TRUMP is seriously dangerous

[seemslikeadream]

For Trump, Three Decades of Chasing Deals in Russia
By MEGAN TWOHEY and STEVE EDERJAN. 16, 2017


Donald J. Trump, a co-owner of the Miss Universe contest at the time, at an after-party for the 2013 pageant in Moscow. He also used the visit to Moscow to discuss development deals. Credit Stoyan Vassev/Reuters
It was 2005, and Felix Sater, a Russian immigrant, was back in Moscow pursuing an ambitious plan to build a Trump tower on the site of an old pencil factory along the Moscow River that would offer hotel rooms, condominiums and commercial office space.

Letters of intent had been signed and square footage was being analyzed. “There was an opportunity to explore building Trump towers internationally,” said Mr. Sater, who worked for a New York-based development company that was a partner with Donald J. Trump on a variety of deals during that decade. “And Russia was one of those countries.”

The president-elect’s favorable comments about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the conclusion of United States intelligence officials that Moscow acted to help Mr. Trump’s campaign have focused attention on Mr. Trump’s business interests in Russia. Asked about the issue at his news conference last week, Mr. Trump was emphatic on one point: “I have no dealings with Russia.” And he repeated: “I have no deals that could happen in Russia because we’ve stayed away.”

The project on the old pencil factory site ultimately fizzled. And by the time Mr. Trump entered the presidential race, he had failed to get any real estate development off the ground in Russia. But it was not for lack of trying.

Mr. Trump repeatedly sought business in Russia as far back as 1987, when he traveled there to explore building a hotel. He applied for his trademark in the country as early as 1996. And his children and associates have appeared in Moscow over and over in search of joint ventures, meeting with developers and government officials.

During a trip in 2006, Mr. Sater and two of Mr. Trump’s children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, stayed at the historic Hotel National Moscow across from the Kremlin, connecting with potential partners over the course of several days.

As recently as 2013, Mr. Trump himself was in Moscow. He had sold Russian real estate developers the right to host his Miss Universe pageant that year, and he used the visit as a chance to discuss development deals, writing on Twitter at the time: “TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next.”

Mr. Trump’s Hopes for Moscow Deals Fail to Break Ground
Donald J. Trump has made repeated efforts over 30 years to build or invest in hotels and luxury housing in Moscow. It never quite happened.

July 1987
Mr. Trump travels to Moscow with his wife, Ivana. They stay in the Lenin Suite at the National Hotel and tour potential construction sites.
Dec. 1988
Mr. Trump says that the Moscow hotel project fizzled because “in the Soviet Union, you don't own anything. It's hard to conjure up spending hundreds of millions of dollars on something and not own it.”
July 1991
Boris N. Yeltsin takes office as the first president of the Russian Federation.
Nov. 1996
At a news conference, Mr. Trump announces plans to invest $250 million in Russia and to put his name on two luxury residential buildings, a Trump International and a Trump Tower, in Moscow. Neither building was constructed.
Feb. 1998
The Moscow Times quotes Norma Foerderer, Mr. Trump’s personal assistant, about his Moscow plans: “That’s way on the back, back, back burner. We haven’t thought about Moscow for some time.”
Feb. 1998
The Russian news media reports that further negotiations never occurred with Mr. Trump about the Moscow hotel. A German company ends up winning the contract.
May 2000
Vladimir V. Putin takes office as president of Russia.
Mid-2000s
A New York development company working with Mr. Trump explores the possibility of constructing a Moscow Trump Tower on the Moscow River, but the project fails to move forward.
2007
Mr. Trump speaks highly of real estate prospects in Russia in a deposition, saying, "We will be in Moscow at some point." Mr. Trump acknowledges meeting with Russian investors at Trump Tower to explore a Moscow development deal, and says his son Donald Trump Jr. is working to get a separate deal there off the ground.
May 2008
Dmitry A. Medvedev takes office as the president of Russia.
June 2008
At a “Real Estate in Russia” conference, Donald Trump Jr. says that the Trump Organization wants to build luxury housing and hotels in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi.
May 2012
Vladimir V. Putin begins his second nonconsecutive term as the president of Russia.
Sept. 2013
During a visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, which he co-owned, Mr. Trump said, "I have plans for the establishment of business in Russia. Now, I am in talks with several Russian companies to establish this skyscraper."
As the Russian market opened up in the post-Soviet Union era, Mr. Trump and his partners pursued Russians who were newly flush with cash to buy apartments in Trump Towers in New York and Florida, sales that he boasted about in a 2014 interview. “I know the Russians better than anybody,” Mr. Trump told Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer who shared unpublished interview transcripts with The New York Times.

Seeking deals in Russia became part of a broader strategy to expand the Trump brand worldwide. By the mid-2000s, Mr. Trump was transitioning to mostly licensing his name to hotel, condominium and commercial towers rather than building or investing in real estate himself. He discovered that his name was especially attractive in developing countries where the rising rich aspired to the type of ritzy glamour he personified.

While he nailed down ventures in the Philippines, India and elsewhere, closing deals in Russia proved challenging. In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. praised the opportunities in Russia, but also called it a “scary place” to do business because of corruption and legal complications.

Mr. Sater said that American hotel chains that had moved into Russia did so with straightforward agreements to manage hotels that other partners owned. Mr. Trump, by contrast, was pursing developments that included residential or commercial offerings in which he would take a cut of sales, terms that Russians were reluctant to embrace.

Even so, Mr. Trump said his efforts put him in contact with powerful people there. “I called it my weekend in Moscow,” Mr. Trump said of his 2013 trip to Moscow during a September 2015 interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.” He added: “I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top of the government people. I can’t go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary.”

When asked about Mr. Trump’s claim that he had “stayed away” from Russia, Alan Garten, general counsel for the Trump Organization, said it was a fair characterization given that none of the development opportunities ever materialized. Mr. Trump’s interest in Russia, he said, was no different from his attraction to other emerging markets in which he investigated possible ventures. Mr. Garten did not respond to questions about whom Mr. Trump met with in Moscow in 2013 and what was discussed.

Stalking Deals in Moscow

Ted Liebman, an architect based in New York, got the call in 1996. Mr. Trump and Liggett-Ducat, an American tobacco company that owned property in Moscow, wanted to build a high-end residential development near an old Russian Olympic stadium. As they prepared to meet with officials in Moscow, they needed sketches of the Trump tower they envisioned.

The architect scrambled to meet the request, handing over plans to Mr. Trump at his Manhattan office. “I hope we can do this,” Mr. Liebman recalled Mr. Trump telling him.

Soon after, Mr. Trump was in Russia, promoting the proposal and singing the praises of the Russian market.

“I’ve seen cities all over the world. Some I’ve liked, some I haven’t,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in Moscow in 1996, according to The Moscow Times. But he added that he didn’t think he had ever been “as impressed with the potential of a city as I have been with Moscow.”

Mr. Trump had been eyeing the potential for nearly a decade, expressing interest to government officials ranging from the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev (they first met in Washington in 1987) to the military figure Alexander Lebed.

Photo

The 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Mr. Trump sold Russian real estate developers the right to host his Miss Universe pageant that year. Credit Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
The 1996 project never materialized, but by then Mr. Trump was already well known in Russia. Moscow was in the midst of a construction boom, which transformed the capital from a drab, post-Soviet expanse into a sparkly modern city.

Yuri M. Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor at the time, said in an interview that he had met with Mr. Trump and showed him plans for a massive underground shopping mall just outside the Kremlin gates. Mr. Trump suggested connecting it to the Metro, “a very important observation,” Mr. Luzhkov said. Today, visitors to the Okhotny Ryad shopping center can go straight from the Metro to the Calvin Klein store without venturing into the cold.

In the following years, Mr. Trump’s pursuit of Russia was strengthened by a growing circle of partners and associates in Canada and the United States who had roots in the region. Among them were Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet-era commerce official originally from Kazakhstan who founded a development company called the Bayrock Group, and Mr. Sater, a partner in the firm, who had moved to New York from Russia as a child.

Bayrock was in Trump Tower, two floors below the Trump Organization. While working to take Trump-branded towers to Arizona, Florida and New York’s SoHo neighborhood, Bayrock also began scouting for deals in Russia and other countries.

“We looked at some very, very large properties in Russia,” Mr. Sater said. “Think of a large Vegas high-rise.”

When Mr. Sater traveled to Moscow with Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. to meet with developers in 2006, he said their attitude could be summarized as “nice, big city, great. Let’s do a deal here.”

Mr. Trump continued to work with Mr. Sater even after his role in a huge stock manipulation scheme involving Mafia figures and Russian criminals was revealed; Mr. Sater pleaded guilty and served as a government informant.

Photo

Mr. Trump with Tevfik Arif, center, and Felix Sater at the Trump SoHo launch party in 2007. Mr. Trump discussed deals in Russia with their development company, the Bayrock Group, but they never materialized. Credit Mark Von Holden/WireImage
In 2007, Mr. Trump discussed a deal for a Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow that Bayrock had lined up with Russian investors.

“It would be a nonexclusive deal, so it would not have precluded me from doing other deals in Moscow, which was very important to me,” Mr. Trump said in a deposition in an unsuccessful libel suit he brought against Tim O’Brien, a journalist.

He claimed the development had fallen apart after Mr. O’Brien wrote a book saying that Mr. Trump was worth far less than he claimed. But Mr. Trump said he was close to striking another real estate deal in Moscow.

“We’re going to do one fairly soon,” he said. Moscow, he insisted “will be one of the cities where we will be.”

Vodka, Yes; Development, No

The Trump brand did appear in Russia, but not quite as the grand edifice the real estate mogul had envisioned.

Trump Super Premium Vodka, with the shine of bottles glazed with 24-karat gold, was presented at the Millionaire’s Fair in Moscow in 2007, and large orders for the spirits followed. The vodka was sold in Russia as late as 2009, but eventually fizzled out. In a news release, Mr. Trump heralded it as a “tremendous achievement.”

He tried — and failed — to start a reality show in St. Petersburg in 2008 starring a Russian mixed martial arts fighter.

But real estate developments remained a constant goal. From 2006 to 2008, his company applied for several trademarks in Russia, including Trump, Trump Tower, Trump International Hotel and Tower, and Trump Home, according to a record search by Sojuzpatent, a Russian intellectual property firm.

Photo

In 2006, Mr. Sater and two of Mr. Trump’s children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, stayed at the Hotel National Moscow across from the Kremlin, connecting with potential partners over several days. Credit Yuri Kadobnov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Donald Trump Jr. became a regular presence in Russia. Speaking at a 2008 Manhattan real estate conference, he confessed to fears of doing business in Russia, saying there is “an issue of ‘Will I ever see my money back out of that deal or can I actually trust the person I am doing the deal with?’” according to coverage of his remarks in eTurboNews.

But he told the Manhattan audience that “I really prefer Moscow over all cities in the world” and that he had visited Russia a half-dozen times in 18 months.

In 2011, he was still at it. “Heading to the airport to go to Moscow for business,” he tweeted that year.

Mr. Trump himself was back in Moscow in 2013, attending the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned with NBC.

Earlier that year, at the Miss USA pageant in Las Vegas, he had announced that Aras and Emin Agalarov, father and son real estate developers in Russia, would host the worldwide competition.

Erin Brady, that year’s Miss USA winner, who watched the announcement from backstage of the auditorium at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino, said the news was a surprise. She was expecting one of the Latin American countries where beauty pageants are widely celebrated.

“I was like, ‘Wow, Russia, I never thought of that,’” she said.

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Phil Ruffin, Mr. Trump’s partner in the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Las Vegas, said he was happy to lend him his new Global 5000 private plane for the trip. He and his wife met Mr. Trump in Moscow, also checking in to the Ritz-Carlton. Mr. Ruffin said he and Mr. Trump had lunch at the hotel with the Agalarovs.

The Agalarovs also reportedly hosted a dinner for Mr. Trump the night of the pageant, along with Herman Gref, a former Russian economy minister who serves as chief executive of the state-controlled Sberbank PJSC, according to Bloomberg News.

Talk of development deals swirled around the visit, and Mr. Trump sent out his tweet, promising that Trump Tower Moscow was coming.

But the tower never appeared on the skyline.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/p ... iness.html

[seemslikeadream]

How Trump’s Apparatchiks Are Erasing Russia’s Role in the Election

Evasions, brushoffs, innuendos, contortions, rationalizations, and attacks.

By William Saletan
Trump Priebus
Donald Trump and Reince Priebus address supporters during his election-night rally in Manhattan, on Nov. 9, 2016
Mike Segar/Reuters,Paneikon/MED

Donald Trump has the best people. They’re loyal, attentive, and hardworking. “I would take anything that the president asked me to do,” said Sean Spicer, the communications director of the Republican National Committee, in a Fox News interview on Thursday. “I’d shovel the driveway of the South Lawn or mow the lawn. Whatever he asks.” On another Fox show, Spicer addressed reports that he would soon be named White House press secretary: “If he asks me to do anything, including sweep the driveway, I’ll do it.”

William Saletan


Spicer and his colleagues are already at work on Trump’s first cleanup job: scrubbing away Russia’s role in the 2016 election. On Friday, the Washington Post quoted a memo from CIA Director John Brennan that says the CIA, FBI, and Director of National Intelligence have reached a “strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election.” ABC News disclosed some of the evidence behind that assessment, including the hackers’ use of a Cyrillic keyboard and an internet address employed in previous Russian infiltrations. Trump, however, continues to dismiss the story, fearing that inquiries into the hack will taint his legitimacy. So out come the Trump minions to protect their boss. Here’s how they’re trying to shovel the story away.

1. Don’t believe it till the CIA shows you the evidence. “Where is the evidence?” demanded Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, in a Sunday interview on Face the Nation. Conway, who is expected to work for Trump inside or outside the White House, dared the CIA to go public: “If Director Brennan and others at the top are serious about turning over evidence to we, the American people, they should do that.” RNC chairman Reince Priebus, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, made the same argument on Fox News Sunday: “If there is this conclusive opinion among all of these intelligence agencies, then they should issue a report, or they should stand in front of a camera and make the case.” Priebus challenged the agencies to “be straight with the American people” about “their opinion as to who, what, where, and how this all happened.”

2. It would be treacherous of the CIA to show you the evidence. While demanding public revelation of the “who, what, where, and how,” Priebus rebuked intelligence agencies for talking to the press. To have these assessments “leaked by people within the intelligence community to these newspapers or through some third-party source is not appropriate,” he warned. Conway, in the midst of her plea for transparency, paused to scold the agencies: “They’re talking to the media. That undermines our national security, our intelligence operations.”

3. Trump might have secret evidence that Russia is innocent. On Face the Nation, John Dickerson asked Conway whether Trump had evidence that Russia wasn’t behind the hack. She offered an ambiguous reply: “Well, the president-elect receives intelligence briefings that I am not privy to.”

“I’ll tell you what the un-intelligence briefing we all know is. Clinton and her team spent $1.2 billion, lost an election they should have won.”
Kellyanne Conway
4. Allegations against Russia are just a ploy by Democrats to change the subject. Speaking to Fox News on Friday, Spicer was asked about President Obama’s discussion of the Russia hack in a news conference earlier that day. Spicer said Democrats were trying to “deflect from what they brought to themselves.” The next day, on Fox and Friends, he gave the same answer to suggestions that the U.S. should investigate Russian interference: “The left is now trying to focus on delegitimizing the election. They lost. They lost because they didn’t have an effective message like Donald Trump. And I think that they should, instead of focusing on that—you know, [they] are trying to deflect and talk about this whole issue.”

5. Let’s change the subject to Democrats losing. Spicer’s “deflection” shtick is just one way to deflect questions about Russia. Another way is to pivot to “the real question.” On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Priebus, “Does the president-elect accept the consensus of the intel community?” Priebus answered:

The real question is why the Democrats and why these electors and why MoveOn.org and all of these organizations are doing everything they can to delegitimize the outcome of the election. … They lost the election because they’re so completely out of touch with the American people that they’re so shell-shocked and they can’t believe it. And what is their response? Recounts, Russians, leaked CIA reports …
Likewise, when Dickerson asked Conway about the Russia reports (“You have the CIA, the FBI, the director of national intelligence, now a number of Republicans, saying it’s clear that the Russians hacked”), she pulled out one of her trademark non sequiturs. “I’ll tell you what the un-intelligence briefing we all know is,” she retorted. “Hillary Clinton and her team spent $1.2 billion, lost an election they should have won, didn’t see us coming.”

6. Obama’s call to punish Russia is just another Democratic stunt. Dickerson asked Conway about Obama’s “decision to retaliate against the Russians for hacking into the election.” She replied: “It does seem to be a political response at this point, because it seems like the president is under pressure from Team Hillary, who can’t accept the election results.” Dickerson, taken aback, asked her whether she was dismissing the retaliation as political. Conway implied that it was: “President Obama could have, quote, retaliated months ago if they were actually concerned about this and concerned about this, quote, affecting the election. Whatever his motives are, what his action is, we’ll respect it as Americans.”

7. Democrats are confusing distinct questions. “They’re conflating whether Russia hacked into the emails [with] how it affected the election,” Conway told Dickerson. Spicer, in several interviews, offered the same complaint: that Democrats and the media were “conflating” whether Russia and other entities regularly probed for security flaws, whether Russia had found any in this case, and whether the hacks had affected the election.

8. Here, let me confuse you. While lecturing viewers about conflation, Spicer uses it to muddy inconvenient questions. Presented with reports that Russia hacked Democrats, he says they’re bogus because there’s no proof that the election’s outcome was changed. Presented with intelligence agencies’ conclusions about the hacks, he dismisses them by saying the agencies claimed voting machines weren’t compromised. On Friday, Spicer was asked about the agencies’ assessment that “Russia interfered in the election.” He brushed the story off: “This wouldn’t have happened if Hillary Clinton didn’t have a secret server.”

The integrity of the vote is so important that we have to make it as hard as possible for the wrong type of people to vote. But Russian interference is no big. More...

All of this is nonsense. Clinton’s server, the voting machines, and the DNC hack are three separate issues. Trump has no secret evidence of Russia’s innocence. He doesn’t even attend daily intelligence briefings. It’s ludicrous to tell intelligence agencies to shut up and then, in your next breath, demand that they stand in front of TV cameras and explain the “who, what, where, and how this all happened.”

But that doesn’t make these excuses meaningless. They’re highly instructive. When Trump’s aides dismiss intelligence as a plot to undermine the president with “recounts, Russians, [and] leaked CIA reports,” that tells you a lot about their disdain for national security and democratic accountability. When they belittle action against Russia as a “political response” by Democrats who “can’t accept the election results,” that shows you the extent to which they view Russia’s American enemies as Trump’s American enemies. With every evasion, brushoff, innuendo, contortion, rationalization, and attack, they’re working hard, in unison, to steer your attention away from Russia. I wonder why.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ction.html

[Elvis]

Do you suppose she voted for Clinton?

[seemslikeadream]

Trump feuds with Merkel, EU, BMW, NATO, China, CIA but not with Putin
By Juan Cole | Jan. 17, 2017 |

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Donald Trump picked a fight with almost everyone but his buddy Vladimir Putin this weekend. His continued tweaking of China over its claims on Taiwan produced a sharp rebuke from Beijing. John Brennan, head of the CIA, pushed back against Trump’s branding of the agency as a Nazi institution after the golden shower Russian dossier on him was leaked.
Trump gave an interview Monday with the German publication Der Bild in which he rampaged around like a bull in a China shop, insulting Chancellor Angela Merkel over her immigration policies, threatening BMW with a trade war, putting Merkel and Putin on the same plane with regard to his respect for them, dismissing NATO as outmoded, harming investment, and putting a scare into Eastern Europe that he’ll abandon them to Putin the way he seems to have acquiesced in the aggression on Ukraine. (See the interview, linked at the bottom of this page, which is in English with German subtitles).
Trump also went again after the Bush administration and his own Republican Party, calling the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 the worst foreign policy decision that the US ever made. “It was like,” he exclaimed, “throwing stones at a beehive.”
Asked whom he respected more, Merkel or Putin, Trump said “both.” Merkel is a treaty ally of the United States. Putin is a frenemy.
Trump said he likes Germany and respects Merkel, but that he disagreed with her decision to admit large numbers of what he called “illegals” from Syria (he then backed up and said he didn’t know where they were from because they weren’t vetted), and suggested that the decision opened Germany to more terrorism. He also dismissed the European Union as a German project, hinting that it was some sort of money-making scam for Berlin, and complained about a chronic US trade imbalance with the EU, which he said “is going to stop.” In November, the US exported $21 billion worth of goods to the EU countries and imported $34.8 billion. Trump shrugged and indicated that he didn’t care if the EU survived or not, since he saw it as a means for Germany to gain unfair trade advantages over the United States. Trump doesn’t understand macro-economics or the function of a trade deficit over time.
Merkel replied curtly, “I think we Europeans have our destiny in our own hands.” She also said that while the issue of terrorism is a great challenge for everyone, it is a separate question from that of immigration.
Several terrorist attacks by Muslims in Europe have actually been carried out mainly by European-born individuals, mostly petty criminals. A recent attack by truck was perpetrated by someone whose asylum application was rejected but who went into hiding. It wasn’t as though he were unvetted.
Most terrorism in Europe in the past decade has been carried out by separatists or far-right groups, not by Muslims.
Trump again slammed NATO, demanding that European countries pony up more funds for it and stop freeloading off the United States. The Der Bild interviewer tried to get him to understand that this sort of talk was spooking the new eastern European members of NATO. Trump said he knew what was going on, but he declined to back down from his attack.
He also went after BMW, which is building a big new auto plant in Mexico. Trump warns that they won’t be allowed to export those cars to the US unless they pay a 35% tariff.
This threat caused BMW stock to drop 2.2% at some points Monday, leveling off at 1%, representing a lost of billions of dollars. Finance specialists warned that Trump is creating an atmosphere in which investors are jittery and putting off investing, which could slow economic growth. They also point out that the US is a member of the World Trade Organization, which would certainly not allow the abrupt imposition of a big new tariff on goods coming in to the US from Mexico. Further, were Trump to follow through on his threats, Germany would retaliate with its own tariffs, which could push the fragile world economy into a Depression.
As for the refugees given asylum in Germany, they are not “illegals.” Human beings cannot be “illegal,” for one thing. But the immigration to Germany has typically been through legal channels, and those denied asylum are leaving in ever greater numbers. Germany accepted about a million asylum seekers in the past two years.
Germany’s population has been declining and was expected to spiral down from 82 million to 60 million by 2050. This decline threatens the ability of elderly Germans to receive government services, since there are so many fewer workers in the next generation and they cannot generate the same amount of tax returns to the state as did the previous cohort. In part, Merkel’s decision to let the asylum-seekers in was taken out of charity, but she and her team may also have calculated that the immigrants who brought skills (the majority) could contribute to the economy over time and slow the country’s population decline.
The German Interior Ministry revealed that some 280,000 migrants applied for asylum in 2016. Germany only admits about half of the applicants to full refugee status. Some 70,000 of those rejected have returned home in the past two years. The largest groups of applicants are Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Eritreans and Albanians.
The US admits roughly 1 million legal immigrants and 70,000 asylees annually, so that Germany’s applicants for the past year are exactly proportional to the numbers actually processed by the US, since it is 1/4 as populous. That is, Germany is just behaving more like the US recently, not doing something unheard of, as Trump (who deeply dislikes immigrants from anywhere to anywhere, apparently) said.
The 890,000 asylum applications received by Germany in 2015 are therefore something extremely unusual. That situation derived from a crisis of immigration across the Mediterranean, in which many lives were at stake (some 5,000 attempted immigrants died on the sea last year). In addition, however, it now seems clear that people smugglers set up shop in Turkey and flooded immigrants into Europe, with its open borders, for a fee, taking advantage of the sympathy of the European public for the boat people. Turkey has made an agreement to police its own borders better (and likely to crack down on these coyotes) in return for a payment of $3 billion from the EU. While Europe clearly needs to do something about its border security, Merkel’s act of compassion and of population policy will certainly benefit the German economy and German dynamism over time. Trump is wrong.
See the Bild Interview with Trump here
http://www.juancole.com/2017/01/trump-feuds-merkel.html

at war with the press, John Lewis, women....and on and on and on

Trump poll numbers at 37%
lowest of any incoming president
he is at war with everyone but Russia

[MacCruiskeen]

at war with the press, John Lewis, women....and on and on and on

Trump poll numbers at 37%
lowest of any incoming president
he is at war with everyone but Russia

You really shouldn't throw that word "war" around so loosely. He is at war with precisely no one. War is not a joke, at least not to Europeans (including Russians).




War (in Stalingrad; corpses not shown)

[seemslikeadream]

get a clue I am not the only one that uses the word war


The build-up to war on Russia

started by Mac

[MacCruiskeen]

get a clue I am not the only one that uses the word war

I have a clue about war, thanks, especially about war in Europe. And you are the only one on this board who flings around the word "war" so loosely, so inaccurately, so frequently and so irresponsibly.

[seemslikeadream]

The build-up to war on Russia

started by Mac

[MacCruiskeen]

The build-up to war on Russia

started by Mac

I did not start the build-up to war on Russia.

[seemslikeadream]

YOU used the word

[Iamwhomiam]

Ahh! Another day at the OK corral. I tell you, when those kids grow up and get guns in their hands, well, it will be war.

[MacCruiskeen]

YOU used the word

Yes, it's a word, it has a meaning, and I used it accurately, unlike you. It is not a war when Trump has a disagreement with John Lewis, even though you say it is. It is a build-up to a war when a years-long campaign of demonisation against Putin serves to justifies a massive reinforcement of US/NATO troops and weaponry across the entire eastern Russian border.

[seemslikeadream]

and you like the word assassination also

it's a word with a meaning



accurately

We have at last reached the "war on degenerate art" phas
Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon Nov 07, 2016 12:45 am
Sorry to go off-topic, but I keep wondering how much money Podesta paid for an original sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, which he demonstrably owns, and for the house he keeps it in. And exactly what he did to "earn" that money.

Hey, how about a "war on degenerate wealth"?

that's just going back 3 months ..shall I continue?

[MacCruiskeen]

and you like the word assassination also

it's a word with a meaning

I do not like the word "assassination" any more than I like the word "war". Nor do I like the things those words denote. I know the meaning of both those words, yes, so I don't throw either of those words around loosely.

stop this assassination talk ..IT IS FUCKING STUPID AND DANGEROUS

NO ONE HERE WANTS ANYONE ASSASSINATED .....

JUST CUT OUT THE BULLSHIT

Trump has declared war on the American people


I said it here and I meant it

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... =8&t=40289

That would make him an enemy combatant, and a traitor.

I don`t know if hanging is still legal for any crime, even treason or declaring war on the American people. But enemy combatants can be shot, right? And are shot, or droned. It happens all the time, even to US citizens. And traitors can be shot, electrocuted or gassed, last time I checked. Maybe they can now be broken on the rack, it`s hard to keep up.

It is an obvious and demonstrable truth that Trump has not declared war on the American people, and more than he declared war on John Lewis or Angela Merkel. So please stop throwing words around so loosely. Because words are weapons, among much else.

[seemslikeadream]

you should know by now I will not do anything you ask


I said it and I mean it