Summations Only

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!"

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.

And he immediately proves how delusional he is. Typical Trump.

I personally prefer the version that says: "Those who fail to learn the lessons of science fiction are doomed to live them." 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:

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The failure of the Kapp putsch was evidence that the results of 1918 could not yet be openly undone; and the following three years were dominated by the fact that Germany, having failed to plunder Europe, would have to bear the belated burden of the war. The war had cost the Reich 164 milliard marks. Of this sum 93 milliards had been raised by war loans, 29 milliards had been met by treasury bills, the rest by increasing the issue of paper money. Not a penny had been raised by taxation. Republican Germany might have been expected to reform the finances of the Reich and to impose taxation on the rich; but the "national" classes were ready for this emergency -- they alleged that taxes were needed solely to pay reparations to the French. To oppose taxes became a patriotic act; and in 1921 direct taxes were actually reduced. In reality the claims of reparations were trifling compare to the needs of Germany's internal budget; and in 1921-3 hardly any reparations were paid. The inflation which were raged at an ever-advancing pace until the end of 1923 was solely due to the failure to balance revenue and expenditure. There was no connection between reparations and inflation, except for purposes of propaganda. Instead of taxing the rich, Germany paid her way and paid off all the costs of the war by destroying the savings of the poor and middle classes. Inflation had a profound political effect: it left Germany in 1924 as free from debt as it had been in 1871, that is to say, in as favorable a financial position at the end of a lost war as it had been at the end of a victorious war. It had a profound economic effect: it enabled German heavy industry to write off all its prior charges and so be free to carry out a new process of rationalizing its procedure almost as sweeping as the original "industrial revolution" in the eighteen-seventies. Most of all it had a profound social effect: it stripped the middle classes of their savings and made the industrial magnates absolute dictators of German economic life. The saving, investing middle class, everywhere the pillar of stability and respectability, was in any case newer in Germany than in France and England -- hence the instability of German policy even before 1914 --; it was now utterly destroyed, and Germany thus deprived of are solid, cautious keel. The former rentiers, who had lost their all, ceased to impose a brake: they became resentful of the republic, to whom they attributed their disaster; violet and irresponsible; and ready to follow the first demagogic savior, not lately from the industrial working class. The inflation, more than any other single factor, doomed the republic; its cause was not the policy of the Allies, but the failure to impose direct taxes on the rich.

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But inflation had, too, an affect on foreign affairs. To sustain the connection between inflation and reparations, it was necessary to cheat and defy the French and to conduct a steady campaign against Versailles, a campaign which gradually convinced even its authors. Once more Germans began to lose caution and to believe that the war had been won. There was new agitation on the eastern frontiers; open refusal to reduce the German army to the prescribed size; and in the reparations negotiations an insolent, almost jeering, contempt. So long as Versailles could be blamed for all the ills of Germany, no one would demand an account of their stewardship from the old "governing classes" who had brought Germany to this plight and who even now were exploiting her weaknesses and confusion to consolidate their power. For once, German policy had counted without the French. Poincar, the French Prime Minister, actually thought that Versailles ought to be enforced and that the victory of 1918 should be safeguarded. In January 1923, wearied of the refusal to disarm, of the nationalistic agitation, of the failure to pay reparations, Poincar, backed by the Belgians and Italians, decreed the occupation of the Ruhr, seat of Germany's industrial power. Even now the Germans did not appreciate the position. They still thought there was some mistake, some misunderstanding. Ever since 1870 they had regarded France as decadent and weak, and they could not suppose the French really capable of invading German soil. Moreover, being themselves willing to forget all the abuse and hostility they had directed against England, they supposed, rightly, that this will to forget was reciprocated. Thus, even though the German army could not turn the French out of the Ruhr, the English friends of Germany, anxious to save Germany from "Bolshevism" and chaos, would do it for them. The German government therefore ordered "passive resistance," a great demonstration of national unity against the invader. Factories, mines, banks, offices, in the occupied zone, were everywhere closed. The workers starved in patriotic devotion; the capitalist also suffered in their feelings, though they arranged a sell coal and steel to the French at a high profit. The war, suspended by the armistice of 1918, was renewed.

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It was renewed, and lost. The occupation of the Ruhr, far more than the last campaign of 1918, brought home to the Germans the fact of defeat. Until then did had passed unnoticed. Even though fighting had ceased, the Germans had expected the "peril of Bolshevism" to do the trick. Successive German governments had threatened to ruin Germany unless the treaty of Versailles was torn up. Poincar called the German bluff: if the Germans wished to ruin Germany rather than acknowledge defeat, they should be allowed to do so. In August 1923, the German industrialists and generals realize that the bluff had not succeeded. Germany had lost the war. The governments of fulfillment was formed under Stresemann, leader of the former National Liberals, the "party of the folk." The currency was stabilized, as it could have been stabilized at any moment by a government determined to make revenue and expenditure balance; reparations were paid punctually and without difficulty; even the process of rearmament was temporarily slowed down. The occupation of the Ruhr had been the cold douche that brings a hysteric to her senses. It ended, for the moment, the campaign against Versailles.

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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.

"Stable genius"? Doddering Donald doesn't have a lick of horse sense!

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.