She shouldn't have come here.

I have said NO foreign leader should come here period. But I guess if they all are then...

Rather than give Trump an opportunity to disrespect her.

prevent WWIII, by saving the Iran deal.

Frankly, I don't blame her, but she doesn't deserve to be treated like that. Trump is dumber than a doorknob and I'm sure Merkel thought a little bit of him goes a long way. But where was Melania and why wasn't she there to greet her when she arrived. I guess she was too busy recovering from her two dinner parties earlier in the week and needed her rest. After all there were all those dishes that needed washing and just the thought of the White House Help doing all that cleanup made her dizzy. Merkel came for a visit because she felt she needed to, in order to try and salvage the relationship between the two countries, but obviously decided that she'd rather walk the streets of DC than to be in his company. That says a lot.

Trump was throwing out a lot of numbers during their press conference regarding the trade deficits between our two countries. After what he did to Trudeau in Canada, I don't believe a word he says when he starts throwing out numbers regarding trade deficits. He made up a number with Trudeau and later it was determined that he doesn't even know what constitutes the trade deficits. He just threw out numbers and it's not like he made an honest mistake, he didn't have a clue and didn't care enough to ask anybody what constituted the trade deficit between the U.S. and Canada and then had the nerve to brag about it and joke about making up numbers. I'm sure won him points with our neighbors to the North. One of the things he didn't include was labor costs and when someone was trying to explain it to him he didn't seem to have a clue as to why they should include labor costs. I guest they didn't teach the concept of trade deficits at the Wharton School of Business, or else, more likely he wasn't paying attention and couldn't be bothered.

He also told Merkel today during the press conference that Germany needs to contribute more to NATO and that Germany needs to do more to contribute to their own security. He doesn't seem to know his history in that after WWII, it was the U.S. and our allies that limited the size of the military that Germany and Japan could have to limit their ability to wage war and threaten neighboring countries and the U.S. ever again. In exchange for imposing that limitation upon them, we promised that the U.S. would provide security for them if they were attacked by others. Since we thought Europe would be the location of the next war with the Soviets, it was our idea to permanently station our troops and equipment in Germany to prepare for the day when the inevitable eventually happened.

" ... Canadian government sources previously have explained away Washington's account of the Canada-U.S. trading relationship as basically counting goods twice.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has been including goods that pass through Canada but don't originate here as Canadian exports in his export calculations, artificially inflating the U.S.'s trade deficit in goods with Canada, sources told CBC back in February.

For example, a Chinese washing machine that passes through the port of Vancouver on its way to the U.S. is being counted as part of both the U.S. trade deficit with China and the U.S. goods deficit with Canada. ..."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-responds-trumps-trade-1.4577493

Each country is supposed to contribute 2% of GDP to defense. Doing that doesnt infringe on the agreement to limit offensive capabilities.
As for trumps business statements, I agree with you. I really dont think he knows that some of the things he says are just plain wrong. This is also a guy who uses the terms "budget deficit" and "trade deficit" interchangeably without knowing they're different!!

And was treated with respect. It’s a positive for our country, despite dickhead Trump.

rather than how she felt personally about the occupant of the White House. She doesn't think only of herself; she's not Trump after all.

Every sane leader in the world is.

not to have invited her to dinner or to at least have made dinner arrangements for her, I'll bet she had a much nicer time wandering around DC and ordering her own burger than she would have had dining with Trump.

He really is a despicable pile of shit that no human being can stand, including his own family.

Would not have happened with don the con

I'm sure it was a better evening than if she had to spend it with Trump

You will be better off hob knobbing with The People and gain a better understanding of our values than spending ANY amount of time with Twitler von Shitgibbon.

Can you imagine if he was in Berlin to meet Chancellor Merkel and she left him on his own for the evening?

Do they have peeing hookers?

in Germany. The "girls" have physicals monthly, and are issued clean bill of health cards.

Or can a person just go get checked every month for the 'just in case' of it...an example:

Random guy at pub: I think you're hot!...wanna Bang?
Random girl at pub: I think you're hot, too...so yes, but Pay Me

Like is it ILLEGAL for the last 3 words to be spoken if one doesn't have your exam card?

I'm just curious. Certainly we would find a way to abuse the privledge in america, but it's interesting to me as a theory conversation I suppose heh...

I think you'd have to register with the government before you're allowed to get paid for sex, and they make sure the required health checks are completed first. Also, pay taxes, etc. Of course, there's a gray/black market, e.g. it's easy to find older men on gayromeo ready to pay "pocket money" to younger men without getting the government or health checks involved. The same is probably true for heterosexual sex work…

There was a change in sex worker laws recently, now use of condoms is mandatory (I wonder why this was changed only recently, seems like common sense).

As Bob Loblaw says, it's perfectly legal there and has been for many years.

to spend time with her.

But Trump was monumentally rude not to have made plans.

A private dinner in an upscale Georgetown restaurant:

https://georgetowner.com/articles/2011/07/26/president-obama-and-chancellor-merkel-dine-1789/

would have made a charming dinner companion. I would not be able to sit down to a private dinner with 45. Maybe she feels the same way.

is that Banana Republic? Just kind of ironic, if so. I mean, that is what Spanky has turned this country into.

DAILY MAIL, UK, Fri. April 27, 18

Look who ISN'T coming to dinner! Trump snubs Merkel by not inviting her to White House when she lands from Germany - so she heads out for selfies at a bar instead.

Angela Merkel landed in Washington D.C. Thursday and unlike Obama, Trump did not invite her to dinner.

Instead she went for a walk in Georgetown and into *J. Paul's, a bar-restaurant which offers a $14.99 cheeseburger and posed for selfies. In 2011 Obama had taken her to 1789 in Georgetown where Colorado rack of lamb is $59.
Trump is hosting Merkel for a working lunch at the White House instead.

President Donald Trump hosted German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House Friday for a 'working lunch' followed by a joint news conference — leaving her to dine with college students on Thursday night.
Her visit to the executive mansion was scheduled to last fewer than three hours.
Commenting on the brevity this morning in a tweet, Trump said, 'So much to discuss, so little time!'

But Merkel had been spotted at *J. Paul's, a bar-restaurant in Georgetown on Thursday evening with her security detail, posing for selfies with other diners, while Trump was at the White House.



Not the White House: Angela Merkel posed for selfies with regular diners at J. Paul's In Georgetown, where the 1/2lb special cheeseburger comes in at $14.95





READ & SEE MORE: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5665273/Trump-lets-Merkel-dine-says-discuss-little-time-White-House.html

Have to hit the golf course!

State dinner. I'm sure she enjoyed what she did far more, though.

and not that she isn't French. He is 1/2 German. His grandfather ran away from Germany in the middle of the night to avoid the draft and when he tried to go back in they wouldn't let him.

Good for her!

DAMMIT!!!!!

Their DNA has too many human genes to not be cooler than Trump.

Plus, she met some real Americans. Now she knows this country is not defined by an uncouth, malignant carnival barker.

What kind of burger costs $14.99?

I'd prefer an informal walk to some pompous diplomatic display too, but then I'm not the Chancellor of Germany.

-- Mal

Most restaurants it's a $10 meal at this point for a burger and fries. I imagine that in DC there are some pretty good "artisanal" and specialty burger places with lots of neat fixings that pump up the price a bit more. Gotta pay the rent and all.

restaurants not the more pricey places. Even fast food restaurants are around $7-$8 for a burger combo meal including tax.

Not saying it's a bad burger in the slightest. I enjoyed quite a few "high priced" burgers during my DC time years ago. It's part of the experience.

For those not familiar with DC, that is the scenic old town part. It has rows and rows of nice places to eat from rustic to fancy gourmet, but one universal aspect is that they are in a location where the rent is sky-high, and they go bankrupt if they can't charge prices that will help them meet the rent.

Besids, Merkel is paid in Euros. It doesn't seem so expensive when you divide by 1.20.

More than anything, it is the rents that threaten big cities' vitality.

My younger daughter had rented a place in Frankfurt when she moved there for her first job. The rent was so high that she decided she would buy an apartment. She did, but it was a 6th floor walk-up (!!!) and I was huffing and puffing every time I went to visit her. She has now moved in with her boyfriend outside of town and rented her apartment out. People were lining up to pay her something like €2500 ($3000) a month for a place that required Olympic training just to bring the groceries home. Sounded like Manhattan. Frankfurt, along with most other big towns in Germany, has nowhere near enough apartments to satisfy demand.

But there is plenty of money to go around, still, it seems. My wife and I were steered to some new "in vogue" fusion restaurant in downtown Düsseldorf for our anniversary (April 10th). We got the last table for two, and we were the oldest people in the place by about 25 years.

making up the patrons. Frankfurt is a hub for a lot of economic and technology activity. Like similar cities it should have a class of young, highly paid people, many couples. That points to the situation that such cities are headed toward, the cities will soon be populated with either highly paid people, very rich people, or homeless people. True middleclass people are being priced out.

Last year, maybe two years ago, I read about an 18 year old woman getting a $25 million dollar luxury apartment in New York City, so that she could go to college there. Her dad is a multi-billionaire. Extrapolate that to parents that have high incomes that can afford expensive places for their kids and at some point, affordable housing vanishes. Interestingly, many of the kids stay after finishing college, further putting pressure on housing prices.

I have only been to Frankfurt four times and never had to use mass transit. What is the mass transit system there like? Does your daughter take a train to work? Mass transit help offset high rents, IMO, because people can work in cities proper and in near surburbs and take mass transit home.

While our daughter lives and works in Frankfurt, we do not. We live in Düsseldorf (actually just outside it--our town was there a few centuries before Düsseldorf was). The restaurant was trendy, but not fancy. It didn't even set me back 100 euros for the pair of us, and for an inner city in northern Europe, that's getting off easy. My wife had some kind of wine. I don't do alcohol, so don't ask me what kind, I wouldn't know. "Younger" to us means the 30 to 40 crowd.

Public transportation is definitely a key. Because of traffic in town, we took the tram into town, and then a combination of U-Bahn and trams in town. In Frankfurt, we ALWAYS use mass transit. Their network is fabulous. I have never driven once when I was down there. My daughter's apartment is in front of the Südbahnhof, which is a stop for both city mass transit and long distance trains. She now lives with her boyfriend out in a small town in the Taunus, where there is no convenient mass transit. So she has to go by car at least to a stop of one of the trams or local trains.

From where we live, it is best to have a car, but only to get to a tram station or local train station. Since I am in a different country practically every day for work, I also need to be near an airport, and Düsseldorf has good connections to almost everywhere. In traffic, it might take me 25 minutes to get to the airport, but since I usually fly before 7 in the morning, it is a 15 minute ride.

You are SO right about mass transit in cities. My elder daughter moved from downtown Los Angeles to midtown Manhattan about ten years ago, and ditched her car. She hasn't owned one since.

like people buy apartments. BTW, what type of work do you do? A generalized answer is adequate. Again, thanks.

They needed someone with a set of very specific skills, and able to speak French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Russian (Swedish and Catalan were bonuses, but not required). Good job security and pay, plus I decide my own vacations, but I've been doing this for over 40 years now (somewhat higher in rank over the years), and I'm not having much success in finding a successor.

There is a legend about a woman who shows up at a bank in Midtown Manhattan wanting to borrow $5000 for one month. The bank says it's kind small potatoes, since a month's interest would only net them $100, but if she can offer collateral, they would do it. She says she has a brand new Mercedes to offer. The bank says OK, but she would have to leave the car with them, which she finds perfectly acceptable. The next day, she drives the Mercedes into their garage, signs the papers, and gets the $5000 paid into her account. After a month, she comes back, pays the bank $5100, and receives her keys and registration and closes out the loan.

The bank manager asks her candidly, if she can afford a new Mercedes, why does she need a loan of $5000 for one month? She answers that she didn't need the loan at all. Completely confused, the bank manager then asks why in the world she even bothered? She explains that she had to park her new car in Manhattan for that month, and that in a typical Manhattan garage, that would have cost her an absolute minimum of $40 a day, and probably more. Thirty days at $40 would have meant at least $1200 in parking fees, and she just did it in their secure garage for $100.

Seems like just the language requirement disqualify pretty much everyone. Maybe you can select underlings (mostly on their ethics and drive), set a requirement to learn languages in X-years and see which one swims upstream the best.

Neat recount on the parking space trick. Smart choice by the lady, if she doesn't need use of the car.

Take care.

I doubt there are banks in Midtown Manhattan that bother with loans of $5,000. A hundred times that, maybe.

I have a small team of Europeans that cumulatively come close, but that's ten people, and they still don't have all the languages (or all the necessary skills) among them. I may have to try to recruit a native Russian speaker, but finding one who is trustworthy will be a challenge. Oh, well. I'm only 66. I figure I have another 14 years before I retire.

I like working, but haven't figured out whether I am the from last minute of work to the morgue type yet.

I was in Dallas Wednesday, Germany Thursday, Spain Friday, back in Germany over the weekend, Belgium today.

At least if it kills me, I won't die of boredom.

Aged beef, lean meat and fat ballanced. When I was a boy, it was common to find a delicious burger, today's stuff tastes like seasoned, ground up plywood. Good burgers used to cost $1.50 when I grew up. Today, to get a decent burger, you start at $12 and go up from there. McDonalds, Burger King, Five Guys ARE NOT GOOD BURGERS. I don't even bother buying common burgers these days, grilled chicken is a safer bet for flavor.

... which was kind of the point.

Frankly, though, I'd bet my tastes are so pedestrian as to shock you.

-- Mal

We always joked about the $20 burgers in DC. It's not really true, but working near the White House and in Georgetown it was close to that.

It is not a hard choice between dining with an Orange Anus and having a burger after a walk around DC.

since we could not depend on the sitting US President to do that..

A door or two away from the City Tavern Club, where I have had gigs more than a few times. We never could get in there in the time available after sound check. We usually went to Thunder Burger & Bar just a block and a half east. Burgers there $10 to $20 as I recall.

There's a five guys right by the white house. There's a burger to be found just about any block in DC. Some of the more delicious options have pictures when America's last democratically elected president visited there.

A lot of local restaurants have posted pictures of when the Obamas or Bidens visited, or Clintons. Not many have the Trumps or Pences.

There's a local restaurant with a mural painted of every American president going back 100 years...except Trump.

Now that would be really gross even by Republican standards of indecency of which they are the reigning champions. Well on second thought it could be used as a dart target with the hairy orifice the Bull' Eye.

Merkel is the real leader of the free world

And I wouldn't want to have dinner with him either!

It is guaranteed that her dinner conversation was far more interesting and entertaining with that group than if she had spent the evening with 45. Regardless if her dining companions were Americans or were from other countries, she undoubtedly gained far more insight into the lives of people in America than she would have while dining at 1600 Pennsylvania.

"Hello, I am pleased to meet you. What do you think about your president?"

"He is a self-serving piece of shit"

"And you sir, what do you think?"

"I just wish you were president, instead of that sociopath."

“Can we buy you a beer? Dinner? Welcome! We’re so excited to meet you!”

I think she was very clever and planned this photo op. She knew she wasn’t dining with Cheeto, and Georgetown is not the closest neighborhood with lots of bars and restaurants. Her staff probably figured this out in advance and thought “where might she have a pleasant stroll and a drink and dinner among a lot of people who will recognize her and be thrilled to welcome her?” And , oh yeah, Kalorama—neighborhood of Obama—isn’t far.

birthday present why should he acknowledge any woman as being worthy?

I’m not using the sarcasm gif because my question isn’t sarcastic.

But to make matters worse, Trump's family were German immigrants, so for that reason they should have had something in common,
however I think in the country that they came from (I think the Bavarian region) I do not think they have much liking for him.

... she's a strong, intelligent Woman ...

... the type of Woman that scares the hell out of him ...

Last edited Fri Apr 27, 2018, 05:32 PM - Edit history (1)

I've never heard of a St. Paul's rest. in DC, only St. Paul's churches and parishes in my 40 years in DC. Thanks.

I bet she take some time out to drop in on Barack and Michelle while she is in DC.

She probably had a lot better time than she would have had with the big orange turd in the WH. I'm curious if those guys in suits in the second picture were with her?

I bet she enjoyed herself a heck of a lot more than if she had had to be entertained by the tweeter.

sitting around the table with Merkel?

Also, although her face is not smiling as much as those faces around her, it looks like a typical "German happy face", so I'm glad she enjoyed that evening.

and their hospitality!

to have such a slob representing the USA. I imagine he eats fast food because he doesn't know how to use silverware.


I hope Mrs. Merkel had a great time exploring our Capital. It looks like she was surrounded by pleasant people.

WaPo: The huge number driving Trump’s frosty relationship with Germany’s Merkel
See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/27/the-huge-number-driving-trumps-frosty-relationship-with-germanys-merkel/?utm_term=.d9584f4f3401

WaPo: Trump-Merkel meeting is more business than pleasure for both leaders
See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/trump-merkel-meeting-is-more-business-than-pleasure-for-both-leaders/2018/04/26/65bbeeb0-46ff-11e8-8082-105a446d19b8_story.html?utm_term=.868534d0fe84
(snips)
Merkel arrives with deadlines looming on two crucial issues. Trump has made May 12 his cutoff for deciding whether to pull the United States out of the Iran nuclear accord. Meanwhile, a European exemption from Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs expires May 1 — on Tuesday. Yet there is little sign Merkel can get Trump to back down from decisions he sees as part of his populist promise to help American workers and secure better international deals.

And for Trump, Germany’s pointed refusal to join the allied air assault on Syria this month is the latest on a list of grievances that include what he calls grossly unfair treatment of U.S. automakers.

-------------
Trump is so full of himself, he can never openly admit any friction or animosity in any relationship when he thinks there's something in it for him and his cronies to gain. He's met his match in Ms. Merkel.

.......

He can't stand the thought of being thought of as inferior to a woman. Also, she is far more intelligent than he is (who isn't?) and he knows that he will look like the moron that he is in her presence.

AND i can assure you he is going to put some pressue on the North Koreans...

I hate him SOOOO MUCH.

good for her.

We've completely abdicated the role, so good for her for doing something cool like walking the streets of Georgetown.

We're getting into Commodus territory here.

Things didn't end well for Commodus.

I could remember Marcus Aurelius but not Commodus. It's role played by River Phoenix in Gladiator:



Whether he was as bad as he's painted is debatable but it's probably safe to say the evil that men do lives after them, and then some

5 Big Macs and a Diet Coke please

treatment. The world is teetering on WW3.....hard times a coming? Being older, senior citizens in WW. My greatest fear, along with the children in WW. No withdrawing of diplomatic assets any given country so I am not worried, so far. This is the end result of diplomatic snub. Right? Hooray for the younger crowd able to experience leadership at a pinnacle time such as this.

You're get all the stout beer that you want to drink and an elegant drinking stein to boot. Just help us get rid of the shit throwing ape.

Option 1: A very awkward evening with a thick clod whose idea of fine dining is KFC and whose idea of smalltalk is to tell you how great he is and how unfair the world is to him and whose bedtime is when most of us are just getting going ...

Option 2: Hit the streets and take in some nightlife with the possibility of real human contact and some local cuisine.

No-brainer, really.

But where was the German Ambassador or embassy personnel? Shouldn't they have entertained her?

Link to tweet