Money Laundering – Politics Plus

Open Thread February 19 2026

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 6:00 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Feb 192026

A couple of days ago, the event map for the No Kings demonstration planned for March 28 was posted.

Archived from The Lever – Yes, it’s a “We told you so,” but sadly it’s right on. If only the US would vote for a woman – we’d have our candidate. But they won’t – and they will not be ready to do so by 2028

Also archived from The Lever, this one is in regard to pedophile protectors – this time at Deutsche Bank. (They are also money launderers, BTW).

This is a short (9½ minutes) excerpt from a much longer video. I think we have all already figure out the point she makes about the evil elite. But what she says about why James Talarico terrifies the regime so much was news to me. And, I think, important. (It’s about 15 minutes if you didn’t see it and want to.)

Open Thread December 6 2024

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 6:00 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Dec 062024

Yesterday, I learned that Steve Schmidt will be speaking at the Oxford Union’s annual debate, along with other Americans Julian Castro and Jeh Johnson. Steve is on the pro side and the other two on the anti. The proposition is “The House believes America is a failing democracy.” The whole thing will be videotaped, and should be on the Oxford Union’s YouTube channel next week. Steve will link to it when it is available. You know, 200 years ago, it might have made some sense to be an isolationist in America. Today, it’s impossible.

Joyce Vance brings together 1984 (with a nod to The Handmaid’s Tale), the Federalist Papers, and a letter to President Biden from two concerned Senators into a warning which we will heed – but a lot more people are needed to heed it. Not that I’m optimistic.

I am sourcing this from PolitiZoom rather than directly from Pavlovitz because I think the commentary adds a little something, as a second look at the same material from a different angle often does.

This is from Wonkette and ties together Trump**, cryptocurrency, and China. Sigh. I can see I am going to be missing more stories for longer than I had hoped. (There are emojis for sighing, but, except for the “sigh of relief” ones, which are pretty cute, they are all awful.)

Belle Russia

Dog

Open Thread October 13, 2022

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 7:10 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Oct 132022

Yesterday, President Biden designated Camp Hale as a National Monument. It’s the site, high in the Rockies, where the Army’s 10th Mountain Division trained during World War II. “It was the first and only division of the U.S. military trained to fight in mountain terrain, and many of the soldiers came back to the area to help build the local ski industry.” Of course, Colorado Republican heads exploded. They are painting it as a “land grab,” but the entire area is already protected anyway. This is just a designation of a piece of Federal land as a Monument. It may possibly increase funding (which is needed.) I thought a little good news would be helpful today. I’m breaking my own (unwritten) rule today to use two short takes from the same source. That’s because, though each highlights a different person, both center on a crook from China, and the facts in both articles are from the same investigation. We certainly have some egregious crooks in the US – but we have no monopoly on them. Also, I’ll be watching the hearing today, so I won’t be saying anything about it till tomorrow.

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

ProPublica – How a Chinese American Gangster Transformed Money Laundering for Drug Cartels
Quote – As they investigated [Xizhi] Li’s tangled financial dealings, U.S. agents came across evidence indicating that his money laundering schemes involved Chinese government officials and the Communist Party elite. China’s omnipresent security forces tightly control and monitor its state-run economy. Yet Li and others moved tens of millions of dollars among Chinese banks and companies with seeming impunity, according to court documents and national security officials. The criminal rings exploited a landscape in which more than $3.8 trillion of capital has left China since 2006, making the country the world’s top “exporter of hot money,”
Click through for the beginning of the onvestigation (and probably ore than you ever wanted to know about money laundering.)

ProPublica – The Globetrotting Con Man and Suspected Spy Who Met With President Trump
Quote – In July 2018, President Donald Trump met at his New Jersey golf club with a Chinese businessman who should have never gotten anywhere near the most powerful man in the world. Tao Liu had recently rented a luxurious apartment in Trump Tower in New York and boasted of joining the exclusive Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. But Liu was also a fugitive from Chinese justice. Media reports published overseas three years before the meeting had described him as the mastermind of a conspiracy that defrauded thousands of investors.
Click through for Part Two of the investigation. This is more information which doesn’t exactly make the Secret Service look good.

Food For Thought

PHP is a programming language used to build websites. We have it at all through our hosting partner, BlueHost. In order to update it, we have to go through Bluehost. During his life, TomCat was the only one who had access to our account there. I (JD) am now the only one. I have been to BlueHost and investigated updating our PHP to 8.3 or even to 8.1. I found instructions to do so - in fact, I found two conflicting sets of instructions. I went through one set of the steps and got the message that Our site could not handle 8.3, but that it had successfully updated to 8.1. I then went back here to see what it looked like. But I couldn't get in - either as an administrator or as a reader. It was just gone. I had to reach BlueHost by phone. It was determined that Politics Plus is in fact not compatible with any version of PHP newer than the one we have. BlueHost therefore uninstalled it for me, and the site came back to normal. Of course, like everyone else, I care about security. But I also am aware that TomCat elected to use different providers for several of the services that BlueHost provides, for instance backups. We are backed up daily - but not by BlueHost. However, out PHP is through Bluehost. I feel that if they are not worried about the older version, I am not going to worry about it. I believe that our security here is all or mostly through WordFence, whom I trust.