Putin and Trump - World-Class Liars

Trump – “There is no collusion. Absolutely none. I have nothing to do with Russia.”

Putin - "Thank you, President Trump. Information obtained from the CIA was sufficient to search for and arrest of criminals.”

          Today, it is revealed by White House press manipulator Sarah Huckabee Sanders that on Sunday Russian President Putin phoned Trump to thank him for a tip from the CIA that thwarted a terrorist attack being planned at Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. A tip from the CIA? And Trump had a hand in providing it?

Countries share intelligence occasionally, but this call was highly unusual since presidents rarely, if ever, thank one another for something from the other's spy agency. According to the White House press release, which was offered only after the Kremlin had mentioned it in their own TASS dispatch, “The Federal Security Service said Friday that seven members of a terror cell had been detained for their involvement in the plot, and that "a significant amount of explosives," weapons and "extremist literature" were confiscated.

          TASS also reported that when caught, the perpetrators even obliged by confessing to the whole terrorist scheme on camera. It was almost as if it was STAGED!!!

For the fifth time this year, this information was released by the RUSSIANS…not by the White House. Not until the Kremlin made the phone call known did our own president acknowledge he had been colluding with…I mean, in contact with, Putin. So we’re just now finding out OUR intelligence agency is working with the RUSSIAN intelligence agency and American citizens have deliberately been kept in the dark. Yet both governments now want to openly brag about it, so it’s not like they’re trying to keep it a secret so they can thwart future terrorist attacks. Why is Trump telegraphing this information? He said so many times on the campaign trail that he wasn’t going to let our enemies know what the U.S. is doing. (What he seems to mean is he doesn’t want U.S. citizens to know what he’s doing.) As if it has always been done this way, Trump is pointing out how our intelligence service is helping the Russians.

This then begs the question of why didn’t our CIA do the same for the Pakistanis who supposedly are our allies when a terrorist bomber struck at a Christian church in Quetta last Sunday killing 9 people? Why didn’t our intelligence services provide any help to Nigeria in recent weeks when Boko Haram killed hundreds of people in separate attacks across that country since mid-November? Closer to home, why didn’t that vaunted intelligence stop Akayed Ullah the New York City subway bomber on December 12th? On top of all that, as recently as last month, Trump said he didn’t trust our intelligence agencies, and less than a year ago he was comparing them to the Nazis. Why was their untrustworthy intelligence good enough now to pass on to the Russians?

Does anyone believe this nonsense? What evidence do we have that the CIA provided the information? There is nothing to show it sent anything or contacted the FSB at all. Neither Trump nor Putin has provided proof of cooperation between the two agencies. We just have to take their word for it. But things that are asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Putin called to thank Trump for the CIA tip, after Thursday's call congratulating him on how strong our economy is. Why would the Russians congratulate the U.S. on a booming economy? How does that help Russia?

          This is just the latest pack of lies from two world-class liars. It was invented (by Putin or Trump, or both) to gloss over something entirely different. Both leaders agreed that this serves as an example of the positive things that can occur when the two countries work together. Here’s the bizarre part…you notice that “when the two countries work together,” the Trump administration never works with Brazil, Thailand, Iran, Denmark, China, Sri Lanka, or any other country in that manner. It is always…ALWAYS…the Russians - and only the Russians. Why?

          Do you believe Trump when he says there’s no collusion?

Something Caught in your Throat? Trump's Recent Weird Speech

On December 6^th 2017, Trump gave a speech about moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in Israel. If you were watching you most likely heard something odd in the last minute where he slurred through much of the remainder of that speech. It sounded as if, if he had dentures, they had come loose and were bumping around in his mouth, or that his tongue wouldn’t cooperate. The next day, in response, the White House announced that Trump would have a physical “early next year.”

Spoiler Alert: That physical exam will be a smoke screen. It will be to cover up what has happened. The people protecting Trump are not going to allow anyone to know what he really suffered or what is actually going on. Any results that are eventually made public will be false.

It could simply be that Trump is finally choking on his own bullshit.

He has been unfit for office since before the election that was flipped to him by the Russians, but this escalates the danger to our nation by having a man mentally unfit for office compounded by being physically unfit for office.

Trump’s physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein, or as he is referred to by late-night comedians “Dr. Feelgood”, may have contrived with Trump to cover up serious health concerns when he admitted last year that he wrote the letter declaring Trump would be the “healthiest president in history” in just five minutes while a limo sent by the candidate waited outside his Manhattan office. That four paragraph letter is the only medical information that’s been released about and by Trump and it really says nothing at all. It is composed of assertions and grandiose expressions about how astonishingly healthy Trump is but it is nothing close to a medical record. Intriguingly, Bornstein may have been giving us an oblique warning when he later said “the Oval Office has been occupied by presidents with dementia or tumors or even men who were "paranoid" or "psychotic." Was he acknowledging something that implicated Trump’s deteriorating health?

Bornstein’s letter was a bungled attempt to make Trump appear to be Superman but Trump’s diet alone speaks volumes about how he takes care of himself. He frequently eats sodium-heavy, high-fat-content, high-cholesterol-laden, low nutrition fast food like McDonald’s hamburgers, fries, and filet-o-fish sandwiches, KFC’s heavily-breaded chicken pieces, cheese and pepperoni pizzas and large chocolate milkshakes for lunch and sometimes even dinner. When he eats steaks they are so well-done they are almost charred – hidden under a thick layer of ketchup, occasionally accompanied by mashed potatoes smothered in gravy or a salad swimming in Roquefort dressing. When everyone else is served one scoop of ice cream at the White House, Trump has demanded and gets two scoops, plus large pieces of chocolate cake whenever he wants. He rarely eats vegetables and throughout the day he snacks on Vienna Fingers, potato chips, Oreos, and slurps down numerous cans of Diet Coke. He doesn’t exercise, and, as anyone who follows his Twitter account can verify, he gets very little sleep.

He maintains that his golf game is his exercise, and he does play A LOT of golf…more than PGA pros play. But he rides in a golf cart everywhere on the course, even right across the greens. He walks only from the cart to the ball and back. Picture after candid picture of him golfing shows a large belly and an expansive waistline. (Only William Howard Taft was a more...rotund...president.) No one knows for certain how overweight he is because he won’t release his medical records. Nutritionists, dieticians, and doctors who have studied the pictures say he is at least 50 lbs overweight. They have no ax to grind. They are simply making an observation about that person’s body mass in the photographs. Trump does not take his health seriously. So something like a stroke is almost expected given Trump’s callous regard for nutrition and an aversion to physical activity.

Notice that it takes two hands to get the small bottle up to his mouth

The White House issued an explanation for Trump’s slurred speech - and the made-up story was further advanced by their consummate liar, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders - that Trump was just having a problem with a dry throat. So why would Trump need a medical exam? My grandfather suffered a stroke when he was in his 70s and Trump’s speech pattern is exactly what my grandfather’s speech sounded like after his stroke. Grandfather also had dentures but he never sounded like that from loose dentures. From the beginning, Grandfather’s stroke noticeably affected his speech and it only got worse until he died. If Trump actually had a dry throat, why didn’t he just take a swig of water as he has done previously (even though he made fun of Marco Rubio for doing the exact same thing on camera?)

Suffering a stroke is nothing to be ashamed of, but since Trump has been lying to us about showing us his tax returns before election day, about how he now doubts that it’s his voice on the Access Hollywood tape (even though there were nine people on the bus with him at the time who all attest that yes that is Trump), and because he has lied over and over about how he has had nothing to do with Russia, even though he signed a letter of intent in October 2015 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow WHILE HE WAS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT, there is no reason to believe the White House’s excuse (probably dictated by Trump) that he just had a dry throat.

Trump is either finally starting to choke on his own lies or most likely suffered a mild stroke and has demanded everyone around him lie or keep quiet about it.

I hope his cabinet is brushing up on the 25^th Amendment.

"If we use big words like 'responding to Presidential disabilities' he won't know what we're talking about."

THE POOR, FORGOTTEN RICH WILL FINALLY GET SOME TAX RELIEF

I will go on the record right now to state that I am rich. No, I am not anywhere near being in the 1%. My wealth did not come from an accumulation of money and property. My wife and I live very comfortably but there is not a chance we'd be confused with any of the small number of Americans who have financial assets in excess of seven figures.

I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice because I have three of the best children in the world; all college educated, all successful in their careers, all still wanting, and looking forward to, spending time with my wife and me at any time. I have three wonderful, well-adjusted, very intelligent grandchildren. All three grandkids go wild with happiness when my wife and I visit their homes, or when they come to see us. I am their gymnasium. They love when my wife reads and sings to them - and they love everything that comes out of her kitchen. They make the two of us feel richer than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), I have a wonderful wife who I have been married to for 38 ½ years. I live in a modern, desirable southeastern US city with nice weather, close to the ocean. I recently retired from a highly successful career in broadcasting. I am an award-winning author and perform with a local band. So I am quite content.

          But I have never pursued money. I saw my father engage in that as I was growing up, but for all his pursuit, he never seemed to be happy about it. He was grouchy, distant, self-centered, devious…but never happy. Money accumulation only gave him a dour look as he sought a way to get more.

          I took a cue from that and decided whatever he did I wasn’t going to do…so I never chased the almighty dollar. I have had a successful career and by any measure I have done well, contributed to my savings account along the way, lived frugally, and invested in my wife’s and my retirement. But I did not try to rake in as much cash as I possibly could. I was far more interested in spending time with my family, watching the kids grow, teaching them, being with them, being the best father and husband that I could. I turned down dozens of lucrative opportunities to make substantial additions to our bank account…because of how I saw my father’s accumulations did nothing for his well-being, but generally it was because what those opportunities required of me…far too many nights, weekends, even months away from my family. My family was, is, and always will be, tremendously more important than money. But I apparently got it all wrong.

          The GOP is going to punish me for NOT pursuing the almighty dollar to make myself a millionaire - by making sure my taxes will go up while providing an enormous wealth redistribution to the very well-off, uber-wealthy, and filthy rich. People making over a million dollars a year will get a massive tax cut from the Republican tax plan by taking that money away from people like me to give to someone who’s net worth is ten to a hundred times what mine is.

The poor will just waste that money, anyway.

          

              Why do I deserve to have my taxes raised and my financial wealth diminished? Because, as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa explained in a November 29^th interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel, part of the reason for repealing, say, the estate tax is “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

So my tax burden will have to go up substantially because I'm not throwing my money at the stock market, plus, to make up the difference from the government's loss of Estate Tax revenue. I am not deserving of a huge tax cut because Grassley has imagined I spent most of my "pennies" on a house, college funds for my kids, day-to-day living expenses, utility bills and the like...which Grassley equates with booze, women and going to the movies. As my wife, children and friends will all attest, I rarely drink any alcohol, the only women I’ve spent money on the past 40 years are my wife and daughter, and when we go to the movies, we almost always go to the dollar theater, if we don’t just wait for the edited version to air for free on TV. So I don’t know where Grassley got his information. He is implying I’d be a millionaire now and could look forward to getting some of that GOP wealth transfer from poor and middle-class people to fatten my own bank account if I had just pursued a hell of a lot more money the past 50 years.

              

          Put simply, the GOP tax plan has been written to favor asset-based incomes, passive business investments and inherited wealth (like Trump’s, so Trump is lying when he says this tax plan is going to hurt him), and it penalizes those foolish enough to actually work for a paycheck. Hey, if your income is obtained from your stock portfolio or you were born into a rich family, you’re going to love this plan. Otherwise, tough sh*t.

Grassley let the cat out of the bag in that same interview. Siegel asked him “…you agree that before you begin to do that [paying down the $20 Trillion National Debt], this bill would increase deficits and the debt by at least $1.5 trillion...unless you really do take away middle-income tax cuts, $2 trillion, right? Are those numbers about right?” Grassley’s response? “Yeah, if you look at it on paper the way the Congressional Budget Office does, that is right.”

He went on to claim that since Trump SAYS the economy is going gangbusters and IF we can boost our economic growth, up from 2 to around 3%, then the $1.5 trillion additional debt will be made up. 

Not one economist thinks that is realistic. They say that is something Grassley "made up."

         Except for a few years doing factory work and then teaching for a short duration, Grassley has spent his career in Congress where he voted in favor of almost every pay raise Senators and Representatives could give themselves, helped to run up the National Debt (while blaming it exclusively on the Democrats), gave the military Carte Blanche for whatever it wanted, and fleeced American taxpayers. He is fleecing us again…only bigger, badder and bolder than ever before. But by the time the worst of the wealth transfer…uh, I mean the fair and equitable tax policy...is implemented, Chuck Grassley will be well into his own retirement. So he won’t need to make any pretense that those “tax cuts” in the GOP bill were aimed at the middle class.

               Grassley claims the massive tax cuts (like eliminating the Estate Tax which only affects .2% [that's point two percent] of Americans) is really just a question of “basic fairness.” Yes, but fairness to whom? It damn sure isn't fair to people like me who are not millionaires.