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  • Originally posted by Gun Grape View Post
    Gotta do it
    Although given our times this maybe more appropo...

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    • Well 2020 appears to be more like...
      “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
      Mark Twain

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      • Original title: Dump That Chump...revised by the band itself.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOo1nQo2KYc
        Trust me?
        I'm an economist!

        Comment


        • Andrew McCabe recounts what briefing the President was like. He says they learned early on that if there was going to be a brief by the NSA or Homeland Security that they needed to bring a video. They had noticed that you could get the President's attention with a video that had animation and pictures. Doesn't that give you a secure feeling knowing we have a four year old as President?

          https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/...newday-vpx.cnn

          Comment


          • If elected, bolstering ties with natural partner India will be high priority: Joe Biden

            Hmmm, tapping into the Indian-Americans vote.
            Politicians are elected to serve...far too many don't see it that way - Albany Rifles! || Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it - Mark Twain! || I am a far left millennial!

            Comment


            • Originally posted by Oracle View Post
              Good strategic and economic move to counter China.

              Comment


              • Exactly how would India provide additional strategic or economic support for the US vis-a-vis China?
                Trust me?
                I'm an economist!

                Comment


                • Horror clouds every page of Mary Trump's book about her Uncle Donald

                  Mary Trump’s book about her Uncle Donald is dark. Right from the get-go, when it begins with this feel-good epigraph from “Les Miserables”: If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed.

                  Already notorious, “Too Much and Never Enough” is Donald Trump’s story, written by his niece, a clinical psychologist and Trump family dissident. It's being released this month after a failed effort, nominally by Donald’s brother Robert, to get a court to stop its publication.

                  You can see why President Trump doesn’t want anyone to read this thing. It gives the lie to many of his most cherished myths about himself, including the howler that he’s self-made.

                  According to the book, Uncle Donald’s ineptitude goes so deep it’s hard to fathom. Mary reports that one of his sisters, casting around for something to give Donald credit for, proposed his five bankruptcies.

                  That kind of revelation produces a snicker from a reader like me, but that’s all that passes for levity here. Horror clouds every page. I expected to encounter some seamy stuff in any history of the Trump family’s fortune. After all, the money comes from brothels, tax evasion, bankrupt casinos, sketchy real-estate deals and a more or less stolen election.

                  But I also expected at least a little gritty urban romance. If not the sumptuous passions of “The Godfather,” the Trump saga would — I hoped — contain a moment or two of “Sopranos”-style wit.

                  Nothing doing.

                  The president’s life story is narrow, provincial and grim — a joyless grind of fraud and cruelty evoked not by the gruesome glitz of Trump Tower but by the dreary Trump apartment Mary lived in as a child with her mother and father, Linda and Freddy Trump. Sloppily installed air conditioners rotted the drywall, and no amount of plastic sheeting could keep out the bitter wind; Trump Management, run by Freddy’s father Fred and brother Donald, refused to fix it.

                  As a piece of writing, Mary Trump’s book is less investigative exposé than gruesome family memoir. Typically, barbarous families who land in memoirs barely scrape by, feeding the kids cat food and festering in the shadows. The barbarous Trump family, by contrast, runs the free world, feeds the kids gold and festers under klieg lights.

                  By now, you’ve probably encountered the bullet-pointed morsels from “Too Much and Never Enough,” especially the claim that Donald paid someone to take his SATs for him. These are mini-bombshells consistent with what the world knows of Trump. “Working the refs, lying, cheating” — this is how the Trump empire operates, Mary Trump writes. Likewise, the Trump White House and the president himself.

                  But even if Trump’s cheating on the SAT is not exactly shocking, it’s nonetheless satisfying to confirm what we guessed all along: The president never acquired baseline competence in math or vocabulary. (Seriously, try to picture him confronting even one polynomial. Trump working through coefficients and variables — he could sooner walk down a ramp.)

                  What’s most intriguing about Mary Trump’s book is not juicy revelations but its thesis: her idea that the Trumps were so deceitful and corrupt that growing up among them meant growing up “institutionalized,” stuck in an m.o. that cripples a person emotionally and cognitively every bit as much as a prison would.

                  And from his adolescence in reform school to his dotage in the Oval Office, as Mary writes, Donald has also been literally “institutionalized most of his adult life.” The chief hallmarks of that institutionalization were deceit and unearned trophies: “Honest work was never demanded of him, and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable.”

                  On election night 2016, Mary Trump, who had supported Hillary Clinton for president, says she was traumatized. She waited and then watched as her uncle was set loose “to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family.”

                  At the heart of that dysfunction, Mary contends, is relentless and incongruous puffery of Donald. First, Trump, though fundamentally infantile and mentally unwell, styled himself a stable genius, all evidence to the contrary. Then his father backed him up. Then the media spread the hype. Finally, and most crucially, banks fell for it.

                  As Mary elegantly puts it, “Their willingness (and then their need) to foster his increasingly unfounded claims to success hung on the hopes of recouping their losses.”

                  That dynamic could apply equally to Trump’s enablers, dependents and supporters.


                  “Too Much and Never Enough” isn’t a gossipfest. It isn’t “rollicking.” It’s a bleak story, and there’s no redemption. The country, like Donald Trump’s creditors, will not recoup its losses.

                  In the end, Mary Trump stays true to the despair she felt on election night. She manages not to qualify it or wish it away. Refusing to flinch from the darkness of Trump’s story is no small accomplishment. We should all be so brave.
                  ________________

                  This man is the President of the United State of America.
                  “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                  Comment


                  • White House Personal Injury Lawyer William Barr Has Bungled This Thing Completely
                    BY CHARLES P. PIERCE - Esquire

                    Late Thursday afternoon, after Geoffrey Berman, the now-fired U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was done telling the House Judiciary Committee about the ways the Department of Justice functions under the command of White House personal-injury lawyer William Barr, the committee released Berman's opening statement. It is an altogether remarkable document. In discussing the circumstances of his departure, Berman explained that, under Barr, the DOJ pretty much functions as the first draft of a play by David Mamet.

                    The meeting took roughly 45 minutes and was held in the Attorney General's hotel suite. It began at approximately 12:10 pm on June 19. The Attorney General's Chief of Staff, Will Levy, was present with me and the Attorney General, but he did not speak. There were sandwiches on the table, but nobody ate...I responded that I loved my job and my colleagues at the Southern District and that I was thankful every day for the privilege of being part of that Office. I asked the Attorney General if he was in any way dissatisfied with my performance as U.S. Attorney. He said that he was not at all dissatisfied. He said the move was solely prompted by Jay Clayton's desire to move back to New York and the Administration's desire to keep him on the team.

                    For the benefit of readers who may have joined us late, Jay Clayton is the golfing buddy whom the president* wished to install as the head of the office most likely to investigate and to prosecute him for various forms of felony grifting. We continue.

                    I responded that I loved my job and my colleagues at the Southern District and that I was thankful every day for the privilege of being part of that Office. I asked the Attorney General if he was in any way dissatisfied with my performance as U.S. Attorney. He said that he was not at all dissatisfied. He said the move was solely prompted by Jay Clayton's desire to move back to New York and the Administration's desire to keep him on the team.

                    I'll bet.

                    The Attorney General pressed me to take the Civil Division position, saying that the role would be a good resume builder. He said that I should want to create a book of business once I returned to the private sector, which that role would help achieve. He also stated that I would just have to sit there for five months and see who won the election before deciding what came next for me...By referring to that resignation I intended to signal the Attorney General that I was not going to resign so that he could disregard normal procedure and appoint someone from outside the Southern District as acting head instead of our Deputy U.S. Attorney.

                    And about here was where Barr refused to let Berman have any coffee because coffee is for lackeys! The good news is you're fired!

                    The Attorney General said that if I did not resign from my position I would be fired. He added that getting fired from my job would not be good for my resume or future job prospects.

                    Eventually, of course, because Barr and his main client bungled the matter as badly as Camp Runamuck has bungled everything else, the president*'s golfing buddy didn't get the gig. Instead, it went to Berman's hand-picked deputy, which is what he told Barr he wanted. Now, Berman got to tell the whole story to Congress, and not, I suspect, for the first time. I hope he got a set of steak knives. Link
                    ____________
                    The passages in bold are part of the statement, the rest is commentary by the author

                    The entire opening statement can be read here.
                    “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                    Comment


                    • Apparently Trumpkin 'commuted' the sentence on Roger Stone... so no prison for this convicted criminal for now.

                      Comment


                      • what gets me about the Stone case is that AG Barr decided to intervene personally to get Stone's sentencing time reduced against the recommendations of all the DOJ prosecutors.

                        what's the point of doing that if Trump was just going to pardon Stone anyway?

                        my guess is that intervention was meant as a message from Barr to the rest of the DOJ to get them to -pro-actively- look out for Trump's interests and protect his flunkies.
                        There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                        Comment


                        • Trump Says He 'Aced' Cognitive Test, but White House Won't Release Details

                          President Donald Trump on Thursday volunteered to Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, that he “very recently” took a test at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center measuring his mental acuity and “aced” it, but the White House would not say when he took it or why.

                          Trump boasted that his success on the test surprised his doctors as he continued his attempt to make a campaign issue of whether his presumptive Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, was mentally fit.

                          “I actually took one when I — very recently, when I — when I was — the radical left were saying, ‘Is he all there? Is he all there?’ And I proved I was all there, because I got — I aced it. I aced the test,” Trump, 74, said in his interview with Hannity.

                          He went on to say that Biden should also take the test.

                          “And he should take the same exact test, a very standard test. I took it at Walter Reed Medical Center in front of doctors,” Trump said. “And they were very surprised. They said, ‘That’s an unbelievable thing. Rarely does anybody do what you just did.’ But he should take that same test.”

                          Trump described taking the test after Hannity mentioned that Biden had said he had taken several cognitive tests. The president insisted that Biden must have meant tests he took for the coronavirus and that his rival “couldn’t pass” a cognitive test.

                          Aides to Trump did not respond to questions about what test he took, when he took it or whether they would make the results public. Over more than three years, the president has repeatedly faced questions about his own health, including why he made a mysterious visit to Walter Reed in November 2019 that White House officials later claimed was to get a jump on his annual physical.

                          After his most recent examination, Dr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, who examined him, said, “The data indicates the president remains healthy.”

                          But Conley’s summary was not the customary report Trump and other presidents have released immediately after an annual physical exam. Rather than one examination, the summary was based on an unknown number of medical appointments that included the visit to Walter Reed in November and another from a checkup conducted in April at the White House.

                          After his annual physical in 2018, the White House physician at the time, Dr. Ronny Jackson, said that the president had received a score of 30 out of 30 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a test that hospitals including Walter Reed use to screen for “mild cognitive dysfunction,” and that there was “no reason whatsoever to think the president has any issues whatsoever with his thought processes.”

                          Jackson said then that Trump had asked to take the test.

                          The Montreal assessment is a 30-question test that takes about 10 minutes to complete and requires, among other things, that the test-taker identify pictures of animals; state the date, month, year and day of the week; and repeat five words immediately and again a short time later.

                          At a meeting of campaign and Republican officials several weeks ago at the White House, Trump boasted, according to a person familiar with what was said, about how well he had performed on the task of repeating five words. It was unclear when Trump took the test he was describing.

                          Since Biden emerged as his election opponent, the president and his advisers have tried to hammer home a message about whether, at age 77 and prone to gaffes, Biden is mentally capable of being president.

                          Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Biden, said the accusations were a product of Trump’s standing in the polls. “If the Trump campaign believes the answer to their precipitously dropping support is to triple down on yet another smear that’s backfired on them for over a year,” he said, “then frankly, maybe it’s not just Donald Trump who’s missing something — but also his campaign’s ‘strategists’ who somehow still haven’t grasped that the ‘project, commit a self-own, then repeat’ model is accelerating their free fall.”

                          Private Republican polling has shown the attacks on Biden’s cognitive state have not done much to move the needle with voters, according to people who described the details of the surveys. And Trump is a difficult messenger for an attack on Biden as his own health has come under scrutiny.

                          That included an episode during a speech at West Point last month when the president had difficulty bringing a water glass to his mouth with one hand and then walked gingerly down a ramp to exit the stage.

                          In response to the questions that followed, Trump lashed out on Twitter, insisting the ramp was slippery, and then devoted more than 10 minutes of his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a week later to defend himself and insist he was healthy. The president described it to the crowd as a “journey” down the ramp and insisted the ramp was as slick as an ice-skating rink.

                          “I looked very handsome,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to run down the whole thing, because the fall there would be definitely bad. So I took these little steps. I ran down the last 10.”

                          The video did not show Trump going any faster until the final three steps.
                          _______________

                          "Aced" the test but the White House won't release anything. The doctors must still be auditing them.

                          Click image for larger version

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                          “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                          Comment


                          • Originally posted by astralis View Post
                            what gets me about the Stone case is that AG Barr decided to intervene personally to get Stone's sentencing time reduced against the recommendations of all the DOJ prosecutors.

                            what's the point of doing that if Trump was just going to pardon Stone anyway?

                            my guess is that intervention was meant as a message from Barr to the rest of the DOJ to get them to -pro-actively- look out for Trump's interests and protect his flunkies.
                            Stone reminded him that he [Stone] had the dirt on him.

                            Comment


                            • Comments regarding India and China have been moved to a new thread
                              “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                              Comment


                              • Click image for larger version

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                                Chris David, 53 year old US Navy veteran and US Naval Academy graduate assaulted by Federal paramilitary in Portland while standing still asking them about their service and their sworn oath to the US Constitution. He will need surgury on his hand.



                                Chris David

                                Christopher David is a United States Navy veteran. He is from Portland, Oregon, USA.

                                When protests in Portland continue for almost two months, U.S. president Donald Trump sent unidentified federal officers to deal with the protesters. David decided to join the protest at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse on July 18, 2020, which marked the 52nd consecutive night of protests in the city.

                                At around 7:30 p.m., David arrived at the courthouse and listened to speeches about racism and police problems. At about 10:45 p.m., he was about to leave when federal officers burst out of the bricked-up front of the courthouse.

                                David slowly approached the officers with a plan to engage them in dialogue and when one officer pushed him back, he just stood still. He told Portland Tribune, “I felt these gentlemen were violating their oath of office and I wanted to talk to them.”

                                Several more officers swarmed forward, hit David with a baton and pepper sprayed him. He had two fractures in his hand and because of the spray and clouds of tear gas engulfing the area, he suffered from momentary vision loss.

                                Sitting down on a park bench, David was assisted by Tav, a street medic who uses the pronouns they and them. With the help of some friends, the medic moved him away from the crowds and got him into an ambulance so he could be taken to the VA hospital nearby.

                                “They are playing me up as an Iron Man and a Superman,” David told KOIN on July 19, 2020. “I’m a 53-year-old over-weight man on blood thinners and I have a lot of physical damage from the military so I’m not made of steel at all.”

                                “They could have killed me last night as my ex-wife and daughter have reminded me 45 times this morning,” David said of the officers who assaulted him during the protest in Portland. Here are 13 more facts about him:
                                1. He was born in 1967.
                                2. He stands 6’2″.
                                3. He weighs about 280lbs.
                                4. He is a former wrestler.
                                5. After high school, he attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
                                6. He became a commissioned officer and aeronautical engineer while serving with the Navy Seabees.
                                7. He was a Naval Lieutenant.
                                8. He is a laboratory scientist at the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
                                9. On July 18, 2020, he got on a public bus and headed to a protest in front of the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland.
                                10. He wore his Navy sweatshirt and Navy wrestling hat when he attended the protest in Portland thinking the police offers would respect him because he was a veteran.
                                11. During the protest, he was carrying nothing in his hands. He only had a backpack on him holding his ID and wallet.
                                12. The viral video showing how he was attacked by police officers was taken by Portland Tribune reporter Zane Sparling.
                                13. He was in the emergency room of the hospital when he found out that the video went viral and people are calling him a hero. Some even dubbed him Captain Portland.
                                Last edited by JRT; 20 Jul 20,, 17:02.
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