BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

Special counselor has been appointed by Justice Department.

Keep your eyes firmly placed on the Department of Defense which as of last year can not tell you where $6,500,000,000,000 ($6.5 TRILLION) in cash was spent on!

If you find that money, you might be surprised how redundant the "special counselor" Robert Mueller will be.

Before we go to any war, this Department needs to account for that amount of money.

http://nation.foxnew...t-taxpayer-cash

This thread is about Trump, his campaign, and its consequences. Your should start your own conspiracy thread if that is your cup of tea. But don't bring your claptrap to this thread, por favore.

School board campaigns are often sleepy affairs, not the sort of electoral battle that generates widespread attention and outside donations. But this week’s election for the Los Angeles Unified school board was something of an epic proxy fight. Some saw it as a battle over the influence of the teachers’ union. Others cast it as a fight against the education agenda of President Trump and Betsy DeVos and the expansion of charter schools.

After Tuesday’s results, the seven-member school board that governs the nation’s second largest public school system will be dominated by supporters of charter schools who may move to increase the number of publicly funded but privately run schools across the city.

The election drew in some $14 million — making it among the most expensive school board races in the country’s history — and a host of high-profile endorsements. In the end, the candidates who portrayed themselves as supporters of dramatic changes won out, leaving the teachers’ union and its supporters angered and worried about the future. Steve Zimmer, the school board president who lost to the challenger Nick Melvoin, was so angered by the defeat that he refused to make the customary congratulatory call. Mr. Zimmer called the results “devastating” and said he would never run for office again.

There are already more charter schools and charter school students in Los Angeles than in any other school system in the country; charter school students make up more than 20 percent of the district’s enrollment. But supporters of the schools say that there is room for many more and that students in the district should have more options.

The fight over the schools, however, obscures some of the district’s other pressing problems — including a declining enrollment and a projected deficit of nearly $1.5 billion.

Mr. Melvoin said he wanted to work to repair the divisions that had been exacerbated by the campaign, calling the union versus charter school paradigm a “false choice.”

“We have schools in every area of L.A. with a huge waiting list just a few blocks away from schools that have been under-enrolled for a long time now,” he said. “We haven’t learned the lessons of the charter movement in L.A. The district is not improving its own schools to please more parents.”

I literally LOL'ed

Just so we are clear.

$6.5 trillion is about twice the ENTIRE ANNUAL federal budget and you are busy chasing down a laughable Russia/Trump collusion conspiracy?

Don't forget we are still under the "War on Terror". That war started 09/11/2001. This war has been going on for 15 years, 8 months and 1 week to this very day.

In countless conversations, he made clear to me that he treated every encounter as a contest he had to win, because the only other option from his perspective was to lose, and that was the equivalent of obliteration. Many of the deals in “The Art of the Deal” were massive failures — among them the casinos he owned and the launch of a league to rival the National Football League — but Trump had me describe each of them as a huge success.

With evident pride, Trump explained to me that he was “an assertive, aggressive” kid from an early age, and that he had once punched a music teacher in the eye and was nearly expelled from elementary school for his behavior.

Like so much about Trump, who knows whether that story is true? What’s clear is that he has spent his life seeking to dominate others, whatever that requires and whatever collateral damage it creates along the way. In “The Art of the Deal,” he speaks with street-fighting relish about competing in the world of New York real estate: They are “some of the sharpest, toughest, and most vicious people in the world. I happen to love to go up against these guys, and I love to beat them.” I never sensed from Trump any guilt or contrition about anything he’d done, and he certainly never shared any misgivings publicly. From his perspective, he operated in a jungle full of predators who were forever out to get him, and he did what he must to survive.

Trump was equally clear with me that he didn’t value — nor even necessarily recognize — the qualities that tend to emerge as people grow more secure, such as empathy, generosity, reflectiveness, the capacity to delay gratification or, above all, a conscience, an inner sense of right and wrong. Trump simply didn’t traffic in emotions or interest in others. The life he lived was all transactional, all the time. Having never expanded his emotional, intellectual or moral universe, he has his story down, and he’s sticking to it.

A key part of that story is that facts are whatever Trump deems them to be on any given day. When he is challenged, he instinctively doubles down — even when what he has just said is demonstrably false. I saw that countless times, whether it was as trivial as exaggerating the number of floors at Trump Tower or as consequential as telling me that his casinos were performing well when they were actually going bankrupt. In the same way, Trump sees no contradiction at all in changing his story about why he fired Comey and thereby undermining the statements of his aides, or in any other lie he tells. His aim is never accuracy; it’s domination.

Special counselor has been appointed by Justice Department.

It looks like the Deputy Attorney General made an excellent decision in appointing former FBI Director Mueller as a Special Counsel. By picking a highly respected, apparently apolitical person to manage the investigation, it eliminates any appearance that politics plays a part in whatever the investigation finds.

This is in stark contrast to handling of similar scandals by the Obama administration's highly politicized Department of Justice. Unlike Attorney General Sessions, Attorney General Lynch never recused herself from the Clinton e-mail investigation, but only alluded to letting the professional Justice Department prosecutors decide what to do. No matter what followed from that would always have the taint of being political. Hence, all the Director Comey drama that followed to try to obviate the impressions that "the fix was in".

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump's loyal backers say they don't know, don't believe or don't care about the explosive revelations that forced the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible collusion between Russia and the Republican campaign

On the other hand, Tony Schwartz, the writer of this piece, ghost-wrote stuff for Trump that Schwartz knew to be complete bull.

Has it? Are you sure? First of all the term has no legal weight outside of political rhetoric. Secondly, President Obama announced that the US was no longer persuing a war on terror back in 2013.

Finally, do you have some credible sources for your 6.5 billion black hole? It is actually expected for defence departments to have dark programs that do not appear on the books and it has always been that way. What the budget is for these in the USA I have no idea. That they do not ell you where the money goes does not mean that it is unaccounted for!

Yes the war on terror is still ongoing and let us not forget the Mother of All Bombs we just dropped on Afghanistan. That war against ISIL (Taliban, et. al) is not a "different type" of "War on Terror". And so what Obama declares that war on terror is over? All he did is remove some troops from key areas. We are still conducting a "war on terror" despite the troop "pull back"; we are just using cutting edge technology to take a clinical approach to war. We have replaced a lot of human troops with controller-operated drones that are conducting reconnaissance, surveillance, and killing terrorists (and civilians) as part of the war theatre.

http://nationalinter...time-warp-20714

With respect to the $6.5 trillion black hole. I have decided to go the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General website which is our military (.mil) website for the DoD. Please note that it discusses $6.5 trillion in year end adjustments which means that at the end of the fiscal year they can't reconcile $6.5 trillion in assets (entries) to the general fund balance. That is trillions with a "T".

Please use the link below:

http://www.dodig.mil...ary.cfm?id=7034

I also trust that you will find the Inspector General of the United States Department of Defense to be a reliable and credible source.

I trust that our own Department of Defense is not "cooking up" conspiracy theories about not knowing where $6.5 trillion in assets have gone and why we can't substantiate them and must record "general journal entries" this large to "balance" the books. Again, roughly 1/3 of our national public debt.

The enemy is much closer to home. . .as Rumsfeld said in his press conference speech in 2001.

The Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management & Comptroller) (OASA[FM&C]) and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis (DFAS Indianapolis) did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter journal voucher (JV) adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend JV adjustments1 made to AGF data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation.2 The unsupported JV adjustments occurred because OASA(FM&C) and DFAS Indianapolis did not prioritize correcting the system deficiencies that caused errors resulting in JV adjustments, and did not provide sufficient guidance for supporting system‑generated adjustments.

In addition, DFAS Indianapolis did not document or support why the Defense Departmental Reporting System‑Budgetary (DDRS-B), a budgetary reporting system, removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during third quarter FY 2015. This occurred because DFAS Indianapolis did not have detailed documentation describing the DDRS-B import process or have accurate or complete system reports.

As a result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and yearend financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. Furthermore, DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions. Until the Army and DFAS Indianapolis correct these control deficiencies, there is considerable risk that AGF financial statements will be materially misstated and the Army will not achieve audit readiness by the congressionally mandated deadline of September 30, 2017.

After an eruption, volcanoes sometimes collapse at the center. The magma chamber empties out and the volcano falls in on itself, leaving a caldera and a fractured ring of stone around the void, covered by deadening ash.

That’s about the shape of Washington after the last stunning fortnight. The White House at the center just collapsed in on itself and the nation’s policy apparatus is covered in ash.

I don’t say that because I think the Comey-Russia scandal will necessarily lead to impeachment. I have no idea where the investigations will go.

I say it because White Houses, like all organizations, run on talent, and the Trump White House has just become a Human Resources disaster area.

We have seen White Houses engulfed by scandal before. But we have never seen a White House implode before it had the time to staff up. The Nixon, Reagan and Clinton White Houses had hired quality teams by the time their scandals came. They could continue to function, sort of, even when engulfed.

The Trump administration, on the other hand, has hundreds of senior and midlevel positions to fill, and few people of quality or experience are going to want to take them.

Few people of any quality or experience are going to want to join a team that is already toxic. Nobody is going to want to become the next H. R. McMaster, a formerly respected figure who is now permanently tainted because he threw his lot in with Donald Trump. Nobody is going to want to join a self-cannibalizing piranha squad whose main activity is lawyering up.

That means even if the Trump presidency survives, it will be staffed by the sort of C- and D-List flora and fauna who will make more mistakes, commit more scandals and lead to more dysfunction.

...

But over the past 10 days the atmosphere has become extraordinary. Senior members of the White House staff have trained their sights on the man they serve. Every day now there are stories in The Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere in which unnamed White House officials express disdain, exasperation, anger and disrespect for their boss.

As the British say, the staff is jumping ship so fast they are leaving the rats gaping and applauding.

Trump, for his part, is resentfully returning fire, blaming his underlings for his own mistakes, complaining that McMaster is a pain, speculating about firing and demoting people. This is a White House in which the internal nickname for the chief of staff is Rancid.

The organizational culture is about to get worse. People who have served in administrations under investigation speak eloquently about how miserable it is. You never know which of your friends is about to rat you out. No personal communication is really secure. You never know which of your colleagues is going to break ranks and write the tell-all memoir, and you think that maybe it should be you.

Even people not involved in the original scandal can find themselves caught up in the maelstrom and see their careers ruined. Legal costs soar. The investigations can veer off in wildly unexpected directions, so no White House nook or cranny is safe.

As current staff leaves or gets pushed out, look for Trump to try to fill the jobs with business colleagues who also have no experience in government. It’s striking that the only person who this week seems excited to take a Trump administration job is Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who made his name as a TV performance artist calling the Black Lives Matter movement “black slime,” and who now claims he has been hired to serve in the Department of Homeland Security.

Congressional Republicans seem to think they can carry on and legislate despite the scandal, but since 1933 we have no record of significant legislation without strong presidential leadership. Members of this Congress are not going to be judged by where they set the corporate tax rate. They will be defined by where they stood on Donald Trump’s threat to civic integrity. That issue is bound to overshadow all else.

The implosion at the center is going to affect everything around it. The Trump administration may survive politically, but any hopes that it will become an effective governing organization are dashed.

By this definition the British have been engaged in a war on terror non-stop since before 1920. Of course GWB famously declared that the war on terror "will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." By that standard, not only is it still going but it will almost certainly still be ongoing in 500 years, assuming that the USA, not to mention mankind itself, survives that long. I find it unlikely that anyone in Washington is still thinking in terms of defeating every terrorist across the world. You could say, if you like, that the war on terror has ended, the war on IS/ISIS has begun. or you can hold up GWB's words and say that the goals have not been met so the war must continue, even though the POTUS himself declared it over.

Here is the full quote on the subject:

I take it you find the idea that the bulk of this amount was due to software problems and systemic issues to be incorrect? I still suspect that these book-keeping errors are also used to help hide secret projects but no doubt there are plenty of other factors - data being deleted, receipts not stored correctly, etc. So what is the right-wing conspiracy think tank on this cash - it went to HC's campaign fund? Or to Obama's Swiss bank account?

Three major impediments prevented GAO from rendering an opinion on the federal government’s accrual-based consolidated financial statements: (1) serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DoD), (2) the federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal entities, and (3) the federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements. Efforts are under way to resolve these issues, but strong and sustained commitment by DOD and other federal entities as well as continued leadership by the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) are necessary to implement needed improvements.

Additionally, the Inspector General highlighted the following 13 material internal control weaknesses that affect nearly every aspect of DoD’s financial
management operations.

• Financial Management Systems
• Fund Balance with Treasury
• Accounts Receivable
• Inventory
• Operating Materials and Supplies
• General Property, Plant, and Equipment
• Government Property in Possession of Contractors
• Accounts Payable
• Environmental Liabilities
• Statement of Net Cost
• Intragovernmental Eliminations
• Accounting Entries
• Reconciliation of Net Cost of Operations to Budget

According to Government Accountability Office, DoD’s pervasive financial and related business management and system deficiencies continue to
adversely affect its ability to (bold mine):
• control costs;
• ensure basic accountability;
• anticipate future costs and claims on the budget;
• measure performance;
• maintain funds control;
• prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse; and
• address pressing management issues

The Trump and Russia conspiracy can wait===>

I think it would probably be a useful exercise to find out how much actually is missing