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Francisco 2.0

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Posts posted by Francisco 2.0

  1. 18 minutes ago, pyrohornIII said:

    I don't understand the outrage over there being no WALL money in the bill.  We were told we weren't paying for it anyway. 

    https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/02/sports/trump-asks-help-in-paying-flutie.html

    You can fool some of the people all of the time....

    Like 30-40%

    The important thing about this link is not the fact that Trump was badgering people to pay for something he wants (history repeating itself, yada) but "John Barron" mentioned in the link....that we now know was Trump himself posing as a Trump employee.

     

    Quote

    John Barron, a vice president of the Trump Organization, said Trump wanted the other owners to honor an agreement that he said had been reached earlier this year before Trump signed Flutie to a six-year contract worth $8.25 million.

    ''When a guy goes out and spends more money than a player is worth, he expects to get partial reimbursement from the other owners,'' Barron said of Trump's signing of Flutie.

     

     

    • Like 1
    • Haha 1
  2. Seems kind of relevant:

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/judge-orders-cody-wilsons-arrest-demands-pictures-of-his-upper-legs/

     

    Quote

    On Wednesday morning, a county judge signed the arrest warrant for Cody Wilson, who is accused of sexually assaulting an unnamed underage girl.

    Upon Wilson’s arrest, Travis County Magistrate Judge Tamara Needles also ordered that police take photographs of the inside of Wilson’s "upper legs," presumably as a way that he can be identified by the victim. Wilson apparently has a "uniquely identifiable skin condition" according to court documents.

    Quote

    A week after the alleged encounter, a counselor contacted APD on August 22 to inform them that one of her clients had been involved in this incident. Detectives then interviewed the girl, who provided numerous details about her alleged encounter with Wilson.

    The girl's parents also allowed the police to search the girl's iPhone. There, authorities found numerous messages and links to SugarDaddyMeet.com, the website where Wilson and the girl apparently met.

    Police ultimately matched a Texas driver’s license of Wilson, who allegedly went by the handle "Sanjuro," with Sanjuro’s profile picture on the website.

    Wilson and the girl exchanged messages first through SugarDaddyMeet and later via iMessages. Reportedly, he eventually told the girl that he was a "big deal." When she attempted to learn more about him, the girl found numerous news articles about the digital firearms activist.

    She was interviewed a second time on August 30 by Austin police, and at that time she told authorities she and Wilson had exchanged nude photos of one another.

     

  3. Jonathan Swan is the national political reporter for Politico.  Today, he held an AMA on Reddit.  This stands out, but not at all surprising:

     

    Edit:  the link to the reddit page for some reason is this huge deal instead of just a link:

     

     

     

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    Q:  

    Are there any particular topics you honestly don't believe is receiving enough press coverage or visibility?

     

     

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     A:

    Almost everything that's important across the federal government. I cover the White House, but I try to avoid as much as possible the gossip beat. I have covered Trump's trade agenda very closely, for example.

    But so much is happening across the agencies that isn't getting national media attention. Skilled and knowledgable beat reporters, including some of my colleagues, closely follow the daily happenings at HHS, Energy, Interior etc. But they rarely rise to cable TV news.

    A senior Trump administration gleefully noted to me a few months ago that their agency was doing things that would be very controversial in a normal world. They have almost no oversight from the White House, Trump doesn't care about their issue area, and the national media is obsessed with the Trump tweet of the day. That's a bad combination and means they can operate with little scrutiny.

     

  4. Full, unquestioned loyalty expected.

    https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/18/trump-ron-desantis-hurricane-maria-828005

    Quote

    President Donald Trump is privately lashing out at one of his top allies, Ron DeSantis, angrily accusing the Florida Republican gubernatorial nominee of publicly betraying him.

    The president has told close associates in recent days that he views DeSantis — who won his Aug. 28 GOP primary thanks to Trump’s strong support — as profoundly disloyal for distancing himself from the president’s assertion that the Hurricane Maria death toll was inflated by Democrats for political purposes.

    “Ron DeSantis is committed to standing with the Puerto Rican community, especially after such a tragic loss of life. He doesn’t believe any loss of life has been inflated,” the DeSantis campaign said last week after Trump tweeted that "3000 people did not die” in Puerto Rico.

    Quote

    DeSantis’s reaction, however, particularly piqued the president. Trump views the former congressman as politically indebted to him, people familiar with the president’s thinking say, because he believes DeSantis owes his electoral success to him. The president has privately maintained that he was correct with his comments about the hurricane’s death toll, and has expressed frustration that DeSantis crossed him on the matter.

    Quote

    One person close to the president described the situation as a “divorce.” At the moment, Trump has no plans to travel to Florida to campaign for DeSantis in the November general election, according to two GOP officials familiar with the president’s schedule.

     

  5. 5 minutes ago, Red Five said:

    We’re about to watch a sitting president tweeting about the size of his dick.

    Hell, he all but bragged about it at a debate in the fall of '15.  Many, including myself, laughed at the time.  What little did we know.

    • Like 1
  6. Now that Stormy's came out with a description of our Dear Leader's cock, when will Trump or a surrogate send out a pic or a counter-description?  You know he wants to.  He can't stand for her description to be the only one.

  7. 5 minutes ago, Iconoclast Texan said:

    $10,500 for his kid’s school tuition is considered pricey. Have you seen what it costs to send your kid to Kinkaid or St John’s? That’s surprisingly affordable for DC

    It's $21,000 per year.  2 kids.

     

    And he's also a member of Congressional Country Club.  He became a full member in 2017 (initiation fee $120,000).  It's listed on his disclousres.

  8. Probably bits and pieces posted upstream, but I digress:

    https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/09/the-many-mysteries-of-brett-kavanaughs-finances/

    Quote

    Before President Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, he had a lot of debt. In May 2017, he reported owing between $60,004 and $200,000 on three credit cards and a loan against his retirement account. By the time Trump nominated him to the high court in July 2018, those debts had vanished. Overall, his reported income and assets didn’t seem sufficient to pay off all that debt while maintaining his upper-class lifestyle: an expensive house in an exclusive suburban neighborhood, two kids in a $10,500-a-year private school, and a membership in a posh country club reported to charge $92,000 in initiation fees. His financial disclosure forms have raised more questions than they’ve answered, leading to speculation about whether he’s had a private benefactor and what sorts of conflicts that relationship might entail. 

     

    Quote

    A number of the questions Whitehouse sent Kavanaugh dealt with the house he bought in tony Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 2006 for $1.225 million. Kavanaugh would have needed $245,000 in cash for the traditional 20 percent down payment on the house. But in 2005, when his nomination to the DC Circuit was pending, Kavanaugh reported a total net worth to the Senate of about $91,000, which reflected a mere $10,000 in the bank and $25,000 in credit card debt. According to his financial disclosure forms before and after the purchase of his house in 2006, Kavanaugh’s liquid assets and bank balances never totaled more than $65,000, and those balances didn’t decline after the purchase of the house. 

     

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    The White House didn’t fully address how Kavanaugh managed to incur all that debt and pay it off in a matter of months on his federal judge’s salary of $220,600 a year. (His wife left the workforce in 2010 and returned in 2015, when she took a part-time, $66,000-a-year job as the town manager in their village of 225 homes.) A spokesman told the Post in July that Kavanaugh had used his credit cards to purchase Washington Nationals season tickets and playoff game tickets for himself and friends, who later paid him back. The White House also said some of the debt came from home improvements. 

     

    Quote

    Whitehouse also asked about Kavanaugh’s membership in the Chevy Chase Club, which he joined in 2016. In his responses to a Senate questionnaire before his confirmation hearing, Kavanaugh made the club sound like a basic rec center, writing, “The Chevy Chase Club is a recreational club. We joined because the club has an outdoor hockey rink and a girls ice hockey program, and because of its gym and sports facilities.”

    But the Chevy Chase Club is a lot more than a gym. Whitehouse noted in his questions that the club’s initiation fee is reportedly $92,000, plus more than $9,000 in annual dues. The private country club founded in 1892 is so elite that a neighborhood realtor once told the Guardian that “you can be a CEO, a billionaire, but you can’t get in.” Its website offers no insight as to how someone might go about joining—it’s by invitation only. But the website does outline the dress code: no jeans, no collarless shirts, and hats must be worn “visor forward.” Any guest hoping to play tennis with a member must appear on the court dressed only in white.  

    Quote

    Whitehouse wanted to know how someone with less than $65,000 in the bank came up with the initiation fee to join the club. Did someone help him? And if so, who? Kavanaugh wrote in his response that he paid the full price to join the club, as well as the annual dues, with no discounts. Befitting a club member, he declined to say exactly how much that initiation fee was.

     

    • Like 2
  9. Um, yeah.  They will get right on that.

     

    https://trib.al/PFBu48V

     

    Quote

    The White House hasn’t asked the FBI to investigate the allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a woman when they were in high school, a request required for the bureau to take further action, according to two people familiar with the matter.

    The FBI’s initial background investigation into Kavanaugh was completed before Christine Blasey Ford came forward with the allegation. Kavanaugh, who has denied the allegation as “completely false,” and Ford have both said they’re willing to testify before Congress.

    Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have said they want the FBI to investigate the allegation. But FBI background investigations are conducted under specific procedures and through requests from government agencies -- which in Kavanaugh’s case would come from the White House, said the two people who asked not to be identified discussing the sensitive matter.

    Further investigation by the FBI could be politically volatile, thrusting the bureau into the middle of a tense battle over the future lineup of the Supreme Court. While there appears to be limited evidence for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to work with, the bureau is accustomed to doing professional background investigations, even when the evidence is thin.

    "There’s a very large political chess match being played out," said Ronald Hosko, a former senior FBI agent who’s now president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. "Both sides have very clearly staked out positions on this candidate."

    Quote

    Hosko said it’s up to the White House to define the parameters of any additional investigation, which should insulate the bureau from attacks that it’s overreaching.

    “I don’t see the FBI as necessarily being at risk from the politics of this,” Hosko said. “The FBI is basically working for the White House. Their job is to dig into the details and let the White House counsel know if there is derogatory information.”

     

     

  10. How fascinating.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/tom-arnold-and-mark-burnett-fight-over-trump-tapes-at-emmys-party?ref=home

    Quote

    Twitter was doing what it does best in the early hours of this morning as recriminations flew in real time following a scuffle between Tom Arnold and MGM Chairman and The Apprentice producer Mark Burnett.

    There is bad blood between the two because of Arnold’s new show, The Hunt for the Trump Tapes, which investigates, among other issues, whether Burnett has suppressed Apprentice-era outtakes of Trump using the N-word, according to the show’s website.

    The show premieres today on Viceland.

    The two were walking into Sunday’s Evening Before Emmy party, a fundraiser for the Motion Picture Television Fund, after having arrived at the same time, when the fight kicked off, according to Variety, which reported it was “unclear who made the first move.”

    Variety said, “One attendee who was within earshot of the scuffle said Arnold could be heard challenging Burnett regarding the outtakes of Apprentice.”

    Needless to say, events were more dramatically recounted on Twitter.

     

    Quote

    Arnold has alleged that there are outtakes from The Apprentice that show Trump using sexist and racist language, including the N-word. Arnold claims that Burnett, who created the reality-TV show, won’t release the tapes because he’s protecting Trump.

    Trump denied the existence of the alleged “N-word tape” last month when former Apprentice star turned Trump aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman published her memoir, Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House.

    In the book, she discusses her efforts to learn more about the rumored recording.

    Trump has denied the existence of any tapes of its kind.

    Burnett and MGM, which owns the Apprentice franchise, have said the studio does not in any case have the legal right to release outtakes and unused footage from the show.

    Quote

     

     

  11. https://www.axios.com/donald-trump-debt-infrastructure-plan-963f975e-a8c4-4560-a517-c68d94de9dc6.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

     

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    Donald Trump wants to rebuild America’s infrastructure the same way he built his buildings: debt, debt and more debt. His then-economic adviser, Gary Cohn, learned this the hard way in a fraught meeting last year, the details of which haven’t been previously reported.

     

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    What happened: As Cohn and his team were putting together their $1.5 trillion infrastructure package, Cohn tried to use a real estate analogy to sell Trump on his plan to pair public and private investment. It backfired.

    The Cohn plan proposed leveraging $200 billion of federal investment into a $1.5 trillion overall infrastructure package — with state and local governments and the private sector making up the difference.

    Trump was skeptical. 

     

    Quote

    Instead, he just wanted the federal government to borrow tons of money for infrastructure projects. He was especially obsessed with overhauling his hometown airport LaGuardia, which he calls "Third World."

    The President horrified some Republicans in an October 2017 meeting with members of Congress at the White House when he told the Democrats that he liked their plan of massive public investment in infrastructure, according to a source in the room.

    "We've just gotta spend money on this," Trump said, according to the source.

    "He wants to govern like Robert Moses, but Republicans won't let him," the source added, referring to the titanic public official known as the "master builder" of mid-20th century New York City.

     

    Quote

    Cohn tried to win Trump over with a real estate analogy, according to two sources familiar with their conversation. "Think about when you're putting up a building, you put down $50 million of your own money to leverage several hundred million," Cohn told Trump.

    The president scoffed. He told Cohn that when he was building, he'd never be so stupid as to put down his own money. He'd borrow the first installment from one bank and borrow the rest from another bank.

    Cohn told associates afterwards that he'd never have supported such an idea when he worked at Goldman Sachs. "I'm a 30% equity guy," Cohn told associates after the conversation. "He [Trump] is 100% leverage."

    Why this matters: During his career as a real estate magnate, Trump proudly called himself the "King of Debt." Now, he's the President of Debt — stimulating the economy by slashing taxes and jacking up defense spending without doing anything serious to rein in entitlement spending.

    A source familiar with Trump's private conversations with Republican members tells me it's going too far to say he doesn't care at all about debt. "When he talks to [Rep. Mark] Meadows and Freedom Caucus members, he's very sensitive to the sense that we're accumulating as much debt as the Obama years," the source said.

    But the proof is in the numbers: Under Trump, the U.S national debt has passed the $21 trillion mark.

    Quote

     

     

    • Like 3
  12. Not really the right thread for this, but yeah, it probably does belong.

    https://www.kctv5.com/news/kansas-woman-told-birth-certificate-wasn-t-enough-to-prove/article_144c19aa-b50f-11e8-94f5-6b921312a97a.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=user-share

     

    Quote

    Born and raised in Kansas, Gwyneth Barbara didn’t expect this kind of hassle.

    Barbara had been issued a U.S. passport before, but this time around, Barbara was told her birth certificate wasn’t good enough to prove her citizenship.

    “It’s like they’re retroactively declaring that I was never a citizen,” Barbara said.

    Barbara was born in a farmhouse in the 1970s in Leavenworth County. She had a birth certificate. Her father went to the courthouse days after she was born to certify her birth -- raised seal and all.

    The local passport agency accepted her documentation as satisfactory for her passport application. Days later, she received a letter from the federal division of the U.S. Passport Agency out of Houston, TX, telling her the application was denied and required further documentation.

     

    Quote

    “I have a birth certificate it was accepted before, why wouldn’t it be accepted again?” Barbara explained.

    The letter stated, because her birth certificate was not issued at a institution or hospital, it was not considered proof enough of her citizenship.

    She received a letter asking her to submit any number of the listed additional documents.

    “Border crossing card or green card for your parents issued prior to your birth? My parents were born in the United States….Early religious records? We don’t have any. Family Bible? They won’t accept a birth certificate but they will accept a family Bible?” Barbara said.

    Meantime, she did her best to dig up any of the random documents she was be asking to provide.

     

     

    Quote

    After weeks of unreturned phone calls and unanswered questions, Barbara contacted U.S. Senator Jerry Moran’s office for help. The senator’s office launched an inquiry and followed up with another. A few days later, Barbara received her passport in the mail, with no explanation.

    According to the federal website, there is no policy stating a birth certificate must come from a hospital or other official institution. To see all of the requirements click here.

    When KCTV5 called the U.S. Passport Agency, the employee answering the phone said a county issued birth certificate for a home birth was acceptable for a passport application, but in some cases, that decision is made on a "case by case basis."

     

  13. I have to assume Graham has fully flipped now.

    https://www.rawstory.com/2018/09/sen-lindsey-graham-military-lawyer-dismisses-mueller-convictions-lying-fbi-not-big-event/

     

    Quote

    Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), an Air Force JAG officer, on Sunday defended President Donald Trump by saying that lying to the FBI is not a “big event.”

    During an interview on Face the Nation, host John Dickerson asked Graham to react to the news that former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort has agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

    “I don’t know yet,” Graham replied. “I know that from the [Judiciary Committee] point of view we found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. I think [Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman] Richard Burr said from the Intel point of view that he has seen no evidence of collusion.”

    Graham argued that Mueller should be allowed to complete his investigation, but the South Carolina senator also said that he was “disappointed” that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails had been closed.

     

     

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    Dickerson asked Graham to grade Mueller based on his record of indictments, pleas and guilty verdicts in the Russia investigation.

    But Graham suggested that guilty pleas for lying to the FBI do not carry the same weight as other convictions.

    “You got to look at the substance of what people pled to,” the military lawyer opined. “Some people pled to lying to the FBI like [George Papadopoulos] got two weeks in jail.”

     

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