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Author | Topic: The Trump Presidency | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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I still think that promising tax cuts is a powerful tool for Republicans to get votes. There are a lot of drooling Homers out there. True enough, though it doesn't help that the Republicans don't explain that the tax cuts are only for the rich and will be made up for by raising taxes on the poor and middle class. Like the current scam that raises the tax rate on the bottom bracket. Or one of Reagan's big tax cuts which resulted in my own lower-middle-class taxes doubling, an experience shared with many of my co-workers. Interestingly, the US economy is the strongest when the top bracket's rates are high, like from 1949 to 1963 when that top rate was 91%. And the economy is the weakest and least stable when that top rate is low.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
It's been a while since I've watched the first season of Daredevil on Netflix, but I think that's where this footage is from. Matt Murdock's efforts in uncovering Fisk's (here portrayed by Trump) massive corruption of the NYPD in Hell's Kitchen results in these multiple arrests by the FBI. Fairly decent pasting of faces over the original -- as I recall, in the original Comey was black.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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But is that dementia going to be used for political purposes?
His actions are clearly criminal and he should be marched out in handcuffs. But progressive radio's take on it is that the Repugnicans will proclaim sudden-onset dementia and quietly remove him via the 25th Amendment, leaving the rest of their corrupt operatives firmly in place, albeit ("all be it"; even a native English speaker has problems with that one) with an extreme fundamentalist Christian now at the helm firmly in place to commit unspeakable horrors in the name of his god. Eliminating Pence would leave us with even greater evil: Paul Ryan as President.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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Trump is merely playing the tune his base wants to hear. He may cause more problems in the world, however...due to his desire to remain in power.
The real reason Trump declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel was because he feared losing his evangelical voter base Well the very reason why that evangelical base wants Jerusalem to be declared the capital of Israel is the same reason they are such fervent supports of the state of Israel: all of that is supposed to lead to the End Times and the Second Coming. Peace in the Middle East not only has nothing to do with anything, but it is the exact opposite of what they want. That evangelical base quite literally wants everything to fall apart and for the shit to start flying in all directions. They quite literally want everything to fall apart at the seams and Donald Trump is the man to make all that happen for them!
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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Trump is not the only senior member of the administration to cultivate the Christian right. Vice President Mike Pence, who could be seen on TV standing behind Trump as the embassy announcement was made, with a reverent glow to his face, had pressed for a move to Jerusalem. And backing also came from Nikki Haley, the ambassador to the UN who tries her best to match Trump on hawkish rhetoric about smiting America’s enemies. She avidly courted the evangelical vote while Governor of South Carolina. OK, who here has forgotten Trump's offer to Kasich to make him the most powerful VP in history? Kasich would wield all the power of the Presidency while Trump just served as a figurehead, his own personal particular strength (one that we all wish he would restrict himself to, disregarding Pence). Who could be so deluded as to believe that Trump hadn't made the exact same offer to Pence? And that we are seeing the consequences of that exact same offer? I received my fundamentalist Christian training as a fellow traveller of the Jesus Freaks of 1970 (right at that movement's epicenter at Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, CA). The only thing that obsessed them more than demonology was the End Times. Hilarious reading for a non-believer (AKA "a normal"), but a nightmare when those extremely deluded idiots gain political power. They have a checklist of what must happen leading up to the Second Coming (a point of contention even with their political wing, premillennialism versus post millennnialism). The establishment of the state of Israel was one check-mark. Then the establishment of Jerusalem as the capital of that state is another (I am kind of weak on that one, being nearly five decades removed), followed by the rebuilding of the Temple (much stronger on that one). Basically, we have people in power whose religious intent is to create instability and war in the Middle East, all in service to their god. To quote from Firefly, "We're humped!"
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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Trump is a failure as a businessman. That's what we're seeing in his hiring practices.
The military teaches us what leadership is. A leader delegates authority to his subordinates so that they can do their job and he supports and enables them in doing their job. At the same time, no leader can delegate responsibility; he remains responsible for what his duly delegated subordinates do. Trump is a complete failure as a leader. Basically, Trump is just a big fat loser.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
And he immediately proves how delusional he is. Typical Trump.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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Santyana, who said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," ... I personally prefer the version that says: "Those who fail to learn the lessons of science fiction are doomed to live them."
I believe history repeating itself, like war, is inevitable. Part of that is because we keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again. In the documentary, Boom Bust Boom, on Netflix, one economist described the cycle in which we have an economic crash, we figure out what caused it and create laws and regulations to keep that from happening again, but then the next generation decides that they're too smart to make those mistakes again so they get rid of those laws and regulations and then actually have the unmitigated gall to look surprised with the next crash happens because all those safeguards had been removed. Sound familiar? Like what the Republicans have been doing this past year? And we have historians telling us that Republicans are now doing the same things that had brought on the Great Depression (eg, on YouTube a clip from CNN in which a Depression historian goes into detail of how the tax bill (now law) is a blast from the past). And we have the recent history of how trickle-down economics was enacted in Kansas and devastated their economy, yet Republicans still want to do the same thing to the entire country. We keep refusing to learn lessons from our previous mistakes, so we keep making those very same mistakes. About 4 or 5 years ago, I read something in a 1945 history book, The Course of German History by British historian A.J.P. Taylor, that sounded exactly like what the Republicans were pushing for and which we are now seeing them doing. The following passages are from pages 195-197 of that book in which he covers the devastating economics of early Weimar. Years ago, a history graduate student explained the Weimar hyperinflation and its causes as he had learned them. Germany wasn't making its reparation payments to France's satisfaction, so France sent in its troops to occupy the Ruhr, the very heart of German industry, in order to take the profits directly. The government declared a general strike, telling everybody to refuse to work for the French. Faced with unemployment payments and no income, the government started printing money without any backing. An issue of Das III. Reich magazine from either 1973 or 1974 has an article on that with both confirmed what I had been told and also showed a series of postcard stamps as the price rose from 10 Pfennig (0.1 Marks) to about 5 Milliarden Marks (5 billion to Yanks and younger Brits). Then Taylor's book filled in more of the blanks. Basically, Germany had entered into the Great War, AKA WWI, without any way to finance it. They expected to pay for the war with the spoils of war from their defeated opponents -- that would explain their absolutely ridiculous demands on Russia in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty which my Russian history professor blamed for the extreme demands made on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. Most notable is that Germany never did tax the industrialists who profited immensely from war production. From pages 195-197 (note that a milliard is a thousand millions, since at the time in the UK a billion was a million millions which is still the case on the Continent):
quote: Just as we're now doing with this new tax law, they didn't tax the rich and forced the poor and middle-class to bear the tax burden, thus destroying the middle class.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
"Stable genius"? Doddering Donald doesn't have a lick of horse sense!
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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A rather large number of people have run the security clearance system with an even larger number having gone through that system and having been trained annually in how that system works. Many, including myself and SCPO Malcolm Nance (he far more so), literally for decades.
Virtually everything that this administration has done from Day One directly contradicts everything in all those decades of experience and training. "Who could have possibly known how security clearances are supposed to work?" Truly the GOP is the greatest security threat that this country has ever known.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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Yesterday on The Stephanie Miller Show (Sirius XM Progress channel), a call-in guest columnist pointed out that Trump, Cohn, et alia, are professional liars. They do all their business by lying and they have lived their entire lives based on lies. They know nothing else.
And they've been able to get away with it for their entire lives. Until now. Now they can and will be held accountable for their lies and they have no idea how to handle it, let alone any idea that it could possibly happen. The irony is that if Trump had never been elected, then they could still be getting away with all their lies. In the meantime, Trump is actually quite helpful in determining what is true. I just take whatever Trump says and assume the opposite. The vast majority of the time, I'm right.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Every time I see Scott Pruitt, he's wearing a RIBBON on his lapel. Not a lapel pin, but a FUCKING RIBBON. One that I cannot find any reference to anywhere. Is that some kind of FUCKING STOLEN VALOR?
I am a retired Chief Petty Officer of the US Navy with 35 years of military service. When you officially receive an award (medal or ribbon), it includes a lapel pin which you are authorized to wear. In bio-pics of LBJ (eg, Brian Cranston's "All the Way", LBJ's photo on Wikipedia), you should see him wearing a lapel pin of the Silver Star which the US Navy awarded him for having once flown into Harm's Way during WWII. Which he had every right to wear. So then just what exactly is this asshole Scott Pruitt up to? Had he actually received some kind of award (in which case why doesn't he just wear the lapel pin instead of the FUCKING RIBBON?). I really hate hypocrites. But even more I hate stolen-valor hypocrites. Edited by dwise1, : even, not ever
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Trudeau should have taken a tough line with Trump: "Yeah, and if you don't straighten up we'll burn it again!" To Trump that isn't a threat. Instead, loss of the White House buildings la 1814 would only give him the excuse to move business to office spaces belonging to his businesses so he can lease them to the US Govt, at full price of course. Plus, those offices would be serviced (eg, catering, custodial) by others of Trump's businesses. And all the while, the cash will be flowing into Trump's own pockets. Anyone who doubts that outcome, just consider how it's gone so far. Seemingly endless golf weekends at Trump resorts where the US Govt had to pay Trump for his large entourage to travel to and from that Trump resort where the US Govt had to pay Trump for their rooms and meals, again at full price I have to assume. Both campaign headquarters (2016 & 2020) are in Trump Tower where they pay a lease to Trump. While there, they are catered by Trump caterers. That's even more money flowing into Trump's pockets. With all this talk about Trump not wanting to win the election, it should seem odd that practically the very next day Trump filed to run for re-election. But considering how profitable Trump found his campaign to be, he wanted to keep that cash cow alive.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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Interesting how so many of the disasters that Trump "fixes" are ones that he had created himself. Does he also suffer from "Mnchhausen by proxy" syndrome where he creates emergencies just so he can "fix" it and get praised as a hero?
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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Two words for you. Merrick Garland. TWO more words for you: Mitch McConnell. Shortly before the 2016 election when it still looked like Clinton would win, he promised publically that if she won then for her entire term he guaranteed that none of her Supreme Court appointees would ever be confirmed, but rather the Republican Senate would block each and every one of them. Now that, plus what they did to Merrick Garland, is obstruction.
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