Monday, July 25, 2016

Convention, heat, and hackers.

Image result for philly dnc heat images With apologies to Nelly, it's hot "herr" in Philly this week, folks. The heat came just in time for the dems big party.

I gotta give it to Bernie's peeps, they were out in full force in the midday heat trying to make their voices heard. Meanwhile, my Jamaican ass was running for the closest air conditioned building. (Hey, I was in a suit; they were in shorts and flip flops.) That type of dedication is what wins elections. Hillary better hope and pray that they put some of that energy into getting her elected.

Sparks are already flying at the convention. Bernie's people actually gave their leader a real Philly welcome for all the world to see.

They are pissed because hacked e-mails confirm what they already knew: That the DNC was favoring Hillary over Bernie.

Now I get it, Bernie was never really a democrat, but he ran as one, and the fair thing to do would have been to give him equal treatment in the race. Sadly, Debbie Wasserman Shultz did not do that, and now, thankfully, she is gone.   

Dems are saying that the Russians hacked their e-mails to embarrass them and give trump the edge in the upcoming election. Apparently the trump Putin bromance runs deep, and word is that Vlad would love to see his buddy Donald running things in the most powerful country on earth.

They sure seem to have a lot in common, and there sure seems to be a history between them.

"Over the last year there has been a recurrent refrain about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. More seriously, but relatedly, many believe Trump is an admirer and would-be emulator of Putin's increasingly autocratic and illiberal rule. But there's quite a bit more to the story. At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. 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.

Let me start by saying I'm no Russia hawk. I have long been skeptical of US efforts to extend security guarantees to countries within what the Russians consider their 'near abroad' or extend such guarantees and police Russian interactions with new states which for centuries were part of either the Russian Empire or the USSR. This isn't a matter of indifference to these countries. It is based on my belief in seriously thinking through the potential costs of such policies. In the case of the Baltics, those countries are now part of NATO. Security commitments have been made which absolutely must be kept. But there are many other areas where such commitments have not been made. My point in raising this is that I do not come to this question or these policies as someone looking for confrontation or cold relations with Russia.

Let's start with the basic facts. There is a lot of Russian money flowing into Trump's coffers and he is conspicuously solicitous of Russian foreign policy priorities.
I'll list off some facts.

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." [More]

Ok, so maybe the theory that the Russians hacked the DNC e-mails to get trump elected is not so far -fetched after all.






32 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why would Putin want Trump to be president? Trump is unpredictable and largely unknown to Putin.

Hillary is well known to Putin. He knows what to expect from her. It makes logical sense that Putin would prefer Hillary to be president.

The DNC sandbagged Bernie. I don't blame his supporters for being pissed off. I doubt they will go away quietly! Who can blame them?


Anonymous said...

Oh No, a hit piece by a raving lunatic! Funny, Mr. Marshall does not mention Uranium One. Or how Hillary used her position to aid and profit from the sale of uranium to Russia.

Field Negroes, among other things uranium is used to make nuclear weapons. Use your google finger. Better yet use a search engine that does not block information from your query.

Uranium is considered a strategic asset. One that should be closely guarded and not sold to the highest bidder. Hillary's finger prints are all over this one but not many cared.

Trump is not talking about war. He's talking about immigration control and restoring jobs to our economy. Honestly, a country must have a sovereign border to call itself a nation. Currently we do not have a sovereign border. This country's leadership has used "Free Trade" to export decent paying American jobs to other countries for 30 years.

When you see those abandoned factories, mills and foundries across America you can thank "Free Trade". Again, look up this "Free Trade" and ask yourself if it really is "Free" and more importantly does it qualify as "Trade".

Vote as you wish but don't use the false information every media outlet is pushing against Trump. Get the facts and make an informed decision. Don't let someone like Josh Marshall form your opinion and make the decision for you. He's a tool.

Yīshēng said...

FLOTUS Michelle Obama!!!!!

YAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!

I Hate Spics, Gooks, Kikes, and Faggots said...

Michelle Obama! Class act! Just like Hillary!
#ImWithHer

Puerto Rican food is nasty shit said...

At least the Dems have Philadelphia. The Repubs got stuck in that Rust Belt shithole Cleveland.

Yīshēng said...

Bernie sounds like he's calling for mutiny. Dems are SCREWED!!!!

Puerto Rican food is nasty shit said...

Sure, the Dems are fractured, but the Repubs will fracture even more between now and November. Just you wait and see.

Pukey Donaldson said...

Hillary could refer to every black person in the building as a "nigger" and blacks would still bow down to her and the Democrats. Not one person can deny that.

dinthebeast said...

I don't know if Putin wants Trump to win, although it would make sense for him to in light of all of the adulation coming his way from Trump, but I don't think that means that much to him.
I do know that Putin does not want Hillary to win, as he has a massive grudge against her from when she questioned the legitimacy of his election. He isn't known for letting those kinds of thing go.
Whether that has colored his financial dealings is an entirely different question, but whatever his motivation, he should not be meddling in our election, and isn't dim enough not to know that. He may see it as justified by what he felt as her meddling in his election, as at the time he decided to blame his problems on her, but she didn't actually meddle and simply pointed out the popular resistance already there against him running for a third term at a time when he was feeling politically vulnerable.
What I am curious about is how much Trump is deliberately using this feud to his advantage, as it sounds like a tactic right up Roy Cohn's alley.

-Doug in Oakland

field negro said...

Cory Booker's speach was terrific. A little long, but a home run. FLOTUS hit a homerun as well.
Sen Warren.....eh, she hit a double.
Man these dems are pretty rowdy..


dinthebeast said...

Whether it's true or not, who knows? But Trump himself claims it's true:

http://crooksandliars.com/2016/07/donald-trump-admits-his-comrades-russia

-Doug in Oakland

Anonymous said...

Why do conservative white male losers always troll blogs that have nothing to do with white people? Not just this blog, but any blog where the administrator isn't white.

Puerto Rican food is nasty shit said...

Pretty strong start for the Democrats. Let's see if they can keep it up and Hillary's poll numbers improve vs. Trump.

I Hate Spics, Gooks, Kikes, and Faggots said...

I love Michelle Obama! Melania Trump would make a horrible and UGLY FLOTUS! Keep her away from the White House!
#ImWithHer

Anonymous said...

Hey blacks in America, how about you start thinking for yourselves and vote for whoever the fuck you want to, instead of automatically voting for the candidate with the D next to their name? Talk about slave mentality. And yet you want to blame everything on white people. Have fun with that.

field negro said...

How about the folks with an R in front of their names give blacks a candidate that they can vote for?😑

withoutacountryx@gmail.com said...

FN I love ya city and the posts u provided at twitter for some real Bismillah food Gracias Ps heat does not bother me I lived in Vegas 20 yrs and Fla LOL

Anonymous said...

Let's see if I got this straight. The DNC gave Bernie the shaft. Yet all we get is a story about the relationship between Trump and Putin. I guess we don't need to know about the shady dealings of the DNC.

Puerto Rican food is nasty shit said...

Regardless of what you may think of Hillary, even if you can't stand her, you just have to swallow your pride, or do whatever you got to do, and just vote for her. 4 or a possible 8 years of Trump is not worth "sticking it to the system" or however you see it.

Limpbaugh said...

Julian Assange says the Russian hack was about a year earlier than the WikiLeaks hack of the emails that WikiLeaks just released. The question of who did it reminded me of the Mohamed movie causing the Benghazi attack claim. In that case, in the very first CIA briefing a CIA analyst said he suspected a specific terrorist who had used peaceful protests as cover before. Since there were protests around the world, it was reasonable to suspect that there had been one in Benghazi. Then it took a week or two to recover security camera footage and to interview people in the area. That's when they realized that there hadn't been a protest in Benghazi. In the meantime Susan Rice was not open to other reasonable possibilities, but I would call that cherry picking instead of lying. I didn't hear Hillary talk about it as much, but without knowing the exact timeline, I'd surmise that she wasn't lying when she blamed the movie. And in the broader picture, the protests were cover on a worldwide scale. But I do suspect that there is a good chance the DNC knows if the Russian hack was separate, and they are lying about it. And of course the broader picture there is, the DNC is corrupt liars who stole the election.

PilotX said...

The Bernie people need to understand if Trump wins he appoints 2 maybe 3 Supreme Court Justices and even if their guy wins in 2020 everything he wants to do gets shot down in the courts. Gotta think long term folks.

field negro said...

Without a country that's what'she up.
Glad u are enjoying Philly.
Now if u can get up to Henry Ave in Roxborough and hit up Chubby's, u will get a real cheeesesteak experience as well.😊

field negro said...

"what's up"
I swear my fingers are too big.

field negro said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Faith_and_Fairness said...

Au contraire, Mr. Field: Best Philly cheesesteak is Ishkabibble's :)

Anonymous said...

field negro said...

"what's up"
I swear my fingers are too big.

4:27 PM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

xD you're such a show off lol...

Anonymous said...

Watching that Shutdown on Broad St. Looks like Bernie's fast becoming an icon. Wow, a lot of discontent in the D party!

Love the bagpipe player though :)

PilotX said...

"Wow, a lot of discontent in the D party"

As long as they vote correctly come November. They know what time it is, you remember the PUMA's in 2008?

field negro said...

"Au contraire, Mr. Field: Best Philly cheesesteak is Ishkabibble's"

Dem there is fighting words. :)

Lance Cockstrong said...

Debbie WS gives me a hardon.

Limpbaugh said...

Russia happens to be allied with the moderate Middle East countries and we are allied with the the terrorist ones. Guess who has attacked Americans? Saudi Arabia on 9/11, and Israel with the Levon affair and the USS liberty Not Iran. Not Syria.

PilotX said...

"Guess who has attacked Americans? Saudi Arabia on 9/11, and Israel with the Levon affair and the USS liberty Not Iran. Not Syria."

There you go with those darn facts again.