Enjoy President Trump, Courtesy of The Kremlin

[Sean Hayden]

He's going to be reelected Tero, I hope you're preparing yourself for it.

[Forty Two]

His hope of reelection lies with the economy first - and it can't just be "ok" or fail to go down. He needs a sustained boom, which is tough to do for another 2-3 years. What would be great for him would be measurable growth in manufacturing, heavy industry, and a shift in the balance of trade in the US's favor, coupled with a strong dollar, low unemployment, and low inflation. If he can add one more thing to that - rising wages, real wages. That would be the coup de gras. We've been hearing about how real wages have been stagnant in the US for decades. If he can point to (a) reduced illegal immigration and better border security at the same time as (b) real wages going up -- even if he can't prove cause and effect - he may have a victory. There is a receptiveness out there to the suggestion that low or stagnant wages for Americans could be caused by allowing too many non-Americans to work in the US (supply/demand/price).

But he is by no means assured of reelection. There is such an array of artillery constantly fired at him, that he really has no business being reelected. If he does get reelected, given the number of stakeholder factions that are lined up against him, and the media, and even forces in the Republican Party - well, that would be an amazing achievement. I find it highly unlikely. His only hope is to be able to point to the scoreboard and register a shutout or near shutout of his gainsayers.

[Tero]

The end is near. The economy will tank in 2019. The stocks have been climbing since Obama saved us from depression and are due for a ”correction.”

Coal jobs did not arrive no matter how fast we burn coal. Trump was a failure to working poor.

[Forty Two]

The end is near. The economy will tank in 2019. The stocks have been climbing since Obama saved us from depression and are due for a ”correction.”

Coal jobs did not arrive no matter how fast we burn coal. Trump was a failure to working poor.

Obama saved us from depression? So, the President does have a lot of ability to affect the economy?

[Forty Two]

Explanation of what Wolfe means when he stands behind the "truth" of his book, Fire and Fury. "He believes in larger truths and narratives. So he creates a narrative that is notionally true, that's conceptually true. The details are often wrong." The late New York Times media columnist David Carr wrote: "Historically, one of the problems with Wolff's omniscience is that while he may know all, he gets some of it wrong." https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/07/michael ... ck-up.html

[L'Emmerdeur]

Fox News sources confirmed the 'Trump wanted to fire Mueller but was stymied by White House counsel' story. It wasn't just 'enemies of the people' like NYT, CNN and NBC. Trump can tweet and blither about 'Fake News!!' as much as he wants, but all he does is confirm his lack of integrity.

[Seabass]

Long-ass Atlantic article about Paul Manafort and the trail of corruption left in his wake. But hey, he played only a minor role in Trump's campaign, and Trump barely knew the guy!

The Plot Against America—Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

I. The Wisdom of Friends
the clinic permitted paul manafort one 10-minute call each day. And each day, he would use it to ring his wife from Arizona, his voice often soaked in tears. “Apparently he sobs daily,” his daughter Andrea, then 29, texted a friend. During the spring of 2015, Manafort’s life had tipped into a deep trough. A few months earlier, he had intimated to his other daughter, Jessica, that suicide was a possibility. He would “be gone forever,” she texted Andrea.

His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a devastating turn. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship. Manafort would swim naked with his boss outside his banya, play tennis with him at his palace (“Of course, I let him win,” Manafort made it known), and generally serve as an arbiter of power in a vast country. One of his deputies, Rick Gates, once boasted to a group of Washington lobbyists, “You have to understand, we’ve been working in Ukraine a long time, and Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure … In every ministry, he has a guy.” Only a small handful of Americans—oil executives, Cold War spymasters—could claim to have ever amassed such influence in a foreign regime. The power had helped fill Manafort’s bank accounts; according to his recent indictment, he had tens of millions of dollars stashed in havens like Cyprus and the Grenadines.

Manafort had profited from the sort of excesses that make a country ripe for revolution. And in the early months of 2014, protesters gathered on the Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, and swept his patron from power. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych sought protective shelter in Russia. Manafort avoided any harm by keeping a careful distance from the enflamed city. But in his Kiev office, he’d left behind a safe filled with papers that he would not have wanted to fall into public view or the wrong hands.

Money, which had always flowed freely to Manafort and which he’d spent more freely still, soon became a problem. After the revolution, Manafort cadged some business from former minions of the ousted president, the ones who hadn’t needed to run for their lives. But he complained about unpaid bills and, at age 66, scoured the world (Hungary, Uganda, Kenya) for fresh clients, hustling without any apparent luck. Andrea noted her father’s “tight cash flow state,” texting Jessica, “He is suddenly extremely cheap.” His change in spending habits was dampening her wedding plans. For her “wedding weekend kick off” party, he suggested scaling back the menu to hot dogs and eliminated a line item for ice.

He seemed unwilling, or perhaps unable, to access his offshore accounts; an FBI investigation scrutinizing his work in Ukraine had begun not long after Yanukovych’s fall. Meanwhile, a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska had been after Manafort to explain what had happened to an $18.9 million investment in a Ukrainian company that Manafort had claimed to have made on his behalf.

continued...

[Tero]

The end is near. The economy will tank in 2019. The stocks have been climbing since Obama saved us from depression and are due for a ”correction.”

Coal jobs did not arrive no matter how fast we burn coal. Trump was a failure to working poor.

Obama saved us from depression? So, the President does have a lot of ability to affect the economy?

Only when the previous president is an idiot.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Long-ass Atlantic article about Paul Manafort and the trail of corruption left in his wake. But hey, he played only a minor role in Trump's campaign, and Trump barely knew the guy!

I read that yesterday. It's a very interesting piece. Nothing directly bearing on Trump's campaign, but it certainly shows that Manafort is a shady character who is heavily involved with others of the same ilk that are also Kremlin-connected.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Despite Trump's repeated 'no collusion, no collusion' soundbite (it must be running into at least a dozen times he's said that particular phrase by now), it seems pretty obvious that Trump and Republicans in Congress are actively working to impede, discredit, and derail investigations of the Russian government's involvement in the 2016 election. One has to question what is the motivation for these efforts. If the Trump campaign truly was completely innocent of any sort of underhanded dealing with Russia there would be nothing to fear. In fact, the investigations would result in Trump being vindicated. The approach that is being taken by Trump and Congressional toadies like Devin Nunes looks remarkably like an attempt to hide something.

'Trump’s Proxy War with Robert Mueller Finds a New Target'

Although his continual interference with the Justice Department has been excused by some as mere naïveté, Donald Trump understands, at some level, that he would do well to leave Robert Mueller alone. “Why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her e-mails and with her dossier?” he asked during a November interview, reportedly “frustrated” that the D.O.J. wasn’t investigating Clinton. “But, you know, as president, and I think you understand this—as a president, you’re not supposed to be involved in that process.” On another level, Trump surely understands that his influence campaign is yielding real results, even as they further entangle him in a potential obstruction case. On Monday, news broke that F.B.I Deputy Director Andrew McCabe would step down, adding another scalp to Trump’s pile. As the president appears to have learned, there are many ways in which he can weaken and undermine Mueller’s case without sacking the special counsel himself.

As The New York Times reported over the weekend, Trump’s shadow campaign against Mueller appears to have focused on how he can leverage a controversial memo, written by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, to pressure and potentially fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. According to the Times, the memo alleges that Rosenstein approved the surveillance of Carter Page, a former foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Trump allies argue that such an order constitutes an abuse of the program, and that if it did occur, “the American people should know”. They also argue that the order to surveil Page was based on the dossier compiled by ex-British spook Christopher Steele, which was, in turn, partially financed by the Democratic National Committee. (Democrats have roundly dismissed the report as misleading and part of a broader smear campaign against U.S. law enforcement.)

[pErvinalia]

The deep state and liberul media is going to invent evidence to find him guilty.

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

[L'Emmerdeur]

There's an intriguing article from the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. However, it's those damn anonymous sources again, so might as well just dismiss it.

'Dutch agencies provide crucial intel about Russia's interference in US-elections'

It's the summer of 2014. A hacker from the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD has penetrated the computer network of a university building next to the Red Square in Moscow, oblivious to the implications. One year later, from the AIVD headquarters in Zoetermeer, he and his colleagues witness Russian hackers launching an attack on the Democratic Party in the United States. The AIVD hackers had not infiltrated just any building; they were in the computer network of the infamous Russian hacker group Cozy Bear. And unbeknownst to the Russians, they could see everything.

That's how the AIVD becomes witness to the Russian hackers harassing and penetrating the leaders of the Democratic Party, transferring thousands of emails and documents. It won't be the last time they alert their American counterparts. And yet, it will be months before the United States realize what this warning means: that with these hacks the Russians have interfered with the American elections. And the AIVD hackers have seen it happening before their very eyes.

The Dutch access provides crucial evidence of the Russian involvement in the hacking of the Democratic Party, according to six American and Dutch sources who are familiar with the material, but wish to remain anonymous. It's also grounds for the FBI to start an investigation into the influence of the Russian interference on the election race between the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidate Donald Trump.

[Scot Dutchy]

The AVID (Algemeen Veiligheid en Inlichting Dienst) also hacked into a camera in the hackers room and got pictures of all the hackers.

[Scot Dutchy]

Trump is brainwashing the electorate. Things will get so bad that sections of the electorate will not believe any news source and only believe Trump. The more and more news channels attach Trump greater will be the impact on that section of the electorate that they will become immune like the 30% that are his core supporters. It is a dangerous game but if he succeeds by the next election he could have up 50% zombie support. It could have come from the book 1984 and is very Orwellian.

[pErvinalia]

There's an intriguing article from the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. However, it's those damn anonymous sources again, so might as well just dismiss it.

'Dutch agencies provide crucial intel about Russia's interference in US-elections'

Well they're Dutch anonymous sources, which are the best anonymous sources..