Political Roundtable Part XXI

[Wizardspride]

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[stilldropin20]

Remember when the righties on this board were proud to bang the drum of Romney was right about Russia being our #1 political foe. How stupid Obama was. Ah good times.

the 80's called, they want their foreign policy back. I mean as if you even could rig americas elections...you can keep your doctor! The JV team! yada yada yada

[stilldropin20]

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They've been gradually shifting to "collusion isn't a crime" and "Clinton was trying to do the same thing" for quite a while. As long as Trump can rely on the unquestioning support of unquestioning supporters, ain't no grave dug (apparently) no matter what he says. Without some power in the hands of an opposition party, there will be no actual response.

Yeah, this has always been the play. Collusion isn’t a crime and Russia is good. Getting along with Russia is a GOOD thing - not a BAD thing etc

Like I said a few weeks ago - the alt-right ethnonationalist types have always been totally on board with Putin and his style of authoritarianism

despite heavy sanctions from trump which have negatively effected Russias economy Putin still caries a 63-70% approval rating amongst Russians living in Russia and has been as high as 92%.

[stilldropin20]

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wrong again. they took a meeting and listened to the pitch. These "russians" also met with Fusion GPS just before the trump meeting and just after the trump meeting.

Yes. the same Fusion GPS that was hired by perkins coie<--(who was being paid $1M from Obama, $10M from HRC and $10M from the DNC) to do oppo research on Trump...the same fusion GPS who paid Steele (a foreign agent!!) to gather such info who then paid (russians!!) for dirt on trump. The same GPS that Bruce Ohr's wife nelie Ohr worked and specifically worked on this dossier. The same dossier that Bruce Ohr later brought to Andrew mccabe. The same dossier that contains the dirt (from russians!!) makes up the largest part of the steele dossier that was used by the entire obama DOJ to spy on broad spectrum carter page and gave them access to spy on the entire trump campaign. All on an uncorroborated dossier that was completely unverified by the FBI.

After spying on the trump campaign for most of 2016 (and they found nothing then just as they have nothing now)...they then unmasked all kinds of americans to embarrass the trump camapign in its infancy and mire it in scandal early. CNN ran with Russia fever for 1 year straight 24/7 for 365 days before they gave up. stuff got leaked to them that they were duped.

and here we are at the end...and Mueller's got nothing...On trump. Now, he a real investigation is done on 2016 collusin there is plenty of evidence that the entire democratic party from its leader barrack Obama on down the line of his DOJ, NSA, and CIA were all in on it to steal the 2016 election from the american people.

I mean a blind man could see this from a mile away. And what he would see is a banana republic under Barrack Hussein Obama. And the tentacles of that banana tree still poison our government today.

[FAH1223]

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[Wizardspride]

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[dckingsfan]

Well, looks like this is the worst of the last three administrations as far as any kind of fiscal restraint. Ouch.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm451

[Wizardspride]

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Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s lead attorney for the ongoing special counsel investigation, said Monday that Trump’s legal team is planning to send a letter to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III this week that will largely rebuff Mueller’s latest offer of a presidential interview that would include questions about possible obstruction of justice.

“We have a real reluctance about allowing any questions about obstruction,” Giuliani said in an interview with The Washington Post when asked about the overarching theme of the letter.

[montestewart]

Well, looks like this is the worst of the last three administrations as far as any kind of fiscal restraint. Ouch.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm451

This is surprising, as Trump has spent the entirety of his career developing his reputation for restraint.

[montestewart]

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If Fox News says it, I believe it, it must be true. DTJ is going to the big house. Orange hair meets orange jumpsuit.

[Wizardspride]

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[stilldropin20]

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so rick gates embezzelded hundreds of thousands of dollars from Paul manaforte<--who caught Gates. Was about to press charges against Gates. And gates, who admits he lied to the FBI, and admits he committed crimes...that rick gates is somehow more credible than Paul manaforte? I mean i dont care about either of them. But i certainly would think no judge or jury will find Gates recollection of the events over Paul manaforte.

For the record, a corporation can loan loan money to its sole proprietor and a sole proprietor can loan money to its corporation. The money must be repaid. but it is legal. And that's what you will likely hear Manaforte's Lawyers argue.

^^^and manaforte is the sole determiner on where his companies loan money to him vs. pay him...again...he must personally reimburse his companies...but they can lend him money as often as he would like with the caveat that he pays his corporation back. and he personally can inject cash into his corporations as loans. so long as his corporation pays back those loans.


In terms of the (tax designations) on various real estate manaforte owned...just because he may have rented out his (primary residence) on BnB for a small percentage of the tax year, i'm not so sure that thats wnough to designate this real estate as "rental income property" instead of his primary residence. For example I think a house can be both. If you live in a place for a certain percentage of the year, then its your primary residence for tax purposes. even if you rent a bedroom out on air BnB for the entire year...i dont think that makes it rental income property...While the income is still income for tax purposes, manaforte still lived some where...where ever that was, he gets to claim it as his primary residence. And all residential rental income can easily offset by expenses if he itemizes it.

At worst, Manaforte owes the IRS some tax dollars. Worst case!!

Given manaforte has competent attornys, so far Muller's got nothing on manaforte. Trump would be justified to pardon any petty crimes of tax evasion of this nature. But i think the judge himself will likely sentence manaforte to time served if manaforte is convicted of "crimes" this petty like co-mingling. Audits fines and fees take care of that stuff.

I already know the bank loan stuff will be a joke too. You can take real estate loans out against your property with any intended purpose. and change your mind the next day. <--this is like a police ticket for pulling into a gas station, not stopping for gas and driving through the gas station to avoid the light at the corner...while technically illegal, all the person driving has to say is that they "intended to stop for gas" or "intended to go into the store." Or was feeling light headed while in traffic and thought that were going to pass out behind the wheel. The moment came and went and they changed their minds.

I had a client that once got a loan to buy a home to fix it up. 203K construction loan. 3 weeks later. literally 3 weeks later he got an offer to purchase that home. Construction had not even begun. My client then changed his mind and sold the home instead of living in it. I think he became overwhelmed with the idea of how much work it would be to fix it up and the offer was very compelling. Completely legal. Any attorney general that brings up charges of attempting to conspire to commit fraud in a case like that is a joke and any cracker jack attorney can beat those charges. Now if conspiring to commit fraud was actually occurring? That is a different story. But smart people dont do that and banks asks those questions on there applications. Is Paul Manaforte going to take the stand and say he lied to the banks? really?

again, if rick gates does that...says paul manaforte lied...who is the jury going to believe? rick gates the guy who was embezzling from his boss and admitted as such and admitted to the FBI that he lied to the FBI?? Or paul manaforte? the guy who has NOT peeped a word to the FBI? Martha Stewert General Flynn <--2 innocent people that talked to the FBI. And because they talked to the FBI and attempted to explain their innocence (because innocent people always think " i got nothing to hide and the FBI will look them right in the eyes and say that to them) get rail roaded. FBI agents on those cases? James Comey on Stewert and mccabe on Flynn.

[dckingsfan]

Well, looks like this is the worst of the last three administrations as far as any kind of fiscal restraint. Ouch.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm451

This is surprising, as Trump has spent the entirety of his career developing his reputation for restraint.

See, there is the thing. In his 5th term as POTUS he is going to finally figure it out. He will reach out to Russia for loans and balance the budget.

[stilldropin20]

Well, looks like this is the worst of the last three administrations as far as any kind of fiscal restraint. Ouch.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm451

This is surprising, as Trump has spent the entirety of his career developing his reputation for restraint.

See, there is the thing. In his 5th term as POTUS he is going to finally figure it out. He will reach out to Russia for loans and balance the budget.

what about the largest ever budget surplus in April 2018?? trump economy breaks yet another record!! cant wait to see this number in 2019?

[FAH1223]

Well, looks like this is the worst of the last three administrations as far as any kind of fiscal restraint. Ouch.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm451

This is surprising, as Trump has spent the entirety of his career developing his reputation for restraint.

See, there is the thing. In his 5th term as POTUS he is going to finally figure it out. He will reach out to Russia for loans and balance the budget.

Speaking of Russia, their macroeconomic policy is so much better.

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https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-09/russia-deserves-top-grades-for-prudent-economic-management

In the eyes of the West, Russia does a lot of things wrong. It meddles in elections. It poisons people on foreign soil. It rides roughshod over free speech and democratic values.

But according to one Western economist, it may also have the world’s most responsible economic management.

Martin Gilman spent 24 years at the International Monetary Fund, much of it as the fund’s man in Russia before, during and after the country’s defining crisis of the late 1990s — a devaluation and default that reverberated around the world. Since 2005, he has been a professor of economics at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics and a well-connected observer of the government’s policies.

I spoke with Gilman about the economic challenges facing Russia today and its leaders’ capacity to meet them. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

Mark Whitehouse: You had a front-row seat for Russia’s default and devaluation in 1998. It happened in part because the country had big debts, weak budget discipline and a political commitment to maintaining the ruble’s exchange rate against the dollar. How does Russia’s economic management today differ from what it was back then?

Martin Gilman: It’s much better, largely because so many of the people now in charge experienced that crisis. For instance, the head of the central bank, Elvira Nabiullina, was a deputy economy minister. Alexei Kudrin, a close Putin advisor and chairman of the Accounts Chamber [Russia’s version of the U.S. Government Accountability Office], was a deputy finance minister. German Gref, the chief executive officer of the state-controlled Sberbank, was a deputy minister of state property. These people want to make sure that it never happens again on their watch. So as long as this economic team is in charge there won’t be another debt crisis in Russia.

They have really brought home the lesson of that crisis. Consider the oil shock of 2014 and 2015. As the price dropped by more than 50 percent, the central bank protected its foreign reserves by allowing the ruble’s exchange rate against the dollar to fall — politically, a very brave move. And they had the stabilization fund, which insulates the economy from the oil market by culling excess revenue when prices are high and providing support when prices are low.

In 2004, when Kudrin first proposed a stabilization fund on the Norwegian model, the IMF advised against it. We thought that in terms of governance, transparency and corruption Russia was closer to Nigeria than Norway, so the first priority was to build the institutions before trying to be Norway. And by God, Kudrin proved us wrong.

Now, when Nabiullina goes to the central bank governors’ meetings in Basel, she’s the one preaching orthodoxy. Almost all central banks have either negative interest rates, very low interest rates or some kind of extraordinary monetary accommodation, and here you’ve got the Central Bank of Russia with the highest real interest rates in the G-20. They are pursuing what the IMF would call a classic conventional policy.

MW: Growth recently has been much slower than what Russia experienced in the 2000s, and economists don’t expect it to be much better in the next few years. At the same time, Putin and his advisors have drawn up ambitious plans to do everything from make Russia one of the world’s five largest economies to boost life expectancy by six years. Do these plans bear any relation to what might actually happen? If not, what is their purpose?

MG: It’s good to have an objective. While very ambitious, unrealistic and probably undoable from an institutional point of view, it still sends a very strong signal to the government that this is what we expect everybody to get behind — we shouldn’t tolerate corruption, we’ve got to encourage productive private investment. Ministers know that if their performance isn’t in line with these goals, they risk getting sacked.

As regards growth, Russia is an old industrial economy. It’s not one of those places where you have a lot of peasants coming into the mainstream workforce. You can’t expect it to grow at very significant real rates, particularly given that it’s stuck in a world economy where nobody is growing significantly.

But an important aside: One can’t know the future. What if investors wake up to the financial profligacy of the U.S. and other Western nations, where government debts are at historical highs and budget discipline is not great? After the crash, who is going to look good? Can you name one G-20 country with almost no debt, positive real interest rates, a flexible exchange rate, significant foreign exchange reserves and a very prudent macroeconomic policy?

MW: There’s this odd juxtaposition in Russia’s economic management. On one hand, you have very fiscally prudent policies, like raising the pension age and the value-added tax, and stockpiling money when oil prices are high. On the other, you see people close to Putin getting very rich on state contracts. Doesn’t the latter undermine the former?

MG: Many people say that until we clean up our institutions, have full transparency on government expenditures and weed out corruption, there’s no point in trying to do stuff like pension reform. I guess the counterargument is that we have to start where we are, not where we would like to be.

Raising the pension age is crucial. Assuming these people are healthy enough to stay in the work force and can get jobs that pay enough, it will go a long way toward addressing Russia’s demographic issues.

But if you’re not dealing with institutional reform at the same time, it could make people even more cynical than they are now. That’s why it’s good to have Alexei Kudrin at the Accounts Chamber. Because of his close relationship with the president, he should be able to dig into anything he wants. And he’d better get results because the clock is ticking toward the next presidential election in 2024. The government is going to have to show that it can limit corruption.

MW: To what extent are Putin’s politics holding Russia back? He has demonstrated that property rights and personal freedoms are violable — and this attitude pervades the bureaucracy. Will the best and brightest want to stay in a country where they can’t speak freely or choose their leaders? How can entrepreneurship and investment thrive in a country where whatever people build can be stolen by corrupt officials?

MG: They won’t. My Russian wife uses the Christmas tree example. Russia is a major importer of Christmas trees, even though it has vast forests. Why? It takes seven to eight years to grow a good one. Nobody is willing to take the risk that in seven or eight years, they’ll still be able to harvest the trees and reap the profits.

It would be nice if Russia could do something like what [former president] Mikheil Saakashvili did in Georgia — just sack all the traffic police and start over. But in a big country like Russia, it could be pretty chaotic. We can’t take those kinds of risks.

I still remember what Putin told us when we at the IMF were trying to get him to push through a big package of reform legislation in his first term. He said that one of the lessons he drew from the mistakes of his predecessors is that you can’t do everything at once. If you try to go against all these vested interests at the same time, they will gang up against you. Maybe better to do one thing at a time.

We’re not seeing big reforms anymore, and we never will. Reform is a dirty word in Russia, it’s associated with the chaos of the 1990s. But small reforms are happening — in the labor force, online government, tax payments, police bribery. Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, has been creating a revolution in terms of regional governance. The young governors coming in actually have KPIs [key performance indicators]. They want to clean things up, and their KPIs are aligned with that. This is truly remarkable in a country like Russia.

There are real improvements. Despite all the bad press, Russia now ranks 35th out of 190 in the World Bank’s Doing Business ratings. It was at 124 in 2010.

[stilldropin20]

That even the scientific method can be manipulated.

Ah, no. Once you start manipulating, then it ceases to actually be the 'scientific method'
and devolves into propaganda.

in theory you are correct.

But in real life? bias CAN and often does enter almost any and every single step of every single "scientific" study. <--that doesn't necessarily make the results bad. But it can skew slightly or significantly any given study. As a doctor and surgeon its my job to know the difference.

from selection, to data collection, and especially interpretation of data...(nearly all studies contain result have at least some level of interpretation AKA potential bias.

here's what we find in real life...these studies using the scientific method are usually funded by someone(even if just the conductor him/herself) but often BIG Pharma, or Big material, Or Big agri, ....someone that usually has a vested interest in the results. So bias creeps in where ever "scientifically" possible. It happens every day. Thats why people like me are vetted through our medical education systems: To be able to pick apart even the scientific method so as to make both long term thoughfully calculated decisions and split second, on the spot decisions in the surgery room to save people's lives.

you want me smarter than the scientific method, you need me smarter than the self righteous nerdy "scientists" that perform those studies so as to sniff out the lack of self awareness in their sometimes entirely biased bull crap but at the same time I must be reasonable to reasonable factual information as a basis of my decision making is based on trusting the entirety and the body of work compiled by the entire scientific and medical community as a whole long before me as well as advances in medicine as a whole. I must know when to trust the past and I must know how to evolve my decision making to new diagnostics, procedures and materials.

There are many false prophets in my world. I cant be deceived by them. But sometimes, even they have valuable information.

But the news? And the entire news and political world is almost nothing but false prophets. And my brain has been better trained to spot them than all of your brains combined.

[pancakes3]

jesus christ, dude. no.

[stilldropin20]

jesus christ, dude. no.

yes. a thousands times, yes. and a thousand more for good measure.

[dckingsfan]

jesus christ, dude. no.

What did he do this time

[pancakes3]

jesus christ, dude. no.

What did he do this time

the tl;dr is that he responded to dobro's post about the scientific method with:

1) there are biases in every scientific study, and as a doctor and a surgeon, he is able to parse out the biases.
2) he, as vetted through his medical education system, can pick apart the scientific method so as to make "both long-term, thoughfully (sic) calculated decisions and split second, on the spot decisions in the surgery room to save people's lives."
3) he is "smarter than the scientific method, and smarter than the self-righteous nerdy 'scientists' that perform those studies" because as a medically trained professional, he must know when to trust "the past" and when to evolve his decision-making to new diagnostics, procedures, and materials.
4) those darn scientists' biggest down fall is their "lack of self awareness in their sometimes entirely biased bull crap"