Boy, Hillary's Probably Hooped Now

[Guest]

don: what is wrong with being friends with Russia?   Cold war aside, I suspect we have more commonality with Russia than we do with China.  
Ru

[IFG]

2 hours ago, Lakelad said:

Charles Krauthammer: No matter who wins on Tuesday, the free world will be leaderless: ....

More ....

David Frum - The Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy  

David Frum - The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton

And for those complacently & gladly assuming Trump will lose:

Reposting Bluemic's Link From the Other Thread, Trump v. 2.0

The most eloquent and persuasive arguments against handing the White House keys to DJT come not from his nominal opponents, but from the other side of the aisle, i.e. the Party that put him up. Of course those who just want to tip the table over will dismiss them as elite lackeys. If they were more thoughtfully informed, they'd see how reckless and immature such a hasty disregard truly is. This is unprecedented behaviour, in somewhat unprecedented times.

We shouldn't sneer at the Yanks', we could well follow them, as they're somewhat following European footsteps, in flirting with charlatans and their phony simplistic bromides.

It's three generations since most of the folks in those mature democracies have faced real adversity. There has never been a better time or place to be alive. We got here by muddling through difficulties, maybe with plenty of acrimony, but not losing sight of the things demanding greater loyalty or sacrifice, and with an institutional memory of what real privation meant. Yet many now talk of themselves & their circumstances in ridiculously apocalyptic terms. Real apocalypse has faded from sight in the collective rear-view mirror.

Democratic sausage-making is not pretty, even if it does beat all the alternatives. There's not a safety-net, tho', and History has shown that people sometimes take a wrong turn.  I hope we don't take such a turn toward authoritarianism.

Cheers, IFG  

[Jaydee]

On 2016-10-30 at 5:27 AM, deicer said:

Isn't it interesting that Trump fans are apoplectic over the email issue, yet nothing is mentioned about Trump's upcoming fraud and child rape court dates....

 

Lawsuit dropped. 

 

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/donald-trump-rape-lawsuit-dropped-230770

[FireFox]

http://video.foxnews.com/v/5197517437001/?#sp=show-clips

[deicer]

Looks like Fox news came through again.....

With wrong information

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/fox-news-admits-phony-hillary-clinton-indicted-foundation/26487/

Donald Trump supporters and the Alt-Right were jubilant on Thursday at the apparent news that Hillary Clinton was likely to be “indicted” by the FBI over her role in the Clinton Foundation charity. Propaganda sites like Breitbart declared that the election was all but over, and Trump himself parroted this claim during his own stump speech. But now it turns out that the Fox News reporter who started the whole thing is admitting that he pretty much made up the entire thing.

The “indictment” storyline began when Fox News reporter Bret Baier claimed on Wednesday night that two anonymous sources had told him Hillary Clinton was going to be indicted over the Clinton Foundation. But nearly twenty-four hours later, after the whole thing had turned into a firestorm among Trump’s base, Baier is now admitting that he incorrectly relayed what his “sources” told him, and he’s also acknowledging that his sources wouldn’t be in a position to know such things to begin with – as individual FBI employees would have no knowledge over whether any given investigation might or might not ultimately lead to an indictment of any kind.

If Bret Baier’s “sources” on this story really exist to begin with, and if they are employees within the FBI, then this represents at least the third time in the past week in which the FBI has attempted to dishonestly rig the Presidential election against Hillary Clinton. The first was when FBI Director James Comey violated federal law by trying to mislead the public into believing that she was under new investigation, when it’s actually an unrelated investigation into Anthony Weiner. The second was when the FBI began tweeting misleading information about Bill Clinton. In any case, this latest FBI-tinged story about Hillary Clinton being “indicted” over the Clinton Foundation is indeed pure fiction. If you enjoy Daily News Bin, consider making a contribution:

http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/03/media/baseless-fox-news-indictment-report/index.html

Throughout the day on Thursday, NBC News, ABC News and CNN all reported that Fox's assertion was not true. And Baier, the Fox host responsible for the original assertion, seemed to backtrack from it, saying he had spoken "inartfully."

On Friday, Baier went further, saying, "That just wasn't inartful, it was a mistake and for that I'm sorry."

By then, however, the talk of a looming "indictment" had spread across the internet and social media, especially among Hillary Clinton opponents who were predisposed to believe the story.

News outlets like The Hill and RealClearPolitics published stories repeating Baier's original claim, and countless conservative blogs and forums claimed it as fact and celebrated Clinton's possible legal peril. Some sites wrote hopefully about prison time.

Related: Fox News gives Tucker Carlson primetime show

By Thursday evening, Clinton's campaign responded by calling on the FBI to make a public statement "to put a stop to these baseless Fox News reports."

Campaign press secretary Brian Fallon cited reporting by NBC's Pete Williams, who said "the idea that indictments are near is just not true."

Fallon tweeted, "This reporting has been debunked far and wide, and even by Fox News' standards, it was shameful for them to air it."

The original report about an ongoing probe into the Clinton Foundation came on Baier's 6 p.m. program "Special Report" on Wednesday. An hour later, he talked with 7 p.m. host Brit Hume and said this: "We talked to two separate sources with intimate knowledge of what's going on with the FBI investigations... The investigations will continue, there is a lot of evidence. And barring some obstruction in some way, they believe they will continue to likely an indictment."

Frenzied headlines ensued. But other anonymous sources told reporters at other outlets that the stories were untrue.

"The idea that indictments are near or something like that, I'm told that's just not true," NBC's Williams reported.

"There's been some reports out there today that an indictment is in the offing in the Clinton Foundation investigation," said CNN's Evan Perez. "Everything we've known about this investigation -- that's been going on well over a year -- is that that's not true."

ABC News called the report "inaccurate and without merit."

By then, however, Brent Bozell, the founder of the conservative Media Research Center, had already slammed the major networks for ignoring Baier's rep

 

[Lakelad]

.

The Clinton Connection

How Bill and Hillary raised and earned millions from Canada’s corporate elite

Fri Nov. 04, 2016 - The Globe and Mail
By Karen Howlett, Jeffrey Jones and Andrew Willis

It was the plane ride that launched a thousand good deeds, and one lingering controversy.

One day in June, 2005, Bill Clinton clambered aboard the private jet of Frank Giustra, the Vancouver mining financier. Mr. Clinton needed to get to Mexico City to begin a speaking tour of Latin America and oversee the work of his sprawling charitable enterprise. The two men didn’t know each other well. But Mr. Giustra happened to have a luxury MD-87 aircraft to get him there. And he was curious about the former U.S. president and his philanthropic work.

The trip and the conversation marked the beginning of a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Soon after, Mr. Giustra became one of the largest single donors to the Clinton Foundation and rallied an entire industry to raise millions of dollars for its fight against global poverty. He, in turn, gained entrée to Mr. Clinton’s inner circle – and became Corporate Canada’s most famous “Friend of Bill.”

For more than a decade, both men have burnished their reputations by travelling the globe and collaborating on big ideas in far-flung places. Mr. Giustra’s Twitter profile is a veritable photo gallery of the two men. Here they are in Peru last November, distributing household goods to women. There they are in El Salvador earlier that same year, assisting small-scale farmers. The Canadian arm of the Clinton Foundation – the brainchild of Mr. Giustra and known as the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership – has poured more than $35-million (U.S.) into eradicating poverty in parts of the developing world where many of the mining companies he helped finance do business.

“We have improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, in Canada and around the world,” Mr. Giustra said in a written statement to The Globe and Mail. He calls such endeavours “my life’s work.”

That work has involved rallying the support of the many high-profile industry figures and associates on behalf of Bill and Hillary Clinton, making him the most prominent figure among their extensive Canadian connections.

But playing that role has also meant being dragged into what he calls a “media circus” – because when the Clintons are involved, the tale is always more complicated than simply giving away a fortune and doing good things with it.

A series of stories in major U.S. publications raised questions about what else Mr. Giustra gets from the relationship, beyond the satisfaction of giving back. The stories revolved around uranium and oil assets acquired by companies in which Mr. Giustra was involved. In 2005, he visited Kazakhstan with Mr. Clinton and, soon after, acquired uranium interests in the former Soviet republic. In 2007, he secured the rights to operate one of Colombia’s largest oil fields.

In both instances, Mr. Clinton introduced Mr. Giustra to the president of the country before the asset sales were completed. Mr. Giustra has repeatedly denied that there was any political interference or that he donated to the charity to further his business interests. Though many have tried over the years, no one has produced evidence that it was the Clinton connection that helped to secure the deals. “Brief meet-and-greets and photo-ops with politicians and heads of state are simply that, nothing more or less, and any sophisticated deal maker will attest that it would be naive to believe that a photo-op will secure anything in a large, complex private transaction,” said David Brown, Mr. Giustra’s lawyer, in a written response to questions from The Globe.

Mr. Giustra and his various businesses have been able to weather the scrutiny. In the battleground of public opinion, however, the Clintons have been unable to shake the negative perceptions that stem from their mixing of philanthropy, for-profit business, friendships with wealthy individuals, corporate interests, foreign interests, and politics. Their success in raising astronomical sums of money from Mr. Giustra and scores of others – some $2-billion – has also given Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, one of his best lines of attack in his battle against Hillary Clinton for the White House.

By portraying her as a Washington insider who engages in “pay-to-play” schemes, whereby donors contribute money in exchange for special access and influence, he has been able to cement a public view of Ms. Clinton as a grasping, unethical politician. In September, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that more than 70 per cent of voters – including a majority of Democrats – believe she is “too willing to bend the rules.” In the third televised debate, when moderator Chris Wallace asked Ms. Clinton if she had kept a 2009 promise to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest in her dealings with the foundation, Ms. Clinton stumbled: She avoided the question, but defended the foundation as a “world-renowned charity.” If she does not capture the presidency next Tuesday, her failure to counter her rival’s “Crooked Hillary” slur will be one of the root causes of her defeat.

If she hangs on to win, however – and the polls still make her the favourite – close scrutiny of the Clintons’ extensive corporate ties will continue for as long as she’s in the Oval Office. In fact, Hillary Clinton would come to power with stronger ties to the Canadian business elite than any president before her. A Globe examination of Clinton Foundation documents and Bill and Hillary Clinton’s own financial disclosures reveal a web of connections into Bay Street that runs far deeper than Frank Giustra and his immediate circle.

"She created this mess and she knows it"

.

 

[Jaydee]

How Hillary entertains a Liberal crowd .....BUT don't ever call it locker room talk.

"The rapper repeatedly used the n-word and dropped the f-bomb as he performed “F—WithMeYouKnowIGotIt” and his hit “Dirt off Your Shoulder” song at a Cleveland rally."

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/jay-z-hillary-clinton-concert-2016-11

[DEFCON]

Deicer

Regarding the article you have posted above; FOX says the Bret Baier report was confirmed by two independent sources before its release.

We may come to learn that the story was a creation of the FBI who released highly inflammatory, albeit it false information to quickly identify and plug a possible leak in its security chain? Bret Baier's report would have served to confirm the leak and by backtracking on the trail, the FBI would find their way to the source, who will probably turn out to be disgruntled Trump supporters?

 

 

 

[Newman]

seems like a good place to put these links...

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/world/scourge+election+fake+news+exploding+social+media+seeping+into/12350935/story.html

[Don Hudson]

Why not be "friends" with Russia & Putin?

The question sounds innocent enough, and perhaps even timely.

It appears that it takes our own Canadian media to answer the question where the American "liberal" media hasn't.

Reposted from deicer's link to Saturday's, (November 04, 2016), Globe and Mail on the "10 things..." Trump thread.

 

Quote

 

Follow the money to see why Putin wants a Trump victory

MARK MACKINNON
MOSCOW — The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Nov. 04, 2016 10:10PM EDT
Last updated Saturday, Nov. 05, 2016 9:26AM EDT

Vladimir Putin likes the idea of Donald Trump as president of the United States. But what the Kremlin wants most from the U.S. election is chaos.

Analysts and diplomats in the Russian capital say undermining U.S. democracy – thus weakening the appeal of the country’s soft power around the world – is the real goal of the Kremlin’s efforts to influence the Nov. 8 election via the alleged hacking of Democratic National Committee e-mails, as well as the extensive coverage by Kremlin-friendly media of Mr. Trump’s claims that the election is rigged against him.

“They would be happy to show that the situation in the U.S. is not ideal, that it is crumbling … that before giving lessons to Russia, they have to fix their own problems,” said Sergey Utkin, head of foreign and security policy at the Moscow-based Centre for Strategic Research.

A discredited U.S. leadership – particularly in the event Mr. Trump carries through on his threat not to concede defeat if Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is declared the winner of the election – strengthens the Kremlin’s hand in its showdowns with the West over Syria and Ukraine, and weakens the argument of those calling for political change in Russia itself.

An actual victory for Mr. Trump would be icing on Moscow’s cake.

To understand why Mr. Putin is rooting for the American billionaire, you have to follow the money – and not just Mr. Trump’s alleged links to Russian businesses.

The Kremlin, analysts here say, is running out of money fast, and needs to find a way to end the Western sanctions that were levelled against it in 2014 over its actions in Ukraine. Mr. Trump, they believe, may be the man to bring about the financial relief Moscow needs.

Not because the Kremlin is expecting he would immediately lift sanctions – though there have been reports that top Russian officials met with Mr. Trump’s adviser Carter Page to discuss just that – but because a Trump victory is expected to shatter the unity of the West and send European governments looking elsewhere for leadership in the world.

“They like to think that if Trump wins, then there is no hope for unity in the West, and if something is bad for the West, then it is good for Russia,” said Nikolai Petrov, an independent political analyst.

Two years ago, Russian troops were entering Crimea ahead of its annexation from Ukraine and the Kremlin was activating its separatist allies in the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk. At the time, Russia’s Reserve Fund – largely accumulated during Mr. Putin’s first decade in power when oil prices were frequently more than $100 (U.S.) a barrel and the domestic economy was growing – stood at nearly $90-billion.

Today, as oil prices linger below $50 a barrel and the economy contracts for a third consecutive year – all while Russia is pouring funds into Crimea, and waging war in faraway Syria – the Reserve Fund is worth just over $30-billion, having been depleted by $6-billion to cover overspending in August alone.

A draft budget submitted last week to Russia’s parliament, the Duma, called for steep cuts to health services, education and even previously sacrosanct defence spending, which has risen in past years as Mr. Putin has modernized his country’s army and deployed it abroad. Even still, Russia’s Finance Ministry expects the Reserve Fund to be completely depleted some time next year, just ahead of presidential elections in 2018, when Mr. Putin is widely expected to run for another six-year term.

There’s loud worry about the tightening finances, and talk that Mr. Putin may be forced to call an early vote to avoid having to campaign for re-election just as his government is going broke.

“Putin is demonstrating now that his time horizon is much longer than the 2018 election. That means he either needs to borrow money to finance until the [2018] election, or hold an early election,” Mr. Petrov said. Borrowing abroad is currently very difficult under the sanctions targeting Russia’s banking sector; hence the hope that a victory by Mr. Trump on Tuesday would shake up the international status quo in Russia’s favour.

U.S. intelligence agencies have accused “Russia’s senior-most officials” of ordering a hacking attack on the e-mail servers of the Democratic National Committee, a leak that damaged Ms. Clinton by revealing how the party’s top figures opposed her only challenger for the nomination, Bernie Sanders.

Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist considered an expert on cyberwarfare, told The Globe and Mail that he considers the evidence connecting Russia to the DNC hack “quite strong.” But a summer-long FBI investigation reportedly found no concrete proof of other ties between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. Mr. Utkin and Mr. Petrov both said that many of the allegations of Russian interference in the American vote are “hysteria.”

The Kremlin denies any involvement in hacking the Democratic Committee e-mails, and Mr. Putin has scoffed at the idea that Mr. Trump is Moscow’s choice in the race for the White House. He claims the narrative of Russia meddling in the U.S. election was “inserted into the public consciousness” by Ms. Clinton and her supporters.

“How is this done? First, they create an enemy in the form of Russia, and then they say that Trump is our preferred candidate. This is complete nonsense and totally absurd,” Mr. Putin told a late October meeting of foreign-policy experts, adding that Russia would work with any president the American people elected.

But as he continued to speak, Mr. Putin abandoned his attempt to sound neutral. “I think there is some sense in his actions,” the Russian President said of Mr. Trump. “I say this because in my view, he represents the interests of the sizable part of American society that is tired of the elites that have been in power for decades now.”

Ironically, the drama unfolding in the U.S. election is following a script that often played out during disputed votes in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe over the past two decades.

Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was often the Kremlin that was crying foul and the U.S. that stood accused of trying to influence elections that Moscow considered its business to run. The Kremlin believes that U.S. meddling led to pro-Western revolutions in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine earlier this century, as well as election-time protests in Moscow five years ago.

(The original sin, in the minds of many here, was the intervention in Russia’s 1996 election, when U.S. spin doctors were dispatched to prevent Boris Yeltsin from losing to Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov. The idea of “managed democracy” – with the Kremlin guiding and limiting the public’s choices – surfaced in Russia soon afterward.)

That history is now being played back through a fun-house mirror.

“This is a year where things ironically switched, that Russia is accused of meddling in an election. Usually, it’s Russia accusing the West of meddling in an election,” said Anissa Naouai, a host with RT, a Kremlin-owned news channel.

RT has made waves – and gained a new following among Mr. Trump’s supporters – during the U.S. campaign by devoting plentiful air time to the Republican candidate’s claims that the election is rigged against him. (Ms. Naouai points out that Western journalists have never shied away from pointing out flaws in Russia’s democracy. “Maybe Russia and America are just becoming more similar.”)

It’s perhaps doubly satisfying to Mr. Putin that he’s seen causing trouble for Ms. Clinton. During the 2011 protests in Moscow, Mr. Putin personally accused Ms. Clinton, then U.S. secretary of state, of masterminding the demonstrations, saying she “set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal.”

“This [history] is very important to understand [Mr. Putin’s] mentality and his behaviour. He’s focused on those events where the U.S. promoted regime change. Now, he can demonstrate that nobody is safe,” Mr. Petrov said. “Putin will be very glad to get payback.”

The script in Ukraine and elsewhere involved the U.S. throwing its diplomatic weight behind anti-Kremlin candidates, while independent media (including outlets that were funded by U.S. democracy-promotion programs) published revelations that undermined public confidence in their political systems.

The day after the election – in Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004 and in Russia in 2011 – crowds came into the streets waving the colours of the opposition candidate, resulting in popular revolutions in the first three countries and a brief challenge to even Mr. Putin’s grip on power. The Kremlin’s political strategists call it the “colour-revolution scenario.”

It’s not much of a stretch to see Mr. Trump’s insurgent run for the presidency – which is glowingly portrayed in state-run media here as a popular uprising by working-class Americans – as borrowing from the same playbook. Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed (without the proof wielded by protesters in Ukraine and elsewhere) that the election is rigged. Some of his supporters have mused aloud about armed rebellion if Ms. Clinton is declared the winner.

“Whoever wins the U.S. election, the loser won’t accept the result,” Dmitry Kiselyov, a Putin confidante who hosts Russia’s most-watched television newscast, gloated this week. “This isn’t a coloured revolution yet. But it’s funny.”

Less evident than the schadenfreude is whether the Kremlin really wants to deal with a President Trump.

There’s little question that Mr. Trump – who has praised Mr. Putin as a strong leader and asked “wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along with Russia?” – starts off from a more pro-Russian outlook than any other White House contender in memory. From the Kremlin’s standpoint, that makes him far-more malleable than Ms. Clinton, who would be expected to continue many of outgoing President Barack Obama’s policies.

U.S.-Russia relations over Ukraine, Syria and other issues are so frosty that the current state of ties is frequently compared to Cold War times.

Mr. Trump’s entourage also includes several figures with Kremlin links. His campaign manager (until he resigned in August as controversy about his Russian connections swirled) was Paul Manafort, a veteran political operative previously best known for managing the career of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Mr. Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 by protesters furious over his deference to Moscow.

Mr. Trump’s main defence adviser is Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn, a former head of the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency, who more recently has been a regular guest on RT programs and who was infamously seated at the head table at an RT gala in Moscow, just two seats away from Mr. Putin.

Carter Page, a previously unknown Moscow-based businessman, was one of Mr. Trump’s foreign-policy advisers until he took a leave from the campaign in September amid furor over his reported meetings with top Putin aides Igor Sechin and Sergei Ivanov to discuss the possible lifting of sanctions. (Mr. Page called the reports, which cited anonymous Western intelligence officials, “completely false.”)

There also appear to be business connections between Mr. Trump and Russia. Though the Republican candidate has yet to open his tax records to public scrutiny, his son Donald Trump Jr. – who is executive vice-president of the Trump Organization – once told an audience that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

The suggestion that Mr. Trump listens to people like Gen. Flynn, Mr. Page and Mr. Manafort has led Kremlin-owned media to declare Mr. Trump the “peace candidate” in this race, in contrast with the “war-like, Russia-hating Hillary Clinton.”

“Putin supports Trump, because Trump supports Putin’s policies. Just that simple. You don’t need a PhD in Russian Studies to understand it,” Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, posted on his Twitter account this week.

Nonetheless, there are deep divisions in the Moscow foreign-policy community over whether four years of Mr. Trump in the White House would actually be good news for Russia. Top of any incoming U.S. administration’s to-do list would be resolving the horrifying civil war in Syria, where Mr. Putin has deployed his country’s air force to bolster the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, while the U.S. backs an array of anti-government militias. The risk of proxy war escalating into a direct conflict between nuclear-armed states was highlighted Oct. 17 by a near-miss in Syrian skies involving a Russian warplane supporting Mr. Assad’s forces and a U.S. jet carrying out a bombing run against the Islamic State.

Next on the agenda would be Ukraine, where the U.S. and its allies are hoping the sanctions will force the Kremlin to abandon its support for separatists in the east of the country, and undo its 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.

After that come myriad other complicated issues – from climate change to combatting international crime – on which genuine co-operation between Washington and Moscow is both crucial and rare.

“Trump likes Russia, likes Putin, likes Putin’s methods of foreign policy and so on. But I’m very careful and cautious about this because we must be cautious of populists, and Trump is a populist,” said Valery Garbuzov, director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, a research centre funded by the Russian government.

While there was personal animosity between Mr. Putin and Ms. Clinton, Mr. Garbuzov said Ms. Clinton was seen as a politician whose behaviour could at least be predicted. A Trump presidency, meanwhile, could bring “chaos” to U.S. foreign policy. “For Russian interests, it would be better when there is a situation of stability in the U.S., a situation of predictability rather than unpredictability. An understanding of reality.”

Some analysts believe that – regardless of who wins – Moscow has already achieved its main aim by fostering the impression of instability in the United States.

Mr. Trump’s main gift to Mr. Putin and autocrats around the world may well be the impression he has created with his complaints that the U.S. system is rigged. If democracy in the United States is so dangerously broken, aren’t Russians better off with the stability offered under Mr. Putin’s authoritarian rule? It’s a hammer Mr. Putin – who has led Russia as either president or prime minister since 1999 – can wield against his few remaining domestic opponents ahead of the 2018 elections. “Russia’s domestic narrative is only strengthened by discrediting the American electoral process,” said one Moscow-based Western diplomat.

Mr. Trump’s claims that the system is rigged against him sound silly to those fighting for political change in Russia. “This can be used by Putin and Russian propaganda,” said Dmitry Gudkov, who was the last anti-Putin MP in the 450-seat Duma until he lost his post in a September election. Mr. Gudkov, who said he was denied access to the media during the campaign, in which the only candidates’ debate was cancelled, added that he could only dream of the kind of exposure Mr. Trump and his ideas have received during his run for the presidency. “I think he needs to come to Russia to understand exactly what a rigged election is.”

 Report Typo/Error
Follow Mark MacKinnon on Twitter: @markmackinnon

 

 

[Guest]

Much ado about Trump and Russia but everyone seems to ignoring the Clintons and China. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3718929/Pictured-Hillary-Bill-Clinton-Chinese-billionaire-accused-Communist-bid-influence-election.html

EXCLUSIVE: Pictured together, Hillary Clinton, her husband and the Chinese billionaire accused of being front for Communist bid to influence election

• Ng Lap Seng  is waiting trial on bribery charges but also faces being subpoenaed over his part in a 1996 scandal
• Ng, a billionaire from the Chinese territory of Macau, is alleged to have been a front for a communist bid to influence the 1996 elections 
• Cash he funneled to a Chinese restaurant owner and friend of Bill Clinton was found to be used as illegal campaign contributions 
• Ng fled the U.S. to avoid being questioned by Congress but returned an is now facing trial accused of bribing United Nations officials
• One of his co-accused has already been sentenced to 20 months and Ng could face demands for a far heavier sentence if found guilty election.

 

Now the scandal is threatening to return to haunt the Clinton -  as Ng faces being questioned in font of Congress, something he managed to evade by fleeing the country in the late 1990s.

 

 

 

 

+4

Communist frontman? Ng Lap Seng was seen shaking hands with Bill Clinton in a picture taken before the revelation of illegal money being donated to the 1996 Clinton campaign

 

+4

Finally facing questions: Billionaire Ng Lap Seng, who was in Federal Court in Manhattan in June, fled the country to avoid giving Congressional testimony but is now facing demands to give evidence

While the illegal donation scheme led to the prosecution of a long-time friend of Bill Clinton, investigators were never able to conclusively establish whether the operation was part of a Chinese government effort to buy influence and access in the Clinton White House.

The 1996 foreign donor scandal led to investigations in both the House and Senate, which uncovered evidence that Democratic fundraisers ignored red flags about the sources of the illegal donations.

It also found indications that the Clinton administration and the Democratic National Committee traded access and favors in exchange for the money.

The case led to the indictment of long-time Clinton friend Charlie Trie, an Arkansas restaurant owner. 

Trie pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and said he used straw donors to make illegal contributions with money supplied by Ng.

At the time, Trie also denied that the money had any direct connection to the Chinese government, and claimed the DNC and the Clinton White House were unaware the donations were coming from foreign sources.

Ng's background and how he ended up as a major funder of Clinton's reelection bid is still largely a mystery. 

But the recent bribery charges against him in New York provide additional indications that he is closely involved with the Chinese government.

 

 

+4

Testimony: In an investigation led by then Senator Fred Thompson, the Chinese government was accused of  trying to affect the 1996 election outcome. Charlie Trie, who was jailed, later gave evidence.

Ng was arrested in New York last year for allegedly offering bribes to the former president of the United Nations general assembly, John Ashe, who died suddenly last month in a barbell weight accident. 

Ng reportedly made a number of trips to the U.S. carrying suitcases full of money, and prosecutors said Chinese officials were also involved in the bribery scheme. 

Ng's trial is scheduled to begin in January and he remains under house detention in New York.

Ng was also a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress, 'a communist organization in the People's Republic of China,' according to the report.

One unnamed business associate told investigators that Ng was 'a peasant farmer before coming to Macau, but somehow had been selected to act as a front for the People's Republic of China'. 

The chief investigator on the Congressional committee at the time told Daily Mail Online Ng was a key missing link in the inquiry. 

'Ng Lap Seng was the source of huge amounts of illegal foreign funds that ended up in the Democratic National Committee through straw donors,' said David Bossie, who is now president of the Citizens United watchdog group.

 

 

+4

He's with her: Hillary Clinton, who campaigned with billionaire Warren Buffett in Ohio on Monday, met the Chinese billionaire accused of being a front for his country's government

'We never got to find out if he was acting as an agent of the Chinese government or his true motivation,' Bossie added.

Ng's attorney said on Thursday that he would not make his client available for an interview with congress. 

However, the House Oversight Committee could override this by issuing a subpoena to Ng. 

 

20 MONTHS FOR PAYING OUT BILLIONAIRE'S CASH

A tearful U.S. citizen who bribed a top United Nations official to get support for business ventures was sentenced to 20 months in prison last Friday by a judge who said bribery schemes do 'substantial damage' to the U.N.'s image.

Sheri Yan, 60, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick in Manhattan after pleading guilty to a bribery charge in January.

Yan admitted paying more than $800,000 in bribes to former U.N. General Assembly President John Ashe, who died several weeks ago in an accident at home. He was awaiting trial after pleading not guilty to a tax charge in the case.

 

Jailed: Sheri Yan leaving an earlier hearing 

Broderick rejected a request to keep Yan out of prison by defense attorney Christine Chung. Prosecutors sought a nearly six-year prison term.

 

 

Chung said she was working as a consultant when she met Ashe in early 2012 in Hong Kong, where Ashe offered to make her an adviser when he became president of the General Assembly. By spring 2012, Yan was passing along bribes to Ashe.

Prosecutors say funds for the bribes came largely from Ng Lap Seng.

Yan's plea agreement said she gave bribes to Ashe to persuade officials in Antigua to enter into business contracts with foreign companies. At the time, Ashe was an ambassador from Antigua and Barbuda.

In 1994, Ng struck up a business relationship with Charlie Trie, a friend of Bill Clinton's who had run a Chinese restaurant in Arkansas that Clinton frequented while he was governor.

That same year, Trie made a $100,000 donation to the DNC, even though he had never made any comparable political contribution before and had no apparent wealth. 

He began to get invitations to high level DNC events and continued to make large contributions, many of them through proxy donors and using money from Ng. 

In total, Ng reportedly channelled over $1 million into the DNC and Clinton's legal aid fund during the reelection campaign.

As the donations poured in, Ng and Trie were granted numerous private meetings with top Clinton administration officials and meetings with Bill Clinton himself - including the handshake caught on camera. 

Currency transaction reports reviewed by congress showed that Ng carried 'large amounts of cash into the United States before each of his meetings,' according to the report.

Trie was also appointed to Clinton's Commission on United States-Pacific Trade and Investment Policy in 1996 'despite the fact that he lacked any qualifications to serve,' the report stated. 

When a Senate aide involved with the trade commission questioned Trie's appointment, 'these objections were met with the response that Trie was a 'must appointment' from 'the highest levels of the White House',' said the report.

Although DNC officials later claimed they did not realize the money was coming from Ng, the Chinese billionaire was listed as a donor on one of its event programs and his signature was on another $15,000 donation check, according to the report.

Trie, who first became friendly with Clinton in 1982, told congress that he was able to arrange coffee meetings with Bill Clinton for these donors in exchange for $50,000 donations to the DNC.

Bossie said that the question of foreign influence in an election has been revived in recent weeks, amid suspicions that the Russian government was behind an email hack at the DNC earlier this month.

'The question of whether a foreign government tried to influence a presidential election is important as we see by the alleged Russian hacking,' said Bossie.

Daily Mail Online has reached out to the Clintons for comment. 

[DEFCON]

Don

I read the article you posted above. Although informative, it doesn't answer the question; 'why not be friends with Russia & Putin', unless of course you accept the perspective the US and the article's author are advancing. For instance; the near miss over Syria referenced only occurred because the US were planning to bomb the forces supporting Assad, not ISIS as they claim, and the Russian jet was responding to the American threat. If Obama's forces were to back away from Syria, Assad, with the aid of Russia would be able to restore order to at least that Country.

It's America's imperialistic ambitions that have destabilized pretty much every middle-eastern Country as well as Afghanistan & Pakistan and yet, they have the audacity to fault Russia for defending the Assad regime, its long standing strategic friend?

The Crimean conflict arises as a consequence of the western banksters quest to install the Federal Reserve banking system in the Ukraine, which would have denied Russia and the relatively new BRIC of its membership, which is not a good reason to get into conflict with Russia in my view.. 

    

[Don Hudson]

DEFCON;

Even as I said I don't believe in "world domination" or "world order" theories as being impractical and impossible to enforce, I do believe that the U.S. has, and still does believe in such notions, and actively pursues them through policies of U.S. Exceptionalism

Such policies are primarily informed not by original concepts of imperialism which intend actual, physical/military occupation but by economic "occupation" informed by old notions of plunder for private profit and appropriation of another country's resources, or it's market, or its currency, or for it's strategic location to protect all the above. It was Great Britain's 'way', for centuries and it worked, for a while.

As for Assad, Russia and the tragedy of the Syrian people, Russia is aiding and abetting Syria's leader in the mass murder of his population. In my view, Obama has done the same thing via the evaporating red line of a few years back. There are just times when negotiations are no longer effective.

Regarding "banksters", let us leave that conflated subject for another time. I think Trump is one such bankster and I have no reason to doubt the G&M statements regarding Trump and money. I think he wants to be friends with Russia to advance business. After all, he's a businessman, not a leader of a country.

[Guest]

Don: I also believe that he wants to be friends with Russia to advance business but so does our current PM. 

[Don Hudson]

Re our PM...not to mention China. And...?

We're all friends when it comes to "trade" and profit...Nixon made great "friends" with the Chinese; where are we today? Kennedy actually had a good relationship with Kruschev, (who tried desparately to avoid the nuclear race at the time). Did the U.S. really "beat" communism and Gorbachev? Did Reagan really bring down the wall, or was there a business opportunity?

Our cultural metaphors are informed by business, just as cultural metaphors were informed by religious beliefs at one time.

This tells me that today, while "business counts", people don't, (except of course when a politician needs their vote every so often).

I don't really believe we need to affirm this, but "friends and neighbours" just doesn't cut it when discussing international relations be they trade, power, isolationism or common bonds. "Friends" is complex. So yes, the U.S. can be "friends", (and, according to Sarah Palin, even neighbours).

But in terms of who's political system one wishes to live under or even have the scent of it nearby, I'll have ours thanks, warts, scent and all.

 

 

 

[IFG]

3 hours ago, DEFCON said:

.... For instance; the near miss over Syria referenced only occurred because the US were planning to bomb the forces supporting Assad, not ISIS as they claim, and the Russian jet was responding to the American threat ....

I'm curious. Assuming you refer to:

5 hours ago, Don Hudson said:

[From the linked G&M article] .... The risk of proxy war escalating into a direct conflict between nuclear-armed states was highlighted Oct. 17 by a near-miss in Syrian skies involving a Russian warplane supporting Mr. Assad’s forces and a U.S. jet carrying out a bombing run against the Islamic State ....

Your source? From Military.com:

• .... In a later statement on the incident, Air Force Central Command said that the Russian fighter was escorting a Russian surveillance aircraft and inadvertently flew across the nose of the U.S. aircraft .... (For the entire article)

Even Brietbart doesn't seem to support your take:

• .... The near-miss occurred late on October 17, when a Russian jet that was escorting a larger spy-plane manoeuvered in the vicinity of an American warplane, USAF Lt. Gen Jeff Harrigan said .... Brietbart article

Both are datelined October 28. Credible updates since then? Ever ready to learn, what were you referring to?

Cheers, IFG

[Don Hudson]

The FBI has completed its examination of Clinton emails. Director Comey has issued the statement that "nothing has changed."

Most emails were copies of those already examined. The "new" emails have not increased the number of those found on Clinton's server.

 

[deicer]

What Don said...

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/06/politics/comey-tells-congress-fbi-has-not-changed-conclusions/index.html

[DEFCON]

 

Taken from the article posted immediately above by Malcolm:

"Yan admitted paying more than $800,000 in bribes to former U.N. General Assembly President John Ashe, who died several weeks ago in an accident at home. He was awaiting trial after pleading not guilty to a tax charge in the case."

Another untimely yet convenient death?

 

 

[Don Hudson]

Election 2016
Inside Donald Trump’s Last Stand: An Anxious Nominee Seeks Assurance

By MAGGIE HABERMAN, ASHLEY PARKER, JEREMY W. PETERS and MICHAEL BARBARO
New York Times NOV. 6, 2016

Donald J. Trump is not sleeping much these days.

Aboard his gold-plated jumbo jet, the Republican nominee does not like to rest or be alone with his thoughts, insisting that aides stay up and keep talking to him. He prefers the soothing, whispery voice of his son-in-law.

He requires constant assurance that his candidacy is on track. “Look at that crowd!” he exclaimed a few days ago as he flew across Florida, turning to his young press secretary as a TV tuned to Fox News showed images of what he claimed were thousands of people waiting for him on the ground below.

And he is struggling to suppress his bottomless need for attention. As he stood next to the breakfast buffet at his golf club in Doral, Fla., eyeing a tray of pork sausages, he sought to convey restraint when approached by a reporter for The New York Times.

“I’m on message,” Mr. Trump asserted, with effort. “I’m not playing around. In fact, I’m a little nervous standing here talking to you even for just a minute.”

The latest news and analysis of the candidates and issues shaping the presidential race.

But moments later, his resolve had collapsed. He allowed the same reporter onto his plane for a flight from Miami to Jacksonville, Fla.

In the final days of the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump’s candidacy is a jarring split screen: the choreographed show of calm and confidence orchestrated by his staff, and the neediness and vulnerability of a once-boastful candidate now uncertain of victory.

On the surface, there is the semblance of stability that is robbing Hillary Clinton of her most potent weapon: Mr. Trump’s self-sabotaging eruptions, which have repeatedly undermined his candidacy. Underneath that veneer, turbulence still reigns, making it difficult for him to overcome all of the obstacles blocking his path to the White House.

The contrasts pervade his campaign. Aides to Mr. Trump have finally wrested away the Twitter account that he used to colorfully — and often counterproductively — savage his rivals. But offline, Mr. Trump still privately muses about all of the ways he will punish his enemies after Election Day, including a threat to fund a “super PAC” with vengeance as its core mission.

His polished older daughter, Ivanka, sat for a commercial intended to appeal to suburban women who have recoiled from her father’s incendiary language. But she discouraged the campaign from promoting the ad in news releases, fearing that her high-profile association with the campaign would damage the businesses that bear her name.

Mr. Trump’s campaign is no longer making headlines with embarrassing staff shake-ups. But that has left him with a band of squabbling and unfireable advisers, with confusing roles and an inability to sign off on basic tasks. A plan to encourage early voting in Florida went unapproved for weeks.

The result is chaotic. Advisers cut loose from the campaign months ago, like Corey Lewandowski, still talk to the candidate frequently, offering advice that sometimes clashes with that of the current leadership team. Mr. Trump, who does not use a computer, rails against the campaign’s expenditure of tens of millions on digital ads, skeptical that spots he never sees could have any effect.

Not even staff members who volunteer to be dismissed are let go. The senior communications adviser, Jason Miller, offered to resign after he was spotted at a Las Vegas strip club the night before the final presidential debate. The offer was rejected.

This inside account of the Trump campaign’s final stretch is based on interviews with dozens of aides, operatives, supporters and advisers, many of whom were granted anonymity to describe moments and conversations that were intended to be confidential.

Hope Hicks, Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, said the campaign was on course and gaining ground. She firmly rejected suggestions that advisers were clashing, and said voters were responding to Mr. Trump’s message.

Ms. Hicks denied that Ms. Trump had misgivings about promoting the ad in which she appeared. “That’s simply not true,” Ms. Hicks said. “Ivanka is totally supportive.”

The closing phase of Mr. Trump’s campaign has been punctuated by swaying poll numbers and dizzying mood swings. It started on Oct. 7 with the explosive release of a recording in which Mr. Trump was caught bragging about forcibly kissing women and grabbing their genitals.

Many Republicans decided that Mr. Trump’s already shaky campaign was over. Some despondent young staff members at the Republican National Committee on Capitol Hill, who usually work late into the night in the final stretches of a campaign, took to leaving their desks early, in time for happy hour at nearby bars. They complained that Mr. Trump had not just lost the election but was dragging down House and Senate candidates, dooming the entire party.

Mr. Trump’s aides were just as thrown by the tape. But they saw a chance to salvage his candidacy — on a Civil War battlefield.

His aides outlined 15 bullet points for him to deliver during an Oct. 22 speech in Gettysburg, Pa., to focus voters on a new theme of cleaning up government, even as several women came forward to accuse him of groping them just as he had described in the recording.

But Mr. Trump grew frustrated with the instructions. By the time he was done revising the proposed speech, only about a half-dozen of the original suggestions remained. And over the firm objections of his top advisers, he insisted on using the occasion to issue a remarkable threat: that he would sue all of the women who had gone public with the accusations.

As the advisers begged him to reconsider — it would make him seem small, they warned, and undermine a pivotal speech — Mr. Trump was adamant. There had to be a severe penalty for those who dared to attack him, he said. He could not just sit back and let these women “come at me,” he told one of them.

The speech was roundly criticized and seemed strikingly out of place on such sacred and historic ground. “The Grievanceburg Address,” one journalist deemed it.

Mr. Trump fell into despair, and the gloom already enveloping the Republican political class started to infect his campaign.

On Oct. 23, he learned that an ABC News poll showed him trailing Mrs. Clinton by 12 points. He lashed out, becoming so agitated that his aides planned to confront the network about its calculations and accuse ABC of bias, according to internal emails.

“Do they think Republicans and Trump supporters are not going to vote?” one of Mr. Trump’s pollsters, John McLaughlin, wrote to the group. “Or is this an intentional effort to suppress Trump turnout?”

They pressed the network on its methods, but other polls delivered similarly grim news.
An Injection of Hope

Then came an astonishing development. On Oct. 28, the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, announced that his agency would review newly discovered emails potentially pertinent to its investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

On an afternoon flight to New Hampshire, Mr. Trump and his aides saw the news splash across the giant flat-screen television on his plane.

Mr. Trump was unsure how to respond.

“What do you think this means?” he asked the small circle traveling with him — Stephen K. Bannon, his campaign’s chief executive; Stephen Miller, his senior policy adviser; and Mr. Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, who lives in New Hampshire.

To the assembled men sitting in white leather seats, the answer was simple: It could turn the election around.

But they insisted that to truly exploit it, Mr. Trump needed to do something he had been incapable of in the past: strictly follow instructions, let a story unfold on its own and resist the urge to endlessly bludgeon his rival.

They headed to a fleet of cars that whisked them to the Radisson Hotel in downtown Manchester, where a crowd of thousands was waiting for the candidate to take the stage.

But his aides needed time to sketch out what Mr. Trump should say — and not say. They sent Michael T. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, onstage with a mission: stall.

As the aides agonized over which words to feed into the teleprompter, they become so engrossed that a hot light set up next to the machine caused Mr. Bannon’s Kuhl hiking pants to begin smoldering.

“I think my pant leg is on fire,” he said after noticing the acrid smell.

At the rally, Mr. Trump did as he was told, quickly praising the F.B.I. and warning that Mrs. Clinton could not be permitted to “take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.” Then, improbably, he moved on.

For the next week, his campaign staff deployed a series of creative tricks to protect its boss from his most self-destructive impulses.

Several advisers warned him that he risked becoming like a wild animal chasing its prey so zealously that it raced over a cliff — a reminder that he could pursue his grievances and his eagerness to fling insults, but that the cost would be a plunge into an electoral abyss.

Taking away Twitter turned out to be an essential move by his press team, which deprived him of a previously unfiltered channel for his aggressions.

On Thursday, as his plane idled on the tarmac in Miami, Mr. Trump spotted Air Force One outside his window. As he glowered at the larger plane, he told Ms. Hicks, his spokeswoman, to jot down a proposed tweet about President Obama, who was campaigning nearby for Mrs. Clinton.

“Why is he campaigning instead of creating jobs and fixing Obamacare?” Mr. Trump said. “Get back to work.” After some light editing — Ms. Hicks added “for the American people” at the end — she published it.

Mr. Bannon, his rumpled campaign chief and a calming presence to the candidate, tried a different approach: appealing to Mr. Trump’s ego and competitive side by suggesting that the Clintons were looking to rattle him.

“They want to get inside your head,” Mr. Bannon told him. “It’s a trap.”

Of course, it was not easy to keep Mr. Trump focused. He chafed at his advisers’ request that he use a seemingly canned line in a speech — a call to curb government corruption by “draining the swamp” in Washington.

But he finally gave in when he saw the crowd reaction. And at a rally in Pensacola last week he noted with a smile that even Frank Sinatra disliked one of his biggest songs, “My Way.”

‘I’m Going to Win’

Mr. Trump still clings to certain prerogatives, such as personally approving every commercial before it reaches a TV screen. During a recent four-hour flight, Mr. Trump painstakingly reviewed a new batch of ads on an aide’s laptop and seized on the smallest details.

He objected to a short clip in one ad that showed him emerging from a hug with a female supporter, worrying that it made him seem dismissive rather than warm.

[DEFCON]

I haven't looked for updates IFG, but I doubt any I might come up with would be any more reliable than the ones you're putting forward.

Regardless, If you find the military's public explanation for the 'incident', satisfactory to your needs, I'm content to let you carry on holding to that belief.

 

[Jaydee]

That sinking feeling when Hillary realized...

 

 

[Kasey]

http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/no-charges-against-clinton-after-email-review-fbi-1.3148197

[Guest]

No matter the outcome in the voting on Nov. 08,it seems the the citizens of the US  will still have to wait until Dec./ Jan to see who will be their next POTUS.  Strange system.

When does the Electoral College cast its votes?

Each state’s electors meet on the Monday following the second Wednesday of December. They cast their votes then, and those votes are sent to the President of the Senate who reads them before both houses of Congress on January 6th.

Tues.  Nov. 8, 2016 - Election Day. Remember, though - voters aren't voting directly for the president - they are voting for a member of the electoral college who will vote for the candidate who get the majority of the vote in their state.

Dec. 19, 2016 - Electors chosen  on Election Day meet in their respective state capitals (or in the case  of the District of Columbia, within the District) on the Monday after  the second Wednesday in December, at which time they cast their  electoral votes on separate ballots for President and Vice President.

Jan. 6, 2017  -  Congress assembles in a joint session to count the electoral votes. The session is ordinarily required to take place on January 6 in the  calendar year immediately following the meetings of the presidential  electors.

Jan. 20, 2017 - Inauguration of the new president. If a president elect has not been determined by that time, then the vice president-elect becomes acting president...Unless the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President  elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who  shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act  shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a  President or Vice President shall have qualified.

[dagger]

Looks form the last polls as if Clinton is going to sail through to victory. 

 

And she has a massive ground game that is turning out record numbers of Hispanics. Justice is served.

 

BTW, I think this gaff this AM is going to stick as a metaphor for the Trump campaign.

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/11/07/trump-scottie-nell-hughes-mazel-tov-cocktails