Trump 36: We Shall Overcome

[Rachel333]

There is so much wrong in here (It didn't definitely show 1/1024 the way Trumpers are claiming, that is just the minimum and even in that case it's still consistent with her story of being told she had a Native American ancestor multiple generations ago; it's not less than the average American; she's not claiming tribal membership in the Cherokee Nation, simply the existence of a Native American ancestor) but how about the sheer racism of "Even they don't want her?" That's just so incredibly offensive to the Cherokee Nation.

[Cartmann99]

6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

 

Oh please, the football stadium in my town can hold more people than that.

[fraurosena]

 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

 

He shits daily on the previously great US of A?

[fraurosena]

Note how he says "to me", not "to America". Freudian slip?

Trump: Saudi Arabia has 'been a great ally to me'

Quote

President Trump on Tuesday said Saudi Arabia has "been a great ally to me" amid an international diplomatic crisis over allegations that Saudi agents killed a U.S.-based Saudi journalist in Istanbul. 

Trump told Fox Business Network's Trish Regan that the U.S. response to Saudi Arabia's involvement in Khashoggi's disappearance will depend on "whether or not they knew about it." 

"Saudi Arabia’s our partner, our ally against Iran," he said. "They’ve been a great ally to me."

"They’re investing tremendous amounts of money," he added, referring to America's $110 billion arms deal with the Saudi kingdom. 

Trump earlier in the day denied having any financial interests in Saudi Arabia, pushing back on speculation that he is treading lightly with the Saudis over Khashoggi because of his financial conflicts of interest.

The president, a longtime business mogul, has long-standing and close business ties to the Saudis, with Saudi businessmen spending significant amounts of money at his hotels and properties over decades. 

One Saudi royal billionaire, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, purchased Trump's yacht and a stake in New York's Plaza Hotel in the 1990s when Trump was in financial distress. 

Trump's business ties to the kingdom have come under intense scrutiny in recent days as Trump has repeated Saudi leadership's denials of involvement in Khashoggi's disappearance.

Turkish authorities say Saudi agents killed and dismembered the Washington Post journalist in Istanbul's Saudi consulate. 

Trump, after praising Saudi Arabia during the Fox Business interview, added, "With all of that being said, you can’t do what we’ve been reading about. We’re gonna learn a lot about it." 

He then discussed the $110 billion arms deal, saying if the U.S. doesn't give the weapons to Saudi Arabia, the country will turn to "Russia or China."

"Aren't we just hurting our own country?" he asked, responding to critics who have said he should end the arms deal. "Because here’s what’s going to happen — [they'll] buy them from China, buy them from Russia."

"We’re not really hurting them, we’re hurting ourselves," he added. "I don’t want to give up a 110 billion dollar order."

 

[Rachel333]

7 hours ago, fraurosena said:

 

Literally the second sentence of that piece is, "Don’t get me wrong, Trump lies all the time." 

[AmazonGrace]

Is that even legal? Can you just round up people who have committed no crime except traveling?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s fanciful, falsehood-filled AP interview, annotated". Because of the notes, I can't quote here, but it's worth a read. It's amazing how delusional he is about pretty much every topic.

[GreyhoundFan]

[RainbowSky]

Can Melania and Kim send their husbands off on vacation together for umm...a while? 

Just tell them they're on a show about how great they are!

[fraurosena]

I thought he was all about the environment?

[from the WaPo article @GreyhoundFan posted above]

Quote

I mean, you know, I am a person that believes very, very strongly in the environment. I am truly an environmentalist. I know some people might not think of me as that, but I’m an environmentalist. 

 

[fraurosena]

I guess he's mad at Mexico again. It's getting closer to the midterms, so he's mustering up the animus against immigrants once more. Maybe some more chants for a wall? 

As usual he's blaming the Dems for everything. Now they are apparently working together with the governments of Central American countries to get criminals to cross the Mexican border into America.

Yeah, stopping payments is going to work. That'll show them. The countries will become even poorer! Then people will want to seek better opportunities and leave those countries, and they'll all flee to America... oh... oops.

Again, of course, it's the Democrats fault. And fuck trade. Also, he wants Mexico to do his work for him now. Lazy loser.

[GreyhoundFan]

I think most of us here feel the same way:

 

[fraurosena]

Brad Heath's thread in response to the presiduncial tweets today:

 

 

[Briefly]

On 10/16/2018 at 1:00 PM, Rachel333 said:

There is so much wrong in here (It didn't definitely show 1/1024 the way Trumpers are claiming, that is just the minimum and even in that case it's still consistent with her story of being told she had a Native American ancestor multiple generations ago; it's not less than the average American; she's not claiming tribal membership in the Cherokee Nation, simply the existence of a Native American ancestor) but how about the sheer racism of "Even they don't want her?" That's just so incredibly offensive to the Cherokee Nation.

I **heard all my life that we had "some" native ancestry.  When my mother died in 2004, someone on her side of the family told us that she actually had quite a bit of Cherokee ancestry.  Which is not surprising, considering how the entire family physically looked and the fact that we were raised with what were/are Cherokee traditions and beliefs.  But she had actually let us think that we were part Mexican.  This relative said that was something she and some of her siblings had done on purpose because the bias against Mexicans was less than the bias against Natives.  There was also a story of a slave that was owned by the tribe and then either freed and married in or was adopted into the tribe after being freed.  The Cherokee tribe did that sometimes, so it made sense.  I never claimed to be Native, and neither did my brother of sister.  We just claimed to have some Cherokee (and Osage from Dad's side) ancestry.  The story was that our mom had also had what are referred to as head rights but that she signed those away.  All of that does make sense with how we were raised.  That is very similar to what I think Ms. Warren's family is.  I guess I'm not surprised at what that idiot in office said.  He is offensive in every sense of the word.

**About 3 months ago, my brother (the family historian) was working on the genealogy again and thought he'd try to see if there was anything new he could find.  We've never been able to get any further back then a specific ancestor who may have been the freed slave.  He and my sister both did dna tests, I didn't and probably won't at this point.  What we discovered is that we have ZERO Native ancestry and ZERO African-American ancestry.  So, obviously, the story of the possible slave ancestor is not true.  Same thing for the Cherokee ancestry my mom honestly thought she had.  From what we have been able to find out, there was an adoption into the Cherokee tribe a few generations back.  But it was a white person and he was probably pretty young at the time.  That person is probably the one we can't get past in terms of parentage, etc.  His name is probably Zachariah.  He was most likely raised in a Cherokee family and then raised his own children with the customs and traditions he was raised in.  Somewhere in there, the fact that he was not a blood relative of his family wasn't mentioned anymore and the family just assumed that they were Cherokee by blood.  A few generations later, we come along and still thought we were Native.  But we aren't.  At all, actually, which is surprising.  We all have physical characteristics that lead anybody to think we are Cherokee.  But dna doesn't lie.  We knew that we had some Irish ancestry and that was proven.  Black Irish, probably which is not black as in African-American but may have also contributed to the belief that we had that in our ancestry.  But we did confirm that we are in fact Scandinavian, Viking Irish as it's called.  That was not a surprise.  But it's nice to have that proven.  We also found a very small amount of Jewish ancestry which I thought was very interesting and I like knowing that.

But the idiot in the white house is still an idiot.  She is what she said and he will do anything he can to diminish her.  He can't stand to be wrong.

[Drala]

Putin Furious at Saudis for Using His Puppet Without Permission

By Andy Borowitz

October 17, 2018

Spoiler

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/putin-furious-at-saudis-for-using-his-puppet-without-permission?fbclid=IwAR2yTS5V4LJBpdJKoeXtqujhsQEdcJuwE6kkjESi1pD5Y0iC0om9e3QM_oU

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump has given every despot on the planet a license to kill"

Spoiler

The late, great historian David Fromkin wrote a book called “In the Time of the Americans,” about the leaders — he focused on Roosevelt, Truman, Marshall and MacArthur — who created the American-led world order out of the ruins of World War II. A future historian writing about today’s world might title the book “In the Time of the Authoritarians.”

The post-Cold War “end of history” moment celebrated by Francis Fukuyama, when the entire world appeared to be converging on a liberal democratic model, appears almost as distant now as the pre-1914 Belle Époque. This is the age of authoritarians and would-be authoritarians — of populists and nationalists. Liberals, understood in the classical sense as the promoters of individual liberty, appear to be almost as embattled as they were in the 1930s. Freedom House reports that 2017 represented “the 12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.” Since 2016, 113 countries have seen a decline in freedom while only 62 have seen an improvement.

Everywhere you look, you see illiberal rulers gaining power and exercising that power ruthlessly and assertively. You see Vladimir Putin annexing Crimea and occupying eastern Ukraine, projecting Russian power into the Middle East, trying to murder dissidents in Britain and even interfering in the U.S. election. You see China’s Xi Jinping accumulating absolute power while seizing military control of the South China Sea and consigning more than 1 million Uighurs to reeducation camps. You see Bashar al-Assad dropping barrel bombs and using poison gas to consolidate his rule in Syria. You see Rodrigo Duterte sending out death squads in the Philippines ostensibly to combat a drug epidemic. You see illiberal rulers undermining democracy in Poland, Hungary and Nicaragua — and soon perhaps in Brazil. And you see Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, bombing Yemen indiscriminately, blockading Qatar, kidnapping the prime minister of Lebanon, locking up dissidents — and now allegedly murdering and dismembering Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

This trend toward repression cannot be blamed entirely on the United States, but it cannot be entirely disconnected from the United States, either. The greatest expansion of democracy around the world occurred in two waves — the first in the 1940s-1950s, the second in the 1980s-1990s — when the United States was at the height of its power and self-assertiveness. American involvement was critical in the democratic transitions of countries as diverse as Poland and El Salvador. Our desire to fight for freedom began to wane when the Iraq War brought home the costs of nation-building by force. President Barack Obama still believed in promoting human rights but was warier of intervening abroad than President George W. Bush had been.

Now President Trump gives every indication that, far from fighting for freedom, he would rather fight against it. This is the president who said it’s “great” that Xi is declaring himself ruler for life, praised Duterte for the “unbelievable job” he was doing “on the drug problem,” congratulated Recep Tayyip Erdogan for winning a rigged referendum that spelled the death of Turkish democracy and declared his “love” for Kim Jong Un of North Korea. When confronted by Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” about Kim’s catalogue of crime — “repression, gulags, starvation” — Trump was dismissive. “I get along with him really well,” Trump said. “I have a good energy with him.” He was equally blasé when Stahl asked him about reports that Putin is involved in “assassinations” and “poisonings.” He probably is, Trump conceded — but “it’s not in our country,” so who cares? Britain can deal with Russian hit teams on its own.

The only thing that matters to this intensely solipsistic president is how other rulers treat him; how they treat their own people or even their neighbors is irrelevant.

Thus, it is hardly surprising that Trump has shown so little outrage about the fate of Khashoggi, an American resident and a columnist for an American newspaper who was reportedly murdered in a NATO country. Trump’s threat of “severe punishment” is undercut by his willingness to accept at face value Saudi denials of complicity — just as he accepted Putin’s denial of hacking the Democratic Party. Trump even speculates, echoing a possible Saudi cover story designed to protect the crown prince, that “rogue killers” could be responsible. How long before he claims that Khashoggi could have been killed by a 400-pound couch potato who somehow waddled into the heavily guarded Saudi Consulate?

If the Saudis carried out this grisly crime with high-level authorization, as the evidence would indicate, they did so at least in part because they anticipated that the American president wouldn’t care about the disappearance of another “enemy of the people.” Other dictatorships are equally emboldened by America’s abdication of authority. This is a good time to be a dictator — and a dangerous time to be a dissident. Trump has given every despot on the planet a license to kill without worrying about the U.S. reaction. Because, in all likelihood, there will be none.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Another Trump-branded building has decided to take down the president’s name"

Spoiler

The residents of a Manhattan condominium called “Trump Place” have voted to remove the president’s name from the tower’s facade, the latest in a string of properties that have distanced themselves from the Trump brand since Election Day 2016.

Unit owners in the Upper West Side building, a 46-story tower at 200 Riverside Blvd., were informed of the decision to remove the signs Wednesday afternoon in an email from the condo board.

According to the email, 69.3 percent of owners who participated in a vote in September and early October said they were in favor of taking down President Trump’s name. As a result, the board said, it had “passed a resolution to remove the Signage.”

The change will not affect the building’s legal name, “200 Riverside Boulevard at Trump Place,” only the signs “TRUMP PLACE” on its east and west facades.

“We are pleased to have resolved this matter democratically. Our entire community has engaged in a thorough and respectful deliberative process regarding how to address the signage on our building,” the board wrote in its email, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post. “We encourage everyone to move forward and respect the will of the community.”

The email did not say when the signs would be removed.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Even after the signs are removed, the president’s company still has a contract to manage the building until at least next year.

This building is part of a large complex that Trump helped develop in the 1990s on the site of an old railroad yard. He no longer owns the buildings, six of which originally bore the name “Trump Place.”

After the election, Trump’s name was removed from three “Trump Place” buildings on the same stretch of Riverside Boulevard, as well as from hotels in Toronto, Panama and New York City’s SoHo neighborhood.

The 200 Riverside Blvd. building was the subject of a lawsuit this year, when the condo board asked a New York judge to determine if it had the right to remove its own signs. The Trump Organization insisted that it did not, saying that an agreement signed in 2000 meant the name could never come down.

The judge ruled for the condo board, saying it could take down the signs — but only if residents approved.

The latest move to remove Trump’s name underscores how his political rise has transformed his brand. Once an icon of big-city success, he is now a deeply polarizing figure in liberal urban areas — including New York, where Trump first made his name.

The fight over the sign at 200 Riverside Blvd. began early last year, after some residents complained about the building’s association with Trump. In response, the building’s board took an informal poll of residents, asking them if they wanted to remove the name.

In that initial survey, about 63 percent said yes. But then the board got a letter from Alan Garten, chief legal officer for the Trump Organization.

“Please be advised that [removing the signs] would constitute a flagrant and material breach of the License Agreement,” Garten wrote in March 2017. He said that if the board made any effort to remove the sign, the Trump Organization “will have no choice but to commence appropriate legal proceedings.”

Garten said that a licensing agreement signed in 2000, in which the building agreed to pay Trump $1 for the use of his name, prevented the signs from ever coming down.

To force the issue, the board sued the Trump Organization instead — and quickly won.

“The court does not find any of defendant’s arguments convincing,” said Judge Eileen Bransten, referring to the Trump Organization.

Trump still has his name on more than 40 buildings around the world, including the two remaining “Trump Place” buildings on Riverside Boulevard.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

Trump has been babbling on Twitter and at his rallies about how he and the Republicans want to protect people with preexisting health conditions:

 

[Drala]

9 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Trump has been babbling on Twitter and at his rallies about how he and the Republicans want to protect people with preexisting health conditions:

 

Shameless liars.  How stupid do they think we are?  Those red maga hats must be lined with tinfoil, allowing the wearer's brain to substitute facts with fantasy.

[Gobsmacked]

5 hours ago, Drala said:

Shameless liars.  How stupid do they think we are?  Those red maga hats must be lined with tinfoil, allowing the wearer's brain to substitute facts with fantasy.

The Redhat contains the workings that allow for connection to the Uni-Brain. The one that is stored up McFuckfaces bottom and activated at his rallies. 

[Rachel333]

 

Oooookay?

 

[RainbowSky]

On 10/18/2018 at 10:55 AM, Briefly said:

I **heard all my life that we had "some" native ancestry.  When my mother died in 2004, someone on her side of the family told us that she actually had quite a bit of Cherokee ancestry.  Which is not surprising, considering how the entire family physically looked and the fact that we were raised with what were/are Cherokee traditions and beliefs.  But she had actually let us think that we were part Mexican.  This relative said that was something she and some of her siblings had done on purpose because the bias against Mexicans was less than the bias against Natives.  There was also a story of a slave that was owned by the tribe and then either freed and married in or was adopted into the tribe after being freed.  The Cherokee tribe did that sometimes, so it made sense.  I never claimed to be Native, and neither did my brother of sister.  We just claimed to have some Cherokee (and Osage from Dad's side) ancestry.  The story was that our mom had also had what are referred to as head rights but that she signed those away.  All of that does make sense with how we were raised.  That is very similar to what I think Ms. Warren's family is.  I guess I'm not surprised at what that idiot in office said.  He is offensive in every sense of the word.

**About 3 months ago, my brother (the family historian) was working on the genealogy again and thought he'd try to see if there was anything new he could find.  We've never been able to get any further back then a specific ancestor who may have been the freed slave.  He and my sister both did dna tests, I didn't and probably won't at this point.  What we discovered is that we have ZERO Native ancestry and ZERO African-American ancestry.  So, obviously, the story of the possible slave ancestor is not true.  Same thing for the Cherokee ancestry my mom honestly thought she had.  From what we have been able to find out, there was an adoption into the Cherokee tribe a few generations back.  But it was a white person and he was probably pretty young at the time.  That person is probably the one we can't get past in terms of parentage, etc.  His name is probably Zachariah.  He was most likely raised in a Cherokee family and then raised his own children with the customs and traditions he was raised in.  Somewhere in there, the fact that he was not a blood relative of his family wasn't mentioned anymore and the family just assumed that they were Cherokee by blood.  A few generations later, we come along and still thought we were Native.  But we aren't.  At all, actually, which is surprising.  We all have physical characteristics that lead anybody to think we are Cherokee.  But dna doesn't lie.  We knew that we had some Irish ancestry and that was proven.  Black Irish, probably which is not black as in African-American but may have also contributed to the belief that we had that in our ancestry.  But we did confirm that we are in fact Scandinavian, Viking Irish as it's called.  That was not a surprise.  But it's nice to have that proven.  We also found a very small amount of Jewish ancestry which I thought was very interesting and I like knowing that.

But the idiot in the white house is still an idiot.  She is what she said and he will do anything he can to diminish her.  He can't stand to be wrong.

If your family member had moved to Uganda 100 years ago, would the people alive now not then be Ugandan?

[Briefly]

1 hour ago, RainbowSky said:

If your family member had moved to Uganda 100 years ago, would the people alive now not then be Ugandan?

I'm not sure how you mean the question so I'm not sure how to answer you.  If you could please elaborate a little, it would help.