• February 16, 2017.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
• February 16, 2017.
Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File.
It’s a very old saying, the rich are different. It’s true, they are, by virtue of money, and the power money purchases. If they are different as people, it’s because money allows them to be arrogant, compassion free, unethical assholes without consequence. No, not every rich person on the planet is a truly shitty person, but they are rare birds in the flock of the rich. Rich people are accustomed to getting their way, using the time-honored method of greasing palms and opening doors with wedges of cash and promises. Now that we have someone in the white house who wouldn’t know an ethical behaviour if it bit him on the balls, the slime trail of the rich is visible from space.
According to a New York Times piece published on Saturday, Trump’s son Eric told the newspaper that Mar-a-Lago admits about 20 to 40 new members each year. Considering that Mar-a-Lago raised its initiation fees to $200,0000 after Trump’s presidential inauguration, that’s up to $8 million dollars coming in from new members per year. And that doesn’t include taxes or the $14,000 charge for each member’s annual dues.
Trump and his closest advisers have repeatedly denied there’s anything improper about Trump’s members-only club in Palm Beach. They say it doesn’t amount to paying for access to President Trump because the club is social, not political. And they argue the powerful people who pay for membership have other avenues of communicating with the president.
That’s an argument? I fail to see it.
“He has not and will not be discussing policy with club members,” White House spokesperson Holly Hicks said in a statement provided to the New York Times.
But reporting from the Times and from Politico suggests otherwise.
Real estate executive Bruce Toll told the New York Times that he does occasionally discuss national policy issues — specifically, Trump’s plans to increase spending on infrastructure projects — when he sees Trump at Mar-a-Lago. According to Toll, Trump sometimes receives advice from other club members about what he should do policy-wise.
Developer Richard LeFrak, a close friend of Trump’s, recounted a discussion at Mar-a-Lago last weekend during which Trump asked him for help with the proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico. Trump was unhappy with the projected cost of the wall, wanted to come up with a way to build it more cheaply, and suggested that the head of the Department of Homeland Security would give LeFrak a call to talk about it.
And according to an audio tape obtained by Politico from one of Trump’s New Jersey clubs that was also published on Saturday, Trump has asked his club members for their guidance selecting his cabinet appointees.
“We were just talking about who we [are] going to pick for the FCC, who [are] we going to pick for this, who we gonna accept — boy, can you give me some recommendations?” Trump said to a member, according to the tape.
[…]
This weekend, Trump is planning to use Mar-a-Lago to meet with potential candidates he’s considering to fill the National Security Adviser position recently vacated by Michael Flynn.
Of course, it’s not unusual for world leaders to surround themselves with rich and powerful people. But it is unique to be able to pay $200,000 for entry into a private club where multiple sources close to the president have confirmed he’s at his most relaxed and ready to mingle.
Applications to Mar-a-Lago have surged since Trump won the presidency.
Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have demanded more information about who holds a membership at Mar-a-Lago and how closely they have been vetted. The urgency increased after last weekend, when Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe discussed a potential North Korea crisis in full view of the diners and waiters at his club.
Trump has spent the past three weekends at Mar-a-Lago even though he promised during the campaign that he would “rarely leave the White House.”
The system of government in the States has always been susceptible to corruption, it’s not the most well thought out system. I would say that no sitting president has ever been as open to corruption, and so willing to embrace it in full view of the public at large as the Tiny Tyrant. Donny isn’t capable of governing, he isn’t even capable of running a proper business, and hates being in the white house, acting as president. No, he only feels capable when he’s immersed in the foul cronyism of the monied, who he can slither over to for ‘advice’ on how to president, as he is utterly bankrupt when it comes to the little things, like intelligence, planning, and knowledge.
Via Think Progress.
From a Native American’s perspective, Trump is acting more like the Founding Fathers than Hitler.
Donald J. Trump has been called a lot of things. A bigot. A misogynist. A racist.
And I agree with these descriptions of the new president. He’s earned those titles, especially given all he has spewed over the decades about women and racial minorities, and just about anyone he disagrees with, or who disagree with him.
But Mr. Trump is also unoriginal.
Many of the controversial policies and plans he’s setting into motion have already been executed in this country.
Think about it.
Mr. Trump has vowed to evict millions of undocumented individuals. Brown folks, mostly.
But, of course, this wouldn’t be the first time a sitting U.S. president would forcibly and eagerly evict the indigenous peoples of this continent from their homes.
One of the first of such evictions in this country’s shady history occurred in the 19th century, back in 1830, when president Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which coercively extirpated thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands.
The brutal act prompted the “Trail of Tears,” a vicious campaign that resulted in a forced westward march of men, women, and children through ice, snow, and freezing temperatures. More than four thousand Native Americans died during that rotten trudge.
“But Mexicans aren’t Indians,” a white man recently said to me at an eatery on the north side of Denver, Colorado, during an impromptu discussion on Trump’s unoriginality.
President Donald Trump, living alone inside the White House, often hungers for friendly interaction as he adjusts to the difficult work of governance. At his clubs, he finds what’s missing.
That showed last November at a cocktail and dinner reception celebrating longtime members of his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club. Deep into the process of meeting potential Cabinet nominees, the president-elect invited partygoers to stop by the next day to join the excitement.
“We’re doing a lot of interviews tomorrow — generals, dictators, we have everything,” Trump told the crowd, according to an audio tape of his closed-press remarks obtained by POLITICO from a source in the room. “You may wanna come around. It’ll be fun. We’re really working tomorrow. We have meetings every 15, 20 minutes with different people that will form our government.”
For Trump, the “Winter White House” of Mar-a-Lago offers him more than a warm and gilded setting outside of Washington, D.C. — it puts the isolated president back in the mix with his club family, where friends said he feels most like himself.
“So, this is my real group,” Trump said at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, on November 18, according to the audio tape. “These are the people that came here in the beginning, when nobody knew what this monster was gonna turn out to be, right?”
He added: “I see all of you. I recognize, like 100 percent of you, just about.”
[…]
Turning to a longtime club member that night, he said: “We were just talking about who we [are] going to pick for the FCC, who [are] we going to pick for this, who we gonna accept — boy, can you give me some recommendations?”
The supportive crowd ate it up as the relaxed Trump, in his element, gave them a close-up view of how he was setting up the government. “You are the special people,” he told the crowd of about 100 members, who mingled around a sushi station served by a waiter wearing a camouflage “Make America Great Again” cap.
Politico has the full story on this, and it should upset the hell outta people. It upsets me, and it’s fucking infuriating. The only thing that matters to Trump is being the center of attention, and that attention is best when people are paying obscene amounts of money to be one of the Tiny Tyrant’s “friends.” The special people – filthy rich lickspittles. Obviously, the rest of us don’t matter in the flaky crust of Trump’s manufactured reality.
Via Simon Moya-Smith.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers assist a child from a family that claimed to be from Sudan as they walk across the U.S.-Canada border into Hemmingford, Canada, from Champlain in New York. REUTERS/Christinne Muschi.
Here’s a contrast and compare: Canadian cops who smile and assist people seeking refuge, and ugly American border cops who want to catch those seeking refuge, so they can lock them up and deport them. This one’s a no brainer, seriously. There’s a family who will now receive help, settle in, and become productive Canadian citizens. Here’s the thing – this family was living in Delaware for two years, being productive citizens in the U.S., but they weren’t legal, and given the current climate, had no hope of becoming legal. So, it’s one big fucking loss for the country with no compassion, and a net win for the country with it.
America is going full tilt manic ugly these days, and warm & fuzzies ain’t easy to come by. My thanks to Canadians for this one.
Think Progress is also covering this story, in-depth. I don’t like the descent into full court ugly here in uStates, but I am grateful people seeking refuge have a place to go where they are welcomed and taken care of by decent peoples.
Twitter.
So many Trump supporters think he’s a good businessman, and that’s why they retain a great deal of faith in him, but Trump’s no businessman, never has been. He started out with not a silver spoon, but a whole set. He’s dismissed his trust fund, and the “little” loan of a million bucks from daddy. For reasons beyond my understanding, supporters don’t seem disturbed in the slightest about any of that, or the numerous failed “businesses”, the open frauds, or the lawsuits. This myth of the “good businessman” persists. Trump sucks at business, and he’s not worth what he claims, either, one of the reasons he doesn’t want those tax returns seen by anyone. I’m sure that’s not the only reason.
Bert Spector has an excellent article up at The Conversation, explaining how Trump does not have business chops, in detail. There’s a big difference between being the CEO of a company, answerable not only to a board, but to shareholders as well. Trump has never done that. He has an LLC, which basically allows him to run a family business, which is not answerable to anyone, so there’s no need to do things in the proper manner, at least not until you get caught. When it comes to Trump, he’s been caught, numerous times, and eventually leaks money out in a settlement, then goes right back to scamming again. The article is in-depth, so just a bit here.
Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made much of his business experience, claiming he’s been “creating jobs and rebuilding neighborhoods my entire adult life.”
The fact that he was from the business world rather than a career politician was something that appealed to many of his supporters.
It’s easy to understand the appeal of a president as CEO. The U.S. president is indisputably the chief executive of a massive, complex, global structure known as the federal government. And if the performance of our national economy is vital to the well-being of us all, why not believe that Trump’s experience running a large company equips him to effectively manage a nation?
Instead of a “fine-tuned machine,” however, the opening weeks of the Trump administration have revealed a White House that’s chaotic, disorganized and anything but efficient. Examples include rushed and poorly constructed executive orders, a dysfunctional national security team and unclear and even contradictory messages emanating from multiple administrative spokespeople, which frequently clash with the tweets of the president himself.
Senator John McCain succinctly summed up the growing sentiment even some Republicans are feeling: “Nobody knows who’s in charge.”
So why the seeming contradiction between his businessman credentials and chaotic governing style?
Well for one thing, Trump wasn’t a genuine CEO. That is, he didn’t run a major public corporation with shareholders and a board of directors that could hold him to account. Instead, he was the head of a family-owned, private web of enterprises. Regardless of the title he gave himself, the position arguably ill-equipped him for the demands of the presidency.
If, like me, your understanding of just how businesses work isn’t all that, go have a read, and learn why the whole “I’m a businessman!” rhetoric from Trump is nothing more than another lie.
Screen Grab.
Yet more constituents, frustrated by the republican response of running away in the face of questions, and people wanting actual answers, have come up with another excellent trolling effort. The target this time is Marco Rubio, who like his compatriots, is hiding in fear of having to give a straight answer.
“Missing – U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (FL-R),” the flier reads, with a picture of the Republican senator. The signs add that Rubio “refuses to take meeting with his constituents” regarding his votes in favor of Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
“Side note, he accepted $100,000 from DeVos family, which might have swayed his vote.”
The fliers also charge Rubio with not responding “to hundred of emails, phone calls and voicemails” and claim he has not been seen in his office for weeks.
Rubio engaged Tillerson in a contentious back-and-forth during the Secretary of State’s confirmation hearing, at one point asking Tillerson if he would label Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.”
Despite originally sparring with Tillerson, Rubio confirmed the former Exxon CEO, Rubio voted for Tillerson, prompting a Greenpeace activist to protest the Florida senator by holding a spine prop behind him during a press gaggle.
Rubio also voted to confirm DeVos, despite a massive public campaign to sway the senator’s vote.
Naturally, there was an outraged denial from Rubio’s spokesperson:
“Anyone who claims they can’t get in touch with Senator Rubio’s office is being dishonest,” the spokesperson said. “Our Tampa office only has two employees and serves multiple counties, yet they have met with dozens of these liberal activists.”
“This is nothing more than a strategy outlined in an online activist manual to carry out ‘mass office calling,’” the spokesperson continued. “In the manual, activists are instructed that ‘you and your group should all agree to call in on one specific issue that day.’ They are further instructed that ‘the next day or week, pick another issue, and call again on that.’ Their goal is to flood offices with calls and emails and then go to the press and claim they aren’t getting a response.”
Right. That’s why rethugs are canceling town halls left and right. This is a way to apply pressure, and rightfully so, because people want answers. Full story here.
Demonstrators block an escalator at the international terminal as protests against President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries continue at San Francisco International Airport, Sunday, Jan. 29, 2017. (AP Photo/Olga Rodriguez).
In a column for the Guardian on Monday, American writer Francine Prose called for a “nonviolent national general strike” to demonstrate “how many of us there are, how strong and committed we are, how much we can accomplish.”
She wrote: “Let’s designate a day on which no one (that is, anyone who can do so without being fired) goes to work, a day when no one shops or spends money, a day on which we truly make our economic and political power felt.”
Calls to do just that have been circulating online recently, with activists setting Feb. 17 — the Friday before President’s Day — as the day for a #nationalstrike against the presidency of Donald Trump.
No one working, no one buying anything, for one day. I realize not everyone will be able to blithely ignore their job for one day, but if you can get away with it, please, please, do. Affinity will be closed for the strike on Friday, February 17th, and I will post a reminder prior to the day. Pretty sure most people can manage to forgo shopping for one day. Be ungovernable.
The full, in-depth story is at News.Mic.
Photograph: Isopix/REX.
George Soros has an interesting article up at The Guardian, about Russia and the EU. There are some very good points made, and it’s difficult to pay attention to everything happening on the world stage right now, which is a gift to unscrupulous leaders.
…Putin is a gifted tactician, but not a strategic thinker. There is no reason to believe he intervened in Syria in order to aggravate the European refugee crisis. Indeed, his intervention was a strategic blunder because it embroiled him in a conflict with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, which has hurt the interests of both.
But once Putin saw the opportunity to hasten the EU’s disintegration, he seized it. He has obfuscated his actions by talking of cooperating against a common enemy, Isis. He has followed a similar approach in Ukraine, signing the Minsk agreement but failing to carry out its provisions.
It is hard to understand why US and EU leaders take Putin at his word rather than judging him by his behaviour. The only explanation I can find is that democratic politicians seek to reassure their publics by painting a more favourable picture than reality justifies. The fact is that Putin’s Russia and the EU are engaged in a race against time: the question is which one will collapse first.
The Putin regime faces bankruptcy in 2017, when a large part of its foreign debt matures, and political turmoil may erupt sooner than that. The president’s popularity, which remains high, rests on a social compact requiring the government to deliver financial stability and a slowly but steadily rising standard of living. Western sanctions, coupled with the sharp decline in the price of oil, will force the regime to fail on both counts.
Unless something happens to prevent it, the current regime in the U.S. will help Russia out financially, by most likely lifting sanctions and going through with that 500 billion dollar oil deal in the Antarctic. If that does take place, it won’t be good, certainly no better than where things stand right now.
The full article is at The Guardian.
Belzebuth ou Belzebub ou Beelzebuth, J.A.S. Collin de Plancy. Dictionnaire Infernal. Paris : E. Plon, 1863.
Prince of demons, the first in power and crimes after Satan. Cornell University Library.
Rick Wiles has come completely unglued, not that he had far to go in that regard. He’s now floating in Alex Jones territory, doing all he can to keep the pizza place conspiracy alive, although I don’t know why. I’ve lived through two major Satanic Panics, where nationwide devil worship was posited, a massive conspiracy of murder, rape, and sacrifices, oh my! None of this shit actually happened, but plenty of people were happy to believe it, at the behest of those who found it a good way to make money. Books were written, it was on news shows, the whole thing. I guess I get to live through a third one, if these idiotic christian fanatics get their way. I’ll just go with the assumption that this latest is yet another way for these professional liars to fill their coffers. Mr. Wiles and his cohorts should remember that in their chosen mythology, there’s the demon Mammon.
Mammon, J.A.S. Collin de Plancy. Dictionnaire Infernal. Paris : E. Plon, 1863.
Wiles also can’t shut up about Ms. Clinton:
Claiming that a tweet from Clinton mocking the conspiracy theory was itself proof that the conspiracy is real, Wiles declared that Christians have no idea how many of their elected leaders are part of a “demonic system” that kidnaps children “to be raped, molested and then murdered.”
Our elected leaders, you say. Okay, why not have a close look at our elected leaders? We can start with the current administration. Plenty of material there without all the demonic pizza.
“Hillary Clinton is telling up front what this is all about,” he said. “She’s bragging it’s about Pizzagate. She’s telling them, ‘We took you down, you dared talk about our filthy child molestation and we took you down.’ That’s what she’s saying.” (Flynn’s son has avidly promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, causing him to lose his job in the administration’s transition team, and Flynn himself has also embraced many wildconspiracytheories, including one linking Clinton to “sex crimes [with] children.”)
I’m pretty sure what Ms. Clinton said amounted to “Oh, bullshit!”
Wiles asserted that “devil-worshiping, Luciferian, demon-possessed maniacs” have formed a “criminal cabal [that is] running this nation and much of the world” that allows them to engage in “child trafficking, child molestation, child rape, [and] child murder.”
The Catholic Church is rife with people who molest and rape children. Child trafficking, child molestation, child rape, and child murder is most often done by people who believe in a god, often the christian god. The person who started raping me when I was a child characterized themselves as a good christian. Lots of “good christians” tied up in those activities. Christians are major consumers of porn. I think you should look to your own houses, they are taking on the stink of the Augean Stables.
When the truth is finally revealed, Wiles warned, “there will be mass vomiting in the society when the people find out what these demon-possessed rulers have been doing for decades with children.”
Oh, there’s plenty of vomiting already taking place over the way theists deal with children. Religion allows for some of the very worst child abuse, such as refusing to provide your child with medical care. Or deciding they are demon possessed, and using that as an excuse to beat the shit out of them. Or denying them an education. Or finding some way to justify sexually abusing them. Or filling their heads with visions of eternal anguish and torment at the hands of a psychopathic god.
“Many of the key officials, elected and appointed, and in corporate board rooms and in Hollywood and in New York City, they are part of a global child molestation ring,” said Wiles, who insisted that Clinton is now “relishing in the fact that they brought down General Flynn because he knows what they are and what they’re doing.”
So Hollywood and New York City are the latter day Sodom and Gomorrah? Trump’s from New York, perhaps you ought to cool it with the east coast blame, eh? The Tiny Tyrant might not like that. The only thing that brought down General Flynn was General Flynn. Like everyone else in the current administration, he was in over his head, lacked the requisite experience, and embodied the Peter Principle.
Via RWW.
Vice President Mike Pence speaking at the Heritage Foundation’s President’s Club Meeting in December. CREDIT: AP Photo/Cliff Owen.
It’s no secret that the constant rethug push for “religious freedom” is nothing more than ugly bigotry, and a way of oppressing already marginalized peoples. They are finally coming out and admitting as much.
The Heritage Foundation has been called “a driving force” behind the Trump White House due to its many close ties with the administration. This week, Heritage issued a new report drawing a strict line in opposition to any kind of nondiscrimination protection for LGBT people, citing “religious freedom” as such a vital right that any LGBT law would be a burden, regardless of whether it offered even the broadest of religious exemptions.
Heritage’s new report, “How to Think About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policies and Religious Freedom,” takes the position that laws that protect LGBT people from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations would be “unjustified.” To arrive at this conclusion, author Ryan T. Anderson undermines the legitimacy of LGBT identities and dismisses the reality of discrimination that LGBT people experience, shrugging off the consequences of that discrimination.
Anderson’s approach is to simply redefine terms in a way that suits Heritage’s anti-LGBT agenda. Wedding vendors that have been penalized for not serving same-sex couples, for example, weren’t “discriminating” against people because of their sexual orientation, but they simply refused service “because they judged in conscience that they could not endorse certain morally relevant conduct.” This is an argument that courts have roundly rejected, because only gay and bi people would enter a same-sex marriage, so it’s de facto discrimination based on sexual orientation, but the report simply denies that it’s “discrimination” or even “mistreatment” at all.
The Heritage Report also insists that sexual orientation and gender identity are not comparable to traits like race and sex because they are “subjective identities,” and thus not “verifiable.” They can only be defined, the report claims, based on “actions,” such as same-sex weddings or gender confirmation surgeries — not identities that people experience at every moment of their lives. This is nothing short of erasure of the LGBT human experience, diminishing it only to “actions” that religious conservatives can reject as “immoral.” It is in no way an accurate representation of how LGBT people experience their identities — and certainly runs contrary to everything psychology has learned about sexual orientation and gender identity.
Crucial to the report’s thesis is to downplay the extent that LGBT people even experience discrimination. This contradicts numerous studies that have shown rates of discrimination that cannot be characterized by mere anecdotes. The recent massive U.S. Trans Survey, for example, found that nearly 1 in 5 transgender people have lost a job just for being transgender. And statistics like those do not even count the invisible discrimination that takes place; studies like résumé tests are showing that many LGBT people are discriminated against without even knowing it.
[…]
Heritage has drawn a new line in the sand by saying that its opposition to LGBT protections is uncompromising and that it is not even open to considering exemptions. It’s nothing short of an admission to what LGBT advocates have been arguing all along: that conservatives are simply using “religious freedom” as a pretext for allowing discrimination against LGBT people.
[…]
Republicans are expected to re-introduce the “First Amendment Defense Act” any day now, which will create a special license to discriminate solely for those who oppose LGBT equality. And President Trump has promised to sign it.
Think Progress has the full story.
