The New American Politics thread

[Montana Moe]

Originally Posted by kn

Why is Google censoring?

Because as a private entity, they can if they choose to do so.

[Senator Clay Davis]

I would think the DNC leaks thing will be pretty easy to remedy, dump Debbie Wasserman Schultz and replace her with the Bernie backed candidate for party leader. Whether they do it or not is another thing, but I would think that should be appeasement enough. So far there's nothing too egregious in the e-mails, but someone has to take the fall and they probably should have dumped her months ago.

[killer_carlson]

Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis

I would think the DNC leaks thing will be pretty easy to remedy, dump Debbie Wasserman Schultz and replace her with the Bernie backed candidate for party leader. Whether they do it or not is another thing, but I would think that should be appeasement enough. So far there's nothing too egregious in the e-mails, but someone has to take the fall and they probably should have dumped her months ago.

I don't agree. I think it dismissive of the motivations of these voters.

Sanders campaign was based in large part that the establishment and status quo was not working for the common person. That the establishment was keeping the "man" down. This premise resonated very strongly with a lot of voters. (Interestingly, Trump has tapped into the equivalent on the Republican side).

So while Clinton supporters might try to dismiss this as no big deal, it is a big deal to a very large group of Sanders supporters. The exact thing that they were campaigning against happened. They were expressly lied to by the organization that was to be expressly objective when this was raised during the campaign. In their mind, the status quo of American society is rigged, and now there is proof that the process they put money, blood sweat and tears into was also rigged.

The questions for a lot of these Democrats are:
Do I hate Trump more than I hate the rigged system? and
Is the system so rigged, does it even matter if I vote?

The risk is whether these voters are so turned off that they stay home on election day. I think we're going to see the Democrats double down on the fear-themed anti trump messaging to try and scare these voters into still coming out.

[socalwingfan]

Originally Posted by Red Ice Player

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...opinions_pop_b

A very sobering editorial. I would suggest everyone should read it, especially those who think that all of this is entertainment.

Thanks for posting that, it is an excellent article

[calumniate]

Originally Posted by socalwingfan

Thanks for posting that, it is an excellent article

Yeah I've never taken the Washington post too seriously, but they have a unique hate for trump which is interesting
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...html?tid=a_inl

Lol. Kind of like Celine Dion saying she doesn't read books cause her head is too full of ideas already :-\

[Street Pharmacist]

Uh oh...

There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

1. All the other discussions of Trump's finances aside, his#debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.

2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here's a#good overview#from#The Washington Post,#with one morsel for illustration ...

Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump's largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was#news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the project has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that's not the most salient part of the story. As the#Times#put it,

"Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt."

Another suit alleged the project "occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia."

Sounds completely legit.

Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.

Trump's tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you're keeping score at home: no, that's not reassuring.

4. Then there's Paul Manafort, Trump's nominal 'campaign chair' who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump's campaign.

5. Trump's foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is#Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you're not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom's role in the Russian political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin's policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.

6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has#aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foerexplains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money. In some cases this is because they support Russia-backed policies; in others it is simply because they sow discord in Western aligned states. Of course, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, not only in the abstract but often for the authoritarian policies and patterns of government which have most soured his reputation around the world.

7. Here's where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump's larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM's Tierney Sneed#explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there's a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump's backing but because he simply didn't care.With one big exception: Trump's team mobilized the nominee's traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point:changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations#in eastern Ukraine. For what it's worth (and it's not worth much) I am quite skeptical of most Republicans call for aggressively arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. But the single-mindedness of this focus on this one issue - in the context of total indifference to everything else in the platform - speaks volumes.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/...really-a-thing

[Flash Walken]

American elections are so broken they are now at the whim of foreign investment.

Yikes.

I guess it is no mystery now where the Trump foreign policy if non intervention in NATO and the Baltics is coming from...

[Dan02]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Uh oh...





http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/...really-a-thing

I'm far from a Trump supporter, but a left wing blog draws some iffy lines and makes up a bunch of crap and you're actually taking it seriously? We can do better.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by Dan02

I'm far from a Trump supporter, but a left wing blog draws some shady lines and makes up a bunch of crap and you're actually taking it seriously? We can do better.

Is worth taking seriously. Paul Manifort alone is worth taking seriously. As is Carter Page

[Dan02]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Is worth taking seriously. Paul Manifort alone is worth taking seriously. As is Carter Page

I have no idea where you're going with this.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by Dan02

I have no idea where you're going with this.

Trump's campaign manager and foreign policy adviser both have our are paid by Putin...

[Dan02]

Manifort also worked on the campaigns of Ford, Reagan, Both Bushs', Dole and McCain, were they also bought by the Russians?

[octothorp]

I'm skeptical of the deep conspiracy charges, but I think even a casual observer would need to admit that Trump is one of the most Russia-friendly presidential candidates ever, (both in direct comments and in general policy ideas) at a time that Russia is more militant and aggressive than any time since Soviet dissolution.

[Dan02]

seriously you post a giant scandalous article from a blog, then when called out on it you pick out the two parts of it that are pretty common knowledge as the keys in the article? As I said we can do better.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by Dan02

seriously you post a giant scandalous article from a blog, then when called out on it you pick out the two parts of it that are pretty common knowledge as the keys in the article? As I said we can do better.

There's no room to discuss the various business ties? You have no comment? This isn't info wars level stuff here

You can do better

[Street Pharmacist]

And FYI, it's a fairly well known blog that won a Polk award (literally the only blog to do so) and does not discuss conspiracy theories generally.

Do you disagree with any of those points? It do you disagree that those add up to at the very least an extremely friendly relationship with Putin?

[jayswin]

Originally Posted by Montana Moe

Because as a private entity, they can if they choose to do so.

Of course they're allowed to, I believe his inquiry was what would their motive be?

[calgarygeologist]

Sweet, Wasserman Schultz is down. I really dislike her and I am glad that she is stepping down. Sounds like she may not even speak at the convention this week.

[killer_carlson]

Wasserman Schultz stepping down. http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/22/politi...ils/index.html


CNN quoting Sanders on State of the Union show:

Sanders on Sunday told Tapper the release of the DNC emails that show its staffers working against him underscores the position he's held for months: Wasserman Schultz needs to go.
"I don't think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC, not only for these awful emails, which revealed the prejudice of the DNC, but also because we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people, and I don't think her leadership style is doing that," Sanders told Tapper on "State of the Union," on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

I think this emphasizes a fact that many of the DNC establishment are wilfully blind to how many American's reject their intention of a coronation rather than a democratic process.

Trump rebukes support from Duke and the KKK. Says he'd support a democrat over Duke http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/24/politi...ate/index.html

[KootenayFlamesFan]

Originally Posted by killer_carlson

Trump rebukes support from Duke and the KKK. Says he'd support a democrat over Duke http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/24/politi...ate/index.html

And then says "......depending who it was." What a goof.

At least he's acknowledging Duke this time, good for him I guess. When he pretended in February he didn't know who he was that didn't work out too well.