A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Thursday, September 17, 2026 18:48
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Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:I am fair certain you do not.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:I know what you're getting at.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Yes I am. It's irrelevant.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Not sure if you are intentionally avoiding the questionQuote:
You seem to be decrying the effects of inflation, but your solution is to ramp up inflation by Increasing Minimum Wage?
I do, and I explained it. I'm well aware that union pay goes up with minimum wage increases. That's an altogether separate problem that needs to be addressed. Not a reason not to increase minimum wage.
You haven't once addressed what I"m getting at. Which is you better build that moat around your house that I've been telling Second he needs to build around his.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Odd how the GoPs never mention investor dividendz or executiv pay having an inflationary effect. Its az if an unlimited amount uv money can go to the rich without any penalty on sosiety at all.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
Huge effect. Add to that all the bonuses and golden parachutes that they get even if they were complete failures.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:In between 1978 and 2014, inflation-adjusted CEO pay increased by almost 1,000%. Meanwhile, typical workers in the U.S. saw a pay raise of just 11% during that same period.
Originally posted by JO753:
Odd how the GoPs never mention investor dividendz or executiv pay having an inflationary effect. Its az if an unlimited amount uv money can go to the rich without any penalty on sosiety at all.
In 2014, the ratio between average American CEO pay and worker pay was 303-to-1. The 1965 ratio was 20-to-1.
http://fortune.com/2015/06/22/ceo-vs-worker-pay/
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Quote:I would like to see that revolt. The revolts of the 1960's were a good thing for the country, but I don't think workers and the unemployed and the poor will revolt today. I'd love to be proved wrong, but what we will probably get is a revolt at the polls in 2020 and four more years of Trump. The battle cry in the Presidential election of 1972 was "Why change Dicks in the middle of a screw? Nixon in 72!" We know how that election came out, don't we.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I do, and I explained it. I'm well aware that union pay goes up with minimum wage increases. That's an altogether separate problem that needs to be addressed. Not a reason not to increase minimum wage.
You haven't once addressed what I"m getting at. Which is you better build that moat around your house that I've been telling Second he needs to build around his.
I think it appropriate when discussing Nixon to include art titled "I Swallowed A Bug" by Jerantino. The art was posted today.
www.deviantart.com/art/I-Swallowed-A-Bug-729499738
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Quote:I will ask you to stay on topic.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Huge effect. Add to that all the bonuses and golden parachutes that they get even if they were complete failures.
Originally posted by JO753:
Odd how the GoPs never mention investor dividendz or executiv pay having an inflationary effect.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
What is the Inflation-causing effect of Investor Dividends, or Executive Pay? What is the cause-and-effect relationship?
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Quote:No, you did not explain it previously.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:I do, and I explained it. I'm well aware that union pay goes up with minimum wage increases.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:I am fair certain you do not.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:I know what you're getting at.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Yes I am. It's irrelevant.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Not sure if you are intentionally avoiding the questionQuote:
You seem to be decrying the effects of inflation, but your solution is to ramp up inflation by Increasing Minimum Wage?
Are you now admitting that you understand that Union Pay Schedules are tied to the Federal Minimum Wage?
If the Minimum Wage is increased by 100%, like from $7.50/hr to $15/hr, then the Minimum Union Scale goes up also. If the base Union Wage Rate is 20% above, then it went from $9 to $18. The tiers of the Union Scale above that base also are boosted by percentage, depending upon Contract Language. So the $30/hr becomes $60/hr. The non-Union wages remain about 80% of the Union Wage, so $24 becomes $48/hr.
This is a fairly simple and circular formula, all predicated on Minimum Wage Increase.
The Minimum Wage worker gets $7.50 more per hour, the bottom rung Union worker gets $9 more per hour, the higher tier gets $30 more per hour, the non-Union worker gets $24 more per hour. So, which of those has the greater increase in buying power? It it clear that the Minimum Wage worker now has their low buying power made even worse, by inflating the wages of everybody else.
If that wasn't simple enough for you, then understand that the Minimum Wage worker has the least likely opportunity for overtime. So 40 hours per week moves them from $300/wk to $600/wk. The worker at the base of the Union Schedule is more likely to get opportunity for up to 20 hours at Time-and-a-half ($270 to $540) and perhaps 15 hours of Double Time ($270 to $540) per week. So from $900/wk to $1,800/wk. Hours beyond that are usually at far higher rates than Double Time. The higher tier Union worker with the same overtime opportunities will go from $3,000/wk to $6,000/wk.
So the Minimum Wage worker who whined for the Increase of $300 per week is competing in the economic market place with those who the Increase garnered $900/wk (possibly for the same work) or $3,000/wk for the semi-skilled. Who do you REALLY think is the winner there? And who just chopped off their foot? For example, housing rents are not going to stay stagnant for long, with between $300 and $3,000 extra per week floating around (merely among Wage workers), so who do you think will be getting the best living accommodations, and who will need to find a cheaper place?
There are standard business models, which largely are similar across industries. Let's take Restaurants, where many Minimum Wage workers are oft employed. To calculate how much must be charged for the product, how to price the food, they know that of all the income, 1/3 should go to the payroll, meaning the costs of having and paying the employee. From that base reference, all else follows. IIRC, the material cost (the food) should be kept under 1/3. And the remaining 1/3 goes to business expenses like rent, utilities, taxes, maintenance, other overhead. By payroll, this means that if the worker "earns" $7.50/hr, then each hour generally costs the employer $15/hr. So very simply, what the worker earns is 1/6 of the factor for cost of the product.
So if the employee doubled their pay-per-hour at a place that serves $3 hamburgers, the price must be sextupled to $18 burgers in order for the restaurant to not go out of business.
So the Minimum Wage worker who whined for their Wage to be doubled now has all purchasing expenses multiplied times 6. Did the whiner benefit themselves, or just cut off their other foot?
All based upon Minimum Wage Increase. Every greedy worker who is not you hopes
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Quote:JewelStaiteFan, you are recapitulating plantation economics: We can't pay the slaves more than food, clothing and shelter because that will cause an inflationary spiral in the cost of cotton and destroy the Confederacy's economy based on slaves working at the absolute minimum wage. Our dear slaves "just chopped off their foot" if we planters can't sell our bales of cotton because the price is too high.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
So the Minimum Wage worker who whined for the Increase of $300 per week is competing in the economic market place with those who the Increase garnered $900/wk (possibly for the same work) or $3,000/wk for the semi-skilled. Who do you REALLY think is the winner there? And who just chopped off their foot?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Are you now admitting that you understand that Union Pay Schedules are tied to the Federal Minimum Wage?
Did I ever argue it? It's irrelevant to my argument and it's an excuse to do nothing until it's too late.
Please show me where I said to raise the minimum wage to $15/hr. I've never once said that. In fact, I've argued loudly against it because it would be too great a shock to the system.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:$15/hr was an example, and it has been widely proposed and endorsed.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Did I ever argue it? It's irrelevant
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Are you now admitting that you understand that Union Pay Schedules are tied to the Federal Minimum Wage?
Please show me where I said to raise the minimum wage to $15/hr. I've never once said that.
Regardless of the amount, Minimum Wage Increase is the root of the same circular formula resulting in the Minimum Wage worker losing buying power.
You are merely saying you want to more gradually put Minimum Wage workers out of work, back on their couch playing games.
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Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
What is the Inflation-causing effect of Investor Dividends, or Executive Pay? What is the cause-and-effect relationship?
The premis uv minimum waje earnerz getting more money automaticly cauzing inflation iz based on the idea that prise uv the goodz and servisez they provide will haf to go up the same amount.
Wut if insted, the upper manajment all the way up to the CEO get less pay to make up for the increased labor cost?
How many burger flipper salaryz duz the McDonaldz CEO, CFO, Prezidentz, VPz, etc etc etc (there are duzenz uv titlez and ranks) equal? All the grossly overpaid peeps who hav next to nothing to do with getting that burger into your handz. Suppoze we cap executiv pay at 2,000,000$.
This goez for every company in the supply chain also.
Then, wut if McDonaldz gets off the stock market? Wut happenz to all the money that wuz being given to investorz? (who hav absolutely nothing to do with getting you your Big Mac)
Wut do you propoze to do with all that money?
I think the real workerz coud get a pretty good boost to their pay AND the price uv the food coud go way down!
JSF, I dont watch Fox very often. Just occasionally look in on Hannity or Carlson to see how they are spinning the latest Trump atrosity, but I think its next to impossible for them to hav hidden the welth gap problem from their fanz all theze yirz. So you must hav herd about the top 1% owning more than the bottom 90%.
How do you think that happened?
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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Why isn't pay rising faster?
www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/10/29/the-surprising-truth-abou
t-where-new-jobs-come-from/#768d7a0a3382
What do established firms use their money for? We know that the big firms don’t use it for investment as much as one might expect. In a Financial Times article entitled “Corporate investment: A mysterious divergence” Robin Harding helped resolve a conundrum that had puzzled the world’s top economists: why is net investment at a measly 4 percent of output when pre-tax corporate profits are now at record highs – more than 12 percent of GDP?
In standard economic theory, this makes no sense. When profits go up, companies should be seizing investment opportunities to lay the groundwork for even more profits in future. In turn, that investment should create jobs and lead to higher wages. That’s how capitalism is meant to work.
As it happens, we have the kind of thing that you rarely see in economics—a study that enables us to pinpoint the problem by offering “with” and “without” data.
It’s brilliant work by economists from the Stern School of Business and Harvard Business School, Alexander Ljungqvist, Joan Farre-Mensa, and John Asker, in an article entitled “Corporate Investment and Stock Market Listing: A Puzzle?” which compares the investment patterns of public companies and privately held firms. It turns out that the lag in investment is a phenomenon of the public companies more than the privately held firms.
“They find that, keeping company size and industry constant, private US companies invest nearly twice as much as those listed on the stock market: 6.8 per cent of total assets versus just 3.7 per cent.” Large publicly-owned firms are simply not investing enough to grow the economy.
Guess where all that money goes?
So if the money doesn’t go into job creation or investment, where does it all go? One part of the answer is that the firms are just sitting on the money, not seeing opportunities for investment. Another part of the answer is given by William Lazonick in HBR and the New York Times: an astonishing amount goes to share buybacks.
“From 2004 to 2013, 454 companies in the S&P 500 Index expended 51 percent of their profits, or $3.4 trillion, on repurchases, on top of 35 percent of profits on dividends… More than three-quarters of compensation for the 500 highest-paid executives came from stock options and stock awards.”
“So who gains from open-market repurchases? Their sole purpose is to give a company’s stock price a manipulative boost, and prime beneficiaries are the corporate executives who decide to do them... For corporate executives, stock-based pay is a ticket to membership in the 0.1 percent top-income club. So why do we let executives manipulate the stock market?"
As The Economist has written, the Blue Chips' use of share buybacks is the equivalent of becoming addicted to snorting "corporate cocaine."
“We are reaping the bitter fruits of the ‘shareholder value’ revolution," as Matthew Yglesias at Slate writes. "Executives at publicly traded companies are paid to generate higher share prices, which is done by hitting quarterly earnings targets. This leads to underinvestment relative to the behavior of managers of privately held firms.”
As Harding concludes, it is “time to stop thinking about corporate governance and executive pay as matters of equity and to regard them instead as a macroeconomic problem of the first rank.”
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US trade gap with China swells to record US$375 Billion
Business | 7 Feb 2018 11:48 am
www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news.php?id=102660&sid=2
US President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to overturn trade policy and bring down the country’s massive, persistent trade deficits.
After a year in the White House, he still has a lot of work to do.
The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services grew by 12 percent to US$566 billion last year, biggest since 2008. A record US$2.9 trillion in imports swamped US$2.3 trillion in exports last year.
The deficit in the goods trade with China — frequently accused of unfair trading practices by the White House — hit a record US$375.2 billion in 2017. The goods gap with Mexico climbed to US$71.1 billion.
"Trump’s trade team has not been able to stem the flood of imports into the country yet,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank.
The trade gap grew even though the U.S. dollar dropped nearly 7 percent last year against the currencies of its major trading partners, a move that gives U.S. companies a price edge in foreign markets and makes imports pricier in America.
Dean Baker, senior economist at the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, says it takes time for a weaker dollar to have an impact on the trade balance.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the trade deficit "ultimately will be reduced” by a combination of new or renegotiated trade pacts and a crackdown on abusive foreign trade practices. He cited the administration’s decision last month to impose tariffs on cheap Chinese solar panels and South Korean washing machines. But Ross said "it is not practical to set an exact deadline” for narrowing the trade gap.
Countries run trade deficits when they buy more products from other countries than they sell and run surpluses when they export more than they import. The United States has not turned a trade surplus since 1975, when Gerald Ford sat in the White House and "Jaws” ruled the box office.
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Don’t kid yourself. The future is bleak.
by Matt O'Brien
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/06/dont-kid-yourself-the-f
uture-is-bleak/?utm_term=.25a16da0b697
Democracy is really a prisoner's dilemma, and we're losing at ours.
That, at least, is the message of the depressingly timely new book “How Democracies Die” by Harvard University professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. It turns out, you see, that whether government of the people, by the people and for the people will in fact perish doesn't just depend on how good a job we did at setting up our political system. If it did, all the Latin American ones that copied our Constitution wouldn't have seen theirs fall apart. No, the survival of our democracy is also a matter of how good a job we do at fighting fair even when we don't have to.
In other words, whether we follow both the written and unwritten rules of politics.
The problem, of course, is that we haven't done that for a while now, and it doesn't look as though that's about to change. That's made our democracy devolve into trench warfare even in the best of times, and maybe a democracy in name only if the worst were ever to come to pass. That might sound alarmist, but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean President Trump isn't trying to undermine the rule of law.
Most of what we're talking about, though, doesn't have anything to do with the White House's current occupant. It's more the fact that everything gets filibustered nowadays. Or that opposition parties semi-regularly shut down the government to try to get their way. Or even say that they'll force the government to default on the debt if their demands aren't met. This is not normal. Or at least it didn't used to be. While there aren't any formal rules against these things, they're the type of hardball tactics that parties rarely, if ever, used before. That's because they knew the other side would respond in kind until our consensus-driven institutions, in particular, the Senate, stopped working altogether.
What changed? Well, the Republican Party did. They're the ones who shut the government down in the 1990s, the ones who threatened to breach the debt ceiling in 2011, the ones who shut the government down again in 2013 and the ones who blocked a sitting president from filling an empty Supreme Court seat simply because they could. A big part of this is that the party was taken over by the conservative movement, which is more hostile to compromise than everybody else. The rest, though, is that it stayed white and Christian at the same time that the Democratic Party and the country at large were becoming much more diverse and secular. They didn't just see their opponents as people with different ideas, but as different people, period.
The result has been what political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein call “asymmetric polarization”: Republicans have moved much further to the right than Democrats have to the left. Not only that, but they've been much more willing to use extreme measures to get what they want. They think that everything is their final chance to stop the country from changing forever — “the 2012 election may be the last opportunity for Republicans,” wrote former South Carolina senator and Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint, because “Republican supporters will continue to decrease every year as Americans become more dependent on the government" — and that their opponents aren't “real Americans” like they are. Who cares, then, if what they're doing isn't considered proper? There are bigger issues at stake.
But in politics, as in physics, every action has a (mostly) equal and opposite reaction. Sure, Democrats haven't held the full faith and credit of the United States hostage as Republicans have, but they did just shut down the government and have embraced the filibuster with equal vigor. What else are they supposed to do? Both parties would be better off cooperating
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Today’s budget deal is the proof: Republicans never cared about the deficit
Republicans used to profess to be extremely worried about the budget deficit. Many of us suspected at the time that they were full of it. And one big thing we’ve learned this week is that they were, indeed, full of it.
Back in 2012, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the budget deficit “the nation’s most serious long-term problem.” That same year, House Speaker Paul Ryan called it a “serious threat” to the economy. They were full of it.
Today’s budget deal — a big, multi-billion dollar increase in military spending “offset” by a nearly-as-large increase in non-military spending — gives up the game entirely. They don’t care, on any level, about the size of the federal budget deficit.
www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42981072
With Bushonomics completely discredited by 2009, the GOP was clearly in need of a brand refresh.
What they came up with was the “Tea Party” and the insistence that the big lesson of the Bush years was that Republicans had moved away from conservative economic orthodoxy. That — at least in theory — is why Republicans opposed Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009. Then Trump won and the Tea Party rebrand became obsolete in 2016.
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Quote:So Obama Averaged $1.25 Trillion Deficit per year.
Originally posted by second:
Today’s budget deal is the proof: Republicans never cared about the deficit
Republicans used to profess to be extremely worried about the budget deficit. Many of us suspected at the time that they were full of it. And one big thing we’ve learned this week is that they were, indeed, full of it.
Back in 2012, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the budget deficit “the nation’s most serious long-term problem.” That same year, House Speaker Paul Ryan called it a “serious threat” to the economy. They were full of it.
Today’s budget deal — a big, multi-billion dollar increase in military spending “offset” by a nearly-as-large increase in non-military spending — gives up the game entirely. They don’t care, on any level, about the size of the federal budget deficit.
www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42981072
With Bushonomics completely discredited by 2009, the GOP was clearly in need of a brand refresh.
What they came up with was the “Tea Party” and the insistence that the big lesson of the Bush years was that Republicans had moved away from conservative economic orthodoxy. That — at least in theory — is why Republicans opposed Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009. Then Trump won and the Tea Party rebrand became obsolete in 2016.
The Trump Tax Reform reportedly over a 10 year span reduces Revenue by $150 Billion per year.
The link you gave indicates almost $300 Billion more outlays over 2 years, or $150 Billion per year.
So Trump's first FY adds $300 Billion for the year, compared to Obama's record of $1,250 Billion per year. Not horrific progress made by Trump in his first attempt.
Obama's FY2017 claimed a $503 Billion Deficit with $3,644 Billion Revenues and $4,147 Billion Outlays.
Obama saddled FY2018 with claimed $454 Billion deficit, $3,899 Revenues, and $4,352 Billion Outlays using static projections.
If Trumponomics generates a 4% increase in Revenue the "Tax Reform Revenue Reduction" will be eliminated, wiped out, erased. If an 8% increase is realized, this new spending increase will also be balanced, wiped out. Much better hope for that than Obamanomics ever pretended.
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Democrats' strategic strike against gerrymandering
www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/monitor_breakfast/2018/0207/In-Democrat
s-strategic-strike-against-gerrymandering-Holder-leads-the-charge
Political gerrymandering 'a fundamental affront to our system of democracy.'
Two cases before Supreme Court
Partisan gerrymandering lies at the heart of two cases before the US Supreme Court – one brought by Democrats in Wisconsin, the other by Republicans in Maryland. The cases show that partisan gerrymandering is an equal-opportunity practice. How the justices rule could reshape the conduct of US elections.
A lawsuit over North Carolina’s congressional map is working its way through the courts. And last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a Texas case on racial gerrymandering.
Another challenge for Democrats is that their voters are clustered in cities and towns and on the coasts, which hurts their chances of winning power, Mr. Wasserman notes. The trend toward partisan “sorting” – people choosing to live near like-minded people – means there’s only so much Democrats can do in redrawing district lines.
“The truth is, gerrymandering compounds sorting,” says Wasserman. “When we’ve had a balkanization or a polarization of voters on the map to the degree we’ve seen in the last 20 years, it becomes easier for partisans drawing the maps to create safely Democratic or safely Republican seats.”
Safe seats often lead to the election of members who don’t feel the need to work across the aisle, contributing to polarization. Elections in such districts are often decided in the primaries, which are dominated by the most hard-line partisan voters.
So the creation of more competitive congressional districts could ease polarization, at least somewhat.
Citizen-led efforts to reform redistricting are under way in seven states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Some involve ballot initiatives, others are trying to pass legislation. But taking redistricting out of the hands of partisans is difficult.
Only four states – Arizona, California, Idaho, and Washington – use an independent commission to draw congressional districts. In 37 states, the state legislature draws the boundaries, and in most, the governor must approve the map. Two states, Hawaii and New Jersey, use politician commissions. Seven states have just one member of the House, and thus there’s no congressional redistricting and gerrymandering is impossible.
“I actually think that a movement toward nonpartisan commissions is in some ways the purest way to do this [redistricting],” says Holder. “But I deal with reality, and between now and 2021, we're not going to get commissions in all of these states.”
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What Happened to All the Jobs Trump Promised?
President Trump has made many claims promising that individual companies such as Amazon, Alibaba and Boeing will hire large – and specific – numbers of American workers, a total of 2.4 million in all. Only about 206,000 of those jobs have been created so far. Roughly 136,000 of those were genuinely new positions, as opposed to slots that were planned before the presidential election. Some 63,000 of them are potentially attributable to Trump, according to the companies that did the hiring.
Just before Trump took office, Alibaba chief Jack Ma stood with the president-elect and promised 1 million U.S. jobs. But there’s no sign any Americans were actually hired. The Chinese e-commerce giant wasn’t planning to build facilities or hire coders in the U.S; it’s trying to recruit American merchants to use its platform with the expectation that those companies would then hire more people. Alibaba wouldn’t comment on its progress.
Trump claimed his trip to Saudi Arabia in May would create “millions” of American jobs. But no jobs were actually created. Lockheed Martin told ProPublica that 18,000 may eventually materialize if preliminary agreements proceed. Other companies that signed deals on the trip, such as Boeing and GE, couldn’t provide even estimates of potential hires.
In October, Trump hosted a signing ceremony for a big order of Boeing jets and said it would create 70,000 jobs. But the company isn’t planning such a hiring spree. A Boeing spokeswoman said the number is just an estimate – using a generic formula and the sticker price of the planes – of indirect jobs that may be supported or sustained.
In all, Trump has made 31 specific claims about companies adding or saving American jobs thanks to his intervention. We went back to see what’s become of those announcements.
https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/trump-job-promises
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Quote:I forgot to point out that Obama's pretend Revenue growth was $255 Billion in one year, despite his record of extended Recession and stagnant economic growth.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:So Obama Averaged $1.25 Trillion Deficit per year.
Originally posted by second:
Today’s budget deal is the proof: Republicans never cared about the deficit
Republicans used to profess to be extremely worried about the budget deficit. Many of us suspected at the time that they were full of it. And one big thing we’ve learned this week is that they were, indeed, full of it.
Back in 2012, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the budget deficit “the nation’s most serious long-term problem.” That same year, House Speaker Paul Ryan called it a “serious threat” to the economy. They were full of it.
Today’s budget deal — a big, multi-billion dollar increase in military spending “offset” by a nearly-as-large increase in non-military spending — gives up the game entirely. They don’t care, on any level, about the size of the federal budget deficit.
www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42981072
With Bushonomics completely discredited by 2009, the GOP was clearly in need of a brand refresh.
What they came up with was the “Tea Party” and the insistence that the big lesson of the Bush years was that Republicans had moved away from conservative economic orthodoxy. That — at least in theory — is why Republicans opposed Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009. Then Trump won and the Tea Party rebrand became obsolete in 2016.
The Trump Tax Reform reportedly over a 10 year span reduces Revenue by $150 Billion per year.
The link you gave indicates almost $300 Billion more outlays over 2 years, or $150 Billion per year.
So Trump's first FY adds $300 Billion for the year, compared to Obama's record of $1,250 Billion per year. Not horrific progress made by Trump in his first attempt.
Obama's FY2017 claimed a $503 Billion Deficit with $3,644 Billion Revenues and $4,147 Billion Outlays.
Obama saddled FY2018 with claimed $454 Billion deficit, $3,899 Revenues, and $4,352 Billion Outlays using static projections.
If Trumponomics generates a 4% increase in Revenue the "Tax Reform Revenue Reduction" will be eliminated, wiped out, erased. If an 8% increase is realized, this new spending increase will also be balanced, wiped out. Much better hope for that than Obamanomics ever pretended.
A minor amount of actual, Real growth would, by comparison, generate real Revenue growth, erasing projected deficits.
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Quote:I forgot to point out that no President has ever set the deficit; Congress does and always has.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
I forgot to point out that Obama's pretend Revenue growth was $255 Billion in one year, despite his record of extended Recession and stagnant economic growth.
A minor amount of actual, Real growth would, by comparison, generate real Revenue growth, erasing projected deficits.
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Quote:Then Trump is going in the wrong direction. He is doing worse than Obama.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
I forgot to point out that Obama's pretend Revenue growth was $255 Billion in one year, despite his record of extended Recession and stagnant economic growth.
A minor amount of actual, Real growth would, by comparison, generate real Revenue growth, erasing projected deficits.
Last May, the Trump administration released a budget projecting the United States would swing from a deficit of $440 billion in 2018 to a surplus of $16 billion in 2027. The budget called for deep cuts to domestic programs and a robust increase in military spending.
Instead, the opposite has happened.
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that the United States will run $2 trillion annual budget deficits by 2027 and have a debt-to-gross domestic product ratio of 105 percent — a level not seen since the end of World War II.
“With this deal, we will experience trillion-dollar deficits permanently,” said Andy Roth, vice president of the conservative Club for Growth. “That sort of behavior, the last time I checked, is not in the Republican platform.”
The seeds of this ballooning debt load are already taking root — the Treasury Department said last month that it expects to borrow $955 billion this fiscal year (not the $440 billion previously projected) and more than $1 trillion in both 2019 and 2020. That money appears set to get only more expensive to borrow, as the Federal Reserve looks to continue raising interest rates and investors demand higher returns from an increasingly debt-laden government.
Indeed, the borrowing spree is contributing to recent volatility in financial markets, as investors fret that the additional fiscal stimulus, paired with a strengthening economy, could fuel inflation and translate into higher interest rates more quickly than anticipated.
www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-learn-to-love-deficit-spen
ding-they-once-loathed/ar-BBITo1p
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Quote:lol. "Non-partisan". Hallmark term for ultra-Libtards who wish to hide their bias and disguise their imbalance. Not even much of a hearty attempt.
Originally posted by second:Quote:Then Trump is going in the wrong direction. He is doing worse than Obama.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
I forgot to point out that Obama's pretend Revenue growth was $255 Billion in one year, despite his record of extended Recession and stagnant economic growth.
A minor amount of actual, Real growth would, by comparison, generate real Revenue growth, erasing projected deficits.
Last May, the Trump administration released a budget projecting the United States would swing from a deficit of $440 billion in 2018 to a surplus of $16 billion in 2027. The budget called for deep cuts to domestic programs and a robust increase in military spending.
Instead, the opposite has happened.
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
Quote:
projects that the United States will run $2 trillion annual budget deficits by 2027 and have a debt-to-gross domestic product ratio of 105 percent — a level not seen since the end of World War II.
“With this deal, we will experience trillion-dollar deficits permanently,” said Andy Roth, vice president of the conservative Club for Growth. “That sort of behavior, the last time I checked, is not in the Republican platform.”
The seeds of this ballooning debt load are already taking root — the Treasury Department said last month that it expects to borrow $955 billion this fiscal year (not the $440 billion previously projected) and more than $1 trillion in both 2019 and 2020. That money appears set to get only more expensive to borrow, as the Federal Reserve looks to continue raising interest rates and investors demand higher returns from an increasingly debt-laden government.
Indeed, the borrowing spree is contributing to recent volatility in financial markets, as investors fret that the additional fiscal stimulus, paired with a strengthening economy, could fuel inflation and translate into higher interest rates more quickly than anticipated.
www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-learn-to-love-deficit-spen
ding-they-once-loathed/ar-BBITo1p
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Moldova: official asks Russia to keep out of local politics
BUCHAREST, Romania
A top Moldovan official on Friday accused Russia of meddling in domestic politics in an election year and called on Moscow to respect the former Soviet republic.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article199267474.html
T 
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Quote:JewelStaiteFan didn’t check so much as one damn thing before writing about the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, did you?
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:lol. "Non-partisan". Hallmark term for ultra-Libtards who wish to hide their bias and disguise their imbalance. Not even much of a hearty attempt.
Originally posted by second:
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
www.crfb.org
www.crfb.org/debtfixer
https://twitter.com/BudgetHawks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_a_Responsible_Federal_Budg
et
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We like to imagine American politics as a kind of scored debate, with political actors as the debaters, the media as the judge, and the public as the audience. Much of cable news is based on this metaphor. Panelists from different sides of issues are introduced to “debate” an issue; shows sell themselves as “no-spin zones”; networks brag that they’re “fair and balanced” or place “facts first.” Under this conception of American politics, a memo that proves a fraud, an argument that proves a bust, a politician who is seen to lie — all of it is revealed and punished, the system self-regulates.
But that metaphor is often wrong, and it’s particularly wrong in the ecosystem driven by Fox News and Trump’s Twitter account. If you’re just trying to activate your tribe, you don’t have to win the argument, you just need to have an argument; you need to give your tribe something to believe.
There are plenty of outlets trying to fact-check the claims, working hard to align their reporting with reality, trying to explain what’s actually happening. But explaining takes some time, it takes dates, and it takes an interest in the explanation and some interest in the people delivering it. This work never reaches most of the people convinced by the original stories, and it likely wouldn’t be credible to them even if it did. As David Roberts wrote in his important essay on tribal epistemology:
Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. “Good for our side” and “true” begin to blur into one.
You don’t need to win the argument. You don’t need to even have the facts. All you need is to offer your side an alternative story in which to believe, a story that makes you sound trustworthy and your enemies untrustworthy. All you need to do is craft a semi-plausible (if not entirely coherent) counternarrative, so that those who don’t want to look past the facade of Trump’s Potemkin village don’t have to.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/9/16991410/trump-fox-nunes-fbi-
warner-texts
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Republicans wouldn’t spend to save US jobs until the crisis was over. Then it was too much, too late.
In 2018, with unemployment at 4.1% and interest rates on the rise, the GOP has enacted tax breaks and spending increases to the tune of $3 trillion, far more than the $800 billion included in the stimulus bill Obama and the Democrats passed over objections of every Congressional Republican in 2009.
In 2011, with unemployment at 9% and borrowing costs falling, the GOP forced a fiscal showdown that ultimately put strict caps on US borrowing, limiting the government’s ability to invest and create jobs at a critical time. Not satisfied, representative Paul Ryan proposed $5 trillion in budget cuts the next year, criticizing then-president Barack Obama’s desire to invest in infrastructure and energy projects as “looming crisis” that would bring a “crushing burden of debt.”
http://budget.house.gov/uploadedfiles/pathtoprosperity2013.pdf
Americans had to suffer through years of unemployment and slow growth while Republicans delayed opening the fiscal spigot and borrowing more money. The GOP is now set to borrow trillions at ever higher interest rates. Do you see what is wrong with the GOP’s strategy? If you don’t, then read https://qz.com/1203958 for more details.
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Quote:Are you again lying to Fans of Firefly?
Originally posted by second:
Republicans wouldn’t spend to save US jobs until the crisis was over. Then it was too much, too late.
In 2018, with unemployment at 4.1% and interest rates on the rise, the GOP has enacted tax breaks and spending increases to the tune of $3 trillion, far more than the $800 billion included in the stimulus bill Obama and the Democrats passed over objections of every Congressional Republican in 2009.
You refer to the $800 Billion Stimulus Act in 2009, which was a complete failure due to all of it paid as kickbacks to his Donors.
Then there was the $600 Billion QE1.
Then was another $600 Billion for QE2.
Then another $480 Billion per year for QE3, which quickly got changed to $1 Trillion per year for 2013 and 2014.
Due to the failure of the Stimulus Act, Bobo demanded that he get his Stimulus Plan of 2011 passed, but reasonable people weren't buying it.
So more than $4 Trillion to prop up his failed Obamanomics, over 8 years, an average of $500 Billion per year.
And you compare this to Trump's $3 Trillion over 10 years, an average of $300 Billion per year?
Quote:yah, sure. "Investing" in more McJobs, Silindra kickbacks for the Obama campaign, and nonexistent "shovel ready" jobs to benefit Democrap Donors, that would have been a genius plan.
In 2011, with unemployment at 9% and borrowing costs falling, the GOP forced a fiscal showdown that ultimately put strict caps on US borrowing, limiting the government’s ability to invest and create jobs at a critical time. Not satisfied, representative Paul Ryan proposed $5 trillion in budget cuts the next year, criticizing then-president Barack Obama’s desire to invest in infrastructure and energy projects as “looming crisis” that would bring a “crushing burden of debt.”
http://budget.house.gov/uploadedfiles/pathtoprosperity2013.pdf
Americans had to suffer through years of unemployment and slow growth while Republicans delayed opening the fiscal spigot and borrowing more money. The GOP is now set to borrow trillions at ever higher interest rates. Do you see what is wrong with the GOP’s strategy? If you don’t, then read https://qz.com/1203958 for more details.
Just because King and Queen Obama needed to siphon more Federal funds for their bank accounts, and Clinton Crime Family Foundation needed more kickback money doesn't mean it would have been beneficial to America.
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Forget the GOP’s obvious hypocrisy on spending — ever since the Bush era, it’s been clear that elected conservatives do not really care about deficits, except insofar as they make a handy club for whacking Democrats. Instead, worry about the lessons Republicans might draw from this experience. During Obama’s presidency, the GOP’s mania for spending cuts — and its ability to wring budget concessions out of the president — was an anchor on the economy at a critical moment when millions were suffering from the aftermath of a financial catastrophe. Yet, the party suffered precisely zero political consequences. Instead, they’re in power in part because of the slow, post-crises economy at the end stages of a recovery that could help them hold onto Congress in 2018. Moreover, it's clear that nobody actually expects them to make good on their rhetoric about fiscal prudence. They’ve abandoned it pretty much without punishment. Pushing austerity during a downturn and priming the pump when the economy is near full health might turn out to be an incredibly canny political strategy, even if it may have been unplanned. If there ever comes another time when sabotaging the economy might work to Republicans’ advantage, they have every incentive to do it again.
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Quote:Baseless pablum. Were you referring here to Bush era as Bush43? Elected Republicans since then have been Congressmembers wringing Budget cut concessions from spendaholic Obamination, all that they could do. Appears you are allergic to facts and truth here.
Originally posted by second:
Forget the GOP’s obvious hypocrisy on spending — ever since the Bush era, it’s been clear that elected conservatives do not really care about deficits, except insofar as they make a handy club for whacking Democrats. Instead, worry about the lessons Republicans might draw from this experience.
But wait:
Quote:Are you subverting sense with the premise that spending Cuts are an anchor on the economy, and the corollary that only Government spending can allow economic growth or expansion, and Federal Debt is not the actual anchor on the economy? You should put a warning label in when you slip that nonsense in the middle of a paragraph. "Entering the rabbit hole" might be good.
During Obama’s presidency, the GOP’s mania for spending cuts — and its ability to wring budget concessions out of the president — was an anchor on the economy
Quote:
at a critical moment when millions were suffering from the aftermath of a financial catastrophe. Yet, the party suffered precisely zero political consequences. Instead, they’re in power in part because of the slow, post-crises economy at the end stages of a recovery that could help them hold onto Congress in 2018. Moreover, it's clear that nobody actually expects them to make good on their rhetoric about fiscal prudence. They’ve abandoned it pretty much without punishment. Pushing austerity during a downturn and priming the pump when the economy is near full health might turn out to be an incredibly canny political strategy, even if it may have been unplanned. If there ever comes another time when sabotaging the economy might work to Republicans’ advantage, they have every incentive to do it again.
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The U.S. is not one two-party nation, but two one-party nations
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/politics-is-more-partisan-now-but
-its-not-more-divisive/amp/
Remember when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill would supposedly come to compromise over drinks?
Here’s the thing: By some measures, the United States is more partisan than ever, but that more peaceful and unified past, that golden age of unity, was … pretty much never.
Let’s think for a moment about what the nature of political division looks like right now in the U.S. Using presidential election results, my FiveThirtyEight colleague David Wasserman found that elections are getting less and less competitive at the county level; a record number of counties in 2016 voted for either Trump or Hillary Clinton in a blowout. This is consistent with findings in political science that even when national presidential races are competitive, many individual states are not. Political scientists have characterized the polarized U.S. as “two one-party nations,” instead of one two-party nation.
The issues we fight over — gender, race, immigration, culture and the role of government — divide Americans neatly and consistently under party labels. The current moment feels divisive because major policy and political questions are “sorted” between the parties — Republicans are mostly unified around one set of answers, and Democrats are mostly unified around another.
American history is also riddled with divisions, including over many of the same questions that divide us now. In particular, race and immigration have long fueled intense fights. The difference is that much of the historical conflict on these issues occurred within parties, so we have to look beyond the tensions between Republicans and Democrats to understand it. Or, often these fights remained outside of electoral politics altogether, and thus those issues went unaddressed. While they might have made for some quieter presidential election years, these dynamics masked serious problems, like inequality, exclusion and violence.
Historically divided parties
For a sense of how much more political division used to play out within each party, look at presidential conventions. A few hundred party faithful gathered every four years to pick their presidential nominee. In many years, it took multiple ballots to come to agreement – in one case, 103. Ten or more ballots were hardly standard, but they weren’t unheard of. Even a few presidents whom we often look back on as unifying — like Lincoln and FDR — took multiple ballots to win the nomination.
Since 1952, of course, every Republican and Democratic convention has been settled on the first ballot. In part, that’s because of rule changes that tied delegate voting to caucus and primary results. But it also reflects the degree to which — especially after the South shifted toward the Republicans — the two major parties no longer have highly contentious factions that disagree on central policy questions. Had modern parties faced more internal division, more presidential conventions might have started without any candidate having reached the minimum delegate threshold needed to win. Indeed, there have been a few close calls, like 1964 and 1980. Things don’t always go smoothly. But more typically, presidential nominations are tied up well before the convention begins.
Before 1952, on the other hand, party members were more likely to duke it out among themselves. Some of the squabbles at these conventions reflected tensions between candidates and factions, but they usually mapped onto some of the same issues that divide us today.
Race and immigration
Lots of evidence suggests that race and immigration are two of the main drivers of our current divided state. Political scientist Michael Tesler found that racial attitudes mattered more in 2016 than in any recent election — even 2008, when the presence of an African-American candidate shaped the political conversation.
Racial divisions between parties haven’t exactly been unheard of in U.S. history. The Rep
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America lost a war to Russia in 2016.
Trump’s fantasy of a military parade and Trump’s choice to release or block congressional memos about the Russia probe were the two big stories of last week. At first glance, they have nothing to do with one another. In fact, they are part of the same story: a grand cover-up of American defeat.
In the past, the United States has organized grand military parades: but always after a victory in war, and always as a way of welcoming soldiers back to civilian life. So it was after the Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War. Such parades marked a moment and made perfect sense.
The problem today is that the United States has not just won a war, but lost one. Carl von Clausewitz, the great student of war, defined its aim as altering the will of the enemy. America lost a cyberwar to Russia in 2016. Defeat is hard to face; but every delay in facing the hard facts makes matters worse. This is no time for parades.
A country that treats defeat as a victory invites calamity. The only serious American response to Russia’s violation of its sovereignty, the Mueller investigation, is now also a target of Russian cyberwar. As reporting by Politico has shown, the very strange decision to release a highly partisan (and very partial) hit memo against Mueller was in large part a consequence of a cyber campaign in which Russian bots played a major part.
www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/04/trump-twitter-russians-rele
ase-the-memo-216935
No array of tanks, whether at their bases or on parade in Washington, can protect us against cyberwar. Serious national defense would involve a serious defense against actual threats to sovereignty, rather than costly gestures meant to change the subject.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/12/america-cyberwar-russia-
2016-memo-truth
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Quote:Not a huge surprise, Democraps are always losing the Wars they get us into. That's the reason they get elected, to get us in to war, and then lose, to remind the voter they should have voted for the opposite party.
Originally posted by second:
America lost a war to Russia in 2016.
Trump’s fantasy of a military parade and Trump’s choice to release or block congressional memos about the Russia probe were the two big stories of last week. At first glance, they have nothing to do with one another. In fact, they are part of the same story: a grand cover-up of American defeat.
In the past, the United States has organized grand military parades: but always after a victory in war, and always as a way of welcoming soldiers back to civilian life. So it was after the Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War. Such parades marked a moment and made perfect sense.
The problem today is that the United States has not just won a war, but lost one. Carl von Clausewitz, the great student of war, defined its aim as altering the will of the enemy. America lost a cyberwar to Russia in 2016. Defeat is hard to face; but every delay in facing the hard facts makes matters worse. This is no time for parades.
A country that treats defeat as a victory invites calamity. The only serious American response to Russia’s violation of its sovereignty, the Mueller investigation, is now also a target of Russian cyberwar. As reporting by Politico has shown, the very strange decision to release a highly partisan (and very partial) hit memo against Mueller was in large part a consequence of a cyber campaign in which Russian bots played a major part.
www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/04/trump-twitter-russians-rele
ase-the-memo-216935
No array of tanks, whether at their bases or on parade in Washington, can protect us against cyberwar. Serious national defense would involve a serious defense against actual threats to sovereignty, rather than costly gestures meant to change the subject.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/12/america-cyberwar-russia-
2016-memo-truth
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Donald Trump doesn’t give a dam. Or a bridge. Or a road. Or a sewer system. Or any of the other things we talk about when we talk about infrastructure.
But how can that be when he just announced a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan? That’s easy: It’s not a plan, it’s a scam. The $1.5 trillion number is just made up; he’s only proposing federal spending of $200 billion, which is somehow supposed to magically induce a vastly bigger overall increase in infrastructure investment, mainly paid for either by state and local governments (which are not exactly rolling in cash, but whatever) or by the private sector.
And even the $200 billion is essentially fraudulent: The budget proposal announced the same day doesn’t just impose savage cuts on the poor, it includes sharp cuts for the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy and other agencies that would be crucially involved in any real infrastructure plan. Realistically, Trump’s offer on infrastructure is this: nothing.
That’s not to say that the plan is completely vacuous. One section says that it would “authorize federal divestiture of assets that would be better managed by state, local or private entities.” Translation: We’re going to privatize whatever we can. It’s conceivable that this would be done only in cases where the private sector really would do better, and contracts would be handed out fairly, without a hint of cronyism. And if you believe that, I have a degree from Trump University you might want to buy.
At one level, none of this should be a surprise. The current infrastructure non-plan looks a lot like the sketchy proposal the Trump campaign laid out in 2016, back when he was still pretending to be a different kind of Republican, less committed to the party’s economic orthodoxy. Even then he was claiming that he could do infrastructure on the cheap, that a relative pittance of federal money could somehow generate vast investment (although the mystery multiplier has gotten even bigger this time around).
First, the economics: America desperately needs to repair and upgrade its deteriorating roads, water systems, power grid and more. True, we’re no longer a depressed economy that needs public investment to put the unemployed back to work; massive infrastructure spending would have been an even better idea five years ago. But it’s still something that needs doing.
Where would the money come from? Well, if you don’t worry too much about deficits — and as we’ve just seen, Republicans don’t care at all about deficits as long as a Democrat isn’t in the White House — we can just borrow it. Despite a modest rise in interest rates, the federal government can still borrow very cheaply: The interest rate on inflation-protected long-term bonds is still less than 1 percent, which is below realistic estimates of long-run economic growth, let alone the Trump administration’s fantasy numbers. So borrowing now to pay for essential infrastructure would still be good economics.
And as I said, there would be political advantages, too. If Trump just pushed ahead with a straightforward, conventional public investment plan, he could trumpet the number of workers employed on new projects. Furthermore, he could surely find a way to stick his name on many of those projects. Historically, many politicians have had what’s known in the trade as an edifice complex — an urge to build big stuff to promote their personal brand and feed their vanity. Certainly Trump of all people would find that prospect appealing.
By the way, some Democrats feared that Trump really would go big on infrastructure, which might drive a wedge into their party and be highly popular besides.
Oh, and another point: Public spending can yield a lot of private profit. An infrastructure program involving real money could be very lucrative for Trump cronies, or for that matter Trump himself. Yes, there are rules that are supposed to prevent that kind of profiteering, but does anyone think those rules would be enforced under current management?
So why isn’t Trump proposing something
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T
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About those security clearances: Why is there so much chaos in the Trump administration?
Discussions with people who work in the Trump administration, or work closely with the Trump administration, make clear that the core of the staffing crisis is a management crisis.
Insiders tend to trace three zones of dysfunction, all of which overlap, and all of which destabilize daily functioning and, in turn, scare off potential recruits qualified for security clearances.
1) Trump doesn’t listen when you brief him, doesn’t read the documents you prepare for him, and can’t correctly remember what you’ve told him. And if you anger him, he will turn on you in a meeting or, worse, in public. No one wants to end up like Steve Bannon or Jeff Sessions. And none of this is a secret to those who might be qualified for these jobs and already have good jobs. The ones who aren't qualified? They'll jump at the chance.
2) Trump is heavily influenced by whoever gets to him last. The result is an ongoing battle, which plays out through both bureaucratic maneuvering and constant leaking, between the various ideological factions of the administration. These fights often seem catty and personal when they spill out into the press, but the stakes are nothing less than the direction of America’s domestic and foreign policy.
This makes the Trump White House a particularly dangerous place to work. All of the factions are constantly maneuvering to consolidate or regain influence by deposing members of rival factions.
In another administration, the hired chiefs of staff enforce the President’s will. But Trump’s views are so mutable, and he’s so deeply swayed by whoever gets into his office or onto his call list, that replacing Chief of Staff Kelly with someone else could actually lead to a completely different version of the Trump administration — it’s likely, for instance, that Chief of Staff Gary Cohn would have pushed Trump toward a deal on DREAMers, rather than away from one.
Trump has set up an administration where the direction of policy is up for grabs and the possible payoffs to deposing colleagues are huge. The results have been roughly as you’d expect.
3) Early staffing decisions have led to ongoing scandals and legal risks. The Trump administration’s haphazard staffing and vetting procedures caused dysfunction. In a normal administration, White House staff secretary Rob Porter would have left quietly when it came clear he cannot qualify for a full security clearance because of domestic violence. Instead, the Trump White House kept him on, only to have his past erupt into scandal.
Similarly, the Trump White House is mired in investigations circling the activities of Trump’s amateurish campaign crew — Donald Trump Jr. and Carter Page and George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner would have been nowhere near the center of a normal presidential operation — and those investigations are discouraging new staffers from joining the administration because they don’t want the hefty legal fees of getting caught in the Russia investigation or whatever scandal may erupt next.
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to “hire the best people.” But the best people want to work for the best bosses, in the best organizations. Trump hasn’t created anything of the kind. The Trump administration is a chaotic, dangerous place, where staffers operate under constant threat from Trump and each other, and in which the president is so uncertain of his own opinions and agenda that more staff energy goes into persuading him of what he believes than carrying out what he wants.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/13/17004108/trump-aides-legal-f
ees-firing-resignations
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I just moved the video second. Sorry, but good post nonetheless.
T
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Quote:No need to be sorry, for I shall put the video back in place. Trump doesn't run his business as sloppily as his White House because he cares more deeply about his business and his money. Eventually Trump will move out of the White House and back to NYNY to give all his time and attention to his business. I perfectly understand why his job in the White House is only a distant second to the work Trump cares most about:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
I just moved the video second. Sorry, but good post nonetheless.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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T
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Its like worrying about a hole on the side uv a bucket wen the bottom iz completely gon.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Its like worrying about a hole on the side uv a bucket wen the bottom iz completely gon.
T
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Democrats are cleaning up in special elections
Long story short, Trump remains historically unpopular for a president early in his second year, and Republicans are paying the price at the polls.
According to an extremely useful comprehensive spreadsheet compiled by Daily Kos, across 70 special elections in 2017, Democrats ran 10 points ahead of Clinton and 7 points ahead of Obama’s 2012 results. Those numbers have accelerated into 2018. Across 12 races, Democrats are running 23 points ahead of Clinton and 8 points ahead of Obama.
Historically speaking, special election results usually are somewhat predictive of midterm general election outcomes, though I don’t think anyone believes it’s realistic for Democrats to obtain a nationwide 23-point swing relative to Clinton’s numbers.
Meanwhile, the special elections are already having real-world impact.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has decided to leave a number of formerly GOP-held seats vacant rather than schedule special elections his party might lose, national Republicans are pushing the panic button on an upcoming special House election in Pennsylvania, and GOP leadership is letting scandal-plagued Rep. Blake Farenthold stick around in his seat rather than risk a special election.
www.vox.com/2018/2/13/17010368/florida-special-election-margaret-good
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Michael Cohen Says He’s the One Who Paid the Hush Money to Stormy Daniels. Just because he's nice.
OK, here’s my guess: Cohen paid Stormy; Kushner paid Cohen; Ivanka paid Kushner; Don Jr. paid Ivanka; and Don Jr.’s end-of-year bonus from The Trump Organization was $130,000 higher than last year thanks to his outstanding performance. You don’t believe me? Fine. Come up with a better theory.
President Trump’s lawyer said he paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels out of his own pocket https://t.co/QtqUeqSFxG
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 14, 2018
Please go on:
Full statement from Trump lawyer Michael Cohen on his payment to Stormy Daniels: https://pic.twitter.com/pG2SQkPJ9r
— Tarini Parti (@tparti) February 14, 2018
Michael Cohen is Trump’s longtime fixer lawyer. Even so, the twitterverse seems to have some skepticism about all this:
I would note: Michael Cohen says neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump Campaign reimbursed him for the payment to Stormy Daniels. He does not say that Donald J. Trump did not reimburse him. https://t.co/3KMhvq2ApV
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) February 14, 2018
“Mr. Cohen…didn’t rule out Mr. Trump reimbursing him for the payment.” https://t.co/XA2Cz6Bh52
— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) February 14, 2018
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Duz it even matter?
Its not like she wuznt paid off or Trump didnt cheat on hiz wife just kuz the money didnt kum from hiz pocket.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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Quote:It matters only because when a President lies about matters of common sense, his lower echelon officials will take note. They will lie, too, following the President's example. Then every news conference and written press release becomes more and more full shit and unbelievable. I think we will be at that point very soon with the Trump administration.
Originally posted by JO753:
Duz it even matter?
Its not like she wuznt paid off or Trump didnt cheat on hiz wife just kuz the money didnt kum from hiz pocket.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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"According to an extremely useful comprehensive spreadsheet compiled by Daily Kos, across 70 special elections in 2017, Democrats ran 10 points ahead of Clinton and 7 points ahead of Obama’s 2012 results. Those numbers have accelerated into 2018. Across 12 races, Democrats are running 23 points ahead of Clinton and 8 points ahead of Obama."
Yanno what that spread between Hillary and Obama tells me? Hillary was a mistake that cost the election.
HAS IT NOT OCCURRED TO YOU BY NOW THAT IF YOU HAVE TO RESORT TO LOGICAL FALLACIES AND TROLLING YOUR SO-CALLED ARGUMENTS ARE LIES?
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https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C2MVeM2K7WgqmJw5RCQbWyTo2u73CX
1pI8zw_G-7BJo/edit#gid=0
Out of 70 special elections, dems flipped 13 and repubs flipped 1. But when I look at the numbers more closely, most places dems flipped were closer to the 50/50 mark. And in deeply repub territory, the margins hardly moved at all.
HAS IT NOT OCCURRED TO YOU BY NOW THAT IF YOU HAVE TO RESORT TO LOGICAL FALLACIES AND TROLLING YOUR SO-CALLED ARGUMENTS ARE LIES?
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Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Duz it even matter?
I don't think so: he slept with her, we all know it. If you don't think so you are dumber than the usual Trump supporter. Even Melania knows it (not that we think she cares - she signed with the devil), so by denying it he's just feeding the MSM gravy train - ironic. What a comprehensive dumb shit, our president.
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So what if he did sleep with anybody. What business is it of yours?
She signed on with the Devil? Hyperbole much?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:I think we will be at that point very soon with the Trump administration.
I wuz there by January 21st 2017.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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If people believe that Trump is substantially lying about something so easy to uncover, it has the potential to flip people who are merely giving him a pass, though it won't change the minds of true fans.
HAS IT NOT OCCURRED TO YOU BY NOW THAT IF YOU HAVE TO RESORT TO LOGICAL FALLACIES AND TROLLING YOUR SO-CALLED ARGUMENTS ARE LIES?
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Quote:Do you mean, like:
Originally posted by second:Quote:It matters only because when a President lies about matters of common sense, his lower echelon officials will take note. They will lie, too, following the President's example. Then every news conference and written press release becomes more and more full shit and unbelievable.
Originally posted by JO753:
Duz it even matter?
Its not like she wuznt paid off or Trump didnt cheat on hiz wife just kuz the money didnt kum from hiz pocket.
I never inhaled.
I never had sex with that woman.
It depends upon what the definition of the word "is" is.
I never raped those women.
We were laughing through the tears at Ron Brown's Funeral.
Ron Brown died in a plane crash.
That bullet in Ron Brown's brain is irrelevant.
Vince Foster committed suicide.
Kara Hultgreen really didn't die from Pilot error.
Lying about common sense things?
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Quote:I could admit that I'm not sure Trump really understands enough to "substantially lie"
Originally posted by 1kiki:
If people believe that Trump is substantially lying about something so easy to uncover, it has the potential to flip people who are merely giving him a pass, though it won't change the minds of true fans.
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Quote:I could admit that I'm not sure Trump really understands enough to "substantially lie"
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
If people believe that Trump is substantially lying about something so easy to uncover, it has the potential to flip people who are merely giving him a pass, though it won't change the minds of true fans.
Are you familiar with the concept of 'bad faith'? Hiding the truth from oneself. Intentional deceit of others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith
Budgets, Bad Faith and ‘Balance’
Paul Krugman FEB. 15, 2018
www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/opinion/republicans-bad-faith-krugman.html
Over the past couple of months Republicans have passed or proposed three big budget initiatives. First, they enacted a springtime-for-plutocrats tax cut that will shower huge benefits on the wealthy while offering a few crumbs for ordinary families — crumbs that will be snatched away after a few years, so that it ends up becoming a middle-class tax hike. Then they signed on to a what-me-worry budget deal that will blow up the budget deficit to levels never before seen except during wars or severe recessions. Finally, the Trump administration released a surpassingly vicious budget proposal that would punish not just the vulnerable but also most working families.
Looking at all of this should make you very angry; it certainly infuriates me. But my anger isn’t mostly directed at Republicans; it’s directed at their enablers, the professional centrists, both-sides pundits, and news organizations that spent years refusing to acknowledge that the modern G.O.P. is what it so clearly is.
Which is not to say that Republicans should be let off the hook.
To be sure, American history is full of politicians and parties that pursued what we would now call nefarious ends. After all, the pre-Civil War Democratic Party — which shares nothing but a name with today’s Democrats — was largely devoted to the cause of preserving slavery. But I can’t think of a previous example of a party that so consistently acted in bad faith — pretending to care about things it didn’t, pretending to serve goals that were the opposite of its actual intentions.
You may recall, for example, the grim warnings from leading Republicans about the dangers of budget deficits, with Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, declaring that our “crushing burden of debt” would create an economic crisis. Then came the opportunity to pass a $1.5 trillion tax cut targeted on the rich, and suddenly all worries about the deficit temporarily disappeared.
Now that the tax cut is law, of course, deficit-hawk rhetoric is back — not as a reason to reconsider those tax breaks, but as a reason to cut food stamps and Medicaid. You knew this was going to happen, although even I expected the fake deficit hawks to wait a little longer before resuming their act.
You may also recall how Republicans posed as defenders of Medicare, accusing the Obama administration of planning to cut $500 billion from the program to pay for the Affordable Care Act. The legislation did in fact seek substantial savings in Medicare, for example by ending overpayments to insurance companies. But so did Republican proposals. And Donald Trump, who promised during the campaign not to cut Medicare or Medicaid, is now proposing hundreds of billions more in Medicare cuts and truly draconian cuts in Medicaid.
Why have Republicans become so overwhelmingly the party of bad faith? (And not just about budgets, of course; remember when Republicans cared deeply about a president’s sexual morality?) The main answer is probably that the party’s true agenda, dictated by the interests of a handful of super-wealthy donors, would be very unpopular if the public understood it. So the party must consistently lie about its priorities and intentions.
Whatever the reasons for G.O.P. bad faith, however, its reality has been apparent for a long time.
Yet the gatekeepers of our public discourse spent years bei
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Quote:Budgets, Bad Faith and ‘Balance’
Originally posted by second:Quote:I could admit that I'm not sure Trump really understands enough to "substantially lie"
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
If people believe that Trump is substantially lying about something so easy to uncover, it has the potential to flip people who are merely giving him a pass, though it won't change the minds of true fans.
Paul Krugman FEB. 15, 2018
www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/opinion/republicans-bad-faith-krugman.html
But our job, whether we’re policy analysts or journalists, isn’t to be “balanced”; it’s to tell the truth. And while Democrats are hardly angels, at this point in American history, the truth has a well-known liberal bias.
nytimes
This is where you fail.
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inocculated agenst the reality virus.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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Trump ranks as worst president in poll of scholars
The survey was conducted among 170 current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is a group of scholars dedicated to studying the American presidency.
These experts were asked to rank each president on a scale from zero (worst) to 100 (best) based on their overall performance in office. With this, Mr. Trump came in last place with an average score of 12.34.
Even among Republican respondents, Mr. Trump still ranked extremely low, earning the 40th spot for presidential greatness. These Republicans labeled James Buchanan -- whose presidency saw the secession of seven states before the Civil War -- as the all-time worst and George Washington as the best.
Coming in first place is Abraham Lincoln, who scored an average of 95.03 between both Democrats and Republicans surveyed. The top seven presidents have remained the same since the poll was last conducted in 2014: Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In this round of questioning, former president Barack Obama moved up in the rankings to 8th best president, whereas in 2014 he came in at 18th. Scholars identifying as Republican, however, ranked Obama 16th. Ronald Reagan, who also moved up from his previous ranking, trails behind Obama in 9th place.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-ranks-as-worst-president
-in-poll-of-scholars/ar-BBJlf3a?ocid=spartanntp
T
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Quote:Do tell me more, JewelStaiteFan, about your excellent character: The Content of the G.O.P.’s Character
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
nytimes
This is where you fail.
Paul Krugman, FEB. 19, 2018
www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/opinion/gop-character-bad-faith.html
Even those who have long since accepted the premise that Donald Trump is corrupt, self-centered and dishonest seem a bit shocked by his tirades over the Presidents’ Day weekend. Using the Parkland, Fla., massacre as an excuse to attack the F.B.I. for investigating Russian election intervention on his behalf — while lying about his own past denials that such intervention took place — took vileness to a new level, which is truly impressive given Trump’s previous record.
Yet if you step back a bit and think about it, Trump’s latest outbursts were very much in character — and I don’t just mean his personal character. When did you last see a member of the Trump administration, or for that matter any prominent Republican, admit error or accept responsibility for problems?
Don’t say that it has always been that way, that it’s just the way people are. On the contrary, taking responsibility for your actions — what my parents called being a mensch — used to be considered an essential virtue in politicians and adults in general. And in this as in so many things, there’s a huge asymmetry between the parties. Of course not all Democrats are honest and upstanding; but as far as I can tell, there’s almost nobody left in the G.O.P. willing to take responsibility for, well, anything.
And I don’t think this is an accident. The sad content of modern Republican character is a symptom of the corruption and hypocrisy that has afflicted half of our body politic — a sickness of the soul that manifests itself in personal behavior as well as policy.
Before I talk about that sickness, consider a few non-Trump examples of the lack of character that pervades this administration.
At the trivial but still telling end of the scale, we have the tale of Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who keeps flying first class at taxpayers’ expense. The money isn’t the important issue here, although his spending violates federal guidelines. The revealing thing, instead, is the supposed reason he needs to fly premium — you see, ordinary coach passengers have been known to say critical things to his face.
Remember this story the next time someone talks about liberal “snowflakes.”
More seriously, consider the behavior of John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, whose record of slandering critics and refusing to admit error is starting to rival his boss’s. Remember when Kelly made false accusations about Representative Frederica Wilson and refused to retract those accusations even after video showed they were false?
More recently, Kelly insisted that he didn’t know the full details about domestic abuse allegations against Rob Porter until, a White House staff member said, “40 minutes before he threw him out” — a claim that seems at odds with everything we know about this story. Even if this claim were true, an apology for his obliviousness seems in order. But these guys don’t apologize.
Oh, and by the way: Roy Moore still hasn’t conceded.
So it’s not just Trump. And it didn’t start with Trump. In fact, way back in 2006 I wrote about the “mensch gap” in the Bush administration — the unwillingness of top officials to accept responsibility for the botched occupation of Iraq, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, and more.
Nor, by the way, are we only talking about politicians. In my neck of the woods, I remain amazed by the unwillingness of right-leaning economists to admit that they were wrong in predicting that the Fed’s efforts to rescue the economy would cause runaway inflation. Being wrong is one thing — it happens to everyone, myself very much included. Refusing to admit and learn from error is something different.
And let’s be clear: Personal responsibility isn’t dead everywhere. You can ask, for example, wh
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Telling it like it iz!
That wuz the thing that Obama got rong for hiz entire tenure az prez - "our colleagez on the other side uv the ile". I dont think he really beleeved it, but he never stopped trying to make us think he did.
Woud the 2010 and later electionz hav gon better if he called them out for wut they really are insted uv covering for them?
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
Trump ranks as worst president in poll of scholars
The survey was conducted among 170 current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is a group of scholars dedicated to studying the American presidency.
These experts were asked to rank each president on a scale from zero (worst) to 100 (best) based on their overall performance in office. With this, Mr. Trump came in last place with an average score of 12.34.
Even among Republican respondents, Mr. Trump still ranked extremely low, earning the 40th spot for presidential greatness. These Republicans labeled James Buchanan -- whose presidency saw the secession of seven states before the Civil War -- as the all-time worst and George Washington as the best.
Coming in first place is Abraham Lincoln, who scored an average of 95.03 between both Democrats and Republicans surveyed. The top seven presidents have remained the same since the poll was last conducted in 2014: Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In this round of questioning, former president Barack Obama moved up in the rankings to 8th best president, whereas in 2014 he came in at 18th. Scholars identifying as Republican, however, ranked Obama 16th. Ronald Reagan, who also moved up from his previous ranking, trails behind Obama in 9th place.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-ranks-as-worst-president
-in-poll-of-scholars/ar-BBJlf3a?ocid=spartanntp
T
LOL. The "Rotten Tomatoes" of American Presidents.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The low opinion of the current president crosses party lines. Of the scholars surveyed, those identifying as Democrats put Trump last, independents put him second-last, and Republicans put him 40th, still in the bottom five.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
LOL. The "Rotten Tomatoes" of American Presidents.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://qz.com/1210855
https://sps.boisestate.edu/politicalscience/files/2018/02/Greatness.pd
f
This is how Republicans ranked the last few Presidents (lower numbers are better):
Reagan 5
GHW Bush 11
Clinton 15
GW Bush 23
Obama 16
Trump 40
This is how Conservatives ranked the last few Presidents:
Reagan 3
GHW Bush 10
Clinton 18
GW Bush 23
Obama 22
Trump 40
Note: Conservative column includes those who self-identified as either Conservative or Somewhat Conservative.
Both Conservatives and Republicans gave Obama a better rating than GW Bush.
If Trump keeps going the way he has, even Conservatives and Republicans might move him down below Buchanan, who was the President that didn’t want the Confederacy to take away half the country, but he didn’t feel like it was his job to do anything more than the 19th Century equivalent to “tweeting” about it. Lincoln followed Buchanan.
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The problem is that there aren't actually any Conservatives in Political Sciences. Their idea of a Conservative is anybody just a tad right of Karl Marx.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:29 of the political scientists that contributed to the survey of Presidents were self-described Conservatives. 21 self-described as Republicans. Obviously, some of those "Conservatives" are not Republicans, but that doesn't make them Commies, does it?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The problem is that there aren't actually any Conservatives in Political Sciences. Their idea of a Conservative is anybody just a tad right of Karl Marx.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://sps.boisestate.edu/politicalscience/files/2018/02/Greatness.pd
f
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Quote:Of the 170 respondents, 9 (5.3%) self-identified as Conservative. 20 (12%) self-identified as somewhat conservative.
Originally posted by second:Quote:29 of the political scientists that contributed to the survey of Presidents were self-described Conservatives. 21 self-described as Republicans.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The problem is that there aren't actually any Conservatives in Political Sciences. Their idea of a Conservative is anybody just a tad right of Karl Marx.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://sps.boisestate.edu/politicalscience/files/2018/02/Greatness.pd
f
57% identify as Democrats. 32.5% self-identified as Liberal, 26% as somewhat Liberal, 24% as Moderates. Most telling, there was "no significant difference" and "little variation" in the results between "self-identified" Democrats, Liberals, somewhat Liberals, and Moderates.
This 82.5% block that mostly can't comprehend that they are ultra-Liberals ranked Reagan as 14th, yet the 5% of Conservatives swayed the results toward reality so much that Reagan ended up 9th overall. The study refused to breakdown the Conservative results, instead muddying them with self-identified somewhat Conservatives.
This comingled group ranked Obama 16th Greatest President? Yep, they were Commies.
And these esteemed "political Scientists" were so clueless that, when asked which President should be ADDED to Mt. Rushmore, 5 of the 170 respondents voted for Washington, T Roosevelt, Lincoln. Hint: they are already there.
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It's funny to watch trolls challenge our best and brightest. They actually believe when they are doing so, that they are perceived as smart, and that they are not perceived as trolls who are, well trolling.
Reality eludes the likes of Jack, JSF, Rappy, sig and kiki. Lost to them, is the fact that their being trolls makes them losers.
T
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Quote:One thing to notice with this survey, there is no weighted balance, which Libtards hate to do when they have 82% of their respondents as Liberals, and 5% Conservatives.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:Of the 170 respondents, 9 (5.3%) self-identified as Conservative. 20 (12%) self-identified as somewhat conservative.
Originally posted by second:Quote:29 of the political scientists that contributed to the survey of Presidents were self-described Conservatives. 21 self-described as Republicans.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The problem is that there aren't actually any Conservatives in Political Sciences. Their idea of a Conservative is anybody just a tad right of Karl Marx.
https://sps.boisestate.edu/politicalscience/files/2018/02/Greatness.pd
f
57% identify as Democrats. 32.5% self-identified as Liberal, 26% as somewhat Liberal, 24% as Moderates. Most telling, there was "no significant difference" and "little variation" in the results between "self-identified" Democrats, Liberals, somewhat Liberals, and Moderates.
This 82.5% block that mostly can't comprehend that they are ultra-Liberals ranked Reagan as 14th, yet the 5% of Conservatives swayed the results toward reality so much that Reagan ended up 9th overall. The study refused to breakdown the Conservative results, instead muddying them with self-identified somewhat Conservatives.
This comingled group ranked Obama 16th Greatest President? Yep, they were Commies.
And these esteemed "political Scientists" were so clueless that, when asked which President should be ADDED to Mt. Rushmore, 5 of the 170 respondents voted for Washington, T Roosevelt, Lincoln. Hint: they are already there.
Although they were able to obfuscate the actual figures for the 5% Conservatives, enough data is exposed that we can extrapolate and interpolate data to find a more accurate ranking.
A Gallup poll shows that Americans self-identify as 38% Conservative and 24% Liberal, so those figures can be used to weight the results for balance.
Since the study admits the Liberals, Somewhat Liberals, and self-identified Moderates are essentially the same, these can be used as the sample of "Liberals" representing the 24%. First I calculated the overall figure among the 2 columns (Libs & Mods). The list below shows the resulting balanced Rank, and then balanced Rating, for the first 2 columns. The next 2 columns of Rank and Rating are results if we pretend that PoliSci experts who self-identify as "Moderates" are really not Liberals (and those results are not used in weighted balancing). In the 5th column I included the Rank presented in the Report. Then the Name and sequence number.
#1 93.71 #1 93.92 #1 95.03 Lincoln 16
#2 93.39 #2 93.48 #2 92.59 Washington 1
#3 83.52 #3 84.36 #3 89.09 FDR 32
#4 78.30 #4 78.39 #4 81.39 T Roosevelt 26
#5 77.06 #5 77.46 #5 79.54 Jefferson 3
#6 74.54 #6 73.36 #9 69.24 Reagan 40
#7 73.25 #8 72.78 #7 74.03 Eisenhower 34
#8 72.65 #7 73.05 #6 75.15 Truman 33
#9 64.16 10 63.53 17 60.90 Bush 41
10 62.60 14 62.09 15 62.16 Jackson 7
11 62.44 #9 63.99 #8 71.13 Obama 44
12 62.39 13 62.59 14 63.24 Adams 2
13 62.35 12 62.93 12 64.48 Madison 4
14 62.16 11 63.41 10 69.06 LB Johnson 36
15 62.12 18 60.55 19 55.49 McKinley 25
16 61.89 15 62.00 13 64.25 Clinton 42
17 61.23 17 61.36 18 60.74 Monroe 5
18 60.94 16 61.43 11 67.40 Wilson 28
19 57.45 19 56.35 20 54.09 Polk 11
20 56.59 21 56.08 22 51.96 Taft 27
21 55.5
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Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
It's funny to watch trolls challenge our best and brightest. Who actually believe when they are doing so, that they are perceived as smart, and that they are not perceived as trolls who are, well trolling.
Reality eludes the likes of Jack, JSF, Rappy, sig and kiki. Lost to them, is the fact that their being trolls makes them losers.
Let me summarize T's post for everyone:
Insult, insult, insult, insult, dur....
Wipe the drool off your keyboard, T.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Schiff: Inexplicable Why Trump Sitting On Russia Sanctions
https://www.iheart.com/content/2018-02-19-schiff-inexplicable-why-trum
p-sitting-on-russia-sanctions/
T
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Here Jack, have a carrot.
come on take it...
T
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I'll ask again. Where are all those who posted over and over again about Hillary being a security risk. You were relentless, as though you really cared about our national security. Huh...guess you don't care after all. You must have been trolling huh? Come on admit it. You're trolls...
And Benghazi trolls, where are you??? Our national security is at risk like never before yet silence. You must have been trolling huh? Admit it, you're trolls.
T
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What’s Killing Liberalism?
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/liberalism-trump-era/5535
53/
It is fair to say that all early liberals would have accepted Adam Smith’s proposition that prosperity will be best served if men are given free rein to pursue their self-interest. Yet by the end of the 19th century, as the industrial economy both raised living standards and plunged workers—now equipped with the vote—into appalling conditions in factories and mines, the doctrine of laissez-faire became both politically and morally unsustainable to liberals themselves. In 1909, Herbert Croly published The Promise of American Life, an immensely influential book that argued that Jeffersonian individualism no longer offered a real guarantee of freedom. “The democratic principle requires an equal start in the race,” Croly wrote, but so long as private property was sacred, equal rights could not guarantee equal opportunity to citizens not born to privilege. Liberalism could not be satisfied merely with the promise of equal rights. . . .
In his famous speech announcing the advent of the Great Society, LBJ used Croly’s metaphor of the unequal race. But by the 1960s it was not white middle-class American who needed state intervention, but minorities, above all African Americans, who had been left behind as America became a broadly prosperous nation. This moral commitment carried obvious political dangers, for liberals were now asking Americans to make sacrifices for others. By the end of the decade, liberalism had begun to lose its hold on the white working-class, once the prime beneficiary of government programs. Liberalism has never regained its appeal for those voters. By 1980, the abandoned laissez-faire tradition had revived, and left-liberalism had been replaced by Ronald Reagan’s right-liberalism of small government, low taxes, and free-market economics. (This is over-simplifying, of course, for Reagan also ran against liberal secularism and liberal doubts about American power and virtue.)
The Democrats responded to their marginalization by dropping the tainted word “liberal” and accepting crucial parts of the Reagan program. “Neoliberals” or advocates of a “Third Way” like Bill Clinton endorsed the conservative emphasis on economic growth but applied liberal principles of social justice to public investment and the distribution of wealth; they aspired to forge a liberalism of the middle class. The right-liberal and left-liberal parties traded power; each appeared to have almost exactly half the country on its side. Then, in 2016, the seesaw stopped: Both parties were rejected in favor of a candidate who simultaneously attacked Wall Street and the welfare state, professed little regard for individual rights and none for free speech, opposed globalization and free trade, and called for the country to erect a wall against pretty much the entire outside world.
Donald Trump’s election has thus provoked a crisis of identity both for the party of the market and the party of the state. Conservatives need to rescue their own party, now marshaled under Trump’s populist banner. Liberals have a problem of a different order; they need to reconstruct their faith as they did in 1912 and 1964 and 1992, when they learned or relearned how to speak to the broad middle of the country. Or rather, liberals need to decide whether that is their goal. Can they, should they, seek to address the deep sense of grievance that the election exposed? Politically, after all, they may not need to: Trump’s base is melting down to the hard core, and Democrats may return to power simply by letting his party self-destruct, and by mobilizing a base fired up by righteous fury. . . .
I doubt whether the near-obsession with identity issues can be uprooted from the heart of the Democratic Party. But liberalism’s appeal has always sprung from its commitment to the language of collective interest—the language of “we.” This offers liberalism a platform very different from the insistent “I” of conservatism, and the “they” of populism—the not-us, whethe
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GOP rattled by Pennsylvania congressional race in the heart of Trump country
The dismayed laborers from shuttered coal yards and steel mills didn't have to shift political allegiances to vote for President Trump in this part of the Rust Belt. They had been electing Republicans long before he showed up on the ballot.
That explains why party leaders in a congressional district stretching from the Pittsburgh suburbs to the West Virginia border are so panicked that their candidate is flailing, with a special election only weeks away.
A poor showing here would signal trouble for the midterm elections in November, in which GOP control of the House and Senate hangs in the balance. Republicans are trying to hold on to a seat being vacated by once popular Rep. Tim Murphy, who resigned after the disclosure of text messages in which the pro-life crusader pressured his mistress to seek an abortion.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-rust-belt-gop-congress-20180
222-story.html
T
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U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania says Impeachment of Judges Who Struck Down Gerrymandered Map Is “A Conversation That Has to Happen”
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/22/toomey-pennsylvania-gerrymandered-
map/
A Republican legislature in Pennsylvania drew the congressional lines back in 2011, which led to the GOP winning 13 of the state’s 18 districts in the 2016 election. The new map from the judges is intended to restore fairness. The 4 million registered Democrats in the state outnumber the 3.2 million registered Republicans.
The GOP map had given Republicans a nearly 3-1 congressional majority in a state that leans Democratic; the court’s new map will still give Republicans a significant advantage, but slightly less of one. For Senator Pat Toomey, that amounted, he said, to a “blatant, unconstitutional, partisan power grab that undermines our electoral process.”
In the wake of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court order that struck down a Republican congressional map as unconstitutionally gerrymandered, Sen. Pat Toomey said that impeachment of the justices is “a conversation that has to happen.”
“I think state House members, state senators, are going to be speaking among themselves and their constituents,” Toomey said. “Does that rise to the level of impeachment? That’s ultimately their decision but it’s a conversation that has to happen.”
The new map means several Republican incumbents now risk losing their seats, and a half-dozen competitive Republican-held congressional districts move left.
Toomey’s floating of impeachment drags what had been a fringe position into the GOP mainstream. And the rhetoric is already intense. The Pennsylvania House Republican spokesman Wednesday morning called the judges “unaccountable despots” after drawing the new lines.
It’s one of the most consequential events yet in the Democrats’ effort to retake the House. There are now at least five plausible opportunities to pick up a seat in the commonwealth, including the seat held by Rep. Pat Meehan, who is retiring after a sexual harassment case. Besides the districts that have all been shifted away from Republicans, the only other notable change is for Rep. Lloyd Smucker, a Republican moving into a more conservative 11th district. But even there, activists in his Lancaster district say they are still determined to beat him, even if the hill is steeper.
State lawmakers are expected to sue to overturn the new maps and President Donald Trump gave Republicans his blessing to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court “if necessary,” arguing that the original version the court ruled unconstitutional was actually “correct.” Legal experts, however, note that the issue is about state law and Republicans probably won’t find much help in federal courts.
“It’s unfortunate that the only way the Republican Party can win elections is to dismantle democracy, relying on unconstitutional gerrymandering and calling for the impeachment of judges that have been elected by the voters of Pennsylvania,” said Greg Edwards, a Democratic candidate for Congress running in the Lehigh Valley. “It shows Democracy is nothing more than an accessory to put on and take off when most convenient to the Republicans.”
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That's not going to happen SECOND. The new boundaries makes sense. They run according to counties. Pennsylvanias' supreme court had an independent group draw the lines and then they made it law. Gerrymandering has had a worse effect on our politics than money. This is great and I hope to see this sweep across the nation.
Our supreme court won't touch this.
T
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania says Impeachment of Judges Who Struck Down Gerrymandered Map Is “A Conversation That Has to Happen”
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/22/toomey-pennsylvania-gerrymandered-
map/
A Republican legislature in Pennsylvania drew the congressional lines back in 2011, which led to the GOP winning 13 of the state’s 18 districts in the 2016 election. The new map from the judges is intended to restore fairness. The 4 million registered Democrats in the state outnumber the 3.2 million registered Republicans.
The GOP map had given Republicans a nearly 3-1 congressional majority in a state that leans Democratic; the court’s new map will still give Republicans a significant advantage, but slightly less of one. For Senator Pat Toomey, that amounted, he said, to a “blatant, unconstitutional, partisan power grab that undermines our electoral process.”
In the wake of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court order that struck down a Republican congressional map as unconstitutionally gerrymandered, Sen. Pat Toomey said that impeachment of the justices is “a conversation that has to happen.”
“I think state House members, state senators, are going to be speaking among themselves and their constituents,” Toomey said. “Does that rise to the level of impeachment? That’s ultimately their decision but it’s a conversation that has to happen.”
The new map means several Republican incumbents now risk losing their seats, and a half-dozen competitive Republican-held congressional districts move left.
Toomey’s floating of impeachment drags what had been a fringe position into the GOP mainstream. And the rhetoric is already intense. The Pennsylvania House Republican spokesman Wednesday morning called the judges “unaccountable despots” after drawing the new lines.
It’s one of the most consequential events yet in the Democrats’ effort to retake the House. There are now at least five plausible opportunities to pick up a seat in the commonwealth, including the seat held by Rep. Pat Meehan, who is retiring after a sexual harassment case. Besides the districts that have all been shifted away from Republicans, the only other notable change is for Rep. Lloyd Smucker, a Republican moving into a more conservative 11th district. But even there, activists in his Lancaster district say they are still determined to beat him, even if the hill is steeper.
State lawmakers are expected to sue to overturn the new maps and President Donald Trump gave Republicans his blessing to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court “if necessary,” arguing that the original version the court ruled unconstitutional was actually “correct.” Legal experts, however, note that the issue is about state law and Republicans probably won’t find much help in federal courts.
“It’s unfortunate that the only way the Republican Party can win elections is to dismantle democracy, relying on unconstitutional gerrymandering and calling for the impeachment of judges that have been elected by the voters of Pennsylvania,” said Greg Edwards, a Democratic candidate for Congress running in the Lehigh Valley. “It shows Democracy is nothing more than an accessory to put on and take off when most convenient to the Republicans.”
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Quote:edited, added first column:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:One thing to notice with this survey, there is no weighted balance, which Libtards hate to do when they have 82% of their respondents as Liberals, and 5% Conservatives.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:Of the 170 respondents, 9 (5.3%) self-identified as Conservative. 20 (12%) self-identified as somewhat conservative.
Originally posted by second:Quote:29 of the political scientists that contributed to the survey of Presidents were self-described Conservatives. 21 self-described as Republicans.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The problem is that there aren't actually any Conservatives in Political Sciences. Their idea of a Conservative is anybody just a tad right of Karl Marx.
57% identify as Democrats. 32.5% self-identified as Liberal, 26% as somewhat Liberal, 24% as Moderates. Most telling, there was "no significant difference" and "little variation" in the results between "self-identified" Democrats, Liberals, somewhat Liberals, and Moderates.
This 82.5% block that mostly can't comprehend that they are ultra-Liberals ranked Reagan as 14th, yet the 5% of Conservatives swayed the results toward reality so much that Reagan ended up 9th overall. The study refused to breakdown the Conservative results, instead muddying them with self-identified somewhat Conservatives.
Although they were able to obfuscate the actual figures for the 5% Conservatives, enough data is exposed that we can extrapolate and interpolate data to find a more accurate ranking.
The list below shows the resulting balanced Rank, and then balanced Rating, for the first 2 columns. The next 2 columns of Rank and Rating are results if we pretend that PoliSci experts who self-identify as "Moderates" are really not Liberals (and those results are not used in weighted balancing). In the 5th column I included the Rank presented in the Report. Then the Name and sequence number.
Quote:
-1.32 #1 93.71 #1 93.92 #1 95.03 Lincoln 16
+0.80 #2 93.39 #2 93.48 #2 92.59 Washington 1
-5.57 #3 83.52 #3 84.36 #3 89.09 FDR 32
-3.09 #4 78.30 #4 78.39 #4 81.39 T Roosevelt 26
-2.48 #5 77.06 #5 77.46 #5 79.54 Jefferson 3
+5.30 #6 74.54 #6 73.36 #9 69.24 Reagan 40
-0.78 #7 73.25 #8 72.78 #7 74.03 Eisenhower 34
-2.50 #8 72.65 #7 73.05 #6 75.15 Truman 33
+3.26 #9 64.16 10 63.53 17 60.90 Bush 41
+0.44 10 62.60 14 62.09 15 62.16 Jackson 7
-8.69 11 62.44 #9 63.99 #8 71.13 Obama 44
-0.85 12 62.39 13 62.59 14 63.24 Adams 2
-2.13 13 62.35 12 62.93 12 64.48 Madison 4
-6.90 14 62.16 11 63.41 10 69.06 LB Johnson 36
+6.63 15 62.12 18 60.55 19 55.49 McKinley 25
-2.36 16 61.89 15 62.00 13 64.25 Clinton 42
+0.49 17 61.23 17 61.36 18 60.74 Monroe 5
-6.46 18 60.94 16 61.43 11 67.40 Wilson 28
+3.36 19 57.45 19 56.35 20 54.09 Polk 11
+4.63 20 56.59 21 56.08 22 51.96 Taft 27
-6.36 21 55.50 20 56.26 16 61.86 Kennedy 35
+2.77 22 53.78 22 52.76 24 51.01 Cleveland 22 & 24
+10.09 23 52.32 24 51.44 28 42.23 Coolidge 30
-0.19 24 51.71 23 51.96 23 51.90 JQ Adams 6
-2.11 25 50.77 25 50.78 21 52.88 Grant 18
+2.65 26 49.93 26 49.13 25 47.28 Ford 38
+6.61 27 47.03 27 46.09 30 40.42 Bush 43
+0.27 28 44.54 28 44.25 27 44.27 Van Bur
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Cow lady Hukubee shoud not be allowed to uze the word 'clear' ever agen.
She uzed up her lifetime alotment a long time ago and iz alwayz lying wen she sez it.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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Quote:She means clear to those with a brain. Sorry you feel excluded, but that is likely common in ChicagoLand.
Originally posted by JO753:
Cow lady Hukubee shoud not be allowed to uze the word 'clear' ever agen.
She uzed up her lifetime alotment a long time ago and iz alwayz lying wen she sez it.
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Quote:Back in the day, clearly Republicans felt at least a twinge of inhibition when thinking of endorsing policy positions that could make them appear hypocritical. Those days, of course, are pretty much gone. GOP elected officials today seem to have no internal guidance mechanism telling them, “Hey, if I spent eight years attacking Barack Obama for increasing the deficit, shouldn’t I think twice about supporting tax and budget policies that do the same?” They’ve learned that the voters they really need to care about, the ones who can unseat them in primaries, simply don’t care whether they’re hypocrites, as long as they endorse the policy positions these voters demand, which are basically whichever ones Donald Trump happens to be supporting at any given moment.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
She means clear to those with a brain. Sorry you feel excluded, but that is likely common in ChicagoLand.
Of course, no politician is less burdened by concerns over hypocrisy than Trump himself. While others might see a flashing red light saying, “Don’t go there, you’re personally vulnerable!” he steamrolls ahead, heedless of the danger. The whole Russia scandal is a daily reminder of this tendency of his. But it now looks like the same lack of inhibition is at play in his legal immigration plan.
When Trump was running for president, he actually didn’t talk all that much about restricting legal immigration. He didn’t endorse any long-term changes to legal immigration. Then Trump began calling for restrictions on family reunification, what he calls “chain migration.”
But when he did this, did it not occur to him that his own in-laws are taking advantage of precisely the “chain migration” provisions he wants to deny others?
The parents of first lady Melania Trump have become legal permanent residents of the United States and are close to obtaining their citizenship, according to people familiar with their status, but their attorney declined to say how or when the couple gained their green cards.
Immigration experts said Viktor and Amalija Knavs very likely relied on a family reunification process that President Trump has derided as “chain migration” and proposed ending in such case.
The Knavses, formerly of Slovenia, are living in the country on green cards, according to Michael Wildes, a New York-based immigration lawyer who represents the first lady and her family.
David Leopold, an immigration lawyer and a past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the first lady’s sponsorship of her parents appears to be the only reasonable way they would have obtained green cards because the process currently gives preferential treatment to parents of U.S. citizens.
Will the apparent fact that Trump’s own family is benefiting from a policy he is actively trying to deny other families in any way harm the chances of the proposal becoming law? Or hurt the GOP generally in the polls? No and No.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/02/22/in-the-gop-political-universe
-hypocrisy-has-no-meaning-or-consequence/
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Speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Friday, President Donald Trump announced a policy idea that at a normal time would have dramatically moved financial markets. But nothing of the sort happened.
He said that unless he can get Mexico and Canada to agree to sweeping changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement that would eliminate the US-Mexico bilateral trade deficit, he “will terminate the deal and we’ll start over again.”
Specific companies that depend on the ability to easily import goods from Mexico to the United States should have seen their share prices plummet while firms that compete with Mexican imports should have seen prices soar. Instead, it was a blah day on financial markets, with the Dow up slightly and no particularly surprising moves from individual companies.
Corporate America just shrugs off his various pronouncements on trade policy. Trump also promised to eliminate the bilateral deficits with China and Vietnam, and nobody in the business world took note.
His rhetoric has nothing to do with the actual conduct of the Trump administration. And Trump’s CPAC speech was filled with such moments — moments that would be blockbuster news from a normal president but that are largely irrelevant given Trump’s marginal role in the Trump administration. He’s a Potemkin president who riles up crowds at rallies but has no real role in governing the country.
“We have ended the war on beautiful, clean coal,” said Trump, “one of our great natural resources.” Coal exports increased, but in fact, US coal consumption dropped in 2017 as natural gas and renewables continue to displace it, and Trump’s own Federal Energy Regulatory Commission appointees killed Trump’s proposed bailout of US coal-burning electric generating plants.
Trump offered a desultory announcement of new sanctions on North Korea:
"I appreciate everything you’ve done. I do want to say, because people have asked, North Korea, we imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before. And frankly, hopefully something positive can happen. We will see. Hopefully something positive can happen. But that just was announced, and I wanted to let you know. We have imposed the heaviest sanctions ever imposed."
Trump doesn’t even appear to be particularly supportive of the new policy, just saying blandly that “hopefully something positive can happen.” Most strikingly of all, he says that the new policy “was just announced” when he himself just announced it.
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Soundz even more disjointed than usual. Another sine that the pressure iz about to squish him like a sub that iz dropping below its max depth.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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Quote:Plagiarize much?
Originally posted by second:
Speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Friday, President Donald Trump announced a policy idea that at a normal time would have dramatically moved financial markets. But nothing of the sort happened.
He said that unless he can get Mexico and Canada to agree to sweeping changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement that would eliminate the US-Mexico bilateral trade deficit, he “will terminate the deal and we’ll start over again.”
Specific companies that depend on the ability to easily import goods from Mexico to the United States should have seen their share prices plummet while firms that compete with Mexican imports should have seen prices soar. Instead, it was a blah day on financial markets, with the Dow up slightly and no particularly surprising moves from individual companies.
Corporate America just shrugs off his various pronouncements on trade policy. Trump also promised to eliminate the bilateral deficits with China and Vietnam, and nobody in the business world took note.
His rhetoric has nothing to do with the actual conduct of the Trump administration. And Trump’s CPAC speech was filled with such moments — moments that would be blockbuster news from a normal president but that are largely irrelevant given Trump’s marginal role in the Trump administration. He’s a Potemkin president who riles up crowds at rallies but has no real role in governing the country.
“We have ended the war on beautiful, clean coal,” said Trump, “one of our great natural resources.” Coal exports increased, but in fact, US coal consumption dropped in 2017 as natural gas and renewables continue to displace it, and Trump’s own Federal Energy Regulatory Commission appointees killed Trump’s proposed bailout of US coal-burning electric generating plants.
Trump offered a desultory announcement of new sanctions on North Korea:
"I appreciate everything you’ve done. I do want to say, because people have asked, North Korea, we imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before. And frankly, hopefully something positive can happen. We will see. Hopefully something positive can happen. But that just was announced, and I wanted to let you know. We have imposed the heaviest sanctions ever imposed."
Trump doesn’t even appear to be particularly supportive of the new policy, just saying blandly that “hopefully something positive can happen.” Most strikingly of all, he says that the new policy “was just announced” when he himself just announced it.
I see everything you copied was from a vox.com article posted at 1:10pm on Friday.
Trump's speech at CPAC was reportedly 75 minutes long, don't see when it started.
Stock Market started the day with a half percent gain and mostly stayed there for hours. Then the last 90 minutes of trading all 3 major indices started climbing, each gaining about 3/4 of a percent in 90 minutes. Perhaps the Market will continue this climb on Monday.
This does point out an interesting thing. Does the Market always go up when Trump has a speech? The Market dropped when the Jobs Report showed too many jobs, and then higher interest rates. How to make money from this info?
With Obama it was easy. His speeches about how he explained how he would destroy the economy would drop the Market, at a period it was trying to grow, and did grow when Obama wasn't speaking. So I would sell out of the Market the day before his speech and immediately schedule a buy-in the day after his speech. I recall gaining 12% in a 3-day span, plus many lesser gains of 8%, 6%, 4%, etc.
But making $ off Trump speech schedule could be trickier.
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Quote:Does the market go up when Trump is asinine? #MAGA?
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
This does point out an interesting thing. Does the Market always go up when Trump has a speech?
On January 29, 2017, the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team 6 launched a surprise raid in a remote part of Yemen, apparently trying to capture or kill an Al Qaeda leader. This was the first covert assault of the Trump era, and the White House, which was not challenged in the U.S. media, hailed it as “highly successful.”
Except it wasn’t.
When the report came out weeks later that SEAL Team 6 had killed women and children, Trump took action. U.S. aircraft returned to the village and repeatedly bomb and strafe it over four consecutive nights, killing the witnesses to the previous massacre by SEAL Team 6. #MAGA?
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/24/iona-craig-won-a-polk-award-for-he
r-investigation-of-a-seal-team-raid-that-killed-women-and-children-in-yemen-heres-how-she-did-it/
A Mexican official said Trump "lost his temper" on Feb 20th. US officials described the President as being "frustrated and exasperated, saying Trump believed it was unreasonable for Pres. Peña Nieto to expect him to back off his crowd-pleasing campaign promise of forcing Mexico to pay for the wall." Trump wants the Mexican President to keep the American President’s promises. #MAGA?
www.cnn.com/2018/02/24/politics/mexican-president-cancels-white-house-
trip/index.html
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For all the talk of Kremlin puppetry and intelligence operations, the heart of the offenses that Mueller has laid out involves the normal aspects of American politics, particularly the opacity of campaign finance, and the startling sums involved.
The Russian effort echoed themes that were already a factor in the election: the Internet Research Agency allegedly paid someone to dress up as Clinton in a prison uniform; the Trump campaign sold “Clinton for Prison” gear on its Web site, and American PACs have been paying for ads calling her a criminal since Bill Clinton’s Administration. Which way did the influence run?
Trump has not surrounded himself with the best people. The bots are not the only ones who come across as preposterous impostors. How did Manafort manage to pass himself off as the adult in the room in a major party’s Presidential campaign? How did Gates hang on in Trump’s orbit, even after Manafort was pushed out? How was Papadopoulos given a seat at high-level meetings? How was Flynn seen as a prudent adviser on matters of national security? Then, there is Trump himself.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/robert-muellers-distinctly-ameri
can-indictments
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Quote:golly gee whiz. Are those actions as bad as hiring thugs to infiltrate peaceful gatherings and instgate riots, as Hilliary/Obama did? And did not the Russians amplify or aid this discord?
Originally posted by second:
For all the talk of Kremlin puppetry and intelligence operations, the heart of the offenses that Mueller has laid out involves the normal aspects of American politics,
The Russian effort echoed themes that were already a factor in the election: the Internet Research Agency allegedly paid someone to dress up as Clinton in a prison uniform; the Trump campaign sold “Clinton for Prison” gear on its Web site, and American PACs have been paying for ads calling her a criminal since Bill Clinton’s Administration. Which way did the influence run?
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/robert-muellers-distinctly-ameri
can-indictments
s
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Quote:Tell me about that "riot", you lying sack of shit.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
golly gee whiz. Are those actions as bad as hiring thugs to infiltrate peaceful gatherings and instgate riots, as Hilliary/Obama did? And did not the Russians amplify or aid this discord?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Tell me about that "riot", you lying sack of shit.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
golly gee whiz. Are those actions as bad as hiring thugs to infiltrate peaceful gatherings and instgate riots, as Hilliary/Obama did? And did not the Russians amplify or aid this discord?
lol... It's "riots", plural.
This happened all the time before the election. It's common knowledge.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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I hav herd several politicianz and commentatorz say 'its inexplicable why Trump haznt acted on the Russia sanctionz'.
Its completely explicable: He iz doing the job he wuz hired to do by Putin.
Maybe its a virus going around Washington that flips sum key neuronz connected to vocabulary. That woud explain why 'clear' now meanz 'murky, undefined, obtuse or obscure' to everybody in Trump's orbit and most Republicanz.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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Quote:If it is so common, then show me on the internet. And don't use Alex Jones' www.infowars.com as your source or that ilk. They truly are spinners of tall tales and lying sacks of shit. Moving on to reality:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Tell me about that "riot", you lying sack of shit.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
golly gee whiz. Are those actions as bad as hiring thugs to infiltrate peaceful gatherings and instgate riots, as Hilliary/Obama did? And did not the Russians amplify or aid this discord?
lol... It's "riots", plural.
This happened all the time before the election. It's common knowledge.
www.axios.com/exclusive-trump-privately-pushing-personal-pilot-to-run-
faa-1519595187-5a735cc4-63e6-4348-b980-1aadf0b8e80d.html
Trump has told administration officials and associates that he wants John Dunkin — his longtime personal pilot, who flew him around the country on Trump Force One during the campaign — to helm the Federal Aviation Administration, which has a budget in the billions and which oversees all civil aviation in the United States. Dunkin would have very-hard-to-detect-by-law-enforcement opportunities to enrich himself from kickbacks on contracts, if Dunkin should be that kind of guy.
One industry insider equated this to the Seinfeld episode when Cosmo Kramer used his golf caddy as a jury consultant. A senior administration official told me that comparison is completely unfair.
Of course Trump wants his personal pilot to head the FAA. That’s the Trumpiest thing ever. #MAGA
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Quote:I find that believable, but Republicans won't believe it even if Trump, in a moment of candor, says it is all true. His fans will let Trump and his lawyers take back any admission of guilty. Here's something believable Trump said. I doubt Republicans will believe Trump on this, either:
Originally posted by JO753:
I hav herd several politicianz and commentatorz say 'its inexplicable why Trump haznt acted on the Russia sanctionz'.
Its completely explicable: He iz doing the job he wuz hired to do by Putin.
Maybe its a virus going around Washington that flips sum key neuronz connected to vocabulary. That woud explain why 'clear' now meanz 'murky, undefined, obtuse or obscure' to everybody in Trump's orbit and most Republicanz.
Trump privately talks up executing all big drug dealers.
In Singapore, the death penalty is mandatory for drug trafficking offenses. And President Trump loves it. He’s been telling friends for months that the country’s policy to execute drug traffickers is the reason its drug consumption rates are so low.
"He says that a lot," said a source who's spoken to Trump at length about the subject. "He says, 'When I ask the prime minister of Singapore do they have a drug problem the prime minister replies, 'No. Death penalty'."
He often jokes about killing drug dealers... He’ll say, 'You know the Chinese and Filipinos don’t have a drug problem. They just kill them.' — A senior administration official to Axios
But the president doesn't just joke about it. According to five sources who've spoken with Trump about the subject, he often leaps into a passionate speech about how drug dealers are as bad as serial killers and should all get the death penalty.
Trump tells confidants a softer approach to drug reform — the kind where you show sympathy to the offenders and give them more lenient sentences — will never work. He tells friends and associates the government has got to teach children that they'll die if they take drugs. I look forward to Trump inspired death squads killing children. #MAGA
www.axios.com/exclusive-trump-privately-talks-up-executing-all-big-dru
g-dealers-1519595170-402cc386-8729-4684-a7ef-a5bf31876afa.html
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In this era of drones and driverless cars, President Trump often sounds and feels like a man from the bygone days of station wagons and smokestacks.
www.axios.com/donald-trump-worldview-past-success-1950s-china-4e778596
-522e-43f8-9fdb-3235c0568427.html
"He feels he’s the personification of the American dream. ... That means building things, going back to the era of his dad. He assumes the rest of the country pines for that. "
— A source close to President Trump
The source added: "He's not necessarily saying we need to go back to the past. He's saying we need ... the principles that made us successful in the past." Yeah, sure thing, buddy. That's what he meant. /sarcasm off
We see it in a "Mad Men" mentality that infuses his rhetoric, policies and personal life.
We see it in his attention to coal over forward-looking international trade.
We see it in testosterone-tinged chest thumping, in person and on Twitter.
We see it in his focus on steel and aluminum, when the next great war may be cyber- and satellite-driven.
We see it in his push for a Pennsylvania Avenue military parade (with "a lot of plane fly-overs"), expected to cost tens of millions of dollars.
We see it in his response to #MeToo.
We heard it in Trump's wistful remarks about Route 66 when speaking last summer in Springfield, Mo., birthplace of the now-outmoded Mother Road: "For many decades, Route 66 captured the American spirit. The communities along this historic route were a vivid symbol of America’s booming industry."
Even his diet and health routine are retro: golfing as exercise (with a cart), and a diet heavy on burgers and thick steaks.
Be smart: Trump's instincts and measures of success look back, while our most fearsome competitor, China, is projecting ahead with an emphasis on artificial intelligence and globalization.
But the nostalgia Trump evokes is a key part of his hold on his electorate — tapping into a lingering fear about a changing America that leaves many in his base feeling like strangers in their own land.
P.S. The White House says President Trump will attend Friday's funeral for the Rev. Billy Graham in Charlotte, N.C. (Graham died at the age of 199 years, give or take a century.)
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Do your own research, Second.
I'm not going to go out of my way to look for things you could easily google yourself just because you're pretending they don't exist.
Here's a hint, the proof is in the DNC emails.
Just because the Russians might have been behind making them public doesn't erase what was in them.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:And the Market continued on Monday, all 3 major indices rising another 1% at opening Bell.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:Plagiarize much?
Originally posted by second:
Speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Friday, President Donald Trump announced a policy idea that at a normal time would have dramatically moved financial markets. But nothing of the sort happened.
He said that unless he can get Mexico and Canada to agree to sweeping changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement that would eliminate the US-Mexico bilateral trade deficit, he “will terminate the deal and we’ll start over again.”
Specific companies that depend on the ability to easily import goods from Mexico to the United States should have seen their share prices plummet while firms that compete with Mexican imports should have seen prices soar. Instead, it was a blah day on financial markets, with the Dow up slightly and no particularly surprising moves from individual companies.
Corporate America just shrugs off his various pronouncements on trade policy. Trump also promised to eliminate the bilateral deficits with China and Vietnam, and nobody in the business world took note.
His rhetoric has nothing to do with the actual conduct of the Trump administration. And Trump’s CPAC speech was filled with such moments — moments that would be blockbuster news from a normal president but that are largely irrelevant given Trump’s marginal role in the Trump administration. He’s a Potemkin president who riles up crowds at rallies but has no real role in governing the country.
“We have ended the war on beautiful, clean coal,” said Trump, “one of our great natural resources.” Coal exports increased, but in fact, US coal consumption dropped in 2017 as natural gas and renewables continue to displace it, and Trump’s own Federal Energy Regulatory Commission appointees killed Trump’s proposed bailout of US coal-burning electric generating plants.
Trump offered a desultory announcement of new sanctions on North Korea:
"I appreciate everything you’ve done. I do want to say, because people have asked, North Korea, we imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before. And frankly, hopefully something positive can happen. We will see. Hopefully something positive can happen. But that just was announced, and I wanted to let you know. We have imposed the heaviest sanctions ever imposed."
Trump doesn’t even appear to be particularly supportive of the new policy, just saying blandly that “hopefully something positive can happen.” Most strikingly of all, he says that the new policy “was just announced” when he himself just announced it.
I see everything you copied was from a vox.com article posted at 1:10pm on Friday.
Trump's speech at CPAC was reportedly 75 minutes long, don't see when it started.
Stock Market started the day with a half percent gain and mostly stayed there for hours. Then the last 90 minutes of trading all 3 major indices started climbing, each gaining about 3/4 of a percent in 90 minutes. Perhaps the Market will continue this climb on Monday.
This does point out an interesting thing. Does the Market always go up when Trump has a speech? The Market dropped when the Jobs Report showed too many jobs, and then higher interest rates. How to make money from this info?
With Obama it was easy. His speeches about how he explained how he would destroy the economy would drop the Market, at a period it was trying to grow, and did grow when Obama wasn't speaking. So I would sell out of the Market the day before his speech and immediately schedule a buy-in the day after his speech. I recall gaining 12% in a 3-day span, plus many lesser gains of 8%, 6%, 4%, etc.
But making $ off Trump speech schedule could be trickier.
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Quote:Don't ever stop being stupid, 6ix. And on to the new: Trump could have taken the DACA-for-border-security deal with the Democrats. He would have gotten his $25 billion for a wall from the Democrats even if most of the Republicans (not all) in Congress would refuse to pay for Trump's wall. But now the Dreamers are still here and Trump got nothing.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Do your own research, Second.
The Supreme Court handed President Trump a significant defeat Monday, turning down the administration's plea for a quick ruling on the president's power to end special protections for so-called Dreamers. Trump wanted this to beat the Congressional Democrats into submission.
The court's decision not to immediately hear the administration's appeal could keep in place a legal shield for nearly 700,000 young immigrants for the rest of this year, and perhaps longer.
The Justice Department had sought to leapfrog the U.S. appeals courts in California and New York. The department had asked for an "immediate review" of a nationwide order by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco that required the government to maintain for now the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
The action the administration sought was rare. It has been nearly 30 years since the Supreme Court granted review of a district judge's ruling before an appeals court could weigh in. And the court said Monday it had no interest in following that course in the DACA case.
www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-court-daca-20180220-story.html
This removes a lot of Trump’s leverage. Democrats have no pressing reason to make a bad deal over DACA if they’ve got at least a year before it can be terminated. Why not wait until after the midterms and see what happens? That’s what Republicans did with Scalia’s Supreme Court seat after he died.
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Question: Why do you and the people on your "side" here feel the need to start every reply with a personal attack?
Answer: That is what people who are losing the argument do.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I can't even figure out what is the tangential connection between the first dozen words of second's quoted topic, and the diversionary topic he shoehorns in next.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Question: Why do you and the people on your "side" here feel the need to start every reply with a personal attack?
Answer: That is what people who are losing the argument do.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Half the time I assume he thinks he's in a different thread.
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Quote:6ix, this is not about me persuading you. I am not into saving souls like a door-to-door minister who is distributing literature for the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Question: Why do you and the people on your "side" here feel the need to start every reply with a personal attack?
Answer: That is what people who are losing the argument do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Tower_Bible_and_Tract_Society_of_P
ennsylvania
Do you remember that story I told you about me being raised as a Jehovah's Witness, but I vote while they don't? You said you didn't understand that story either. They are the finest people on Earth and I am not. There is a little key in that story to unlock what is going on here. It boils down to Armageddon. The bible version of Armaggedon has the bad people (the Republican voters) and the lukewarm people (the Independent voters) outnumbering the good (the Democratic voters). In the Bible the lukewarm people think they are good. Unsurprisingly, the bad people think they are good, too. www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation3:15-17 You might need to read the book of Revelations to find out how that movie ends, but the bad and the lukewarm people truly can't understand why God would judge them harshly.
Quote:Dear JewelStaiteFan, I disrespect you too much to belabor the obvious. Look around. The wealthiest society on earth is currently subjected to the chaotic rule of a mean and vulgar charlatan who refined the manipulation of humanity through a TV show that was a ratings smash in its first season, continued under his guidance for more than a decade, and relied on the cruelty of whimsical humiliation for its frisson. Donald Trump had a solid education in the power of images, the flimsiness of objective reality, and the magnetism of authority.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
I can't even figure out what is the tangential connection between the first dozen words of second's quoted topic, and the diversionary topic he shoehorns in next.
Half the time I assume he thinks he's in a different thread.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, O.K.?” he declared during the campaign. Let’s hand it to Trump: he was right. Americans voted him into office after he said that. They were ready to roll the dice, even on nuclear war, if the alternative was to be bored. They were mad.
There’s not much new under the sun. Long before Facebook and Twitter and Russian trolls on social media, the potential to combine the bombardment of visual media, the “genius” of an individual (Trump’s word), and mass disorientation to forge dystopian madness had been imagined.
So here’s a little test. The following three passages are not in chronological order. Which came first, and when do they date from?
“We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you.”
Here’s the second: “This whole country’s just like my flock of sheep! Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers — everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle….. They’re mine. I own ’em. They think like I do. Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for them.”
And finally: “The stresses set up by the social changes wrought by the advent of technology are straining the structure of civilization beyond the limits of tolerance. The machine does our work for us and meekly comes and goes at our bidding. But it inexorably demands its wages.”
The answers are: the first dates from 1976 and is from the extraordinary Sidney Lumet movie “Network,” written by Paddy Chayefsky. The second, from 1957, appears in the equally prescient Elia Kazan movie “A
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, this is not about me persuading you. I am not into saving souls like a door-to-door minister who is distributing literature for the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Question: Why do you and the people on your "side" here feel the need to start every reply with a personal attack?
Answer: That is what people who are losing the argument do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Tower_Bible_and_Tract_Society_of_P
ennsylvania
Do you remember that story I told you about me being raised as a Jehovah's Witness, but I vote while they don't? You said you didn't understand that story either. They are the finest people on Earth and I am not. There is a little key in that story to unlock what is going on here. It boils down to Armageddon. The bible version of Armaggedon has the bad people (the Republican voters) and the lukewarm people (the Independent voters) outnumbering the good (the Democratic voters). In the Bible the lukewarm people think they are good. Unsurprisingly, the bad people think they are good, too. www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation3:15-17 You might need to read the book of Revelations to find out how that movie ends, but the bad and the lukewarm people truly can't understand why God would judge them harshly.
I don't need an anecdote of yours to know that you're a dick. You prove that here everyday without needing to know anything about your background.
Don't be so hard on yourself though. Nothing you've done in here is going to lead to God judging you harshly man. FFF.net is child's play compared to what they say to each other on Facebook and Twitter, and those idiots are saying it to people they know and even care about. And any vitriol we have toward each other here can't hold a candle to "/b/" over at 4chan.
If God sends you to hell for your behavior here, he's having a shitty week.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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A Snake Responds To Trump's 'Snake' Poem.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Congress passed an anti-nepotism law in the wake of John Kennedy's appointment of his brother, Bobby, as attorney general.
Here's what the law says:
"A public official may not appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement, in or to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control any individual who is a relative of the public official."
www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/3110
How did Trump get around this statute to hire his daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner? Because "agency" in the law above is interpreted by Trump's lawyers (and why distrust them?) to not include the White House. So, Trump couldn't make Ivanka the Treasury Secretary. But, according to the current interpretation of the law, he is fine with having her in a senior role within the White House.
Which is OK (I guess, if you can trust Trump's lawyers), legally speaking. But, as a practical matter, it simply doesn't work -- as this latest Ivanka response to NBC's question makes clear. You can't be both a daughter and a senior presidential adviser. The rules of engagement -- and response -- that cover one simply don't apply to the other.
Unless Congress updates the anti-nepotism language to clear up the legal questions as to whether it applies (or does not) to the White House, we will have this Ivanka Trump situation again sometime -- and it won't end any differently (or better).
www.cnn.com/2018/02/26/politics/ivanka-trump-accusations/index.html
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The rich support Trump because they knew it would make them even richer. That’s paid off for them.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/surprise-corporate-tax-cuts-are
-making-the-rich-even-richer/
Republicans fully expected this, and all their blather about “$4,000 in wage growth” was just the usual smokescreen to justify a giveaway to the rich. Back in October, Council of Economic Advisers head Kevin Hassett said “I would expect to see an immediate jump in wage growth.” Today he’s singing a different tune: “Right now we’re going to have an adjustment where you see probably more dividends and share buybacks than wage increases.” Wage growth will come later.
You betcha. You will be seeing those fat paychecks any day now.
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Bonuses and Bogosity
Paul Krugman FEB. 27, 2018
www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/opinion/bonuses-and-bogosity.html
On Feb. 19 Walmart, America’s largest employer, announced broad-based pay hikes. In fact, it announced that it would be raising wages for half a million workers. The Trump tax cut is working! Oh, wait. That announcement was three years ago – it came on Feb. 19, 2015. And as far as I can tell, nobody gave the Obama administration credit for the move.
Why did Walmart raise wages? Partly because the labor market was tightening: unemployment had fallen more than 40 percent from its peak in 2009 (a decline for which the Obama administration’s stimulus and other policies actually do deserve some credit.) This tightening labor market meant that Walmart was having trouble attracting workers.
Walmart was also in the midst of a change in business strategy. Its policy of always low wages, always, was starting to look problematic: low pay meant high turnover and low morale, and management believed that moving at least partway to the Costco strategy of paying more and getting better performance as a result made sense.
The moral of this story is that unless the economy is deeply depressed, there will always be some companies, somewhere, raising wages and offering bonuses. Which brings me to the Trump tax cut and the very bad, no good job much of the media initially did of covering its effects.
Every card-carrying economist agrees that cutting corporate tax rates will have some trickle-down effect on wages – in the long run. How much of a trickle-down effect depends on a bunch of technical factors: what share of corporate profits represents monopoly rents rather than returns to capital, how responsive inflows of foreign capital are to the U.S. rate of return, what share of the capital stock is even affected by the corporate tax rate. Enthusiasts claim that the tax cut will eventually go 100% to workers; most serious modelers think the number is more like 20 or 25 percent.
Whatever the number, however, it’s about the long run. It requires a chain of events: lower taxes -> higher investment -> higher stock of capital -> higher demand for labor -> higher wages. And this chain of events should take a number of years, probably decades, to fully work itself through. Even in the most favorable analyses, there is no reason to expect any wage gains in the first few months after a tax cut.
Yet for a while there the news was full of stories about companies announcing that they were giving their workers bonuses thanks to the Trump tax cut. Why were they doing this?
Well, the tax cut provided no immediate incentive to raise wages. It did, however, give companies that benefited from the tax cut a strong political incentive to claim that the tax break was the reason for bonuses or wage hikes they would have given in any case. Why not? They want the tax cut to look good, since it’s good for them. And hyping its benefits is a cheap way to make a de facto campaign contribution to an administration that can do a lot to help companies it likes, say by removing pesky safety or environmental regulations.
In other words, the whole “bonuses thanks to tax cut” story was bogus, and obviously so. Yet much of the media fell for it.
There was also a big element of innumeracy involved. Most people have no idea just how big the U.S. economy is; if you say “company X just hired 1000 workers” or “company Y just gave 5000 workers a $1000 bonus” they imagine that these are big stories, when in reality they’re just noise in an economy where around 5 million workers are hired – and an almost equal number quit or are fired – every month.
The numbers we have so far show that the much-hyped bonuses are trivial – less than $6 billion, or 0.03% of GDP – while stock buybacks have been more than $170 billion. And many of those bonuses would probably have happened anyway, whereas stock buybacks are running far above historical levels.
Furthermore, the surge in stock buybacks suggests that the long run effect of the tax
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The President Doesn’t Matter (As Much As You Think)
https://bostonreview.net/mark-schmitt-all-about-barack-obama-books-rev
iew
A month before the 2008 presidential election, the cover of The American Prospect, which I edited at the time, depicted an empty Oval Office and the headline, “The President Doesn’t Matter (As Much As You Think).” Inside we ran articles about the institutions of Washington, such as the Senate Finance Committee—and its chairman, lacking both initiative and strength of character, Montana Democrat Max Baucus—and the Federal Reserve, explaining the limits they would impose on the scope of change that might be possible under an Obama administration.
The issue fell flat on the newsstand, and the Prospect’s board of directors was apoplectic about the cover. Even if my colleagues and I were right, the publisher complained, the cover “wasn’t appropriate to the moment.”
It’s true that it wasn’t an appropriate moment to make that point, because no one wanted to hear it. In that moment, many liberals forgot an insight that they should have learned in the Bush era: conservative dominance was not just a matter of electing a president, but of building a stable pyramid of organizations focused on policy development, grass-roots mobilization, and media, at the top of which you’ll find the president. That president could be almost anyone—even, as if to prove the point, dopey George W. Bush—because the ideological and organizational infrastructure is more important. Democrats invert the pyramid, vesting all hope in individual presidential candidates, who are expected to build their entire infrastructure from scratch. . . .
Eric Alterman’s Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama delves deeply into the failed-state culture of American politics that makes it impossible to be a transformational president.
“Kabuki” is not Alterman’s invention, but a word we often used when I worked on Capitol Hill in the 1990s to describe the rituals and outright frauds that make up the day-to-day life of America’s democratic institutions. It’s the whole world of fake votes; pandering to lobbyists who in turn trick their clients; constructed showdowns, such as the game over the debt ceiling; and a dozen other gimmicks that have spun wildly out of control in the years since. Alterman defines kabuki as something that “resembles a democratic process at great distance but mocks its genuine intentions in substance.” And he goes on, in his short book, to fill out that wise definition with solid accounts of the multiple debacles of the Bush era, the capture of Congress by lobbyists, the poisonous role of the right-wing media, the unrepresentative nature of the Senate in particular, and the failure of the left to mobilize.
If there is a flaw in Alterman’s excellent book it is that, in his focus on the right, he lets congressional Democrats off the hook. Aside from Senator Charles Schumer, hardly the worst of the lot, he has little to say about the many Democrats who made a hash of Obama’s agenda. When I think back to the two erroneous predictions that I made after the 2008 election—that Obama would succeed in splitting off a few cooperative Republicans and that Congressional Democrats would stand with him rather than throw him overboard as they had Clinton and Carter—it’s the second that upsets me most. It was only a matter of weeks before Democrats in both houses started insisting on scaling back the stimulus and hedging their bets by establishing a record of voting against the president, and it was some of Obama’s earliest Senate supporters, such as Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who were the most mercenary and stabbed Obama in the back when it was to their advantage. Even after the 2010 election showed Democratic Congressmen that voting against Obama initiatives was no insurance against defeat, Obama’s “frenemies” were still at it.
The fearful, hyper-cautious culture of learned helplessness among congressional Democrats and their staffers is every bit as crippling to an
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