Trump to Turkish Reporter: Are You Friend or Foe?

During a rally on Friday, he provoked anger when he asked a Turkish reporter whether he was friend or foe, days after suspected Islamic State suicide bombers killed 43 people at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport.

The exchange came as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee rattled off a string of countries with which he believed the US could strike better deals.

A voice in the crowd in Denver called out: “Turkey.”

Mr Trump responded directly, asking: “Are you from Turkey, sir? Good… congratulations.”

He then turned to the audience, saying: “I think he’s friend. Are you friend or foe?”

He then went on to talk about the country’s response to ISIL.

“Turkey, by the way, should be fighting ISIL,” he said. “I hope to see Turkey go out and fight ISIL.”

The crowd cheered his words but they provoked anger among commentators, who pointed out that Turkey was a US ally, has provided bases for war planes attacking ISIL positions, and its own jets have run missions against the jihadist group.

However Turkey is also known to be playing a “double game” by refusing to stop ISIL fighters from crossing their southern border to attack their common enemy, the Kurds.

(h/t Telegraph)

Reality

Donald Trump continues to propagate his dangerous “us versus them” mentality.

This is not the first time Trump has asked someone their allegiance at a campaign event. During rallies, when the presumptive GOP nominee hears sounds of a disruption, sometimes Trump will yell out the question to gauge whether the noise is coming from protesters or cheering fans.

If the noise is coming from a “foe” of Donald Trump, he usually follows with “Get them the hell out!”

Media

Trump’s Vegas Hotel Spent Half A Million Dollars To Stop Maids From Unionizing

GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump fashions himself a friend of union workers. He has bragged about having good relationships with labor unions. When the AFL-CIO recently endorsed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, Trump claimed it was he who deserved the labor federation’s coveted backing.

“I believe [union] members will be voting for me in much larger numbers than for her,” Trump declared last month.

Before entering the voting booth, those union members might want to know how much money one of Trump’s businesses has spent in an effort to persuade low-wage workers not to unionize.

The Culinary Workers Union recently organized housekeepers and other service workers at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. The union won the election in December — but not without a fight from hotel owners Trump Ruffin Commercial LLC. That’s a joint venture between the likely GOP nominee and casino magnate Phil Ruffin, himself a major financial backer of Trump’s presidential run.

According to Labor Department disclosure forms reviewed by The Huffington Post, Trump Ruffin shelled out more than half a million dollars last year to a consulting firm that combats union organizing efforts. The money was paid from Trump Ruffin to Cruz & Associates in a series of seven payments between July and December, totaling $560,631.

Nearly $285,000 of that money was paid over the course of two weeks in December, shortly after the hotel held its union election.

Despite the heavy investment from Trump Ruffin, the union prevailed by a vote of 238 to 209. Trump Ruffin argued in a filing with the National Labor Relations Board that the union illegally swayed the vote, but a regional director for the NLRB rejected those claims. The hotel has asked that the board members in Washington review that decision. According to an NLRB spokeswoman, the board has not yet determined whether it will grant that review.

A lawyer for Trump and a campaign spokeswoman did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the payments. Lupe Cruz, the owner of Cruz & Associates, did not respond to a voicemail left at his office on Friday.

Cruz, himself a former union organizer, is known for his consulting work on behalf of employers battling unions. Trump Ruffin’s disclosure forms listed the payments to Cruz as being for “consultation services and employee educational meetings.”

Companies often enlist the services of anti-union consultants to deal with an organizing campaign. The consultants’ goal is to convince enough workers that forming a union would be against their best interests so that the union eventually loses the election. Unions derisively call these consultants “union busters.” Their tactics can be subtle or not so subtle. When companies retain such firms, they are required to disclose their payments in filings to the Labor Department.

While there’s nothing out of the ordinary about the Trump hotel’s use of labor consultants, the more than half a million dollars spent by the hotel is significant. (For perspective, another Trump enterprise — his presidential campaign — began the month of June with only $1.3 million on hand.) The large sum indicates just how badly hotel management wanted to keep workers from unionizing, despite Trump’s public claims that he is an ally of rank-and-file workers.

The billionaire has spent much of the last week trying to align himself with the downtrodden working class, particularly by speaking out against U.S. trade pacts with other countries. Trump and much of organized labor share the perspective that these have been raw deals for the average American worker.

At different points in his campaign, Trump has also boasted that as a business owner, he’s gotten along well with unions. “I’ve worked with unions over the years — I’ve done very well with unions,” he said at a town hall meeting in February. “And I have tremendous support within unions.”

But the Culinary Workers Union accused management at Trump’s hotel of violating labor law numerous times by allegedly retaliating against pro-union employees during the organizing campaign. The NLRB’s general counsel, who acts as a kind of prosecutor, found merit in many of those charges, accusing the hotel of illegally firing one worker and intimidating others. The labor board has not yet ruled on the matter.

The bargaining unit at Trump International in Las Vegas includes more than 500 housekeepers, restaurant employees and guest services workers, many of them Latino and Filipino. The union has urged the hotel to accept the election results and start bargaining over a first contract.

“We asked the company to sit down and bargain with us back in December, and they should have,” Bethany Khan, a union spokeswoman, previously told The Huffington Post. “They’re running out of time and options to delay this.”

The union claims that housekeepers at Trump’s hotel earn about $3 less per hour than housekeepers at other unionized hotels on the Vegas Strip.

(h/t Huffington Post)

Reality

And yet the candidate claims to be a friend of regular working people.

Trump Lets ‘Heeby-Jobbies’ Comment Slide

Donald Trump’s trade speech Thursday veered off course when he didn’t stop a woman who, while pointing to her head, objected to the “heeby jobbies” worn by some employees at the Transportation Security Administration.

The comment during a town hall in New Hampshire was an apparent reference to hijabs, or headscarfs, that some Muslim women wear.

When the woman urged him to replace Muslims with U.S. military veterans at TSA, Trump said, “And we are looking at that,” seemingly indicating he was considering a new policy.

Reality

Racism isn’t necessarily what we say, it can also be what we don’t say.

Donald Trump let a woman make an incredibly insensitive comment, did not correct her, and even went so far to say yeah maybe we should look into removing Muslims from working at the TSA.

Media

Trump’s Plane Joke: It’s Mexico ‘Getting Ready to Attack’

Standing before a crowd outside the shuttered Osram Sylvania light-bulb factory in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Thursday, Donald Trump offered up the closed plant as a direct symptom of trade deals advocated by both Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton.

He also joked that a plane flying overhead could be from Mexico and poised for attack.

“Mexico, and I respect Mexico, I respect their leaders, what they’ve done to us is incredible,” Trump said at the outdoor gathering, where a plane buzzed overhead. “Their leaders are so much smarter, so much sharper. And it’s incredible.”

Pointing to the sky, Trump mused, “in fact, that could be a Mexican plane up there. They’re getting ready to attack. So that’s the way it is, folks. I just want to say that this is a factory, and the legacy really of Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton because this legacy is largely due, you could actually say entirely due, to NAFTA.”

Media

Trump Calls For Torture Saying ‘I Like Waterboarding a Lot’

Republican Donald Trump has repeated calls for the return of waterboarding against Islamic State militants, saying: “I like it a lot.”

His comments at a rally in Ohio came hours after suicide bombers killed 41 people at an airport in Istanbul.

“You have to fight fire with fire,” said the Republicans’ likely nominee, after referring to IS beheadings.

Waterboarding, described by President Barack Obama as torture, was banned by the US in 2006.

The Turkish authorities believe the so-called Islamic State was behind the attacks at Ataturk International Airport on Tuesday.

“We have to fight so viciously and violently because we’re dealing with violent people,” Mr Trump said.

At one point, he asked the crowd: “What do you think about waterboarding?”

They cheered as he gave his answer: “I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.”

The New York tycoon lamented that the US is prevented from waterboarding but “they [Islamic State] can do chopping off heads, drowning people in steel cages, they can do whatever they want to do”.

(h/t BBC)

Reality

Trump’s proposed reliance on tactics used by Bond villains as a practical response to the terrorist acts of the Islamic State should be leaving people feeling aghast and concerned.

Unlike fictional TV shows, like 24 where Jack Bauer runs around and tortures his way to the bad guy or movies like Zero Dark Thirty who include torture scenes that never happened which lead to the capture of Osama Bin Laden, reality is quite different.

Waterboarding, and other forms of torture, is considered a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions and is not reliable for obtaining truthful, useful intelligence.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that “the CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” There was no proof, according to the 6,700 page report, that information obtained through waterboarding prevented any attacks or saved any lives, or that information obtained from the detainees was not or could not have been obtained through conventional interrogation methods.

In-fact, we’ve know for centuries that torture is not effective. Here is Napoleon’s own words on the subject:

“It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.”

Instead, rapport-building techniques are 14 times more effective in extracting information than torture and has the upside of not being unethical.

Media

FEC Complaint Filed Over Trump Emails To Foreign Politicians

Two watchdog groups, the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21, said they will file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, arguing that the Donald Trump campaign has broken federal law by sending fundraising emails to foreign elected officials.

“Donald Trump should have known better,” Paul S. Ryan, the deputy executive director at the Campaign Legal Center, said in a statement. “It is a no-brainer that it violates the law to send fundraising emails to members of a foreign government on their official foreign government email accounts, and yet, that’s exactly what Trump has done repeatedly.”

Fred Werthemier, the president of Democracy 21, said that Trump’s fundraising pleas to foreign members of parliament are “a strange and unique development that we have not seen before in campaign fundraising.”

Campaign finance law prohibits campaigns from knowingly accepting or soliciting contributions from foreign nationals. It’s not clear whether the Trump campaign purposefully sent the emails to foreign members of parliament.

The complaint from the two watchdog groups notes that elected officials in Iceland, Scotland, Britain and Australia have received the emails.

Members of parliament in Denmark and Finland also say they have received the fundraising pleas.

(h/t Talking Points Memo)

Links

Copy of the Trump email.

Donald Trump Aide Tweets Pic Accusing Clinton of Murder

Twitter

A top Donald Trump supporter on Tuesday tweeted a photo of Hillary Clinton, which featured a written message accusing the former secretary of state of murder.

Michael Cohen, who serves as special counsel at the Trump Organization, tweeted:

The graphic he included in the tweet features a picture of Clinton, with the words, “I presided over $6 billion lost at the State Department, sold uranium to the Russians through my faux charity, illegally deleted public records, and murdered an ambassador. Elect me!”

Messages left with Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaigns were not immediately returned.

CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield slammed Cohen on her show Tuesday, saying: “This show is called ‘Legal View’ because we know a thing or two about the law, and Michael Cohen is a lawyer. That there is libel.”

“To suggest that a woman murdered an ambassador. Look, it’s not as though Hillary Clinton’s team is about to go and launch some litigation on this, but that’s pretty striking stuff,” she said.

Banfield showed a tweet from 2014 of Cohen with Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, where he wrote, “#tbt being received by two great Americans…Hillary Clinton and Patrick Kennedy at the Kennedy Compound.”

“Apparently Michael Cohen thought she was a great American two years after Benghazi, and now he does not,” she said. “Let’s just be really frank here, people. Don’t call someone a murderer of an ambassador, for God’s sake. It’s offensive to Americans who really want the truth and what’s going on in politics. Please, give us a break.”

Cohen’s tweet comes the same day as a the House Select Committee on Benghazi released an extensive report on the September 11, 2012, attacks that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. The report from the House Republicans on the committee argues that intelligence was available suggesting an attack in the area was possible and that Clinton and a top aide, Patrick Kennedy, should have realized the risks.

Cohen’s tweet came after an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll published Tuesday shows Trump is ahead of Clinton at “being honest and straightforward” 41% to 25% respectively and 44% to 39% on the issue of national security.

(h/t CNN)

Reality

Clinton did not kill Ambassador Stevens and 2 years of 8 Republican-led Benghazi committees found no wrongdoing by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or President Obama.

Let’s also review the other claims.

$6 Billion Lost

False – The State Department inspector general discovered $6 billion worth of federal contracts that overlapped with Clinton’s tenure that had either missing or incomplete paperwork. “The failure to maintain contract files adequately creates significant financial risk and demonstrates a lack of internal control over the Department’s contract actions,” the IG’s office wrote in the audit, which did not mention Clinton by name and covers a six-year period that continued well after she left office in early 2013.

Here is the full report. Read it yourself.

Sold Uranium to the Russians

False – This comes from the book “Clinton Cash” where the author falsely claimed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State had “veto power” and “could have stopped” Russia from buying a company with extensive uranium mining operations in the U.S. In fact, only the president has such power.

Trump Flip-Flops Position on Muslim Ban to Only ‘Terrorist States’

Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States has been a central issue of his campaign — but he has described the ban differently in the weeks since the mass shooting in Orlando.

While gaggling with reporters as he toured his golf club here, Trump suggested in an offhand comment that his ban wouldn’t apply to Muslims from countries not typically associated with terrorism.

“It wouldn’t bother me, it wouldn’t bother me,” Trump said when asked whether he would allow a Scottish Muslim into the U.S. under his policy.

His spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, told CNN Saturday that Trump supports barring only Muslims from “terror states,” not all Muslims.

Trump even indicated that the ban is not ironclad, telling CNN in a brief interview on Saturday he would consider allowing Muslims from states with heavy terrorist activity to enter the U.S., as long as they are “vetted strongly.”

He also told the Daily Mail that individuals from “terror countries” would be “even more severely vetted” but could ultimately be allowed entry into the country.

“People coming from the terror states — and you know who I’m talking about when I talk about the terror states — we are going to be so vigilant you wouldn’t believe it and frankly a lot will be banned,” Trump told CNN after touring his golf course here.

Trump also focused on the need to ban individuals from “terrorist countries” in an interview later Saturday with Bloomberg Politics.

“I want terrorists out. I want people that have bad thoughts out. I would limit specific terrorist countries and we know who those terrorist countries are,” Trump said, again not specifying which countries would be included.

(h/t CNN)

Reality

With the many other flip-flops since becoming the Republican party’s nominee, Trump rejected almost every stance that his supporters loved which separated him from the other Republican primary candidates.

On December 7th, 2015, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump released a statement calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can “figure out what is going on.” The reasons Trump cited for the Muslim ban included studies that did not exist and unsubstantiated claims that there was a “great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population” and the that “it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension.”

It was a statement that, by far, was one of the most bigoted statements Trump, or any other politician, has made in our lifetime.

Trump tweets that Scotland loves Brexit (though Scotland voted against)

Twitter

Donald Trump praised the Scottish this morning for “[taking] their country back” in the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. This is despite the fact that Scotland voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU, with 62 percent of the population backing the Remain campaign. However, this wasn’t enough to change the total outcome of the UK vote, which backed the decision to leave 52 percent to 48 percent.

Reality

Scotland isn’t the reason the Brexit vote succeeded. Far from it: 62 percent of Scots voted to remain in the EU.

In-fact, there is serious talk in Scotland to leave the UK in order to stay in the EU.

Trump Struggles to Explain Clinton Server Hack Evidence

Donald Trump insisted Thursday that the private email server Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state was hacked, but the presumptive Republican nominee couldn’t say where he learned that information.

“But is there any evidence that it was hacked other than — routine phishing –” “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt asked Trump in a sit-down interview that will air Thursday on “NBC Nightly News.”

“I think I read that,” Trump said. “And I heard it, and somebody–”

“Where?” Holt pressed him.

“—that also gave me that information. I will report back to you. I’ll give it to you,” Trump said.

U.S. officials have told NBC News that there is no evidence that hackers penetrated the server, although there is evidence of phishing attempts. Clinton’s campaign says that there is no evidence that her private server was ever hacked.

Trump’s remark comes a day after he argued that Clinton’s private server left her vulnerable to blackmail if she were president.

“Her server was easily hacked by foreign governments — perhaps even by her financial backers in Communist China — putting all of America in danger,” Trump said Wednesday in a speech that slammed Clinton. “Then there are the 33,000 emails she deleted. While we may not know what is in those deleted emails, our enemies probably do. So they probably now have a blackmail file over someone who wants to be president of the United States. This fact alone disqualifies her from the presidency.”

NBC News fact-checked some of Trump’s claims in the speech.

Trump’s campaign offered alleged examples of attempted hacks from China and other countries in a published version of his Wednesday address, but none of the cited reports say that Clinton’s server was ever successfully penetrated as the candidate argued.

(h/t NBC News)

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWliCw3PKBg

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