Amerika du hast es besser

[Peiresc]

Gewaltenteilung ist really, really bad for the country, aber ich kann im Moment wenig dagegen tun. For now.

[Bloedmann]

https://www.morgenpost.de/politik/article212428081/Letzter-Arbeitstag-Twitter-Mitarbeiter-nimmt-Trump-offline.html

[Peiresc]

Noch zu #1515. Das ist natürlich auch auf Sessions gemünzt. Im Sommer hatte der Präsident ja eine so wüste Attacke auf seinen Justizminister gefahren, dass sogar Demokraten (IMHO unverständlicherweise) ihre Liebe zu ihm entdeckten. Die naheliegendste Erklärung ist: er war davon ausgegangen, dass ihn Sessions vor den Konsequenzen der Russland-Geschichte schützen wird, und er war schwer enttäuscht, dass sich Sessions da ausgeklinkt hat. Das war der Verrat. Und ein Rausschmiss wäre als Racheakt zwar verständlich gewesen, aber hätte in dieser Sache nicht geholfen. Außerdem ist Trump ein Weichei, wenn es in einer persönlichen Auseinandersetzung hart auf hart kommt.

-----

Ein wenig off-topic, aber weil wir das Thema schon mal berührt hatten:

So einfach kann es sein, die Stimmung aufzuhellen. Was sollte dazu besser geeignet sein als die orientalische ... ähm, Höflichkeit.

Erinnert bisschen daran:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panda-Diplomatie

(Der eigentliche Grund, Pandas zu verschenken ist - so vermuten zumindest böse Zungen - dass sie von den Chinesen (zurecht) als aussterbende Art gesehen werden. Dauernd nur hochgiftige Bambussprossen futtern schlägt dann doch arg auf die Libido.)

Die Panda-Diplomatie ist gefährdet, wenn der Panda nicht mehr gefährdet ist.

Part of the panda's clout derives from its international role as a symbol of conservation. Late last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the global authority on endangered species, officially downgraded the animal from "endangered" to "vulnerable" in what was ostensibly a validation of China's decades-long effort to save its national icon from extinction.

But the Chinese government did not see it that way. According to five people familiar with the matter, Chinese officials were livid about the decision and have been furiously lobbying for a reversal ever since. The authorities worry the downgrade makes pandas less valuable, from both a financial and political perspective, and could threaten tourism revenues and the business of panda loans to foreign countries. "There was huge anger about [the panda being downgraded] because it makes pandas less important, and makes it harder to raise money and draw attention to them," said one of the five people familiar with the government's reaction.
https://www.ft.com/content/8a04a532-be92-11e7-9836-b25f8adaa111

[Peiresc]

David Roberts von vox.com diagnostiziert eine epistemiologische Krise. Sie hat sich über Jahre und Jahrzehnte angebahnt.

Say Mueller reveals hard proof that the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with Russia, strategically using leaked emails to hurt Clinton's campaign. Say the president — backed by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox News, Breitbart, most of the US Cabinet, half the panelists on CNN, most of the radio talk show hosts in the country, and an enormous network of Russian-paid hackers and volunteer shitposters working through social media — rejects the evidence.

They might say Mueller is compromised. It's a Hillary/Deep State plot. There's nothing wrong with colluding with Russia in this particular way. Dems did it first. All of the above. Whatever.
[...]
So we may just have to live with a president indicted for collusion with a foreign power.

Man mag das für düster und fatalistisch halten, aber es ist schwierig zu widersprechen. must-read.

[ErpelderNacht]

In der US-Sphäre blubbert grad eine Geschichte über Korruption und Machtmissbrauch, ausgelöst durch einen Artikel Donna Braziles bei Politico, ehemalige Chefin des DNC und berüchtigt für das geheime Zustecken von Fragen an Clinton im Vorfeld von TV-Debatten in ihrer vormaligen Eigenschaft als CNN-Mitarbeiterin.

http://archive.is/https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774?

Inside Hillary Clinton's Secret Takeover of the DNC
When I was asked to run the Democratic Party after the Russians hacked our emails, I stumbled onto a shocking truth about the Clinton campaign.

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton's team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I'd had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

Stimmten die Gerüchte, ausgelöst durch die DNC-Leaks?

So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama's neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary's campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party's debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

Immer die gleichen Namen. Debbie Wasserman Schultz musste bekanntlich im Zuge der DNC-Leaks zurücktreten. Sie kümmerte sich nicht um die Schulden der Partei und überließ die Kontrolle schlußendlich der Clinton Campaign.

Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn't been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton's headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn't have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.

Debbie kümmerte sich nicht und ließ alle anderen im Unklaren. Clinton übernahm die Kontrolle der hochverschuldeten Partei.

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary's campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt."What?" I screamed. "I am an officer of the party and they've been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems."

Das glaub ich ihr.

That wasn't true, he said. Officials from Hillary's campaign had taken a look at the DNC's books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama's campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

The borrower is the slave to the lender.

If I didn't know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie's way. In my experience she didn't come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

Ein vernichtendes Urteil über Debbie.

"Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?" I asked. "I don't know how Debbie relates to the officers," Gary said. He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary's campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp.

Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party's national committee.

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the thirty-two states' parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC.

The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

Follow the money.

"Wait," I said. "That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You're telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?"

Clinton hatte die Kontrolle, noch bevor sie nominiert war.

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

"That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie," he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. "It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election."

The borrower is the slave to the lender. Das Aufregendste daran ist, dass diese 20 Mille eigentlich DNC-Spendengelder sind, die die Clinton Campaign eingesackt hatte und dann "großzügig" gegen Kontrolle der Partei spendete, damit diese nicht unter der Schuldenlast kollabierte.

Right around the time of the convention the leaked emails revealed Hillary's campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild "the party from the ground up ... when our state parties are strong, we win. That's what will happen."

Große Sprüche und das Gegenteil tun.

Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary's campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as "essentially ... money laundering" for the Clinton campaign, Hillary's people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie's people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

Erstmal andere beschuldigen. Die Strategie der Lügner.

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.When I got back from a vacation in Martha's Vineyard I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party's finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.
I had been wondering why it was that I couldn't write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

Kurz: Clinton hatte umfassende Kontrolle.

When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate's team starts to exercise more control over the party.
.
.
This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

Kurz: Die umfassende Kontrolle ist normal, sobald ein Kandidat nominiert wird. Clinton hatte aber ein Jahr vorher die Kontrolle übernommen und noch bevor sie sich überhaupt nominieren hatte lassen.

I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none.
Then I found this agreement.The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party's integrity.

Bernie Sanders hatte nie eine Chance.
The election was rigged.
Durch Clinton.

[Peiresc]

Bernie Sanders hatte nie eine Chance.
The election was rigged.
Durch Clinton.

Da gibt es einen alten Song von den Sparks dazu.



Vor ein, zwei Tagen habe ich irgendwo von einem Strategie-Treffen der Republikaner gelesen, wo man sich schnell und zwanglos einig war, dass man das nächste Halbjahr wenigstens noch auf Hillary Clinton rumhacken werde, das ist 'ne sichere Bank. Leider habe ich keine Chance, den Link wiederzufinden.

Nicht eine Zehntelsekunde nehme ich Fox oder Trump ab, dass es ihnen um Recht und Gesetz geht oder dass sie von Mitleid mit Bernie zerfressen sind. Du etwa?

In #1513 waren übrigens noch ein paar Fragen an Dich liegengeblieben, vielleicht hast Du sie übersehen.

[Peiresc]

David Roberts von vox.com.

They might say Mueller is compromised. It's a Hillary/Deep State plot. There's nothing wrong with colluding with Russia in this particular way. Dems did it first. All of the above. Whatever.

Fox News? Vor 6 Minuten

@AlanDersh: "Nothing was violated if and when Donald Trump and the campaign 'colluded' with the Russians."

[Peiresc]

Die Steuerreform, leicht fasslich erklärt:



Papa: wohl Papa John's Pizza, the third largest take-out and pizza delivery[4] restaurant chain in the United States. [WP]

On October 16, 2014, after a year-long investigation by the New York State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, five Manhattan Papa John's pizza locations and their parent company New Majority Holding LLC along with its owner, Ronald Johnson, were all sued in the amount of $2,000,000 for unpaid wages.

[ErpelderNacht]

In #1513 waren übrigens noch ein paar Fragen an Dich liegengeblieben, vielleicht hast Du sie übersehen.

Rhetorische Fragen erwarten keine Antwort.

Ein Detail:

ein vom DNC und der Clinton-Campaign bezahltes Pipi-Dossier

Das Dossier ist von einem Republikaner in Auftrag gegeben worden, die Demokraten haben es nur geerbt.

Das ist falsch. Nochmal die WaPo:

http://archive.is/O6hyH

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.
After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Steele und damit das Pipi-Dossier kam also erst ins Spiel, nachdem die Clinton Campaign und der DNC über Marc Elias Fusion GPS beauftragt hatten. Dieser unbekannte Republikaner war da nicht involviert.

Elias...den Namen hatte ich doch kürzlich erst gelesen...
https://forum.psiram.com/index.php?topic=15175.msg218590#msg218590
Bei Donna Brazile:

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.When I got back from a vacation in Martha's Vineyard I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party's finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

[Omikronn]

Nur ein kleiner Einwurf vom schweigenden Mitleser:

In #1513 waren übrigens noch ein paar Fragen an Dich liegengeblieben, vielleicht hast Du sie übersehen.

Rhetorische Fragen erwarten keine Antwort.

Mit solchen Posts trägst du nicht unbedingt dazu bei deine eigene Argumentation zu festigen...

[ErpelderNacht]

Mit solchen Posts trägst du nicht unbedingt dazu bei deine eigene Argumentation zu festigen...

Im Ausgangspost sind drei rhetorische und eine Warum-Frage.
Da gibt es nichts zu antworten.

[Peiresc]

Da gibt es nichts zu antworten.

Du wusstest nichts zu antworten.

[Peiresc]

PS.

ein vom DNC und der Clinton-Campaign bezahltes Pipi-Dossier

Das Dossier ist von einem Republikaner in Auftrag gegeben worden, die Demokraten haben es nur geerbt.

Das ist falsch.

Nein, das war nur nicht ganz exakt, aber es war eher richtig als falsch. Fusion GPS wurde von Republikanern beauftragt.

Representatives for the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online news site, informed congressional investigators Friday the outlet had originally funded the research firm that created the salacious dossier containing allegations of ties between Donald Trump's campaign and Russian operatives, the publication said in a statement.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/27/trump-russia-washington-free-beacon-fusion-gps-244265

Und die Lefties werden natürlich noch etwas deutlicher:

Now it turns out that the conservative website was the one that got the ball rolling regarding Fusion GPS' research on Trump. After the Free Beacon stopped paying Fusion GPS for the research, the company then turned around and offered to continue digging into Trump for Democrats.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/10/28/conservative_website_washington_free_beacon_was_first_to_hire_firm_behind.html

Ich glaube nicht, dass die Dems schon wussten, was in dem Dossier drin stehen wird, als sie das Fusion-Angebot? angenommen haben, denn das hätten sie dann billiger haben können. Die Lage wird in etwa gewesen sein: der Mr Trump ist ein so auffälliger Russen- und Putinfreund, und war der nicht neulich sogar in Moskau? Vielleicht hat er Dreck am Stecken, er wird erpresst, bestochen, wer weiß. Der bekannte linksextreme McCain hat das Dossier für immerhin so prüfenswürdig gehalten, dass er es ans FBI weiter gegeben hat.

[Peiresc]

Noch zu dem Steele-Dossier: Seth Abramson hat das Protokoll der Anhörung von Carter Page im Kongress intensiv durchgesehen.
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/927999713714081799

CONCLUSION: These 28 bombshells are what we learned simply from DECEITFUL Congressional testimony. So just IMAGINE what MUELLER knows. {end}

Eines der vielen Details, das nach seiner Analyse beweist, dass die multiplen Russland-Kontakte von Page, Papadopoulos usw. Trump und der Trump-Kampagne bekannt waren, dass sie von russischer Seite das Ziel hatten, die Sanktionen aufzuheben, dass sie Gegenleistungen angeboten und erbracht haben (z. B. das Hacking), der Kongress von der Administration systematisch belogen wurde usw., ist dieses:

Seth Abramson? @SethAbramson  9 Std.
BOMBSHELL: Everything the Steele Dossier said about Page appears to be either exactly accurate or so close to it as to be indistinguishable.

-----

Noch zu den Demokraten.

Dems win from coast to coast

Aber es gibt keinen Grund für sie, übermütig zu werden. Kürzlich hatte Sean Spicer (kennt den noch wer?) einen lesenswerten Text bei TheHill. Kurz gesagt geht es um die finanzielle Lage des DNC (verzweifelt) und des RNC (rosig), und um die Möglichkeiten, die das für die gezielte chirurgische Wählerbeeinflussung bietet bzw. nicht bietet. Nebenbei bietet er eine nüchterne Erklärung für den Einfluss der Clinton-Kampagne auf den DNC, aber er hat vergessen, Clinton als das Böse herauszustellen:

As Hillary Clinton said at the Code Conference last May: "I set up my campaign and we have our own data operation. I get the nomination. So I'm now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party. I mean, it was bankrupt, it was on the verge of insolvency, its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it — the DNC — to keep it going."
http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/358952-after-a-year-of-trump-republicans-looked-poised-to-dominate-again-in-2018

[Peiresc]

Andere sind etwas zurückhaltender als Abramson in der Beurteilung von Carter Page

The specific allegations in the Steele dossier about Page remain unconfirmed.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/7/16616912/carter-page-testimony-trump-russia

wenn es insgesamt aber auch nicht gut für ihn steht.

Und was Keith Schiller angeht:

Und er kann sich
Nicht erinnern
Und man kommt nicht
An ihn ran