Zitat von nahal im Beitrag #2837

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So ein Glück, dass dieser Verbrecher Obama nicht mehr im Amt ist !

"In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation."

https://www.politico.com/interactives/20...-investigation/

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CHARTS: See How Much Of GOP Tax Cuts Will Go To The Middle Class

https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571754894...tm_content=2048

And then you know how grateful voters will be in November.

And by the way:

https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t...f6c&oe=5ABF8399

US to send anti-tank missiles to Ukraine
President Donald Trump is expected to announce his approval of a plan to sell anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian government, a move that would mark a significant escalation in lethal U.S. military support for Ukrainian forces battling Russian-aligned forces in the border region, four State Department sources tell ABC News.

If the president formally signs off, the plan will be presented to Congress for a 30-day review period where it would need to be approved before the State Department can implement it.

The sale of anti-tank missiles, which could possibly include the U.S.-made Javelin system, provoked a strong reaction from Russia on Saturday, saying it "crossed the line," and could threaten to derail Trump’s calls for better relations with Moscow.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sources-t...ory?id=51957745


Top Marine general: 'There's a war coming'
The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Robert Neller, told troops Thursday that "there's a war coming" and urged them to be prepared.

"I hope I'm wrong, but there's a war coming," Neller told Marines stationed in Norway, during a visit there, according to Military.com. "You're in a fight here, an informational fight, a political fight, by your presence," he added.

The commandant pointed to Russia and the Pacific theater as the next major areas of conflict, predicting a "big-ass fight" in the future.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-r...es-a-war-coming

U.S. Tax Bill May Inspire Cuts Globally, While Fueling Trade Tensions
To President Trump and congressional Republicans, the overhaul of the tax code that became law on Friday will make the United States a better place to do business. To the rest of the world, it has the potential to challenge the global economic order, creating an uneven playing field and setting off a race among countries to cut corporate taxes.

The overhaul is already threatening economic relations, adding to concerns that Mr. Trump is advancing a nationalistic agenda at the expense of other countries.

European leaders this week raised the prospect of a trade battle, implying that they may fight the new tax rules before the World Trade Organization. Chinese officials are readying defensive measures to protect the country’s economy and its competitiveness. ...

... The new rate — down to 21 percent, from 35 percent — takes the United States from the top of the global tax spectrum to the lower end. Countries like Australia, France, Germany and Japan, all of which have effective corporate tax rates of at least 30 percent, will be under pressure to follow. ...

..“There will be pressure for a new round of lowering corporate taxes,” said Stefano Micossi, the director general of Assonime, an Italian association of publicly listed companies.
China, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s over its trade practices, may also be forced to play the tax game. ...

... Deep in the tax package’s fine print were provisions that looked like protectionism to Asian and European companies.
The European Commission, which manages the European Union, objected to a tax break that companies in the United States would get for so-called foreign-derived intangible income — money they make from selling property or services abroad.

The measure is supposed to encourage companies to produce goods in the United States and sell them overseas. But European officials said the provision appeared to violate agreements among countries against subsidizing their exports. ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/busin...rref=world/asia

Russian submarine activity increases around Atlantic internet cables: report
Russian submarine activity around undersea cables that provide Internet and other communications connections to North America and Europe has raised concerns among NATO officials, according to The Washington Post.

NATO officials say an unprecedented amount of Russian deep-sea activity, especially around undersea internet lines, constitutes a newfound "vulnerability" for NATO nations.
“We are now seeing Russian underwater activity in the vicinity of undersea cables that I don’t believe we have ever seen,” said NATO submarine commander and U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Andrew Lennon. “Russia is clearly taking an interest in NATO and NATO nations’ undersea infrastructure.”
“It’s a pattern of activity, and it’s a vulnerability,” added British Air Chief Marshal Stuart Peach, who has spoken about the issue in the past.
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/366290...internet-cables

https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats...38629286230117/

Zitat von nahal im Beitrag #2837

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So ein Glück, dass dieser Verbrecher Obama nicht mehr im Amt ist !

"In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation."

https://www.politico.com/interactives/20...-investigation/

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https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/arti...er-stoppen.html

Richtige Entscheidung, aber dazu muss man natürlich E... in der Hose haben.

Größter Geldgeber ist ja die EU.

Trump Demands That Publisher Halt Release of Critical Book
President Trump escalated his attack on a new book portraying him as a volatile and ill-equipped chief executive on Thursday as his legal team demanded that the author and publisher halt its release and apologize or face a possible lawsuit.

The book, which is scheduled to be released next week, angered Mr. Trump in part by quoting Stephen K. Bannon, his former White House chief strategist, making derogatory comments about the president’s children. Mr. Bannon was quoted as saying that Donald Trump Jr. had been “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” for meeting with Russians during the 2016 campaign and that Ivanka Trump was “dumb as a brick.” Mr. Trump fired back, saying that Mr. Bannon had “lost his mind” and had “nothing to do with me or my presidency.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/us/po...-publisher.html


Questions about Trump's fitness raised by bombshell new book pose growing threat for Republicans in 2018 elections
In a new book informed by extensive White House access, top officials described the president with words like "crazy" and "stupid."

"It raises the question about whether the president has the judgment and discipline that are commensurate with that power," says Richard Haass, a national security aide under both Presidents Bush and now head of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In the book "Fire and Fury," those deriding the president's capabilities, judgment and stability include his senior-most aides and family members.

"He couldn't really converse, not in the sense of sharing information or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation," Wolff wrote in characterizing the view of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.

At another point, Wolff described the president as "a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities." Determining his wishes, Wolff quotes ex-White House aide Katie Walsh as saying, was "like trying to figure out what a child wants."

The damaging assessments extend beyond the personal. Steve Bannon, who served as chief executive of Trump's campaign and chief strategist in his White House, called it "treasonous" for top Trump advisers to meet with Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton at Trump Tower in June 2016. Contradicting the president's assertions that he knew nothing of that meeting until much later, Bannon said there was "zero" chance that Donald Trump Jr. did not take those Russians to his father's office that day.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/04/bombshel...source=sharebar|twitter&par=sharebar

The President Is Mentally Unwell — and Everyone Around Him Knows It

Es lohnt sich den Artikel in Gaenze zu lesen. Ein kleiner Auszug:

....Everybody [in the White House] was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something.

… Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country’s future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends. ...

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/201...m-knows-it.html

Forget Treason. Money Laundering Is Serious.
Steve Bannon's charge against Trump's son isn't the worst thing he's saying about the president's inner circle.

..."This is all about money laundering," Wolff quotes Bannon saying. "Their path to [expletive] Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner." For good measure he added, "It’s as plain as a hair on your face."

"It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner stuff," Bannon adds. "The Kushner stuff is greasy. They’re going to go right through that." (He used a nastier word than "stuff," but let's keep things family-friendly around here.)

Bannon then roasts the Trump White House for how ill-prepared it is to take on Mueller's team: "They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five."
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/...oney-laundering


After Bannon links Trump family with money laundering, Trump throws him under the bus
Trump used to have nothing but praise for Steve Bannon. Now he claims he's "lost his mind."
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-bannon-s...t-7f205f3f0cf7/

"You Can’t Make This S--- Up": My Year Inside Trump's Insane White House
Author and columnist Michael Wolff was given extraordinary access to the Trump administration and now details the feuds, the fights and the alarming chaos he witnessed while reporting what turned into a new book.

...There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump's family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/m...e-house-1071504

@Willie

Warum posten Sie eigentlich fast nur englischsprachige Pressebeiträge
und fast nie Ihre selbst formulierte persönliche Meinung?

Zitat von Willie im Beitrag #2862

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[b]Forget Treaso

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Zitat von nahal im Beitrag #2865

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Zitat von Willie im Beitrag #2862

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Forget Treason

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Aha,
wenn nach 1 1/2 Jahren nichts herauskommt. :-))))

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Zitat von nahal im Beitrag #2866

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Zitat von nahal im Beitrag #2865

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Zitat von Willie im Beitrag #2862

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Forget Treason

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Aha,
wenn nach 1 1/2 Jahren nichts herauskommt. :-))))

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Zitat von Marlies im Beitrag #2864

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@Willie

Warum posten Sie eigentlich fast nur englischsprachige Pressebeiträge
und fast nie Ihre selbst formulierte persönliche Meinung?

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Zitat von nahal im Beitrag #2865

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Zitat von Willie im Beitrag #2862

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[b]Forget Treaso

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Aha,
wenn nach 1 1/2 Jahren nichts herauskommt. :-))))

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https://www.facebook.com/NowThisPolitics...56095667755248/
https://www.facebook.com/NowThisPolitics...54403301257818/
https://www.facebook.com/actdottv/videos/622709134586323/

It's Been an Open Secret All Along
The scandal of Michael Wolff’s new book isn’t its salacious details—it’s that everyone in Washington has known its key themes, and refused to act.

The details in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury make it unforgettable, and potentially historic. We’ll see how many of them fully stand up, and in what particulars, but even at a heavy discount, it’s a remarkable tale.

But what Wolff is describing is an open secret.
Based on the excerpts now available, Fire and Fury presents a man in the White House who is profoundly ignorant of politics, policy, and anything resembling the substance of perhaps the world’s most demanding job. He is temperamentally unstable.
Most of what he says in public is at odds with provable fact, from “biggest inaugural crowd in history” onward. Whether he is aware of it or not, much of what he asserts is a lie.
His functional vocabulary is markedly smaller than it was 20 years ago; the oldest person ever to begin service in the White House, he is increasingly prone to repeat anecdotes and phrases.
He is aswirl in foreign and financial complications.
He has ignored countless norms of modern governance, from the expectation of financial disclosure to the importance of remaining separate from law-enforcement activities. He relies on immediate family members to an unusual degree; he has an exceptionally thin roster of experienced advisers and assistants; his White House staff operations have more in common with an episode of The Apprentice than with any real-world counterpart.
He has a shallower reserve of historical or functional information than previous presidents, and a more restricted supply of ongoing information than many citizens.
He views all events through the prism of whether they make him look strong and famous, and thus he is laughably susceptible to flattering treatment from the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping abroad or courtiers at home. ...

Who is also in on this open secret? Virtually everyone in a position to do something about it, which at the moment means members of the Republican majority in Congress.
They know what is wrong with Donald Trump. They know why it’s dangerous. They understand—or most of them do—the damage he can do to a system of governance that relies to a surprising degree on norms rather than rules, and whose vulnerability has been newly exposed. They know—or should—about the ways Trump’s vanity and avarice are harming American interests relative to competitors like Russia and China, and partners and allies in North America, Europe, and the Pacific.

They know. They could do something: hearings, investigations, demands for financial or health documents, subpoenas. Even the tool they used against the 42nd president, for failings one percent as grave as those of the 45th: impeachment.

They know. They could act. And they don’t. The failure of responsibility starts with Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, but it doesn’t end with them. Every member of a bloc-voting majority shares responsibility for not acting on their version of the open secret. “Independent” Republicans like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski share it. “Thoughtful” ones, like Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake. Those (in addition to Flake) who have nothing to lose electorally, from Bob Corker to Orrin Hatch. When they vote as a majority against strong investigations, against subpoenas, against requirements for financial disclosure, and most of all against protecting Robert Mueller and his investigation, they share complicity in the open secret.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...-secret/549653/

Former Trump legal team spokesman reportedly quit because he believed statement on Trump Tower meeting was obstruction of justice
http://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-sp...ice-2018-1?op=1

Neueste Bezeichnung fuer Steve Bannon: "Sloppy Steve".
(so named by the Commander in Chief)

https://scontent.ford1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v...717&oe=5AB15DE6

https://scontent.ford1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v...462&oe=5AB2342C

Everyone in Trumpworld Knows He’s an Idiot

... One of the more alarming anecdotes in “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff’s incendiary new book about Donald Trump’s White House, involves the firing of James Comey, former director of the F.B.I. It’s not Trump’s motives that are scary; Wolff reports that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were “increasingly panicked” and “frenzied” about what Comey would find if he looked into the family finances, which is incriminating but unsurprising. ...

Wolff’s scabrous book comes out on Friday — the publication date was moved up amid a media furor — but I was able to get an advance copy. It’s already a consequential work, having precipitated a furious rift between the president and his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who told Wolff that the meeting Donald Trump Jr. brokered with Russians in the hope of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” On Thursday the president’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Wolff’s publisher, Henry Holt, demanding that it stop publication, claiming, among other things, defamation and invasion of privacy. This move would be fascistic if it weren’t so farcical. ...

... The book recounts that after the political purge in Saudi Arabia, Trump boasted that he and Kushner engineered a coup: “We’ve put our man on top!” ...

But most of all, the book confirms what is already widely understood — not just that Trump is entirely unfit for the presidency, but that everyone around him knows it. One thread running through “Fire and Fury” is the way relatives, opportunists and officials try to manipulate and manage the president, and how they often fail. As Wolff wrote in a Hollywood Reporter essay based on the book, over the past year, the people around Trump, “all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.” ...

According to Wolff, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff, called Trump an “idiot.” (So did the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, though he used an obscenity first (a fucking idiot).) Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, compares his boss’s intelligence to excrement (a pile of shit). The national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, thinks he’s a “dope.” It has already been reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” (a fucking moron) which he has pointedly refused to deny.

And yet these people continue to either prop up or defend this sick travesty of a presidency. ...

...Some of the military men trying to steady American foreign policy amid Trump’s whims and tantrums might be doing something quietly decent, sacrificing their reputations for the greater good. But most members of Trump’s campaign and administration are simply traitors. They are willing, out of some complex mix of ambition, resentment, cynicism and rationalization, to endanger all of our lives — all of our children’s lives — by refusing to tell the country what they know about the senescent fool who boasts of the size of his “nuclear button” on Twitter.

Maybe, at the moment, people in the Trump orbit feel complacent because a year has passed without any epic disaster, unless you count an estimated 1,000 or so deaths in Puerto Rico, which they probably don’t. There’s an old joke, recently cited by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, that describes where we are right now: A guy falls from a 50-story building. As he flies by the 25th floor, someone asks how it’s going. “So far, so good!” he says.

Eventually, we’ll hit the ground, and assuming America survives, there should be a reckoning to dwarf the defenestration of Harvey Weinstein and his fellow ogres. Trump, Wolff’s reporting shows, has no executive function, no ability to process information or weigh consequences. Expecting him to act in the country’s interest is like demanding that your cat do the dishes.
His enablers have no such excuse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/opini...trump-book.html