[Winstonm]

Quote

Donald Trump David Dennison Individual-1 was in the room when his then-lawyer Michael Cohen discussed organizing hush money payments to two women with the publisher of the National Enquirer in 2015, NBC News and CNN reported Thursday.

Individual-1 needs no money for his wall - he can build it with the bricks he's shiting.

[Winstonm]

Quote

Newly revealed government documents obtained by Vox investigative reporter Murray Waas show that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort urged President Donald Trump to go all-out in attacking the FBI from the “earliest days” of his presidency.

The records obtained by Waas shed more light on the communications between Manafort and the White House that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office alleges Manafort lied about even after he agreed to fully cooperate with investigators.

Among other things, Manafort urged Trump to attack the credibility of the FBI as a way to undermine its investigation into whether the Trump campaign worked with Russian government agents during the 2016 presidential election.

As one of Waas’s sources explains, Manafort wanted the White House to “declare a public relations war on the FBI” to “delegitimize” its entire investigation into the Trump campaign. Manafort also said it was particularly important to hurt the credibility of former FBI Director James Comey, whom Manafort believed would become a key witness in the case against Trump.

Why oh why would Individual-1 be talking to Manafort after Manafort had been indicted?

[ggwhiz]

This guy threw his hat in the ring for the Chief of Staff job and I think he would be perfect!

https://www.youtube....h?v=QixQMUu4CKI

[johnu]

ggwhiz, on 2018-December-14, 12:40, said:

This guy threw his hat in the ring for the Chief of Staff job and I think he would be perfect!

https://www.youtube....h?v=QixQMUu4CKI

Being hard headed is a prerequisite for working in the White House. That and a little roid rage would be a plus in blending in with the backstabbers and petty tyrant wannabes that work there.

[Winstonm]

And another one's gone and another one's gone, another one bites the dust:

Quote

Ron Zinke, President Donald Trump’s loyal but embattled secretary of the Interior Department, is leaving the administration.

The former Montana congressman had a tumultuous tenure as chief steward of America’s natural resources, facing nearly 20 federal investigations ― one of which his agency’s internal watchdog recently referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal violations ― and besieged by a steady drumbeat of unfavorable headlines.

Only the "best people".

[y66]

And the horses they rode in on.

[Chas_P]

Hi guys. Just passing through, drinking a little whiskey, and holding a good thought for all of you.



Best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible,
low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, winter solstice holiday,
practiced within the most joyous traditions of the religious persuasion
of your choice, but with respect for the religious persuasion of others
who choose to practice their own religion as well as those who choose
not to practice a religion at all; plus, A fiscally successful, personally
fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the generally
accepted calendar year 2019, but not without due respect for the
calendars of choice of the other cultures whose contributions have
helped make our society great, without regards to the race, creed,
color, religious, or sexual preferences of the wishees.

(disclaimer: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It
implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the
wishes for him/herself or others and no responsibility for any
unintended emotional stress these greetings may bring to those not
caught up in the holiday spirit.)

[johnu]

As the Trumps Dodged Taxes, Their Tenants Paid a Price

I know Winston will like this different take on the fraud inspired All County Building Supply & Maintenance company used by Dennison and his family to steal money from their renters. No lie and no fraud is too small, or too big for Dennison.

Dennison may end up getting sued for overcharges in a NY civil court. Hopefully he will hire the "best" lawyers. I hear that Michael Cohen is looking for a job

[barmar]

Winstonm, on 2018-December-15, 08:49, said:

And another one's gone and another one's gone, another one bites the dust:

Only the "best people".

I like his reason for leaving, all the money he'd have to spend defending himself on all the charges of conflicts of interest, misuse of government funds, etc. If he didn't abuse his office so much, he wouldn't have to defend himself.

Of course, he claims all these allegations are false and politically motivated.

[johnu]

"Dennison" Whines Over ‘Unfair’ Coverage On NBC, ‘Saturday Night Live’

Quote

“A REAL scandal is the one sided coverage, hour by hour, of networks like NBC & Democrat spin machines like Saturday Night Live,” Dennison tweeted. “It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal?”

Apparently Dennison's TV tuner is broken and he doesn't get the Fox Propaganda Channel

[Chas_P]

johnu, on 2018-December-16, 16:25, said:

"Dennison" Whines Over ‘Unfair’ Coverage On NBC, ‘Saturday Night Live’



Apparently Dennison's TV tuner is broken and he doesn't get the Fox Propaganda Channel

LMAO! No, he probably only watches Mika, Joe, and Rachel who are all totally straightforward and unbiased. You guys really are amusing. Thanks for the belly laughs.

[johnu]

Chas_P, on 2018-December-16, 19:38, said:

LMAO! No, he probably only watches Mika, Joe, and Rachel who are all totally straightforward and unbiased. You guys really are amusing. Thanks for the belly laughs.

I see you still have as much integrity as Dennison.

Chas_P, on 2018-October-22, 18:11, said:

With that said, I think I will follow Ken’s lead and exit this forum. I’m not going to change your mind and you aren’t going to change mine. And when you get right down to where the rubber meets the road nothing that either of us says on an internet message board will have any more effect on the great scheme of things than a fart has on a tornado. So I bid you adieu and wish you well with your future endeavors.

johnu, on 2018-October-25, 19:20, said:

Apparently you have Dennison's disease and can't remember that you quit this forum. Or maybe you just don't have any integrity and your word means nothing.

At least try to have some fake self respect. Just create a new username and pretend that you are a new poster. I can suggest a couple of names for you:

Chas_Miller
Chas_Barron
Chas_Dennison

[Winstonm]

johnu, on 2018-December-16, 21:48, said:

I see you still have as much integrity as Dennison.





At least try to have some fake self respect. Just create a new username and pretend that you are a new poster. I can suggest a couple of names for you:

Chas_Miller
Chas_Barron
Chas_Dennison

Individual Poster-1

[y66]

From House Democrats’ big democracy reform package is good policy, and smart politics by Lee Drutman at Vox:

Quote

House Democrats have decided on their priority legislation for the next Congress, and it’s all about improving the quality of American democracy. HR 1, the bill number typically reserved for the House majority party’s most important policy, marks the first time that political reform has been given this kind of top billing.

There’s a lot in the bill, including a number of ethics and disclosure and election security proposals that should be commonsense. But at heart, there are four big-ticket items that would be standalone news on their own: a small-donor matching system for campaign finance, mandatory independent redistricting commissions, automatic voter registration, and felon reenfranchisement. Collectively, this is the most transformative pro-democracy package in decades.

More

[y66]

From I Have Seen the Future of a Republican Party That Is No Longer Insane by Jonathan Chait (December 10, 2018):

Quote

This week, the Niskanen Center, a libertarian-leaning Washington think tank, held a conference on the future of the Republican Party, called “Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump.” In my one opportunity to offer a comment, I helpfully suggested that the Republican Party as currently constituted needed (this is a direct quote) “to die in a fire.” The surprising thing is that many of the attendees in the room, including people who work at the Niskanen Center itself, told me afterward that they agree.

Economist William Niskanen worked for the Reagan administration, and then proceeded to chair the Cato Institute, a redoubt of the firm anti-government verities that define conservative economic thought. Toward the end of his life, though, Niskanen began to express some doubts about the efficacy of supply-side economics, the unquestioned foundation of the Republican domestic platform. Cutting taxes without cutting spending, Niskanen observed, simply hadn’t worked. The small-government movement needed to “convince voters to reduce their demand for the services financed by federal spending,” he wrote. “Until that time, some increase in federal taxes appears to be a necessary part of a fiscal policy to balance the budget.”

Niskanen’s observation that tax rates needed to reflect actual rather than desired spending levels is banal to right-of-center economists in almost any country. But it was (and is) absolute heresy on the Republican right, which has elevated anti-tax absolutism into a theological principle. The Niskanen Center, founded in 2015, four years after Niskanen’s death, drew upon his heresies as a basis for an unconventional and less dogmatic approach to libertarian economics. And in the Trump era, its heretical tendencies have blossomed. Rather than going along with Trump, or waiting him out so things can go back to normal, Niskanen has used the shock of his ascension to rethink the ideas that brought the American right to this point. The center has developed something that for more than a generation has been almost totally nonexistent in American politics: a right-of-center program that is detached from the conservative movement.

Niskanen’s scholars have criticized the failures of conservative policy you might expect — climate science skepticism, the Republican health-care plan — a heterodox center-right think tank to criticize. But Niskanen has gone beyond point-by-point rebuttals and has developed a broad and deep argument with the movement’s core assumptions.

Last year, Will Wilkinson argued against “small-government monomania” and in favor of a social safety net to “increase the public’s tolerance for the dislocations of a dynamic free-market economy,” and identified libertarianism with hostility to democracy, resulting in persistent Republican efforts “to find ways to keep Democrats from voting, and to minimize the electoral impact of the Democratic ballots that are cast.” Brink Lindsey attacked “the notion that downward redistribution picks the pockets of makers and doles it out to layabout takers.”

These are frontal assaults on the basic orientation of the libertarian political project. By recognizing the value of social transfers as a backstop to a free-market system, and acknowledging that the right’s obsession with the protection of property has made it hostile to democracy itself, they forced themselves to rethink not only the methods but also the goals of libertarian politics.

Wilkinson, late last year, stepped away from libertarianism, acknowledging that according to libertarians’ own data, countries with larger welfare states also had more freedom. This revealed “a pretty major intellectual mistake lurking within the ideal-theoretic version of libertarianism that the most prominent institutions of the ‘freedom movement’ were built to promote.”

Jerry Taylor went a step farther. During his previous time at the Cato Institute, he had seen libertarians refusing to accept climate science, because it implied the existence of a problem that would require more government to solve. Versions of this pathology were everywhere. “Over and over again, libertarian friends and colleagues were engaged in fierce, uncompromising debate about empirical matters that had nothing to do with libertarian principles or commitments,” he wrote. “Is the Keynesian multiplier consequential? Is Thomas Piketty correct that returns to capital are greater than the rate of growth? Do tax cuts pay for themselves?” The answer had to support the anti-government agenda. Taylor concluded that strong ideological precommitments were themselves the problem. “I have abandoned that libertarian project,” he wrote recently, “because I have come to abandon ideology.”

But this is not to say Taylor or his colleagues have given up on a public philosophy. Instead, they have tried to map out a program for maximizing human freedom that follows the facts. This week, following its conference, the Niskanen Center published its manifesto, signed by four of its senior staff. Titled “The Center Can Hold: Public Policy for an Age of Extremes,” it synthesizes two years of heresies into an impressively coherent approach to governing.

While defending the benefits of creative destruction and free trade, which permit new business ideas to replace old ones, Niskanen’s paper concedes that the simple small-government vision fails to capture important facts about political and economic life. Merely ending de jure racial discrimination does not wipe away a racial caste system that permeates multiple institutions in American life. “You can get very strong intergenerational transmission of subordinate status,” the paper importantly allows, “even in the absence of contemporary unjust acts.” The libertarian dream of a meritocratic capitalist system has to account for massive inequality that was originally produced by brute force, which requires “a strong presumption for widespread opportunity and an openness to redistribution.”

In theory, it argues, market forces do a better job than central planners. In reality, though, most of the regulations conservatives target are those that advance legitimate social objectives — protecting health, safety and the environment — and impose costs on existing firms. The regulations most in need of scaling back are those imposed by state and local governments, and which protect incumbent owners of businesses and land. That is, regulations can be either good or bad, but in general, Republicans are attacking the good ones while leaving the bad ones in place.

Judging by Niskanen’s overview of the landscape, it is difficult to identify any aspect of public policy in which the Republican Party is making the world a better place. And this is both the most thrilling and discouraging thing about its critique. The Niskanen Center is not playing the influence game, jostling to bring a slogan or campaign plank to the attention of the next Republican candidate. It is operating from the starting point of what a well-functioning right-of-center party ought to stand for, rather than how the current one can be tweaked.

The pathological character of the Republican Party is the most important problem in American politics. It has taken decades to develop to its current deformed state, and will not be solved quickly. There is no way to imagine the current incarnation of the GOP getting to the place Niskanen envisions any time soon. Niskanen’s manifesto contains multiple points of overlap with the prevailing orientation of the Democratic Party, and almost none with the prevailing orientation of the Republican Party. One can imagine a future in which the Democrats move toward socialism, opening a void in the center for the ideas espoused by Niskanen to take hold in something that perhaps shares the name, but otherwise none of the important ideological traits, of today’s Republican Party.

That distant point probably lies years, even decades, away. It can only happen after today’s Republican Party is destroyed, rendered incapable of wielding power at the national level, and its governing philosophy discredited completely. The Niskanen Center is the one institution planning for what can follow after the cleansing fire.

[Winstonm]

Wow. Another accomplishment by Donny Trump, Davey Dennison, Individual-1:

Quote

The Dow and S&P, both down nearly 7% this month, are on pace for their worst December performance since the Great Depression.

[Chas_P]

johnu, on 2018-December-16, 21:48, said:

I see you still have as much integrity as Dennison.





At least try to have some fake self respect. Just create a new username and pretend that you are a new poster. I can suggest a couple of names for you:

Chas_Miller
Chas_Barron
Chas_Dennison

To quote Pogo Possum: “Don't take life so serious. It ain't nohow permanent.” Kick back a little. Learn how to lose. Enjoy living. Everything on Earth is temporary. Listen to a little Mannheim Steamroller. Merry Christmas!

[Winstonm]

It seems Michael Flynn learned nothing from Individual-1 about how to do business overseas. All he had to do was license his name to Erdogan and voila', Flynnsylvania would have been perfectly legal!

[kenberg]

y66, on 2018-December-17, 07:55, said:

From I Have Seen the Future of a Republican Party That Is No Longer Insane by Jonathan Chait (December 10, 2018):

This link is something of a Christmas present. It includes the link https://niskanencent...ve-to-ideology/ which I also looked at. I had not previously known of the Niskanen Center, nor of Taylor and all.

He notes:

Quote

I helpfully suggested that the Republican Party as currently constituted needed (this is a direct quote) “to die in a fire.” The surprising thing is that many of the attendees in the room, including people who work at the Niskanen Center itself, told me afterward that they agree.

I am surprised that he would find this surprising! I am also not so sure that it might take decades, as he suggests, for the shift that he envisions to occur. While I think Trump is one of the most repulsive people on the face of the Earth, I was/am not all that enthusiastic about either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders either. Better than Trump is a pretty low hurdle to clear. I don't see myself as a freak, I think that there are quite a few of us who think this way.

I have known a fair number of Libertarians and it is easy to be skeptical. The guys at Niskanen seem to be saying "Sounds nice but not very practical when we get down to specifics". This was usually my reaction. For example, having free education until I was 17 and then affordable college was a great thing for me and I think, when applied to everyone, it was a pretty good mechanism for the nation as well. Watching out for yourself is always a good idea, but some amount of helping others is not only good for those who are being helped, it is good for everyone. They seem to agree with this.

I found it to be a good read.

At any rate, I wish everyone a happy holiday season. And I wish myself luck with my upcoming 80th birthday. Becky has invited a number of people over, and their political views are, shall we say, highly varied. Such things were never a problem in the past, but these days? Maybe I need to put a security force on speed dial.

[johnu]

Trump Foundation To Shut Down Amid Lawsuit Against The Charity

For once, Dennison news that doesn't involve collusion and treason related activities with the Russians

Quote

As part of the agreement, the Trump Foundation will dissolve under judicial supervision. It will also be required to distribute any remaining charitable assets to reputable organizations approved by Underwood’s office.

Underwood’s lawsuit seeks millions in restitution and penalties. It also seeks to prevent Trump and his three eldest children ― Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump ― from serving on the boards of other New York charities.

The president vowed shortly after Underwood’s lawsuit was filed to fight the case, calling it the work of “sleazy New York Democrats.”

“I won’t settle this case!” he tweeted.

For all extents and purposes, this foundation was already shut down years ago and repurposed as a personal piggy bank for Dennison. It brings a tear to my eye that Dennison has the "Tegridy" to stand up and fight for his right to break yet another law.