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Oh Wait—Donald Trump Decides He Has a Foreign Policy Team After All

by MargareHutchens Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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After finally telling us that he didn’t need a foreign policy team because he was his own team, Donald Trump made yet another U-turn today and announced his foreign policy team. It’s enough to make you dizzy. I’ll let Robert Costa introduce them:

Keith Kellogg…executive vice president at CACI International, a Virginia-based intelligence and information technology consulting firm…. Joseph Schmitz….Blackwater Worldwide…. George Papadopoulos…international energy center at the London Center of International Law Practice…. Walid Phares…National Defense University and Daniel Morgan Academy in Washington…. Carter Page…managing partner of Global Energy Capital and longtime energy industry executive.

This is quite a team. Kellogg was COO of the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003-04 under Paul Bremer, and we all know how that turned out. Schmitz is the son of noted Southern California crackpot John Schmitz—which I suppose I can’t hold against him—and served as inspector general of the Defense Department under George Bush. He resigned in 2005 following charges that he “slowed or blocked investigations of senior Bush administration officials, spent taxpayer money on pet projects and accepted gifts that may have violated ethics guidelines.”

Papadopoulos is on his second presidential campaign this year, having previously found a home with Ben Carson. Phares is well known to all Fox News viewers for his regular appearances there—and for his background during the 80s as a “high ranking political official in a sectarian religious militia responsible for massacres during Lebanon’s brutal, 15-year civil war.”

Page I don’t know much about. Apparently he’s the head of an investment fund “focused on energy investments worldwide,” and that’s good enough for Trump.

So….this is a helluva C-list crew Trump has assembled. A guy who worked for Paul Bremer; the son of John Schmitz; a former Ben Carson advisor; a Fox News talking head; and a guy who specializes in torts.

As for Trump’s actual foreign policy, apparently it’s the same as always: he’s super militaristic, but he doesn’t want to actually use the American military for much of anything. He’d like other countries to start taking care of Ukraine and NATO and the South China Sea—or, if they insist on America doing it, he’d like them to pay us for it. Apparently Trump’s ambition is to sit at the head of a vast American tribute empire.

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Oh Wait—Donald Trump Decides He Has a Foreign Policy Team After All

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Trump Foreign Policy Adviser Has Ties to Brutal Lebanese Militia

by David Green Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has finally announced the names of five of his foreign policy advisers, and at least one members of his new team is sure to raise eyebrows.

Walid Phares, a Lebanese academic who advised Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012, is one of the five names Trump gave to the Washington Post during a meeting with the paper’s editorial board on Monday. As Mother Jones reported in 2011, Phares was a major player in the Lebanese Forces, one of the Christian militias that fought in Lebanon’s brutal 15-year civil war. According to Toni Nissi, a colleague of Phares’ at the time, Phares helped the group’s leader, Samir Geagea, steep its fighters in religious ideology.

“Samir Geagea wanted to change them from a normal militia to a Christian army,” Nissi said. “Walid Phares was responsible for training the lead officers in the ideology of the Lebanese Forces.”

The Lebanese Forces are now just one of Lebanon’s many political parties, but the group was responsible for one of the war’s most notorious incidents, the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982.

Phares is also well known as an anti-Muslim campaigner. He’s appeared on the radio show of Frank Gaffney, the conspiracy theorist who’s a foreign policy adviser to Ted Cruz.

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Trump Foreign Policy Adviser Has Ties to Brutal Lebanese Militia

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Elizabeth Warren Lists All the Ways She Considers Trump a "Loser"

by Alba6653seaz Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a Twitter rampage on Monday afternoon, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) enumerated all the ways in which she considers Donald Trump a loser. The liberal favorite launched a barrage of critiques at the Republican presidential candidate, tweeting about everything from the Trump University fiasco to Trump’s numerous corporate bankruptcies. She repeatedly called him a “loser” and concluded, “It’s our job to make sure @realDonaldTrump ends this campaign every bit the loser that he started it.”

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Elizabeth Warren Lists All the Ways She Considers Trump a "Loser"

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Mitt Romney Announces He’s Voting for Ted Cruz

by AnnettOlmstead Posted on March 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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After condemning Donald Trump in a speech earlier this month, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took an all-of-the-above approach to stopping the Republican front-runner from picking up the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. He campaigned for John Kasich in Ohio last week and offered to do the same for Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida.

But although Kasich did win his home state, Romney is now jumping ship. On Friday, ahead of the potentially winner-take-all Utah caucuses, the favorite son is going all-in for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

In a statement on his Facebook page, Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, announced he would be supporting Cruz not just in Utah, but in all future contests as well. Lest there be any confusion, Romney offered praise for Kasich but indicated the time had come to pick just one candidate to stop Trump. Here’s the statement:

This week, in the Utah nominating caucus, I will vote for Senator Ted Cruz.

Today, there is a contest between Trumpism and Republicanism. Through the calculated statements of its leader, Trumpism has become associated with racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and, most recently, threats and violence. I am repulsed by each and every one of these.

The only path that remains to nominate a Republican rather than Mr. Trump is to have an open convention. At this stage, the only way we can reach an open convention is for Senator Cruz to be successful in as many of the remaining nominating elections as possible.

I like Governor John Kasich. I have campaigned with him. He has a solid record as governor. I would have voted for him in Ohio. But a vote for Governor Kasich in future contests makes it extremely likely that Trumpism would prevail.

I will vote for Senator Cruz and I encourage others to do so as well, so that we can have an open convention and nominate a Republican.

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Mitt Romney Announces He’s Voting for Ted Cruz

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Ted Cruz Endorsed by Senator Who Joked About Murdering Ted Cruz

by MireyaVaughn37 Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Some good news for Sen. Ted Cruz today: He finally got a second senate colleague to endorse him. According to CNN, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham will endorse and raise money for the Texas conservative, as part of a last-gasp effort by Republicans in Washington to stop Donald Trump from winning the party’s nomination.

Graham wasn’t much help to his previous pick, Jeb Bush, though. And, given the former presidential candidate’s past comments about Cruz, his endorsement doesn’t carry much weight. It does, however, display the increasing desperation of the Republican establishment. Just last month, Graham told Wolf Blitzer that, “If you’re a Republican and your choice is Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in a general election, it’s the difference between poisoned or shot—you’re still dead.” In that same interview, Graham said Cruz was worse than President Barack Obama on foreign policy. A few weeks later, he’d taken an even darker turn. “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate and the trial was in the Senate,” Graham told a group of journalists, “no one would convict you.”

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Ted Cruz Endorsed by Senator Who Joked About Murdering Ted Cruz

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Clinton Backers Edit Trump Ad to Make Him the Punch Line

by RichelleSimson1 Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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A day after Donald Trump posted an ad on his Instagram account featuring Hillary Clinton barking like a dog, a super-PAC backing Clinton for president has responded in kind.

The ad, from Priorities USA, formed in 2011 and now supporting Clinton, repeats the motifs from the Trump video—Vladimir Putin doing martial arts, an ISIS fighter with a gun—but replaces the barking Clinton footage with a garbled response from Trump to a question about whom Trump consults for policy ideas. Instead of a clip of Trump laughing, there’s a clip of Clinton laughing. The closing text is the same: “We don’t need to be a punchline!”

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Clinton Backers Edit Trump Ad to Make Him the Punch Line

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Trump endorsed by Florida’s climate-denying governor

by FaeSharwood479 Posted on March 16, 2016

Trump endorsed by Florida’s climate-denying governor

By on 16 Mar 2016commentsShare

Republicans of the internet, Florida Gov. Rick Scott has a message for you, posted on the official Rick Scott™ Facebook™ page: Embrace Donald Trump.

Not only is Scott jumping on the Trump wagon, he even compares himself to the man. “When I first ran for Governor the political class and party leaders opposed me with great vigor, and some even said if I won the primary they would never vote for me,” he writes. “But the voters had other ideas, and they are the only ones who count.”

And we can see the resemblance. Sure, one has bird feathers for hair and the other is bald as a baby’s asshole, but both have been accused of fraud for shady dealings in the business world: Trump for his “university,” and Scott for overseeing one of the largest boondoggles in Medicare history.

Plus, both the future presidential nominee and the current governor are climate change deniers. Trump has repeatedly said that climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese to undercut the United States in manufacturing; Scott’s administration banned state officials from mentioning climate change in official reports. In Florida. It’s a match made in denier heaven.

Congratulations to Mr. Trump on the endorsement. Congratulations to Mr. Scott on finding a buyer for his soul.

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Trump endorsed by Florida’s climate-denying governor

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John Kasich is no better than Donald Trump on climate change

by StephaiValazque Posted on March 16, 2016

John Kasich is no better than Donald Trump on climate change

By on 15 Mar 2016commentsShare

Ohio Gov. John Kasich won his home state in the GOP presidential primary on Tuesday night, and as Ohio is a winner-take-all state, that means he’s put enough delegates out of Donald Trump’s reach to stall the frontrunner’s march to the nomination, for now. The Kasich campaign hopes this momentum will be enough to help him win a few more states and then force a contested convention, with the full backing of the establishment behind him.

Kasich, then, is the GOP establishment’s last and only choice, now that Marco Rubio has bowed out. He isn’t just a favorite among top party officials. In recent weeks, he’s earned a slew of endorsements from newspapers around the country. A few of these papers have pointed to Kasich as the only moderate Republican, mentioning his views on climate change as one of the things that makes him more mainstream than his opponents.

The Detroit Free Press, for instance, wrote: “Kasich accepts the reality of climate change […] Yet climate change denial is de rigeur among most Republican politicians, a shameful dodge that will pile suffering on our children and grandchildren. Although Kasich favors robust state regulation to control climate change over U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards, this is a more significant step than his GOP cohorts are willing to take.” The South Florida Sun Sentinel, meanwhile, said, “On the subject of climate change, to which Florida is especially vulnerable, only Kasich called for policies to reduce carbon emissions.” The Illinois Journal Star noted that by choosing Kasich, Republicans would “get an intelligent man who doesn’t deny the science behind climate change, though he’d prefer private-sector solutions to government ones.”

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Yet the governor is no climate ally; he’s just a bit better than Trump at hiding his brand of denialism. He falls under the “do-nothing” category of politicians who will accept at least some of the science but want to, well, do nothing about it.

Take what Kasich said in the last debate as an example: After Marco Rubio fumbled through an answer on sea-level rise, Kasich’s speech was almost a relief. “I do believe we contribute to climate change,” he began. I say almost a relief, because Kasich in the same answer also spoke in the familiar climate-denier code: “Now, it doesn’t mean because you pursue a policy of being sensitive to the environment, because we don’t know how much humans actually contribute.”

Kasich has repeated that line in campaign stops, including saying at a Vermont event last month that he didn’t know “how much individuals affect the climate.”

His acknowledgement that the climate might be changing does make him seem reasonable compared to the likes of Trump or Ted Cruz. But what matters more are his views on climate policy, and here the governor has shown no more interest in taking action than his competitors. Kasich says he supports renewables but equally alongside coal, natural gas, and oil. He opposes most policies that curb carbon pollution and that encourage wind and solar over dirtier sources. He’s promised to “freeze all federal regulations for one year except for health and safety” — and considers the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate and health regulations as the first that need to go. And he’s criticized the international climate deal the world reached last December, insisting the thousands of climate policy experts that were in Paris for a climate conference should have been there for ISIS: “I think when [Secretary of State John Kerry] went to Paris, he should have gone there to get our allies together to fight ISIS instead.”

In the end, it doesn’t matter much if Kasich manages a “yes” to a question on the science. He is still dangerous. The New York Times, which also endorsed Kasich in January, put it best: “Kasich is no moderate.” They weren’t talking about climate change, but they might as well have been.

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John Kasich is no better than Donald Trump on climate change

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Here’s How Donald Trump Treats the Little People

by RamiroRestrepo9 Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s pretty common knowledge that Donald Trump lies routinely about his wealth and his businesses. He can get away with this because he runs a private company and isn’t required to open his books to the public.

But there was one period in his life when he ran a public company. Here’s the backstory: During the ’80s, Trump invested heavily in Atlantic City casinos. He ended up owning three of them, culminating in the Trump Taj Mahal, a billion-dollar monstrosity that was ill conceived and poorly run, hemorrhaging money from the day it opened. Trump had borrowed heavily during this period, guaranteeing many of the loans personally, and this was the last straw. His company was bankrupt.

He would have been personally bankrupt, too, but his creditors decided to put him on a leash and let him try to work his way out. He made steady progress, but the casinos continued to be a millstone around his neck. By the mid-’90s, however, the stock market was getting hot and lots of small investors, then as now, were mesmerized by the Trump name. So Trump decided that as long as there were lots of rubes who still thought he was a great businessman, he might as well take advantage of them. Timothy O’Brien tells the story in TrumpNation:

In a masterstroke of financial maneuvering, and in a tribute to the sucker-born-every-minute theorem, Trump managed to take two of the Trump casinos—the Plaza and the Taj Mahal—public in 1995 and 1996, at a time when Donald was unable to make his bank payments and was heading toward personal bankruptcy. The stock sales allowed Donald to buy the casinos back from the banks and unload huge amounts of debt. The offering yanked Donald out of the financial graveyard and left him with a 25 percent stake in a company he once owned entirely.

…In one fell swoop someone else became responsible for the debts that almost sank Donald…Exactly what investors thought they might get for their Trump Hotels investment wasn’t entirely clear. Donald had already demonstrated that casinos weren’t his forte, and investors were buying stock in a company that was immediately larded with debts that made it difficult, if not impossible, to upgrade the operations.

…Allan Sloan, the financial writer who had opined with great accuracy on many things Trump, offered a fair warning to Trump Hotels’ investors: “Shareholders and bondholders have to be total fools ever to think that Donald Trump will put their interests ahead of his own.”…Donald spent several years proving Sloan correct.

…Just a few months after Trump Hotels absorbed the Taj, Donald sold his last Atlantic City casino, the Castle, to the public company. That is, Donald sold his own casino, with all of its heavy debts, to a public company he controlled. The $490 million price tag for the Castle was about $100 million more than analysts thought it was worth…sending the company’s stock into a nosedive from which it never recovered.

…Although Trump Hotels’ shares were sinking and there were no earnings to be seen, Donald paid himself $7 million for his handiwork at the company in 1996…Jerry Useem at Fortune took note in 2000 of Donald’s “disquieting” tendency to “use the casino company as his own personal piggy bank.” In addition to the multimillion-dollar bonuses Donald was lifting out of Trump Hotels, Useem pointed out that “the pilots of his personal 727 are on the casino company’s payroll” and that in 1998 Donald “had the already cash-strapped company lend him $26 million to pay off a personal loan.”

Trump’s fans were conned into buying up his debt-laden properties and turning them into a public company. Trump, who plainly had no interest in running a casino and had demonstrated no corporate management skills during the prior decade, paid himself millions of dollars from the company’s coffers for doing essentially nothing. He then unloaded his third casino onto the public company at an inflated price.

The public company didn’t show a profit during a single year of its existence. In 2004 the stock was delisted and the company forced into Chapter 11 reorganization. It was renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts, but with Trump still at the helm it continued to pile up losses and amassed debts of nearly $2 billion. In 2008, after missing a $53 million bond payment, it declared bankruptcy yet again and Trump resigned as the company’s chairman. Its investors lost all their money.

In case you’re curious, this is how Trump treats the little people. Some of the investors in his casinos were big guns who should have known better. But plenty of them were moms and pops who believed Trump when he insisted he was the greatest businessman the world had ever known. Trump didn’t care: He figured he could fleece them, and he did. That’s what happens to people who trust Donald Trump.

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Here’s How Donald Trump Treats the Little People

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Miami GOP mayor gives Marco Rubio a chance to lead on climate, and Rubio fails miserably

by ChristopherForsh Posted on March 11, 2016

Miami GOP mayor gives Marco Rubio a chance to lead on climate, and Rubio fails miserably

By on 10 Mar 2016commentsShare

Marco Rubio seemed surprised he was asked about climate change science at a Republican presidential debate held in Miami, where some 2.4 million people are at risk from rising seas. CNN moderator Jake Tapper asked Rubio to respond to the words of Miami Republican Mayor Tomás Regalado, who acknowledges the human-made threat to his city, and wants to hear his state’s senator acknowledge it, too: “Will you, as president, acknowledge the reality of the scientific consensus about climate change and, as president, will you pledge to do something about it?”

Rubio responded: “Well, sure, the climate is changing and one of the reasons why the climate is changing is the climate has always been changing,” he said, interrupted by applause. “There’s never been a time when the climate has not changed. I think the fundamental question for a policymaker is, is the climate changing because of something we are doing and if so, is there a law you can pass to fix it?”

Rubio blamed Miami flooding on its low-lying land and listed a convoluted second reason that it’s also “higher sea levels or whatever may be happening.” He continued his fact-free musings by dismissing the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. “But as far as a law that we can pass in Washington to change the weather, there’s no such thing.” The audience laughed.

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Most of the time, reporters and debate moderators will leave it at that and move on to another topic. But Tapper followed up with the key detail Rubio wanted to skip over. “So just to clarify, Senator Rubio,” Tapper said, “Mayor Regalado when he talks about the reality of the scientific consensus about climate change […] he’s saying the scientific consensus is that man does contribute to climate change.” Tapper asked if Rubio would tell the man he’s wrong.

In fewer words, Rubio said, yes he would. “If we pass — if you took the gift list of all of these groups that are asking us to pass these laws and did every single one of them, there would be no change in our environment. Sea level would still rise.” In a world where we really did enact that wishlist, seas would still rise, yes, but the world would be well on its way to a more moderate path of warming.

You can watch Rubio’s full answer here:

Ohio Gov. John Kasich answered the same question, saying humans have some impact, but “we don’t know how much humans actually contribute.”

CNN didn’t bother GOP frontrunner Donald Trump for his thoughts on global warming. Though Trump brought it up on his own earlier when talking ISIS.

“We’re not knocking out the oil because they don’t want to create environmental pollution up in the air,” he said. “I mean, these are things that nobody even believes. They think we’re kidding. They didn’t want to knock out the oil because of what it’s going to do to the carbon footprint.”

None of this is even remotely true, but pesky things like facts haven’t stopped any of the GOP candidates yet.

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Miami GOP mayor gives Marco Rubio a chance to lead on climate, and Rubio fails miserably

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