Thought for the Day

[Stavros]

On Camp David, annual maintenance cost $10 million-
Camp David is very rustic, it’s nice, you’d like it. You know how long you’d like it? For about 30 minutes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/u...rump.html?_r=0

Cost of Cashpoint's golfing weekends = $3 million. 16 so far, thus roughly $50 million. Is this already the most expensive Presidency since 1789?

[nitron]

or

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.....

[nitron]

ERDOGAN......you better hope there's no god,

[Stavros]

ERDOGAN......you better hope there's no god,

He believes he is God, in a manner of speaking, arrogating more and more power to himself and his family because the Strong Man is what people want. They don't want a President who can't get policies through Parliament or is challenged in the courts, so it is hardly surprising that from now on he is Boss and don't argue with him!

The President of the USA has called the Sultan to congratulate him on his victory in the referendum -the State Department has queried the validity of the vote, but that's no surprise as there is no 'joined up' government in the USA, but we don't know if the President congratulated the Sultan on purging the armed forces, the civil service, schools, universities and the media of 150,000 people it did not like, while the immediate consequence of the failed coup last year was the arrest and imprisonment of 50,000 opposition figures, including anyone who protested in a way the supporters of the Sultan did not like, to add to the record number of journalists imprisoned in Turkey, more per capita than any other country in the world. Shutting down newspaper -check; shutting down media outlets -check.

We don't know if the President congratulated the Sultan on the 'strategic patience' that Turkey used when it gave a safe haven to Daesh and al-Qaeda, or if the Sultan complained about those thousands of US service personnel fighting alongside 'terrorists -aka Kurds, although the Turks deny they exist as they are 'Mountain Turks'...

But we can be sure that the President of the USA is most concerned to protect the Branded building in Istanbul, known as the 'Twin Towers' (you can't make it up) which has netted him at least $5 million in the last 10 years, pocket money for sure, but as Cashpoint would say, 'Every dollar counts', just as to this ATM in Turkey you can add the ATM's in Egypt, and since the meeting with Premier Xi the major breakthrough in China-US relations, namely an agreement that Cashpoint can open branded buildings/ATM's in China, and stop claiming China is a 'currency manipulator' which he claimed repeatedly on the campaign trail but now denies.

As always, Follow the Money, in the case of both men, for Sultan will now use his powers to make himself even richer than he is already. What other reason is there for going into politics?

[broncofan]

A woman named Louise Mensch claims that she has sources in the US intelligence community and they have confirmed that there exists smoking gun evidence of Trump Russia collusion. I am hesitant to credit this information since I've seen her call random people she has a negative interaction with on twitter Russian moles. From what I gather, Louise Mensch was a conservative MP in Britain who did not have a very good reputation there and was/is remembered for several notable verbal blunders. She now lives in New York and has been tweeting and blogging with manic intensity about Russia-gate. She has also appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher recently.

She has been the first to report the existence of at least one fisa warrant and her initial report was accurate, but she seems to have a very high error rate or be prone to rampant speculation. I suppose the one question I have is that if the information being spread among independent media (ie. bloggers) is correct why would there not already be indictments. I wonder if Louise Mensch will eventually call someone who is litigious a Russian agent and get sued....

I suppose the reason I am posting this here is because there seems to be a left-wing cottage industry of digging up innuendo about Russia-gate and some of it might be true, but it is presented in such a way that you can't really trust it. Has anyone else been following the rumor-mill and if so do you find it reliable. How exactly can one verify information presented with anonymous sources and a thousand caveats and weasel words?

[broncofan]

Typically I would just wait until it was reported by credible news services with verified information...so I must just want it to be true. This last election has really provided an avenue for opportunistic wingnuts to purvey nonsense. I am not saying Mensch is one of them, but the era of the blogger and the twitter warrior is really allowing charlatans to flourish.

[Stavros]

Louise Mensch (nee Bagshawe) was indeed a Tory MP but was not offered any ministerial jobs and had the woeful reputation of being one of the most attractive MPs on the green benches -attractive to middle aged men, that is, which in the House of Commons is equivalent to a curse- and disliked the invasion of her privacy MPs like her receive from the media, but which she encouraged, often through her ill-prepared, often daft statements. Once she went to New York to be with her husband she started this 'internet presence' which once led her to laud Leonard Cohen as a symbol of the joy of America ('Russia is joyless' she claimed) even though Cohen was Canadian. She has claimed Theodor Herzl was an anti-semite and has a long-running feud with the journalist brother of Christopher Hitchens, Peter, which is about as interesting as a feud between Bill O'Reilly and Jill Stein.

She is one of those people who live through a cycle of cocktail parties in NYC and Washington DC where her access to 'insiders' probably led her to the information she puts out on the net. As with most people who want to be taken seriously, a percentage of what she writes is accurate, but another percentage just made up or from unreliable sources, choose your own percentages.

The allegations of Russian connections to the campaign of the Republican candidate are strong, not least with regard to Paul Manafort who was laundering money for Ukraine's crooked political elite and left the campaign early on, and there are links to other oligarchs from whom Golf borrowed money with links to shady characters like Roger Stone and Carter Page. Whether the Russian government had links remains to be seen but when the Republican candidate openly and in public asks a foreign government to hack his opponent, you wonder where the police went that day. And if Obama broke the law and ordered a wire-tap then why hasn't he been arrested and charged?

[broncofan]

Thank you Stavros. That was exactly the information I was soliciting and fills in the gaps for me. A lot of what she says and writes seems like the sort of information one would get from talking to influential people in a social rather than professional setting. You are right about the existing Russia connections, but what she says goes far beyond what can be confirmed...

She claims Epshteyn, Page, and Manafort have been recorded during the election cycle discussing how they would tell Russians that Trump will radically change U.S. policy towards Russia in exchange for the Russian's assistance in "hacking the election" (hacking the election meaning hacking the DNC). If such a recording existed, why would the FBI not just haul these people in, charge them, and encourage them to talk in exchange for leniency? For this reason I am guessing it's not true. That does not seem like the type of recording a law enforcement agency would sit on for months in the hopes that something more incriminating materializes without their intervention.

[broncofan]

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/...korean-n748046

In field tests our missile defense system has failed to shoot ballistic missiles out of the sky on six out of nine occasions. Yet the pentagon insists that the system is more than competent enough to protect the U.S. from a nuclear ballistic missile attack from Iran or North Korea. The system can be made more effective using the shot doctrine, where five or so interceptors would be fired at each warhead in the case of an attack. Anyone launching an attack can make the implementation of this approach very difficult by firing multiple decoys at the same time as a warhead. Apparently, the missile defense system can discriminate between decoys and real warheads based on heat, which then can be countered by cooling the warhead before it's launched by the country carrying out the attack.

The point is not that the system is not perfect, or even that North Korea yet has intercontinental range with its nuclear weapons, but that Trump is acting like they could not possibly strike the U.S. If they did, the retaliatory strike would wipe out North Korea, but they are not rational actors and our defenses against their aggression are probably not as ironclad as the Pentagon claims.

[trish]

If it becomes a matter of who sports the biggest dick, Kim or Donald, it is more than likely Kim Jong un will aim his nuclear arsenal at our fifty million innocent friends and allies in South Korea. Donald won't be thinking about the effects of radiation burns on babies and children until it becomes politically expedient for him to do so.