TRUMP - Just because.....................Naw, I just can't say it!
POSTED BY: SHINYGOODGUY
UPDATED: Monday, March 9, 2026 20:06
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Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary has said machines are cheaper, easier to manage than humans.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/12/08/donald-trumps-pi
ck-for-labor-secretary-has-said-machines-are-cheaper-easier-to-manage-than-humans/
Automation is expected to displace many human workers in low-skilled jobs.
While Trump is campaigning to bring factory jobs back to the USA, his labor secretary will be campaigning to abolish jobs that could never be exported.
Fast food executive Andrew Puzder, who President-elect Donald Trump is expected to tap as labor secretary, has advocated replacing some human workers with machines as a way for businesses to reduce costs associated with rising wages and health-care expenses.
While machines require regular maintenance and can sometimes malfunction, Puzder said, they are also easier to manage than humans and don’t pose the same legal risks. “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” Puzder told Business Insider in March.
Puzder serves as the chief executive of CKE Restaurants, the corporate parent behind fast food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. The company counts 3,300 locations in 42 states and 28 countries, according to its website.
CKE Restaurants launched a pilot program with Microsoft last year that brought electronic kiosks into 30 Hardee’s restaurants, allowing customers to place orders without speaking to an employee. A request for comment on the company’s automation initiatives was not returned by the time of publication.
Not all restaurant functions can be automated, however, Puzder explained after the Business Insider piece. In a Los Angeles Times interview later that same month, Puzder said cashiers are still needed because some customers are more comfortable interacting with humans. Other restaurant functions, such as preparing fresh biscuits and hand-breaded chicken, cannot easily be automated, Puzder wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial in March.
Puzder is critical of government policies that he says drive up labor costs, including legislation to increase the minimum wage and President Obama’s signature health care law. Those policies have forced labor-intensive businesses, such as restaurants, to look for ways to eliminate expenses, he wrote in the Journal.
“Dramatic increases in labor costs have a significant effect on the restaurant industry, where profit margins are pennies on the dollar and labor makes up about a third of total expenses. As a result, restaurants are looking to reduce costs while maintaining service and food quality,” he said.
But Puzder sees automation shaking up industries well beyond his own. Technology has already started to replace workers in airports and grocery stores, he said, blaming the trend on the liberal labor policies advocated by Trump’s former Democratic presidential rivals.
“This is the problem with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and progressives who push very hard to raise the minimum wage,” Puzder told Business Insider in March. “Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job?”
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Quote:I invite you to try and find consumer goods made in the USA and to figure out what 'made in the USA' means.
Trump voters can show their deep concern for jobless Americans by NOT buying those pants or shoes or sheets NOT made in America.
“If someone makes a burrito with beef from Mexico, but it’s made here, it’s still made in America.”
http://www.today.com/parents/one-moms-challenge-buy-only-made-usa-one-
week-857929
One mom's challenge: Buy only "Made in USA" for one week
was challenged, as a blogger with iVillage, to buy nothing but American-made products for my family for an entire week. I jumped at the opportunity. Why not? Buy American and teach my child our values by example? Who wouldn’t want to do it? I thought it really couldn’t be that hard.
Not exactly.
It was actually harder than I expected it to be.
I wasn’t prepared for the blurred lines and sense of confusion I got when I tried to buy the most basic household items.
"Made in America with domestic & imported parts."
That, my friends, was what my toilet paper package said.
Kinda gross, I thought. How many “parts” are in my toilet paper? And which ones are domestic?
I had to stop and really think about what I was doing. Was I breaking the mission? Does that mean that it's still American? Am I willingly contributing to foreign child labor and harsh working conditions every time my family flushes?
Or should I look on the bright side? Did partially American-made mean I was uplifting the economy?
But then I kept thinking, well, there HAS to be some kind of toilet paper completely “Made in USA.”
Nope.
I ended up buying the “Made in USA with domestic and imported parts” Charmin after having no luck finding entirely domestic-made TP. I searched high and low. And I’m sorry, but I, my husband and my 4-year-old can’t live without toilet paper!
On to food, the next essential. ...
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:I don't shop 'brands', I shop for items with the characteristics I'm looking for. eg: bed linens, 100% cotton, natural, NOT treated to be perma-press or stain resistant. If I'm trying to get something done quickly, I go to the closest store that will probably have it - in my case Target, which is just a few blocks away. IF I'm lucky and the store is actually carrying what I'm looking for, they almost always only only have 1 type anyway, I just buy what they have.
Let me ask you something: when you shop for "X" and you see the same exact brand and item in several places, do you buy the most expensive one?
I can't answer your question.
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Quote:I hope you're not using somebody's guesses about the future - which may or may not come true - to explain away the analysis that 50% of manufacturing jobs that were lost in recent, real-life, factual history were sent overseas.
But Puzder sees automation shaking up industries well beyond his own.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:Factory production was moved because of money. That is not a guess. It is also not a guess that while Trump is campaigning to bring factory jobs back to the USA, his labor secretary will be campaigning to abolish jobs that could never be exported. Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary has said machines are cheaper, easier to manage than humans.
Originally posted by 1kiki:Quote:I hope you're not using somebody's guesses about the future - which may or may not come true - to explain away the analysis that 50% of manufacturing jobs that were lost in recent, real-life, factual history were sent overseas.
But Puzder sees automation shaking up industries well beyond his own.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/12/08/donald-trumps-pi
ck-for-labor-secretary-has-said-machines-are-cheaper-easier-to-manage-than-humans/
This is not a guess: over the next 8 years the labor secretary and business owners will abolish non-factory jobs at the very same time as Trump is creating jobs by moving factory production from overseas back to the USA. Why am I certain? Money. This is not a guess: Business owners, Trump and the GOP love money more than they love Americans without a job. Technology companies love money and a technical challenge.
If it doesn't happen in the next 8 years, then maybe in the next 16, 24, or 32. In 32 years, we might even know for sure that Trump was right about the greenhouse gas effect. Maybe Trump is correct that global warming is a Chinese hoax. Trump's pick for the head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, certainly has acted like it is all a hoax. That is not a guess.
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:
Puzder serves as the chief executive of CKE Restaurants, the corporate parent behind fast food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.
Another Idiocrasy prediction way ahed uv schedule.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.nooalf.com
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Donald Trump really, really doesn't want to hear about how Russia got him elected
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/donald-trump-really-really-does
nt-want-hear-about-how-russia-got-him-elected
Guess what? It turns out that Vladimir Putin really did think that the best way to cripple America was to get an incompetent buffoon like Donald Trump elected president. Smart man. Here's the Washington Post: "The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter."
The New York Times adds this: "They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks."
Donald Trump's transition team thinks the intelligence community is full of crap, and we should ignore them and move on. "The election ended a long time ago," they said in a statement, "in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history."
Oh really? Let's interrupt our story about the greatest act of ratfucking in history for an aside about how Trump really did: Electoral Votes of Presidents Since 12th Amendment Passed -- Donald Trump Ranks 44th Out of 54
The good news, I guess, is that Trump has given up on claiming that he won a great victory in the popular vote. The bad news is that he's simply switched to lying about his Electoral College victory.
Now back to Putin. I'd say that given Trump's apparent inability to ever utter the truth—along with the odd coincidence that Trump just happens to be pro-Russia on nearly every issue Russia cares about—it might be smart to at least take a peek at what the intelligence folks have to say. Especially since the Post story also says this:
In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence...and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.
So McConnell really did Trump a solid, didn't he? And guess what? It turns out that Trump thinks McConnell's wife is the best qualified person in the whole country to be his Secretary of Transportation! Just another coincidence, I'm sure.
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Tweets portend a scary future
By Rick Casey
Two tweets in the past week have me nervous. One for the near future, the other for the distant future.
One is from Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Gen. Mike Flynn. He has tweeted a link to a story on a website called “True Pundit” that says law enforcement sources found evidence “linking (Hillary) Clinton herself and associates to … sex crimes with minors” and other felonies.
The link didn’t mention the suburban Washington pizza restaurant that other tweets (including from Flynn’s son) falsely specified as the site of Clinton’s alleged child trafficking operation, but it helped feed that outrageous lie.
The restaurant’s owners and staff received hundreds of death threats and then, last week, a North Carolina man walked into the restaurant with what appeared to be an assault rifle; the staff and customers fled as he fired off some shots. At least one was to break a lock as he searched for captive children.
There were none, of course. The whole thing was a hoax widely circulated on the internet. What’s scary is that people such as this hero-wannabe believed it. Even scarier is that the man who will be President Trump’s top adviser on national security issues helped foster it.
And this isn’t, by far, the first wild and weird conspiracy theory Flynn has espoused. Last year in San Antonio, he gave a speech warning that our elected officials were conspiring to help Muslims institute Shariah law in Texas.
Flynn had been in Florida the week before and said that “all 12 Democrats” in the 36-member Florida state Senate “voted to have Shariah law as part of the state judicial system in the state of Florida. You got that going on in this state right here. You have that going on in this state right here. It’s over 100 cases around the country.”
In fact, the Florida state Senate has 40 members, and 14 were Democrats. But never mind the small stuff. The big stuff is that no senators had voted to make Shariah law part of Florida’s state’s judicial system. None.
Then Flynn went up to Dallas and said this: “When you, in the state of Texas, you, in the state of Texas — your legislators, your state representatives, your state senators, there’s a bunch of them that would be willing to have Shariah law imposed in the state of Texas.”
To which the proper response is: Name two. I don’t think I risk contradiction by stating that no member of the Texas Legislature is willing to have Shariah law imposed on his or her family. The Houston Chronicle had already named the notion that Shariah law would be imposed in Texas as the 2015 “Hoax of the Year.”
I find it frightening that in a little more than two months, a man who thinks Texas legislators would subject all of us to Shariah law and that Hillary Clinton may have run a child trafficking ring will be in the White House shaping President Trump’s response to world crises.
The other scary tweet has more distant consequences, and possibly more dire. It came from the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, headed by San Antonio’s own Rep. Lamar Smith. It read: “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists.”
Its source: Breitbart News. That’s who the committee tweet linked to with the news. It is very scary that a committee that wields great power over national science policy gets its science news from Breitbart, which doesn’t exactly have a science section, but has run an unseemly number of articles proclaiming that, scientifically speaking, women are no good at science.
Trump has appointed Breitbart’s CEO, Steve Bannon, to be his top policy adviser in the White House. Bannon has described breitbart.com as being “a platform for the alt right,” including the movement’s white nationalists. It has the appearance of combining political coverage to the right of Fox News with the graphic sensibilities of a British tabloid.
Which, actually, is where it got its story on a drop of global temperatures. Not surprisingly, cli
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Quote:I think we need a time travel joke spoken with the voice of George Washington:
Originally posted by G:
There is this part of me that I admit (somewhat shamefully) is hanging by the edge of my seat waiting to see just what the eff this horror show is going to do once they are in office. In terms of writing a script, the last 3 weeks have been a pretty epic lead in.
"Gentlemen, I do not fully comprehend what we have just witnessed, but one thing is exceedingly clear — we must abandon any inclination we may have held toward a system of direct democracy — and institute a safeguard to ensure that such a dangerous narcissist will never become president of this nation! It shall be known as — the electoral college!
Our posterity will never even know how close they came to utter ruination!"
www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/12/5/1606903/-Cartoon-The-mysterious-str
anger
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:No, it's just another one of your unsupported bullshit claims quoted from another unsupported bullshit claim.
Factory production was moved because of money. That is not a guess.
The manufacturing jobs that were lost were lost due to a voluntary choice by international corporations, not a matter of necessity. As my posts with all their links show.
BTW, I noticed that you abandoned your claims that manufacturing loss was due to technology, and also that people should just 'buy American' (because they can't).
You're making progress.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:So you're claiming money is bullshit and it's only "voluntary choice by international corporations". No need to talk about money when it is all about "voluntary choice". I guess you don't know that money motivates factory owners. Just curious: do you think patriotism and love for their American factory workers are as powerful motivations as money for factory owners? If you do, can you prove it?
Originally posted by 1kiki:Quote:No, it's just another one of your unsupported bullshit claims quoted from another unsupported bullshit claim.
Factory production was moved because of money. That is not a guess.
The manufacturing jobs that were lost were lost due to a voluntary choice by international corporations, not a matter of necessity. As my posts with all their links show.
How do you, Trump, and Bernie propose to get international corporations to involuntarily change their choice back to the USA? Trump's answer is money. Trump with his 35% tariff. V.P. Pence with his $7,000,000 of Ohio tax money for Carrier. Since an American factory worker is paid more than Chinese, the Americans buying a made-in-america product will be paying more, which means, again, money. If 1kiki thinks Americans love American factory workers enough to be willing to pay more, prove it by showing me some examples of these magnanimous American buyers of American goods.
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President Barack Obama seems to fear that president-elect Donald Trump will ignore US intelligence that Russia used cyber tools to influence the result of the Nov. 8 election. And with good reason: Trump has displayed intense skepticism of what US intelligence agencies regard as a profound risk to the American electoral system.
So Obama is attempting to box Trump in politically—ordering a definitive report on Russia’s cyber-intrusions before he leaves office in six weeks.
In a new briefing to key members of Congress last week, the CIA advanced its long-held conclusion that Russia conducted cyber-intrusions and disseminated fake news in order to disrupt the presidential election. In its latest assessment, the CIA said the attacks were not intended solely to disrupt the election, but specifically to skew it to Trump’s advantage, according to the Washington Post. The newspaper quotes a US official who was in the congressional briefing as saying “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected.”
The CIA assessment aligns with the discovery of similar cyber-attacks across Europe, including the hacking of sensitive servers, as well as information warfare. In recent days, intelligence officials in both the UK and Germany have said that Russia’s cyber warfare imperils their respective democracies. On Dec. 10, Nicholas Burns, one of the most respected former diplomats in the US, tweeted that the threat is sweeping.
Trump’s team, however, has brushed off the new reports as the work of a tarnished intelligence community. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’” the statement read.
In an interview with Time magazine, Trump had voiced similar sarcasm about the cyberattacks. “It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey,” he said. “I believe that it could have been Russia and it could have been any one of many other people. Sources or even individuals.”
Hence Obama’s worry. Broadly speaking, Trump is setting an early trend of treating information he doesn’t like as politicization. For instance, his transition team has suggested that the Energy Information Administration, the much-respected data division of the US Department of Energy, is politicizing its data to support Obama’s climate change agenda. And he is accusing the 17 US intelligence agencies—one of the baselines of US foreign policy—of doctoring the hacking analysis to tarnish him and his presidency. The mindset suggests another dimension to Trump’s penchant for operating in an alternate universe of facts.
With that as the backdrop, Obama is racing against the clock to get the facts on Russia out there prior to Trump’s inauguration.
Much more at http://qz.com/860071/barack-obama-is-racing-for-a-definitive-report-on
-russias-cyber-attacks-on-the-presidential-election-before-trump-takes-office/
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AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/democrats-trump-and-the-ongoing-da
ngerous-refusal-to-learn-the-lesson-of-brexit/
Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit
Glenn Greenwald
The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’s even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president Tuesday night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.
That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the population — all while compiling their own long record of failure and corruption and destruction — are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare.
After the Brexit vote, I wrote an article comprehensively detailing these dynamics, which I won’t repeat here but hope those interested will read. The title conveys the crux: “Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions.” That analysis was inspired by a short, incredibly insightful, and now more relevant than ever post-Brexit Facebook note by the Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins, who
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AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG
Obama is the first Democratic president since FDR to be elected and reelected with a majority of the popular vote. He personifies our emerging majority-minority nation, the kaleidoscopic America. He helped to forge a new, potentially growing majority coalition of people of color, single women, millennials, and professionals.
The scope and durability of this coalition, however, have proved uncertain. Obama energized this coalition around his person—but unlike Roosevelt or Reagan, he failed to inspire it with a historic mission, to instill deeper understandings of a new role for government at home and abroad. These voters failed to turn out in the midterm elections, and the Democrats suffered historic reverses. White blue-collar workers felt abandoned in both politics and policy. Hillary Clinton’s stunning defeat in 2016 was caused in part by white working- and middle-class voters rebelling against an establishment that had failed them. Obama will leave office with Republicans in control in Washington and in 25 states to the Democrats’ five. Under Obama, Democrats have lost more than 900 state legislative seats across the country.
https://www.thenation.com/article/was-barack-obama-a-transformational-
president/
Was Barack Obama a Transformational President?
Despite his bold promises, the president put more energy into rescuing, rather than changing, the old system.
By Robert L. Borosage
Obama swept into office with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in the midst of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. He helped rescue the economy with the largest stimulus in history. He passed the biggest health-care reform in half a century and the most ambitious financial reform since the 1930s, and he slowed America’s rising inequality with the first steps toward progressive tax reform.
(But) Consider these hallmarks of the conservative-era consensus: the assault on government, deregulation and financialization of the economy, corporate-defined globalization, and growing inequality. All of them characterized the status quo when Obama was elected president in 2008, and all of them remain in place as he prepares to leave office.
Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package was unprecedented in size, but still too small to drive a robust recovery. And as Republicans assailed its “failure,” Obama stunningly surrendered the ideological debate. In his first year in office, with unemployment in double digits and Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushing a new jobs bill through the House of Representatives, the president embraced austerity. The opportunity to rebuild America and put people to work was squandered.
The president’s financial reforms were similarly compromised. In 2009, he told 13 major bankers: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” And so it was. After Bush, Obama, and the Federal Reserve bailed out the bankers who caused the 2008 financial crisis, the banks emerged more concentrated than ever. Only one major banker went to prison for what the FBI called an “epidemic” of fraud. Big banks were required to build up more capital, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created. But Obama leaves office with executive-compensation rules still unwritten and with federal regulators warning about the dangers of banks that are too big to fail and too weak to survive a downturn.
Obama’s historic health-care reform has extended insurance to 20 million Americans and requires coverage of pre-existing conditions. But the White House ducked taking on the pharmaceutical companies and abandoned the public option that might have provided a check on insurance-company abuses. The reforms initially slowed the pace of rising prices, but now double-digit price hikes by insurance companies facing less and less competition in the various exchanges are making adequate he
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AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG
http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/gov-jerry-brown-on-clinton
s-emails-its-almost-like-a-vampire-510336579979
Brown on Clinton's Emails: "It's Almost Like a Vampire"
Fri, Aug 21
Governor Jerry Brown said that Hillary Clinton's emails have a "dark energy" and are following her "like a vampire." Watch the full interview with Chuck Todd Sunday on Meet
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Workers at endangered Indiana plant feel forgotten by Trump
www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Workers-at-endangered-Indiana-plant-fee
l-10787688.php
50-hour workweeks belie the anxiety at the United Technologies-owned factory outside a small northeastern Indiana city, where Mike Harmon and co-workers wonder whether they aren't just stockpiling parts for when the company sends their 700 jobs to Mexico.
Their situation has gained scant attention compared to the sister Carrier Corp. factory two hours away in Indianapolis.
"The whole time during the campaign Trump talked Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indianapolis, never heard one word about Huntington," said Harmon, a 44-year-old Huntington native who's worked at the factory for seven years.
It's a perceived slight by Trump that stings in a county where 72 percent voted for Trump and manufacturing makes up about one-fifth of all jobs.
Employees in Huntington say they've been working mostly seven days a week since late October, making control panels for the furnace, air conditioning and refrigeration industries. Leaders of their union believe the company is doing so ahead of the factory's layoffs expected to start in April and continue into 2018.
It isn't clear whether Trump intends to keep personally intervening in corporate decisions. Three days after the Carrier factory trip, Pence told ABC's "This Week" that Trump will "make those decisions on a day-by-day basis in the course of the transition, in the course of the administration."
Some Huntington workers are upset over the tax incentives for a company that also owns Pratt & Whitney — a big supplier of fighter jet engines that relies in part on U.S. military contracts.
Bob Breedlove, a 60-year-old who's worked at the plant for a decade, voted for Trump and still thinks he's the right person, even though he's "not crazy about this deal."
"My tax dollars are going to save the company, but they aren't going to help save my job," Breedlove said. "I know how much money this company makes, they don't need our help to stay in business and make a profit."
At a downtown diner in Huntington, Lori Guy explained that her vote for Trump already is paying off, even if it didn't help her town. "I'm sure if there was a way, he would have saved more jobs," said Guy.
While Blake Hancock is grateful for the jobs that are staying in Indiana, the 25-year-old believes Trump was trying to buff up his image, not protect workers.
"There are still 1,300 people who are losing their jobs," Hancock said. "I feel like it was a numbers game ... to buy the favor of the American public."
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Quote:Brexit required only a 50% majority. It got 51.89%. Prime Minister David Cameron must be a fool for setting the decision point at 50%. Why not set it lower? 40%? Or even one-third? Because even Cameron could see 40% and 33.33% are absurd. Why couldn’t Cameron see that 50% is almost as ridiculous? Probably the same reason he can't see that the income distribution in the UK is ridiculous skewed toward the top 1%. He is a mindless robot with no imagination. His kind is a widespread affliction.
Originally posted by 1kiki:
After the Brexit vote, I wrote an article comprehensively detailing these dynamics, which I won’t repeat here but hope those interested will read. The title conveys the crux: “Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions.” That analysis was inspired by a short, incredibly insightful, and now more relevant than ever post-Brexit Facebook note by the Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins, who wrote that “both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.” Bevins went on: “Since the 1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.”
http://equitablegrowth.org/research-analysis/economic-growth-in-the-un
ited-states-a-tale-of-two-countries/
If Cameron had not been politically incompetent he should have set the decision point at 60% or even two-thirds. Or Cameron could have set the number at 50% of all registered voters or 50% of all eligible voters. That is 23,250,000 or 25,678,000 votes versus the actual “Leave the European Union” vote of 17,410,742. Cameron was not thinking clearly when he called for a referendum.
Leaving the EU is a big deal with big costs and it should have been decided by a big margin of the voters. But if it was politically impossible for Cameron to imagine any decision point other than 50%, then at least Cameron should have had the wisdom to call a second vote to confirm that the first vote wasn’t just fuck-you-Europe peevishness caused by stagnating incomes, but that the voters were really willing to pay all the costs of Brexit.
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Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda....
Staying in the EU is what George Soros wanted.
Watch as the European Nations, One By One, Exit the EU in the next two years.
The financial problems weren't the straw Second. It was the Unelected Officials ruling over the European nations that were putting thousands of Middle Eastern economic refugees in their neighborhoods that raped their teenage daughters that made them want out.
The silly thing is to assume that "white males" in the world have been so casturated that they will just accept anything from here on out.
Although no White Males have been involved in any massive slaughter of other peoples for nearly 100 years and none that I know of are eager to return to such a thing, it would be a very grave mistake to believe that they are incapable of reverting to their primate brains when their backs are against the wall.
We are at our "ends" here.
We want to play nice, but the game is stacked against us, and has been for at least 15 years.
Paula Cole asked "Where have all the cowboys Gone" back in the late 90's.
They're still right here.
They just went to sleep.
They weren't needed.
I have no desire to start a war.
But if anybody of any color were to touch a single hair on my niece without her permission I would gladly go to prison ending their life in retribution.
And although I might not be black or a woman, I've had sex with anything with a hole when I was younger.
To be completely honest, although I ended up identifying as a heterosexual when it was all over, I have to say that the Tranny's that REALLY try are the most fun to be with. The ones who are completely passable. The ones you can take home to a family party and watch them fool everyone.
If you want a Woman who will do ANYTHING for you, take a beautiful young transsexual to a family party and show Her off as your new GF. Make her feel completely at home with your family and watch her charm them.
When the day is over and night comes, you will NEVER have a more appreciative lover than that night.
Just one more reason to oppose Islam.
If the Girl I'm talking about lived there, she'd be stoned to death or thrown into a fire.
I won't bother telling anyone to wake up. Everyone will eventually.
Just sad how many have to be abused here in the states before it happens is all...
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who
-would-vote-for-trump/
Sometimes statistical analysis is tricky, and sometimes a finding just jumps off the page. Here’s one example of the latter.
In the country’s 50 most-well-educated counties, Hillary Clinton improved on President Obama’s 2012 performance by almost 9 percentage points, even though Obama had done well in them to begin with.
The 50 counties (minimum population of 50,000) where the smallest share of the population has bachelor’s degrees, Clinton did worse than Obama by an average of 11 percentage points worse. These are really the places that won Donald Trump the presidency.
How do we know that education levels drove changes in support — as opposed to income levels, for example? It’s tricky because there’s a fairly strong correlation between income and education. Nonetheless, with the whole country to pick from, we can find some places where education levels are high but incomes are average or below average. If education is the key driver of changes in the electorate, we’d expect Clinton to hold steady or gain in these counties compared to Obama in 2012. If income matters more, we might see her numbers decline.
In most places that fit this description, Clinton improved on Obama’s performance. In those magical counties where the population is highly educated and pay is average or less, Clinton improved on Obama’s performance by an average of about 4 percentage points.
There are also some counties where incomes are high but residents aren’t well-educated. Examples: Suffolk County turned into Trump Territory, voting for him by 8 percentage points after Obama had won it by 4 points in 2012. Trump made even larger gains in Staten Island, New York (Richmond County), winning it by 17 points after Obama won it by 3 points in 2012.
Long story in short, educational levels are the critical factor in predicting shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016.
There is much more at http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who
-would-vote-for-trump/
But although this finding is clear in a statistical sense, that doesn’t mean the interpretation of it is straightforward. It seems to me that there a number of competing hypotheses that are compatible with this evidence:
Trump’s approach to the campaign — relying on emotional appeals while glossing over policy details — may have resonated more among people with lower education levels.
Education levels probably have some relationship with racial resentment, although the causality isn’t clear. The act of having attended college itself may be important, insofar as colleges and universities are often more diverse places than students’ hometowns. There’s more research to be done on how exposure to racial minorities affected white voters.
Educational attainment may be a better indicator of long-term economic well-being than household incomes. Unionized jobs in the auto industry often pay reasonably well even if they don’t require college degrees, for instance, but they’re also potentially at risk of being shipped overseas or automated.
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I'm going to read the rest of your post after saying this, but I have to say right now I take SERIOUS issue with the whole "Education" demographic thing.
As if to say that I'm a dumb ass hick for voting for trump.
It happens to be true that I'm not "Educated", as in as many times as I tried college it just wasn't for me. I do hope that as many negative things you might say about me, a lack of intelligence is not an attribute I am afflicted with.
Personally, I found that statistic EXTREMELY Offensive during this election cycle.
That being said, I will read the rest of your post now....
WOW....
Your entire Post was extremely offensive.
My only reply to that is the fact that "Educated" kids are Indoctrinated Kids.
The type that burn American Flags and actually get the school administrators at major colleges to refrain from flying the American Flag after Trump was elected.
It has nothing at all to do with Intelligence.
Just Education.
There is a VAST difference between the two, and in most cases there is very little Overlap.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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I'll just P.S. that reply now with this...
Enjoy the Real World, college kids.
There are no "Safe Spaces" for you to run and hide.
Chances are, assuming you are employed in any job that requires human interaction, you're going to be "Triggered" at least once on a daily basis.
If this happens to you, you have two options. Grow a pair and deal with it like an adult...
Or lash out and then go cry in a corner and hope you don't get fired for it.
You're 24 years old now. The days of "Everyone Winning a Trophy for Playing" are over.
It's called "Swimming With Sharks", starring Kevin Spacey.
Step 1: Rent the movie.
Step 2: Learn more in 2 hours than your $200,000 education taught you between Beer Pong matches.
Step 3: Thank me later.
Yes.
I could have shown an important thing Kevin Spacey said that really "Rocked" your world, but this video is more important, given that you are far more likely to have to eat this particular type of Shit Sandwich or something like it.
This is your New Life.
The Good News is, if you eat the asshole out of your bosses for the next 20 years while climbing the ladder and losing part of your soul with every rung you climb, you will one day be able to be just as cruel and evil to the 24 year olds who aren't even born yet that just came out of college in 2050.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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SECOND: I agree with SIX- educated people are primarily indoctrinated people.
I mean, for chrissake we have colleges and universities now where students are so mentally tender that any little hiccup throws them into a tizzy. "Safe spaces?" Playdoh? Coloring books? Therapy puppies? (I feel sorry for those puppies, being forced into being petted by a gazzilion strangers! It must be terribly unnerving and scary for them!)
The measure of a person's intelligence isn't how much they can be TAUGHT ... lots of people were taught to believe uncritically that the earth was flat .... but how much they look at familiar things in new ways, and perhaps change their own paradigms.
Whatever happened to the concept of "critical thinking"?
I'm a big believer in education. In order to be able to come up with new observations and new ideas you need to learn the old ones first. But right now the schools are just droid-factories: people who never question the way things are, or their role in it, or their own beliefs.
-------
And by the way, for all of the liberals out there crying about "censorship" I have not ever seen a more censoring and censorious group than liberals. The moment anyone falls out of the liberal way of thinking, they are treated to hysterical judgments and insults. And in defense of "their" way of thinking, they're willing to brand anything that doesn't meet their POV as "fake news" and look to big daddy google or big mommy facebook to "curate" "truthiness" for them.
Who the hell wants their life "curated" for them anyway? Sheesh.
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
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Quote:“I’m, like, a smart person”: Trump doesn’t even listen to facts
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Whatever happened to the concept of "critical thinking"?
http://qz.com/860315/donald-trump-doesnt-even-listen-to-the-facts-from
-his-secret-intelligence-briefings/
Most presidents-to-be spend their precious few months before taking office learning as much as they can from the people tasked with keeping the US safe. Not Donald Trump, whose cabinet pageantry and victory tour has left little time for briefings.
Trump receives one briefing a week. Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president-elect, is briefed at least six times per week. Does Trump think he is six times smarter than Pence?
To justify not receiving daily intelligence updates, the president-elect claimed on Fox News Sunday today, “I get it when I need it. I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.”
(N.B. Trump has only been elected for four years. Maybe he needs reminding?)
In the same interview, Trump put himself even more at odds with the intelligence community he will soon inherit and be tasked with leading. Trump skewered a new report by US intelligence agencies, which claimed with “high confidence” that Russia interfered with the election by releasing Democratic National Committee emails through WikiLeaks.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump said on Fox News. “I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it.” Did you notice that Trump has nothing to support his opinions other than it looks bad for him?
The report states that Russian hackers breached both DNC and Republican National Committee servers, but only DNC emails were publicized. Russia is still in possession of potentially-damaging RNC emails.
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Quote:Looking at the new hires, I have to agree.
But right now the schools are just droid-factories
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:Maybe your boss should learn behavioral economics. It revolutionized the art of NBA draft picks. It could do the same with your boss’s picks for new employees.
Originally posted by 1kiki:Quote:Looking at the new hires, I have to agree.
But right now the schools are just droid-factories
www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/12/how_daryl_morey_used_behavio
ral_economics_to_revolutionize_the_art_of_nba.html
The worry for 1kiki is would a boss who knew behavioral economics have picked 1kiki as an employee?
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Quote:
But right now the schools are just droid-factories- SIGNY
Looking at the new hires, I have to agree. - KIKI
Maybe your boss should learn behavioral economics. It revolutionized the art of NBA draft picks. It could do the same with your boss’s picks for new employees.
www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/12/how_daryl_morey_used_behavio
ral_economics_to_revolutionize_the_art_of_nba.html
The worry for 1kiki is would a boss who knew behavioral economics have picked 1kiki as an employee?- SECONDRATE
I read through the whole article carefully, thinking that it MUST have been linked for a reason related to this thread, and all I got out of it was Now there's 12 minutes of my life that I'll never get back! What did it tell me that Moneyball didn't?
You linking that particular article tells me, SECOND, that you've lost the point about the value of people as independent thinkers. Because all of the article tells me is that "they" are working on metrics to pick the best tools out of a lineup of people: Who will never rise above, or fall below, or do anything unexpected, but be very predictable.
In my career, I've probably interviewed over 250 people, either for preliminary screening or final hiring. The new hires are competent ... some of them are excellent computer people, some are phenomenal instrument troubleshooters, others have detailed knowledge of atmospheric chemistry. Many of them are self-starters, who are looking to improve the "efficiency" of our team. And I've got nothing against that! But there is only one person (possibly two) who are willing to look at The Big Picture. In other words, to assess our organizational EFFECTIVENESS, as opposed to efficiency. And only one of them is willing to look at our policies (and the politics behind them). Thinking new thoughts, coming up with new ideas is extremely important, it allows people (and organizations) to be alert to and adapt to new circumstances and unexpected events. I find the scope of most of the new hires' thinking to be far too limited and geared towards social media: they're more worried about being graceful, or coming up with the bon mot, or finding unusual hobbies (like wall climbing) than with thinking about anything real.
So tell me, SECOND, do you think you could pass a screening interview?
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
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Quote:Moneyball did not realize the deeper reason for the inefficiencies in the market for players: They sprang directly from the inner workings of the human mind of the “experts”, not the players. The ways in which some basketball expert might misjudge basketball players and the ways in which any expert’s judgments might be warped by the expert’s own mind. That was not in the book Moneyball, but it was definitely a major point of the article you read for 12 minutes, and yet you completely missed that main idea, Signym.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I read through the whole article carefully, thinking that it MUST have been linked for a reason related to this thread, and all I got out of it was Now there's 12 minutes of my life that I'll never get back! What did it tell me that Moneyball didn't?
Quote:With a couple of sentences, Signym, you gave a perfect demonstration of what is wrong with how your mind analyzes problems and creates solutions. I predict you can’t understand what you did wrong, but I will give you some clues:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You linking that particular article tells me, SECOND, that you've lost the point about the value of people as independent thinkers. Because all of the article tells me is that "they" are working on metrics to pick the best tools out of a lineup of people: Who will never rise above, or fall below, or do anything unexpected, but be very predictable.
Daryl Morey is the independent thinker, Signym. And you got the article’s lesson backwards: people are NOT very predictable, despite all the data Morey gathers on players. But he can make predictions such as the statistical likelihood that Trump will have conflicts of interests because he and his children are creating, with every new contract they sign, new possible conflicts between what is best for the Trump family fortune and what is best for America. Because Trump keeps his family business a big secret, we don’t know what the conflicts are. Trump and family are pretending that their secretiveness means there can be no significant conflicts, which only a Trump voter would believe.
I predict that, statistically, most conflicts between what is best for the Trump family fortune and best for America, America will actually come out second best, but Trump will insist, loudly with fake sincerity, that is not true. If the Trump family released their tax returns, made all details of each business deal public, told us who they borrowed money from for each deal, how much, what interest rate, that would go a long way toward making sure there are no conflicts that benefit the Trump fortune. Trump won't be doing any of that I predict statistically from his past.
Quote:I interviewed twice on the same day in Houston, near the Galleria. Both divisions wanted to hire me and I would have been happy with only one job offer. That was a very memorable day and is what happens when you graduate from UT Austin.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So tell me, SECOND, do you think you could pass a screening interview?
Homer discovers Russia's President Vladimir Putin in disguise.
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Quote:I'm sure the person who hired me would have been horrified to know that I interviewed sitting on a kitchen floor in an apartment that had no furniture - which is why I was sitting on the floor, wearing a down parka, with snow melting off my shit kicker boots, and drinking beer out of the bottle. But such is life. I passed the interview and was told so right at the end of the interview which was done long-distance over the phone; I was hired, and have done well, and done right, ever since. My days as a student/ itinerant job-adventurer were over. So, all your attempts to try and demean me - really truly - look both mean-spirited and ignorant from my POV. Which is how I'll continue to think of you until you come up with a better version of yourself. But I'm not going to waste any time waiting.
The worry for 1kiki is would a boss who knew behavioral economics have picked 1kiki as an employee?
Here are some more selected jobs I did - EKG technician, roadie, assembly-line worker (nasty-dirty assembly line, not clean assembly), waitress, geological field assistant (an instant lesson in rock-climbing!).
But getting back to the students of today ... when I went to school - one of those mega-universities where freshman classes are 350+ students - well, maybe I just hung out with a bunch of brilliant snots. We'd sit at the front of the physics lecture hall and make a game out of pointing out contradictions in the lecture, especially in the proofs. (It was kind of a game of 'stump the professor' where we'd try and out-do each other finding subtle gaps or contradictions in the logic.) We had fun with chemicals we weren't supposed to have. We engaged in what is now called social engineering. And so I was telling one of the newer hires about a particular thing we did, and he asked, wistfully, where that happened. He was shocked as hell to find out we were lowly sophomores at the time. But at THAT time in my life, there was social upheaval, new and better ways of looking at history and society, new technologies to learn ... OUR world was so much bigger than it is today. We grew up knowing not just how, but also what, and why, and where we were in the big picture.
The kids today are perfectly capable of performing even complicated technical tasks with sufficient training. But they don't seem to have mentally extrapolated from those tasks to an understanding of what, essentially, is happening at each step, even though they have more than enough education in theory and practice to do so. That makes them incapable of troubleshooting when things go wrong. Worse, they don't seem to think they SHOULD have to think about what's going wrong. Someone else should just fix it for them. Imagining how to do the same thing but better is something I haven't seen from them yet. And imagining how to get the same data through a completely different route is, so far, out of the question. Just give them a routine and that's what they'll do. As to their view of the world ... it seems to be limited to an exchange of bons mots that passes for conversation, about very limited current 'cultural' topics. So far, they're pretty much droids.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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But to get back to a topic I'd prefer to discuss instead of discussing myself, and FAR would prefer to discuss rather than discussing you, SECOND ...
AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/democrats-trump-and-the-ongoing-da
ngerous-refusal-to-learn-the-lesson-of-brexit/
I posted this above, and it says what I've been saying all along, which is that people have had it with 'more of the same'.
Quote:
But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare.
Quote:To no avail. All of my posts - at least a hundred - pointing out what Hillary was doing wrong compared to Trump went unaddressed. Pointing out Bernie's strengths and pointing out that HILLARY NEEDED TO BE A BETTER CANDIDATE got me the label of Russian troll. And let me point out, turned you all into rabid, partisan ankle-biters.
Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate ...
Well, I'll say it now and with great satisfaction: I TOLD YOU SO.
And I hope you all now feel as stupid as you deserve to feel.
Quote:And this also reflects what I've said more than once. Ronald Reagan reframed the relationship between our society and our government. THE DEMOCRATS HAVE FAILED TO FIND A CREDIBLE ANSWER IN THE LAST 30 YEARS. And with the advent of Bill-triangulation-style policy setting, have shown they're perfectly willing to sell us to international corporations, as long as they get a comfortable lifestyle afterward as payment.
Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently. That, as Matt Stoller’s indispensable article in The Atlantic three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice the Democratic Party made decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power.
The only issue where I depart with Greenwald is that he failed to notice that women, minorities and older people have been working in a post-2007 economy for 50+ years.
But those economic problems didn't matter until they hit the white working-class males.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG
Was Barack Obama a Transformational President?
By Robert L. Borosage
https://www.thenation.com/article/was-barack-obama-a-transformational-
president/
Obama's domestic achievements are framed as 'yes ... but' statements.
He swept into office on a tide of reform ... but failed to overcome "the hallmarks of the conservative-era consensus: the assault on government, deregulation and financialization of the economy, corporate-defined globalization, and growing inequality."
He passed the largest ever stimulus package but ... (it) was still too small to drive a robust recovery." But as republicans assailed it, he ... "stunningly surrendered the ideological debate ... and embraced austerity".
"The president’s financial reforms were similarly compromised. Bush, Obama, and the Federal Reserve bailed out the bankers who caused the 2008 financial crisis but the banks emerged more concentrated than ever. Only one major banker went to prison for what the FBI called an “epidemic” of fraud.
Big banks were required to build up more capital, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created ... But Obama leaves office with executive-compensation rules still unwritten and with federal regulators warning about the dangers of banks that are too big to fail and too weak to survive a downturn."
"Obama’s historic health-care reform has extended insurance to 20 million Americans and requires coverage of pre-existing conditions. But the White House ducked taking on the pharmaceutical companies and abandoned the public option that might have provided a check on insurance-company abuses.
The reforms initially slowed the pace of rising prices, but now double-digit price hikes by insurance companies facing less and less competition in the various exchanges are making adequate health care unaffordable for more and more people."
"Obama declared income inequality to be “the defining challenge of our time.” Obama did raise taxes marginally on the wealthy and decreased them for low-wage earners. But the president’s reforms are a minor correction to decades of upward after-tax redistribution. More important, little was done to alter the economic structures that generate extreme inequality in incomes before taxes.
Obama now argues that unions “should play a critical role” in reducing inequality, but he abandoned campaign pledges to make labor-law reform a priority.
He raised the minimum wage for federal employees, but he refused to require preferences in federal contracts for good employers that respect the right to organize."
"The new jobs—disproportionately contingent, precarious, and part-time—add to the insecurity. Student debt is soaring. Our trade deficits are ruinous. And our public infrastructure is deteriorating, as the share of GDP devoted to domestic spending has plummeted to levels not seen since the Eisenhower era. It is hard to argue that this constitutes a transformation."
Obama promised the most transparent administration ever but "He has prosecuted more whistle-blowers than any president in US history, and he defended mass surveillance while
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Why don't we get to the topic at hand...Trump and his infinite wisdom.
...and here we go!
Trump rejects the Intelligence community's finds:
Another source briefed on the intelligence told NBC News that the U.S. government has identified specific Russian actors it believes were involved in computer systems hacks — based on intercepted communications, human tips and computer forensics.
...and then we have this:
Briefings, Trump No Go!
A former senior intelligence official also noted Trump's assertion Sunday on Fox News that he doesn't always take the Presidential Daily Briefing — the top-secret briefing on national security developments — because "I'm, like, a smart person."
(Laughs hysterically, or LOL, whichever you prefer) You can't make this shit up.
"It is curious that someone who refuses to take intelligence briefings has decided that he doesn't agree with the analysis contained in them," the former official said.
(Intelligence and Trump, laughs hysterically x2)
Rep. David Schiff contributed this:
"Perhaps, once he has taken office, Mr. Trump will go to the CIA and look at the rows of memorial stars in the lobby — each representing a fallen officer — and reflect on his disparagement of the intelligence community's work," he said.
Well said.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/intelligence-agencies-distresse
d-by-trumps-rejection-of-findings-on-russia/ar-AAlqRcc?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp
SGG
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Why don't we get to the topic at hand...Trump and his infinite wisdom.
I'm sure your endless obsession with Trump will magically fix the problem that DEMOCRATS HAVE NO ORGANIZED PLAN TO OPPOSE TRUMP, AND NO AGENDA THAT PEOPLE WILL RALLY TO.
So, what are you going to do about it? Whine some more? Carp some more? Pout some more? Yeah. That'll work. (not)
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG
There are many articles like the ones I posted, above, and below, about what democrats did wrong. The problem is, they don't come from democrats - not the voters and not the politicians.
Unless democrats can come to grips with what they did wrong, nothing will change the pattern of democrats being marginalized in national, state and local politics.
With that in mind, I hope democrats here will put some thought into what they should be doing differently.
The Democrats Screwed Up
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/opinion/the-democrats-screwed-up.htm
l
Despite all the discussion of demographic forces that doomed the G.O.P., it will soon control the presidency as well as both chambers of Congress and two of every three governor’s offices. And that’s not just a function of James Comey, Julian Assange and misogyny. Democrats who believe so are dangerously mistaken.
What’s Wrong With the Democratic Platform
It has good language on many issues, but it lacks an overarching vision.
https://www.thenation.com/article/whats-wrong-with-the-democratic-plat
form/
How did Democrats lose 2016 US Presidential Election
http://viapopuli.com/democrats-lose-2016-us-presidential-election
First, practically stealing the primary on behalf of the preferred corporate candidate, as opposed to the popular candidate who advocated what people cared for.
7 Reasons Donald Trump Won The Presidential Election
http://www.npr.org/2016/11/12/501848636/7-reasons-donald-trump-won-the
-presidential-election
4. Clinton did not fire up the Obama Coalition.
Clinton got nearly 5 million fewer votes overall than Obama
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Trump sets John Bolton to be #2 at the State Department. Bolton is a neocon still defending President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, if you forgot. He now defends Trump.
Starting at 2:12 on the video, Bolton is seriously suggesting that the hacks into Democratic Party computers might have been false flag operations, presumably with the goal of making it look like Russia supported Donald Trump. This would ruin Trump's reputation and guarantee a win for Hillary Clinton. But that means Bolton is completely nuts.
And Bolton doesn't even make sense on his own terms. No campaign in its right mind would do this, and certainly not Hillary’s campaign desperately trying to keep the word "email" in any form out of the public discourse.
Dark insinuations of false flag operations are a favorite among conspiracy theorists. They think it makes them sound sophisticated and worldly. This means that either Bolton is a conspiracy theorist or else he doesn't mind sounding like one if that's what it take to defend his side. And soon he'll be the #2 guy at the State Department, the person really running things while Tillerson provides the public face. God help us.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The authoritarian leaders who are eagerly awaiting a Trump presidency
by Echo Huang
http://qz.com/857918/the-authoritarian-leaders-who-are-eagerly-awaitin
g-a-trump-presidency/
Since Donald Trump won the US presidential elections, he has been receiving congratulations from world leaders.
While that’s to be expected, the enthusiasm for a Trump presidency from leaders with less-than-stellar human rights records has raised some eyebrows. Some of them, such as Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, seem hopeful for a US president who won’t interfere with how they govern their countries. Others, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, believe relations between their countries and the US will improve under Trump.
Here are some authoritarian leaders who have expressed support for Trump:
1. Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte
Duterte, who’s earned a nickname as “Trump of the East,” said he would welcome the opportunity to be friends with Trump. “I can always be a friend to anybody especially to a president, a chief executive of another country,” he said, adding Trump “has not meddled in the human rights.”
That’s a big plus in Duterte’s book, who has made no secret of his feelings around human rights. “If it involves human rights, I don’t give a shit,” he said in October. Since coming into office this year, he’s waged a bloody war on drugs that has killed thousands, including children and innocent people.
In December, Duterte recounted a conversation he had with Trump, in which the US president-elect praised how he was governing the Philippines: “You’re doing great. I know what’s your worry about these Americans criticizing you. You are doing good, go ahead.”
2. Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko
The man dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” reached out to congratulate Trump just hours after his victory (paywall). Lukashenko, who has jailed opponents and crushed opposition marches over the past 21 years, said Trump was helping return the US “to real democracy” and that his victory was “testimony to the American people’s choice in favor of a politics based on honesty, responsibility, and a search of change.”
3. Cambodian prime minister Samdech Hun Sen
The prime minister who has ruled Cambodia with an iron fist for three decades endorsed Trump in November because “Trump is a businessman” who “would not want to have war.”
Hun Sen is known for cracking down on opposition groups and was accused by a political analyst of shooting and killing an activist this July. In November, he congratulated Trump, writing on his Facebook page: “I believe that the policies of the Republican Party, which offered value to the freedom of humanity … would continue to be warm and firm for democracy, rights, and freedom of Khmer people in Cambodia.”
4. Russian president Vladimir Putin
Since Trump won the election in November, Putin has come out to say he is willing to “restore” relations between Russia and the US. “During my recent telephone conversation with Mr. Donald Trump, our opinions coincided that the current, unsatisfactory state of Russia-US relations, undoubtedly must be straightened out,” Putin said at a foreign policy conference in Moscow on Dec. 7.
Indeed, Russia appeared to be so eager for a Trump presidency that it may have intervened with the US presidential election, as some members from the CIA and National Security Administration have recently suggested.
5. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad
To Assad, Trump is a “natural ally.”
“We cannot tell anything about what he’s going to do, but if, let’s say if, he is going to fight the terrorists, of course we are going to be ally, natural ally in that regard with the Russian, with the Iranian, with many other countries,” the Syrian president said in an interview with Portuguese state TV RTP this November. Trump has said the US’s problem is not Assad (paywall), whose brutal war tactics have involved the use of chemical weapons, and that he would prefer to work with Russia, and thus A
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Quote:What the Democrats did wrong was not to open the field of candidates wider than just Bernie, Hillary & Martin O'Malley. The Dems should have attracted TRUMP! He could have gone to the Democratic side as easily as the Republican side if only the Dems had been more welcoming to his personal eccentricities and his world view. He beat all the Republicans in the primary. He beat one old woman. Trump could be President-Elect with one twist: all his cabinet could be Democrats rather than Republicans, if only the Democrats had been kinder to him . . .
Originally posted by 1kiki:
There are many articles like the ones I posted, above, and below, about what democrats did wrong. The problem is, they don't come from democrats - not the voters and not the politicians.
Unless democrats can come to grips with what they did wrong, nothing will change the pattern of democrats being marginalized in national, state and local politics.
Elections are won by giving the people what they want. They want Trump. The Democratic voters (excluding the party officials) could have recruited him. Instead, the Democratic voters of Manhattan booed Trump when he voted. That is no way for those people to act if they want a rich, famous, boorish, high quality candidate for 2020 to replace Bernie, Hillary & Martin O'Malley.
I saw a serious article about what a Democrat should change about themselves to make them more like Trump if they want to be elected President in 2020. It even gives good advice to Democrats running at the the state and local level. Here is a sample:
Donald Trump loves McDonald’s
Trump, like Bill Clinton of 25 years ago, loves McDonald’s and isn’t afraid to tell you about it.
“The Big Macs are great,” he told Anderson Cooper at a campaign town hall. “The Quarter Pounder. It’s great stuff.”
This isn’t just unhealthy — it’s remarkably outré. Trump isn’t touting the virtues of Danny Meyer’s celebrity chef–infused Shake Shack or the magic of the West Coast’s legendary In-N-Out Burger, which refuses to franchise outside a relatively narrow geographical area to ensure its beef can be distributed fresh. Hillary Clinton snuck off to organic-friendly Chipotle. Trump went for the tried and true: the unfashionable yet ubiquitous simple pleasure of the Big Mac.
Identity politics is everywhere
Something worth noting is that Trump himself is actually not blind to personal health issues. He has a history of alcoholism in his family and consequently abstains from alcohol and other drugs. A great many Americans could improve their health along a number of dimensions, including weight, by emulating Trump and giving up booze.
But even though Trump is a teetotaler, he does not engage in public anti-alcohol messaging or campaign as a temperance advocate.
Working-class people who enjoy both fast-food burgers and beer are well aware that Trump likes Big Macs too, while Democrats think it’s very important to make sure SNAP benefits are redeemable at farmers markets so rich and poor alike can enjoy the benefits of eating local, seasonal produce. Trump doesn’t drink beer, but he doesn’t advertise that fact.
This is identity politics just as much as campaigning with the Mothers of the Movement is. Neither Trump nor Puzder is, obviously, a real working-class person. But there’s an old joke about two barefoot guys in the woods who come across a bear. One starts lacing up his sneakers, and the other asks why, pointing out that he’s never going to outrun the bear.
“I don’t need to outrun the bear,” he explains. “I just need to outrun you.”
A Thickburger or two doesn’t make Trump a member of the white working class. But it’s good enough to outrun the vast majority of Democratic Party elected officials from either of the main factions.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/9/13884838/puzder-populism
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Trump’s ‘Good ol’ days’ also were the bad air days
Climate change is a slow-building, largely invisible threat, hard to explain or demonstrate to the general public — which is one reason lavishly funded climate deniers have been so successful at obfuscating the issue. So it’s worth pointing out that most environmental regulation involves much more obvious, immediate, sometimes deadly threats. And much of that regulation may well be headed for oblivion.
Think about what America was like in 1970, the year the EPA was founded. It was still an industrial nation, with roughly a quarter of the workforce employed in manufacturing, often at relatively high wages, in large part because of a still-strong union movement. (Funny how Trumpist pledges to bring back the good old days never mention that part.)
It was also, however, a very polluted country. Choking smog was quite common in major cities; in the Los Angeles area, extreme pollution alerts, sometimes accompanied by warnings that even healthy adults should stay indoors and move as little as possible, were fairly common.
It’s far better now —not perfect, but much better. These days, to experience the kind of pollution crisis that used to be all too frequent in Los Angeles or Houston, you have to go to places like Beijing or New Delhi. And the improvement in air quality has had clear, measurable benefits. For example, we’re seeing significant improvements in lung function among children in the Los Angeles area, clearly tied to reduced pollution.
The key point is that better air didn’t happen by accident: It was a direct result of regulation — regulation that was bitterly opposed at every step by special interests that attacked the scientific evidence of harm from pollution, meanwhile insisting that limiting their emissions would kill jobs.
These special interests were, as you might guess, wrong about everything. The health benefits of cleaner air are overwhelmingly clear. Meanwhile, experience shows that a growing economy is perfectly consistent with an improving environment. In fact, reducing pollution brings large economic benefits once you take into account health care costs and the effects of lower pollution on productivity.
Meanwhile, claims of huge business costs from environmental programs have been wrong time and time again. This may be no surprise when interest groups are trying to maintain their right to pollute. It turns out, however, that even the EPA itself has a history of overestimating the costs of its regulations.
So the looming degradation of environmental protection will be a bad thing on every level: bad for the economy as well as bad for our health. But don’t expect rational arguments to that effect to sway the people who will soon be running the government. After all, what’s bad for America can still be good for the likes of the Koch brothers. Besides, my correspondents keep telling me that arguing policy on the basis of facts and figures is arrogant and elitist, so there.
The good news, sort of, is that some of the nasty environmental consequences of Trumpism will probably be visible — literally — quite soon. And when bad air days make a comeback, we’ll know exactly whom to blame.
www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/opinion/trump-and-pruitt-will-make-america-
gasp-again.html
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Quote:I'm using the Trump-obsessed democratic contingent here as an indicator of what it will take for those democratic voters to join reality. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/democrats-donald-trump-232491 Democrats fear another Trump trouncing Leaderless and lacking a strategy, top party officials worry they're not ready for Trump's first 100 days. http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/national-party-news/309660-democ
Originally posted by G:
I'm sure your endless obsession with the Democrats will magically fix the problem that DEMOCRATS HAVE NO ORGANIZED PLAN TO OPPOSE TRUMP, AND NO AGENDA THAT PEOPLE WILL RALLY TO.
So, what are you going to do about it? Whine some more? Carp some more? Pout some more? Yeah. That'll work. (not)
rats-where-the-hell-are-you Democrats: Where the hell are You? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democratic-party-future-poll_us_58
4dad0ce4b04c8e2bb04ba1 Democrats Are Not Very Excited About The Future Of Their Party
So far the democratic party is rudderless and foundering, with no one speaking for them, and no direction. They don't look promising as a counter to Trump.
What will it take for the hypnotized to tear their eyes off of Trump and turn to actively supporting a new direction? Or are they so enmeshed in the democratic party's identity politics that they literally can't conceive of any other pov?
And what will happen if the democratic party stands up for them post-Trump about as well as Obama and Hillary have to date? ie not at all
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:I think there are 4, not 3. There is the left and right, or the Bernie and Hillary, branches of the Democrats. Then there is plutocrat and populist, or the McConnell/Ryan and Trump, branches of the Republicans. For some technical reasons written into the Federal and State Constitutions, there can only be two major political parties. Since 4 parties (or 3) are too many there will be problems in the immediate future of the USA.
Originally posted by G:
Hopefully from the ashes of these 3 something new and better will emerge. It's hard to make progress when you're standing still.
See the very short article "Why Only Two Major Parties?"
www.factcheck.org/2008/01/why-only-two-political-parties/
Since the Republicans control all the old Confederate States, one political solution would be for the South to rise again, and the Republicans go their own way. But in short order I'd expect the South to invade the North in a reenactment of the Civil War, using modern weapons rather than black powder rifles and cavalry charges on horseback. That would make thrilling television entertainment, even better than Firefly.
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Quote:Apparently you didn't read your own article.
I read through the whole article carefully, thinking that it MUST have been linked for a reason related to this thread, and all I got out of it was Now there's 12 minutes of my life that I'll never get back! What did it tell me that Moneyball didn't? - SIGNY
Moneyball did not realize the deeper reason for the inefficiencies in the market for players: They sprang directly from the inner workings of the human mind of the “experts”, not the players.- SECOND
Quote:That means Billy Beane and Moneyball.
Bill James was then busy popularizing an approach, rooted in statistical reasoning, to thinking about baseball. With some help from the Oakland Athletics...
Quote:Both Morey and Beane are attempting to build a "model" ... a predictive calculator based on measured qualities and mathematics ... to find "the better ball player". Like ALL models, its success depends on constantly crosschecking the model with actual results, and then "tweaking" the model (adding new parameters or eliminating or downplaying old parameters or adding correction factors).
And yet you completely missed that main idea, Signym.Quote:
You linking that particular article tells me, SECOND, that you've lost the point about the value of people as independent thinkers. Because all of the article tells me is that "they" are working on metrics to pick the best tools out of a lineup of people: Who will never rise above, or fall below, or do anything unexpected, but be very predictable.
With a couple of sentences, Signym, you gave a perfect demonstration of what is wrong with how your mind analyzes problems and creates solutions. I predict you can’t understand what you did wrong, but I will give you some clues:
Daryl Morey is the independent thinker, Signym. And you got the article’s lesson backwards: people are NOT very predictable, despite all the data Morey gathers on players.
Models are BASED ON predictability. If there is some source of unpredictability in your model it's useless. Morey is trying to eliminate the unpredictability of human performance by measuring more and better and by doing what most scientific modelers do: "tweaking" his model to eliminate past failures.
Where that logic breaks down is that all models only work in a certain mathematical space .... that is, certain underlying principles have to remain the same, or the model doesn't work any more. Maybe someone comes along who changes the nature of the game itself - a sharpshooter like Curry. Or maybe the economy collapses and the players are suddenly much more motivated than before. Does Morey understand that his model only works in a pre-defined mathematical space? Because the problem is that models are EXCEPTIONALLY good at predicting the past ... you can tweak them based on where they failed .... IN THE PAST ... but in order to make good predictions you need more than statistics.
Quote:He can??? How would you know??? Because he didn't. Wow, that are some big balls ya got there, SECOND, borrowing Morey's cloak like that for your own purposes!
But he can make predictions such as the statistical likelihood that Trump will have conflicts of interests because he and his children are creating, with every new contract they sign, new possible conflicts between what is best for the Trump family fortune and what is best for America.-SEOCND
And more blah blah blah
Quote:I'm awfully happy for you that you got a job at that hotel, SECOND! Don't let that discourage you, everybody's got to start somewhere!
So tell me, SECOND, do you think you could pass a screening interview? - SIGNY
I interviewed twice on the same day in Houston, near the Galleria. Both divisions wanted to hire me and I would have been happy with only one job offer. That was a very memorable day and is what happens when you graduate from UT Austin.= SECOND
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A game show host is about to be sworn in as president of the United States and 1kiki and Signym are convinced that the Democratic Party is practically on its last legs.
That is not what the data says. But neither 1kiki or Signym understand data. I've been watching you two and I see how your brains malfunction in very predictable patterns. You are perfectly transparent to others, yet your minds are opaque to yourselves. You won't see your own patterns because you cannot see yourself as others do. So sad for you to be so limited yet so verbose. With all your writing, everyone can see what is wrong with you in great detail.
Maybe I should simplify it for you so you can add it to signatures? 1kiki and Signym are standing naked in front of everyone, but they imagine they are fully clothed.
¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤
How Did Trump Win? The FBI and the Russians.
Sam Wang has crunched the data from polls released in October to judge the effect of FBI Director James Comey's letter on the election:
From opinion data alone, it is possible to estimate when a change occurred. This can test between alternative explanations, which include not only the Comey letter (October 28th) but preceding events such as the announcement of a hike in Affordable Care Act premiums (October 24th).
I calculated a day-by-day margin using polling data from the Huffington Post....After the Affordable Care Act premium hike announcement, opinion did not move for days....However, the big change does coincide well with the release of the Comey letter. Opinion swung toward Trump by 4 percentage points, and about half of this was a lasting change.
http://election.princeton.edu/2016/12/10/the-comey-effect/
Hillary Clinton lost four points when the letter was released. She eventually gained back some of that, but it looks like two points were permanent. This jibes well with Nate Silver's estimate that the Comey letter cost Clinton two points.
It is traditional at this point to acknowledge that lots of things affected the election: bad campaign strategy, rural blue-collar whites, etc. etc. This is what you'll read about in all the post-election thumbsuckers, but this kind of stuff happens to all campaigns. The Trump campaign certainly made lots of mistakes, though no one talks about them anymore. The difference here is that things like the Comey letter don't happen to all campaigns. This was an egregious intervention in the campaign by the director of the FBI, who was motivated at least partly by his fear of a rogue group of agents who were dedicated to Clinton's defeat.
This is decidedly not normal. Comey knew exactly what he was doing. He was warned that it would be an unprecedented bit of interference in an election. But he went ahead anyway, and went ahead in a manner perfectly calculated to do the maximum damage. The press played along and the rest is history.
Without Comey's letter, Clinton likely would have won the popular vote by four points and the Electoral College by 300 votes or more. Who knows about the Senate? Maybe Democrats would have won that too. Eliminate the Russian "ratfucking", a technical term ( released Dem emails but not GOP emails that Russia also stole ) and Clinton would have won in a landslide. Instead, a game show host is about to be sworn in as president of the United States and everyone is convinced that the Democratic Party is practically on its last legs.
This. Is. Not. Normal.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/how-did-trump-win-fbi-and-russi
ans
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Quote:First of all, I never said that. HOWEVER, it seems to me that the data- which shows a Democratic loss in state legislatures, governorships, Congress and the Presidency, does speak to a level of Democratic weakness in ALL levels of government.
A game show host is about to be sworn in as president of the United States and 1kiki and Signym are convinced that the Democratic Party is practically on its last legs.
Also, the percent of registered Democrats has dropped dramatically, and registered Independents tend to break more Republican than Democrat. I think the Democrats need to find a new mission (aside from representing a grab-bag of "victim" subgroups) and put the pedal to metal.
Quote:That IS what the data says. You can look at the popular vote for President as a source of comfort, if that's what floats your boat, but the Dems are not in the ascendancy right now. I'm sure that you're counting on the "demographic advantage" when the subgroups of Latinos, millenials, and other self-identified "victim" groups will grow, but aside from representing self-identified victims, Dems do not have an overall message of hope.
That is not what the data says-SECOND
Quote:NOT a reliable indicator! They should have used the IBD/TIPP poll... which I have cited at least five times, which turned out to be far more correct than any of the liberal-biased polls .... as as you know GIGO. (Garbage in, garbage out) Conclusions based on suspect data is immediately irrelevant. Again, so much blah blah blah.
How Did Trump Win? The FBI and the Russians.
... I calculated a day-by-day margin using polling data from the Huffington Post
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
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The United States boasts a deeply conservative economic tradition. From its origins as a colonial, agricultural society, it quickly emerged as a slave holding republic built on the ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide of Indigenous peoples. After the Civil War (1861-65), it reshaped itself in the crucible of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism straight through to the Roaring ‘20s. A post-Depression Keynesian consensus led U.S. leaders to reign in the most conservative impulses during the mid-20th century, but the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s set the stage for the current neo-liberal moment.
Consequently, ever since the industrial revolution, the United States has typically trailed other developed nations in establishing a basic social welfare system. It has never fielded a competitive socialist or labor party. It was the last major nation to implement an old age pension. More recently, ObamaCare made it the last major nation to mandate that all of its citizens receive some sort of healthcare coverage, even if it's quite wanting in many cases.
Amid its overriding conservativism, the United States has had only three presidents with any real socialist tendencies: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45), Harry S. Truman (1945-53), and most recently Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose presidency (1963-69) ended before half of current Americans were born (median age 37.9).
The election of Donald Trump as president and, just as important, the impending Republican dominance of Congress, make certain that the United States will not correct its social welfare shortcomings anytime soon. Indeed, the nation may take significant steps backwards.
However, a quick review of America's stunted progressive history suggests that the opportunity for a progressive counter-revolution may be closer than it appears at this dark moment.
And not because Trump’s victory represents the last gasp of an aging generation or the violent undulations of a shrinking white electorate. But rather, because Trump and his Grand Old Posse have the potential to wreak so much damage and engender so much ignominy upon the national consciousness as to generate the kind of rare and extreme circumstances that have previously led the United States to make genuine progress in developing modern social welfare. The chaos and horrors of a Trump presidency may yet produce opportunities for improving the nation.
More at www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/12/the-counter-revolution.html
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SECOND, you're just flailing - throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. When one argument fails, you just dredge up another.
This is like the liberals' reaction to a Trump Presidency:
When safe spaces don't work, try demonstrations.
When demonstrations don't work, try riots.
When riots don't work, try recounts.
When recounts don't work, try faithless electors.
And when all else fails ..."But Putin..."
All in the meantime, endlessly slag the President-elect.
Instead of trying to rewrite history ... which never works ... what you SHOULD be doing is figuring out why the Democrats stopped representing Americans, and looking how to get the electorate back in the future. That's an effort I could get behind.
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
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Quote:Will this one stick with you? Or will you be unable to comprehend because of your learning disability?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you're just flailing - throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. When one argument fails, you just dredge up another.
Trump tweeted and Lockheed Martin stock moved
Do we really want the president of the United States calling out individual corporations and affecting their stock prices? Do we really want to be left wondering if maybe someone had a little advance knowledge of Trump's tweets?
Here is the tweet (but he has done this before with Sprint and T-Mobile, sending two stocks upward):
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The F-35 program and cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th.
8:26 AM-12 Dec 2016
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/808301935728230404
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/donald-trump-once-again-day-tra
der-chief
If Trump let his favorite insiders know a day ahead that he was going to move a stock’s price with his infamous tweets, for example, their stocktrades would get lost in the noise and no one would ever know that Trump did them a favor.
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Quote:
A game show host is about to be sworn in as president of the United States and 1kiki and Signym are convinced that the Democratic Party is practically on its last legs.
That is not what the data says.
The data says she won 3 populous states with large urban areas: New York, California and Illinois. And she won a dozen or so small states. Overall, she won 17 of 50 states. To put it another way, she lost 33 of 50 states. That's pathetic. And it doesn't indicate broad popular support.
Also, as Signy pointed out, and which I've pointed out multiple times in the past - democrats have lost both houses of Congress, retain only 18 of 50 governorships, have only 15 of 49 state senates and 16 of 49 state houses. https://www.multistate.com/state-resources/governors-legislatures
AND in addition, democrats have lost significant voter share to 'independents', which, as Signy pointed out, tend to break republican.
And now democrats lost the ONE thing they had left to lose: the presidency.
I'd say things are not looking good for democrats.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:opinion, speculation, innuendo
Originally posted by second:
If Trump blah blah blah ...
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How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Will this one stick with you? Or will you be unable to comprehend because of your learning disability?
Quote:Good.
Trump tweeted and Lockheed Martin stock moved
Quote:Who the fuck cares? the F-35 is a vastly overpriced and under-performing boondoggle, which we have had to foist off on our "allies" just to make the per-plane costs go down. In Syria, Russian planes fly roughly one mission per day, American planes fly roughly one mission every ten days. The rest of the time, they spend in maintenance. That's no way to build a military.
Do we really want the president of the United States calling out individual corporations and affecting their stock prices? Do we really want to be left wondering if maybe someone had a little advance knowledge of Trump's tweets?
The contractors have been making a killing for decades, sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the government (taxpayer) teat, and "business as usual" has led to more "business as usual". It serves Lockheed Martin right for being a greedy, parasitical company.
Quote:I can't imagine why your panties are in such a twist. This is a GOOD thing.
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The F-35 program and cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th.
8:26 AM-12 Dec 2016
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
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Well, money well spent by the Koch Brothers.
SGG
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Go Fuck Yourself!
SGG
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Can we move this to a (new) shorter thread?
Something that applies to Trump as President-elect, and not Trump the candidate? Because I guarantee you NOBODY is going to look at the previous 26 pages ... or even the previous five posts (especially yours, SECOND) no matter HOW blistering you think they are!
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
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Awwwwwwwww, lost your broomstick dear? Call 1 (800) WHOTHEFUCKGIVESASHIT
SGG
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Nope, not mad.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Can we move this to a (new) shorter thread?
Something that applies to Trump as President-elect, and not Trump the candidate? Because I guarantee you NOBODY is going to look at the previous 26 pages ... or even the previous five posts (especially yours, SECOND) no matter HOW blistering you think they are! - SIGNY
Awww, she's mad.- GSTRINGQuote:Glad you think so!
And funny wrong as usual.-GSTRINGQuote:I have read SECONDRATE'S/ SECONHAND'S posts, which are usually links to someone else's posts. and what I find is that they usually consist of shocked- and inaccurate - whining. It's difficult to have a conversation about some specific thing if everyone is posting about everything: hard to locate relevant comments.
I read every one of second's posts. I look forward to every one of second's posts. You would learn a lot if you did the same.- GSTTRINGQuote:Because the topic isn't specific enough. I have some very specific things to say about Trump and Obama. But that's OK, I'll just start other threads about those more focused thoughts and leave this one for whatever.
Why move a thread? Click the thread title, go to the last page - easy even for you.= GSTRING
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
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Ya know, it's funny but nearly 3 million popular votes later and the CIA report of widespread Russian hacking, and we still don't have a TRUE leader,
as "president-elect" Donald Hump goes about betraying the people who voted for him, by picking billionaire cabinet members to help ruin this country.
Last legs!? Fuck, Trump is out there prepping with KY Jelly and practicing grabbing his ankles before in-auguration day. January 20th sworn in, by Jan. 21 singing a Russian lullabye to the tune of tie a yellow ribbon round my old white ass. Before Putin rips him a new one, maybe he should buy him dinner and a box of chocolates.
SGG
quote]A game show host is about to be sworn in as president of the United States and 1kiki and Signym are convinced that the Democratic Party is practically on its last legs.
That is not what the data says.
The data says she won 3 populous states with large urban areas: New York, California and Illinois. And she won a dozen or so small states. Overall, she won 17 of 50 states. To put it another way, she lost 33 of 50 states. That's pathetic. And it doesn't indicate broad popular support.
Also, as Signy pointed out, and which I've pointed out multiple times in the past - democrats have lost both houses of Congress, retain only 18 of 50 governorships, have only 15 of 49 state senates and 16 of 49 state houses. https://www.multistate.com/state-resources/governors-legislatures
AND in addition, democrats have lost significant voter share to 'independents', which, as Signy pointed out, tend to break republican.
And now democrats lost the ONE thing they had left to lose: the presidency.
I'd say things are not looking good for democrats.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Fuck the people who voted for Trump. They'll get their when he runs the country into the ground. They will be ordering consumer goods from a Russian outlet mall in Weehauken NJ.
Cites!? - proven track record. Trump has run many of his businesses into the ground and laughed all the way to the bank. He'll do America the hard way.
By the way, we've already slipped into the 7th Ring of Hell, and soon after we will be that 3rd World country you've heard about.
People of Earth, Be Afraid!
SGG
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, you're going to be mad at roughly half of the United States because they didn't vote for your Annointed One?
Yanno, SECOND, after Bush stole the election for the second time, I was pretty pissed off. But not at people here who voted for Bush, and not even at the GOP for cheating, but at the Democratic Party, for not taking action when it was clear that Karl Rove stole the election the FIRST time (FL 2000).
Why did the DNC SPECIFICALLY rig the primary against Sanders? To me, that was a serious strategic blunder: If the voting results were telling the DNC that one candidate could win the primary and the polling results were telling them that same candidate had a much better chance of winning against Trump in a head-to-head, why did the DNC insist on foisting off a much less popular candidate, by hook or by crook, on its own constituency???
That kind or arrogance and entitlement is pretty breathtaking, but I can think of a few interlinked reasons why:
1) Most of Sanders donations came in small amounts, from individuals.
2) Hillary would be able to fill her "war chest" with multi-million dollar, big-ticket donations,
3) Those big donors wanted a return on their investment, which WASN'T Bernie.
4) The DNC believed they would need a lot of money to run a campaign, especially for a candidate who had a huge unfavorable rating.
What this speaks of, in the DNC, is a lack of faith in the popular vote for its own brand. The DNC deliberately turned its back on its own voters choice. The decision having been made, Debbie and Donna and John and the rest of the party apparatchiks then conspired how they were going to jam Hillary down everyone's throats.
I still have a hard time wrapping my head around that decision. Either Bernie's probable policies ... on "free trade", on Israel, on Saudi Arabia and our proxy terrorists, on the dollar, on globalism .... were going to be so different than Hillary's (her policies being known to those who get to see her "private face") that Bernie was completely and totally unacceptable to the DNC's underwriters .... or people in the DNC were getting serious kickbacks from their big-money donors. In any case, it boggles the mind.
That was the DNC's internal flaw. Externally, the DNC simply stopped representing "Americans". It made a point of slicing and dicing America into gay-Americans, female-Americans, Hispanic/Chicano-Americans, African-Americans, transgender-Americans, illegal aliens, legal immigrants etc and appealing to each slice as if they were victims (We are, but not in the way the DNC wants us to believe). But in the end, the DNC (Obama) followed policies that simply did not benefit the vast majority of Americans, where ALL of our interests overlap.
It's not just Trump, SECOND. I don't know if you noticed, but the DNC has lost a lot of Congressional seats, state Legislators, governors, and even county supervisors/commissioners, and mayors.
They're doing something seriously wrong. It's time for you to stop being mad, you need to wake up and smell the coffee. And if you are as rich as you say you are, and you have any donor-influence on the DNC, or at least Texas Democrats, then use that influence to slap them into reality.
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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorcNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Signym, see if you understand this Constitutional dilemma. Trump claims he has already started working on it, but he can't have his cake and eat it, too. What Trump tweeted is NOT a solution, no matter what he claims. To solve Trump's dilemma will take either a Supreme Court case, with all the Democrats voting against all the Republicans, or passing a major piece of legislation, with the Senate Democrats filibustering against. Or Trump could liquidate his properties, which he'd rather not.:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I can't imagine why your panties are in such a twist. This is a GOOD thing.
Trump is a walking, talking violation of the Constitution. He violates the emoluments clause, which basically says no officer of the United States can be on the receiving end of any kind of economic benefit, payment, gift, profit, whatever, from a foreign government or its corporations or agents. That includes Donald Jr. or Ivanka or Eric. Foreigners stuffing money into any of Trump’s family bank accounts, not just Donald’s, violates the emoluments clause.
Since yesterday Trump has already begun arguing that is not so: “Even though I am not mandated by law to do so, I will be leaving my businesses before January 20th so that I can focus full time on the Presidency. Two of my children, Don and Eric, plus executives, will manage them. No new deals will be done during my term(s) in office.” That’s Donald saying he will fire his daughter from the family business, but even if he fires his sons, too, and it still won’t be enough to satisfy the Constitutional requirement.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/808528428123254785
Read the Emoluments Clause:
www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/68/emoluments-claus
e
There is an explanation of why the clause exists. It involves King Louis XVI and Ben Franklin, the ambassador to France.
Trump is a constant emolument magnet. He thinks of himself as a babe magnet, but he’s an emoluments magnet. And all around the world everybody wants to go to his hotels and not the competitors, and wants to give him a variance or a special land use permit and there’s simply no way short of absolutely liquidating all of his assets and placing the proceeds into a blind trust and not handed over to his kids or wife. No way short of that prevents him from being a walking, talking violation of the Constitution from the moment he takes the oath.
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Quote:No. I'm extremely frugal. If I need something and it seems pricey, I'll try to figure something else out to use instead, or go without. If I REALLY need it and it seems pricey I'll shop online. What I won't do is go from store to store to store to save $.10 on an item. Plus, I know in general which stores have the best overall prices. For groceries they're Trader Joe's and Vitamin City. For certain household goods it's Vitamin City and Target. For others it's Target and Walgreens. For first aid and sundry it's Target and Walgreens. And I go to Ace Hardware for things I can't get anywhere else. Ace is pretty expensive, but I support them as a business, because they REALLY are 'the helpful place'.
it looks like from your comment above "I just buy what they have" that you are not a cost conscience consumer. Is that true?
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:The Constitutional dilemma of tweeting about Lockheed Martin's F-35?
I can't imagine why your panties are in such a twist. This is a GOOD thing.- SIGNY
Signym, see if you understand this Constitutional dilemma.- SECOND
What in god's name does this have to do with ... anything? You've got a permanent knot in your undies. I mean, I know you despise Trump but your posts are just unhinged bitching. How about focusing on something real?
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
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Quote:You best look at the ACE Hardware labels for Chinese goods.
Originally posted by 1kiki:Quote:No. I'm extremely frugal. If I need something and it seems pricey, I'll try to figure something else out to use instead, or go without. If I REALLY need it and it seems pricey I'll shop online. What I won't do is go from store to store to store to save $.10 on an item. Plus, I know in general which stores have the best overall prices. For groceries they're Trader Joe's and Vitamin City. For certain household goods it's Vitamin City and Target. For others it's Target and Walgreens. For first aid and sundry it's Target and Walgreens. And I go to Ace Hardware for things I can't get anywhere else. Ace is pretty expensive, but I support them as a business, because they REALLY are 'the helpful place'.
it looks like from your comment above "I just buy what they have" that you are not a cost conscience consumer. Is that true?
1kiki, I thought you and Trump were deeply concerned about factory jobs? This shows no passion whatsoever for American factory workers losing their incomes. It would be like complaining about millions of gas station attendants losing jobs to self-service gas stations than being unaware that you are buying gas at a self-service filling station solely because it is more convenient and cheaper for you.
Please, 1kiki, pay higher prices and inconvenience yourself for patriotic love of displaced American factory workers from faraway states. Factory workers east of the Mississippi will thank you . . . not. They’re not appreciative. They think you, in snooty California, owe them a living in hardworking Pennsylvania. If the production of popular items like iPhones and sneakers were done domestically rather than abroad, their prices would increase considerably.
www.businessinsider.com/how-much-products-would-cost-if-made-in-us-201
6-11/#iphones-1
www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/mothergooseandgrimm/s-1902507
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Quote:BECAUSE WAGES TO AMERICAN WORKERS ARE HIGHER.
If the production of popular items like iPhones and sneakers were done domestically rather than abroad, their prices would increase considerably. - SECOND
I guess you have a problem with that?
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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
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Quote:If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana, especially if Texans have to pay higher prices to create factory jobs in California or the Midwest. It is all about doing what is right for your own state, not some state that is four or five state borders away. That is why the USA didn't end up being called the One State of America, with a single BIG star on the flag.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:BECAUSE WAGES TO AMERICAN WORKERS ARE HIGHER.
If the production of popular items like iPhones and sneakers were done domestically rather than abroad, their prices would increase considerably. - SECOND
I guess you have a problem with that?
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How Putin got his pet game show host elected president
by Kevin Drum, Dec. 13, 2016 6:24 PM
Over lunch I read today's big New York Times story about the Russian cyberattacks aimed at disrupting the US election. It was mesmerizing even though I already knew a lot of it, and it was also depressing as hell.
www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html
By the time I finished, I was pretty close to thinking that the right response would be a couple dozen cruise missiles aimed straight at Putin's lone remaining aircraft carrier. I guess we're all lucky I'm not the president.
There are a dozen depressing things I could highlight, but somehow I found this the most depressing of all:
"By last summer, Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day — procured by Russian intelligence agents, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media, including The Times....Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence."
I know: news is news. Somehow, though, that doesn't seem sufficient. I'm still not entirely sure what the right response is to leaks like this, but simply publishing everything no matter where it came from or what its motivation no longer seems tenable. There has to be something more to editorial judgment than that.
Anyway, Putin won this round. He didn't do it all by himself —— he had plenty of help from the FBI and the media —— but in the end, he got his pet game show host elected president of the United States. I hope we all live through it.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/how-putin-got-his-pet-game-show
-host-elected-president
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Quote:
Saturday, December 10, 2016 1:50 AM Originally posted by 1kiki:
http://www.today.com/parents/one-moms-challenge-buy-only-made-usa-one-
week-857929
One mom's challenge: Buy only "Made in USA" for one week
Quote:
Tuesday, December 13, 2016 12:49 PM Originally posted by second:
You best look at the ACE Hardware labels for Chinese goods.
Quote:
Wednesday, December 14, 2016 1:25 AM Originally posted by 1kiki:
http://www.today.com/parents/one-moms-challenge-buy-only-made-usa-one-
week-857929
One mom's challenge: Buy only "Made in USA" for one week
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:Are you speaking for yourself? Assuming you are a Texan as you claim, of course.
If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians ...
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:Does it disturb 1kiki's view of Americans that Texans don't feel that Trump voters in West Virginians are family? And Texans won't willing pay more to create jobs for people they never met in states that are far away? That is what Trump is promising: to create jobs in rundown states at the expense of people in states that are booming.
Originally posted by 1kiki:Quote:Are you speaking for yourself? Assuming you are a Texan as you claim, of course.
If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians ...
I actually saw people on TV in a coal-mining town that voted 80% for Trump say that they are forgotten by the rest of the country. I'd tell them you can't forget somebody you never knew. Maybe the Trump voter meant "ignored"?
The same Trump people from that small, rundown coal town also said that because coal built America the rest of Americans owes W Virginians for all the coal they once-upon-time dug from the ground. Those Trump voters, even though they think Texas owes them still more, were already paid and they don't deserve to be paid again and again for coal that was burned years ago. But Trump voters can't see it the way it is.
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Much would be made of blue-collar voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan who’d pulled the lever for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then for Trump in 2016. Surely these voters disproved racism as an explanatory force. It’s still not clear how many individual voters actually flipped. But the underlying presumption—that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could be swapped in for each other—exhibited a problem. Clinton was a candidate who’d won one competitive political race in her life, whose political instincts were questioned by her own advisers, who took more than half a million dollars in speaking fees from an investment bank because it was “what they offered,” who proposed to bring back to the White House a former president dogged by allegations of rape and sexual harassment. Obama was a candidate who’d become only the third black senator in the modern era; who’d twice been elected president, each time flipping red and purple states; who’d run one of the most scandal-free administrations in recent memory. Imagine an African American facsimile of Hillary Clinton: She would never be the nominee of a major political party and likely would not be in national politics at all.
Pointing to citizens who voted for both Obama and Trump does not disprove racism; it evinces it. To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed only money and white bluster.
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/50
8793/
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians ...
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Are you speaking for yourself? Assuming you are a Texan as you claim, of course.
Quote:Can you answer the question?
Does it disturb 1kiki's view of Americans that Texans don't feel that Trump voters in West Virginians are family?
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:
Saturday, December 10, 2016 1:50 AM Originally posted by 1kiki:
http://www.today.com/parents/one-moms-challenge-buy-only-made-usa-one-
week-857929
One mom's challenge: Buy only "Made in USA" for one week
Quote:
Tuesday, December 13, 2016 12:49 PM Originally posted by second:
You best look at the ACE Hardware labels for Chinese goods.
Quote:
Wednesday, December 14, 2016 1:25 AM Originally posted by 1kiki:
http://www.today.com/parents/one-moms-challenge-buy-only-made-usa-one-
week-857929
One mom's challenge: Buy only "Made in USA" for one week
Can you address the topic?
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Can you answer the question?
Your questions aren't interesting to me, except the last one about how the democrats fucked up. I have a partial answer from "The Most Epic Ratfucking Operation in History".
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/russia-ran-most-epic-ratfucking
-operation-history-year
The basic story here is simple: the Russians hacked, the media gave the revelations big play, and Republicans gleefully made use of the Russian agitprop. Altogether, the Russians released hacked documents from four different sources:
DNC
DCCC
The Clinton Foundation
John Podesta
But nothing was ever released from any Republican sources—despite the fact that, according to the New York Times, the Russians had hacked the RNC and possibly other Republican accounts as well. If I had to guess, I'd say there's a good chance they hacked a few people at the Trump Organization too. So here's where we are:
The Russians ran a very sophisticated operation designed to hack into both US government servers and the servers of US political organizations.
They released only hacked documents from Democratic organizations. Republicans were left alone.
The intelligence community told high-ranking leaders of both parties what was going on, but Republicans flatly opposed any public acknowledgment of what was happening. I add that Trump is the LOUDEST denier that Russia was involved.
Republicans cheerfully made use of all the hacked material, even though they knew exactly where it came from.
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As I've claimed all along, after democrats lose the presidency, the country's ability to retain much of the agenda put in place over the decades will depend on senate democrats being the 'party of no'. How much do you trust senate democrats to take up the role?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/opinion/buck-up-democrats-and-fight-
like-republicans.html
Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans
On Monday, members of the Electoral College will vote in Donald J. Trump as president. Though he lost the election by nearly three million votes and almost daily generates headlines about new scandals, the Democratic Party is doing little to stop him. If you’ve been asking yourself “Where are the Democrats?” you’re not alone.
Since the election, top Democrats have been almost absent on the national stage. Rather, they have been involved largely in internecine warfare about how much to work with Mr. Trump. The Hillary Clinton campaign, trying to encourage a peaceful transition, has gone almost completely dark, with her most notable appearances coming in selfies with strangers. Nobody deserves downtime more than Mrs. Clinton, but while she is decompressing, the country is moving toward its biggest electoral mistake in history.
There’s no shortage of legal theories that could challenge Mr. Trump’s anointment, but they come from outsiders rather than the Democratic Party. Impassioned citizens have been pleading with electors to vote against Mr. Trump; law professors have argued that winner-take-all laws for electoral votes are unconstitutional; a small group, the Hamilton Electors, is attempting to free electors to vote their consciences; and a new theory has arisen that there is legal precedent for courts to give the election to Mrs. Clinton based on Russian interference. All of these efforts, along with the grass-roots protests, boycotts and petitions, have been happening without the Democratic Party. The most we’ve seen is a response to the C.I.A. revelations, but only with Republicans onboard to give Democrats bipartisan cover.
Take the recount efforts in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. While the Democratic Party relitigates grudges in the press, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who received about 64 million fewer votes than Mrs. Clinton, has led the effort. The Democrats have grudgingly participated from the sidelines, but only because public perception forced them to. This effort has proved feeble, with a Pennsylvania judge denying the request because it was “later than last minute.”
Fast forward to 2016, and the Democrats ... are leaving the fight to academics and local organizers who seem more horrified by a Trump presidency than Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. The Republicans in 2000 threw everything they could muster against the wall to see if it stuck, with no concern about potential blowback; the Democrats in 2016 are apparently too worried about being called sore losers. Instead of weathering the criticism that comes with fighting an uphill, yet historically important battle, the party is still trying to magic up a plan.
This aligns with my observation to date.
Are democrats spineless? They could be. Or tptb have told top democrats to stand down, and democrats - dutifully - are obeying the people they truly represent.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Can you answer the question?
Quote:Is that how democrats lost congress, and 33 out of all 50 governorships, state senates and state houses, mostly back in 2010? Is that how democrats lost voter-identification since 1982? Did democrats end up like this due to a giant Russian ratfucking operation being run since 1982?
Originally posted by second:
Your questions aren't interesting to me, except the last one about how the democrats fucked up. I have a partial answer from "The Most Epic Ratfucking Operation in History".
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Quote:The Democrats believe too strongly that the people have spoken. It is such a passive way to look at politics. Republicans believe that people can be bent to will of the GOP, if the party puts enough force into the effort. It is a very energetic way to look at voting and the Democratic Party can't go there, to the place where the GOP will go in every election. It is a life-and-death struggle for the GOP, while the Democrats see it as some kind of televised tennis match at Wimbledon. That needs an example:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Are democrats spineless? They could be. Or tptb have told top democrats to stand down, and democrats - dutifully - are obeying the people they truly represent.
The Democrats have a chance of preventing Trump from winning by using all the Democratic Electoral College electors to vote for Romney. If 37 Republican electors go along, then Republicans win the White House, except it isn't Trump. (Trump in 2016 did poorly compared to Romney in 2012.) Hillary won't do it because it is not sporting, it feels like cheating, it doesn't follow the will of the people. Hillary would have some weak excuse, except she hasn't even acknowledged the idea exists. The GOP would do it in a second if the tables were turned.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/democrats-can-use-the-electoral-colleg
e-to-stop-trump-but-not-how-you-think/2016/12/05/c69bb24e-ba86-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html
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Good Grief, It's A Charlie Brown Christmas Special!
Who won Santa's vote for President?
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:1kiki, you could just as easily ask why nobody did anything to protect Blacks after Southern Reconstruction collapsed in 1877 until 1964. My answer would be that the vast majority of Americans between 1877 and 1964 did NOT share the values of 2016's Democratic Party toward blacks.
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Is that how democrats lost congress, and 33 out of all 50 governorships, state senates and state houses, mostly back in 2010? Is that how democrats lost voter-identification since 1982? Did democrats end up like this due to a giant Russian ratfucking operation being run since 1982?
Keeping with the same theme and choosing one item out of many where the Democratic Party's values are different than the majority of Americans: the vast majority of Americans in 2016 do NOT share the values of today's Democratic Party toward blacks. The vast majority is nothing like Bernie, for example. That is why Democrats are a minority party and why Bernie would not have won, except in New England states and the West Coast. There was no chance Bernie would win in the Confederate States, especially against a guy like Trump, who LOUDLY insists he is not a racist.
Since Dems and Reps both claim to be not racist, it is very controversial to claim Dems are a minority party because the majority of Americans are racist. Let's compare food, instead. More than two-thirds (68.8 percent) of adults are considered to be overweight or obese. Almost 3 in 4 men (74 percent) are considered to be overweight or obese. I see an advantage for Republicans! Trump of the deep-fried taco bowl and 20-ounce Porterhouse fame represents the majority of Americans. It is the Democrats championing the healthy food movement. That is a losing strategy for Democrats. Republicans will give the people what they want and tell them to eat as much as they please. That is what a winning political strategy looks like.
I could keep going with solid explanations of why Democrats are a minority party. One more: Democrats say that coal produces greenhouses gases that affect climate. That is a losing political idea. Republicans say greenhouses gases don't change climate. That is a winning political idea with coal-miners. People who aren't coal-miners (except for climate scientists) don't care but very little about what nonsense Republicans say about climate, which is a win for Republicans.
Hacked documents were showing up in local races all over the country
www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/house-democrats-hacking-dccc.ht
ml
The intrusions in House races in states including Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina can be traced to tens of thousands of pages of documents taken from the D.C.C.C., which shares a Capitol Hill office building with the Democratic National Committee....The seats that Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in the country.
....In Florida, Guccifer 2.0’s most important partner was an obscure political website run by an anonymous blogger called HelloFLA!, run by a former Florida legislative aide turned Republican lobbyist. The blogger sent direct messages via Twitter to Guccifer 2.0 asking for copies of any additional Florida documents. “I can send you some docs via email,” Guccifer 2.0 replied on Aug. 22....“I don’t think you realize what you gave me,” the blogger said, looking at the costly internal D.C.C.C. political research that he had just been provided. “This is probably worth millions of dollars.”
The hacked documents played a big role in a Florida congressional primary between Annette Taddeo and Joe Garcia:
After Mr. Garcia defeated Ms Taddeo in the primary using the material unearthed in the hacking, the National Republican Campaign Committee and a second Republican group with ties to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, turned to the hacked material to attack him.
....After the first political advertisement appeared using the hacked materia
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SECOND:
A large majority of Americans shared the "value" that there should be single payer, or at least government option, for healthcare.
A majority of Americans shared the value that we should stop meddling in the Mideast.
A large majority of Americans disagreed with the bank bailout, and wanted to see real consequences - yanno, like jail time (such as happened under Reagan when the S&L's went tits up) - for the cretins who drove our financial system into the ditch.
If the Democrats has had the spine to actually DO those things, and to make the "recovery" a recovery for everyone, and at least not lose more manufacturing jobs, the Dems would have had a loyal following for decades. But the Dem party's values are mostly about money, and a large part of the remainder is about being a war party, so they ignored what a lot of people wanted. So they deserve to be where they are: busted, after eight years of failure.
Where do they go from here? If Trump is going to be such as ass-kisser to business, if Americans don't see a measurable improvement in their lives, if the wealth gap (which has grown under both Bush AND Obama) continues to grow under Trump ... will the Dems be ready to pick up the pieces? Or will they offer "more of the same", like they did this past year?
Because if all we get is more, and more, and MORE of the same, there will no longer be a Democratic OR a Republican Party remaining.
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
Hillary knew all about the Electoral College when she ran for office. All of this after-the-fact bitching is still just an attempt to rewrite history. I guess you're all still in various stages of grief, including anger, denial, and bargaining, all rol
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Quote:That opinion needs a little proof behind it, Signym. Americans don't even support Obamacare. If they don't qualify for it, they don't want anyone else to have it, either. And they certainly don't want to pay the $1 trillion it costs over 10 years.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND:
A large majority of Americans shared the "value" that there should be single payer, or at least government option, for healthcare.
Quote:I will believe that, Signym, when I see protests on the streets of America for the way Israel treats 1.75 million people like prisoners of war in the Gaza Strip. Didn't you also notice that American Christians back the Jewish Israelis 100% against all Muslims in the world? Didn’t you notice that Americans were okay with invading Iraq, based on obviously, at the time, false rumors of WMD? Americans only turned against that war when the US Army lost control of Iraq in a typical Bush SNAFU. And as far as I know, no Americans are protesting any other war anywhere in the world, not just the Middle East.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND:
A majority of Americans shared the value that we should stop meddling in the Mideast.
Quote:You forgot Enron and "Bernie" Madoff. Those people got hammered by government because they stole money. The bank bailouts were not about stolen money. Those were caused by Bush and the SEC not wanting to impose "unnecessary" regulations on banks. The SEC let any old risky securities to go on sale. The only people punished were the auditors who gave AAA ratings to junk securities.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND:
A large majority of Americans disagreed with the bank bailout, and wanted to see real consequences - yanno, like jail time (such as happened under Reagan when the S&L's went tits up) - for the cretins who drove our financial system into the ditch.
Wall Street tycoons are not in fear of being kidnapped, ransomed, or assassinated for what they have done. If there is even a single American Madman out there who has avenged Main Street for what Wall Street did, I never heard of him. Since not even one crazy American cares, why should politicians? Especially since tycoons have got all the legal help they will ever need to defend themselves from the Justice Department.
Quote:President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the “stimulus” — into law. It helped end the economy’s plunge; it saved millions of jobs.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND:
If the Democrats has had the spine to actually DO those things, and to make the "recovery" a recovery for everyone, and at least not lose more manufacturing jobs, the Dems would have had a loyal following for decades. But the Dem party's values are mostly about money, and a large part of the remainder is about being a war party, so they ignored what a lot of people wanted. So they deserve to be where they are: busted, after eight years of failure.
It was also a political disaster. And the consequences of that political disaster — the perception that stimulus failed — have haunted economic policy ever since.
www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/opinion/krugman-the-stimulus-tragedy.html
Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky did what he could to prevent a recovery. Did anybody in America punch McConnell’s funny-looking face for what he and the Republicans did? By the way, none those bastards have Secret Service protection. Anybody in Kentucky, if they cared, could hit McConnell. Never happened.
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Where do they go from here? If Trump is going to be such as ass-kisser to business, if Americans don't see a measurable improvement in their lives, if the wealth gap (which has grown under both Bush AND Obama) continues to grow under Trump ... will the Dems be ready to pick up the pieces? Or will they offer "more of the same", like they did this past year?
Because if all we get is more, and more, and MORENOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:I can't help it if you;re an ignoramus. Poll after poll taken at the beginning of Obama's term said so. They WOULD have supported single payer because it stood a much better chance of working than Obama's boondoggle.
A large majority of Americans shared the "value" that there should be single payer, or at least government option, for healthcare.- SIGNY
That opinion needs a little proof behind it, Signym. Americans don't even support Obamacare. - SECOND
Quote:Everyone would have qualified. That's the beauty of single payer.
If they don't qualify for it, they don't want anyone else to have it, either.
Quote:
A majority of Americans shared the value that we should stop meddling in the Mideast.-SIGNY
I will believe that, Signym, when I see protests on the streets of America for the way Israel treats 1.75 million people like prisoners of war in the Gaza Strip. Didn't you also notice that American Christians back the Jewish Israelis 100% against all Muslims in the world? Didn’t you notice that Americans were okay with invading Iraq, based on obviously, at the time, false rumors of WMD? Americans only turned against that war when the US Army lost control of Iraq in a typical Bush SNAFU. And as far as I know, no Americans are protesting any other war anywhere in the world, not just the Middle East.- SECOND
Protests against the Iraq war
Quote:
A large majority of Americans disagreed with the bank bailout, and wanted to see real consequences - yanno, like jail time (such as happened under Reagan when the S&L's went tits up) - for the cretins who drove our financial system into the ditch.- SIGNY
You forgot Enron and "Bernie" Madoff. Those people got hammered by government because they stole money. The bank bailouts were not about stolen money. Those were caused byBush and the SEC not wanting to impose "unnecessary" regulations on banksClinton repealing Glass Steagall and signing the Commodities Futures Modernization Act.
Bush wasn't blameless, but the regulatory allowance was signed by Clinton.
Quote:Are you saying they should be?
Wall Street tycoons are not in fear of being kidnapped, ransomed, or assassinated for what they have done.
Quote:SO because people tried to legal way to influence government
If there is even a single American Madman out there who has avenged Main Street for what Wall Street did, I never heard of him. Since not even one crazy American cares, why should politicians? Especially since tycoons have got all the legal help they will ever need to defend themselves from the Justice Department. - SECOND
TEA PARTY PROTEST
http://americansfortruth.com/uploads/2009/09/tea-party-rally_huge_wash
-dc.bmp
OCCUPY PROTEST
AND NOBODY LISTENED, and the protesters didn't take up arms or pay a few snipers to start taking out the top 0.01%, they didn't have a real opinion?
Quote:So basically you're advocating violent revolution, which is the only way people without money get anything done.
Half of Americans are apathetic whiners who can’t do a thing except vote once every two to four years. The other half of them won’t even vote. That half are complete whiners. It is no surprise that those losers get ignored by politicians, but the top 1%, theenergeticwealthy people who know whosearm to twistpalm to grease, always get their way.
Good for you!
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Quote:Revolution? Doesn't that require more than one person? But I have not heard of even a single person punching Mitch McConnell in his funny-looking face. Two, or even three!, in my wildest dreams punching McConnell would please me. They don't even have to do it on the same day because that would require coordination and Americans don't seem able to do much of significance (beyond marching in the street and standing around a building with protest signs. I heard of the Vietnam War protests. Thousands of those didn't work worth a damn, yet any one of them had more passion, because of the draft & the very real possibility of being killed in Vietnam, than all the Tea-party protests & Occupy Wall Street protests put together.) Need I add that the passionate Vietnam protests did not end the war but did end the draft? Politicians were scared of all that passion, which is no longer around in present-day anti-war protests, because there is no draft.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So basically you're advocating violent revolution, which is the only way people without money get anything done.
Good for you!
Hey Kentucky! If you see your senior Senator and realize Mitch McConnell's cheating you out of your money to give more to the rich, punch him in the face. He will pay more attention to that message than a million snail-mails or a billion emails sent to his offices in DC or Kentucky.
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Putin Personally Directed Anti-Clinton Hacking
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/nbc-news-putin-personally-direc
ted-anti-clinton-hacking
Russia's hacking goes further than previous reports have suggested:
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.
Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said.
....The latest intelligence said to show Putin's involvement goes much further than the information the U.S. was relying on in October, when all 17 intelligence agencies signed onto a statement attributing the Democratic National Committee hack to Russia....Now the U.S has solid information tying Putin to the operation, the intelligence officials say. Their use of the term "high confidence" implies that the intelligence is nearly incontrovertible.
This comes from William Arkin, Ken Dilanian, and Cynthia McFadden, who are all careful reporters.
Nobody had any idea that Donald Trump would run, let alone win the Republican nomination, when the hacking operation started. And even after Trump did win the nomination, nobody thought he had much of a chance to win. All of Putin's hacking would have been for nought if he hadn't had some help from James Comey and a rogue group of FBI agents in New York.
Putin got lucky. But that's the way intelligence operations work. You try a lot of stuff and hope that a fraction of it pans out. This probably seemed like a low-cost-low-probability exercise when it was first started, and ended up succeeding beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Doesn't the timing of this story leave you just a little suspicious?
Isn't the building crescendo of hysteria ... just before the Inauguration, no less! ... a tad reminiscent of the Iraq WMD hysteria?
I'm going to point to an important part of the article
Quote:
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.
Wow! TWO sources??? All two???
What if I were to say that the spies and diplomats were from Ukraine? Would that make any difference?
Yanno, the overarching intelligence outfit that rides herd on the CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA etc has already decided not to endorse the CIA view. This sounds like two CIA staffers gone rogue. I'm going to copy this to the FAKE NEWS thread, because as are as I can tell, it's FAKE NEWS until demonstrated otherwise.
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
Hillary knew all about the Electoral College when she ran for office. All of this after-the-fact bitching is still just an attempt to rewrite history. I guess you're all still in various stages of grief, including anger, denial, and bargaining, all rol
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Quote:Are you and Trump going to spend his term of office whitewashing everything Russia does in order to forestall the release of damaging, stolen GOP documents by Russia? Is Trump answerable to the American people, or a foreign government that does not have the United States’ best interests at heart? Or are you claiming that only the Dems had their email stolen because the GOP's security was far superior?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Doesn't the timing of this story leave you just a little suspicious?
Isn't the building crescendo of hysteria ... just before the Inauguration, no less! ... a tad reminiscent of the Iraq WMD hysteria?
. . . it's FAKE NEWS until demonstrated otherwise.
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So you hail a cab in Manhattan to go to LaGuardia and the cabdriver heads for the Lincoln Tunnel and you say, “La-Guardia, LaGuardia!, LaGuardia!!,” and he says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and you’re in New Jersey, and you yell at him to stop and he doesn’t, he points north and says, “Bridge!” and now you’re on I-87 passing through Poughkeepsie — this is pretty much where we are with Trump Inc. so far. The populist revolt turns into a corporate boardroom and the disaffected Democrats who voted for it are not going to catch that plane to Florida after all. They will be spending four years on cousin Sid’s rollaway in Schenectady.
The big guy said a couple weeks ago that he was planning to “focus on running the country” and now we see what “focus” means in his case. He appointed a pollution defender to head the EPA and his secretary of state will be the Exxon exec, a business partner of the Russians, and now you have to wonder if our next Surgeon General will be an optometrist. And why not Billy Bush to head the Endowment for the Arts? You got a problem with that?
-- Garrison Keillor
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Quote:
Doesn't the timing of this story leave you just a little suspicious?
Isn't the building crescendo of hysteria ... just before the Inauguration, no less! ... a tad reminiscent of the Iraq WMD hysteria?
. . . it's FAKE NEWS until demonstrated otherwise. - SIGNY
Are you and Trump going to spend his term of office whitewashing everything Russia does in order to forestall the release of damaging, stolen GOP documents by Russia? Is Trump answerable to the American people, or a foreign government that does not have the United States’ best interests at heart? Or are you claiming that only the Dems had their email stolen because the GOP's security was far superior? - SECOND
Are you going to spend the rest of the Trump Presidency in near-total, unthinking hysteria? I'm not claiming anything, SECOND. The stolen emails were given to Assange by NOT RUSSIA, Assange says so. He knows where they came from: NOT RUSSIA. There is some evidence that it came from a DNC insider. The biggest intelligence super-agency refuses to endorse the CIA view: Are you saying that they don't have America's interests at heart?
The hack started just as Trump was entering the primaries, in 2015. It's a little hard to claim that whoever did the hack was supporting Trump - OR ANYBODY - at that point.
Now personally, I have a huge GIANT space in my brain where I emotionally quarantine information, and that space is called "interesting if true".
Quote:
You'll trust them [the Director of National Intelligence, DNI] which supervises and coordinates the other intelligence agencies] but not the CIA? Hrrrmmm...
There is more than one intelligence agency at work here: CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA, NRO - all together, 16 agencies - and they do NOT all share the CIA's intepretation. In the past, both the DIA and the FBI have been more on-target, and the CIA seems to have confused its "operational/propaganda/destabilization" role with its intelligence-gathering one.
If this was anything more than two guys with a wild hair up their ass, we wouldn't be treated to leaks from anonymous people based on nameless sources. I still think there is a power struggle going on between the CIA and the remaining intelligence agencies.
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
Hillary knew all about the Electoral College when she ran for office. All of this after-the-fact bitching is still just an attempt to rewrite history. I guess you're all still in various stages of grief, including anger, denial, and bargaining, all rol
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Republicans Are Warming Up to Vladimir Putin
What did Putin actually do during this period? He escalated the siege of Aleppo. He escalated military activities in Ukraine. And he released a whole bunch of emails hacked from Democrats and Democratic organizations. I wonder which of these accounts for the sudden bounce in Putin love among conservative Republicans? Hmmm....
https://twitter.com/williamjordann/status/809069737879674888/
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:
Republicans Are Warming Up to Vladimir Putin
https://twitter.com/williamjordann/status/809069737879674888/
OH LOOK! FROM TWITTER!
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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A Practical Guide for Promoting (or Resisting) the Trump Agenda.
Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen.
It works for Republicans who want Trump to honor his promises or Democrats who don’t.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1DzOz3Y6D8g_MNXHNMJYAz1b41_cn53
5aU5UsN7Lj8X8/mobilebasic
The document is full of insight about what does and does not work. (Example: members of Congress listen to their own constituents, not voters from other districts. They are more likely to answer actionable questions rather than vague requests.)
Whatever one thinks of the emerging Trump administration’s plans, this is a precious compendium on the importance of political engagement, and a reminder of the real power available through active participation.
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
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:The more we learn about the Russian plot to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and elect Donald Trump, and the failure of the FBI to adequately respond, the more shocking it gets....I was surprised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials. Instead, messages were left with the DNC IT “help desk.”
Originally posted by 1kiki:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Republicans Are Warming Up to Vladimir Putin
https://twitter.com/williamjordann/status/809069737879674888/
OH LOOK! FROM TWITTER!
....Comparing the FBI’s massive response to the overblown email scandal with the seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the FBI.
FBI Director James Comey justified his handling of the email case by citing “intense public interest.” He felt so strongly that he broke long-established precedent and disregarded strong guidance from the Justice Department with his infamous letter just 11 days before the election. Yet he refused to join the rest of the intelligence community in a statement about the Russian cyberattack because he reportedly didn’t want to appear “political.” And both before and after the election, the FBI has refused to say whether it is investigating Trump’s ties to Russia.
Outside of a badly-written novel, it's hard to believe that any law enforcement organization would do as little as the FBI did against a major assault from a hostile foreign power aimed at one of America's main political parties.
Even when plenty of evidence was amassed about Russia's actions, Comey downplayed it in private briefings. This gave Republicans the cover they needed to insist that Obama not mention anything about it during the campaign.
Put all that the FBI has done since 2015 together and you need to be pretty obtuse not to see the partisan pattern. In every single case, Comey and the FBI did what was best for Republicans and worst for Democrats. In. Every. Single. Case.
If you want to believe this is just a coincidence, go ahead. But nobody with a room temperature IQ credits that. The FBI has spent the entire past year doing everything it could to favor one party over the other in a presidential campaign.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/why-are-democrats-so-damn-timid
-about-james-comey-and-fbi
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/156500/
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Quote:Unscripted reality
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Are you going to spend the rest of the Trump Presidency in near-total, unthinking hysteria? I'm not claiming anything, SECOND.
Post-production aside, Trump cannot change the story on his conflicts of interest.
"We’ll fix it in post."
That phrase must have been thrown around a lot on the set of “The Apprentice.”
When it came time for The Donald to dispense of a contestant — “You’re fired” — the show’s producers would gather and discuss who did well in their weekly challenges, who was pulling their weight and who deserved to stay.
Donald Trump would ignore the facts and go with his gut.
“Manipulating footage to invent a story point that did not exist organically is common in reality TV editing, although with ‘The Apprentice,’ it proved a tremendous feat,” A.J. Catoline wrote in CineMontage, the journal of the Motion Pictures Editors Guild.
The real world isn’t a reality TV show, and there’s no post-production editing to fit the narrative with Trump’s decisions. That hasn’t stopped him from trying.
Thursday was supposed to mark Trump’s first news conference in 140 days — an event that he had promised would be spent clarifying how he would untangle his personal business interests before assuming the presidency.
On Monday, he canceled.
According to his tweets, Trump will make a public announcement in January (after the Electoral College vote) and plans to leave his two adult sons in charge, with instructions to make “no new deals.” Left unsaid is how Trump specifically plans to leave his business, whether he’ll establish a blind trust or liquidate his assets, and how he’ll keep an appropriate wall between himself and his children.
Trump has instead filled the news cycle with all sorts of distractions: meeting with tech CEOs, an angry tweet about a restaurant review, inviting Kanye West to Trump Tower.
Shocking twists and special guest stars can’t change the story: The next president of the United States has extensive private business holdings that create conflicts of interests, open him to avenues for bribery and potentially violate the Constitution’s prohibitions on emoluments.
Trump has not released tax documents, so the public simply does not know how far his ventures range. However, a financial disclosure form from last May indicates that he has a stake in hundreds of corporations around the globe and each raises questions about how Trump will represent U.S. interests even if they conflict with his own finances.
The president-elect keeps trying to fast-forward past these important concerns. Maybe he’ll just end up kicking the can on that promised January news conference. But until he clarifies what, exactly, he’s doing, Trump leaves himself vulnerable to damaging speculation and potential ethics violations.
The U.S. Office of Government Ethics, which was created in the wake of the Watergate scandal, has recommended that Trump divest himself of his business interests in order to avoid a litany of foreseeable conflicts. Simply transferring ownership to his children isn’t enough.
Trump’s eventual decision will be part of the story of United States. His Republican colleagues need to push him to live up to the highest ethical standards. The consequences cannot be fixed in post — this isn’t reality TV.
www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Unscripted-reality
-10799755.php
The perfect cartoon for 1kiki and Signym:
www.newyorker.com/cartoons/a20602
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:Hacks don't - but people do.
The hack started just as Trump was entering the primaries, in 2015. It's a little hard to claim that whoever did the hack was supporting Trump - OR ANYBODY - at that point. - SIGNY
Which means absolutely nothing, thanks. Hacks don't have calendars or seasons - wise up. - GSTRING
*****
So here is the confusing thing about the hacks and releases: the timeline is screwed up and the attribution is messed up too.
Do you know how many hacking attempts/leaks on the DNC that the media has reported?
FOUR.
Over time, they have reported on one discovered BY THE FBI SEP 2015 but beginning who knows when .... According to reports, the FBI attempted to alert the DNC to the intrusion. Special Agent Adrian Hawkins repeatedly called the DNC over several weeks to alert them that a group called "The Dukes" (which Crowdstrike calls "Cozybear") had infiltrated the system. The tech guy who took the calls, Yared Tamene, ran a cursory check of system logs but not finding anything interesting and ignored the FBI calls until they stopped. “I did not return his calls, as I had nothing to report,” he wrote in a memo seen by the New York Times.
In MARCH 2016, [Crowdstrike says] that another hacking attempt began. This one was done though phishing emails claiming that "S?me?ne has your passw?rd", which snared one DNC staffer, Billy Rinehart, to click on the email to change Podesta's gmail password.
Here is the email, as released by WIKILEAKS:
Quote:
From:slatham@hillaryclinton.com
To: mfisher@hillaryclinton.com, john.podesta@gmail.com
Date: 2016-03-19 12:07
Subject: Fwd: S?me?ne has your passw?rd
The gmail one is REAL
Milia, can you change - does JDP have the 2 step verification or do we need
to do with him on the phone? Don't want to lock him out of his in box!
Sent from my iPhone
Begin forwarded message:
*From:* Charles Delavan <cdelavan@hillaryclinton.com>;
*Date:* March 19, 2016 at 9:54:05 AM EDT
*To:* Sara Latham <slatham@hillaryclinton.com>;, Shane Hable <
shable@hillaryclinton.com>;
*Subject:* *Re: S?me?ne has your passw?rd*
Sara,
This is a legitimate email. John needs to change his password immediately,
and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account.
He can go to this link: https://myaccount.google.com/security to do both.
It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP.
If you or he has any questions, please reach out to me at 410.562.9762
On Sat, Mar 19, 2016 at 9:29 AM, Sara Latham <slatham@hillaryclinton.com>;
wrote:
Sent from my iPhone
Begin forwarded message:
*From:* Google <no-reply@accounts.googlemail.com>;
*Date:* March 19, 2016 at 4:34:30 AM EDT
*To:* john.podesta@gmail.com
*Subject:* *S?me?ne has your passw?rd*
S?me?ne has your passw?rd
Hi John
Someone just used your password to try to sign in to your Google Account john.podesta@gmail.com.
Details:
Saturday, 19 March, 8:34:30 UTC
IP Address: 134.249.139.239
Location: Ukraine
Google stopped this sign-in attempt. You should change your password immediately.
CHANGE PASSWORD < https://bit.ly/1PibSU0>;
Best,
The Gmail Team
You received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google product or account.
Charles Delavan
HFA Help Desk
The HFA Operations Team is here to support you. Let us know how we’re doing
by filling out a brief survey < http://bit.ly/1gL3oMk>;.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/34899#efmAAGAAbAHLAIUAWxA
XH
APRIL 2016, The DNC brings in CrowdStrike
JUNE 14, WaPo reported (from Crowdstrike leak) that hackers had gained entrance to "the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump" (not the Podesta emails) and the day after, Crowdstrike announces that there were two hacks, the first one in 2015, which the FBI attributed to The Dukes is now being attributed to Cozybear and the second one i
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Take Trump’s Moscow-friendly views seriously (and literally)
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971322/trump-tillerson-ru
ssia
Trump has been at this long enough that it’s long past time to stop thinking about his frequently expressed pro-Russian views as some kind of thoughtless gaffe. Since exploding onto the political stage with the claim that Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers, Trump has routinely articulated a desire to rework the American alliance system:
He has specifically praised Vladimir Putin in the face of significant media criticism.
He has endorsed Russia’s brutal intervention in the Syrian Civil War.
He has changed the GOP platform to become less supportive of Ukrainian independence from Russia.
He has called into question America’s obligation to our NATO allies.
He has said, over and over again, things like “I want to get along with Russia.”
Many of these moves were seen, at the time they happened, as gaffes reflecting Trump’s inexperience or lack of knowledge. And on some level, perhaps they were. But whether Trump set about to conduct a pro-Russian presidential campaign or else just stumbled into it, at this point he’s stuck with it long enough that we should assume Trump knows what he’s doing.
Tillerson is the right choice for a rapprochement with Moscow
The idea that the United States should abandon its current opposition to Russian efforts to dominate its neighbors and crush the Syrian opposition happens to be one that none of the conventionally qualified candidates for secretary of state endorses.
As a logical matter, the idea of asking Tillerson to disavow pro-Russian views is ridiculous. If the Senate doesn’t want to see America’s next secretary of state take foreign policy in a new pro-Russian direction, then the solution is to refuse to confirm Tillerson and insist on a more normal choice like Bob Corker, Robert Zoellick, Stephen Hadley, Nicholas Burns, or any of the other dozen or so conventionally qualified Republicans who are available.
Trump ran a pro-Russian presidential campaign, benefited from the efforts of Russian hackers, and then reached outside the box of normal candidates to select a secretary of state who has personal relationships with high-ranking Russian officials, financial investments in Russia, and a record of pro-Russian policy views. Trump wants Tillerson to run the State Department because he wants a top diplomat who’ll make an improved relationship with Russia a top priority — achieved largely through unilateral US concessions on sanctions and de facto recognition of a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
This may be a bad idea, but it’s not a crazy or nonsensical one. And it appears to be how Trump intends to put his stamp on American public policy, even while leaving domestic policy overwhelmingly in the hands of orthodox, establishment-minded Republicans. The question for GOP senators is whether they want to stop Trump and Tillerson.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I dont no a bunch about Russia, so my opinion iz not worth much.
It seemz to me that it woud be better in the long run if America and Russia got along. If this involvez letting Putin do sum stuff outside their borderz that duznt affect American interests, OK. Its not like America can claim to be innosent uv meddling and bomming!
BUT. Its never a good idea to let proven enemyz gain power. Iz Russia an enemy or just a rival looking out for its own well being?
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.nooalf.com
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I know we don't speak a lot JO, and although we used to be awesome super friends in another forum it alwayhs makes me sad when we don't agree today.
But this post made me happy :)
Ask yourself this....
Do you believe for a second that a conspiracy theorist who has at least 12 years history at this site would just blindly follow trump when my early history was 110% critical of GBW?
I don't believe that Russia or Putin had anything to do with our votes. During and weeks after the 2nd Debate, the Democrats including Obama laughed and said it wasn't a thing, yet now.......
I agree it would be wise to build a relationship with Russia.
To put it in Childlike things, I remember my first "Enemy" being the New York Nicks to my Chicago Bulls....
But then I remembered in later years it was Shaq and Orlando, and even Indiana Pacers and I should remember the name why (Reggie?), but as I've said before, sports do play little in my life now.
Yeah... Reggie Miller.
What a Fucking Badass he was....
I mean REALLY....
Against the Best of The Bulls, there was a night where HE SINGLE HANDEDLY WAS RESPONSIBLE for a couple of steals and 3 pointers and won a game that never should have been won with that little time on the clock.
That's why Professional sports don't mean shit. just a bunch of overpaid athletes from other places.
if you want to watch something you care about, watch and support local sports
EDITED TO ADD: I wasn't talking against Reggie Miller and his AMAZING accomplishment. I'm was just talking that it was something forgotten because it was AGAINST the Bulls Dynasty of the time.
I'd have to research it. I'm sure it was on YouTube. It was like at least an 18 point turn around that was SINGLE attributed to Reggie Miller.
Against the BEST TEAM in PRO BALL at the time.
it was something like 3 three pointers and 2 steals in between, all by him, in like under "the shot clock"
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Why Putin is suddenly gaining popularity among Republicans
www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2016/1216/Why-Putin-is-suddenly-gaining
-popularity-among-conservatives
A new poll released this week by YouGov shows that in the US, self-identified Republicans viewing Putin as very or somewhat favorably rose from 10 percent in July 2014 to 37 percent today.
The YouGov poll not only shows an uptick in support over the past two years, but also a decline in antipathy. Nearly half of Republicans – 47 percent – still view Putin somewhat or very unfavorably – but those seeing him “very unfavorably collapsed from 51 percent in 2014 to 10 percent now.
“If you look at public opinion in the United States, there were pretty universal negative views of Putin up to this summer,” Darden says. “Then we had the Republican nominee sounding very pro-Putin, and the public shifted shockingly quickly.”
The turnaround in the Russian leader’s image in the US can be ascribed almost completely to Trump’s repeated contrasting of Putin’s strong leadership and President Obama’s “weakness.”
“It’s really the people who are opposed to Obama who are revising their view of Putin,” Darden says. “It’s pure partisanship that says, ‘Putin was the enemy of Obama, therefore he must be a pretty decent guy.’ ”
That sunk in with voters drawn to Trump’s rhetoric and style, and the result is that “a surprising number of people now see Putin in a positive light as a man of action,. They see Putin as a leader who was dealt a weaker hand than the president of the United States, but who has somehow been able to play it better.”
When the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday proposed a resolution praising outgoing Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for supporting the world’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, Russia stood up to its Western colleagues and said no.
The wording about sexual minorities, whom Russian President Vladmir Putin disdains, was replaced with a benign reference to the “most vulnerable” and “marginalized.”
There’s no doubting Putin’s opposition to sexual minorities and his deep disdain for what he sees as a decadent West. In his often-cited 2013 state-of-the-nation speech, the Russian leader defended Russia’s “traditional” values against the West’s “so-called tolerance,” which he condemned as “genderless and infertile” and for promoting “the equality of good and evil.”
Instead of facing near universal rejection in the West over Putin’s oppressive governance at home, his seizure of Crimea, and his intervention in Syria on behalf of a despot, Putin is for some a hero. Nationalist conservatives see Putin as defending sovereign nationhood in the face of globalization, and traditional values against an onslaught of threatening forces.
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First off... Congratulations on the 1,500th post on this thread Second.
Beyond that, so what?
Last I checked, Sean Connery has been retired from acting for 15 years....
We aren't Soviet Agents. We're just not at all agreeable to the Neo-Con and/or Neo-Lib bullshit.
Stuff that you are in favor of is the exact same stuff you were against 10 years ago.
They flipped the script, and you took the bait.
Of course I don't want Russia to own us.
But at the same time, THIS is how out of control Liberalism has gotten in this country.
The fact that we can actually have this conversation and it might actually have a little bit of weight to it.
In the ENTIRE WORLD there are two major powers that do not let ANY Muslims across their borders. China and Russia.
This isn't 19-fucking-80. I'm not Snake Pliskin coaching the US hockey team to beat Russia.
Islam is a VERY "rapey" culture and their women are dogs. They are invading the lands of my ancestors and raping the women there and trying to force them all to wear hajibs... because apparently these ANIMALS can't help but rape women who aren't covered head to toe, and bullshit "Leaders" like Merkel in Germany don't defend German Women and are about to be voted out and the Muslims are going to be forced out soon after that.
I'm sure all the Muslims weren't "Bad People". The ones who weren't had plenty of opportunity to speak against that and beg local law enforcement to make an example of them, but none of them did that. Islam wants to convert the entire world.
Buh-Bye Muslims. Buh-Bye Unelected European Union "Masters".
10 years from now, or very much less, there will be ZERO EU.
ANYONE would RATHER be invaded by Russia than raped to submission by Islam.
That's just the facts.
Shut your fucking mouth about it until you are raped or your daughter is raped by a Muslim that hates her because she wears sexy clothes and make up.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A new poll released this week by YouGov shows that in the US, self-identified Republicans viewing Putin as very or somewhat favorably rose from 10 percent in July 2014 to 37 percent today.
This iz a predictable side effect uv ODS. Back in 2010 I posted a comic about Obama suffocating haf the countryz GoPs by declaring "breathing iz good". It wuz set in the future - 2016.
Considering everything that haz happened, its not that far fetched! I dare Obama to test it!
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.nooalf.com
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Obama doubled our national debt and the only "jobs" that were "recovered" in the last 8 years were part time, minimum-wage jobs now held by people who used to be able to support a family with real jobs, or people who just completely left the workforce like me and are no longer a statistic they track....
Nobody but the truly Privilged White people will revere Obama as a great president. Not even ANY black people. He did NOTHING for Black People or Latin People. He actually deported more illegal Latinos that GWB did. One thing I actually agreed with him on although nowhere near the amount that should have happened. The only "Legacy" he has is Obamacare that is crushing middle income people, and Trump will strip it to bare bones if he doesn't just renig on what he said to appease idiot lefties like you and destroy it altogether.
I say this knowing full well that I will no longer have health insurance in my current position. I'm okay with that. It's not right that I have insurance while my Niece's parents pay 6k per year more with twice the deductible to cover my free insurance.
I said 10 years ago here that GWB was the worst president we EVER had.
Not even considering how little respect any foreign countries have for us now, but just for how much he spent with such little results for the middle class. Not to mention that Race Relations have been set back 50 years under 8 years of Obama. Blacks and Whites have not lived under this much tension since the 60's.
Obama was so much worse. He makes GWB look like JFK.
Because he is Black, nobody will talk about him at all in school 30 years from now. He will be among the 30+ "invisible" presidents we never discuss in public school.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Discuss Nixon much in school? Was Obama worse than Nixon?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Obama was so much worse. He makes GWB look like JFK.
Because he is Black, nobody will talk about him at all in school 30 years from now. He will be among the 30+ "invisible" presidents we never discuss in public school.
With a phone call, private citizen Nixon wrecked foreign relations with Vietnam before his inauguration and gave the USA four more years of war. Read the details here www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/12/george-will-confirms-nixons-viet
nam-treason#
Before Trump is inaugurated, he is wrecking foreign relations with China. Read the details here:
Obama Warned Trump about the risk of messing with China on Taiwan
by Max de Haldevang
http://qz.com/865705/obama-explains-the-risk-of-trumps-messing-with-ch
ina-on-taiwan/
If China hadn’t provided warning enough to Donald Trump by seizing an American vessel in the South China Sea and threatening sanctions on an unnamed US automaker, president Obama had clear advice at a press conference today: think things through before you mess with Taiwan.
It’s not clear how much foreign policy issues have come up in Obama and Trump’s regular phone calls, but the president’s clearly spelled-out message seems to imply his successor is yet to fully grasp China’s vision of itself, or of the way negotiations play out with a global superpower. The quote is worth reading in full:
“Understand that with China, the issue of Taiwan is as important as anything on their docket. The idea of ‘one China’ is at the heart of their conception as a nation. And so if you are going to upend this understanding, you have to have thought through what the consequences are, because the Chinese will not treat that the way they will treat some other issues. This goes to the core of how they see themselves, and their reaction on this issue could end up being very significant. That doesn’t mean you have to adhere to everything that’s been done in the past…it does mean that you have to think it through.”
If you look at that in context with a statement from the same press conference, you can get an idea of how little Trump might have gamed out his tactics on China: “Since there’s only one president a time, my advice to him is that, before he starts having a lot of interaction with foreign governments, beyond the usual courtesy calls, he should have his full team in place,” Obama said.
The overall message is: it’s your foreign policy but make damn sure you know what steps two, three, four and down to twenty are before going straight for the motherload from the word “go.” Because this isn’t Manhattan real estate, it’s an ancient country with a strong sense of identity and a lot of tools at its disposal, beginning with the kinds of cyber-attacks it’s been prying away with for years.
Instead, the way Trump’s acted so far has been the real world equivalent of his reported advice to a US official in 1990 on how to strike a “great deal” with the Soviets on nuclear arms: “Trump told him to arrive late, stand over the Soviet negotiator, stick his finger in his chest, and say, ‘Fuck you!,'” the New Yorker‘s Evan Osnos reported earlier this year.
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Quote:
If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana- SECOND
AND YOU WONDER WHY HILLARY LOST????
Quote:bullshit
Trump ran a pro-Russian presidential campaign, benefited from the efforts of Russian hackers
Quote:Why? What American interests does this cross? I have asked over and what our AMERICAN interests are and yanno what?? NONE OF YOU KNOWS. But If you could figure our what our actual interests are, you'd be a lot less likely be be spun around by our elites and their fake news. Please, think long and hard what our AMERICAN interests are before you start getting all hysterical about
and then reached outside the box of normal candidates to select a secretary of state who has personal relationships with high-ranking Russian officials, financial investments in Russia, and a record of pro-Russian policy views. Trump wants Tillerson to run the State Department because he wants a top diplomat who’ll make an improved relationship with Russia a top priority — achieved largely through unilateral US concessions on sanctions and de facto recognition of a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
This may be a bad idea
"Russia".
Quote:
but it’s not a crazy or nonsensical one. And it appears to be how Trump intends to put his stamp on American public policy, even while leaving domestic policy overwhelmingly in the hands of orthodox, establishment-minded Republicans. The question for GOP senators is whether they want to stop Trump and Tillerson.- SECOND
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
You're suffering from the various stages of grief including bargaining, denial, and anger, all at once
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Quote:When you use "our AMERICAN interests", who do think believes you are American? Your obsession, and 1kiki’s, with Russia makes everyone at Fireflyfans, except 1kiki and maybe 6ixStringJack, think you’re Russian. No Americans care about Russia, but they do care that Trump is obsessed with Putin and Putin is sneaking stolen emails to Trump. Is Putin blackmailing Trump? Although he never shuts up, Trump is so secretive about his business that we can only guess.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Please, think long and hard what our AMERICAN interests are before you start getting all hysterical about "Russia".
Trump can talk more about himself and say less than any other American politician. I do wish Trump’s accountant would talk about Trump’s tax returns or his foreign business dealings or his conflict of interest between what is best for the Trump family fortune and best for the USA, etc. because Trump is not talking.
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/156590/
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/156500/
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Quote:
Please, think long and hard what our AMERICAN interests are before you start getting all hysterical about "Russia". - SIGNY
When you use "our AMERICAN interests", who do think believes you are American?-SECOND
Honey, I've been here longer than YOU have.
Do you want to know how to check? Just click on MY NAME. It will bring up my info: BROWNCOAT ID#:1606 SINCE: 2002.11.05 15:46. Yours says BROWNCOAT ID#:20832 SINCE: 2006.06.23 01:50. Do you really ... REALLY .... think that ANYBODY would place a foreign troll on a no-account website for 14 years, on the off chance they might come in handy some day, to try to sway maybe 20 people?
Quote:
Your obsession, and 1kiki’s, with Russia makes everyone at Fireflyfans, except 1kiki and maybe 6ixStringJack, think you’re Russian.- SECOND
I'm not the one posting endlessly about Russia; I leave that to you, KRAPO (who's British) and GSTRING. In fact, that's what pisses you all off: I don't post about Russia.
I just refuse to get on that recently-concocted anti-Russian bandwagon, because it sure smells a lot like the anti-Iraq bandwagon, and the anti-Vietnam bandwagon, and every anti-(fill in the blank) bandwagon that the USA elites wanted to go to war with: full of shit.
Well, I don't give a crap about "Russia" unless it impacts our interests, and neither should you.
Quote:Then why do you keep bringing it up?
No Americans care about Russia
Quote:
but they do care that Trump is obsessed with Putin and Putin is sneaking stolen emails to Trump.
HAHAHAHA!
You're grasping at straws, SECOND. You have used every negative meme you can think of to discredit Trump, from pictures of Trump struck by lightening to Trump as a pervert to "hacked elections" to "faithless electors" and pretty much every bit of flotsam that came your way. Now you're grasping at the "...but Putin!" straw. The only thing you haven't posted yet is your secret wish that someone would assassinate Trump, and OH! You'd be in so much trouble if you did! Tomorrow the Electoral College votes, and it looks like none of your attempts to rewrite history will work.
So take a deep breath. Down several of your favorite alcoholic beverages and contemplate why YOU'RE so anti-American. Here's a reminder of your anti-Americanism:
Quote:
If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana- SECOND
Clearly, you don't care about "America". You can't even think of "Americans" without some sort of hyphenated-precious-identity subgroup on it, yanno "gay Americans" or "black Americans" or "Hispanic Americans". As far as all of us having common interests, that concept is so foreign to you you can't even imagine what should draw us all together.
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
You're suffering from the various stages of grief including bargaining, denial, and anger, all at once
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What Do Trump Voters Want?
Paul Krugman on the disconnect between what Trump voters think they want and reality.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/what-do-trump-voters-want/
There is the widespread belief by, well, almost everyone, that they are entitled to — have earned — whatever good hand they have been dealt by the market economy. This is reflected in the more or less universal belief of the affluent that they deserve what they have; you could see this in the rage of rentiers at low interest rates, because it’s the Fed’s job to reward savers, right? In this terrible political year, the story was in part one of people in Appalachia angrily demanding a return of the good jobs they used to have mining coal — even though the world doesn’t want more coal given fracking, and it can get the coal it still wants from strip mines and mountaintop removal, which don’t employ many people.
What those longing for the return to coal want is those jobs they deserve, where they earn their money — not government handouts, no sir.
A fact-constrained candidate wouldn’t have been able to promise such people what they want; Trump, of course, had no problem.
But is that really all there is? Working-class Trump voters do, in fact, receive a lot of government handouts — they’re almost totally dependent on Social Security for retirement, Medicare for health care when old, are quite dependent on food stamps, and many have recently received coverage from Obamacare. Quite a few receive disability payments too. They don’t want those benefits to go away. But they managed to convince themselves (with a lot of help from Fox News etc) that they aren’t really beneficiaries of government programs, or that they’re not getting the “good welfare”, which only goes to Those People.
And you can really see this in the regional patterns. California is an affluent state, a heavy net contributor to the federal budget; it went 2-1 Clinton. West Virginia is poor and a huge net recipient of federal aid; it went 2½-1 Trump.
And an interesting comment on Krugman’s item that is is almost as long as what Krugman wrote:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/what-do-trump-voters-want/
#permid=20843570
I think it's easy to see an angry coal miner as selfish when we should be seeing him as afraid.
People want to be able to eat, have a house, and provide for their kids' future, but they also want status within their community. Status these days might be misinterpreted as something like winning "The Apprentice," with all that gaudiness, but I think it really is the ability to feel good about one's place. And, as we've seen in studies with other primates, loss of status (or never having it in the first place) is like a little death. I think, actually, that some people would rather die, or kill others and the nation, than suffer that kind of loss.
Look at those 700 people who work for Carrier. I saw that deal as welfare by another name, or Socialism. But, as contradictory as I thought it was - given Republican principles - it showed Trump's base that he could maintain their status, for at least a little longer. People were allowed to keep feeding their families without SNAP, and they were allowed to keep engaging their brains without going to a gov't training center. Is it a fiction? I guess. But the citizens of Indiana helped those people for at least a little bit longer. Should it matter that the money flowed through Carrier's books to the employees, instead of directly through the local welfare office?
Welfare is well being. It has to be more than just debit and insurance cards.
Barb Valaw wrote:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/what-do-trump-voters-want/
#permid=20837154
I recently had lunch at an Olive Garden in Pennsylvania. It is part of a county which has a large number of towns formerly dependent on coal mining which are now beaten down. Two men sat in the booth behind me who were clearly Trump voters. One said to the other that he would normally not e
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SECOND, calm down. I can hear your head exploding all the way over here.
Paul Krugman, stawmanning his way through an entire article.
I don't know what "Trump voters" want, but I know what I want: Three things.
1) Stop trying to foment war with Russia. Come up with some sort of modus vivendi that allows each of us to have our essential interests respected. Restore national sovereignty over our foreign policy. End our pointless concocted wars for Saudi Arabia or Israel or the elite EU bankers.
2) Start solving the illegal immigration problem. Restore national sovereignty over our borders.
3) Get out of TPP/ TTIP, and tear up NAFTA as much as possible. Restore national economic sovereignty.
Three things. It looks like TPP and TTIP are already dead. It looks like Trump is serious about not being on a escalating ramp-up to war with Russia. The rest is to be demonstrated.
Everything else, I'm willing to fight Trump at every level of government. Now, let me explain my rationale for voting the way I did: It will be far easier to fight Trump and the Republicans than it would be to fight some secret international "trade tribunal" on environmental and economic issues. If you think fighting Trump is going to be difficult - and it will be - imagine what it would be like if your local or state regulations were overturned by the TPP or TTIP because they might interfere with normal or expected transnational profits. Where would you turn then? (The answer is: Nowhere. You'd be as fucked as a whore in a whorehouse.)
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
You're suffering from the various stages of grief including bargaining, denial, and anger, all at once
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