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Op donderdag 3 mei 2018 23:53 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:

[..]

Misschien kunnen we het nog een keertje over Seth Rich hebben.

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After a week of Russian propaganda, I was questioning everything (PBS)

One day this past fall on my morning commute from D.C. to Virginia, I tuned the radio to 105.5 FM, expecting to hear my usual bluegrass. But instead of fiddles and guitar, I heard a voice in Russian-accented English announce: “This is Radio Sputnik.”

I had no idea then what Radio Sputnik was. What came to mind was Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, which triggered the Space Race between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. The beach-ball sized satellite, once launched, didn’t do much besides orbit the Earth beeping, but it played on American fears and anxieties about being technologically behind, serving as powerful Soviet propaganda.

Enter Radio Sputnik. Like its sister outlet RT, Sputnik is a Russian government-funded media outlet, widely seen by Russia experts as a vehicle to disseminate disinformation for the Kremlin, and, like its space-dwelling namesake, to make the West look bad. While RT is television, Sputnik lives on the radio, a wire service and website. Both RT and Sputnik are under the banner of the news agency “Rossiya Segodnya,” which means “Russia Today,” and which was created in December 2013 by presidential decree by Vladimir Putin.

Both outlets, according to Ben Nimmo, an information defense fellow with the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, put out propaganda intended to polarize and confuse, and “attack the facts rather than report them.”

For a recent example, see Sputnik’s coverage since the April 7 chemical attack in Douma, Syria. While Western powers say Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government forces were behind the attack, Sputnik has pushed a narrative that the attack was faked, orchestrated by the humanitarian search-and-rescue group the White Helmets. According to Sputnik, the White Helmets, which was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, is a Western-funded construct, and had turned an ordinary instance of dust and smoke inhalation into a chemical attack. Sputnik’s main source for this coverage was a 9/11 truther.

(Snopes, the fact-checking site, said that images being used to discredit the White Helmets are stills from a movie set. According to the Washington Post, statements by medics saying that children in Douma suffered from asthma attacks instead of a chemical attack may have been coerced.)

“The whole point is to make you doubt, to induce paralysis,” Nimmo said. When compared to the better-known RT, he said, Sputnik is “much more regressive and much more pernicious.”

SPOILER

Today, Sputnik operates in 34 countries in more than 30 languages, including, as of this past summer, on an FM station (and now an AM) in Washington, D.C. When Sputnik launched stateside, the investigations into Russia’s supposed interference in the U.S. election were accelerating, and the media outlet was greeted with critical coverage. The Washington Post editorial board accused Russia of “weaponizing information.”

By fall, the FBI was investigating claims from Sputnik’s former White House reporter, Andrew Feinberg, that he was fired for not asking the White House questions about a Fox News story that said Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich leaked information to Wikileaks before he was killed. The story was roundly debunked. (The FBI declined to comment to the NewsHour on Sputnik, and Sputnik said Feinberg was fired for performance-related issues.) In February, Sputnik’s U.S. provider was forced to register as a foreign agent with the U.S. Department of Justice.

And yet, through all the criticism, Sputnik has quietly continued to put out the same information — or disinformation — as it had before. Because its provider is now a foreign agent, Sputnik is now required to disclose that it is funded by the Russian government. But while it does this on air, I never saw such a disclosure online. And so Sputnik stories like the one alleging that the chemical attack in Syria was a fake can easily spread, until they appear on the lips of a congressional candidate, are published on mainstream sites like Britain’s The Independent, and get covered by major outlets, including CBS and Newsweek.

Sputnik, for its part, claims that it is “telling the untold” stories the Western and mainstream media ignores.

To better understand the organization, I put myself on a weeklong Radio Sputnik-only diet. I also spent a day in its newsroom, speaking with employees, including one who was fired soon after he began speaking with me. What I found was a stranger picture than I anticipated, one in which I began to understand how persuasive disinformation could be.

Inside Radio Sputnik
Over the last month, questioning the chemical attack in Douma dominated the news at Sputnik. But when I visited the Sputnik offices, in early April, the story in question was the poisoning of the Skripals, an ex-Russian spy and his daughter who had been exposed to a nerve agent, which the Western world said was the work of the Kremlin.

Before my visit, I called Andrew Feinberg, the fired Sputnik White House reporter, to ask about some of the claims he’d made in a Politico story about his former employer. In the piece, he’d said his editor asked him to question the White House about “alternate versions” to who was behind the sarin gas attack of April 2017. He also said he was asked in his hiring interview what he would do if asked to write something untrue. (That editor later told me the first allegation was true, the second false.) When I told Feinberg, who is now working as a reporter for a trade publication, that I was going to visit Sputnik, he laughed bitterly and asked: “Do you have a flask?”

Once inside Sputnik’s K Street studio, I sat in on the taping of the main morning show, “Fault Lines,” which is something like a mix of the old TV series “Crossfire” and the conspiracy theory site Infowars. The show is hosted by Lee Stranahan, the former Breitbart reporter who the New York Times said had upended an Idaho town with his exaggerated reporting on a juvenile sex crime, and Garland Nixon, a self-professed Bernie Sanders supporter, former cop and board member of the ACLU. (Stranahan told me he stands by his Idaho reporting.) They pride themselves on coming from two different sides of the aisle, though over a month of listening to them, I rarely heard them disagree.

After the show ended, Nixon and Stranahan sidebarred with each other about the Skripals: how the father and daughter had recently woken up after the attack, how that wasn’t possible after a nerve agent poisoning, and how that must mean the West was lying about what really happened. Questioning the West’s Skripal narrative had been the focus of an earlier part of their show that morning, before they put on actor Danny Glover to talk about his activism, and a Howard University professor and political scientist to talk about demonstrations over housing issues at the university.

It is this mix of legitimate news — often including topics undercovered by the mainstream media — along with conspiracy theories and disinformation that makes propaganda so effective, said Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist who spent years working for Russian channels and specializes in studying Russian propaganda. He wrote a book about the experience called “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” and is today a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics. “It’s about embedding yourself as much as possible in social media communities,” Pomerantsev said. “And then it can spread the story it wants to spread, whether it’s about Ukraine or the White Helmets.”

Or about the Skripals. Online, Sputnik raised a number of different theories about how the poisoning “actually happened.” Some of these theories were also raised to me while in the newsroom, especially the idea that if the Skripals really had been exposed to a nerve agent, they never would have woken up. This was argued to me so persuasively that I found myself Googling it in the bathroom.

While at Sputnik’s offices, I also sat down with Mindia Gavasheli, a Russian national who runs Sputnik’s D.C. newsroom. He told me he began his career as a TV correspondent at age 18, before RT hired him as a producer. Later, he was tapped to oversee Sputnik’s U.S. project.

When asked about claims of propaganda, Gavasheli defended the media outlet as putting out a necessary, alternate point of view.

“I probably wouldn’t hire someone who is saying the same thing as the mainstream media. Because ‘Russia is a terrible place’ is a mainstream thing,” he said. “I don’t see anything wrong with reflecting the interests … of the Russia side too.”

Gavasheli denied to me that Feinberg was ever told to ask the White House about Seth Rich. He said that in fact he’d banned his newsroom from covering the Seth Rich story, because he realized from the get-go that it seemed fishy. When presented with a conspiratorial Seth Rich story that still lived on Sputnik’s site, Gavasheli said “op-eds” like that piece were written from Moscow, and that his team didn’t write or edit them.

He said the same for an article on Sputnik’s site that pushed a fake story about German chancellor Angela Merkel taking a selfie with a Brussels bomber. The man was actually a Syrian refugee.

Gavasheli and other Sputnik journalists pointed me instead to their work on undercovered issues: examining police violence in the U.S., the idea of single-payer health care, and how issues with the U.S. voting system disproportionately affect poorer areas. They defended story after story that critiqued, mocked, or proffered unproven theories about the West, especially on foreign policy, as more than well-deserved. Russia watchers have a word for this: “whataboutism,” meaning efforts to discredit the West in general instead of refuting individual arguments. Sputnik calls it telling the untold.

‘Between two angry elephants’
When I sat down with Lee Stranahan, the former Breitbart reporter, who calls himself a “political futurist,” he shrugged off the idea that Sputnik was Russian propaganda by employing some whataboutism of his own.

“When you work for Sputnik, you get called a traitor and a Putin puppet … But why does no one bring up the coup we fomented?” he said, referring to Russian allegations that the U.S. fomented a coup in Ukraine.

Stranahan also argued that Russia — and Russian media — is being unfairly vilified by the U.S. He brought up the July 2016 hacking of Democratic National Committee emails, which were released by Wikileaks and claimed by a persona called Guccifer 2.0. U.S. intelligence blamed the leaks on Russia, and the Daily Beast reported that Guccifer was a Russian intelligence officer. But Stranahan said that narrative didn’t add up, and to prove it, showed me what he said were Twitter direct messages between himself and Guccifer.

If Guccifer was Russian, he said, “What you wouldn’t need to do is create a fake persona, do a Twitter page, do a WordPress page, which is infamously prone to hacking.”

“Russia has turned into a fake adversary,” he said. “I’m 100 percent happy to be working here.”
In general, the Sputnik newsroom is full of journalists with politics outside the mainstream. Sputnik has hired journalists of Stranahan’s right-wing, and sometimes conspiratorial, persuasion, as well as a number of journalists on the far left. One of Sputnik’s main shows, “By Any Means Necessary,” is hosted by Eugene Puryear, a former Green party candidate for Washington D.C.’s City Council.

On Sputnik’s newswire side, a female American journalist told me that after working in the Middle East for years, she began to see how reporters from different countries could approach the same story differently, such as the Palestinian conflict. “There are objective facts but what context do you tell those in?” she said. “We provide a different context or background.”

She defended Sputnik, which she joined after moving back to the states. But she said working there had become more difficult as the Russia investigations progressed, and since Sputnik’s U.S. provider had to register as a foreign agent.

“We’re getting squeezed,” she said. “There’s a saying in Persian, ‘Don’t get between two elephants. We’re between two angry elephants.’”

Before I left Sputnik’s offices, another of its wire reporters, John Stanton, who covered the Pentagon, handed me a written note. It was innocuous — the note asked me to pass along a hello to someone at the NewsHour he knew — but after I left he emailed me to say more.

“I’d exercise caution in relying on the credibility of what you hear/read from Sputnik,” he wrote. “Just to give you a sense of the climate here,” he said, he was accused by Sputnik’s director of communications after I left of “passing along information.”

Five days later, Stanton was fired.

“I’m relieved,” he told me over the phone after he was let go. “It was taking years off my life.”

‘Pushing a wet noodle’
When we met in person after his firing, Stanton said he initially took the job at Sputnik because of his interest in Russia and because he needed the paycheck. Before Sputnik, he had worked for years as a freelance journalist, writing for a number of fringe national security websites. He said he only started believing that Sputnik was a propaganda site after about a month of working there.

He stayed at Sputnik for nearly two years, during which time he kept notes on his assignments and observations. He told me he kept these notes as “insider research” for a client he did not want to publicly name. He insisted he did not take the job at Sputnik for that reason.

While there, Stanton said he wrote many legitimate stories about Department of Defense contracts and U.S. troop movements. He also said he got the opportunity to interview senior-level sources at the Pentagon, which he hadn’t gotten to do before. Once the Russia investigations heated up, though, that all dried up, he said.

But Stanton said he increasingly saw evidence of Sputnik’s efforts at disinformation. He showed me emails in which an editor asked him to look into a story, put out by the Syrian foreign ministry, that said the U.S. and UK had supplied “chemical warfare agents” to terrorists in Syria. The chemical warfare agents were actually tear gas, and there was no evidence of how it had made its way there. “They wanted to build that up to more than it ever was,” he said. According to the emails, Stanton pushed back and the editor backed down.

Stanton also said there was stock language added to any story he wrote about Crimea, such as text that said more than 95 percent of Crimean voters supported the move to rejoin Russia in a 2014 referendum. Many countries question the legitimacy of those results. And Stanton said stories that reflected negatively on Putin, or positive LGBTQ stories, were a “no-go,” meaning pitches he sent on those topics were not approved.

Sputnik did not respond to request for comment about these claims, and said it did not comment on personnel matters.

“They mix real with unreal, use dubious sources,” Stanton said. But trying to pin down what he really found problematic, he said, “was like pushing a wet noodle.” What he meant is that proving disinformation can be impossibly slippery.

‘If you can persuade a person, you don’t need to kill him’
The roots of the word “disinformation,” defined as false or misleading information intended to deceive, go back to the Russian word, “dezinformatsiya,” which in the 1920s was the title of an entire department of the precursor of the KGB. The head of that unit, Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, is quoted as having said: “Our friends in Moscow call it ‘dezinformatsiya.’ Our enemies in America call it ‘active measures,’ and I, dear friends, call it ‘my favorite pastime.’”

The Soviet Union’s disinformation strategy relied in part on media manipulation, including via radio, though also on covert operations, even assassinations, according to a CIA history of the time. Some of the country’s most famed disinformation campaigns included planting stories that said Western politicians had supported the Nazis, that the U.S. supported apartheid and that the U.S. had created HIV/AIDS as a bioweapon (more on that later). Some of these fake stories persist today, such as that fluoride was a government plot to control the mind, and that the CIA assassinated JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Both are favorites on the site Infowars.)

For years, the U.S. ignored or did not know how to respond to Soviet disinformation campaigns. By the 1980s, though, the U.S. was using Russia’s brand of disinformation effectively, such as to undercut Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. At the same time, American media outlets willingly put on television people like Vladimir Posner, a silky smooth apologist for the worst of Soviet foreign policy. He showed up again and again on shows like “Nightline” and “The Phil Donahue Show.”

Russia excelled at disinformation during the Cold War, and it has continued to under Putin, who has cracked down on the country’s independent media and harnessed technology to make the Russian perspective available around the world. Dmitry Kiselyov, perhaps Russia’s best-known propagandist, has famously said that: “If you can persuade a person, you don’t need to kill him.” And Vladislav Surkov, a Russian businessman in Putin’s inner circle, is known for having applied his background in avant-garde theater to Russian politics, to create the feeling that no one knows quite what is real, including during the 2014 annexation of Crimea. It has been argued that the popularity of Putin itself is largely a media creation.

According to Pomerantsev, the British journalist who worked for Russian channels, and now studies propaganda at the London School of Economics, Russia’s information warfare strategy today combines learnings from psychological warfare, dirty PR, and brainwashing from cults. TV and radio have long served as two important disinformation mediums. As the efforts of Russian bots during the U.S. presidential campaign demonstrated, the internet has only made all of that easier.

Working at Sputnik
Days after Stanton was fired, and after we met, he published a long document of his observations of working at Sputnik on Cryptome, an online publication that’s been the source of major leaks and controversy (such as in revealing the supposed identity of the CIA analyst who tracked down Osama bin Laden).

“I did so because I wanted a relatively safe place on the [World Wide Web] to store the document in case my home computers get nailed,” Stanton told me in an email of his decision to publish on Cryptome.

The document begins with Stanton’s musings on how governments today can control and exploit free flows of information online, and ends with the admission that he had been performing insider research on his employer since soon after he arrived. He implied that he felt it was his duty. “Even as the United States of America continues to find its way forward,” he wrote, “it remains — and will remain — the greatest country on the planet.”

Initially Sputnik would not answer questions about Stanton’s firing. But then Beverly Hunt, Sputnik’s director of communications, called me to make sure I had seen Stanton’s document on Cryptome. She followed up by sending me a screengrab of the final page, with the line about “insider research” circled — evidence of his betrayal.

How Radio Sputnik made me doubt the truth
As one last attempt to better understand Sputnik, I put myself on a weeklong Sputnik media diet. As best I could, I consumed news only from its website, radio station and social media platforms.

According to Russia watchers like Pomerantsev, Sputnik dominates the news in countries with weaker independent media. In Serbia, for example, Pomerantsev said Sputnik is influential in part because the local news is so low quality, and international media like the BBC doesn’t exist. “So it’s almost seen as your go-to newswire there,” he said. “In our kind of Western markets, Sputnik is pretty trashy. But in other countries, it’s taken seriously.”

And in other countries Sputnik’s coverage has had meaningful impacts on the political process, such as on the German election last September, which Pomerantsev and several other scholars examined for a study for the London School of Economics. The study showed that Sputnik’s coverage during the election leaned heavily toward the right-wing party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), which ultimately did well in the polls.

“Radio Sputnik [Germany] heavily criticized [Angela] Merkel and repeated anti-migration themes throughout the campaign, including a public poll that showed that ‘lands with more migration are more prone to terrorism,’” the study wrote. “The channel also provided a platform for AfD party quotations such as, ‘rape is increasing due to Merkel’s policy.’”

Ben Nimmo, the Atlantic Council information defense fellow, said that kind of coverage fit with the “broad pattern of Kremlin operations [of disinformation]: to polarize people.”

“To have an alleged news network which is fanning the prejudices of the far right and the far left and playing to those two bases and appealing to them by attacking the center — that’s entirely in character,” Nimmo said.

Coverage on Sputnik’s English language site and D.C. radio program seemed intended to polarize, but also, as Nimmo had described, to distract and confuse.

Day 1 of the diet was April 10, the first of two days Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent testifying before Congress about Facebook’s role in sharing user data that may have helped Donald Trump win the presidency. While I saw later that his testimony had dominated headlines, there was no mention of it on Sputnik’s site for most of the day. Instead, Sputnik led with a story about Google’s supposed search manipulation, claiming it had favored Hillary Clinton in the election.

Meanwhile, on the radio, Nixon and Stranahan were busy talking about the Skripals, saying that the British government was not happy the Skripals had woken up after being poisoned. Stranahan called the Skripal poisoning a “false flag” attack by Western government — false flag being a favored conspiracy theory term for a secret operation intended to deceive. Over the next few days, I counted more than a dozen uses of the phrase “false flag” on the outlet. The phrase often served to morph factual news stories into a murky morass.

On Day 2, I turned on breaking news alerts on my phone from Sputnik. I was alerted that the U.S. was “using ‘fabrications and lies’ as excuse to target Syria,” in a story that relied on Syria’s own state news agency. I was also told that “soil examination in Douma didn’t show any poisonous substances,” according to the Russian ministry of defense, even though the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons hadn’t released its findings yet. When I visited Sputnik’s Instagram page, I found mostly dog photos, workout life hacks and a positive video of Putin for International Women’s Day.

Day 3, I turned on 105.5 FM on my way to work, and Nixon and Stranahan were starting to cast their doubts on the validity of the chemical weapons attack in Syria. They recalled the Nayirah testimony of 1990, in which the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter gave false testimony of human rights abuses by Iraqi soldiers to bolster support for the Persian Gulf War.

I broke my media diet then to look up the Nayirah testimony. I briefly entertained the possibility that the West could have distorted what happened in Douma to build support for a U.S. strike there. I even found myself researching more theories about what happened to the Skripals. It didn’t matter that later I would see how the facts had been twisted. It was in moments like these, listening to Sputnik, that I could see how you’d begin to believe that everything was possible.

The great irony
The ultimate goal of media outlets like RT and Sputnik, Russia experts told me, was to get one of their stories to spread widely and gain acceptance, first to a site like Breitbart, then Fox, and even to the mouth of the president, or to a mainstream media outlet like the Washington Post. Or, more efficiently, to move directly to a member of the president’s staff, as in a false Sputnik story about a NATO base terror attack in August 2016, which was quoted by Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort.

Thomas Rid, a political scientist who studies information in conflict, said that it’s easier today than ever for Sputnik to accomplish that kind of “conveyor belt” of disinformation.

“I think it’s important to see it in historical continuity,” Rid said. “Putin himself is familiar with these measures in the Cold War. But back then, in the mid ‘80s, when disinformation in the Cold War was at its peak, it was really hard to place a story in the American mainstream.”

Rid cited the major KGB disinformation campaign of the time: “Operation INFEKTION,” which was the conspiracy theory that HIV/AIDS was a U.S.-made bioweapon to kill Africans. After Russia started the rumor, it slowly but eventually made its way into American media coverage. In today’s era of so-called “fake news” and distrust of the mainstream media, propaganda spreads much faster, Rid said.

Last week, Sputnik’s homepage was pushing an interview with a young Syrian boy and his father from Douma who said there was no chemical attack — that it was all a set-up. According to the Intercept, that interview was recorded not in Douma, but at a Syrian army facility with Russian military advisors present. But efforts to debunk the interview were too late, as the boy’s interview already appeared in the pages of Metro UK, and its video on Sputnik has since racked up more than 30,000 views on YouTube. This week, Sputnik is alleging that Western journalists “poisoned” witnesses in Douma.

“It’s not that Russian disinformation has changed fundamentally. It’s that we have changed fundamentally,” Rid said. “Today we as a society are practically asking for these disinformation operations.”

Years ago, Russian anthropologist Alexei Yurchak coined the term “hypernormalization” to talk about how the Soviets were such masters of propaganda and disinformation that eventually it became impossible for its own people to see beyond it. The U.S. is a more open society whose First Amendment allows its citizens to question and call out false narratives. The great irony is that the First Amendment also allows Sputnik to say what it wants, even to spread confusion and distrust. And it’s working.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 00:05 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Supertof om als laatste post een echt uitgebreide te maken ... hier in de herhaling dus:

[..]

Ook zoiets ... dit leeft in bepaalde kringen nogsteeds trouwens he!

Hoe dan ook, er was gister een artikel bij PBS Newshour over iemand die Russisch propagandaknaaal Sputnik gevolgd heeft .. die raakte aardig van de leg, hoewel het waarschijnlijk wel wat hyperbolisch gesteld was. Klaarblijkelijk wordt het daar in de VS in New York uitgezonden op de FM alsook in bepaalde delen van Europa. Hier het artikel:

Althans, waarschijnlijk zijn mensen als als OllieA en brokjespoes hier ook in geinteresseerd.. dus het is waarschijnlijk goed te vermelden dat het een mooie echt wel lange longread is en dat als je het leest bij de bron er talloze links naar bronnen staan en enkele plaatjes enzo:

[..]

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 00:11 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:

[..]

Bedankt voor het artikel.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 00:05 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Supertof om als laatste post een echt uitgebreide te maken ... hier in de herhaling dus:

[..]

Ook zoiets ... dit leeft in bepaalde kringen nogsteeds trouwens he!

Hoe dan ook, er was gister een artikel bij PBS Newshour over iemand die Russisch propagandaknaaal Sputnik gevolgd heeft .. die raakte aardig van de leg, hoewel het waarschijnlijk wel wat hyperbolisch gesteld was. Klaarblijkelijk wordt het daar in de VS in New York uitgezonden op de FM alsook in bepaalde delen van Europa. Hier het artikel:

Althans, waarschijnlijk zijn mensen als als OllieA en brokjespoes hier ook in geinteresseerd.. dus het is waarschijnlijk goed te vermelden dat het een mooie echt wel lange longread is en dat als je het leest bij de bron er talloze links naar bronnen staan en enkele plaatjes enzo:

[..]

Inside Russia's propaganda machine

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 00:35 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

[..]

Namens mij ook dank voor dit artikel. Het bijbehorende YT-je

Inside Russia's propaganda machine

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Ik vind het ook een boeiende vraag waarom de ene persoon veel ontvankelijker is voor dit soort propaganda dan de andere. Maar dat is een beetje off topic.

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Op donderdag 3 mei 2018 18:48 schreef Vis1980 het volgende:

[..]

pssst niet doorvertellen hoor, maar het gaat niet om de seks, maar om het afkopen met welk geld. Niet draaien aub.

twitter:

AP twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 03:08:15 Missouri lawmakers call historic special session to discuss "disciplinary actions," which could include impeachment, against Gov. Eric Greitens. https://t.co/BrBjuXE2l9 reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 03:18 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
Eric Greitens

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Trump Orders Pentagon to Consider Reducing U.S. Forces in South Korea

May 3, 2018

President Trump has ordered the Pentagon to prepare options for drawing down American troops in South Korea, just weeks before he holds a landmark meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, according to several people briefed on the deliberations.

Reduced troop levels are not intended to be a bargaining chip in Mr. Trump’s talks with Mr. Kim about his weapons program, these officials said. But they acknowledged that a peace treaty between the two Koreas could diminish the need for the 28,500 soldiers currently stationed on the peninsula.

Mr. Trump has been determined to withdraw troops from South Korea, arguing that the United States is not adequately compensated for the cost of maintaining them, that the troops are mainly protecting Japan and that decades of American military presence had not prevented the North from becoming a nuclear threat.

His latest push coincides with tense negotiations with South Korea over how to share the cost of the military force. Under an agreement that expires at the end of 2018, South Korea pays about half the cost of the upkeep of the soldiers — more than $800 million a year. The Trump administration is demanding that it pay for virtually the entire cost of the military presence.

The directive has rattled officials at the Pentagon and other agencies, who worry that any reduction could weaken the American alliance with South Korea and raise fears in neighboring Japan at the very moment that the United States is embarking on a risky nuclear negotiation with the North.

Officials declined to say whether Mr. Trump was seeking options for a full or partial reduction of troops, though a full withdrawal was unlikely. They emphasized that rethinking the size and configuration of the American force was overdue, regardless of the sudden flowering of diplomacy with North Korea.

But Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Kim injects an unpredictable new element. His enthusiasm for the encounter — and the prospect of ending a nearly 70-year-old military conflict between the two Koreas — has raised concerns that he may offer troop cuts in return for concessions by Mr. Kim.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis added to those concerns last Friday when he suggested that the future of the American military presence might be on the table.

“That’s part of the issues that we’ll be discussing in negotiations with our allies first, and of course with North Korea,” he said. “For right now, we just have to go along with process, have the negotiations and not try to make preconditions or presumptions about how it’s going to go.”

SPOILER

A spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Col. Patrick Ryder, said he had no information about troop options being prepared for the president.

For Mr. Trump, withdrawing troops would have multiple benefits, said Victor D. Cha, a Korea scholar at Georgetown University who was for a time under consideration to be ambassador to Seoul. It would appeal to his political base, save the United States money and give him a valuable chit in his negotiation with Mr. Kim.

“But from the perspective of the U.S.-South Korea alliance,” Mr. Cha said, “it would represent a major retrenchment.”

Kelly E. Magsamen, a top Asia policy official at the Pentagon during the Obama administration, said, “U.S. presence in South Korea is a sacrosanct part of our alliance.”

The South Korean government reiterated this week that the troops were still needed and would not be pulled out as a result of a peace treaty with North Korea. But even close allies of President Moon Jae-in have raised doubts about the rationale for a long-term American presence.

“What will happen to U.S. forces in South Korea if a peace treaty is signed?” Moon Chung-in, an adviser to the president, said in a widely read article published this week. “It will be difficult to justify their continuing presence.”

Mr. Kim recently declared, through South Korean officials, that he would drop the North’s longstanding insistence that American troops leave the peninsula. Some experts argue that watching American soldiers depart is far less important to him than winning relief from economic sanctions.

For years, the American presence has been more important as a symbol of deterrence than as a fighting force. At their current levels, the troop numbers are down by about a third from the level in the 1990s.

As the South Koreans have become a premier fighting force — with their own special operations forces, the ability to oppose the North’s artillery along the Demilitarized Zone and now their own cyberforces — they have become less dependent on the United States. Most American troops have pulled back to well south of Seoul.

Since President George Bush removed tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea in the early 1990s, the nuclear deterrent against the North has been based far away, in missile silos on the continental United States, submarines in the Pacific or bombers based on Guam.

Mr. Trump is not the first president to push for troop reductions. Jimmy Carter ran for office on a promise to withdraw all ground combat forces, in part to protest South Korea’s autocratic government at the time. Resistance from the military and Congress stymied his efforts. In 2004, George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, shifted nearly 10,000 troops from South Korea to the Iraq war.

During the Obama administration, former officials said, the Pentagon was always reluctant to consider troop reductions or the suspension of joint military exercises when the White House talked about potential pathways to ridding North Korea of its weapons.

“It would be foolish to give any of that away early in discussions, given the long North Korean track record of breaking agreements,” said Christine Wormuth, a former top Defense Department policy official in the Obama administration.

Mr. Trump, however, has long argued that America’s military presence is not an asset but a liability — not just in South Korea but in Japan as well. As both countries became wealthy, he said, they should have taken on more of the burden for their defense. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he even suggested that the two nations acquire their own nuclear weapons so they did not have to depend on the American nuclear umbrella.

Grudgingly, Mr. Trump admitted that the troops had kept the peace on the peninsula. But he said they had not prevented the North from acquiring nuclear weapons or menacing its neighbors.

“We’ve got our soldiers sitting there watching missiles go up,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in July 2016. “You say to yourself, ‘Well, what are we getting out of this?’”

Over the past year, officials said, Mr. Trump has continued to question the need for troops with aides like his former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, and his deputy, Maj. Gen. Ricky L. Waddell.

Before the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, when tensions between the United States and North Korea were high, the president broached the idea of withdrawing the dependents of troops from South Korea for security reasons. His chief of staff, John F. Kelly, talked him out of the plan, a former official said, because it would have stoked fears of an imminent military strike against the North.

During that period, tensions flared between the White House and the Pentagon because Mr. Trump’s aides believed the military was dragging its feet in providing the president with options for a limited strike on North Korea.

Now, officials said, the situation was reversed: The Pentagon worries that Mr. Trump will push too swiftly to demilitarize.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 05:58 schreef Szura het volgende:
https://mobile.nytimes.co(...)ries&pgtype=Homepage

[..]

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 06:01 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Belangrijke stap, zal ook de Chinese rol verder onder druk zetten omdat hun belangrijkste zorg is dat bij een akkoord alsnog Amerikaanse troepen in Zuid-Korea blijven, die zullen ook wel blijven maar met zo'n stap versterkt Trump de positie van Kim jegens Xi Jinping. De Chinezen hebben zichzelf aardig buitenspel gezet.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 06:04 schreef Szura het volgende:

[..]

Ik lees vooralsnog alleen maar deskundigen die het überdom zouden vinden om dit te doen en alleen het nieuws van deze voornemens al schadelijk vinden.

quote:

As North Korea holds summit meetings with its archenemies — first South Korea, and soon the United States — China is hustling not to lose influence.

Its foreign minister, Wang Yi, returned Thursday to Beijing after two days in North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, where he met with the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, shoring up China’s position as the North’s best friend.

China holds substantial economic leverage, but in the heightened strategic competition between it and the United States, it worries that Mr. Kim is using that rivalry to reduce dependence on China, his country’s longtime benefactor.

One of Mr. Wang’s jobs was to try to stop Mr. Kim from veering toward the United States under President Trump, some Chinese experts said.

“Beijing likely would want to ensure that Pyongyang would not develop a closer relationship with Washington than Beijing,” said Zhao Tong, a North Korea expert at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing. “The visit by the Chinese foreign minister, the first in 11 years, appears to be part of that effort.”

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Beijing has suspected that Washington might agree to put aside its nuclear disagreements with North Korea and accept the North’s nuclear capabilities if it served to contain China, he said.

Mr. Wang could have delivered a careful message, reminding the North that China was its true friend despite the rough patch in the past six years since Mr. Kim came to power, said Xia Yafeng, a Chinese historian at Long Island University.

“Wang Yi had a mission: to coordinate with the North Koreans on how to talk with Trump,” he said. “He can advise the North Koreans, but he cannot threaten them. He may say: ‘Be careful when you talk with Trump. We will always side with you.’”

China grudgingly went along with Washington’s demand last year that it support United Nations sanctions meant to deny the North of critical foreign currency from sales of coal, minerals, seafood and garments.

But Beijing’s desire to punish North Korea’s economy is probably wavering, Mr. Zhao said.

“I can imagine China taking additional measures to further improve ties with North Korea,” Mr. Zhao said. These would include working to connect North Korea to roads and rail networks in northeast Asia, and embracing the North in its Belt and Road Initiative.

There are already signs that China is trying to loosen some of the economic restrictions. Businessmen in the area of northeastern China that borders North Korea say that some North Korean workers are returning to China on short-term visas, and that they expect trade to pick up soon.

“I can imagine China already starting studies into options to increase economic cooperation with North Korea in areas that would not violate existing United Nations Security Council resolutions,” Mr. Zhao said.

Beijing was miffed and surprised at being pointedly excluded from several items in the joint declaration that North and South Korea issued last Friday at the end of their summit meeting.

The two Koreas said they would start talks with Washington to negotiate a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, which ravaged the peninsula from 1950 to 1953.

The declaration mentioned “trilateral or quadrilateral” talks. If the talks were “trilateral” that would include North and South Korea and the United States but not China, which sent millions of troops to fight on North Korea’s side during the war. China withdrew all its troops in 1958.

“The Chinese heard it was North Korea that got the talks to be broadened to quadrilateral,” said Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy.

Beyond that, China was not invited to send observers to the planned destruction of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in North Korea at the end of this month. Mr. Kim said he would invite South Korean and American experts to witness the shutdown, a gesture that American officials said would have little impact on the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

“The test site is close to the Chinese border,” Mr. Haenle said. “The Chinese were upset because China is a nuclear power, South Korea is not.”

Despite these snubs, the visit of the foreign minister, Mr. Wang, was symbolically important, Mr. Xia said.

In the heyday of the China-North Korea relationship when Mr. Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, was in power, top-level visits between the two countries were frequent. The grandfather visited China many times, Mr. Xia said. Even Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, made seven trips between 2000 and 2011.

The parade of visits stopped after the young Mr. Kim came to power and derailed the relationship to China by ordering the killing of senior Korean officials close to Beijing.

Mr. Kim made a surprise visit to Beijing in late March, apparently on his own initiative, maneuvering in a way that made him look less like a supplicant and more like an equal.

Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Kim is likely to take place in the Demilitarized Zone at the border between South and North Korea, Mr. Trump has said. Some diplomats are speculating that the two leaders may meet on the northern side of the zone, drawing a distinction with the summit meeting last week on the South Korean side, and satisfying Mr. Trump’s desire for drama.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, is expected to go to Pyongyang after the Trump-Kim meeting. One of the foreign minister’s duties was to confirm details of Mr. Xi’s visit, Chinese analysts said.

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As the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, prepares for his meetings with the presidents of South Korea and the United States, China has found itself in an unaccustomed place: watching from the sidelines.

Worse, many Chinese analysts say, North Korea could pursue a grand bargain designed not only to bring the isolated nation closer to its two former Korean War foes, but also diminish its reliance on China for trade and security.

Such an outcome — a reversal of 70 years of history — remains a long shot, amid doubts about whether the North would agree to relinquish its arsenal of nuclear weapons. Still, China finds itself removed from the center of the rapidly unfolding diplomacy, and unusually wary about Mr. Kim’s objectives in reaching out to his nation’s two bitterest enemies.

Mr. Kim’s meeting with the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, is set for Friday, and a meeting with President Trump — the first ever between leaders of the two nations — is expected to follow in May or early June. In a sign of just how much is suddenly on the table, South Korea recently confirmed that it was in talks with the North and with the United States about signing a treaty to end the Korean War, which halted in 1953, but never formally ended.

With events moving so quickly, and Beijing finding itself largely left on the outside, analysts said China and its leader, Xi Jinping, must at least consider what they called worst-case contingencies.

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“The loss of prestige is a big problem for China and Xi, who wants everyone else to view China as an essential actor of international relations, especially in the Northeast Asian context,” said Zhang Baohui, a professor of international relations at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “Now, suddenly, China is no longer relevant.”

[“We no longer need” nuclear or missile tests: Read about whether North Korea is really willing to trade away its arsenal for economic benefits.]

In a declaration over the weekend that North Korea would suspend nuclear and missile tests, Mr. Kim spoke as if the North was already a nuclear power, and no longer needed weapons tests, a direct challenge to the Trump administration’s stated goal of denuclearization. Washington has declared that the coming negotiations are about getting rid of the arsenal.

Still, Mr. Trump apparently wants to claim a place in history as the American leader who formally ended the Korean War — even though he tweeted on Sunday morning that he was not rushing into a deal. And Mr. Moon is eager to edge toward the reunification of the two Koreas. So China fears the outcome could be either a North Korea or a unified Korean Peninsula leaning toward the United States.

Since the 1950-53 Korean War, when China fought on the side of the North against the United States and its ally in the South, the alliances have been immovable. The North has provided a convenient buffer for China against having American troops on its border; the South serves as a base in the region for the American military.

In negotiations over the denuclearization of the North, Beijing has to worry whether all that could suddenly be in play, Chinese analysts said.

“If a grand deal can be struck between Kim and Trump, in the form of denuclearization in exchange for normalization of bilateral relations, then Northeast Asia may see a major realignment,” Mr. Zhang said. “China does not run Kim’s foreign policy and they know that.”

The possible new alignment on the Korean Peninsula that most concerns Beijing is a loose unification between North and South Korea with American troops remaining in the South.

As part of its conciliatory moves before the meetings, the North has dropped its demand for the departure of the 28,000 United States troops stationed in the South as a condition for denuclearization.

“A unified, democratic Korea aligned with the U.S. will be dangerous to the Communist regime in China, though not necessarily the Chinese nation,” said Xia Yafeng, a North Korea expert at Long Island University.

From China’s point of view, a favorable outcome from the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim may simply be a less dangerous version of the status quo, Mr. Xia said.

There could be a “nice photo” of the two men, with vague promises from the North Korean leader to get rid of his nuclear weapons, and then long negotiations in which China would have a big say, he said.
What is curious is that China has for decades spoken in favor of a peace treaty to end the Korean War. Premier Zhou Enlai of China mentioned ending the Korean War in a 1971 interview with The New York Times columnist James Reston, Mr. Xia said.

China, however, has a very specific view of what such a treaty would entail: the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea, which would leave both Koreas leaning toward China.

“A peace treaty is good for China in that it will presumably denuclearize North Korea, and more important, it will end the legality of the U.S. military alliance and troop presence on the peninsula,” said Yun Sun, a North Korea expert at the Stimson Center in Washington.

Since North Korea is looking for security guarantees from the United States in return for denuclearization, that guarantee “will hopefully include the withdrawal of U.S. troops,” she said.

But, like his grandfather and father, who ruled North Korea before him, Mr. Kim has shown signs of wanting to reduce China’s influence.

When the young leader made a surprise visit to Beijing three weeks ago to meet Mr. Xi for the first time, the two men seemed to repair somewhat the traditionally close relationship between the two countries that had been in the freezer since Mr. Kim came to power in 2011.

In fact, the visit was probably not so much a gesture of rapprochement as a deft move by Mr. Kim to play China against the United States, just as his grandfather had maneuvered between China and the Soviet Union, Chinese analysts said.

Mr. Kim’s purpose was to give the impression to the Americans that he was entering the meetings with China at his back, they said. Mr. Xi accepted an invitation from Mr. Kim to make a return visit to Pyongyang, but there were no signs that would happen before Mr. Trump meets with Mr. Kim, a Chinese government spokesman said.

Analysts say that since coming to power, the young Mr. Kim has resented his country’s almost total economic dependence on Beijing, which has only increased under the tough United Nations economic sanctions that China voted for last year.

About 90 percent of the North’s foreign trade in essential items — coal, minerals, seafood, textiles — passes through China, and China is its biggest supplier of fuel.

At the urging of the Trump administration, China approved the sanctions that have severely cut the North’s access to fuel and hard currency. North Korean ties with China seemed to hit a low, with Mr. Kim refusing to even meet a Chinese envoy in November, and conducting a ballistic missile test instead.

Perhaps wary of alienating the North, and unhappy with Mr. Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, Beijing was no longer so willing to punish the North, Chinese analysts said.

There are already signs that trade is picking up along China’s border with North Korea, Chinese traders say, which could mean a relaxing after six months of near total trade embargo.

Hours after the North’s announcement on Saturday of its suspension of nuclear tests, one outspoken Chinese state-run newspaper, The Global Times, said the United Nations should “immediately discuss the cancellation of part of the sanctions against North Korea.”

Further, the United States, South Korea and Japan should lift their unilateral sanctions against the North, the paper said.

Correction: April 23, 2018
A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the Chinese president. He is Xi Jinping, not Xi Jingping.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 06:41 schreef Szura het volgende:
Ja de rol van China vind ik ook interessant, maar ik ben niet de enige die twijfelt aan de door jou aangehaalde coördinatie vanuit Washington. Come on, het is Trump die het tegenovergestelde van z’n geclaimde ‘fine-tuned machine’ runt en zonder ambassadeur en zonder minister van Buitenlandse Zaken inging op de uitnodiging voor een top. Bovendien lijken er al belangrijke zaken te worden prijsgegeven voor de top überhaupt ingepland is, lijkt me toch zorgelijk.

Twee draadjes daarbij:
https://twitter.com/nktpnd/status/992228890969018368?s=21

https://twitter.com/ajmount/status/992223508087394304?s=21

quote:

Reduced U.S. troop levels are not intended to be a bargaining chip in Trump’s planned summit in late May or early June with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un about Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, the Times said.

The officials said, however, that a peace treaty between the two Koreas could diminish the need for the 23,500 U.S. soldiers currently stationed on the peninsula, the newspaper said.

A full withdrawal of U.S. troops was unlikely, the officials said, according to the paper.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 07:47 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Als Trump de betaling van de 130k aan Cohen heeft opgevoerd als juridische kosten en ze vervolgens als aftrekpost (no pun) heeft opgevoerd, zou dat dan belastingfraude zijn geweest?

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 07:47 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Als Trump de betaling van de 130k aan Cohen heeft opgevoerd als juridische kosten en ze vervolgens als aftrekpost (no pun) heeft opgevoerd, zou dat dan belastingfraude zijn geweest?

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 08:53 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Het zou wel wat zijn als de IRS een inval doet in het Witte Huis.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 08:59 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Het waren toch juridische kosten.....

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:11 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Dat Trump en Cohen het in de doofpot wilden hebben is natuurlijk geen reden om de hardwerkende amerikaanse belastingbetaler de rekening te geven.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 08:59 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Het waren toch juridische kosten.....

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:15 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

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De reden waarom er zo'n stennis om is, is het feit dat diezelfde juridische kosten volgens Giuliani écht niet uit de partijkas zijn betaald. Okee, dat is een punt. Maar het feit dat Trump de relatie met Daniels geheim heeft proberen te houden vanwege de verkiezingen, en niet om dit te verbergen voor zijn vrouw, torpedeert Giuliani statement volledig. Waarom die geheimzinnigheid als er "niets is gebeurd"? waarom 130.000 dollar zwijggeld betalen om een politieke campagne te redden? En als dit is gebeurt met die reden, dan moet die 130.000 dollar (mét bonus voor Cohen) als campagnefonds zijn gebruikt. welke terugbetaal-constructie Trump ook heeft gebruikt, het heeft ingedruist tegen de regels. En juist dáár ging Giuliani de fout in.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:12 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Dan moet je iets aan het systeem doen he.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:18 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Ja maar daar reageer ik dan ook niet op zeg.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:18 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

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dat systeem is er.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:18 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

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ja het is wel iets anders dan een one liner he?

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:12 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Dan moet je iets aan het systeem doen he.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:19 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Je neemt voor het gemak aan dat het legaal is een betaling aan een derde op te voeren als "juridische kosten" en dus maar van de belasting af te trekken. Dat is onzin. Als dat mag gaat iedereen zijn boodschappen laten afrekenen na tussenkomst van een advocaat. "Hey, mijn advocaat betaalde een kratje bier., nu is het aftrekbaar!"

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:20 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Ligt eraan of Cohen deze betaling heeft gedaan als 'vriend' van Trump of als zijn advocaat.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:22 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Giuliani calls for Sessions to 'step in' on Cohen investigation

Whoa....

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:22 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Leg uit.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:20 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Ligt eraan of Cohen deze betaling heeft gedaan als 'vriend' van Trump of als zijn advocaat.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:25 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

betaal jij voor je "vriend" zomaar 130.000 aan een pornoster? En als dit zoals Giuliani dit zegt, een doorlopende betalingsregeling is, dan kun je er gemakshalve van uit gaan dat deze zaak niet op zich staat. Hoeveel afkoopsommen heeft Trump openstaan en zijn al op deze manier "afgehandeld"? En als dan ook nog je client op televisie openlijk hierover liegt en zegt dat die er niks van weet, dan lijkt het me voor een rechter een koud kunstje om de schuldvraag uit te pluizen.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:27 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ik denk niet dat de rechter of de belastingdienst in zo'n smoesje tuint.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:27 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Cohen werkt al jaren samen met Trump, is ongetwijfeld uiterst loyaal en wordt vast prima door hem betaald, en ik denk dat hij ook niet bang was dat hij dat geld niet heeft teruggekregen verder.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:25 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Als Cohen Daniels betaalt van zijn eigen account kan hij altijd opvoeren dat hij deze betaling heeft gedaan als vriendendienst voor Trump die vervolgens datzelfde bedrag bij hem declareert. Dat kan hij apart gedaan hebben van het juridisch opstellen van het contract. In dat geval hoef je natuurlijk als Trump zijnde niks op te geven het is immers een soort gift aan een vriend.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:31 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

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Denk je echt dat Cohen nog loyaal zal blijven nu er een inval in zijn kantoor, huis en hij al een tijdje afgetapt is door de FBI (die mogen dit niet zomaar)?

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:31 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Het zal je verbazen, maar ook Amerika kent schenkbelasting.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:28 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Smoesje of een maas in de wet- en regelgeving want het zal me niet verbazen als dit vaker gebeurt.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:33 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Eerlijk gezegd vertrouw ik die Kim Jung-Un voor geen meter. Zijn plotse welwillendheid en sympathieke gebaren (gevangenen vrijlaten en Moon letterlijk de hand toereiken) wekken argwaan. Ik geloof er helemaal niets van dat hij binnen een paar maanden is gedraaid als een blad om een boom, net nu hij de beschikking heeft over een operationeel kernwapenarsenaal.

Waar ik evenmin iets van geloof, is dat China zogenaamd buitenspel dreigde te staan. Peking is de enige echte bondgenoot van Noord-Korea en dat is al tientallen jaren het geval. Het lijkt mij buitengewoon sterk dat Kim zijn vaste Chinese bondgenoot zomaar verruild voor de VS, zeker niet nu het land wordt aangestuurd door de wispelturige, leugenachtige en onbetrouwbare Trump. Ik vermoed dat Xi geenszins verrast is door de recente ontwikkelingen. Sterker, ik denk dat hij de koers die door Kim is uitgestippeld mede heeft vormgegeven.

Ook die warme gebaartjes van Kim doen de wenkbrauwen fronzen. Plots toont hij zich een redelijk leider, die bereid is tot het sluiten van compromissen. Ik geloof daar, nogmaals, helemaal niets van. Ik krijg het idee dat hij zich de redelijkheid zelve toont om de VS de wind uit de zeilen te nemen. Als de deal mislukt, kan Kim zeggen dat hij zich van zijn beste kant heeft laten zien. Trump kan moeilijk internationale steun vinden voor een preventieve aanval op een land dat zich zo welwillend heeft opgesteld als Noord-Korea de laatste weken heeft gedaan.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:33 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

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leuk dat je dit zegt: Trump heeft er namelijk een (klein) handje van om mazen in de wet en rerelgeving uit te laten vissen door zijn juristen. Het verschil is dat in deze kwestie er veel striktere regels worden gehanteerd.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:33 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Maar het is opgegeven als declaratie.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:40 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

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Ja, maar jij stelt dat het niet opgegeven zou hoeven te worden als het een vriendendienst was. Dat is niet zo, ook giften moet je gewoon melden.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:40 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Het gaat er niet om of het geld voor Stormy uit de campagnekas kwam, het gaat er om of het gezien kan worden als een bijdrage aan de campagne. En daar lijkt het wel op.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:41 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Nou ja ik neem aan dat het juridisch vrij ingenieus geweest moet zijn anders doe je zoiets niet.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:43 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Dat lijkt me een redelijk voorbarige aanname.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:41 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Nou ja ik neem aan dat het juridisch vrij ingenieus geweest moet zijn anders doe je zoiets niet.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:36 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Jij gaat er vanuit dat Kim plotseling is gedraaid. Wie zegt dat hij altijd hetzelfde was als zijn vader en opa? Vanaf het begin af aan was zijn relatie met China slecht, vermoordde zijn broer, verschillende berichten van de interne strijd die hij moest leveren om zijn macht te stabiliseren. Kim is pas vrij recent aan de macht gekomen het is niet zo dat hij al jarenlang een reputatie had opgebouwd waar we hem nu op kunnen afvallen. Wellicht dat hij juist veel meer Westers is geworden, niet voor niks in Europa opgegroeid voor een gedeelte, wacht het maar eerst eens af.

Als je de achtergrondartikelen leest had je ook gezien dat dit met China ook niet zomaar is gebeurd, daar gaan al jaren van spanning aan vooraf, en China heeft de situatie compleet verkeerd ingeacht. Zowel Trump als Kim wat dat betreft dus. En dat proberen ze nu te herstellen.

We zullen zien hoe serieus Kim zal zijn de komende maanden maar het is veelbelovend tot dusverre.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:44 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

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Ik vraag me af of het überhaupt gedaan is.

Verder mag het natuurlijk gewoon als het gebeurd is. Trump heeft een dusdanig leger duurbetaalde accountants dat ze daar echt geen fouten bij maken.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:47 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Is dat zo? Als Trump gewoon opgaf dat het om "Juridisch Advies" of zo ging.....

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:48 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Dan?

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:50 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Dan weten zijn accountants niet wat Cohen met het geld deed.....

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:44 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Ik vraag me af of het überhaupt gedaan is.

Verder mag het natuurlijk gewoon als het gebeurd is. Trump heeft een dusdanig leger duurbetaalde accountants dat ze daar echt geen fouten bij maken.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:51 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Die accountants zijn voornamelijk gespecialiseerd in civiele zaken. De problemen die de juristen van Trump hebben heeft voornamelijk te maken met het feit dat ze de handelingen van het civiele deel van de Trump gerelateerde transacties niet kunnen bewijzen aan die van de staat zonder de regels te schenden.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:50 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Dus?

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:53 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Dus kan dat worden opgevat als fraude. Als Trump willens en wetens een betaling aan Stormy anders opvoert in de boekhouding was hij gewoon strafbaar bezig.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:44 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Omdat?

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:52 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Geen idee wat hier staat, maar vast een goed punt.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:11 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Als Trump al wordt afgezet - wat mij sterk lijkt - moet hij door het slijk worden gehaald en door Mueller aan de schandpaal worden genageld. Het mag niet zo zijn dat zo'n lullige wip met een pornoster hem het presidentschap kost.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:06 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Maar hij heeft de betaling aan zijn advocaat gedaan.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:11 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Als Trump al wordt afgezet - wat mij sterk lijkt - moet hij door het slijk worden gehaald en door Mueller aan de schandpaal worden genageld. Het mag niet zo zijn dat zo'n lullige wip met een pornoster hem het presidentschap kost.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:19 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Waarom betaalde hij dat geld? Uit schuldgevoel of om de kans op verkiezingswinst te vergroten?

Nou dan.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:20 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

[..]

Het begint erop te lijken dat zijn campagneteam heeft samengewerkt met de Russen. Dan kan het niet zo zijn dat hij wordt afgezet vanwege het omkopen van een pornoster.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:17 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

het was de republikeinen gelukt met Bill Clinton om dezelfde reden, een sex schandaal , dus geen wroeging.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:20 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

[..]

Het begint erop te lijken dat zijn campagneteam heeft samengewerkt met de Russen. Dan kan het niet zo zijn dat hij wordt afgezet vanwege het omkopen van een pornoster.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:23 schreef remlof het volgende:

[..]

Bill Clinton heeft gewoon zijn twee termijnen als POTUS uitgezeten.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:28 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Bij een impeachment komen er minstens de volgende aanklachten.

• Fraude (Belastingfraude, bankfraude, etc.)

• Samenwwerking met de Russen

• Machtsmisbruik / Obstruction

• Meineed zie ik ook nog wel gebeuren

• Opzettelijk liegen tegen het Amerikaanse Volk (High Crimes and Misdemeanors)

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:18 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Of de IRS en de rechter dat accepteren is de vraag. Wat is er feitelijk gebeurd? Het ziet er op papier leuk uit, maar dat is niet het enige waar men naar gaat kijken.

twitter:

marcorubio twitterde op woensdag 02-05-2018 om 18:27:19 Although written by intern at Politico, this article is a reminder of how difficult it can be to discuss public policy in political press. Not only did I not back down on tax cut, I doubled down & added detail for rationale https://t.co/4NTDOxcEju reageer retweet

twitter:

MonicaLewinsky twitterde op donderdag 03-05-2018 om 15:15:13 blaming the intern is so 1990's. 🙄 https://t.co/6CGPERpNqx reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:33 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

dat wel, maar de impeachment was al opgestart.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:57 schreef DustPuppy het volgende:
Dit was ook niet heel slim...

Giuliani revealed sensitive State Department intel in disastrous Fox News interview

Dat interview gaat nog een lange nasleep krijgen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 11:26 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Artikeltje over de advocaten van Trump: The Loyalists and Washington Insiders Fighting Trump’s Legal Battles (NYTimes)

Voor wie het overzicht een beetje kwijt is:
[ afbeelding ]

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 11:15 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Het probleem met Giuliani is dat hij "old school" is, in de jaren 80 van de vorige eeuw had hij vast en zeker het zaakje wel kunnen "schoonpoetsen" helaas voor Giuliani is de tijd niet stil blijven staan.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 11:33 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Ik snap sowieso niet zo goed waarom hij erbij betrokken is. Voor dit soort zaken wil je toch competente professionals met een lange, recente geschiedenis van vergelijkbare zaken? Giuliani is wel weer partner in een law firm sinds een jaar of 10 geloof ik, maar concrete zaken doet hij daarbij niet.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 08:53 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Het zou wel wat zijn als de IRS een inval doet in het Witte Huis.

twitter:

TheLastWord twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 04:46:08 🚨 BREAKING: @MichaelAvenatti tells @Lawrence there were communications the payment to Stormy Daniels had to be made in advance of the 2016 election. https://t.co/6V8DomUguH reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 11:46 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:
Het is grappig te zien hoe de WH-goebbels Sarah Huckabee Sanders zich elke keer in allerlei ontwijkende bochten moet wringen om lastige vragen niet te hoeven beantwoorden..

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 11:50 schreef AnneX het volgende:

[..]

Zou zij er zelf nog in geloven? # bubble

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 11:50 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

TheLastWord twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 04:46:08 🚨 BREAKING: @MichaelAvenatti tells @Lawrence there were communications the payment to Stormy Daniels had to be made in advance of the 2016 election. https://t.co/6V8DomUguH reageer retweet

Dat zou dus het bewijs kunnen zijn dat het ging om een verkapte campagnebijdrage.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 11:55 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Verklaart gelijk waarom Cohen afgetapt werd voor ze de inval bij hem deden. Hij MOET er met Trump over hebben gecommuniceerd.
[ afbeelding ]

SPOILER

Tsar bomba HD

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 11:33 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Ik snap sowieso niet zo goed waarom hij erbij betrokken is. Voor dit soort zaken wil je toch competente professionals met een lange, recente geschiedenis van vergelijkbare zaken? Giuliani is wel weer partner in een law firm sinds een jaar of 10 geloof ik, maar concrete zaken doet hij daarbij niet.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:03 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Hij is loyaal.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 10:12 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Omdat competentie geen inherente eigenschap van advocaten is.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:17 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Ik denk dat je best mag verwachten dat de jarenlange advocaat van een multimiljardair enige competentie bezit zeg anders heb je ook weinig om op verder te bouwen.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:20 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Hij heeft vast competenties die erg handig zijn voor een client die in het vastgoed zit.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:17 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Ik denk dat je best mag verwachten dat de jarenlange advocaat van een multimiljardair enige competentie bezit zeg anders heb je ook weinig om op verder te bouwen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:18 schreef Ulx het volgende:
A timeline of Trumpworld’s changing story on Stormy Daniels

Een handig overzicht.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:38 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Als je vergelijkingen maakt met de keuzes die Trump heeft gemaakt voor de staf van het Witte Huis, dan moet je de incompetentie bij diegene die ze inhuurt zoeken. No offence.

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:41 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Vertegenwoordigde Cohen exclusief Trump trouwens?

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Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:41 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Vertegenwoordigde Cohen exclusief Trump trouwens?

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:18 schreef Ulx het volgende:
A timeline of Trumpworld’s changing story on Stormy Daniels

Een handig overzicht.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:50 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

[..]

Heerlijk. In januari nog alles ontkennen en de media aanvallen en deze week dan details over de deal met Daniels uiteen zetten in een serie Tweets.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:47 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Afgezien wat vage diensten voor Sean Hannity, heeft hij ook de belangen behartigd van een andere perverse millionair: Elliott Broidy, de suikeroom van de Republikeinse partij, die $1.6 miljoen moest dokken omdat die een Playboy model had bezwangerd.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:54 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Dan zal daar ergens wel zijn echte specialiteit zitten .

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 00:05 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Althans, waarschijnlijk zijn mensen als als OllieA en brokjespoes hier ook in geinteresseerd..

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:53 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Je land zou maar geleid worden door een pathologische leugenaar.

quote:

Fox News host Neil Cavuto had some harsh words for Donald Trump on Thursday: "Mr. President, you stink."

The host listed some of Trump’s worst lies and misstatements, including claiming there was widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election and the recent revelation that he repaid his personal lawyer Michael Cohen for $130,000 in hush money given to porn star Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, after he’d repeatedly denied knowing about the situation.

“How can you drain the swamp if you’re the one that keeps muddying the water?” Cavuto asked. “You didn’t know about that $130,000 payment to a porn star until you did.” Cavuto, one of the few hosts on Fox News who calls out the president, said Trump cannot criticize the press for reporting “fake news” when he repeatedly makes false statements without correction.

“Your base probably might not care,” Cavuto added. “But you should. I guess you’re too busy draining the swamp to ever stop and smell the stink you’re creating. That’s your doing. That’s your stink. Mr. President, that’s your swamp.”

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 12:17 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Ik denk dat je best mag verwachten dat de jarenlange advocaat van een multimiljardair enige competentie bezit zeg anders heb je ook weinig om op verder te bouwen.

quote:

The United States has never had kings, dukes or even barons, but President Donald Trump’s most loyal subjects have found a way to pay him millions of dollars in tribute.

New Jersey Republican congressman Tom MacArthur spent $15,221 to hold a fundraiser at Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, according to a HuffPost analysis of Federal Election Commission filings. Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican and a close Trump ally in the House, spent $689 for an office Christmas party at Trump’s hotel a few blocks from the White House. The Illinois-based Family PAC paid $3,183 to Trump’s hotel in Chicago to hold a conference there.

And the Republican National Committee this week will likely spend in the neighborhood of a half-million dollars at Trump’s resort in Doral, a few miles west of downtown Miami, for its spring meeting — not counting hundreds or even thousands of dollars RNC members must pay out of their own pockets for airfare, hotel rooms and some meals.

The golf resort boasts plenty of ornate chandeliers and baroque fountains — but lies directly beneath the flight path of Miami International Airport’s takeoffs and landings, and is miles from the closest beach. RNC members said they like it anyway, even if it means that some of their own money winds up in the president’s pockets. “Well, we elected a president who’s a businessman,” noted one RNC member on condition of anonymity. “A shrewd businessman.”

Cindy Siddoway, the RNC committeewoman from Idaho, said she didn’t know how the RNC settled on Trump’s golf resort but had no objection. “I don’t have a have a problem with it,” she said. “It’s a lovely hotel.”

In all, some 70 Republican candidates and parties from Washington state to Washington, D.C., have spent $1.9 million of their donors’ money at the president’s golf courses, hotels and restaurants thus far this election cycle. A portion of every one of these dollars enriches Trump and his family personally.

SPOILER

“If you are a politician who, A, has no principles and, B, wants Donald Trump’s endorsement, then of course you will want to host your fundraising event at a Trump property,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, an open-government advocacy group that has successfully sued Trump for access to White House visitor logs. “There’s no better way to appeal to the transactional president, no better way to make a mark with the no-attention-span president.”

One GOP official, on condition of anonymity, acknowledged the unsavoriness of funneling donor money to the president and his family but said that ― given Trump’s brazenness about profiting from his presidency — the party had essentially given up. “In terms of the optics of it? We’re way past that at this point,” the official said.

For years, the entire system of donors with financial interest in particular legislation and regulations giving campaign contributions to candidates who will then craft those same laws and regulations has been derided as corrupt and tantamount to legalized bribery.

But candidates must abide by strict rules on what they can and cannot do with that money. Using it to personally enrich themselves is illegal.

Trump’s refusal to divest himself of his hotels and golf courses — despite his promises to do so during the campaign — has made it possible for Republican candidates and parties to put money directly into his pocket.

“It’s a scary reality when we’re discussing whether the president is susceptible to the influence of people paying him while president, but it is our current reality,” said Jordan Libowitz of the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued Trump for violating the constitutional prohibition from taking payments from foreign and domestic government officials.

The biggest source of GOP money flowing to Trump’s properties is the Republican National Committee, which essentially went under the control of Trump since his election in 2016. Through its March filing, it has spent $763,335 at Trump properties since Jan. 1, 2017. That includes $106,646 for a dinner at Trump’s Washington hotel in January, $224,858 for a weekend of meetings and fundraisers at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in March and $237,310 in advance payments to Trump’s Doral golf resort for this week’s spring meeting. In past meetings, the RNC would typically pay half of the total cost of the event beforehand, and the remainder afterward.

The next biggest spender at Trump properties is the president’s re-election campaign, which is wholly under the president’s direct control. Thus far it has funneled $551,643 of its donors’ money to his hotels and golf resorts as well as to Trump Tower in Manhattan, where it rents office space and buys food from Trump’s restaurants there.

Other high-profile spenders include Great America Committee and America First Action, two Trump-supporting political action committees that occasionally host fundraisers at his Washington, D.C., hotel.

But Trump properties also draw smaller committees as well as candidates for House and Senate races, who choose to pay the higher prices that Trump venues often charge compared to nearby competitors.

Illinois’ Adam Kinzinger, Kansas’ Kevin Yoder, New York’s Peter King, California’s David Valadao and Florida’s Ted Yoho are all Republican House members who reported spending at Trump properties.

Both the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee have held events at Trump properties, as did the Morris County, New Jersey, Republican Party — reportedly with dire results.

After paying Trump’s Bedminster golf course $24,487 and a Fox News host $30,000 to serve as keynote speaker, the fundraiser actually wound up losing money, leaving the local party with shaky finances.

Omar Navarro, a Republican who hopes to replace Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters in Los Angeles, reported spending thousands at Trump’s golf resort in Palos Verdes. He conceded that the high costs at the Trump resort ate into the total he collected, but said it was the only venue that would agree to host him.

“Trump is the only place where I can hold an event without being shut down,” Navarro said. “They don’t get intimidated by fascist people who keep us from having campaign events.”

He said longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone headlined his first fundraiser and former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio his second. “It’s expensive. It’s not cheap,” he said.

Hoping For A Payoff

CREW’s Libowitz said it is obvious why candidates and incumbent Republican officials alike spend money at Trump properties: in the hopes of winning Trump’s support and endorsement.

“If someone wanted to try to literally buy his favor, they have a direct and legal line to do so. This is why we’ve seen a sudden influx of spending by Republican candidates and committees at Trump properties where they had not previously spent,” Libowitz said. “They have to have their events somewhere, so many may believe that allowing the president to profit off of them will give them a leg up in gaining his support.”

One Republican close to the White House, though, scoffed at the idea that Trump’s political office — known for its dysfunction — had the initiative or discipline to keep track of which candidates were frequenting Trump properties. “No,” he said. “Please.”

Another Republican official close to Trump, who believed that the use of Trump properties by GOP candidates was ethically troubling, agreed that Trump’s political team is not paying any mind to who is spending money at his golf courses and hotels and who is not. “I don’t know that it is noticed by anyone,” the official said. “Maybe it is.”

For Corey Stewart, a U.S. Senate candidate for Virginia, time is running out for somebody in the president’s political world to notice his Trump-brand loyalty.

Stewart jumped into the Senate race not long after losing the primary for the Republican nomination for Virginia governor last year. In October and November of 2017, he spent $1,422 at the Trump hotel in Washington on meals as “meeting expenses.”

Stewart said he hosts get-togethers with small groups of “high-dollar donors” there – although at least on one occasion in November, he appeared to be socializing with tourists and other visitors at the bar, not meeting with donors. His FEC report for that period included a bill for $355 for that date.

“I might have been just hanging out there,” he said, adding that the hotel has become a “clubhouse for conservatives” in the area. “We like to host events there because there are a lot of MAGA folks who like to meet there,” he said.

Notwithstanding his frequent visits there, Stewart said he does not expect Trump to endorse him prior to the June 12 Virginia primary, in which he faces two opponents.

Navarro, of Los Angeles, similarly does not expect a Trump endorsement, but said he would continue to use Trump properties. “I’d rather do business in a place where someone has my values,” he said.

And — notwithstanding his own website that calls for “an end to accepting bribes” and ridding “corruption/greed” in government ― he rejects the idea that Trump is doing anything wrong by profiting from his businesses while in office.

“If he’s not breaking the law, he’s not breaking the law,” Navarro said.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 13:08 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

[ afbeelding ]
het zal je maar gebeuren..

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 13:26 schreef Zwoerd het volgende:

[..]

Rutte is natuurlijk geen pathologisch leugenaar.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 13:27 schreef Tchock het volgende:

[..]

Eens. Rutte liegt alleen (af en toe) om grotere problemen te voorkomen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 13:30 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:
Trump's workdays are getting shorter and shorter and shorter... (bron) (Geef mij zo'n baan LOL)

[ afbeelding ]
Yep, that's it.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 13:30 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Dan heeft hij wel ERG veel problemen onder zijn ruif, moet ik zeggen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 13:31 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:
Klopt. deze dag wordt door de regering gezien als een zondag, dus niks mis mee.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 13:34 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:

[..]

Ho, maar op zondagen moet hij toch golfen?

(Overigens schijnt hij gisteren juist een heleboel afspraken te hebben afgezegd want "te druk", vandaar dat het iemand opviel. )

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 13:32 schreef Tchock het volgende:

[..]

Welnee, laten we wel wezen. Ik ben geen fan van Rutte en hij liegt inderdaad (te) vaak. Maar dat is een kwestie voor Nederlandse politiek.

Trump heeft letterlijk duizenden leugens in anderhalf jaar. Dat is echt van een andere orde.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 13:32 schreef Tchock het volgende:
Trump heeft letterlijk duizenden leugens in anderhalf jaar. Dat is echt van een andere orde.

quote:

In the 466 days since he took the oath of office, President Trump has made 3,001 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. That’s an average of nearly 6.5 claims a day.

When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. Slowly, the average number of claims has been creeping up. Indeed, since we last updated this tally two months ago, the president has averaged about 9 claims a day.

Trump has a proclivity to repeat, over and over, many of his false or misleading statements. We’ve counted at least 113 claims that the president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking frequency.

Seventy-two times, the president has falsely claimed he passed the biggest tax cut in history — when in fact it ranks in eighth place. Fifty-three times, the president has made some variation of the claim that the Russia probe is a made-up controversy. (If you include other claims about the Russia probe that are not accurate, the count goes to 90.) Forty-one times, the president has offered a variation of the false claim that Democrats do not really care about the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump terminated.

Thirty-four times, the president has wrongly asserted that a border wall was needed to stop the flow of drugs across the southern border, even though the Drug Enforcement Administration says a wall would not limit this illegal trade, as much of it travels through legal borders or under tunnels unaffected by any possible physical barrier.

Thirteen times in the past five weeks, Trump has claimed his long-promised border wall is already being built, even though Congress denied him the funding and prohibited the use of prototypes he had viewed with great fanfare.

Of course, not every day is filled with falsehoods, but the president makes up for his slow days with days that offer an extraordinary number of misleading claims — such as 53 on July 25, 2017, or 49 on Nov. 29, 2017.These are often days when the president has had a series of freewheeling interviews or given a campaign-rally-style speech.

SPOILER

For example, only days ago, on April 28, Trump racked up 44 claims, many of which came from the president’s 80-minute speech in Michigan. (April 28 is tied in third place with Dec. 8, 2017 for most number of claims in a single day.) In his speech, Trump touched on many of his main themes, such as immigration and jobs, adding in a liberal dose of his favorite false facts. Among them:

- He took credit for 3 million jobs “since the election,” even though he did not become president until almost three months later. About 2.5 million jobs have been created since Trump took the oath of office.

- He cited his “incredible success” in terms of job growth, even though annual job growth under his presidency has been slower than the last five years of Obama’s term.

- He said “wages are going up for the first time in many, many years,” even though they have been rising steadily since 2014.

- He once again cited the unemployment rate — especially for African Americans — even though he repeatedly said during his campaign that the unemployment rate was phony and could not be trusted.

- He said the border wall was being built even though Congress only provided funds for fencing.

- He claimed he had attracted 32,000 people at a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on the eve of the election when the venue held only 4,200 and local media estimated that perhaps that many were waiting outside, for a total of 8,000.

- He claimed he had “essentially” gotten rid of Obamacare, when he has not. He also falsely suggested he only failed to pass repeal legislation because of one vote, ignoring the fact that none of the substantive replacement bills got nearly enough votes. Sen. John McCain’s vote was against a “skinny” repeal that was only to lead to talks with the House on a common position, with no guarantee of an agreement that would pass both Houses.

- He falsely claimed that Democrats colluded with the Russians, and the whole probe started with “a document that was paid for by the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and Hillary Clinton.” But the DNC was a victim of Russian activities, as its emails were hacked and then released via WikiLeaks. The House Intelligence Committee has confirmed that the FBI’s counterintelligence probe began with a tip from the Australian government, which notified U.S. authorities about a drunken conversation between a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, and an Australian diplomat in May. Papadopoulos claimed the Russians had “political dirt” on Clinton. The information in the dossier funded by Democrats came to the attention of the FBI later.

- He got simple facts wrong, such as claiming that Henry Ford invented the assembly line (it was Ransom Eli Olds) and that Franklin D. Roosevelt served 16 years (it was 12). He also said the European Union was created “to take advantage of the United States” even though it was created after World War II with the aim of ending bloody conflicts on the continent — and with the active support of the United States.

- He once again claimed that under the Iran nuclear agreement, the United States gave the country $150 billion. But this was always Iran’s money. Iran had billions of dollars in assets that were frozen in foreign banks around the globe because of international sanctions over its nuclear program. The Treasury Department estimated that once Iran fulfilled other obligations, it would have about $55 billion left. The Central Bank of Iran said the number was actually $32 billion.

- He falsely said that major newspapers and television networks make up nonexistent sources. That is grounds for firing in the news business. Sources can certainly be wrong, but they exist.

- For the 31st time, he used a made-up number — $7 trillion — for how much the United States supposedly has spent on wars in the Middle East.

- He falsely claimed that fired deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe “took $700,000 for his wife’s campaign.” McCabe’s wife ran for Virginia Senate, receiving about $700,000 from then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) and the state Democratic Party. But campaign records show that every cent raised for the campaign was spent. McCabe also did not participate in his wife’s campaign.

- He once again claimed that President Xi Jinping of China instantly agreed to a request from Trump to allow the sale of U.S. beef after years of blocking it. But China had already agreed to such sales under a deal brokered by the Obama administration.

- He said — for the 29th time — that the U.S. trade deficit with China is $500 billion. But it’s really about $300 billion. He also said “we lose about $500 billion” through the trade deficit even though countries do not “lose” money on trade deficits.

- He claimed “we have done more than anybody in a year” and “I accomplished more than I promised.” In reality, at the end of his first year, Trump had signed fewer bills than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower (though he has since caught up and passed Obama and is tied with George W. Bush). As for promises, our Trump Promise Tracker shows Trump has only kept 23 percent of 60 key promises and broken 27 percent.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 13:50:00 Giuliani tells NBC News that he made Trump “aware of paperwork” that showed Trump’s payments to Cohen were actually reimbursements for the Stormy hush money payment.Trump replied: ‘Oh my goodness, I guess that's what it was for,’” Giuliani said. https://t.co/kU1K2QTh9p reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 14:15 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 13:50:00 Giuliani tells NBC News that he made Trump “aware of paperwork” that showed Trump’s payments to Cohen were actually reimbursements for the Stormy hush money payment.Trump replied: ‘Oh my goodness, I guess that's what it was for,’” Giuliani said. https://t.co/kU1K2QTh9p reageer retweet

Dat klinkt echt als Trump.

"Grutjes! Heeft die gekke Mike gewoon 130K aan een pornosterretje gegeven terwijl ik nooit met haar geslapen heb. Potvoldriedubbeltjes!"

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 14:52 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Als ik PressSec van Trump was geweest had ik mijn ontslag ingediend. Hoe kun je Trump nou verdedigen als hij jou de waarheid niet vertelt? Die Sanders staat gruwelijk voor lul en is 100% ongeloofwaardig.

twitter:

MichaelAvenatti twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 15:12:52 There is no excuse for the refusal of the Treasury Dept. to release the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) relating to the $130k payment. We are calling on @SenBlumenthal @RepCharlieDent and others in Congress to immediately subpoena the SAR and release it to the people. #basta reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 15:16 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

MichaelAvenatti twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 15:12:52 There is no excuse for the refusal of the Treasury Dept. to release the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) relating to the $130k payment. We are calling on @SenBlumenthal @RepCharlieDent and others in Congress to immediately subpoena the SAR and release it to the people. #basta reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 16:15 schreef RM-rf het volgende:
interssant achtergrond artikel over de buitenlandse politiek van Trump nu...

zowel ingaand op hoe Trump Mei/begin juni tot een opeenhoping voor zeer bepalende events lijkt te willen maken waarbij niemand uit zijn team werkelijk lijkt te weten wat de president nu wl of niet gaat besluiten...

zowel op de staal-tarieven, op de ontmoeting met Kim en Noord-Korea, op de opening van de ambassade in Jeruzalem (Trump heeft gehint dat hij bij die opening zelf in persoon wil aanwezig zijn) en een aangekondigt Peace-plan voor het miden-oosten

Als laatste en meer specifiek ook de houding tegenover Rusland (en deels ook de omgang met de europese bondgenoten)
Hierbij speelt mee dat de huidige bezetting van het Trump-buitenland-team extreem Havik-achtig is en heel stevig anti-Rusland is, in de personen van Bolton en Pompeo zitten er aan de top absolute rusland-haters, vergelijkbaar met Cheney onder Bush jr.

Trump zelf lijkt echter continue een totaal andere koers in te zetten, en lijkt, overigens vergelijkbaar met Bush jr. te denkend at hij samen met zn goede vriend Putin wel de boel eventjes op orde kan krijgen...
OOk een sterke opmerking dat de laatste drie presidenten allemaal lijken te hebben gedacht dat alle problemen met Rusland de schuld van hun voorganger was en dat zij die problemen wel 'eventjes' kunnen oplossen met charme en charisma.

https://www.newyorker.com(...)-with-vladimir-putin

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 09:44 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

[..]

Nogmaals, ik ben zeer sceptisch. Ik zou Kim bovendien ook afraden om te vertrouwen op de Trump-administratie. Je stuurt immers aan op een deal met een administratie die aan de lopende band leugens loopt te verspreiden en bewezen heeft geen betrouwbare partner te zijn. Trump geeft bovendien geen zier om de situatie op het Koreaanse schiereiland, de reden dat hij een deal wil is omdat hij hunkert naar complimentjes.

En ik kan mij niet aan de indruk onttrekken dat de Noord-Koreanen zich hier bewust van zijn. Vanuit hun perspectief zou ik ook meer vertrouwen hebben ik Peking dan in de Amerikanen.

quote:

The former director of the Office of Government Ethics on Thursday said that revelations that President Trump reimbursed personal attorney Michael Cohen for a payment to adult-film star Stormy Daniels means the president has admitted to filing a false financial disclosure.

Walter Shaub tweeted that “in trying to talk his way out of a campaign finance violation, Trump has admitted to filing a false financial disclosure in 2017.”

"He personally certified that his disclosure was ‘complete and correct,’” Shaub tweeted.

SPOILER

Shaub's tweet comes as Trump’s newest attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R), admitted Wednesday that Trump reimbursed his lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 hush money payment given to Daniels to cover an affair she claims she had with the president.

Giuliani said Trump set up a $35,000 payment schedule out of his personal family bank account to pay back Cohen through a law firm.

“It’s not campaign money. No campaign finance violation,” Giuliani said.

Cohen was paid between $460,000 and $470,000 from Trump through those payments, which also included money for “incidental expenses” incurred on Trump’s behalf.

Schaub said that admission means there was a $460,000 liability that was purposefully left off Trump's financial disclosure report.

“I normally assume commissions are inadvertent,” Schaub tweeted. “However, given all of the deception about the Stormy Daniels payment, it is pretty hard to be believe this is not intentional.”

Cohen has long insisted that he paid Daniels out of his own pocket without discussing it with Trump.

“Take, for example, the way Trump’s people fooled Maggie Haberman regarding this payment,” Schaub said, referring to the New York Times reporter.

In a New York Times article in February Cohen specified that he was not reimbursed by the Trump Organization or the campaign for the payment.

The former ethics chief said that Trump’s attorneys “wanted him to be the first person in history to file a financial disclosure report without certifying that report as true.”

Schaub insisted in May 2017 that the ethics office would only work with Trump’s legal team if he signed off on the financial documents, according to a report from The Associated Press.

"This seems like as strong a circumstantial case for a violation as one is going to see," Schaub tweeted. "It is absolutely stunning that we've reached the point where the President of the United States appeared to have lied to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics about a payoff to a porn star."

Trump defended the payment on Thursday in a set of early morning tweets, claiming the reimbursement was legal because it was a private contract between two parties.

The president said the Daniels agreement “was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair,” adding that such arrangements “are very common among celebrities and people of wealth.”

Shaub was not the only former ethics official to point to the possible false financial disclosure issue.

Former Obama administration ethics chief Norm Eisen on Wednesday also said that Giuliani's revelation that Trump reimbursed his attorney could mean that Trump filed a false financial disclosure.

twitter:

waltshaub twitterde op donderdag 03-05-2018 om 14:33:33 AMAZING! In trying to talk his way out of a campaign finance violation, Trump has admitted to filing a false financial disclosure in 2017. He personally certified that his disclosure was "complete and correct," subject to penalties at 18 U.S.C. § 1001 and 5 U.S.C. app. § 104. 1/ https://t.co/FdDEsuRPaj reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 16:54 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Stick en carrot. Zeer effectief om te dealen met dictators.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 17:13 schreef RM-rf het volgende:

[..]

Je hebt het stuk dus duidelijk niet gelezen...

Trump maakt exact dezelfde fouten als voorgaande presidenten juist door die kortzichtige en simpele gedachte dat het een spelletje zou zij en dat het om de 'persoonlijke omgang' zou gaan met een andere heerser....


Typisch wel dat dat 'monarchen-principe waaraan ooit continentaal europa ten onder gibg, toen de aristocratische heersers daar dachten dat politiek enkel een omgangs-spelletje is tussen de elite nu juist ook zo sterk door de VS gemaakt wordt

quote:

When Peter Coughlin was in his sophomore year at James Madison University in northern Virginia, he was besieged by a strange and unsettling illness. At random times throughout the night, Coughlin would wake up with hives, full body chills, and raging fevers. These episodes always ended up with him in the bathroom, throwing up until his stomach was empty.

After keeping a food journal for nearly a year, Coughlin realized his symptoms occurred after eating meat, primarily pork. “I essentially spent a week proving my point,” Coughlin says. “I’d eat a bunch of red meat, and go through a series of pretty severe reactions.”

When he finally went to the hospital in 2016, the doctor tested him for all the usual allergies and was flummoxed by the lack of results. She gave him a strong antihistamine and an EpiPen and sent him home.

Frustrated, Coughlin started researching. He found similarities between his symptoms and documented cases of something called alpha-gal allergy. A major study on the allergic reaction had been done right across the Blue Ridge Mountains at the University of Virginia.

Suddenly, his hiking trips in that very mountain range came into focus: “I kept pulling ticks off of me,” he says. According to the research, those little brown bugs, marked by a telltale white spot, were to blame for his meat allergy. Coughlin was bit by lone star ticks.

SPOILER

Alpha-gal isn’t your typical hayfever-like allergy. It’s a severe, delayed-reaction immune response, which means it hits hours after someone who suffers from the allergy eats meat. People with alpha-gal describe their episodes as terrifying experiences that can land you in the emergency room and change the way you live your life.

“I was disheartened,” Coughlin says. “I’m a big eater.”

Even a decade ago, only small populations of lone star ticks were found in the northeastern U.S. As climate change shifts temperatures and humidity levels across the country, many types of ticks, which thrive in warm, humid weather, are able to expand their ranges. The EPA even uses Lyme disease, which is transmitted by blacklegged ticks, as an indicator to track where the country is warming. The spread of lone stars has been linked to climate change, and now, the ticks have made it all the way up through Maine, imparting severe red meat allergies on unsuspecting carnivores — and offering a window into our changing world and its effect on human health.

As lone stars expand into new communities this summer, the ticks are poised to catch people off guard. And just like Coughlin, these little fellows are big eaters.

***

As you read this, millions of tiny, black-and-brown-legged creatures are beginning to reawaken after laying dormant underneath layers of last year’s leaf cover.

Ticks are only second to mosquitoes as vectors for human disease. This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report showing illnesses from ticks, fleas, and mosquitoes are on the rise. Disease cases in the U.S. more than tripled between 2004 and 2016, and the report found that we’re ill-equipped to tackle the growing problem.

Large swaths of the eastern U.S. are already dealing with an epidemic of Lyme disease, an illness that can rob you of your short-term memory, your motor functions, and, very rarely, even your life.

And every so often, it seems, the ticks that rouse themselves from the leaf litter are armed with unexpected and mysterious pathogens, like the resurfaced Powassan virus or Pacific Coast tick fever. The CDC report says seven new tick-borne infections have been recorded since 2004. The organization hasn’t recognized alpha-gal allergies yet.

“It’s scary,” says Graham Hickling, the director of the University of Tennessee’s Center for Wildlife Health. “Pretty much every year, we’re finding something new.”

A combination of factors has allowed lone stars to conquer territories far outside their known range.

Climate change is among them. It’s likely affecting the viability rates for the thousands of eggs that a single lone star can lay at a time. “When we start getting these warm seasons, high rainfall kind of years, that probably means that those 2,000 baby ticks do a lot better,” Hickling says.

That’s not the only way climate change is aiding survival rates. Many ticks go dormant during the winter, when consecutive below-freezing days and nights turn them into sesame-sized popsicles. But as warming keeps taking days out of the region’s cold season, ticks are able to stay active for longer.

Hickling says a benign climate is helpful for ticks and what they carry: “There are more opportunities for those viruses to start infecting us.”

Holly Gaff, a tick-borne disease expert at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, also points to one of the tick’s favorite hosts, the white-tailed deer. Deer can travel several miles in the days or even weeks it takes for lone stars feed on them, eventually dropping the ticks a long way from where they first picked them up. Reforestation efforts in the eastern U.S. that began in the 20th century, coupled with a slump in hunting, have led to an explosion in white-tail deer populations. The growth of suburbs means there are plenty of people pressed up against these wooded areas.

Gaff calls this combination of factors — higher deer populations, people living next to fragmented forests, a friendlier climate — the “perfect storm” for lone star–tick proliferation. “When you have nature in balance you get some ticks, but not like this,” Gaff says.

Already, at least 600 known cases of alpha-gal have occured north of the Mason-Dixon line, according to University of North Carolina allergist Scott Commins, one of the researchers who discovered the connection between ticks and alpha-gal. But that’s probably only a fraction of the incidences. It’s a difficult pathology to diagnose, and doctors aren’t required to report alpha-gal to the CDC.

Compared to blacklegged ticks, lone stars are much more aggressive. Blacklegged ticks behave in relatively predictable ways — they hang out in leafy undergrowth, arms and legs outstretched in case a hapless animal or human passes by. According to Ellen Stromdahl, a researcher with the United States Army Public Health Center, blackleggeds are relatively small and weak.

Lone stars, on the other hand, hunt in packs and travel at surprising speeds, emerging from the leaf litter like a swarm of thirsty, galloping lentils.

“If you sit in the middle of the woods breathing out CO2, you’ll get a fan club of lone stars pretty quickly,” Hickling says.

On top of lone stars’ rapacious mentality, Old Dominion’s Gaff says that after conducting a series of experiments, the bugs “seem to be invincible.”

She’s tried freezing them — but they came crawling out of the freezer after seven days on ice. Next, she tried drowning them, figuring that sea-level rise on Virginia’s coast could end up doing humanity a favor by drowning out tick populations. Her team submerged lone stars in salt, fresh, and brackish water. Every single tick lasted for at least 30 days in each condition — the last lone star died after 74 days.

***

It only takes one bite from a lone star tick for an unsuspecting victim to develop a meat allergy that can last months, years, or even an entire lifetime.

Here’s how scientists think it goes down: Alpha-gal is a sugar molecule found in nearly all mammals, except humans and a few other primates. A lone star carrying alpha-gal (or an alpha-gal-like substance) bites a person and spreads it to their blood through the tick’s saliva. Then, the molecule essentially rewires the body’s immune system, prompting it to produce an overload of alpha-gal antibodies. When that person goes in for a cheeseburger, their body has a life-threatening reaction to the sugar in the meat.

As recently as a few years ago, the link between lone stars and this allergic reaction was controversial. In 2011, a team of University of Virginia allergists presented its hypothesis in front a group of tick experts. The scientists’ reaction was dismissive.

“We thought, ‘These guys are full of stuffing,’” Gaff recalls.

That team was led by Thomas Platts-Mills, who initially made the connection between lone stars and alpha-gal. Platts-Mills applied insights from his study of patients who were taking the cancer drug cetuximab. Some patients were allergic to the drug, which contains alpha-gal. The team looked into what could be causing the reaction and discovered the linkbetween lone stars and alpha-gal antibodies.

As more people started turning up in emergency rooms with sudden and inexplicable reactions to meat, other researchers began coming around to the idea that a sesame-sized insect could, in fact, instill a lifelong aversion to red meat in full-sized human beings. Platts-Mills is now working on mapping cases of the allergy.

One such case took place in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. John Beckett, a self-professed meat lover, was besieged by a pack of lone stars when he was cleaning out underbrush from an old car lot in 2014. Two weeks later, he was chowing down on hamburgers with some friends at a dock party on the lake when he started breaking out in hives.

Over time, Beckett figured out that he felt sick every time he ate red meat.

The hives weren’t enough to make him stop, though. It wasn’t until he wound up in the emergency room — after eating a cowboy rib eye from one of his favorite restaurants — that he decided to kick red meat out of his diet once and for all.

“The hives had closed my airways,” Beckett says. “I thought I was going to die that night.”

When he finally went to an allergist and got his blood tested, his doctor told him the levels of alpha-gal antibodies in Beckett’s system were the highest he had ever seen. “You gave me bragging rights,” Beckett remembers his doctor telling him.

That was four years ago. Beckett stopped eating meat, and the amount of alpha-gal antibodies in his blood declined only slightly.

Mark Vandewalker, an allergist who’s been treating patients in Missouri since 1990, has noticed an uptick in patients exhibiting anaphylaxis, or a systemic allergic reaction, to meat. He sees patients come in with hives, swelling, itching, and, occasionally, some respiratory difficulties.

“Initially, I didn’t even believe that the condition was real,” Vandewalker says. “But now, having seen so many cases of my own, I think that it’s impossible to deny that this is a very unusual, but a very real, form of food-induced anaphylaxis.”

The vast majority of food-related anaphylaxis occurs within minutes after eating, but alpha-gal is one of the rare allergies that doesn’t work that way.

“What’s odd is that it’s happening in the middle of the night,” Vandewalker explains. “These episodes have occurred three, four, five, even up to eight hours after eating.”

That makes it harder to diagnose, which is why patients with alpha-gal are often sent home from medical facilities without answers.

***

On a trip to visit his family in Leesburg, Virginia, last year, Peter Coughlin was bitten by a blacklegged tick. He contracted Lyme disease, which required him to go on a regimen of antibiotics.

A few months later, he reunited with a bunch of his high school friends, and the group decided to go out to eat. It had been two years since his alpha-gal symptoms began popping up, and Coughlin explains he was ready to jeopardize his health in the name of grilled steak.

“I just said, ‘Fuck it,’” he recalls. “I filled my pocket with Benadryl and went to Korean barbecue.”

This time Coughlin didn’t have an allergic reaction. The Benadryl he had brought stayed in his pocket.

According to Vandewalker, the Missouri physician, alpha-gal can eventually retreat to the point where eating red meat again is possible. Doctors and researchers don’t know, however, how long the antibodies will linger patient to patient — remember, John Beckett’s levels were still high four years after he was bit — and they don’t know how to counteract it besides telling patients to lay off the red meat.

Though alpha-gal remains somewhat mysterious, there is some good news about the ticks that carry it. While in some areas up to 50 percent of blacklegged ticks carry some kind of infectious disease — Lyme, Babesia, Anaplasmosis — the rate of transmissible illnesses found in lone stars (like Rocky Mountain Fever) is much lower, around 10 to 20 percent. What’s more, a recent study published by the Army Public Health Center indicates that lone stars can’t carry Lyme disease at all. Stromdahl, the Army entomologist, surveyed 54 studies from 35 different research groups involving 52,000 ticks and found that a chemical in lone star saliva kills Borrelia – the bacteria that causes Lyme.

“You never want to say never with ticks or insects and what they can carry,” she says. “But we presented a lot of evidence that they don’t.”

But the reality is that we’re living in a warming world, and one of the consequences of that is a tick expansion. And while a group of scientists is working on a vaccine for alpha-gal, others are devising ways to attack the issue at its root — by eliminating the ticks from highly populated areas.

Gaff at Old Dominion conducts studies using a robot called a tickbot, which moves around dragging a rag soaked with permethrin (a common treatment for lice that also kills ticks). The bot, which has a little piece of dry ice embedded in its center, breathes out CO2 and attracts ticks to the toxic rag.

Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Upstate, New York, is conducting tick experiments on entire neighborhoods, which he calls “tick towns.” Twenty-four communities volunteered for the experiment, and some are outfitted with a naturally occurring fungus that sucks the life force out of ticks. Others have little contraptions called “bait boxes” that dab rodents with a small dose of Frontline, the flea and tick medicine for cats and dogs. According to Ostfeld, these preventive measures are “probably our best hope at clobbering ticks.”

Tickbots and tick towns aren’t much comfort to people already living with Lyme or alpha-gal, but they’re our best shot at keeping people who are still unaffected safe. For the alpha-gal allergic among us, the spread of lone stars means the end of traditions that once seemed reassuringly permanent — like eating hamburgers at a dock party on the Lake of the Ozarks. Those get-togethers aren’t what they once were for John Beckett. But he’s playing the long game.

“I’m trying my best not to get bitten a second time,” he says, adding he reckons his blood levels will have evened out in a few decades. “By the time I’m 80 I might be able to eat meat again.”

twitter:

AP twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 16:41:59 The Latest: President Trump suggests Rudy Giuliani misspoke about porn star, says he'll "get his facts straight." https://t.co/E6ZXmp1Jbx reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 17:16 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Ik reageer op jouw post. Volgens mij is het een zeer effectiebe strategie. Stick en carrot dus. Persoonlijke omgang dwingt hij af. Tussen Westerse democratieen werkt die strategue wat minder maar de diplomatieke benadering werkt dan weer niet bij dictators en co.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 17:16 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Ik reageer op jouw post. Volgens mij is het een zeer effectiebe strategie. Stick en carrot dus. Persoonlijke omgang dwingt hij af. Tussen Westerse democratieen werkt die strategue wat minder maar de diplomatieke benadering werkt dan weer niet bij dictators en co.

quote:

President Donald Trump’s new attorney, Emmet Flood, a veteran of the Clinton impeachment battles, is the leading candidate to replace the White House’s top lawyer, several people familiar with the matter said Thursday.

The move would be an effort to prepare for the possibility that Democrats could regain control of the House after the November election and undertake new congressional investigations.

Three people told The Associated Press that Flood is on deck to replace White House counsel Don McGahn, who has been making plans to leave for some time. But two of the people cautioned that the timing was unclear and McGahn’s departure was not imminent.

They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal White House decision-making.

SPOILER

For now, Flood is replacing outgoing White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who has functioned as a critical point person for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Cobb coordinated dealings with prosecutors, worked closely with Trump’s personal lawyers and has repeatedly urged cooperation with the investigation in hopes of bringing it to a quick end.

Flood, whose hiring was announced Wednesday, is likely to advocate a more confrontational approach. He represented President Bill Clinton during his impeachment and served in the White House counsel’s office during the George W. Bush administration as it faced a slew of oversight investigations after Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006. That’s a situation the Trump administration could find itself in by year’s end.

During the Bush years, Flood worked alongside Bill Burck, an experienced Washington defense attorney who now represents McGahn and former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus in the Mueller investigation.

Democratic majorities in either the House or Senate would give the president’s political opponents subpoena power to investigate the administration. Flood’s hiring comes amid growing resignation in the White House that the House is likely lost.

White House officials, sensing growing pressure from Mueller’s investigation, see Flood as someone to play hard ball with Mueller over interview and document requests, particularly those in which the president could invoke executive privilege.

Flood is also expected to be an important adviser to Trump on whether the president should agree to be questioned by Mueller’s prosecutors.

McGahn, who has advocated hiring Flood for months, clashed with Cobb over strategy in responding to Mueller. McGahn is not directly coordinating the White House interactions with Mueller because he himself is a witness. But he has pushed for more frequent and aggressive claims of executive privilege.

McGahn would highly recommend Flood to the president as his replacement, the people familiar with his plans said. One said Trump has told people he wants Flood to replace McGahn at some point.

But Flood’s potential elevation is tied in part to the timing of the special counsel’s investigation. Officials don’t believe it’s a good idea to have the White House counsel serve as the point person for dealing with Mueller’s team.

As a White House employee, Flood, like Cobb, will not be representing Trump personally, and his conversations with the president won’t be covered by attorney-client privilege. That means that investigators could seek to question him, as they did with McGahn.

As White House counsel, McGahn oversees a much larger staff of attorneys and advises the president on the legality of his policy decisions across the administration. The counsel’s office is heavily involved in the White House’s interactions with Congress, responding to requests for documents and witness interviews and wielding wide latitude to dictate the administration’s cooperation with any investigation.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 17:27 schreef DeParo het volgende:
Dank voor de nuttige reacties.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 17:16 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

AP twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 16:41:59 The Latest: President Trump suggests Rudy Giuliani misspoke about porn star, says he'll "get his facts straight." https://t.co/E6ZXmp1Jbx reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 17:28 schreef Xa1pt het volgende:

[..]

Waaruit leid je in godsnaam af dat Trump strategisch inzicht zou hebben terwijl z'n aandachtsspanne niet verder reikt dan 3 regels?

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 17:31 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Omdat er een duidelijke lijn in zijn bb zit.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 17:16 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:
Zelf had ik altijd verwacht dat de gemiddelde Amerikaan pas milieubewust zou worden als hij voor de tweede keer binnen 1 jaar een sterkere airco moest kopen, maar dit is ook wel een goede kanshebber: een door klimaatverandering oprukkende teek die een vleesallergie veroorzaakt en zich desnoods kan voortplanten in de vriezer! (Niet geschikt voor lezertjes die na een artikel over insekten opeens overal jeuk krijgen.)

[..]

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 17:59 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

[..]

Sorry, maar dit is echt delusional wensdenken

Er is geen lijn, er zijn slechts tweets.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 17:31 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Omdat er een duidelijke lijn in zijn bb zit.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 18:18 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Types als DeParo doen mij altijd denken aan de Cruijff-uitleggers die we in de Nederlandse media altijd hadden. Als Johan weer eens een niet al te samenhangend verhaal over het één of ander hield buitelden die over elkaar heen om te verklaren hoe briljant de laatste profetieën van het orakel wel niet waren.

quote:

Judge Wants to See Unredacted Memos Directing Mueller Probe (Courthousenews)

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A federal judge said Friday he wants to see unredacted versions of the Justice Department memos setting the scope of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2016 election probe before deciding whether to toss charges filed against onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Judge T.S. Ellis III gave Justice Department attorneys two weeks to provide him with complete copies of two memos written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, one from May 2017, and the other, from August, that lay out the scope and ground rules for the investigation.

Ellis said he will determine whether the memos should remain under seal, or be made available to the public, once he receives them.

Manafort faces no charges related to the 2016 presidential election. He is accused in cases filed both in Alexandria, Virginia and Washington, D.C. of hiding the work he did for and the money he made from a Russia-friendly political party in Ukraine and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

In Virginia, he is also accused of concealing foreign bank accounts, falsifying his income taxes and failing to report foreign bank accounts.

In Washington, Manafort faces counts of conspiracy to launder more than $30 million, making false statements, failing to follow lobbying disclosure laws and working as an unregistered foreign agent.

But his attorneys argue that the charges should be dropped because they don’t stem from the matter Mueller was charged with investigating.

On Friday morning Ellis appeared inclined to side with Manafort’s defense team, pressing Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben, who joined the case as counsel Thursday night, to justify the filing of the charges in the context of Mueller’s probe.

“I don’t see what the relation is … none of the information [in the indictment] has anything to do with the Russian government or the Trump campaign because all of the allegations long predate any contact [Manafort had] with the campaign,” the judge said.

Dreeben said the Justice Department granted Mueller the authority to investigate “links and possible coordination of individuals” associated both with the Trump campaign and Russia, and this made delving into Manafort’s past financial transactions relevant.

“We just want the full scope, your honor. Those leads that we investigate will help us understand who he knew, who he was paid by and who handled any money,” Dreeben said.

twitter:

business twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 18:26:55 A federal judge questioned if Robert Mueller overstepped his authority charging Paul Manafort with crimes unrelated to Russian election interference https://t.co/0o9Spcy231 https://t.co/y7kx6ZSg3U reageer retweet

twitter:

NBCNews twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 18:45:47 NEW: U.S. federal judge made it clear in court on Friday that he is skeptical over the ability of Special Counsel Mueller to bring charges against Paul Manafort. https://t.co/Oe20XAmOmc reageer retweet

twitter:

thehill twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 18:46:03 Judge in Manafort case says prosecutors just want information that would lead to Trump's impeachmenthttps://t.co/MVH4izN3g4 https://t.co/VA1FDfT9X4 reageer retweet

quote:

Robert Mueller’s team just had a really rough day in court (Vox)

A federal judge expressed skepticism about special counsel Robert Mueller’s wide-reaching probe Friday morning during a hearing related to charges Paul Manafort is facing in Virginia.

Judge T.S. Ellis III suggested that he suspected Mueller’s team only charged Manafort with 18 counts of bank fraud and other charges in Virginia as a way to “get” to President Donald Trump — and suggested Mueller shouldn’t have “unfettered power” to do that, NBC’s Ken Dilanian reports.

To recap: Manafort, who chaired Trump’s presidential campaign, has been indicted in two different venues — in Washington, DC, back in October, and on further charges in Virginia in February.

In Virginia, Mueller’s team has charged Manafort with five counts of filing false income tax returns, four counts of failing to report foreign bank and financial accounts, and nine counts of bank fraud or bank conspiracy, related to his handling of money he made doing work for Ukraine’s government.

This was a hearing in the Virginia case, for which the trial is currently scheduled to take place in July. Manafort has filed a motion to dismiss this indictment — arguing that Mueller overreached his mandate by charging him with crimes unrelated to Russian interference with the campaign.

Judge Ellis suggested Mueller’s team just wants Trump’s impeachment

When Manafort’s team made this same argument in court in DC, the presiding judge, Amy Berman Jackson, seemed skeptical. (She hasn’t yet ruled on the motion, though she did dismiss an accompanying civil suit filed by Manafort.)

But Manafort may have found a more receptive audience with Judge Ellis, in Virginia, a 77-year-old Ronald Reagan appointee.

“I don’t see what relation this indictment has with what the special counsel is authorized to investigate,” Ellis said, according to Politico’s Josh Gerstein. “What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”

Though Ellis didn’t issue a ruling, Brandi Buchman of Courthouse News reports that he asked to review an unredacted copy of a memo from last August, in which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized Mueller to investigate crimes related to Manafort’s Ukraine work. Mueller’s team revealed the memo’s existence in court filings, but the vast majority of it is redacted.

If Ellis does in fact end up dismissing Manafort’s Virginia indictment (and, for what it’s worth, many smart court reporters are skeptical that he ultimately will), it wouldn’t get Manafort completely out of the woods, as he’d still face charges in Washington. But it would be a dramatic defeat for Mueller, with major implications for his strategy as a whole — which, it seems, has relied heavily on bringing or threatening unrelated charges against Trump associates to try to get them to “flip.”

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 19:19 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Het betreft volgens mij deze memo van Rosenstein van augustus 2017: https://www.documentcloud(...)cope-of-Mueller.html

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 19:23 schreef Montov het volgende:

[..]

Rosenstein heeft toch ook in het Congress verklaard dat Mueller andere criminele activiteiten mag opsporen die tijdens het onderzoek naar boven komen?

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 19:23 schreef Montov het volgende:

[..]

Rosenstein heeft toch ook in het Congress verklaard dat Mueller andere criminele activiteiten mag opsporen die tijdens het onderzoek naar boven komen?

En op wat voor manier kan redacted tekst die scope verkleinen? Waarom is een begrenzing van de scope geheime informatie die initieel niet wordt vrijgegeven?

twitter:

johnson_carrie twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 18:45:02 Guys. Let me tell you something: Sometimes a judge likes to bat around the government, like a cat with a toy. And then, he rules in their favor. reageer retweet

twitter:

joshgerstein twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 18:40:58 I strongly doubt Ellis will dismiss the case or reassign it even. He did mention that possibility twice, but it wasn't clear how serious he was about it. I think DOJ would immediately appeal such order. I think he'll ultimately conclude that if May order was vague, August fixed. reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 20:22 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Het is goed om de intenties van Mueller onder de loep te nemen.
Zeker na de schandalen rond zijn personeel.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 00:05 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Supertof om als laatste post een echt uitgebreide te maken ... hier in de herhaling dus:

[..]

Ook zoiets ... dit leeft in bepaalde kringen nogsteeds trouwens he!

Hoe dan ook, er was gister een artikel bij PBS Newshour over iemand die Russisch propagandaknaaal Sputnik gevolgd heeft .. die raakte aardig van de leg, hoewel het waarschijnlijk wel wat hyperbolisch gesteld was. Klaarblijkelijk wordt het daar in de VS in New York uitgezonden op de FM alsook in bepaalde delen van Europa. Hier het artikel:

Althans, waarschijnlijk zijn mensen als als OllieA en brokjespoes hier ook in geinteresseerd.. dus het is waarschijnlijk goed te vermelden dat het een mooie echt wel lange longread is en dat als je het leest bij de bron er talloze links naar bronnen staan en enkele plaatjes enzo:

[..]

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 20:22 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Het is goed om de intenties van Mueller onder de loep te nemen.
Zeker na de schandalen rond zijn personeel.

twitter:

JaxAlemany twitterde op vrijdag 04-05-2018 om 20:46:47 TRUMP: "@kanyewest must have some power.. because I doubled my African American poll numbers -- it went from 11 to 22 in one week. Thank you, Kanye. Thank you." reageer retweet

SPOILER

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 19:28 schreef Tchock het volgende:

[..]

Klopt. Uit de aanstelling van de Special Counsel:

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 22:04 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

[..]

"matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation" lijkt voor interpretatie vatbaar. Je kan heel z'n leven in detail onderzoeken in de hoop links met Rusland te vinden, of in de hoop iets strafbaars te vinden om hem onder druk te zetten. Hoe maakt een rechter het onderscheid?

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 22:12 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Wat Seth Abramson erover te melden heeft in dit draadje: https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/992492021926555651

Judges don't like to be made fools of, or used, or asked to take political risks—as doing so can destroy their professional careers. Judge Ellis' anger here is about Judge Ellis—there's no way he believes that Paul Manafort gets to escape prosecution on multiple federal felonies. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/992428456171491328

2/ The Manafort case is either a career-killer for Ellis, a career-defining case that's not the case he wants to define him, or a case that deeply burdens the rest of his judicial duties due to charges he expects will ultimately be dropped the moment Manafort agrees to cooperate.

3/ If you think Ellis is angry because he thinks there's no case against Manafort; if you think he's angry because he thinks no federal authority—Mueller or otherwise—should prosecute Manafort; if you think Ellis is angry because he believes the feds have lied to him—think again.

4/ I've seen this sort of anger from judges—up close—many times before: if they think the parties before them aren't being blunt about what's "really going on" in the case, they decide they're being played for saps and being put upon and being put in a bad spot and they lash out.

quote:

5/ Should the judge have said what he said? No. If the case doesn't go the feds' way, is there a chance these remarks constitute reversible error? Yes. But the Occam's Razor explanation here is that you have a judge blowing off steam and hoping neither party asks for his recusal.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 13:17 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Aannemen dat een advocaat over enige competentie beschikt is nog wat anders dan er vanuit gaan dat elke gemaakte keuze per definitie een solide juridische basis kent. Er kan bijvoorbeeld best sprake zijn van een onderschatting van het risico dat dit problematisch zou gaan worden, naar buiten zou komen of wat dan ook.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 05:49 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Uiteraard. Maar niemand ontkent dat.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 08:06 schreef Wombcat het volgende:

[..]

Zeg dat niet te hard. Iig in dit topic zijn er in het verleden wel degelijk mensen geweest die dat ontkenden.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 00:33 schreef Monolith het volgende:
Stuk van Politico over de Alma Mater van Cohen:
https://www.politico.com/(...)ey-law-school-218318

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 09:41 schreef Monolith het volgende:
Iowa heeft ook een zeer stringente abortuswet aangenomen:
https://www.politico.com/(...)-kim-reynolds-569680

Vermoedelijk ook deels een poging om eens te kijken of de SC bereid is om Roe v. Wade (deels) terug te draaien.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 10:36 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Iowa wel een mooie staat.

quote:

Trump neemt afstand van zijn nieuwe advocaat

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 11:03 schreef Bluesdude het volgende:

[..]

https://nos.nl/artikel/22(...)nieuwe-advocaat.html

Prachtig deze trumpsoap. Je verzint het niet.. Zijn de filmrechten al gekocht ?

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 11:03 schreef Bluesdude het volgende:

[..]

https://nos.nl/artikel/22(...)nieuwe-advocaat.html

Prachtig deze trumpsoap. Je verzint het niet.. Zijn de filmrechten al gekocht ?

quote:

President Trump heeft in harde woorden afstand genomen van zijn nieuwe privé-advocaat Rudy Giuliani. "Giuliani is een geweldige vent, maar hij is net begonnen. Hij moet de feiten nog op een rijtje krijgen."

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 10:46 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Bedankt voor de informatie.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 11:47 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Oneens?

quote:

President Trump heeft in harde woorden afstand genomen van zijn nieuwe privé-advocaat Rudy Giuliani.

President Donald Trump: Rudy Giuliani Knows Russia Probe Is A 'Witch Hunt' | CNBC

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 12:29 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Niks fakes aan, hij heeft dat gezegd: https://www.theguardian.c(...)aniels-rudy-guiliani

quote:

Former Secretary of State John Kerry has fielded dozens of private meetings and phone calls in recent months in an effort to preserve the Iran nuclear deal, as President Trump appears poised to withdraw from the pact.

The Boston Globe reported on Friday that Kerry, who helped broker the 2015 nuclear agreement, met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at the United Nations in New York last month to discuss ways to salvage the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the formal name for the Iran deal.

He has also met and spoken with a handful of European officials. Last month, he met with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, according to the Globe, and spoke by phone with Federica Mogherini, the European Union's top foreign affairs official.

Kerry also reportedly met with French President Emmanuel Macron, both in New York and in Paris.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 11:43 schreef Falco het volgende:

[..]

Wow, that escalated quickly.

[..]

(lol)

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 12:32 schreef Nintex het volgende:

Blijkbaar is er een shadow government/deepstate bezig om terroristenstaat Iran de hand boven het hoofd te houden en de Trump regering the ondermijnen. Dat vind ik veel schokkender dan een broodje aan verhaal over de Russen.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 12:32 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Overigens dit is ook wel frapant:

Blijkbaar is er een shadow government/deepstate bezig om terroristenstaat Iran de hand boven het hoofd te houden en de Trump regering the ondermijnen. Dat vind ik veel schokkender dan een broodje aan verhaal over de Russen.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 12:44 schreef Mike het volgende:
Trump en Giuliani moeten zijn optreden bij Hannity van tevoren overlegd hebben. Je gaat daar niet blanco naartoe en dingen roepen die haaks staan op wat Trump tot dan toe had geroepen. Ik heb niet zo'n hoge dunk van Giuliani, maar ook zeker niet zo laag dat hij zomaar zonder enige kennis van zaken wat zou gaan roepen op prime time.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 12:53 schreef Tchock het volgende:

Daarbij ontstaan nu twee problemen: dat Trump dit alles eerder ontkende en dat hij de betaling op had moeten geven (zie tweets van Seth). Ik kan me niet voorstellen dat Giuliani expres deze risico's neemt, tenzij hij reden heeft om te geloven dat dit beter is dan het alternatief.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 12:53 schreef Tchock het volgende:

[..]

Het klinkt mij meer in de ogen alsof Giuliani een juridische tactiekwijziging doet. In plaats van ontkennen dat de betaling gedaan is zoals het standpunt eerst was, betoogde hij direct dat er geen campagnegeld bij betrokken was (want dan is het waarschijnlijk niet strafbaar).

Daarbij ontstaan nu twee problemen: dat Trump dit alles eerder ontkende en dat hij de betaling op had moeten geven (zie tweets van Seth). Ik kan me niet voorstellen dat Giuliani expres deze risico's neemt, tenzij hij reden heeft om te geloven dat dit beter is dan het alternatief.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 12:46 schreef Mike het volgende:

[..]

Je bedoelt zoals de republikeinse senatoren die de Obama regering aan het ondermijnen waren? https://www.usnews.com/ne(...)-for-the-oval-office

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 11:58 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Een hele hoop velden. Verder is er niks.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 12:46 schreef Mike het volgende:

[..]

Je bedoelt zoals de republikeinse senatoren die de Obama regering aan het ondermijnen waren? https://www.usnews.com/ne(...)-for-the-oval-office

quote:

New guidelines issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior now prohibit staff members from informing private interests when they must obtain a permit before they can develop properties where activities may affect habitats of endangered species.

A memorandum issued last month by the Fish and Wildlife Service principal deputy director, Greg Sheehan, declared that it’s “not appropriate” for staff to tell developers when they need to obtain such a permit — even though it may be required by law in many circumstances.

Under a section of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, businesses and individuals must request what’s called an “incidental take permit” if they believe their developments could interfere with the habitats of endangered species.

Sheehan insists in his memo that it’s the “decision of the applicant” whether or not to apply for such a permit. Staff members should not use “mandatory language (e.g., a permit is ‘required’),” the memo warns.

SPOILER

“The biological, legal, and economic risk assessment regarding whether to seek a permit belongs with the private party determining how to proceed,” Sheehan said.

Staffers will still be able to provide “critical technical assistance” when it’s requested, according to the memo.

The memo also appears to sharply limit situations where such permits may be required. That includes only cases “where a non-federal project is likely to result in a ‘take’ of a listed species of fish or wildlife ... habitat modification, in and of itself, does not necessarily constitute take,” according to the memo. That would seem to imply such a decision would rely on the judgment of a private interest with a commercial business at stake.

Sheehan was the official who announced to trophy hunting lobby group Safari Club International in Tanzania last year that the Trump administration was lifting an Obama-era ban on elephant trophies from two African nations, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Donald Trump later held off on the action, but the ban was officially lifted again on a “case-by-case basis” in March.

He’s considered among the Interior officials “behind the curtain who are really, really changing our public lands and setting a future direction that may or may not be consistent with what the law requires,” Jim Lyons, a research scholar at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, told The Revelator.

Environmental advocates have criticized Sheehan’s newest edict as a way to weaken regulations with the kind of single-handed action that has been a hallmark of the Trump administration. Noah Greenwald of the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity told The Hill that he believes it will be harder to enforce requirements protecting habitats of endangered species because there will no longer be a record of permit recommendations.

The memo the latest erosion of wildlife protections by the Trump administration.

The administration is also battling blanket safeguards when a species is declared threatened. Under the Endangered Species Act, once a species is listed as threatened, a series of protections automatically go into effect. Under a proposed new rule, specific protections would be decided on a case by case basis.

An endangered species is at risk of extinction, while a threatened species is likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future. Threatened species include such animals as manatees, sea otters, the Guadalupe fur seal, wood bison, the gray wolf, the grizzly, the polar bear and the northern spotted owl. There are more than 300 threatened animal and plant species in the U.S. More than 500 animal species are endangered in the U.S.

Last month, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke tapped Susan Combs — a rancher and fierce opponent of the Endangered Species Act with strong ties to the oil industry — to serve as acting secretary for fish, wildlife and parks.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 06:01 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Belangrijke stap, zal ook de Chinese rol verder onder druk zetten omdat hun belangrijkste zorg is dat bij een akkoord alsnog Amerikaanse troepen in Zuid-Korea blijven, die zullen ook wel blijven maar met zo'n stap versterkt Trump de positie van Kim jegens Xi Jinping. De Chinezen hebben zichzelf aardig buitenspel gezet.

quote:

It did not occur to Bertha Lewis to be afraid.

She was watching the final presidential debate of 2008, and John McCain had just said something insane. “We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama’s relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy,” the Arizona Republican proclaimed.

Lewis had been leading ACORN ― the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now ― for about five months. ACORN advocated for the poor. In addition to helping families navigate federal aid programs, the group ran campaigns to improve city sanitation, protested against predatory lenders and registered people to vote. The nation’s top Republican politician had just declared this body of work tantamount to stealing an election.

“It was absurd,” Lewis said in a recent interview. “Those words had no meaning.”

SPOILER

If anything, Lewis reasoned, the attack was probably good news. Republicans had always loathed ACORN, in no small part because poor voters tend to vote Democrat, but open, inflammatory denunciations of the group were generally confined to the talk radio fringe.

Lewis had been bogged down in a top-to-bottom overhaul of ACORN’s financial and managerial structure ever since she accepted her promotion. If GOP leaders were escalating things in October, she figured it meant she was running a solid voter registration operation despite all the paperwork she’d been buried in.

McCain’s debate paranoia wasn’t an isolated outburst. It became the Republican Party’s closing pitch for the 2008 election, amplified in political media. U.S. newspapers published over 1,700 stories on ACORN during October ― more than 10 times the average monthly total so far that year. More than three-fourths of these stories were devoted to allegations of “voter fraud.”

The illegal voting accusations never panned out. But within 18 months, Lewis would be forced to close ACORN’s doors ― exhausted, short-staffed, out of money and, most important, out of allies.

***

ACORN had survived for more than 40 years. Its sudden collapse was a defining moment in 21st century American politics. The explosive cocktail of racism, dishonesty, incompetence and cowardice that brought down the organization reveals as much about Washington Democrats as it does about the conservative movement. It marked the Republican Party’s full transition from the coded winks and nods of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to the bellicose white nativism that defines Donald Trump, and it exposed a Democratic Party establishment unprepared for dirty tricks in the Digital Age and unwilling to defend many of the black voters and activists it claimed to represent.

After McCain lost the 2008 election, his allegations of a vast ACORN conspiracy to steal the election looked even more preposterous. Nobody could find a single fraudulent vote that had been cast by someone connected to ACORN. But the ACORN story kept bouncing around conservative media anyway. Prosecutors in a few states cited a handful of ACORN employees for shoddy voter registration ― submitting incomplete forms or paperwork with bogus names like “Donald Duck” or “Tony Romo.” In many cases, ACORN itself had flagged the faulty documents before turning them over to state officials, since election laws required that all registration paperwork an organization had collected be turned in. This detail often wasn’t included in the stories.

Then in September 2009, everybody seemed to forget about ACORN voter fraud entirely. Right-wing provocateurs James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles released a batch of undercover videos through Andrew Breitbart’s new website that appeared to show ACORN employees offering to help O’Keefe get away with all kinds of outrages, including dodging tax payments for an underage prostitution ring he claimed he wanted to smuggle into the country. Fox News pumped out updates on the story day after day as more videos were released in a slow trickle. O’Keefe appeared on “Fox & Friends” dressed like a 1970s stereotype of a pimp one morning, and Breitbart and Giles would make Sean Hannity’s show another evening.

It was much juicier than the stale voter fraud story. Both Hannity and Glenn Beck ran segments in which a California ACORN employee supposedly confessed to murdering her husband.

Several formal investigations would later find that, although the undercover videos might have been embarrassing, ACORN workers didn’t violate any laws. The district attorney’s office in Brooklyn, New York, found “no criminality” after a five-month investigation. Neither did the California attorney general’s office. The murder “confession” touted by Fox turned out to be a prank by an ACORN employee who’d caught on to the stunt. (State investigators interviewed her ex-husbands, who were still very much alive.)

In an interview with HuffPost, O’Keefe said it’s wrong to focus on whether his work uncovered actual criminality.

“It exposed immorality. It exposed soullessness,” he said. “Undercover work is about testing and affirming what people are willing to do.”

O’Keefe has clung to the fact that ACORN workers in Baltimore gave him tax advice for his illegal business, including tips on “how to disguise my 13 underage El Salvadorian sex girls on the tax returns,” as he claimed on Reddit in January.

***

In fact, after being told the girls didn’t have Social Security numbers, the ACORN worker told O’Keefe that “we can’t use them at all,” according to unedited transcripts originally posted to Breitbart’s site. Confronted about the transcript, O’Keefe said it was still “highly immoral” for ACORN employees to help him report illegal income to the IRS. But even that’s questionable, since illegal income is supposed to be reported to the IRS.

“One of the things a tax preparer has to do when you have a client with illegal income is navigate between reporting the illegal income ― which must be done ― and protecting the client’s right not to incriminate himself,” according to Larry Zelenak, a tax professor at Duke University School of Law.

A crime may well have been committed at the ACORN offices ― by O’Keefe. California state law prohibits non-consensual recordings of confidential conversations. The state granted him immunity from potential charges in exchange for access to his complete recordings, but it didn’t wipe out his liability in civil lawsuits. O’Keefe eventually agreed to pay a $100,000 settlement to a former ACORN employee who had actually contacted the police after O’Keefe’s visit but was portrayed in the video as a willing collaborator. As part of the settlement, O’Keefe said he regretted “any pain” he caused the man.

But Washington didn’t wait around for the facts to come out. On Sept. 14, 2009, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted 83 to 7 to block some federal grants to ACORN. Government funding typically accounted for 10 to 15 percent of ACORN’s annual funding. The group received $48.4 million from the federal government from 2005 to 2009 ― most of it, including a $25 million grant in 2008, for housing counseling and foreclosure mitigation.

On Sept. 17, the House followed suit, with 172 Democrats joining 173 Republicans in voting to defund ACORN, including some of the most progressive voices in the party, such as Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) and John Conyers (D-Mich.).

Today, Democrats don’t like to talk about that vote. Several told HuffPost they didn’t remember how they voted or why they voted the way they did, other than to note the vote occurred amid a rash of scandalous ACORN headlines.

“Democrats panicked and felt like they had to be a part of that,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), one of the 75 Democrats who voted no, told HuffPost.

Democrats had assumed a defensive posture following electoral victories in November 2008 and wanted to focus on their policy agenda, according to Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who missed the vote.

***

“We’re fighting about Dodd-Frank, we’re fighting about stimulus, we’re fighting about the Affordable Care Act, and we’re fighting about climate change and cap-and-trade,” Connolly said. “Huge battles. Huge! I think the calculus for some of my colleagues was, ‘How much political capital do I want to expend on this when I have these other big ones?’”

But that wasn’t how Republicans saw Democrats at the time. Democrats were on a roll ― they had taken control of Congress in 2006 and pounded Republicans again in 2008. They’d just reclaimed the White House. The GOP was the party of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis and the bank bailouts. Reeling from these failures, the official Democratic rebuke of ACORN seemed to chart a new course for Republican political strategy in which aggressive attacks from Breitbart and Fox News ― however outlandish ― could force Democrats into concessions.

“In many ways, I feel like this issue was a prelude to how conservatives would weaponize issues going forward in the tea party era that would follow,” said Kurt Bardella, who has worked for both Breitbart and as a spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the foremost Republican ACORN opponent in Congress. (Bardella is currently a columnist for HuffPost.)

“ACORN was the only political success Republicans experienced in this period of time,” Bardella said. “I think having a win that the Breitbart side of the world could claim as their own gave them the first real sense that the Republican base was with them more than the politicians, and they could leverage and activate that to play a more impactful role in shaping the direction of the GOP.”

***

A day after the Senate voted to defund ACORN, an incredulous Jon Stewart featured the O’Keefe video on “The Daily Show,” shaming journalists for missing the apparently massive nationwide fraud underway at ACORN. Hadn’t Republicans been warning about the group for years?

“Where the hell were you?” Stewart ranted.

Reporters had, in fact, scrutinized ACORN, turning up a major scandal at the organization the previous year. In July 2008, The New York Times reported that Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, had embezzled almost $1 million from the organization from 1999 to 2000 and kept it secret from the ACORN board. Rathke was fired, and some funders, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, decided to sever ties with the group. But there was not a rush for the exits. Drummond Pike, the head of the Tides Foundation, personally paid back the embezzlement debt.

The board promoted Lewis from her position in New York’s ACORN office to replace Wade Rathke, and she spent much of the next year auditing finances and reorganizing ACORN’s management structure. As the country’s financial crisis escalated, she beefed up the group’s anti-foreclosure activism, and by the summer of 2009, the stigma from the embezzlement scandal seemed to have faded. Republicans weren’t really harping on it. Instead, Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) were raising a fuss over the possibility that ACORN volunteers might somehow corrupt the census.

***

The reforms Lewis implemented convinced Dave Beckwith, who was then the executive director of the Needmor Fund, a philanthropy that supports social justice work, that ACORN had turned a corner. “They took organizational internal repair very seriously,” Beckwith told HuffPost. “They changed the role the board played, they became much more transparent about finances and they changed leadership.”

But when the O’Keefe videos hit, ACORN was still in a funding hole. Lewis and other longtime ACORN staffers say the group could have weathered the storm if the Democratic Party hadn’t abandoned it. It wasn’t just a question of losing government grants. The vote to defund ACORN sent a very clear signal to liberal donors that ACORN wasn’t worth defending.

“We tried to engage the philanthropic community in understanding what happened and the degree to which the organization was taking the repair process,” said Beckwith. “And frankly, most were not interested in hearing that story because they had been convinced by a false narrative of corruption and malfeasance.”

By the spring of 2010, the organization was out of money and officially closed its doors.

Other liberal and left-wing organizations also refused to speak out on ACORN’s behalf, Lewis said. When she reached out to Planned Parenthood, which O’Keefe had gone after the year before, she said the reproductive health care nonprofit told her that it didn’t want to help or even be seen together. As Lewis saw it, Planned Parenthood’s leaders seemed to feel like they had “dodged a bullet” in avoiding a congressional funding battle and didn’t want to court any further controversy.

Another ACORN alum, former executive director Steve Kest, says Planned Parenthood didn’t just leave ACORN for dead. It made phone calls to funders and members of Congress on behalf of ACORN ― more than plenty of other liberal groups were willing to do.

“It is clear now that the attack on ACORN was the beginning of a new era of extreme attacks on community-based organizations,” Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Erica Sackin told HuffPost. “None of us, including Planned Parenthood, knew enough or did enough in that moment to expose these video attacks for what they were.”

When a different group of conservatives published videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood negotiating fees for fetal organ tissue in 2015 and Republicans sought to defund group, Democrats and liberals rallied instead of running for cover, offering a much stronger defense than ACORN had enjoyed.

***

Lewis thinks this was a matter of optics. While Planned Parenthood serves plenty of low-income black and brown women, it has always deployed accomplished, well-to-do white women as the centerpiece of its public image. Planned Parenthood officials make the rounds at Democratic Party fundraisers and fancy liberal conferences. ACORN hired poor people of color and held sit-ins at bank branches.

“If we had been a community group ― like, stick to your neighborhood, give out some turkeys, give the natives some blankets, do social services, occasionally have a silent march and then kneel down and pray ― that might have been fine,” Lewis said. “The attacks on the organization were all around race …. It was because our constituency was black.”

The O’Keefe videos dropped about a month after a different ACORN-related bombshell that had gone almost entirely unnoticed. In August 2009, the House Judiciary Committee released thousands of pages of emails and transcripts related to President George W. Bush’s controversial decision to fire several Department of Justice prosecutors in his second term.

The documents revealed that in 2006, after a U.S. attorney in New Mexico refused to file bogus voter fraud charges against an ACORN worker, the Bush administration retaliated by firing him ― an account that corroborated a report from the Justice Department’s inspector general. This was a major scandal. The president had fired prosecutors for refusing to bring a nonsense case against an organization he believed to be a political enemy.

The U.S. attorney scandal was not new in 2009, but the details about the involvement of White House adviser Karl Rove were. Several major news outlets picked up on it ― but nearly all of them missed that Rove’s displeasure with the New Mexico prosecutor wasn’t just about voter fraud. It was about voter fraud and ACORN.

Nearly a decade since the documents were disclosed, however, Rove remains a respected member of the Republican intelligentsia. O’Keefe, though he succeeded where Rove failed, is disgraced. Most of his subsequent undercover projects have fallen flat ― none more dramatically than last year’s attempt to discredit the Alabama women who had credibly accused Senate candidate Roy Moore of having abused or stalked them when they were teenagers.

Several Democrats told HuffPost they didn’t think they would fall for another smear campaign like the one waged against ACORN. O’Keefe and Breitbart were new figures in 2009. People wouldn’t take them seriously today.

“Having been there and done it, I think there’s some wisdom now that would take hold that would perhaps prevent this from happening again,” said Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), who voted in favor of the 2009 ACORN resolution.

***

But Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) isn’t so sure.

“We react spontaneously to virtually anything, and sometimes overreact,” Yarmuth said. “The impact of social media has increased exponentially since 2009 where you can get swamped by social media on any particular misstep or issue. The potential for that happening again is greater, not less.”

Without ACORN to kick around, the Republican Party’s voter fraud claims have evolved. President Trump claims 3 million to 5 million illegal votes cost him the popular vote in 2016, and he even appointed a commission to investigate the supposed problem. Its work was clearly farcical, and the commission disbanded earlier this year in disarray.

ACORN registered more than 865,000 voters for the 2008 election. While other groups have tried to pick up the slack, there’s a reason Republicans haven’t selected a new organization to serve as the voter fraud boogeyman: nobody is doing the same caliber work on the same scale that ACORN did.

And while just about every possible explanation for Trump’s 77,744-vote margin of victory in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan has been explored to death, almost nobody talks about the effect ACORN might have had in those states.

If Congress has learned any lessons from the ACORN episode, you wouldn’t know it from the legislative record. Each year, government spending bills typically include new bans on funding for ACORN or its successors ― a term with no legal definition. Congress blocked money for ACORN again in its March funding bill.

Issa, who championed the original, successful defunding effort in 2009, told HuffPost that ACORN offshoots might still be at large, though he could not name any. The conservative group Judicial Watch hasn’t raised alarms about an alleged ACORN affiliate receiving federal funds since 2014.

Bardella, the former Issa spokesman, said Republicans had been right to investigate ACORN’s use of federal funds and its finances back in 2009. But he said Issa is probably foolish to raise the specter of ACORN successor groups running amok.

“He’s just talking out of his ass."

_{by Zach Carter and Arthur Delaney}

quote:

A high-ranking political appointee at the Department of the Interior told colleagues their job is ultimately to protect their boss, Secretary Ryan Zinke, internal emails reveal ― in particular from matters that could trigger an ethics probe or negative media attention.

In the March 28 email exchange, Daniel Jorjani, a former Koch brothers adviser whom Zinke appointed as his principal deputy solicitor, raised concerns over a $4,000 bill for a staffer’s six-day trip to the U.S. Virgin Islands. The staffer, Russell Roddy, was the agency’s director of scheduling and advance until he quit in January. Roddy had traveled to the Virgin Islands in preparation for a trip Zinke took in late March and early April.

The exchange, released as part of an open records request, occurred less than a month after Zinke took over the agency. It starts with a rather blunt email from Roddy explaining in detail why he needed to stay on the islands for nearly a week.

“I may not be good at a lot of things,” he told Jorjani, “but one thing I know I am good at is efficiently planning and executing events and advance.”

SPOILER

Roddy’s email paints a picture of a frustrated and overworked employee. In his note to Jorjani, Roddy said he was “in dire need of a vacation.” (Two months later, as Interior Department staff made last-minute travel arrangements to ensure Zinke’s wife could join him for a dinner in Anchorage with Alaska Gov. Bill Walker, Roddy wrote to several colleagues: “UGH! We have all kinds of planes, trains and automobiles manifests to now scramble with.”)

Roddy left under unclear circumstances, Politico reported at the time.

In his reply, Jorjani was understanding, writing “Rusty - Not your fault.” He cast blame on another staffer for failing to prepare the paperwork in advance of the trip. What seemed to worry Jorjani most was the possibility of an investigation by the agency’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and how such a probe could reflect on Zinke.

“$4,000 for a six day advance in the Virgin Islands is not a small sun [sic] and will draw the OIG’s attention. (OIG loves travel investigations. They are easy to document and spin in a negative way),” Jorjani wrote.

Jorjani boasted that he had experience fending off such internal investigations, noting that he had “worked and successfully protected” Interior presidential appointments who had undergone investigations from the internal watchdog.

Jorjani noted that approval was sought only after Roddy departed on the trip, and he stressed the importance of properly documenting travel. “Otherwise,” he wrote, “it will be easy for the OIG or the Washington Post to spin things negatively.”

“At the end of the day,” he added, “our job is to protect the Secretary.”

Interior spokesperson Heather Swift said that the email “speaks for itself.” Jorjani did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

The email provides a peek into Zinke’s inner circle, suggesting some appointees view their role as gatekeepers who must first and foremost protect the secretary against ethics scandals.

Jorjani previously held senior positions at the Charles Koch Foundation and Charles Koch Institute and most recently worked as general counsel at the Koch-supported Freedom Partners. A top legal operative at Zinke’s Interior Department, Jorjani’s calendar shows he met extensively and communicated with industry lobbyists, trade groups and corporate executives.

In December, he was involved in rolling back several Obama-era regulations, including authoring an interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act that protects energy companies and other parties from being prosecuted for unintentionally killing birds. The oil and gas industry praised the decision. Jorjani also decided to renew controversial leases for the Twin Metals copper and nickel mine in Minnesota following a lobbying blitz by the leaseholder, Chilean company Antofagasta, Plc.

Zinke and his team have faced mounting criticism over their spending, travel and apparent conflicts of interest. The inspector general investigated Zinke’s use of private planes at taxpayers’ expense — a controversy the secretary shrugged off as “a little BS” — and concluded that he ”generally followed relevant law, policy, rules, and regulations.”

Among the trips that have been heavily scrutinized was his 2017 visit to the U.S. Virgin Islands for the 100th anniversary of the transition of power from Denmark ― the trip Jorjani was worried about Roddy spending so much time and money planning. While there, Zinke flew on chartered planes, at a price of $3,150, and attended a Republican fundraising event ― one of several instances that have earned him accusations of mixing work with politics.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 mei 2018 06:01 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Belangrijke stap, zal ook de Chinese rol verder onder druk zetten omdat hun belangrijkste zorg is dat bij een akkoord alsnog Amerikaanse troepen in Zuid-Korea blijven, die zullen ook wel blijven maar met zo'n stap versterkt Trump de positie van Kim jegens Xi Jinping. De Chinezen hebben zichzelf aardig buitenspel gezet.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 16:20 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

[..]

Buitenspel gezet? In welke wereld leef jij precies?

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 14:47 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

[..]

Vind je? Het lijkt toch meer alsof China de enige relevante macht is in de regio omdat de VS zich terugtrekt.

quote:

President Trump said in his speech to the National Rifle Association on Friday that his support among black Americans has increased since hip-hop artist Kanye West expressed his support for him. The problem is, there's no reliable data to support that claim.

“Kanye West must have some power because you probably saw I doubled my African American poll numbers,” Trump said. “We went from 11 to 22 in one week. Thank you, Kanye. Thank you. When I saw the number, I said, 'That must be a mistake. How can that have happened?' Even the pollsters thought that must be a mistake.

“Now we've come a long way. You remember I'd come into big rooms, big audiences and I'd say, 'What do you have to lose?' Because the Democrats have always had their votes. Horrible on crime, horrible on education, horrible on everything. I'd say 'What do you have to lose?' And they voted for me. And we won, but now the numbers are much higher than they ever were before with African Americans and we're happy.”

Trump's getting quite a bit mixed up here. Let's review.

SPOILER

West posted several pro-Trump tweets on April 25. In one tweet, West called the president “my brother”:

“You don't have to agree with trump but the mob can't make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother. I love everyone. I don't agree with everything anyone does. That's what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.”

A few days later on April 29, a Reuters/Ipsos poll reported that Trump's approval with black men — not black Americans, as Trump claimed — was 22 percent. His approval with black men a week before was 11 percent with this poll, which uses a non-probability online sample, a methodology that a 2014 Pew Research study found doesn't necessarily accurately represent African Americans.

It's quite early to determine how differently black Americans view Trump after West's tweets. Polls released in the coming weeks will do a better job of showing whether black Americans are having a change of heart about Trump.

Other polls released this week show no significant change in support for Trump among black voters after West donned a “Make American Great Again” hat. The Pew Research Center poll released Thursday reported that only 13 percent of African Americans approve of Trump. In January that number was 14 percent.

Gallup has Trump's approval rating at 13 percent with black Americans this week, up from 11 percent in February. But perhaps the most intriguing claim by Trump is attributing whatever change he saw in support from African American men in that one poll to West.

West is an influential artist, but there is no proof that black men's views of Trump are shaped significantly — or at all — by the rapper. If anything, support for West may have declined after he blamed enslaved black people for their enslavement, implied that African Americans who vote Democrat are not “free thinkers” and endorsed views expressed by Candace Owens, a black conservative activist who says liberal blacks are on “the Democratic plantation.”

Ted Johnson, senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Washington Post's Vanessa Williams that Trump's latching on to West or any other black celebrity “is not an engagement strategy” that will win over black voters for the Republican Party.

What would it take?

“To not be so ridiculous on civil rights,” he said. “Then they would have an audience in black America when they start talking about fiscal conservatism or regulatory reform or tax reform.”

Following West's support for the president, Trump surrogate Darrell Scott is proposing a White House summit on race issues featuring entertainers and artists. That may be time well spent for those interested in furthering the conversation, but looking to West to be the cornerstone of Trump's black voter outreach is not likely to lead to any significant changes for the president or his party as a whole.

^{by Eugene Scott}

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 17:27 schreef DeParo het volgende:

[..]

Dat dacht China ook tot Trump plotseling een akkoord tekende met Taiwan, een handelsoorlog aankondigde, Noord-Korea benaderde zonder Chinese inmenging en ook TPP wel eens alsnog zou kunnen binnentreden.

quote:

A Kansas man who shot three people in a bar, killing an engineer from India, will likely spend the rest of his life in prison on the state charge of premeditated first-degree murder. He still faces federal hate crime charges in the shooting.

District Court Judge James Charles Droege sentenced Adam Purinton, 52, to 50 years in prison on Friday for the fatal shooting of Srinivas Kuchibhotla in February 2017. Purinton opened fire at Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe, where he wounded Kuchibhotla’s friend, Alok Madasani, who is also from India. Bystander Ian Grillot was shot as he tried to intervene in the shooting.

Police said Purinton shouted racial slurs at the two immigrants, at one point yelling “get out of my country.” After leaving the bar, Purinton went to an Applebee’s in Missouri where a bartender at the restaurant said the man claimed he had “just killed two Middle Eastern men.”

SPOILER

“Today’s sentencing in the murder of my husband will not bring back my Srinu,” Kuchibhotla’s wife, Sunayana Dumala, said in a Friday statement. “But it sends a strong message that hate is never acceptable.”

Dumala, who had been with her husband for more than a decade, then directed her message to Purinton.

“In the few minutes that you have seen Srinu you built so much hatred for him that you decided he did not deserve to live,” she said. “What harm did he do to you that you grew so much animosity towards him? He was only enjoying a glass of beer with his friend. I wish you had the ability to see beyond my husband’s skin color and the beautiful and kind-hearted person underneath it.”

At the time of the shooting, President Donald Trump faced strong criticism for remaining silent on the perceived hate crime until six full days after the shooting.

Purinton will not be eligible for parole until 50 years into his sentence. If convicted of the hate crime charges, he could face the death penalty.

quote:

APNewsBreak: Mueller team questions Trump friend Tom Barrack

WASHINGTON (AP) — Investigators working for special counsel Robert Mueller have interviewed one of President Donald Trump’s closest friends and confidants, California real estate investor Tom Barrack, The Associated Press has learned.

Barrack was interviewed as part of the federal investigation of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The specific topics covered in questions from Mueller’s team were not immediately clear.

One of the people who spoke to AP said the questioning focused entirely on two officials from Trump’s campaign who have been indicted by Mueller: Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Manafort’s longtime deputy, Rick Gates. Gates agreed to plead guilty to federal conspiracy and false-statement charges in February and began cooperating with investigators.

This person said Barrack was interviewed “months ago” and was asked a few questions about Gates’ work on Trump’s inaugural committee, which Barrack chaired, and but there were no questions about the money raised by that committee.

A second person with knowledge of the Barrack interview said the questioning was broader and did include financial matters about the campaign, the transition and Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.

Barrack’s spokeswoman, Lisa Baker, declined comment.

Barrack has rare access and insight into Trump going back decades, since their days developing real estate. Barrack played an integral role in the 2016 campaign as a top fundraiser at a time when many other Republicans were shunning the upstart candidate. Barrack later directed Trump’s inauguration.

Bron: AP

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 12:32 schreef Nintex het volgende:

[..]

Overigens dit is ook wel frapant:

[..]

quote:

Mike Pence dishonors himself. Again.

WHEN VICE PRESIDENT Mike Pence appeared at an event in Arizona the other day and lauded former sheriff Joe Arpaio as a “tireless champion of . . . the rule of law,” his comment wasn’t just a risible fiction about a man who made racial profiling his political calling card, thumbed his nose at a federal judge’s order and was convicted of criminal contempt of court. In kowtowing to Mr. Arpaio, a hero to alt-right racists, the vice president also announced his own contempt for principles higher than reflexive genuflection to anything and anyone favored by President Trump.

It was Mr. Trump, of course, who pardoned Mr. Arpaio last year almost immediately after he was found guilty of criminal contempt for ignoring a federal judge’s order to halt his office’s systematic racial profiling patrols in Maricopa County, in and around Phoenix. That pardon was a milestone in Mr. Trump’s ongoing assault on the norms and traditions of legality. Mr. Arpaio had expressed no contrition nor even applied for a pardon, let alone been reviewed for one by the Justice Department — the usual process by which presidential pardons have been granted.

(..)

By publicly hailing Mr. Arpaio, the vice president ignored the former sheriff’s long record of lawlessness and blatant disregard of constitutional principles. Once, the question of what Mr. Pence really stands for was a nuanced one. Now, not so much. By embracing the role of Mr. Trump’s avatar, he has made clear that he stands exclusively for Mr. Trump, with all the moral liabilities that involves.

Bron: WaPo

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 21:20 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

[..]

De Logan Act wordt nooit toegepast. Hoog tijd dat ze die overbodige wet schrappen.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 14:19 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:
Medewerkers van het Ministerie van Interieurverzorging moeten voortaan hun kop houden als voor ontwikkelingsplannen een vergunning m.b.t. bedreigde diersoorten nodig is. De gedachtengang was waarschijnlijk dat als er geen vergunningen worden aangevraagd (zelfs wanneer dit wettelijk verplicht is), al die linkse milieuhippies nooit te weten komen dat er bedreigde dieren zitten. Of záten.

Nu gaan ze dus dubbel opletten.

Interior Department Tells Staff To Shut Up About Mandatory Endangered Species Permits (HuffPo)

[..]

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 21:26 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Daar is hier zo te zien ook geen overtreding van, want het lijkt alleen gelobby te zijn en niet onderhandelingen namens de VS.

quote:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 22:01 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

[..]

De tekst van de Logan Act lijkt me zo ruim interpreteerbaar dat haast alles eraan zou voldoen.

[..]

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 23:13 schreef Szura het volgende:
https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/(...)eschamend-en-obsceen

Wat een enorme randdebiel is het toch .
Post hier maar een ‘baassmiley’ voor Nontex, toe maar .

quote:

French government 'suppressed gruesome torture' of Bataclan victims as official inquiry is told some were castrated and had their eyes gouged out by the ISIS killers. Victims of terrorist attacks were tortured by ISIS, inquiry hears; Policemen on the scene of nightclub vomited when they saw victims;

twitter:

Techno_Fog twitterde op zaterdag 05-05-2018 om 18:24:17 Judge Ellis: "If I look at the indictment, none of that information has anything to do with links or coordination between the Russian gov't and individuals associated with the campaign of Donald Trump." https://t.co/GzYgUlyR0d reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 23:42 schreef Nintex het volgende:

[..]

[..]

Mensen met wapens hadden dat kunnen voorkomen.

Trump had gewoon gelijk.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 23:56 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Dit draadje toont aan. Het hele Rusland onderzoek is een farce. Een coup poging

twitter:

Techno_Fog twitterde op zaterdag 05-05-2018 om 18:24:17 Judge Ellis: "If I look at the indictment, none of that information has anything to do with links or coordination between the Russian gov't and individuals associated with the campaign of Donald Trump." https://t.co/GzYgUlyR0d reageer retweet

Donald Trump: Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find 30K emails that are missing.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 23:56 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Dit draadje toont aan. Het hele Rusland onderzoek is een farce. Een coup poging

twitter:

Techno_Fog twitterde op zaterdag 05-05-2018 om 18:24:17 Judge Ellis: "If I look at the indictment, none of that information has anything to do with links or coordination between the Russian gov't and individuals associated with the campaign of Donald Trump." https://t.co/GzYgUlyR0d reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 23:42 schreef Nintex het volgende:

[..]


[..]

Mensen met wapens hadden dat kunnen voorkomen.

Trump had gewoon gelijk.

quote:

Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 23:42 schreef Nintex het volgende:

[..]

[..]

Mensen met wapens hadden dat kunnen voorkomen.

Trump had gewoon gelijk.

quote:

one of the auxiliary venues, the Bridgestone Arena (which will be hosting an NRA-sponsored concert by country music artist Alan Jackson and comedian Jeff Foxworthy), is a private venue that prohibits the possession of firearms, and attendees are bound to follow its regulations when they are in that particular arena.

quote:

Op zondag 6 mei 2018 00:05 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

[..]

Had ook op het concert tijdens de NRA conventie in 2015 kunnen gebeuren:

[..]

quote:

Op zondag 6 mei 2018 00:07 schreef Nintex het volgende:

[..]

Met de secret service daar?

quote:

Op zondag 6 mei 2018 00:08 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Waarom zou er bij een NRA event in 2015 secret service aanwezig zijn?

quote:

Op zondag 6 mei 2018 00:09 schreef Nintex het volgende:

[..]

Weet je wel niet hoeveel politici lid zijn van de NRA?

quote:

Op zondag 6 mei 2018 00:11 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Weet je hoeveel politici bescherming genieten van de secret service? Dat zijn er niet bijster veel. Daarnaast zijn ze natuurlijk niet bij elk willekeurig NRA event te vinden.

quote:

Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.

People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.

The extraordinary revelations come days before Trump’s 12 May deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.

Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”

One former high-ranking British diplomat with wide experience of negotiating international peace agreements, requesting anonymity, said: “It’s bloody outrageous to do this. The whole point of negotiations is to not play dirty tricks like this.”

Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president. Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”

According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.

[..]

quote:

Judge rejects Mueller's request for delay in Russian troll farm case (Politico)

A federal judge has rejected special counsel Robert Mueller’s request to delay the first court hearing in a criminal case charging three Russian companies and 13 Russian citizens with using social media and other means to foment strife among Americans in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In a brief order Saturday evening, U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich offered no explanation for her decision to deny a request prosecutors made Friday to put off the scheduled Wednesday arraignment for Concord Management and Consulting, one of the three firms charged in the case.

The 13 people charged in the high-profile indictment in February are considered unlikely to ever appear in a U.S. court. The three businesses accused of facilitating the alleged Russian troll farm operation — the Internet Research Agency, Concord Management, and Concord Catering — were also expected to simply ignore the American criminal proceedings.

Last month, however, a pair of Washington-area lawyers suddenly surfaced in the case, notifying the court that they represent Concord Management. POLITICO reported at the time that the move appeared to be a bid to force Mueller’s team to turn over relevant evidence to the Russian firm and perhaps even to bait prosecutors into an embarrassing dismissal in order to avoid disclosing sensitive information.

On Friday, Mueller’s prosecutors disclosed that Concord’s attorneys, Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly, had made a slew of discovery requests demanding nonpublic details about the case and the investigation. Prosecutors also asked a judge to postpone the formal arraignment of Concord Management set for next week.

The prosecution team sought the delay on the grounds that it’s unclear whether Concord Management formally accepted the court summons related to the case. Mueller’s prosecutors also revealed that they tried to deliver the summonses for Concord and IRA through the Russian government, without success.

SPOILER

“The [U.S.] government has attempted service of the summonses by delivering copies of them to the Office of the Prosecutor General of Russia, to be delivered to the defendants,” prosecutors wrote. “That office, however, declined to accept the summonses. The government has submitted service requests to the Russian government pursuant to a mutual legal assistance treaty. To the government’s knowledge, no further steps have been taken within Russia to effectuate service.”

Mueller’s team sent a copy of the formal summons to Dubelier and Seikaly and asked them to accept it on behalf of Concord Management, but Dubelier wrote back on Monday saying that the government’s attempt to serve the summons was defective under court rules. He did not elaborate.

The three companies named in the indictment are all reported to be controlled by a Russian businessman known as Russian President Vladimir Putin's "chef," Yevgeny Prigozhin. He's also one of the 13 individuals criminally charged in the case.

In their request on Friday to put off the arraignment, prosecutors included the extensive demands for information that the lawyers for Concord Management have set forth since they stepped forward last month.

“Until the Court has an opportunity to determine if Concord was properly served, it would be inadvisable to conduct an initial appearance and arraignment at which important rights will be communicated and a plea entertained,” attorneys Jeannie Rhee, Rush Atkinson and Ryan Dickey wrote. “That is especially true in the context of this case, which involves a foreign corporate defendant, controlled by another, individual foreign defendant, that has already demanded production of sensitive intelligence gathering, national security, and foreign affairs information.”

The Mueller team proposed that both sides file briefs in the coming weeks on the issues of whether Concord has been properly served.

In a blunt response Saturday morning, Concord's attorneys accused Mueller's team of ignoring the court's rules and suggesting a special procedure for the Russian firm without any supporting legal authority.

"Defendant voluntarily appeared through counsel as provided for in [federal rules], and further intends to enter a plea of not guilty. Defendant has not sought a limited appearance nor has it moved to quash the summons. As such, the briefing sought by the Special Counsel’s motion is pettifoggery," Dubelier and Seikaly wrote.

The Concord lawyers said Mueller's attorneys were seeking "to usurp the scheduling authority of the Court" by waiting until Friday afternoon to try to delay a proceeding scheduled for next Wednesday. Dubelier and Seikaly complained that the special counsel's office has not replied at all to Concord's discovery requests. The lawyers, who work for Pittsburgh-based law firm Reed Smith, also signaled Concord intends to assert its speedy trial rights, putting more pressure on the special counsel's office to turn over records related to the case.

Friedrich, a Trump appointee based in Washington, sided with Concord and said the arraignment will proceed as scheduled Wednesday afternoon.

The indictment, obtained by Mueller but announced by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, accused the defendants of mounting an “information warfare” operation in connection with the 2016 election.

The IRA, long suspected of ties to the Kremlin, allegedly used social media, email and other means to manipulate “unwitting” American citizens and Trump campaign officials into protests, demonstrations and the recirculation of media messages. Most of the interventions were intended to benefit Trump or demean his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, the indictment alleged.

quote:

Op zondag 6 mei 2018 00:25 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:
Was dit al bekend?

[..]

https://www.theguardian.c(...)ps-iran-nuclear-deal

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 00:48 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Die Ben Rhodes is een totale kneus.

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Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 19:26 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

[..]

Akkoord met Taiwan is verdere vervreemding van China. Het nut ervoor is er niet. Handelsoorlog wint niemand wat mee. NK benaderde Trump, niet andersom. NK deed dit al met alle andere zittende presidenten sinds de jaren 60 en raad eens waarom die niet ingingen op onderhandelingen zonder voorwaarden vooraf met een stalinistische despoot. TTP is weer een goed voorbeeld van de absolute kortzichtigheid van Trump.

Ik weet niet in wat voor bubbel jij leeft, maar je haat tegen China en Iran beinvloed serieus je beoordelingsvermogen. En niet ten goede.

twitter:

CNNPolitics twitterde op zaterdag 05-05-2018 om 22:46:07 Rudy Giuliani advocates regime change in Iran: "I think it's the only way to peace in the Middle East. It's more important than an Israeli-Palestinian deal" https://t.co/Fpf6OgOlaC reageer retweet

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 02:03 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Ik heb helemaal geen haat tegen China of Iran sowieso een domme stelling. Als je de regio en relaties een beetje in de gaten hield kon je weten dat het begon met toenadering en warme woorden tussen China en de VS. Veel van deze anderzijdse acties begonnen pas begonnen nadat China niet over de brug kwam om iets te doen aan het handelstekort en rondom haar eigen 'verkiezingen' hetzelfde beleid waar zoveel duscussie over was (invloed in buitenlandse bedrijcen etc.) nog maar eens verstevigde. Jij mag allemaal de logica niet zien maar die is er wel degelijk. De enige die in een bubbel leeft ben je gewoon zelf schijnbaar.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 06:10 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

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En nu ben je gewoon keihard aan het liegen

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 06:40 schreef OMG het volgende:
Hoe is een 55% disapproval vs 40% approval precies "een tie soort van"?

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 06:50 schreef OMG het volgende:
Ik kijk naar die link van je, en die opent met koeienletters de percentages die al vermeldde.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 06:15 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Oh ja? Waarover dan precies?

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 06:57 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

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Over precies dat wat je beweert in je post. Om nog maar even te zwijgen over dat je de rest van mijn post negeert. Stop er gewoon mee om je eigen mening als feit te presenteren.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 06:51 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Ik heb nu twee keer op mijn link gedrukt en ik kom toch echt uit op de cijfers die ik noemde.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 07:05 schreef OMG het volgende:

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Misschien moet je dan eens iets aan je link kunsten doen, want als ik erop druk is dit het eerste wat ik zie;

[ afbeelding ]

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 08:49 schreef thesiren.nl het volgende:
Misschien leef je toch in een filter bubbel en word je informatie gefeed op basis van je cookies.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 07:01 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Klein kind. Als je zegt dat ik lieg dan mag je best zeggen waarover. Niks wat ik heb gezegd in die post is niet al tig keer gezegd of valt niet te staven maar je wilt niet eens zeggen wat precies (of je kan het niet). Ik reageer letterlijk op je post en het enige wat je zegt is dat ik lieg. Zo sneu.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 09:40 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

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Geen trek in. Want je kunt het allemaal zelf opzoeken. Wel eerst even cookies verwijderen begrijp ik. Ik ga niet mee in dat debiele deparoshowtje van je.

quote:

South Korean President Moon Jae-in said U.S. President Donald Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the standoff with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program, a South Korean official said on Monday.

“President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. What we need is only peace,” Moon told a meeting of senior secretaries, according to a presidential Blue House official who briefed media.

Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Friday pledged at a summit to end hostilities between their countries and work toward the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula.

Trump is preparing for his own summit with Kim, which he said would take place in the next three to four weeks.

The Trump administration has led a global effort to impose ever stricter sanctions on North Korea and the U.S. president exchanged bellicose threats with Kim in the past year over North Korea’s development of nuclear missiles capable of reaching the United States.

In January, Moon said Trump “deserves big credit for bringing about the inter-Korean talks. It could be a resulting work of the U.S.-led sanctions and pressure”.

Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize just months into his presidency, an award many thought was premature, given that he had little to show for his peace efforts beyond rhetoric.

Even Obama said he was surprised and by the time he collected the prize in Oslo at the end of that year, he had ordered the tripling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

As well as Obama, three U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter

Moon’s Nobel Prize comment came in response to a congratulatory message from Lee Hee-ho, the widow of late South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, in which she said Moon deserved to win the prize, the Blue House official said.

Moon responded by saying Trump should get it.

Trump on Monday suggested his planned meeting with Kim take place at the Peace House on the border between North and South Korea.

The upcoming Trump-Kim meeting was the main subject of a private walk and chat that Kim and Moon had during their meeting at the border, the official said.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Sunday that Trump would maintain a “pressure campaign” of harsh sanctions on North Korea until Kim scraps his nuclear weapon program.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 09:07 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Dat de link schijnbaar wanneer je op je mobiel zit naar een andere bron wijst betekent niet dat de data niet klopt daarvoor kan je naar de andere links gaan die ik nu hier hebt gepost.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 09:58 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Je lijkt haast blij dat een aanzienlijk deel van het kiesvolk zich vrij makkelijk in de luren laat leggen door een oranje con-man.

Hoe dan ook, dit is wat ik zie bij de Reuters poll:

[ afbeelding ]

Wel leuk, want daar kunnen we wel iets mee ... het is het 5-dagen rollend gemiddelde, waarmee we kunnen kijken wat het per dag was. Dat levert dit op:

[ afbeelding ]

Ja, er staat een -2 in. Dat is raar en kan ik niet verklaren. Anyway, zoals vrij duidelijk te zien is springt er 1 dag enorm uit en zijn de dagen hierna weer in lijn met hoe het ervoor was. Nu zag je ook in andere polls een opleving (zie bv. ook de stijgende lijn van de afgelopen dagen bij 538, dus ik zou het niet als een meetfout oid willen betitelen. Het is me niet helemaal duidelijk waarom specifiek die dag eruit sprong, maar als de trend is als de paar dagen erna zal het een vrij korte opleving zijn.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 09:55 schreef DeParo het volgende:
South Korea president says Trump deserves Nobel Peace Prize:
https://www.reuters.com/a(...)-prize-idUSKBN1I10OD

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Waaruit nogmaals blijkt dat Amerika onder Trump toch wel echt een directe rol heeft gespeeld en niet allemaal slechts van de Noord-Koreaanse kant komt zoals sommige posters stelden.

quote:

Trump asked Moon to give him public credit for pressuring North Korea into talks

SEOUL -- Even before he was elected South Korea's president eight months ago, Moon Jae-in was vowing to take the "driver's seat" in global efforts to deal with North Korea.

But as the inter-Korean talks have shown this week, it's clearly Kim Jong Un who's steering, although Moon could fairly claim to be riding shotgun. It's Kim who's decided when the Koreas will talk and what they will talk about.

As for President Trump? Well, he could be said to be in the back, going along for the ride.

As South Korea presses ahead with efforts to bring a large North Korean delegation to the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang next month, it is willingly agreeing to North Korea's demands.

But Trump, a former businessman who prides himself on being a masterful negotiator, is claiming -- and getting -- most of the credit for the sudden burst of Olympics-related diplomacy between the two Koreas.

During a Jan. 4 phone call in which the South Korean leader briefed the American president on the plans for talks with North Korea, Trump asked Moon to publicly give him the credit for creating the environment for the talks, according to people familiar with the conversation.

[...]

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 10:04 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Waaruit blijkt dit dan? Dat Moon veren in de kont van Trump stopt is niet nieuw en zelfs verstandig, maar veel concreets wordt niet genoemd wat hij gedaan heeft... dat blijft bij: "It could be a resulting work of the U.S.-led sanctions and pressure"

Soms zie je een Trump-fan ook wel een hele rant posten op bv. reddit, wat erop neer komt dat zijn getwitter indruk gemaakt zou hebben + sancties. Het lijkt me sterk dat Trumps irrationele gedrag indruk gemaakt heeft op wie dan ook. Misschien dat de sancties geholpen hebben, maar dat is zoals blijkt uit de statements van Zuid Korea speculatie.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 10:07 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Dit blijkt uit dat Moon de rol van Amerika prijst in het nader bijeen brengen van beide Korea's. En is dat een ultiem bewijs dat Trump en Amerika het allemaal tot in detail hebben gecoordineerd? Uiteraard niet. Maar uit een dergelijke statement blijkt wel iets meer sturing en coordinatie van Amerikaanse kant dan een analyse op basis van tweets bijvoorbeeld.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 10:04 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Trump asked Moon to give him public credit for pressuring North Korea into talks

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 10:10 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Het artikel dat je post lijkt meer op een opinie dan op een neutraal stuk. Trump zou inderdaad gevraagd hebben om credits aan hem te geven. Maar de 'analyse' klinkt toch wat minder objectief.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 10:09 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Het kan dat de VS een bepaalde rol gespeeld hebben, maar het mag duidelijk zijn dat een hyperbolisch statement als "Trump verdient de Nobel-prijs" slechts de wereld in gestuurd wordt om hem te helpen met zijn binnenlandse PR.

Hij heeft nota bene bij Moon er op aangedrongen hem te prijzen, wat Moon dan ook doet, want waarom zou je de president van de VS boos maken als leider van Zuid Korea zijnde?

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 10:11 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Gelukkig dat we wel allebei vast stellen dat Trump Moon gevraagd heeft om credits. Als ik Moon was geweest had ik hier ook gehoor aan gegeven en het maakt alles wat hij hierover verder zegt nogal suspect.

Het is niet voor niets dat hij niet concreet wordt over Trumps rol ... 'ja, eh, het zou druk kunnen zijn of sancties, maar misschien ook niet'.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 10:16 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Waarom zou het hem suspect maken? Volgens mij wordt er op dat niveau veel vaker gevraagd elkaar credits te geven indien nodig en wanneer de banden prima zijn. Of hij concreet wordt over Trump zijn rol kunnen we niet zeggen omdat dit een standaard artikeltje is op basis van een Koreaanse verklaring. Ik weet niet of ze in het oorspronkelijke artikel nog verder gaan wellicht .

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 10:27 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Omdat hij daarmee gehoor geeft aan datgene wat hem gevraagd wordt en hij daarmee dus de schijn tegen heeft. Daarbij wordt hij niet concreet.

We kunnen het slechts doen met de informatie die we wel hebben, niet met de informatie die we niet hebben. Speculatie over wat er misschien in een of ander mogelijk Koreaans mogelijk artikel verder staat hebben we niks aan.

Maar goed, ik ben weer klaar met de DeParo-show voor vandaag, want je gaat met dit soort redenaties de verdediging in, en dat kun je desnoods hele topics volhouden.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 10:38 schreef DeParo het volgende:
toegeven dat Amerika een leidende rol speelt mbt de Koreaanse onderhandelingen

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 10:47 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Een laatste nabrander over wat ik bedoel met dat je in de verdediging schiet: Daarnet kom je met gekkigheid als dat we niet weten wat er in het Koreaans geschreven was en in dit geval verdraai je mijn standpunt vrij subtiel. Trump != Amerika en ik claim niet geen enkele rol van Amerika of Trump.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 11:36 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Zelfs als de Noord- en Zuid-Korea op wonderbaarlijke wijze vrede sluiten, dan is dat vooral ondanks Trump, en niet dankzij.

Kom op, we hebben de man allemaal horen praten en zien tweeten. Trump beschikt over de verstandelijke vermogens noch de empathie om deze rivalen nader tot elkaar te brengen.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 11:38 schreef Barbusse het volgende:
Vooralsnog zie ik niet in waarom Trump zoveel credits moet krijgen. Ja, er is overleg geweest, ongetwijfeld ook achter de schermen waarvan weinig bekend is gemaakt wie met wie waarover heeft gesproken. Maar wie heeft dan daaraan deelgenomen namens de VS? Trump doet niet eens de moeite om een ambassadeur te zoeken voor Zuid Korea en Tillerson heeft in een krap jaartje het ministerie van binnenlandse zaken gesloopt. Dus wie moet credits krijgen voor wat?

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 11:40 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Amerika voor het aanzetten tot een direct dialoog tussen beide Korea's, weten met Noord-Korea in onderhandeling te gaan op het moment dat hun alliantie met China wat stroever verloopt, een duidelijk zwart-wit beeld stellen voor Noord-Korea, de deur niet te sluiten voor gesprekken ondanks oorlogsdreiging, en simpelweg een van de partners in deze dialoog te zijn.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 11:38 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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En zo'n reactie is simpelweg niet objectief Koos. Je hebt geen idee wat er achter de schermen gebeurt, in hoeverre Noord-Korea wel degelijk heeft geluisterd en gehandeld op basis van Amerikaans initiatief of handreikingen, prima dat het niet werk om nader te groeien tot Europa of Canada wellicht maar Noord-Korea is niet zo'n land en China evenmin overigens.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 11:38 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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En zo'n reactie is simpelweg niet objectief Koos. Je hebt geen idee wat er achter de schermen gebeurt, in hoeverre Noord-Korea wel degelijk heeft geluisterd en gehandeld op basis van Amerikaans initiatief of handreikingen, prima dat het niet werk om nader te groeien tot Europa of Canada wellicht maar Noord-Korea is niet zo'n land en China evenmin overigens.

quote:

Op zondag 6 mei 2018 11:38 schreef Barbusse het volgende:
Vooralsnog zie ik niet in waarom Trump zoveel credits moet krijgen. Ja, er is overleg geweest, ongetwijfeld ook achter de schermen waarvan weinig bekend is gemaakt wie met wie waarover heeft gesproken. Maar wie heeft dan daaraan deelgenomen namens de VS? Trump doet niet eens de moeite om een ambassadeur te zoeken voor Zuid Korea en Tillerson heeft in een krap jaartje het ministerie van binnenlandse zaken gesloopt. Dus wie moet credits krijgen voor wat?

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 11:46 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

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Dit is simpelweg niet waar, zoals ik al meerdere malen heb aangegeven. Ik blijf het niet herhalen. Noord Korea heeft deze uitnodiging tot onderhandelingen zonder voorwaarden gegeven aan vrijwel alle presidenten van de VS sinds het regime aan de macht kwam. Trump initieert niet, hij reageert. En met die reactie legitimeert hij 1 van de misdadigste regimes sinds WOII.

quote:

Op zondag 6 mei 2018 11:46 schreef Barbusse het volgende:

[..]

Dit is simpelweg niet waar, zoals ik al meerdere malen heb aangegeven. Ik blijf het niet herhalen. Noord Korea heeft deze uitnodiging tot onderhandelingen zonder voorwaarden gegeven aan vrijwel alle presidenten van de VS sinds het regime aan de macht kwam. Trump initieert niet, hij reageert. En met die reactie legitimeert hij 1 van de misdadigste regimes sinds WOII.

Anyway, ik ben niet in discussie met jou, ik vroeg me iets af. Iets waar je ook uiteraard geen antwoord op geeft, slechts wat verwachtingsvolle insinuaties.

quote:

The new sanctions are noteworthy for two reasons. First, they’re carefully designed to prevent North Korea from illicitly selling goods at sea, one of Pyongyang’s last steady sources of income. Second, they illustrate the White House’s emerging strategy for trying to resolve its nuclear standoff with North Korea through direct talks with Pyongyang as well as economic measures designed to hobble the regime of Kim Jong Un.

The first signs of the new approach came two weeks ago, when Vice President Mike Pence scheduled a secret meeting with high-level North Korean officials. Pyongyang canceled the meeting just hours ahead of the gathering, but Pence made clear that the administration was still open to talks.

“The point is, no pressure comes off until they are actually doing something that the alliance believes represents a meaningful step toward denuclearization,” he told the Washington Post on February 11, one day after the canceled chat with North Korea. “So the maximum pressure campaign is going to continue and intensify. But if you want to talk, we’ll talk.”

quote:

But China’s view of the US president began to shift after Mr Trump threatened to put tariffs on another $100bn of Chinese imports. Mr Trump had already enraged Chinese officials in March by signing the Taiwan Travel Act, which urges more US exchanges with the self-ruled island that Beijing regards as Chinese territory.

Beijing’s previously sanguine view of Mr Trump was partly due to the fact the US president did not use his first year in office to follow through on some of the pledges he made during the campaign about getting tough with China.

While Chinese officials now realise Mr Trump meant what he said in Beijing in November — that the Sino-US trade relationship was not “fair and reciprocal” and had to be solved — they also believe they can emerge from a trade war relatively unscathed.

“Trump has certainly got [China’s] attention,” said Peter Mandelson, the former EU trade commissioner who this week led a British delegation to China that met Mr Wang. “Chinese officials are confident and sure of their direction. They don’t want a fight [with the US], but if they get one they’re going to give as good as they get.”

China was surprised again on Friday after Mr Trump said he would consider re-joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Chinese officials had seen his move to leave the TPP, which did not include China, on day one in office as a “grand gift”.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 12:02 schreef Wombcat het volgende:

[..]

Je kunt dit ook omdraaien:
En zo'n reactie is simpelweg niet objectief DeParo. Je hebt geen idee wat er achter de schermen gebeurt, in hoeverre Noord-Korea wel degelijk heeft geluisterd en gehandeld op basis van Chinees of Noord-Koreaans initiatief of handreikingen.

Het blijft opvallend hoe vaak jij schermt met wat er misschien achter de schermen is gebeurd, terwijl je daar net zo min zicht op hebt als wij.
Puur praktisch gezien geldt dit:

[..]

En dit:

[..]

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 11:46 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

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Tenzij Trump achter de schermen een compleet ander mens is, is het simpelweg onmogelijk dat hij verantwoordelijk is voor mogelijke successen die worden behaald. De man is een ongeïnteresseerde, ongeletterde, dumbass. Hij is zo pijnlijk dom, dat ik soms last krijg van plaatsvervangende schaamte.

Ergens hoop ik ook dat het vredesproces faalt, anders denken die Amerikanen straks nog dat het een goed idee is om vaker een Trumpist tot president te verkiezen.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 12:05 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Je leest wat je wilt lezen, dat is wat anders, beide stellingen zijn gewoon ontkracht. Ja we weten niet wat er achter de schermen gebeurt maar we weten wel degelijk dat Amerika niet alleen reageert. We weten wel degelijk dat er in ieder geval dusdanige ontwikkelingen gaande zijn die zowel Amerika als Zuid-Korie optimistisch stemmen, en dan zouden we nog steeds geen credits hoeven geven aan Amerika, ik vind het vooral erg kortzichtig.

quote:

Kim has sought to 1) secure his rule against internal challengers, 2) achieve and demonstrate a reliable nuclear deterrent, 3) improve his people’s quality of life, and 4) elevate North Korea’s international standing as a nuclear state. Until very recently, his priority has been the first two goals. Having made significant progress on them, with his current charm offensive, Kim is now aiming to do the same for the latter two.
(...)
So in March 2013, Kim announced the “byungjin line” of simultaneously pursuing a long-range nuclear strike capability and economic development. U.S. policy under Obama and Trump has tried to make those two aspects of Kim’s strategy a trade-off—you can have economic ties to the outside world or you can have nukes, but you can’t have both—but the North Koreans always refused to see it that way. As a result, U.S. policy has had the effect only of accelerating Kim’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, leading to four nuclear tests and 86 missile tests over the past six years. More U.S. pressure always translated into more testing, which is why the idea that maximum pressure brought about any of the recent events is a farce.
(...)
Neither Trump’s maximum pressure nor Moon’s opportunism can explain the timing or global extent of Kim’s gambit. North Korea held meaningful diplomacy with the outside world in abeyance while it chased a secure second-strike nuclear capability last year. But only one month after his record-breaking ICBM launch, Kim gave the New Year’s speech that initiated all the diplomacy and hopeful media coverage that has come to define 2018 in stark contrast to the same time last year.
With a firmer grip on the regime and a strengthened nuclear strike capability, all this diplomacy moves Kim closer to his remaining goals of prioritizing the economy and elevating North Korea’s international standing as a nuclear state.
(...)What Kim wants is utterly at odds with decades of U.S. policy toward North Korea. Maybe that's OK given the abysmal failure of that policy, which saw the Kim regime attain its dream of acquiring nuclear weapons while keeping its people in appalling conditions. America's past positions are certainly not something Trump is beholden to. More disconcertingly though, there hasn't been any meaningful public discussion about aspects of North Korea policy other than denuclearization, such as human rights protections or the long-term merits of the U.S. troop presence in South Korea. Without a serious public debate, Trump could saunter into a meeting with Kim and unwittingly trade away American interests that were long assumed to be important but simply never discussed. In return, because of what Kim's goals are, Trump will inevitably not get the denuclearization he seeks, and it is unclear if something less or different is acceptable to the United States.

How acceptable, for instance, is a peace treaty if North Korea makes only symbolic progress toward denuclearization?

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 12:07 schreef DeParo het volgende:

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Dat is jouw mening maar je weet zelf ook wel dat die niet vaak als argument tellen.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 11:46 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

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Ergens hoop ik ook dat het vredesproces faalt, anders denken die Amerikanen straks nog dat het een goed idee is om vaker een Trumpist tot president te verkiezen.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 12:28 schreef Nintex het volgende:

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Je wilt Nucleaire oorlog, omdat anders Trump credits krijgt.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 12:21 schreef Wombcat het volgende:

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Wat jij continu vergeet is dat Kim nu ook in een andere positie zit dan twee, vier of acht jaar geleden: hij heeft kernwapens en ICBM's, dus een veel sterkere onderhandelingspositie, Dat betekent ook dat hij veel meer aanleiding heeft dan in het verleden om onderhandelingen te willen.

En wat de partijen claimen hoeft natuurlijk niet waar te zijn, kan ook onderdeel van het spel zijn. Zoals al vaker is aangegeven, is het een goed idee om Trump een paar kruimels te geven, want hij hapt graag.
En er zijn al genoeg analyses langsgekomen dat Kim heel andere bedoelingen met de onderhandelingen heeft dan Trump en dat Trump zich nu al dusdanig in de kaarten heeft laten kijken, dat hij eigenlijk niet meer terug kan.

Hier bijvoorbeeld: https://www.politico.com/(...)ts-from-trump-218115

Paar relevante stukjes eruit:

[..]

Nu Kim kernwapens heeft, is de logische stap voor hem om dat uit te buiten op de onderhandelingstafel. Dat er nu dus onderhandelingen zijn/komen is imo veel meer de consequentie van dat hij die wapens nu heeft, dan van wat anders dan ook. Niet de verdienste van China, Zuid-Korea of de VS, maar simpelweg van de veranderde positie van NK.

quote:

“Anybody who tells you what North Korea wants is lying, or they’re guessing,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a scholar in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former senior director for arms control and nonproliferation in the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. “We don’t know what Kim Jong-un has for breakfast, so how can we know what his real end game is? We just don’t have great intelligence into his personal thinking.”

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 12:25 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

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Het gros van wat hier wordt gepost, is een mening die is verpakt als een visie. Jouw complete Iran- en Korea-repertoire is gestaafd op jouw bevooroordeelde meningen. En dat geeft verder ook niet, want dit is een discussieforum. Het is alleen wat vermoeiend als je dan telkens 'high and mighty' loopt te doen met reacties zoals bovenstaande.

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Op zondag 6 mei 2018 12:28 schreef Wombcat het volgende:
In aanvulling van wat ik hierboven postte:

Voor zowel China, Noord-Korea als de VS bekt het natuurlijk ook voor geen meter om te zeggen "Tsja, Kim heeft nu kernwapens, dus we moeten we naar de onderhandelingstafel, al onze eerdere acties hebben niet tot het gewenste resultaat geleid." Dan is het beter om elkaar wat credits toe te schuiven.

En het lijkt me een volstrekte illusie om te denken dat aan de onderhandelingstafel Kim zijn sterkste troef gaat weggeven.