[AMV] Amerikaanse politiek #332 Presidentiële tweets!

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Op vrijdag 30 juni 2017 21:20 schreef Bernhard.von.Galen het volgende:

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Behalve als Trump daarmee de winst heeft gekregen. Dan is het slim toch?

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 00:48 schreef Whiskers2009 het volgende:
Zo, zo, ambities?
https://mobile.twitter.co(...)s/880919871353217024

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 01:06 schreef Monolith het volgende:
Een overzichtje van hoe ver de publieke pensioenen in elke staat onder water staan:
https://www.bloomberg.com(...)ok&utm_medium=social

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 00:48 schreef Whiskers2009 het volgende:
Zo, zo, ambities?
https://mobile.twitter.co(...)s/880919871353217024

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President Trump just used a White House meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in to complain about the US–South Korean trade deficit, a perennial Trump talking point. The problem is that what he said isn’t true.

Here’s what Trump said while sitting across the table from Moon, who was elected in May after a scandal led to the arrest of his predecessor:

The United States has trade deficits with many, many countries, and we cannot allow that to continue ... with South Korea right now, but we cannot allow that to continue. This is really a statement that I make about all trade: For many, many years the United States has suffered through massive trade deficits; that’s why we have $20 trillion in debt.

The president’s distaste for trade deficits with any country is not news, but that last sentence is striking — Trump is claiming that trade deficits are at the root of the national debt.

That is a creative explanation — and an incorrect one.

Let’s step back and clarify some terms. The US trade deficit refers to the fact that the US imports more from the world than it exports. The national debt is the result of the fact that the US government spends more revenue than it collects. There’s no direct relationship between the two.

Running a trade surplus — that is, exporting more to the rest of the world than you import from it — is no defense against incurring debt, which has to do with how much the government spends compared with how much it takes in from taxes.

“It would be easy to imagine a country with a trade surplus that ran large budget deficits — that's clearly happened in the past,” Josh Bivens, the director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, told me. “My guess that right now Germany has a small budget deficit even though they're running big trade surpluses.”

The simplest way to reduce the debt has nothing to do with trade. It would instead involve simply ending the mismatch between how much money the government raises and how much it spends.

The problem is that major events in recent history have made that difficult, and could do so in the future as well.

“A big chunk of the national debt was incurred because of the economic crisis,” Bivens explains. “As the economy just cratered in 2008, 2009, and 2010, tax collection just cratered along with it, and [then with spending on] automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance, food stamps, and some legislation like the Recovery Act, there was a large increase in the national debt over those years.”

The accumulation of debt isn’t just something that happens to the economy — it’s also the product of policy decisions. Prior to the Great Recession, US debt skyrocketed because President George W. Bush implemented huge tax cuts for the rich while spending trillions of dollars on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

It’s not unreasonable for Trump to want to try to shrink the US’s trade deficit, but that won’t bring down the national debt. One actual way to reduce the debt would be to close tax loopholes on income for corporations and the super wealthy. But right now he and his party are looking to do just the opposite — they want more cuts for the rich through both health care legislation and comprehensive tax reform.

The fact that Trump made a big stumble when describing how policy works is not a surprise. But on the issue of trade, the one policy domain where he’s consistently engaged and seems to have some sincere interest, one might expect him to show some degree of fluency in the issue. One would be wrong.

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The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians

https://lawfareblog.com/time-i-got-recruited-collude-russians

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 09:01 schreef Montov het volgende:
Naar aanleiding van het verhaal in de WSJ over de connecties van Flynn en Russische hackers, een van de tussenpersonen doet zijn verhaal:

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 08:44 schreef Refragmental het volgende:

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Wat gek. Ik meen me toch echt te herinneren dat ik me moest identificeren met een idkaart of paspoort bij het uitbrengen van mijn stem.

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 09:37 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Dat is in principe net wat anders. Het gaat bij voter-id echt om een losstaande manier van identificeren. Zaken als een rijbewijs of een door de staat afgegeven id-kaart kun je doorgaans ook gebruiken in staten waar identificatie verplicht is. Bijvoorbeeld:

[ afbeelding ]

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 09:25 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

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Flynn zit er wel echt diep in, hoor.

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 09:46 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Het lijkt tot aan de top van de Trump campagne te gaan.

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 09:44 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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Voter ID wetgeving is wel iets breder. Feitelijk betreft het alle wetgeving die enige vorm van officiële identificatie vereist voor registratie of het stemmen zelf.

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 09:55 schreef Elzies het volgende:

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Zitten we maanden qua nul harde bewijsvoering nog steeds in die Russische hoax?

Die gekke anti-Trumpies ook. Blijf lachen om die op de mens gelijkende wezentjes. En liegen dat ze kunnen!

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 10:20 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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We zien het wel. Bewijs hoef je pas na het onderzoek te leveren. En de onderzoeken lopen nog. Tot nu toe is het heerlijk amusement. Een president die geen wet door het congres kan jassen, die maar wat doet. Zich toe laat juichen door miljoenen bots op Twitter. Zijn stafleden slaan elkaar de hersens in. Trump die zegt te gaan improviseren in zijn gesprek met Poetin komende week. Idiote rants over ontbijttelevisie. Zijn mensen die elke blunder moeten goedpraten. Hij lijkt op een op hol geslagen slingeraap die met een brandende fakkel aan zijn staart door het WH banjert. En de GOP er maar achteraan rennen met emmertjes water.

Ik ben de Trumpanzees wel dankbaar voor deze kermis.

Nou ja, zolang hij geen derde wereldoorlog start. Dat zou minder zijn.

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 10:31 schreef Elzies het volgende:

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Ik had de reactie al een beetje aangepast. Tevergeefs zo zie ik.

Er is buiten veel gespeculeer geen hard bewijs. We weten allemaal dat dit zogenaamde bewijs nooit boven tafel zal komen. Dit is een farce, een hoax met als enige doel een zittende en gekozen president te beschadigen. Ik benoem het liever zoals het is.

Ik zie overigens geen Derde Wereldoorlog uitbreken onder Trump. Die kans was onder Clinton vele malen groter geweest.

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 10:38 schreef Vis1980 het volgende:

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Tja, die Elzies heeft het opnieuw bij het juiste eind. Ik begin ook steeds meer te houden van Donald Trump.

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 10:39 schreef Elzies het volgende:

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 09:01 schreef Montov het volgende:
Naar aanleiding van het verhaal in de WSJ over de connecties van Flynn en Russische hackers, een van de tussenpersonen doet zijn verhaal:

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GOP Activist Who Sought Clinton Emails Cited Trump Campaign Officials

WASHINGTON—A longtime Republican activist who led an operation hoping to obtain Hillary Clinton emails from hackers listed senior members of the Trump campaign, including some who now serve as top aides in the White House, in a recruitment document for his effort.

The activist, Peter W. Smith, named the officials in a section of the document marked “Trump Campaign.” The document was dated Sept. 7, 2016. That was around the time Mr. Smith said he started his search for 33,000 emails Mrs. Clinton deleted from the private server she used for official business while secretary of state. She said the deleted emails concerned personal matters. She turned over tens of thousands of other emails to the State Department.

As reported Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Smith and people he recruited to his effort theorized the deleted emails might have been stolen by hackers and might contain matters that were politically damaging. He and his associates said they were in touch with several groups of hackers, including two from Russia they suspected were tied to the Moscow government, in a bid to find any stolen emails and potentially hurt Mrs. Clinton’s prospects.

Mr. Smith’s purpose in listing the officials isn’t clear. There is no indication in the document that he sought or received any coordination from the campaign officials or the campaign in general.

Mr. Smith died in mid-May at age 81, about 10 days after he spoke to the Journal. He said he operated independently of the Trump campaign.

Officials identified in the document include Steve Bannon, now chief strategist for President Donald Trump; Kellyanne Conway, former campaign manager and now White House counselor; Sam Clovis, a policy adviser to the Trump campaign and now a senior adviser at the Agriculture Department; and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who was a campaign adviser and briefly was national security adviser in the Trump administration.

Mr. Bannon said he never met with Mr. Smith or anyone affiliated with a limited-liability company, KLS Research LLC, that the document said had been established for its mission. “Never heard of KLS Research or Peter Smith,” Mr. Bannon said.

Ms. Conway said she knew Mr. Smith from Republican politics but hadn’t spoken to him in years. “I never met with him” during the campaign, Ms. Conway said. “There were no calls, no meetings, no nothing.”

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did the Agriculture Department, Mr. Clovis’s employer.

Mr. Flynn, his consulting firm Flynn Intel Group and his son Michael G. Flynn, who was chief of staff at Flynn Intel, were cited more extensively as Mr. Smith sought to recruit researchers, as well as in documents related to the effort that have been described to the Journal. Neither Mr. Flynn nor his son responded to requests for comment.

The names of the other campaign officials haven’t surfaced in connection with Mr. Smith’s work except in the document, which the Journal reviewed on Friday.

The document section that lists campaign officials is followed by the words, “in coordination to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure.”—a possible reference to campaign strictures imposed by campaign finance and disclosure laws.

The document was included in a package of opposition research Mr. Smith shared through an encrypted email with Matt Tait, a cybersecurity expert who once worked for British intelligence. Mr. Tait said he was approached last summer by Mr. Smith, who wanted him to help verify whether emails offered to the group by hackers came from Mrs. Clinton’s private serve.

After discussing his project by phone and in emails Mr. Smith gave him a document called the “KLS research packet,” which contained articles Mr. Smith planned to use for opposition research, Mr. Tait said. The packet cover sheet is the document that listed the Trump campaign officials. Mr. Smith’s name and phone number are typed at the bottom of it.

Mr. Smith asked Mr. Tait to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Mr. Tait said he declined and ceased communications with Mr. Smith, never reviewing any purported Clinton emails.

The document Mr. Smith presented to Mr. Tait, which he kept, is titled, “A Demonstrative Pedagogical Summary to be Developed and Released Prior to November 8, 2016,” which was Election Day.

It cites as the “preferred vehicle” for the effort a limited-liability company established in Delaware. Mr. Smith established KLS Research as that vehicle on Sept. 2, according to incorporation documents.

The House Intelligence Committee and its counterpart in the Senate are investigating Russian election meddling and whether there was coordination with the Trump campaign. So is Special Counsel Robert Mueller. President Trump has denied any collusion. The Russian government has denied it tried to interfere.

U.S. investigators have examined reports from intelligence agencies that tell of Russian hackers discussing how to get emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence. It isn’t clear who the intermediary might have been or whether Mr. Smith’s operation was the one allegedly under discussion by the Russian hackers.

Mr. Smith said in the May interview he had assembled a group of technology experts, lawyers and a Russian-speaking investigator based in Europe to acquire emails his group theorized might have been stolen from Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

He said that after vetting batches of emails offered to him by hacker groups last fall, he couldn’t be sure enough of their authenticity to leak them himself and told the hackers to give them to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks has never published such emails or claimed to have them. In a statement to the Journal, it said, “WikiLeaks has never revealed a source and never will.”

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 10:31 schreef Elzies het volgende:

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We weten allemaal dat dit zogenaamde bewijs nooit boven tafel zal komen.

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 10:40 schreef Vis1980 het volgende:

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Nee Elzies, je valt weer door de mand.

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Op zaterdag 1 juli 2017 10:40 schreef Vis1980 het volgende:

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Nee Elzies, je valt weer door de mand.