October 31, 2019

Mitch McConnell's support in Kentucky has cratered...

...since he attached himself to Trump — and now his seat is on the line

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story October 31, 2019

Excerpt...

“The poll showing that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the president’s most stolid defender, is down to a 18 percent job approval rating in Kentucky. Only 37 percent in the Public Policy Poll said they would vote for him again next year,” she wrote, adding that McConnell’s numbers should serve as a warning to all GOP lawmakers no matter how conservative their states are.

“The Bluegrass State is the canary in the mine for how much Trump can help, or hurt, a candidate as his impeachment looks ever more likely. After two weeks of unimpeachable civil servants bearing witness to an impeachable president, clinging to Trump out of fear he will kill you if you don’t do what he says is becoming more politically perilous,” she wrote before pointing out: “McConnell’s facing his toughest race since he first won election in 1984.”

As such, McConnell has moved ever-so-slightly away from Trump, with Carlson writing, “As his poll numbers have dropped and his re-election bid looms, McConnell has made ever so slight moves to distance himself from Trump, whose whims now extend to the slaughter of our erstwhile allies, like the Kurds and Ukrainians. Somewhere inside the old McConnell lives a patriot and institutional loyalist appalled that Trump has deputized a shadow government staffed by rogue operators like Rudy Giuliani and his now-indicted pals. To those ends, McConnell recently refused to confirm Trump’s claim that McConnell said his Ukrainian call was ‘innocent,’ or to agree that impeachment is a “lynching.” He hedges his criticism of impeachment by objecting to the process.”

Unfortunately for McConnell, as she writes, should things go south for Trump, McConnell will likely be dogged by the fact that his wife, Elain Chao works in the Trump administration as Secretary of Labor and because of a fundraising email he sent out using stopping Trump’s impeachment as a hook for donations.

Continues...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/mitch-mcconnells-support-in-kentucky-has-cratered-since-he-attached-himself-to-trump-and-now-his-seat-is-on-the-line/

Ha ha. It is to laugh.

October 29, 2019

Senator Warren is Exactly Right

"Warren is determined to talk about the substance of the issue, whether or not the reporters want to hear it.

by Dean Baker

EXCERPT...

For a larger context, consider how the budget is reported. Reporters routinely highlight the budget deficit and the accumulated debt, as though this is the most important feature of the budget. It is at least implicit in nearly all reporting that the country would be better off with a lower budget deficit.

This is also indicated in their choice of sources. An incredibly high percentage of budget stories in leading news outlets (i.e. the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio) feature comments from Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an organization committed to lower deficits and debt.

News stories on the budget almost never present the countervailing view, which is endorsed by a growing number of economists, that the budget deficit has generally been too small in the years following the Great Recession. The result has been that growth has been slower than it otherwise would have been, causing workers to be needlessly unemployed.

Furthermore, there is now considerable research on the concept of "hysteresis," which means that there are lasting effects of a period of slow growth and high unemployment. The logic is that many of the people who go unemployed for long periods of time lose skills and may end up being permanently unemployed. In addition, less growth will typically mean less investment. This lost investment means the economy will be less productive in the future. Furthermore, there is even a generational impact, since we know the children of unemployed parent(s) are likely to have poorer educational prospects and therefore worse labor market prospects when they grow up.

Instead of the debt and deficit posing a generational burden on our children, as the conventional story has it, the opposite is true. The failure to run deficits that are large enough to push the economy to full employment leaves the country, and our children, poorer than they otherwise would be.

CONTINUES...

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/10/26/senator-warren-exactly-right

October 26, 2019

Hey, Congressional Democrats! Go Big!

Investigate. Document. Indict. Impeach Demented Donnie for ALL his high crimes, misdemeanors and treasons.

Then, use the opportunity to tell We the People how all roads lead to Putin — and show what has been done to harm the United States on television.

Later, if Moscow Mitch, Lindsey Leningram and the GOPNRA Senate won’t convict and remove, no matter what, fine.

The Reputin Party can spend 2020 explaining how they let a traitor stay in office to continue harming the country.

October 23, 2019

They even ordered pizza.

Traitors.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/house-republicans-literally-storm-the-impeachment-hearings

October 23, 2019

Remember Barr was given super-top secret power to oversee IC

Trump gives attorney general Barr sweeping power to declassify intelligence in Russia probe review

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-directs-intelligence-community-cooperate-attorney-general-investigation/story?id=63244302

So...it doesn’t take an Unstable Moron to see how that authority can be abused most profitably, even if it is treason.

October 23, 2019

HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE.

Nice ring to it.

Barr quashed the investigation of all that Taylor today revealed.

October 22, 2019

EU Amb. Sondland role shows Trumputin wanted US to betray NATO!

Sondland’s job was to represent USA before European Union.

In that role, Trump sent Sondland to Ukraine to assist Giuliani and Co.’s work to get dirt on an American politician in exchange for $400 million in military aid.

Taylor’s testimony today reinforced Trump’s actions betrayed an ally, Ukraine, to the benefit of mob boss Putin.

Sondland’s presence in Europe puts him in a position to do the same treasons to our European allies — a foreign policy to corrupt elections at home in exchange for selling out our country to our nation’s greatest foe.

October 20, 2019

Serf Mentality

It’s how Capitalism gets done.

Outstanding analysis, Soph0571! Thank you!

October 20, 2019

You are most welcome! Craig Unger is TOPS!

He lifted up the lid...



Trump’s Russian Laundromat

How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.

By CRAIG UNGER
The New Republic, July , 2017

Excerpt...

Trump made his first trip to Russia in 1987, only a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Invited by Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin, Trump was flown to Moscow and Leningrad—all expenses paid—to talk business with high-ups in the Soviet command. In The Art of the Deal, Trump recounted the lunch meeting with Dubinin that led to the trip. “One thing led to another,” he wrote, “and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”

Over the years, Trump and his sons would try and fail five times to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow. But for Trump, what mattered most were the lucrative connections he had begun to make with the Kremlin—and with the wealthy Russians who would buy so many of his properties in the years to come. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. boasted at a real estate conference in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

The money, illicit and otherwise, began to rain in earnest after the Soviet Union fell in 1991. President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.” After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s power and serve his personal financial interests. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out of Russia since the 1990s.

At the top of the sprawling criminal enterprise was Semion Mogilevich. Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the FBI, the short, squat Ukrainian was the key money-laundering contact for the Solntsevskaya Bratva, or Brotherhood, one of the richest criminal syndicates in the world. Before long, he was running a multibillion-dollar worldwide racket of his own. Mogilevich wasn’t feared because he was the most violent gangster, but because he was reputedly the smartest. The FBI has credited the “brainy don,” who holds a degree in economics from Lviv University, with a staggering range of crimes. He ran drug trafficking and prostitution rings on an international scale; in one characteristic deal, he bought a bankrupt airline to ship heroin from Southeast Asia into Europe. He used a jewelry business in Moscow and Budapest as a front for art that Russian gangsters stole from museums, churches, and synagogues all over Europe. He has also been accused of selling some $20 million in stolen weapons, including ground-to-air missiles and armored troop carriers, to Iran. “He uses this wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises,” the FBI says, “but to influence governments and their economies.”

In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to London, recorded an interview with investigators detailing his inside knowledge of the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime. “Mogilevich,” he said in broken English, “have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993.” A year later Litvinenko was dead, apparently poisoned by agents of the Kremlin.

Continues...

https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate

October 19, 2019

Do you think Drumpf will invite Putin to G7 @ Doral?

Asking for a friend who’s interested in reality and television.