problems” with Pierri.
• In 2006, Manafort’s firm took on Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska as a client. Manafort helped arrange meetings between Deripaska and John McCain as McCain started his presidential run in August 2006 despite the fact that the U.S. had revoked Deripaska’s visa in July 2006 amid concerns he was linked to organized crime.
• In 2007, Manafort’s firm set up a private equity partnership with Deripaska in the Cayman Islands, which was supposed to include $19 million of investments. The firm received $7.5 million in management fees for the partnership, but Deripsaka sued the firm in 2008 for failing to invest, return, or even account for the $19 million. While Deripsaka failed to retrieve his investment, he had reported that Manafort and his partners had purchased a stake in Ukrainian cable television and Internet ventures with it.
• In 2008, Manafort tried to develop a 65-story Manhattan luxury apartment building with funding from Dimitry Firtash, Ukrainian energy tycoon with a mixed and troubled international legal history. Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko sued Manafort in 2011 for helping Firtash hide his ill-gotten millions in offshore real estate investments.
by 82_28 » Wed May 25, 2016 11:19 pm
Donald Trump has garnered a lot of attention as a Republican presidential candidate. But how has this attention impacted his business interests? Are sales up or down?
The Trump brand is associated with a variety of hotels, apartments, and products. On one hand, a growing number of political supporters could boost sales of Trump products; on the other, a growing number of political detractors could lead people to avoid his brand. So which of these two forces is stronger?
To answer this question, we analyzed hotel data from Hipmunk, a Priceonomics customer and travel search engine. Focusing on Trump Hotels’ most-booked locations, we compared bookings this year to the previous year (before Trump attracted national political attention).
The results? Bookings at Trump Hotels are down big time: they have decreased 59% compared to the same period last year on Hipmunk. It seems that customers willing to spend $500 a night on a Trump Hotel room may not be fans of Trump the political candidate.
by JackRiddler » Thu May 26, 2016 10:05 am
by JackRiddler » Thu May 26, 2016 10:09 am
by norton ash » Thu May 26, 2016 10:24 am
JackRiddler » Thu May 26, 2016 9:09 am wrote:If this fucking farce doesn't end with simultaneous indictments of Trump and Clinton it's just not a real Hollywood movie.
by seemslikeadream » Tue May 31, 2016 3:27 pm
by seemslikeadream » Tue May 31, 2016 3:43 pm
‘He Brutalized For You’
How Joseph McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn became Donald Trump’s mentor.
By MICHAEL KRUSE April 08, 2016
The reporter from the Washington Post didn’t ask Donald Trump about nuclear weapons, but he wanted to talk about them anyway. “Some people have an ability to negotiate,” Trump said, of facing the Soviet Union. “You either have it or you don’t.”
He wasn’t daunted by the complexity of the topic: “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he said.
It was the fall of 1984, Trump Tower was new, and this was unusual territory for the 38-year-old real estate developer. He was three years away from his first semi-serious dalliance with presidential politics, more than 30 years before the beginning of his current campaign—but he had gotten the idea to bring this up, he said, from his attorney, his good friend and his closest adviser, Roy Cohn.
That Roy Cohn.
Roy Cohn, the lurking legal hit man for red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy, whose reign of televised intimidation in the 1950s has become synonymous with demagoguery, fear-mongering and character assassination. In the formative years of Donald Trump’s career, when he went from a rich kid working for his real estate-developing father to a top-line dealmaker in his own right, Cohn was one of the most powerful influences and helpful contacts in Trump’s life.
Over a 13-year-period, ending shortly before Cohn’s death in 1986, Cohn brought his say-anything, win-at-all-costs style to all of Trump’s most notable legal and business deals. Interviews with people who knew both men at the time say the relationship ran deeper than that—that Cohn’s philosophy shaped the real estate mogul’s worldview and the belligerent public persona visible in Trump’s presidential campaign.
“Something Cohn had, Donald liked,” Susan Bell, Cohn’s longtime secretary, said this week when I asked her about the relationship between her old boss and Trump.
By the 1970s, when Trump was looking to establish his reputation in Manhattan, the elder Cohn had long before remade himself as the ultimate New York power lawyer, whose clientele included politicians, financiers and mob bosses. Cohn engineered the combative response to the Department of Justice’s suit alleging racial discrimination at the Trumps’ many rental properties in Brooklyn and Queens. He brokered the gargantuan tax abatements and the mob-tied concrete work that made the Grand Hyatt hotel and Trump Tower projects. He wrote the cold-hearted prenuptial agreement before the first of his three marriages and filed the headline-generating antitrust suit against the National Football League. To all of these deals, Cohn brought his political connections, his public posturing and a simple credo: Always attack, never apologize.
“Cohn just pushed through things—if he wanted something, he got it. I think Donald had a lot of that in him, but he picked up a lot of that from Cohn,” Bell said.
“Roy was a powerful force, recognized as a person with deep and varied contacts, politically as well as legally,” Michael Rosen, who worked as an attorney in Cohn’s firm for 17 years, told me. “The movers and shakers of New York, he was very tight with these people—they admired him, they sought his advice. His persona, going back to McCarthy … and his battles with the government certainly attracted clients.”
It was a long, formidable list that included the executives of media empires, the Archbishop of New York and mafia kingpin Fat Tony Salerno, and there, too, near the top, was budding, grasping Donald John Trump.
“He considered Cohn a mentor,” Mike Gentile, the lead prosecutor who got Cohn disbarred for fraud and deceit not long before he died, said in a recent interview.
People who knew Cohn and know Trump—people who have watched and studied both men—say they see in Trump today unmistakable signs of the enduring influence of Cohn. The frank belligerence. The undisguised disregard for niceties and convention. The media manipulation clotted with an abiding belief in the potent currency of celebrity.
“If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent, you get Roy,” he told Newsweek in 1979.
A year later, pressed by a reporter from New York magazine to justify his association with Cohn, he was characteristically blunt: “All I can tell you is he’s been vicious to others in his protection of me.”
He elaborated in an interview in 2005. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Trump told author Tim O’Brien. “He brutalized for you.”
Trump, in the end, turned some of that cold calculation on his teacher, severing his professional ties to Cohn when he learned his lawyer was dying of AIDS.
***
Cohn and Trump, according to Trump, met in 1973 at Le Club, a members-only East Side hangout for social-scene somebodies and those who weren’t but wanted to be.
By then Cohn had been in the public eye for 20 years. As chief counsel to McCarthy, he led secretive investigations of people inside and outside the federal government whom he and McCarthy suspected of Communist sympathies, homosexuality or espionage. Over a period of several years, McCarthy’s crusade destroyed dozens of careers before a final 36-day, televised hearing brought his and Cohn’s often unsubstantiated allegations into the open, leading to McCarthy’s censure in the Senate. Cohn, disgraced by association, retreated to his native New York.
There, through the ‘60s and into the ‘70s, Cohn embraced an unabashedly conspicuous lifestyle. He had a Rolls-Royce with his initials on a vanity plate and a yacht called Defiance. He was a singular nexus of New York power, trafficking in influence and reveling in gossip. He hung on the walls of the East 68th Street townhouse, that doubled as the office of his law firm, pictures of himself with politicians, entertainers and other bold-face names. He was a tangle of contradictions, a Jewish anti-Semite and a homosexual homophobe, vehemently closeted but insatiably promiscuous. In 1964, ’69 and ’71, he had been tried and acquitted of federal charges of conspiracy, bribery and fraud, giving him—at least in the eyes of a certain sort—an aura of battle-tested toughness, the perception of invincibility. “If you can get Machiavelli as a lawyer,” he would write in The Autobiography of Roy Cohn, “you’re certainly no fool of a client.”
Trump was 27. He had just moved to Manhattan but was still driving back to his father’s company offices in Brooklyn for work. He hadn’t bought anything. He hadn’t built anything. But he had badgered the owners of Le Club to let him join, precisely to get to know older, connected, power-wielding men like Cohn. He knew who he was. And now he wanted to talk.
He and his father had just been slapped with Department of Justice charges that they weren’t renting to blacks because of racial discrimination. Attorneys had urged them to settle. Trump didn’t want to do that. He quizzed Cohn at Le Club. What should they do?
He became Donald’s mentor, his constant adviser on every significant aspect of his business and personal life.”
“Tell them to go to hell,” Cohn told Trump, according to Trump’s account in his book The Art of the Deal, “and fight the thing in court.”
That December, representing the Trumps in United States v. Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump and Trump Management, Inc., Cohn filed a $100-million countersuit against the federal government, deriding the charges as “irresponsible” and “baseless.”
The judge dismissed it quickly as “wasting time and paper.”
The back-and-forth launched more than a year and a half of bluster and stalling and bullying—and ultimately settling. But in affidavits, motions and hearings in court, Cohn accused the DOJ and the assisting FBI of “Gestapo-like tactics.” He labeled their investigators “undercover agents” and “storm troopers.” Cohn called the head of DOJ down in Washington and attempted to get him to censure one of the lead staffers.
The judge called all of it “totally unfounded.”
By June of 1975, the judge had had it with the Trumps’ attorney. “I must say, Mr. Cohn,” he said in a hearing, “that this case seems to be plagued with unnecessary problems, and I think the time has come when we have to bite the bullet.”
They hashed out the details of a consent decree. The Trumps were going to have to rent to more blacks and other minorities and they were going to have to put ads in newspapers—including those targeted specifically to minority communities—saying they were an “equal housing opportunity” company. Trump and his father, emboldened by Cohn, bristled at the implication of wrongdoing—even, too, at the cost of the ads.
“It is really onerous,” Trump complained.
At one point, flouting the formality of the court, Trump addressed one of the opposing attorneys by her first name: “Will you pay for the expense, Donna?”
Trump and Cohn seemed most concerned with managing the media. They squabbled with the government attorneys over the press release about the disposition. First they wanted no release. Impossible, said the government. Then they wanted “a joint release.” A what? A public agency, it was explained to them, had a public information office, on account of the public’s right to know.
Cohn didn’t want to hear it.
“They will say what they want,” he told the judge, and everybody else in the courtroom, “and we will say what we want.”
The government called the consent decree “one of the most far reaching ever negotiated.”
Cohn and Trump? They called it a victory.
Case 73 C 1529 was over. The relationship between Cohn and Trump had just begun.
“Though Cohn had ostensibly been retained by Donald to handle a single piece of litigation,” Wayne Barrett, an investigative journalist for New York’s Village Voice, would write in his 1992 book about Trump, “he began in the mid-‘70s to assume a role in Donald’s life far transcending that of a lawyer. He became Donald’s mentor, his constant adviser on every significant aspect of his business and personal life.”
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 01, 2016 9:17 am
The Art of the Swindle
In court filings, former employees of Trump University allege that it preyed on the insecurities of its students, selling them courses they did not need or could not afford.
MATT FORD 7:32 AM ET POLITICS
Predators, by and large, do not attack the strongest prey in the wild. They instead target the vulnerable, the very young, and the very old—the prey that is least able to defend itself.
Trump University, the defunct real-estate education program created by presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, pursued a similar approach, according to its former employees in legal documents unsealed Tuesday.
“Based upon my personal experience and employment, I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money,” said Ronald Schnackenberg, a sales manager at Trump University in 2006 and 2007.
Those declarations and other internal Trump University documents depict an aggressive, ethically dubious business model that targeted potential customers’ financial fears and socioeconomic anxieties and offered Trump’s personal brand as the solution—a strategy later echoed in his presidential campaign.
In his declaration, Schnackenberg recounted meeting a couple after a live event in New York City in 2007. Apparently swayed by the presentation, they expressed an interest in purchasing a $35,000 Trump Gold Elite program, the most expensive tier available.
“I did not think it was an appropriate program for them because of their precarious financial condition—they had no money to pay for the program, but would have had to pay for the program using disability income and taking out a loan based upon equity in his apartment,” he testified. “Trump University reprimanded me for not trying harder to sell the program to this couple.”
A different salesperson closed the deal with them. “I was disgusted by this conduct and decided to resign,” Schnackenberg said.
Schnackenberg made the declaration in September 2012—about three years before Donald Trump announced his presidential bid—as part of a class-action lawsuit against the businessman by former Trump University customers. The declaration and other trial documents remained under seal until Tuesday after federal judge Gonzalo Curiel—a newfound target of Trump’s stump-speech anger—ordered many of them to be made public Friday in response to a public-interest motion by the Washington Post.
For a Trump University employee, failure simply meant the abstract loss of potential profit. For a Trump University student, however, failure could mean financial ruin.
Official scripts and guidelines in Trump University’s sales playbooks harnessed this fear to drive prospective buyers towards the product. During one-on-one sessions after the $1,500 second-tier seminar, the playbook encouraged salespeople to assess each customer’s fears, goals, and financial status, then “close the deal” on the next tier of seminars.
“When you introduce the price, don’t make it sound like you think it’s a lot of money, if you don’t make a big deal out of it they won’t,” the playbook advises. “If they can afford the gold elite don’t allow them to think about anything besides the gold elite.” The Trump Gold Elite package, which included a series of retreats, a three-day “in-field mentorship,” and a free trial on foreclosure-tracking software, cost $35,000.
If the customer hesitated, the playbook offered a sample text to “push them out of their comfort zone” by criticizing their financial status.
“It’s time for you to be 100% honest with yourself,” the suggested text read. “You’ve had your entire adult life to accomplish your financial goals. I’m looking at your profile and you’re not even close to where you need to be, much less where you want to be. It’s time to fix your broken plan, bring in Mr. Trump’s top instructors and certified millionaire mentors and allow us to put you and keep you on the right track. Your plan is BROKEN and WE WILL help you fix it.”
The playbook also includes rebuttals to common concerns about spending up to $35,000 on a series of seminars. For example, if customers want to try real-estate investing on their own, salespeople were told to pepper them with technical questions about their business plan, apparently to undermine their self-confidence.
“How are you going to locate the properties? How are you determining ARV? All cash offer? Where is your financing coming from? How will you negotiate price? Terms? What about exit strategies?” the playbook offers as suggested dialogue. “One mistake on any one of these and you’re broke, beaten, and worse off than you are now.”
“You can ask them questions so they realize they don’t have a chance for long term or short term success,” the playbook then reminds the employee.
Amidst this sea of imagined dangers, the salesperson would then pivot to pitch Trump University as a lifeboat. “The risk isn’t spending 35K – it’s entering into the world of REAL ESTATE without specialized knowledge, guidance and trained professionals in the field holding your hand,” the playbook’s rebuttals said. “WE are the safe decision.”
The playbook frequently tells Trump University employees to lean on the instructors’ and mentors’ wisdom as a selling point. But Jason Nichols, a Trump University sales executive who worked for the company in 2007, challenged this depiction in his declaration to the court.
“The Trump University instructors and mentors were a joke. Most of them were not experts in real estate and did not [have] experience in the real estate techniques they were teaching,” Nichols said. “They were unqualified people posing as Donald Trump’s ‘right-hand men.’ They were teaching methods that were unethical, and they had little to no experience flipping properties or doing real estate deals. It was a façade, a total lie.”
Other rebuttals suggested by training materials likewise appealed to customers’ insecurities while invoking Trump’s success. What if customers say they want to invest that $35,000 fee in property instead? “You have no specialized knowledge or system to fall back on,” the playbook suggests. “Mr. Trump doesn’t use his own money to invest and look at his success!”
Or a customer might say they have enough information to invest on their own. “But what we’re offering is a proven system from Mr. Trump to help you close multiple deals every month, with a millionaire mentor by your side making sure you don’t make any mistakes, and creating the most amount of profit per deal,” the playbook counters. “Let me ask you a question; are you capable of making or two mistakes on your own?” (In parentheses, the salesperson is instructed to smile while saying these lines.)
The scripts and rebuttals emphasize the risk of not taking part in the program while evading its inherent risks. What if the customer doesn’t want to go into debt by purchasing the seminars? “Every single company goes into debt when they are first starting out, EVERY SINGLE BUSINESS!” the playbook says. “The profits pay off the debt and before you know it, your new real-estate business will start making amazing returns.”
Corinne Sommer, the former manager of Trump University’s events departments, recalled how instructors in the second-level seminars, which cost roughly $1,500 to attend, would ask customers to call their credit-card companies to triple or quadruple their credit limit and max out their credit cards for real-estate investments.
“While Trump University’s advertisements claimed it wanted to help consumers make money in real estate, in fact, based upon my experience, I believe that Trump University was only interested in selling every person the most expensive seminars they could possibly buy on credit,” Sommer testified. “I recall that some consumers had showed up who were homeless and could not afford the seminars, yet I overheard Trump University representatives telling them, ‘it’s ok; just max out your credit card.’”
Not everyone proved unhappy; the filings also included testimony from many graduates of Trump University who professed themselves delighted with the decisions they’d made.
Trump University came to an end five years before Trump’s presidential campaign officially began. But both products rely on a similar three-part strategy. The first part is an emphasis on insecurity. For Trump University’s sales team, that meant focusing on the customer’s personal financial shortcomings when closing a deal. For Trump himself, it manifests as stump speeches bemoaning the decline in American manufacturing, the peril of illegal immigration, the rise of China and ISIS, and how “we don’t win anymore.”
These insecurities may or may not be grounded in reality. But the solutions to them often aren’t. Trump University promised an easy path to wealth and success in the real-estate market just as the housing bubble was about to burst. (“Let’s get you enrolled today so you can start building a real estate empire,” reads one suggested line from the playbook.) Trump’s campaign solutions are even more grandiose, ranging from a giant wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to a military so large and strong “we’ll never have to use it.”
The third part is Trump, or, perhaps more accurately, Trump’s personal brand, in all its coiffed and gilded glory. Decades of effort invested in making a surname synonymous with business acumen and extravagant wealth imbued Trump University with a legitimacy it could not otherwise acquire. Trump himself also relies on this on the campaign trail—not the name recognition, but its association with “winning.” For both Trump and Trump University, the goal is for prospective customers and potential voters alike to think his success can rub off on them, too.
But that payoff may never come. “I do not believe that Trump University taught Donald Trump’s investing ‘secrets,’” one former Trump employee testified. “Donald Trump came from a wealthy family and had resources at his disposal to purchase real estate—that is the secret—one the average consumer could not replicate.”
by kool maudit » Wed Jun 01, 2016 9:27 am
by kool maudit » Wed Jun 01, 2016 9:42 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Wed Jun 01, 2016 2:15 pm
I felt a shudder down my spine yesterday watching Donald Trump's fusilade against the press. This is not a moment to be trifled with. It wasn't his first tirade and it won't be his last.
I was reminded of my college journalism professor, the late Hugh Cunningham, who would exhort his young charges in a thundering voice to "never let them scare you." It was his most important lesson. One of Edward R. Murrow's favorite words was "steady." That also bears repeating today.
This is a dirty, nasty election. And it is only going to get worse. The reporters in the trenches need no lecture from me. They are walking through daily mindfields, bracing themselves against winds of discontent whose effects no one can predict.
I know what it is like to sit in those seats and feel the scorn and even wrath of politicians of all political persuasions. Attacking the press for unfair coverage has long been a bipartisan pursuit. Sometimes it works. I am happy to say that more often it doesn't. But Trump's brand of vituperation is particularly personal and vicious. It carries with it the drumbeats of threatening violence. It cannot be left unanswered.
This is not about politics or policy. It's about protecting our most cherished principles. The relationship between the press and the powerful they cover is by its very definition confrontational. That is how the Founding Fathers envisioned it, with noble clauses of protection enshrined in our Constitution.
Good journalism--the kind that matters--requires reporters who won't back up, back down, back away or turn around when faced with efforts to intimidate them. It also requires owners and other bosses with guts, who stand by and for their reporters when the heat is on.
I still believe the pen is mightier than the sword. And in these conflicted and troubled times, we should reward the bravery of the men and women not afraid to ask the hard questions of everyone in power. Our nation's future depends on it.
by elfismiles » Wed Jun 01, 2016 2:27 pm
Donald Trump Is a 'Shape-Shifting Lizard,' According to Hacked Highway Sign
[Shape shifting lizard]
As seen on Happening Now
Trump Calls ABC Reporter a 'Sleaze' in Combative Press Conference
Baez Denies Claims That Casey Anthony Paid for Legal Fees with Sex
It appears that a Bernie Sanders supporter hacked into some construction signs in the Dallas area.
Drivers traveling along I-30 early Tuesday saw a sign reading "Bernie for President" and another that declared Donald Trump to be a "shape shifting lizard!!"
Hacked road sign in the Dallas area.
Another let morning commuters know that work was canceled and instructed them to "go back home."
http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/05/31/d ... ghway-sign
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 01, 2016 3:51 pm
Random Observations on a Meltdown (Trump Edition)
1. At his press conference today, Republican presidential nominee and anthropomorphic mold spore Donald Trump went full Rubio. From the very beginning of his appearance at Trump Tower, an ugly motherfucker of a building, Trump was so ludicrously repetitious and sweaty and barely comprehensible that the Florida senator must have been somewhere, thinking, "Aw, c'mon, where the fuck is Chris Christie now?" (Answer: trussed up on a bed in the penthouse, asshole lubed and ready.)
Here is an actual quote from Trump's opening remarks: "I think it will be very exciting. It will add to the excitement in Cleveland and that's good. That's what we want because it's going to be an exciting period of time." That is not edited or elided or anything. This was followed up with, no shit, a moment later with "So that's something to me that's very exciting. And overall, it's just been a very exciting process."
Didn't this human garbage compactor talk about his vocabulary? Can someone implant a fuckin' thesaurus in his brain? Or is he brain-damaged from all spray-tan chemicals?
And that's not even getting to the endless number of times he said that he didn't raise funds for veterans' organizations to get publicity.
2. What kind of lying cocksucker gets to say that and not get laughed out of the building? Trump held a public event in January opposite a Republican debate he refused to attend because Fox "news" wasn't "nice" to him. That event was broadcast on other channels. Today, Trump himself called the press conference in order to say who the money raised had gone to. He could have just put out a fuckin' list, but, no, like an enraged bonobo with an unlimited amount of shit to toss, Trump had to get in front of the press to deny that he wanted press coverage.
3. This is not even to mention the underwear sniffer in the "Make America Great Again" camo-colored cap who stepped forward on stage to declare that he's a vet, that other vets were on stage with Trump, but that it was Hillary Clinton who is "using veterans as political pawns." Fuck that guy, fuck his service to our country, and fuck him forever with every dick around.
4. Fucknut up there said that we should head to Trump's website to read about how much Il Donaldo wants to do for veterans. If you go to that page, it's got the shit title of "Veterans Administration Reforms That Will Make America Great Again." Sure, it says that vets would be able to go to any doctor who accepts Medicare and that Trump will, through his innate Trumpiness, trump the trump trump trump. That includes "increasing funding" for a shitload of things, which is totally not something that Democrats would ever ask for (except for all the fucking times they've asked for it and been blocked by Republicans). Mostly, though, the page is filled with platitudes and detail-free promises, treating the VA with all the seriousness you'd expect of a reality show star, even finding a way to, no shit, drop in his catchphrase: "Under a Trump Administration, there will be no job security for VA executives that enabled or overlooked corruption and incompetence. They’re fired."
When you go to Hillary Clinton's page for her plans for vets, she gets way specific, as you'd expect from a former Secretary of State (remember: Clinton is a twice-elected Senator, too; she ain't just Benghazi Bitch, the Email Slut). In fact, there's another page on "How She'll Get It Done," which goes into even more details than any campaign ever normally would.
Compare one thing, treatment of women vets. Trump says, "The fact that many VA hospitals don’t permanently staff OBGYN doctors shows an utter lack of respect for the growing number female veterans. Under the Trump plan, every VA hospital in the country will be fully equipped with OBGYN and other women’s health services."
Seemingly responding to that, Clinton's plan says that she calls for "New funding to ensure women equal and respectful [treatment], going beyond simply modifying facilities and increasing the number of OBGYNs employed by the VHA, to include expanding provider training, ensuring culturally-competent VHA staff and policies, and providing other gender-specific health services – including mental health services." She adds in reproductive health services and childcare facilities at VA facilities so women can see their doctors without having to worry about getting their kids taken care of. In other words, comprehensive, intelligent stuff that isn't accomplished by a wave of a small hand, but rather through "bipartisan legislation" because that's how shit is done (or used to be done. Who knows anymore?). It's still pie-in-the-sky, sure, but it's aspirational and specific, with lots of possible goals that can be achieved.
And, unlike Trump, Clinton and Bernie Sanders have actually done things to help vets beyond holding a bullshit public (but apparently secret) fundraiser whose real purpose was to pull ratings away from Fox because Donald Trump is a pathetic, needy piece of shit.
5. Trump said that he was waiting to see "documents" from the IRS before deciding if an organization was worthy of a donation. He needed their tax information in order to get the full picture. Huh. You could actually hear every reporter's sphincter tighten in anticipation of attacking Trump for that lack of self-awareness.
6. Most of the event, though, was a prolonged meltdown at the press, with Trump calling them "sleazes" and "dishonest," acting as if he should be above the kind of scrutiny that he demands of others. If we lived in normal times, it would have marked the end of his presidential aspirations. At this point, unless each reporter sucks his dick and massages his prostate, Trump is going to keep attacking the media to discredit all the negative shit that is going to start pouring out.
Dear media, somewhere there is a small burning ember of actual journalistic integrity in your mulch pile of clickbait and faux objectivity.
Blow on that ember. Destroy this man, this Trump. Because if you don't and he's elected, he will be coming after you. This is a petty, angry little person who doesn't give a shit if he insults a federal judge. If he's president, do you think that your precious First Amendment will protect you?
by 82_28 » Wed Jun 01, 2016 11:52 pm
DUBLIN, Ohio -- The longtime PGA Tour event at Miami's Trump Doral resort is leaving South Florida and heading to Mexico City in 2017.
The PGA Tour announced Wednesday that the new event will be known as the WGC-Mexico Championship. It will be held March 2-5 next year, with a venue in mind but not yet announced.
The Tour has a seven-year agreement through 2023 with Group Salinas, a collection of companies based in Mexico City primarily involved in retail, television and telecommunications, to sponsor the event.
Trump Doral had been the site of a PGA Tour event since 1962.
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