kleptocrats

At 6:59 (PT) on Thursday night, Rachel Maddow left her MSNBC audience with a classic tease that she promised would be explosive by Friday. It started exploding immediately after the tease, when various news sources started reporting that the Trump family is involved in money laundering, the Russian Mafia and Colombian drug cartels through two of their most infamous properties, Mar-A-Lago in Florida and the Trump Ocean Club in Panama. The charges aren't new-- but the proof is.

Back in February, we were already talking about Wilbur Ross' amazingly shady connections with Putin's venal kleptocracy.

I haven't noticed any of the polling firms that now routinely ask if people think Trump is a liar or not-- most do-- whether or not people think Trump is a crook. I predict that in less than a year, that will be a standard polling question-- and that eventually most Americans will say yes. I assume the majority of DWT readers already are ready to say Trump is a crook.

"They chained him to a bed and 8 riot guards with rubber batons beat him to death... That's what they do in Russia."Putin, the richest man on earth, is a murderous thug, who has his political opponents killed-- including journalists. So when he turned to the moron who he helped get into the White House and said, pointing menacingly to members of the press, "These are the ones who insulted you?" it shouldn't necessarily be taken as a joke.

Fareed Zakaria had GOP establishment NY Times columnist David Brooks on his CNN show Sunday to talk about Señor Trumpanzee’s role within the conservative movement. I don’t know who watches Zakaria’s show-- no one I know-- but I bet there was a lot of teeth gnashing from Republicans when Zakaria opened the segment by setting up a comparison between Saint Ronnie and Trumpanzee. “Where does conservatism go from here?

The Donald and FelixIt's almost a year ago that I wound up in a former piece of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan, a central Asia kleptocracy where Donald and Ivanka Trump were in business with local mobsters laundering money for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. But Azerbaijan was hardly the only former part of the Soviet empire where Trump was trying to make a buck.

This morning-- Day 99 of the Trump Regime-- the Commerce Department released a sour look at what's happened to the economy since Mr. "I thought it would be easier" was installed in the Oval Office. According to the NY Times, "the economy barely grew, expanding at an annual rate of only 0.7 percent. The growth was a sharp decline from the 2.1 percent annual rate recorded in the final quarter of last year. It was the weakest quarterly showing in three years.

You may have come to expect cowardly conservative careerists in the Senate like Joe Manchin (D-WV), Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) to cross the aisle and rubber-stamp virtually all of Trump's horrendous nominees for high public office.

Last night CNN reported that Obama vowed retaliatory action against Russia for its meddling in the US presidential election. Right on top of that, Rachel Maddow, on MSNBC, declared Putin the richest man/kleptocrat on earth and that U.S. intelligence services are preparing to hit him in his pocketbook.

Corruption draws certain types of characters to DC the way flies are drawn to horse barns. And while there's never quite been anyone like El Presidente-elect Señor Trumpanzee before, who actually told the NY Times yesterday that "In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly. There's never been a case like this...