A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 147 of 725
Quote:Easy to find examples of Democracy being subverted for a large profit paid by Putin. He has billions to spend and the people he buys sell themselves cheaply, for only millions. He can afford to buy many greedy Brits and Americans. Here are two examples, Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Why yes. Yes, they do.
Banks’s defense of his behavior to the Times is so absurdly suspicious it almost reads like a winking, dada joke: “The idea that things were dangled as some sort of carrots for me to be involved with the Russians is very far-fetched,” he said. “I wonder what the Russians wanted from me?” What they wanted was perfectly obvious: Banks funded the Brexit political referendum in which Russia had a strong interest in passing. Russia could not directly finance the referendum, but Banks could. Therefore, what they would want is for him to use some of the money they were dangling before him to support Brexit, which he did. At this point, it seems virtually certain that Russia did use Banks, perhaps in conjunction with Mellon, as a pass through to covertly finance the Brexit referendum.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, Donald Trump and many members of his inner circle have a long trail of financial ties to Russia. The overt behavior looks remarkably similar. Trump and his cronies refuse to disclose their precise financial connections (by, for instance, following the established norm of a presidential candidate publishing his tax returns.) They continuously lie about the number and nature of their covert contacts with Russian officials, then keep insisting with each new disclosure that there is no more to disclose and the whole question is a witch hunt. Meanwhile, they continue to deliver a policy outcome payoff to Putin.
Yesterday alone, reports have emerged that Trump offered Emmanuel Macron a better deal if France would exit the European Union, refused to rule out accepting Russia’s claim to seized territory from Ukraine, and that his government is studying the possibility of withdrawing troops from Germany. Like Banks’s winking “what could the Russians have wanted from me?” defense, Trump is virtually daring his critics to draw the obvious conclusion.
More at http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/the-british-russia-collus
ion-scandal-is-breaking-wide-open.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The messy reality of Donald Trump’s poll numbers
He’s playing a strong hand, poorly.
On June 25, Axios’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei took readers inside Donald Trump’s “winning, cynical plan.” They argued that “the more President Trump does, says and tweets outrageous things, the more his critics go bananas and the better he does in the polls.”
The evidence for this was that Trump had hit 45 percent in Gallup’s presidential approval tracker — a personal high for him, though he’s since slipped back to 42 percent. More impressively, Trump’s approval among Republicans is hovering around 90 percent, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s disapproval among Republicans was up to 53 percent.
“It’s arguably the most cynical strategy imaginable,” write Allen and VandeHei. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be successful politically.”
I should say at the outset: I believe Allen and VandeHei have this one wrong. I don’t think Trump’s poll numbers show he’s found a successful political strategy — quite the opposite, in fact. But this is a difficult debate to have because it requires defining what success would look like for Trump, which means settling on some counterfactual sense of where Trump’s poll numbers could and should be.
Sure, 45 percent, or his current 42 percent, is higher than Trump’s April low of 38 percent, or his all-time Gallup low, last seen in December, of 35 percent. But his numbers have held within a very narrow range since his inauguration. Indeed, Trump’s approval has actually been the most stable of any president in polling history, as this chart from Charles Franklin shows:
[ ] Charles Franklin/Gallup data
The real question, then, is whether the narrow range Trump has settled into represents success or failure. And so we need to establish a baseline: Are Trump’s poll numbers high given what we might expect, or low?
3.8 percent unemployment and 42 percent approval. Is that “winning”?
Here’s another way to think about this question: Would President Marco Rubio or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Mitt Romney be at 42 percent amidst 3.8 percent unemployment? I doubt it. But I also can’t prove it.
More at www.vox.com/explainers/2018/7/5/17531360/donald-trump-poll-numbers-pop
ularity
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The real question, then, is whether the narrow range Trump has settled into represents success or failure. And so we need to establish a baseline: Are Trump’s poll numbers high given what we might expect, or low?
3.8 percent unemployment and 42 percent approval. Is that “winning”?
Here’s another way to think about this question: Would President Marco Rubio or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Mitt Romney be at 42 percent amidst 3.8 percent unemployment? I doubt it. But I also can’t prove it.
I can't see him winning a second term. Time will tell but I just can't see it.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by JJ:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The real question, then, is whether the narrow range Trump has settled into represents success or failure. And so we need to establish a baseline: Are Trump’s poll numbers high given what we might expect, or low?
3.8 percent unemployment and 42 percent approval. Is that “winning”?
Here’s another way to think about this question: Would President Marco Rubio or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Mitt Romney be at 42 percent amidst 3.8 percent unemployment? I doubt it. But I also can’t prove it.
I can't see him winning a second term. Time will tell but I just can't see it.
Really you guys??
1. I will never trust another poll no matter where, no matter who, no matter when. Russian hacking - past or future - make any professional polling moot.
2. @T - who do the Dems have that can beat Trump in even a fair fight? Or change previous voting habits or negate more interference? I believed the last one was a done deal, not this next one.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Big Business Reaps Trump’s Whirlwind. The bill for decades of cynical politics is coming due.
July 5, 2018 www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/opinion/trade-war-trump-business-jobs.html
The imminent prospect of a trade war, it seems, concentrates the mind. Until very recently, big business and the institutions that represent its interests didn’t seem to be taking President Trump’s protectionist rhetoric very seriously. After all, corporations have invested trillions based on the belief that world markets would remain open, that U.S. industry would retain access to both foreign customers and foreign suppliers.
Trump wouldn’t put all those investments at risk, would he?
Yes, he would — and the belated recognition that his tough talk on trade was serious has spurred a flurry of action. Major corporations and trade associations are sending letters to the administration warning that its policies will cost more jobs than they create. Meanwhile, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has begun an advertising campaign to convince voters of the benefits of free trade.
Pathetic, isn’t it? Who in the Trump administration is going to pay attention to those letters? What, exactly, does the chamber think it will accomplish by running those ads?
The thing is, big business is reaping what it sowed. No single cause brought us to this terrible moment in American history, but decades of cynical politics on the part of corporate America certainly played an important role.
What do I mean by cynical politics? Partly I mean the tacit alliance between businesses and the wealthy, on one side, and racists on the other, that is the essence of the modern conservative movement. www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-intervi
ew-southern-strategy/
For a long time business seemed to have this game under control: win elections with racial dog whistles, then turn to an agenda of tax cuts and deregulation. But sooner or later something like Trump was going to happen: a candidate who meant the racism seriously, with the enthusiastic support of the Republican base, and couldn’t be controlled.
When organizations like the Chamber of Commerce or the Heritage Foundation declare that Trump’s tariffs are a bad idea, they are on solid intellectual ground: All, and I mean all, economic experts agree. But they don’t have any credibility, because these same conservative institutions have spent decades making war on expertise. www.igmchicago.org/surveys/steel-and-aluminum-tariffs
The most obvious case is climate change, where conservative organizations, very much including the chamber, have long acted as “merchants of doubt,” manufacturing skepticism and blocking action in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s hard to pivot from “pay no attention to those so-called experts who say the planet is warming” to “protectionism is bad — all the experts agree.” www.bloomsbury.com/us/merchants-of-doubt-9781608193943/
Similarly, organizations like Heritage have long promoted supply-side economics, a.k.a., voodoo economics — the claim that tax cuts will produce huge growth and pay for themselves — even though no economic experts agree. So they’ve already accepted the principle that it’s O.K. to talk economic nonsense if it’s politically convenient. Now comes Trump with different nonsense, saying “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” How can they convince anyone that his nonsense is bad, while theirs was good? www.igmchicago.org/surveys/tax-reform-2
But a trade war may be only the start of big business’s self-inflicted punishment. Much worse and scarier things may lie ahead, because Trump isn’t just a protectionist, he’s an authoritarian. Trade wars are nasty; unchecked power is much worse, and not just for those who are poor and powerless.
Trump is already in the habit of threatening businesses that have crossed him. After Harley-Davidson announced that it was shifting some production overseas because of trade conflicts, he warned that the company would be “taxed like never before” — wh
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
This is why Trump won and hopefully why in the fall he will lose.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The trolls are alive and well, and most Nazis, here and in EU, aren't aware they're being gaslighted by Russians.
Even the Republican senate finally conceded it.
The rise of the neoNazis is, at least in part, orchestrated by Putin. You want a "commie" to blame it all on? There you go.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
No such thing as Nazis in 2018.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Since there are so many places I could post this exonerating tidbit, I'll post it in a few places:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/06/politics/paul-manafort-trial-public/ind
ex.html
Prosecutors says any alleged collusion with the Russian government won’t come up at the trial.
SECOND is a troll because it constantly misrepresents what people post, fails to address their actual positions, and resorts to personal attacks when its brain isn't working (which is most of the time).
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME