@Walter Hinteler,
Walter Hinteler wrote:
georgeob1 wrote:From the End of WWI until the Syrians kicked them out soon after WWII,
Well, I'd thought, the English term for the French
Mandat pour la Syrie et le Liban was "Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon".
To all what I know, it was a League of Nations'
Class A Mandate - I'd thought "colony" to be something different.
Syria was by no means a French colony, but a country under the mandate of the League of Nations, administered like a protectorate. The objective was to give independence to this country, as well as to Lebanon, when a reliable and serious political elite would be formed to lead and administer this country.
I assume a similar arrangement was made for the British "Mandates" over Palestine and Iraq. Both Britain and France had worked out together how they would divide the spoils of the Ottoman Empire Before the start of WWI and their mutual efforts to bring down Ottoman rule of the Middle East. The historical record certainly supports the existence of colonial ambitions on the part of both Britain and France. Both countries made a bad job of it, bequeathing the world a continuing mess in the Middle East. The United States repeated these errors in Iraq.
@Olivier5,
French President Emmanuel Macron, whose country has special forces in Syria as part of the anti-Islamic State coalition, complained Friday that he had learned of a US withdrawal by Twitter. "And yet I thought that we were in NATO, that the United States and Turkey were in NATO..." Macron told reporters at an EU summit.
@georgeob1,
georgeob1 wrote:I assume a similar arrangement was made for the British "Mandates" over Palestine and Iraq.
Indeed.
And for all former "Schutzgebiete" (German territories) in West and Central Africa (Class B Mandates) as well as the (Class C mandates) former German possessions in South West Africa and certain of the South Pacific Islands.
This was all a result of the Versailles Treaty, the US diplomat Edward M. House one of the leading figures in the creation of all these mandates (see:
Bruce, Scot David, Woodrow Wilson's Colonial Emissary: Edward M. House and the Origins of the Mandate System, 1917–1919, University of Nebraska Press, 2013).
@coldjoint,
Either way it doesn't let Trump off the hook for asking a foreign government to look into a political opponent in return for a white house meeting and military aid. He broke campaign laws because the law says anything of value and dirt on Joe Biden is of value to Trump's re-election campaign. So is asking the Ukraine to look into if Ukraine has the DNC server. An investigation like that going on would give Trump legitimacy to bring it on the campaign trail regardless of how stupid it is.
At the end of the day, this was investigated, there was no evidence to suggest Hunter or Joe Biden did anything corrupt over there.
Quote:Kent said he had concerns that Ukrainian officials would view Hunter Biden as a conduit for currying influence with his father, said the people. But when Kent raised the issue with Biden’s office, he was told the then-vice president didn’t have the “bandwidth” to deal with the issue involving his son as his other son, Beau, was battling cancer, said the people familiar with his testimony.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/diplomat-tells-investigators-he-raised-alarms-in-2015-about-hunter-bidens-ukraine-work-but-was-rebuffed/ar-AAIYP6Z?ocid=spartandhp
The optics looked bad and they all should have known better. But that don't excuse the current President's actions which is on a whole other level. Whataboutism doesn't always work.
And your other post about the ban was just silly. You don't know the nationalities of the IS who escaped.
@revelette3,
Claiming that "investigating the Bidens" counts as a campaign contribution is silly and preposterous.
But if it is actually a campaign contribution, then "investigating Trump" is also a campaign contribution, and all of the Democrats have broken campaign finance laws for the past three years for trying to have Trump investigated.
@oralloy,
Do the words "foreign government" mean nothing to you?
Trump was in effect blackmailing (however you want to phrase it) the newly president of Ukraine because he wasn't sure he was going to "play ball." So he held a WH visit and military aide over Ukraine's head to get him to "play ball." He used his high position as President of United States to do it. It breaks the constitution and campaign laws.
Moreover, bringing Hillary name is dumb, I wish she would go away and ya'll wouldn't keep mentioning her. We are talking about our President we have now in this administration. But if Hillary broke campaign laws by providing financial support for the Steele dossier then so did the republicans who first financed it before she did.
The US constitution allows the congress and the House in particular oversight over the President. They have a duty to hold him accountable if they have reasonable evidence to believe he did something wrong. Our own intelligence community concluded the Russians meddled in our elections by hacking into the DNC server and other diverse methods. That gave them a reasonable reason to investigate Trump. The senate then has the right to smack it down if they feel they need to. It is the system we have and I am glad for it even when it don't go my way.
Trump on the other hand is mudding the waters with baseless conspiracy theories and you same gullible dupes keep falling for it, time and time again. Like he said, he could walk down fifth avenue... He has used the state department to carry out his baseless conspiracy theories and we have witnesses who have risked much to testify as to what they know about it all.
Luckily I am going to visit some of my family members, maybe I'll be distracted from this for a while a little bit.
Jared Kushner may have an ethics problem – to the tune of $90m
Since Kushner entered the White House, a firm he founded has received over $90m in foreign funds. The public has a right to know the sources
Vicky Ward
Sun 16 Jun 2019 02.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 18 Jun 2019 14.20 EDT
Senate Democrats have asked the Federal Reserve to scrutinize Deutsche Bank over allegedly suspicious transactions tied to President Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The stench surrounding Jared Kushner has grown more pungent with every passing day.
On Monday, the Guardian’s Jon Swaine reported that, since Kushner entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, a company Kushner co-founded has received over $90m in foreign funding, channeled through secretive offshore companies.
The public has no idea where this money is coming from – a major problem given that Kushner is not just one of Donald Trump’s chief international envoys, he is the de facto chief envoy.
The former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former defense secretary James Mattis found Kushner’s interference in Middle East diplomacy opaque, irritating and – by the summer of 2017, when he greenlit a blockade of Qatar, a country with a US airbase – downright dangerous. His zeal for settling a “deal of the century” for the Israeli prime minister, “Bibi” Netanyahu, an old family friend, has made him the US government point person in a region notorious for attempting to curry US political favor with dollars.
Even a whiff of potential conflicts of interest undermines Kushner’s diplomacy – something that would be unacceptable in any other administration.
But this is Trump World. There is only one guiding rule, which the principals barely bother to hide: pay to play. The corruption and self-dealing by Trump and his family is on so vast a scale that if it wasn’t so horrifying you’d almost admire the audacity.
Kushner founded the company in question, an online commercial real estate broker called Cadre, with his brother, Joshua, in 2014. “Cadre is going to make us billionaires,” Kushner announced to colleagues shortly afterwards. He refused to give up the entirety of his stake when he joined the Trump administration. (Kushner claims he divested from most of it, but shareholders were not notified of any sale, which is highly unusual.)
Worse: on his initial financial disclosure form, which he filed in March 2017 with the Office of Government Ethics, Kushner did not even list his stake in Cadre, which was worth up to $25m at the time. After the glaring oversight was reported by the Wall Street Journal, a lawyer for Kushner said that the omission was inadvertent and would be rectified. By June 2018, Kushner’s stake in Cadre was valued at up to $50m, or between 3% and 6% of the company.
Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017
A whistleblower has alleged that Kushner’s business interests are among the reasons career White House personnel security officers recommended that neither he nor his similarly conflicted wife, Ivanka Trump, be given a security clearance – a recommendation President Trump ignored.
Many administrations suffer embarrassing exhibits of corruption from family members who see proximity to power as their opportunity to cash in. In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter’s little brother, Billy, tried to profit by endorsing Billy Beer. In 1999, Neil Bush, son of the 41st president and brother of the future 43rd, founded a classroom technology company that received investments from the Kuwaiti royal family, a Chinese technology executive and a Russian billionaire. That same year, Tony Rodham, Hillary Clinton’s now deceased brother, partnered with the political opponent of a United States ally to export hazelnuts from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
But those efforts were made outside the White House by relatives without top-level security clearances. They pale in comparison to what the Trumps and Kushners may have done.
Some highlights to date: first there is the issue of the president’s tax returns, which Trump has refused to disclose despite a law that says that the treasury secretary must provide them to Congress if requested. We also know that, starting in 2010, Deutsche Bank lent money to the Trump Organization not from the bank’s own balance sheet, but via the private banking division, which means that Trump’s business is on the hook to entities or individuals whose identity is obscured.
Meanwhile, as president, Trump has brazenly intermingled politics with his business by flaunting presidential access via Trump properties like Mar-a-Lago, the so-called “Winter White House”, and the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, which have been flooded with foreign occupants looking to curry favor with administration figures.
Then there was “the bangle”. On 16 November 2016, just days into the Trump transition, Ivanka promoted a diamond bracelet from her jewelry line on 60 Minutes. The next day, her company sent out a “style alert” advertising the bangle for over $10,000. For the next 17 months, Ivanka moonlighted as a White House adviser while keeping ownership of her company, which was awarded several lucrative foreign trademarks, sometimes around the time of her meetings or chats with those foreign countries’ leaders.
Meanwhile, her husband, Jared – nominal head of foreign outreach on behalf of the Trump transition – and his father, Charles, were meeting secretly with the Chinese and various Middle Eastern rulers, seeking funds to bail out their financially stricken building at 666 Fifth Avenue, for which they needed $1.4bn by February 2019.
History will judge corruption to be the most destructive and defining characteristic of the mob-like family
Ultimately a Canadian firm – Brookfield, whose largest outside shareholder is an uber-rich Qatari sovereign wealth fund – came to the rescue with a financial offer that, according to any normal real estate logic, made no sense: leasing the building for 99 years, for $1.3bn – and paying the entire amount up front. Coincidentally, around the time that deal was reported to be in the works, the secretary of state called on the Saudis to end their blockade of Qatar. In cynical parlance, this is called dollars for diplomacy.
Fortuitously for the Kushner family business, the blockade of Qatar continues, which means the Qataris are still vulnerable. In the spring, representatives of the Qatari government told me in person and by email that there was another payment due to Jared via an offshore fund in June – which happens, apparently, to be when Cadre received the $90m.
In any other administration, a senior government official (let alone son-in-law) who was revealed to have clung on to a $50m stake in a company while serving in office and not disclosed it would have been asked by the president to leave. But President Trump will do no such thing – so other parts of the government must.
The Department of Justice should investigate Jared’s initially non-disclosed $50m stake in Cadre, and the investments the company has since received.
And Congress must work harder to overcome stonewalling and investigate the strange relationships that Kushner Companies and the Trump Organization have had with Deutsche Bank, where senior executives ignored calls to report Trump and Kushner transactions to the government for potentially suspicious activity. At least Senator Elizabeth Warren is demanding that the government-backed mortgage firm Freddie Mac supply details about its $800m Kushner deal this spring.
Congress should also put the microscope on Jared’s private communications and unwavering alliance with the clearly dangerous – but rich – crown prince of Saudi Arabia. (The Saudis, it should be noted, were shareholders in the Canadian firm that bailed out 666 Fifth Avenue.) But somehow that message gets lost in noise about Russia and other red herrings.
History will judge corruption to be the most destructive and defining characteristic of the mob-like family occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And it will be – but only if Congress takes action.
@farmerman,
Quote:SO cmon , lets not allow California's votes to count less than those of North Dakota.
From
Wikipedia
Quote:Clinton led in nearly every pre-election nationwide poll and in most swing state polls, leading some commentators to compare Trump's victory to that of Harry S. Truman in 1948 as one of the greatest political upsets in modern U.S. history.[17][18] While Clinton received 2.87 million more votes than Trump did (the largest margin ever for a losing presidential candidate),[19] Trump received a majority of electoral votes and won upset victories in the pivotal Rust Belt region. Trump won six states that Democrat Barack Obama had won in 2012: Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.[20] Ultimately, Trump received 304 electoral votes and Clinton garnered 227, as two faithless electors defected from Trump and five defected from Clinton. Trump is the fifth person in U.S. history to become president while losing the nationwide popular vote. He is the first president with neither prior public service nor military experience, and the oldest person to be inaugurated for a first presidential term.
304 to 227 is a massive difference, and a strong indicator that California had nothing to do with Trump's decisive victory, Clinton gaining 55 of those votes from Cali.
I'm still gobsmacked that anyone with zero public service nor military experience can be on the ticket in the first place, but (ad nauseum) HRC thought having the Don as an opponent, among all the other things she did, both legal and not legal, would be the icing on her cake for the run for head office.
I guess the people of the REST OF THE NATION saw through all of her bullshit, and narcissism, and got tired of being treated like **** by her.
@revelette3,
revelette3 wrote:Do the words "foreign government" mean nothing to you?
The Steele dossier was produced by foreigners too. So that's Hillary guilty of the same crime as Trump.
And Biden tried to pressure the government of Ukraine too. So he's guilty as well.
And the foreign thing is irrelevant in any case. If "investigating people" is a campaign contribution, have any Democrats declared the investigations of Trump as official campaign contributions? And have the value of the contributions stayed within legal limits? If the Democrats violate a different section of the campaign finance code, it's still a violation.
revelette3 wrote:Trump was in effect blackmailing (however you want to phrase it) the newly president of Ukraine because he wasn't sure he was going to "play ball." So he held a WH visit and military aide over Ukraine's head to get him to "play ball." He used his high position as President of United States to do it.
Good for him. That's the way international relations work.
revelette3 wrote:It breaks the constitution and campaign laws.
What part of the Constitution is supposed to be violated by this?
If "having people investigated" is a campaign contribution, then all of the Democrats are guilty of breaking campaign laws for trying to have Trump investigated.
revelette3 wrote:Moreover, bringing Hillary name is dumb, I wish she would go away and ya'll wouldn't keep mentioning her.
I realize that it's inconvenient for you that the Democrats are guilty of the same imaginary crimes that you are concocting against Trump, but that's reality whether you like it or not.
revelette3 wrote:We are talking about our President we have now in this administration.
Ah, the old "let's ignore the fact that the Democrats are breaking the law at the same time as we lynch Republicans for doing the same thing" argument. Hypocrisy really is an old standby for progressives.
Sorry, but no sale. If Democrats get to be above the law, then so do Republicans.
revelette3 wrote:But if Hillary broke campaign laws by providing financial support for the Steele dossier then so did the republicans who first financed it before she did.
Hint: This whole "investigations are campaign contributions" nonsense is nonsense.
revelette3 wrote:The US constitution allows the congress and the House in particular oversight over the President. They have a duty to hold him accountable if they have reasonable evidence to believe he did something wrong.
That doesn't make it OK for Democrats to abuse their power by conducting witch hunts against people who disagree with them.
revelette3 wrote:Our own intelligence community concluded the Russians meddled in our elections by hacking into the DNC server and other diverse methods. That gave them a reasonable reason to investigate Trump.
And that investigation did not find that Trump did anything wrong.
revelette3 wrote:The senate then has the right to smack it down if they feel they need to. It is the system we have and I am glad for it even when it don't go my way.
Just don't complain when the next Democratic president is destroyed with endless witch hunts.
Even if Trump stays in office until 2025, revenge for the past three years will still mean everyone doing their very best to impeach the next Democratic president and remove them from office.
revelette3 wrote:Trump on the other hand is mudding the waters with baseless conspiracy theories and you same gullible dupes keep falling for it, time and time again. Like he said, he could walk down fifth avenue... He has used the state department to carry out his baseless conspiracy theories and we have witnesses who have risked much to testify as to what they know about it all.
I've not fallen for anything. I support Trump because he protects America's civil liberties from progressives who want to violate our civil liberties for fun.
I couldn't care less if he rambles on about aliens killing JFK. As long as he continues to protect America's civil liberties from those nasty progressives, I'm fine with him believing any conspiracy theory that he wants to believe. That doesn't mean that I'll believe it myself, but it's not going to bother me if
he believes it.
https://thehobbledehoy.com/2019/03/08/british-writer-pens-the-best-description-of-trump-ive-read/
I excerpted the first half. This is good.
Quote: Someone on Quora asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:
A few things spring to mind.
Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.
For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.
I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.
Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.
And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.
Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.
He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.
He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
@snood,
Quote:He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
For ****'s sake, mate.
freedom of speech, right?
But don't bring ol' mate Jabba into it. K?
He might be offended
