All the graphic novels by Mr. Delisle are very good.
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Also we can almost certainly thank Jon Voight for this And CALLED IT
What?
So Voight told Tramp to save Hollywood with Tariffs, is that the point?
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Yup. Sounds like a game of telephone and last person who talked to him.
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A year or so ago, Trump offered to get some kind of legislation passed that would benefit auto makers if they all donated a certain amount of money to his campaign, and I immediately said, “WTF? That’s a bribe! He’s literally soliciting a bribe!” It’s the literal definition of bribery, both in common language use, and in US law, and yet no mainstream media reported it that way. This is the same thing. For some reason, the media cannot get it through their heads that this guy is actually doing crimes. Blatantly. And they refuse to call it that, and act shocked when someone else says what it is. It’s infuriating.
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I’m pretty sure that particular proposal is going to quietly get shelved pretty quickly. Alcatraz has been a museum run by the National Park Service since, what, 1961 or something? That’s over 60 years since it’s been a prison. I’m sure it would cost billions to re-convert it back to a prison. Maybe 10s of billions. Getting materials and labor out there to do the work would be a nightmare.
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I think they know. They’re just cowards who don’t want to lose their jobs.
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But But… it’s an official act
So. Can’t be illegal.
And. eO that makes bribing foreign officials legal now.
My head hurts
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Wouldn’t his treatment of Big Law technically be extortion? “Give me something I want or i will make bad things happen to you.”
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Even American movies are filmed abroad - I can’t think of many/any recent big-budget movies, even the ones ostensibly set in the US, that weren’t filmed at least in part overseas. (e.g. List of productions filmed at Pinewood Group facilities - Wikipedia)
Or rather that Voight was telling Trump that other countries have incentives to make movies there, and if he wanted movies to be filmed in the US, they needed incentives to film here, too. Trump, having scrambled eggs for brains*, and still upset about the Parasite Oscar wins, immediately went to, “punish foreign films with tariffs!” instead.
*Trump clearly doesn’t get the idea of incentives. For him, incentives for one group are the same as putting disincentives on others. (It’s part of his general lack of understanding of business. Contrary to the common assertions, he’s not a businessman, he’s a real estate/con-man/licensing guy, a bunch of non-fungible goods in one-off deals, and fundamentally doesn’t understand how normal businesses run, at all.)
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I think Voight very plausibly said something like that, but honestly, if it was as simple as “Trump found out that foreign films are a thing so immediately decided he needed to tariff them too” I wouldn’t be surprised.
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I’m constantly amazed that Trump gets more and more blatant with his bribery schemes - from his club memberships and expensive hotel rentals, to the purchase of Truth Social stock, to buying his cryptocurrency, etc. and the press coverage is - at best - that it “raises ethics concerns.” As if Trump wasn’t literally getting large sums of money, personally, from various entities including foreign countries, for nothing (besides influence). How is it even possible to talk about it without calling it bribery?
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There you go again with your logic and facts.
This is a golden opportunity for grift! There is tax money to be drained from the public purse and re-distributed to the Donvict and his cronies. It’s the perfect real estate scam. For once, he’s playing to his strengths.
Bonus rant.
Reopening a prison? His base will eat this up. And not just any old prison, you could write several books about its importance in the American self-narrative identity. Selling this will be so easy.
There are several ways to do this, but the rough outline could be: private investors for the refurbishment and running of the prison, because “it saves money”. Their contracts state that everything else, i.e. updating (or creating) the infrastructure needed to operate the place will be paid for from some public budget or other. The private investors invest… as little as possible. In the looks, not in the substance. The “finished” prison may or may not open, but pretty soon it turns out, totally unexpected, that the whole thing isn’t viable because reasons. The private investors, A. Shell & Co Holdings (Panama) go bust and vanish into thin air. What to do, what to do… Well, it isn’t a museum anymore. Let’s not throw good money after bad, let’s sell the whole mess to… private investors! A.N. Other Carapace Company scoops everything up for a very reasonable price and develops the rock into a gated moated community for Bay Area techbros or luxury apartments or whatever. Real estate is great for laundering and/or parking money.
While I’m at it, put “Selling the giant redwoods to a logging company” on your bingo cards.
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Damn you!
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It can be illegal, it just that that doesn’t matter.
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The executive order only pauses enforcement of the FCPA, but does not invalidate the law itself. So, in theory, a new administration may decide to resume enforcement and go back to any statute of limitations in that enforcement.
I’m sure this is targeted directly at his cronies and those who hope to buy a pardon from him for the crime. Of course, he’ll only issue a pardon to his immediate family (if that) so he’ll have leverage over whoever supplicates before him.
As a signal of “everything in the White House is for sale” you can’t get any better, though.
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