Trump's America

[N.E. Brigand]

Just as historical reference source: a Trump supporter compiled this list of Trump's accomplishments in office.

[yovargas]

Would genuinely be interested in seeing a fact checker dive into that list and get a sense of how much of that stuff can genuinely be credited to Trump.

[N.E. Brigand]

Buzzfeed yesterday reported that the reason Donald Trump never joined Parler is that:

"The Trump Organization negotiated on his behalf *while he was in office* to make it his exclusive posting platform in exchange for an ownership stake in the company" but the negotiations fell through.

[RoseMorninStar]

I have not looked into this/not sure if it's the same list. It's a couple of months old: A Fact-Checked List of Trump Accomplishments

One from USA TODAY Fact check: On a viral list of 10 Trump 'accomplishments,' 3 are true.

[RoseMorninStar]

I'm not saying that Q-Anon, which claims that liberals secretly run pedophile rings, was created to distract from actual pedophilia on the right, but:

"NEW: D.C. Police arrested Ruben Verastigui -- a former 'senior digital strategist' for the Senate Republican Conference -- on charges of distribution of child pornography resulting from a time span that allegedly included his time at the SRC."

The specifics of the charges are even more disturbing than that sentence suggests. I won't detail them!

Verastigui's social media shows him at the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018, at a social media summit in the White House in 2019, at the White House as recently as December, and in a post just three months ago he wrote that he was pleased to see Ronna McDaniel, the Republican Party chair, was still using a photograph he took as her avatar when calling into Fox News. He's also credited in a Time magazine story on McDaniel for providing the same or a similar photo in his capacity as "RNC Senior Graphic Designer."

He also touts his membership in several pro-life groups. Isn't there a joke about Republicans caring about children only until the moment of birth?

N.E., That's truly disturbing, disgusting, disheartening. Heartbreaking. I certainly wouldn't cast the horrific acts of a few on such a broad group (as has been done with those who believe the QAnon conspiracy theories have done to Democrats) but I am not surprised when people who are so warped, sick, and pathological/narcissistic blame others for the very things they are doing. That is a hallmark of what they do.

[N.E. Brigand]

Not easy to watch. This is raw video from the insurrection.
"Shooting and Storming of the US Capitol in Washington DC"

A valuable record of the events, but also at times self-incriminating: the person who filmed that and posted it to Youtube, "Jayden X," is John Sullivan, who has been charged with aiding the rioters, and who liberal activists had come to view over the past year as an agent provocateur for his actions at other protests.

When Donald Trump's lawyer Michael van der Deen today claimed that "One of the first people arrested [for the insurrection] was a leader of Antifa," he was apparently referring to Sullivan, who, as noted above, is not a leader of Antifa.

Edit (Feb. 22): I moved the extra information I lately added here to the Trump-Russia thread, which was bumped by someone else.

[N.E. Brigand]

So far as I can tell, it stems from "the great" Aruna Viswanatha (as Rebecca Ballhaus calls her), who is not (so far as I can tell) an attorney (though I may be wrong).

In any event, here are the terms of Manafort's plea agreement in which he agreed to make the forfeiture both criminal and civil, and thus ensure that it would not be covered by any future pardon. Weissman knew (just as you and I knew) beyond any doubt that this was coming and made sure that it was covered.

Weissmann hasn't said anything about this news from more than a week ago:

U.S. prosecutors are no longer seeking to seize a Hamptons mansion and two New York City properties from Paul Manafort following his pardon by former President Donald Trump.

Prosecutors said Friday they will dismiss a 2019 preliminary forfeiture order entered against Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, after he was sentenced to 7½ years in prison for financial crimes and conspiracy.

In a court filing, they said Trump’s Dec. 23 pardon of Manafort meant the U.S. will no longer seek Manafort’s sprawling house in Water Mill, New York, his brownstone in Brooklyn, or his apartment on the edge of Manhattan’s Chinatown.

But speaking of Manafort, today prosecutors in SDNY added a conspiracy charge to their case against Stephen Calk, the Chicago banker and Trump 2016 campaign adviser who is alleged to have approved $16 million in loans to Manafort in exchange for being considered for a position in the Trump administration, possibly Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, or Secretary of the Army. (Calk was never nominated for any of these positions.)

Calk was first charged in May 2019. I had missed this story from September 2020 about how prosecutors apologetically made a late request to delay Calk's trial after finding some 30,000 documents relevant to his case in a shuttered office that had been used by Robert Mueller's team. I guess those documents led to this new charge.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Did you see that I posted about that an hour before you did, in a different thread?

[N.E. Brigand]

Did you see that I posted about that an hour before you did, in a different thread?

Nope! Only just now saw your post about that! Like you, I meant to note the story about the forfeiture last week but forgot.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm glad I posted my mea culpa before you pointed out my ultimately wrongness. But even more I am flabbergasted that we both posted independently within an hour of each other about a story that was already almost a week old at the time!

Great minds, or something like that!

[Túrin Turambar]

A pastor in Missouri tells women that while they can't all aspire to be "the epic trophy wife of all time like Melania Trump" they can at least be "a participation trophy". Pleasingly, he was censured by his congregation.

It is, ironically, International Women's Day today.

[Frelga]

There's nothing wrong with being a trophy wife, or husband, it that's what someone chooses. But Melania kinda sucked at it. An accomplished trophy wife displays admiration and adoration of her employer in public. She doesn't scowl at him or slap his hand on camera, although I can see how that would be a reflex by now.

[RoseMorninStar]

Ugh..That pastor deserved to be censured. How disgusting and insulting. What did he possibly think he was going to accomplish with such an awful comment?

[elengil]

Sigh...

Apparently the Trump campaign had to refund over 500,000 people because of donations made to the online fundraiser because while those people legitimately did donate, they intended to donate... once. Whereas due to not reading the exceptionally fine print, their donations rather defaulted to being monthly 'donations' - at first - but the campaign still wasn't satisfied so then near the end, the donations defaulted to weekly.

[N.E. Brigand]

From The Scotsman: a new report about previously undisclosed charges to the Secret Service by Trump's Scottish and Irish resorts: some £17,000 in 2017, including £5,400 for one room per an invoice dated August of that year. "It is unclear who visited Turnberry that month, but as revealed last December, Eric and a 30-strong party of 'international guests' flew to Scotland by private jet in July 2017 to play the family’s golf resorts."

[N.E. Brigand]

Not easy to watch. This is raw video from the insurrection.
"Shooting and Storming of the US Capitol in Washington DC"

A valuable record of the events, but also at times self-incriminating: the person who filmed that and posted it to Youtube, "Jayden X," is John Sullivan, who has been charged with aiding the rioters, and who liberal activists had come to view over the past year as an agent provocateur for his actions at other protests.

When Donald Trump's lawyer Michael van der Deen today claimed that "One of the first people arrested [for the insurrection] was a leader of Antifa," he was apparently referring to Sullivan, who, as noted above, is not a leader of Antifa.
Edit (Feb. 22): I moved the extra information I lately added here to the Trump-Russia thread, which was bumped by someone else.

The Dept. of Justice has filed to seize more than $90,000 that Sullivan apparently made by selling his video to CNN, arguing that Sullivan provoked some of the insurrectionists into violence in order to make money. He can be heard on his own video saying things like "F---, yeah! We are all part of this history" and "It's our house, m---------" and "Let's burn this s--- down." He urged Capitol police officers to let the rioters proceed. There's other video of him admitting that he was only pretending to be a journalist. And right after the insurrection, he told a friend that he "brought [his] megaphone to instigate s---" and that as a result he stood to make "millions of dollars" from the footage he shot.

Also in news of who's to blame for the insurrection, Rep. Carlos Gimenez, Republican of Florida, said yesterday on CNN that it can't have been Donald Trump who incited the rioters because, "I know for a fact that I saw people in my hotel room that were saying they were going to do something at two o'clock. And that happened at nine o'clock in the morning."

Please, Congressman, tell us more about the people who were plotting in your hotel room on the morning of the insurrection.

[Beorhtnoth]

Why is the "insurrection" in Washington heinous, but the Maidan revolution in Kyiv to be celebrated?

And one minor query, that might be more significant than it appears, but isn't the clamour for security in Washington a tacit admission that the politicians are no longer "of the people", but require protection "from the people"?

What more evidence is required to demonstrate the political fracture of the people from the democratic process?

[elengil]

Just in case anyone forgot that we're still slipping into authoritarianism in many smaller jurisdictions... book banning has become book burning, holocaust both-sides-ing has become a requirement, and professors are the enemy...

[elengil]

https://news.yahoo.com/two-fox-news-con ... 44582.html

Two Fox News Contributors Quit in Protest of Tucker Carlson's Jan. 6 Special

[RoseMorninStar]

Interesting article el. Discouraging and hopeful at the same time.