Christmas Is Red, Roses Are Blue..

[toucana]

♫ ♫ Christmas Is Red, Roses Are Blue I’m off To Jail. The Rest Of You Too ♫ ♫

It takes a certain kind of genius to screw up something as simple and mundane as putting up the Xmas decorations and turning on the festive season lights, but the Trump clan managed it in spades yesterday.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/28/melania-trump-red-christmas-trees-white-house-decorations

Commentators were already struggling to find words to describe what the Guardian called Melania Trump’s “jarring blood red Christmas trees” in the West Wing which have been likened to car-wash brushes, or the waves of blood in the film of Stephen King’s iconic tale The Shining. The sinister blood red cones have already been photoshopped online into wearing white bonnets resembling those worn by the suffering women in The Handmaids Tale, and likened to the decorations that might have been in place at the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones.

Yesterday president Trump went to attend the 96th National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony organised by the National Park Service not far from the White House. But things did not go quite as planned

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/11/28/something-bizarre-happened-after-the-christmas-tree-lighting-ceremony-at-the-white-house.

After the briefest of appearances, Trump vanished from sight and sped back to the White House in his motorcade moments after Melania flipped the switch, abandoning the entire protective press pool of reporters who were supposed to be covering this seasonal fixture. The dumbfounded press pool were left standing in the cold for 15 minutes before being ferried back to base, and then being told that WH staff were “putting a lid on it”. Some of the press were not amused:

Where is Donald Trump tonight anyway? Is he in the White House, hiding under his desk? Is he down at the local strip club, asking if they take rubles?
Bill Palmer

On a more serious note, The BBC is reporting that the Frankfurt HQ of Deutsche Bank which is Germany’s biggest bank is being raided by police and German prosecutors in connection with a giant new criminal money laundering scandal.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46382722

Today’s raids apparently arose from new information disclosed by the ‘Panama Papers’, a very large cache of leaked confidential data stolen from the computers of a Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca in 2016.

In 2017, Deutsche Bank was fined $630m (£504m) by US and UK regulators in connection with a Russian money laundering plan.

Under the scheme, clients illegally moved $10bn out of Russia via shares bought and sold through the bank's Moscow, London and New York offices.

Deutsche has also been connected with another huge money laundering scandal at Denmark's Danske Bank. An internal investigation by Danske found that about €200bn (£177bn) of payments were funnelled through its Estonian branch.

Anyone who has been following the footnotes of the Mueller investigation will find this news particularly interesting for several reasons:
- It was said to have been a friendly intelligence agency based in Estonia that first warned the CIA that large amounts of Russian money were being laundered into Republican party funds in March 2016 during the run-up to the US 2016 presidential elections.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/apr/13/british-spies-first-to-spot-trump-team-links-russia

- It was Deutsche Bank who were directly implicated in laundering Russian Mafia money into the New York real estate market with the help of the Bank of Cyprus run by governors that included Wilbur Ross who later became Trump’s Commerce Secretary.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/trump-commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-business-links-putin-family-paradise-papers

- One of the key executives in Deutsche Bank’s international investment branch was a man called Justin Kennedy who was the head of their Real Estates Capital Markets division. Remarkably he authorised loans of $1billion to Donald Trump’s real estate projects at a time when no other bank would do so.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/anthony-kennedy-son-loaned-president-trump-over-a-billion-dollars-2018-6

Justin Kennedy happens to be the son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote SCOTUS judge who unexpectedly resigned his office in late June 2018, thereby creating the vacancy that was subsequently filled by a conservative Roman Catholic Brett Kavanaugh in October.

[wolfhnd]

It's not like brutalized architecture was a gift to the world. The same people that critique the crassness of the Trumps fall all over themselves to praise some of the ugliest "art" Western Civilization has ever produced.

[TheVat]

The Justin K connection is a little spooky.

LOL at all the cultural memes (like blood erupting in The Shining) that were evoked by Melania's aesthetic choices.

[jocular]

Is it light relief amid the horror or the other way round?

With these Trumps , they are spoiling us..

[wolfhnd]

I'm sick of the whole first significant other non sense and throw the British Royal family in for good measure. I don't want hear from them, I don't want to see them, I don't want to hear about them, I don't want to see their spawn, I didn't elect them and I want them to be as invisible as possible.

[toucana]

Other developments in what is rapidly turning out to be anything but a ’slow news’ day:
- Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal attorney unexpectedly turned up in court in Washington DC and pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. He told the court that he had previously lied when he told Congress that negotiations with Russia about building a Trump Tower in Moscow had finished before the Iowa caucus in January 2016. Michael Cohen admitted that he had continued actively working on the Moscow Trump Tower deal with Vladimir Putin and the Russian authorities until as late as June 2016, which contradicts Trump’s repeated claims that he had no business dealings with the Russsian government during the 2016 election year.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46390368

As he left the White House for a G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Mr Trump told reporters of Cohen: "He's a weak person and not a very smart person. He's got himself a big prison sentence. And he's trying to get a much lesser prison sentence by making up this story."

When asked to explain why put a ‘weak and not very smart person’ in charge of his personal affairs for so many years, president Trump replied that “He once did a favour for me”.

- President Trump has abruptly announced the cancellation of a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin that had been scheduled to take place during the G20 summit in Argentina. The meeting was ostensibly cancelled because of the ongoing crisis over Russia’s seizure of three Ukrainian naval vessels near the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea last Sunday as they attempted to navigate the Kerch Strait into the Sea of Azof.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46386160

- The offices of Trump’s former personal tax accountants were raided by Federal officers in Chicago earlier today according to a tweet from Chicago Sun-Times City Hall reporter Fran Spielman. The offices in question belong to Chicago Alderman Edward Burke whose law firm did tax work for Donald Trump for 12 years up until May 2018.

https://twitter.com/fspielman/status/1068177373684817923

The FBI apparently ordered all employees to leave, and sealed the office windows with brown paper according to a photograph.

[Serpent]

I'm sick of the whole first significant other non sense and throw the British Royal family in for good measure. I don't want hear from them, I don't want to see them, I don't want to hear about them, I don't want to see their spawn, I didn't elect them and I want them to be as invisible as possible.

Amen, brother!
The Windsors usually send their sons off on military missions abroad. What would be good places to send the Trump spawn and spawn-in-law?

[TheVat]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench

[TheVat]

Given the thread's direction, towards humor and venting about politics, I moved it to Lounge. Also had to remove 2 flame posts. Keep it civil, guys.

[-1-]

I actually liked the blood-red Xmas trees. They are a nice diversion from the normal green, green-blue, or white.

In fact, I think nature made a mistake when it coloured Xmas with green and red, but made Xmas trees all green.

Time to pick a fight with Evolution, and show it who is the real boss.

[-1-]

The Windsors usually send their sons off on military missions abroad. What would be good places to send the Trump spawn and spawn-in-law?

- Canadian finishing schools: how to become a bleeding heart liberal, while maintaining the international status quo of the rich.

- The training camps of the French Foreign Legion.

- The beauty parlor and spa in Hitler's underground bunker suite.

- Russian Tennis Camps for the children of the elite, erudite, extremely rich and good looking and, well, for the just about uber-human little tykes.