Author Archives: AlfonzoIRKZ

Trump Knew About Michael Flynn Situation for "Weeks," Sean Spicer Says

by AlfonzoIRKZ Posted on February 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that President Donald Trump has known for several weeks that his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, may have been untruthful about his communications with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

“We’ve been reviewing and evaluating this issue with respect to General Flynn on a daily basis for a few weeks trying to ascertain the truth,” Spicer said.

According to Spicer, then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates informed the White House last month that Flynn may have misled the administration about the nature of his December phone calls with Kislyak. “Immediately after the Department of Justice notified the White House counsel of the situation, the White House counsel briefed the president and a small group of senior advisers,” Spicer said.

Spicer maintained that the decision to remove Flynn did not stem from legal concerns but a “trust” issue.

The statement that Trump has known about the issue for weeks appears to directly contradict the administration’s previous comments on the controversy, including Trump’s own remarks aboard Air Force One last week. On Friday, Trump claimed he was unfamiliar with the allegations—raised in a Washington Post story—that before Trump took office, Flynn had discussed easing sanctions against Russia with Kislyak.

“What do you think about reports that Gen. Flynn had conversations with the Russians about sanctions before you were sworn in?” a reporter asked Trump on Friday.

“I don’t know about it, I haven’t seen it,” he responded. “What report is that?”

After a reporter mentioned the Post story, Trump added, “I haven’t seen that. I’ll look into it.”

When asked about that exchange on Tuesday, Spicer insisted that the president was not denying that he knew about the Justice Department’s warning, but was instead simply claiming not to have seen the specific Post story in question.

During Tuesday’s press briefing, Spicer also said that Trump had asked Flynn to step down from his post because of the “evolving and eroding level of trust” between Flynn and the president. Hours earlier, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway made multiple media appearances in which she claimed Flynn resigned on his own.

Shortly after Tuesday’s briefing, the New York Times reported that the had FBI interviewed Flynn during his brief tenure as national security adviser about his conversation with Kislyak. As the Times noted, the revelation “raises the stakes of what so far has been a political scandal” because “if he was not entirely honest with the FBI, it could expose Mr. Flynn to a felony charge.”

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Trump Knew About Michael Flynn Situation for "Weeks," Sean Spicer Says

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Here’s the Best News We’ve Gotten All Year

by AlfonzoIRKZ Posted on June 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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No joke. This may be boring as hell, but it really and truly is great news:

Federal Reserve officials strongly signaled they will toughen big-bank capital requirements even more than they have since the 2008 crisis, a move that will add to the pressure on the largest U.S. banks to consider shrinking. Fed governors Daniel Tarullo and Jerome Powell, in separate public comments on Thursday, said the Fed would require eight of the largest U.S. banks to maintain more equity to pass the central bank’s annual “stress tests.”

“Effectively, this will be a significant increase in capital,” Mr. Tarullo said on Bloomberg television….Mr. Powell said at a banking conference that the Fed’s move would make big banks “fully internalize the risk” they pose to the economy.

“I have not reached any conclusion that a particular bank needs to be broken up or anything like that,” he said. The point is to “raise capital requirements to the point at which it becomes a question that banks have to ask themselves.”

Bernie Sanders has campaigned heavily on the idea of breaking up big banks. But that shouldn’t be our goal. Our goal should be to make banks safer and to reduce the likelihood that they need to be bailed out in the future. That’s what higher capital requirements do: they force banks to carry a bigger buffer against losses, which makes them less likely to fail in any future downturn.

As it happens, new regulations put in place since the financial meltdown of 2008 have already increased capital requirements, but big banks still have an unfair advantage in the market: their funding costs are lower because investors figure they’ll be bailed out if they ever implode in the future. To make up for this, big banks should, as Tarullo said, “fully internalize the risk” they pose to the economy. In other words, if big banks have an automatic advantage simply because taxpayers have little choice but to rescue them in case they fail, they should be required to pay higher insurance premiums against failure. That’s essentially what higher capital requirements do.

This is fair. However, higher capital requirements also make big banks less profitable, which in turn gives them a strong incentive to downsize all on their own. And that’s how it should be. There’s no reason for the Fed or anyone else to pick and choose banks to break up. We just need to make sure they’re reasonably safe and are operating on a level playing field. If we do this, we’re providing an organic incentive to downsize. The banks themselves get to decide whether and how to do it.

The only bad news here is that the Fed is unlikely to raise capital requirements enough to suit me. Nonetheless, this is very much another step in the right direction.

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Here’s the Best News We’ve Gotten All Year

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The Insane Story Behind Trump’s Deleted Nazi Tweet

by AlfonzoIRKZ Posted on July 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier today, Donald Trump tweeted out a campaign poster featuring what appeared to be men in Nazi uniforms, superimposed over the American flag. The tweet was swiftly deleted, but not before the internet went to work tracking down the original image, sourced to the stock photography website iStock.

Mother Jones can now reveal that the image in question was taken at a World War II reenactment near Kent, England, some time within the last five years, according to its photographer, George Cairns. We reached Cairns by Skype at his home in St Albans, a town just north of London, where he was hanging out playing video games when his Twitter feed started to blow up in response to the Trump story.

George Cairns, photographer. Supplied.

Cairns is a British freelance stock photographer and photography instructor who says he frequents war reenactments as good locations to pick up realistic-looking stock images—not just of Nazis, but also of American GIs and other soldiers. Cairns said he didn’t know much about Donald Trump beyond the controversy over a golf course the billionaire and GOP presidential contender bought in Scotland last year.

So what does Cairns make of Trump using his image to endorse his candidacy?

“Well luckily, it’s not endorsed him in a sense… So that’s a good thing,” he said. “I’m not a Trump supporter. I can sleep OK tonight.”

In an almost impossibly bizarre coincidence, this isn’t the first time the Cairns family has been caught up in a photo kerfuffle involving Nazis and American politicians. George’s brother John is also a stock photographer, and took the image of Nazi reenactors that was accidentally used in a flier for the campaign of North Carolina state legislator Tim Spear in 2010.

“I have photos of American soldiers as well,” Cairns said. “But for some reason, politicians seem to be downloading Nazis.”

The photo isn’t a massive moneymaker for the photographer. “I’ve sold that image twice this year,” Cairns said. Yesterday, Cairns made $8.64 on a sale. Today, $1.71. “I can buy a coffee!” he joked.

In the world of stock photography, you have basically no control over who uses your photos, Cairns said. The best you can do is pick keywords for the images you upload that let people know exactly what they’re buying. In this case, Cairns said, Trump’s people should have been able to tell what they were looking at.

“I tried to keyword it carefully so people would be aware that it’s WWII fascists.”

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The Insane Story Behind Trump’s Deleted Nazi Tweet

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How to Create a Rain Barrel

by AlfonzoIRKZ Posted on June 4, 2015

Originally posted here – 

How to Create a Rain Barrel

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Bernie Sanders Has the Most Glorious 404 Error Page Ever

by AlfonzoIRKZ Posted on May 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Think you’ve landed on the wrong page of Bernie Sanders’ campaign site? Fear not. In order to help guide you back to the page you were trying to reach, Sanders, who just announced his presidential bid, created the most terrific error page of any 2016 candidate. Just take a look:

Follow his directions: “Just scoot down to the bottom of the page and you’ll find your way back home to where you should be!” The site is further enhanced by the perfect URL: berniesanders.com/wtf.

Bravo, Bernie. The broken links may have turned into your first big win.

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Bernie Sanders Has the Most Glorious 404 Error Page Ever

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Rand Paul is the P.T. Barnum of the Modern Senate

by AlfonzoIRKZ Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Waldman is impressed by Rand Paul:

Rand Paul continues to win my admiration, I have to say. There are people who come into the Senate with a kind of celebrity status and get lots of good press—one Barack Obama comes to mind—but I can’t think of anyone who has gotten so much good press through their own initiative, coming up with one clever way after another to get people to pay attention to them in ways that are almost always positive. His latest move required a subtle ideological tightrope-walk, one that Paul played perfectly. And all it took was a tweet.

It’s true. Rand Paul has a sort of Palinesque native genius for self-promotion. This isn’t going to get him any closer to the Oval Office than St. Sarah, mind you, but it’s still damn impressive. Like Waldman, I was nodding my head in admiration when I saw his tweet about Ted Nugent last night, because I knew instantly that it was perfectly suited to get him a whole gob of attention for a day or two. If he’s lucky, maybe even longer. For a tweet about Ted Nugent!

It’s genius, I tell you. He knows how to play both his own base and the media like a Stradivarius.

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Rand Paul is the P.T. Barnum of the Modern Senate

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