A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 226 of 725
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The government also spent nearly $400,000 protecting the president’s two older sons during three international trips they took in early 2018, the office found.
Uday and Qusay?
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Enjoy this: 4 Trump vacations cost $13.6 million
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
No telling what the future holds.
Not a damn thing I could do about it any way it turns out, so I'll just sit back and enjoy the shit show.
Four of President Donald Trump’s trips to his Florida home cost taxpayers nearly $13.6 million, the U.S. government’s watchdog reported Tuesday.
The federal government costs included $60,000 paid directly to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, the Government Accountability Office said in its report, which examined Trump’s visits over four weeks in early 2017.
The GAO noted in its report that it didn’t include some expenses that are classified nor did it include salaries or benefits of Secret Service and Defense Department personnel.
The government also spent nearly $400,000 protecting the president’s two older sons during three international trips they took in early 2018, the office found.
http://time.com/5521886/trump-trips-mar-a-lago-cost/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It's all a joke. It's all fiat currency. We're going to hear about these obscene amounts of money ballooning into the billions before we die, meanwhile, most of us are still dealing with thousands.
$13 Million for four vacations sounds like a bargain compared to $6 Billion for a wall, which in turn sounds like quite a bargain when compared to $60 Billion per year for Food Stamps, which sounds like nothing when compared to nearly $800 Billion per year spent on the military.
Come to think of it, that's all kind of dwarfing your own status in life, Second, isn't it?
Does it make you sad to realize that you're much closer to my end of the wealth spectrum than you are to the true elites?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Sounds like nothing compared to the $2 trillion for the Iraq War, which was a GOP brainstorm.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
It's all a joke. It's all fiat currency. We're going to hear about these obscene amounts of money ballooning into the billions before we die, meanwhile, most of us are still dealing with thousands.
$13 Million for four vacations sounds like a bargain compared to $6 Billion for a wall, which in turn sounds like quite a bargain when compared to $60 Billion per year for Food Stamps, which sounds like nothing when compared to nearly $800 Billion per year spent on the military.
www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSBRE92D0PG20130314
Sounds like nothing compared to, "We’ve spent $6 trillion" on the wars in the Middle East. — Donald Trump
www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/27/donald-trump/d
id-us-spend-6-trillion-middle-east-wars/
Sounds like nothing compared to $100 trillion for a nuclear war. Trump's John Bolton has helped put the knife into Ronald Reagan’s landmark treaty, one that broke the back of the nuclear arms race in 1987. It was the first time that the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to destroy, not just limit, nuclear weapons. Together they destroyed almost 2,700 perfectly good nuclear weapons that they had spent billions of dollars and many years building. It began the process of massive reductions in global nuclear arms that continued until the current administration.
Why is Bolton against these nuclear security treaties that Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, have championed? Because he thinks they make America weak. In 1999, he decried the liberal “fascination with arms-control agreements as a substitute for real non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” A year later, he ridiculed “the Church of Arms Control.”
For Bolton and others like him, these agreements are part of the effort by the global Lilliputians to tie down the American Gulliver. In his mind, we must have maximum flexibility and multiple military options to preserve our security and interests around the world. We must protect our nation with military might, not pieces of paper.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2019/02/01/inf/?utm_term=.
f5bcf4a85d89
To give you an idea of the size of these trillion dollar numbers, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the United States was worth $19.4 trillion in 2017. Haven't worked out the number for 2018, yet.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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So why is Trump getting his arm twisted by Bolton? More to the point, why did he appoint Bolt-on and Pompous to begin with? This wasn't what he campaigned on.
Some say that the pressure of the RUSSIA!!! smear campaign is forcing him to back down from his original goals; because any meetings, any agreements that he might make with RUSSIA!!! would - in the eyes of idiots who still think there's a grand conspiracy deeply hidden somewhere - confirm that he's a "Russian tool" or some such nonsense.
The non-binding votes in the Senate on NATO and Syria w/drawal show that there are still a lot of neocon GOPers in office, and the fact that the Dems have chosen to smear Trump with ridiculous allegations have weakened his position considerably in dealing with the AIPAC/neocons of both parties.
Of course, The Donald himself still is wedded to Israel, which doesn't give him much room to maneuver in the Middle East. He himself needs to square that circle, because- as I have pointed out more than once- as long as he believes that guaranteeing Israel's security rests on defeating Iran, several of his goals for the Middle East conflict with each other.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .
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Quote:I heard an interesting point on Tom Luongo's show lately. He was talking about the intractability of our debt ... not only is the US government debt sky-high, but so is trade, personal and non-financial business debt. And the debts associated with financial speculation, especially in the hedge funds, is literally incalculable but estimated to be somewhere in the range of 10-60X WORLD GDP.
It's all a joke. It's all fiat currency. We're going to hear about these obscene amounts of money ballooning into the billions before we die, meanwhile, most of us are still dealing with thousands.
In other words, it's unpayable.
Some have speculated that TPTB will engineer a financial crash which will wipe out all of that theoretical "wealth" (debt). Others have speculated the TPTB will engineer a world war to cover up the coming economic crash, and to justify a whole new financial system - maybe even a new currency.
Others have speculated that the Fed will simply continue to backstop bad loans with even more bad loans. But to that thought, Luongo said The IMF won't let them. OTHER central banks will riot over having to respond to a constantly devaluing dollar. So ... hmmm...
It's interesting what will happen next.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .
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Quote:Trump’s split personality on foreign policy
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So why is Trump getting his arm twisted by Bolton? More to the point, why did he appoint Bolt-on and Pompous to begin with? This wasn't what he campaigned on.
Some say that the pressure of the RUSSIA!!! smear campaign is forcing him to back down from his original goals;
www.vox.com/2019/2/6/18213706/state-of-the-union-trump-foreign-policy
Trump is hawkish in the sense that he adores military power, letting his military run roughshod in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. During the campaign, for example, he famously said he would “bomb the shit” out of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. That pleases those in his party who champion America’s military ability to fight terrorists or potentially stop human rights abuses.
But Trump is also wary about overextending the United States in foreign wars, and has criticized his last two predecessors for invading Iraq, escalating the war in Afghanistan, and sending troops into Syria in the first place.
But was Donald Trump against the Iraq War from the beginning? No. He said "it looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint." Trump’s first published remarks critical of the Iraq War appeared almost a year and a half after the military action began.
www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-iraq-war/
His reticence to reach for the military option in some cases has made him a champion of the anti-interventionist right, who have also found strange bedfellows in the antiwar left. But you know this guy can turn 180 degrees overnight without a real explanation of why he changed directions.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Throughout the 1932 Presidential campaign, Hoover had attacked what he considered a “social philosophy very different from the traditional philosophies of the American people,” warning that these “so-called new deals” would “destroy the very foundations” of American society. As Hoover later put it, the promise of a “New Deal” was both socialistic and fascistic; it would lead the country on a “march to Moscow.”
In January 1933, President Herbert Hoover found himself in a position familiar at that point to millions of Americans: He was about to lose his job. Unsure of what the future might hold, he considered whether to accept an offer of a regular appearance on a weekly radio program sponsored by the Old Gold tobacco company. Hoover found the idea distasteful — becoming a speaker on a show whose ultimate purpose was to advertise cigarettes seemed to him a debasement of the presidency — but it was a desperate time. As he wrote to his press secretary, Theodore Joslin, “It is probably something I cannot do, but, well, I hate to say it, but I need that $150,000, Ted.”
Meanwhile, the financial structure of the United States was approaching collapse. At the start of Hoover’s presidency, 24,000 banks had been open for business throughout the country. By 1933, 10,000 of these had shut their doors. One state after another — Nevada, Iowa, California — was suspending normal bank operations in order to keep frightened depositors from withdrawing their cash. Publicly, Hoover insisted that the solution to the panic was a recommitment to the gold standard by nations that had recently abandoned it, such as Great Britain; he blamed the impending Roosevelt administration for sowing fear and discord. But privately, only a day before Michigan declared a bank holiday to protect its faltering financial system, he told Edgar Rickard, an old friend from Hoover’s days as a mining engineer and executive, to withdraw “$10,000 in bills” for emergencies.
The story of an angst-filled Hoover quietly squirreling away funds while lecturing the country about the moral necessity of keeping the banks open is one of the pleasures of life.
More at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/fdr-herbert-hoover-big-go
vernment/580456/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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In 1961, America faced what conservatives considered a mortal threat: calls for a national health insurance program covering senior citizens. In an attempt to avert this awful fate, the American Medical Association launched what it called Operation Coffee Cup, a pioneering attempt at viral marketing.
Here’s how it worked: Doctors’ wives (hey, it was 1961) were asked to invite their friends over and play them a recording in which Ronald Reagan explained that socialized medicine would destroy American freedom. The housewives, in turn, were supposed to write letters to Congress denouncing the menace of Medicare.
Obviously the strategy didn’t work; Medicare not only came into existence, but it became so popular that these days Republicans routinely (and falsely) accuse Democrats of planning to cut the program’s funding. But the strategy — claiming that any attempt to strengthen the social safety net or limit inequality will put us on a slippery slope to totalitarianism — endures.
And so it was that Donald Trump, in his State of the Union address, briefly turned from his usual warnings about scary brown people to warnings about the threat from socialism.
More at www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/trump-socialism-state-of-the-union.
html
Trump Versus the Socialist Menace: The Commies are coming for your pickup trucks.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Liberals and Conservatives React in Wildly Different Ways to Repulsive Pictures
To a surprising degree, our political beliefs may derive from a specific aspect of our biological makeup: our propensity to feel physical revulsion to a photo of reality.
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/the-yuck-factor/580465/
Part I of IV. “My Jaw Dropped”
Why do we have the political opinions we have? Why do we embrace one outlook toward the world and not another? How and why do our stances change? The answers to questions such as these are of course complex. Most people aren’t reading policy memos to inform every decision. Differences of opinion are shaped by contrasting life experiences: where you live; how you were raised; whether you’re rich or poor, young or old. Emotion comes into the picture, and emotion has a biological basis, at least in part. All of this and more combines into a stew without a fixed recipe, even if many of the ingredients are known.
On rare occasions, we learn of a new one — a key factor that seems to have been overlooked. To a surprising degree, a recent strand of experimental psychology suggests, our political beliefs may have something to do with a specific aspect of our biological makeup: our propensity to feel physical disgust.
In the mid-2000s, a political scientist approached the neuroscientist Read Montague with a radical proposal. He and his colleagues had evidence, he said, that political orientation might be partly inherited, and might be revealed by our physiological reactivity to threats. To test their theory, they wanted Montague, who heads the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Virginia Tech, to scan the brains of subjects as they looked at a variety of images — including ones displaying potential contaminants such as mutilated animals, filthy toilets, and faces covered with sores — to see whether neural responses showed any correlation with political ideology. Was he interested?
Montague initially laughed at the idea — for one thing, MRI research requires considerable time and resources — but the team returned with studies to argue their case, and eventually he signed on. When the data began rolling in, any skepticism about the project quickly dissolved. The subjects, 83 in total, were first shown a randomized mixture of neutral and emotionally evocative pictures — this second category contained both positive and negative images — while undergoing brain scans. Then they filled out a questionnaire seeking their views on hot-button political and social issues, in order to classify their general outlook on a spectrum from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. As Montague mapped the neuroimaging data against ideology, he recalls, “my jaw dropped.” The brains of liberals and conservatives reacted in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures: Both groups reacted, but different brain networks were stimulated. Just by looking at the subjects’ neural responses, in fact, Montague could predict with more than 95 percent accuracy whether they were liberal or conservative.
Only the reaction to repulsive things correlated with ideology. “I was completely flabbergasted by the predictability of the results,” Montague says. (We’re not talking about reality. It’s about photos. You should see how Republicans over-react when they are faced with the real thing.)
More at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/the-yuck-factor/580465/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Pffft...
Who needs a lab coat. The last two years in the RWED have been a prime example of liberal overreaction.
And no, I'm not at all "flabbergasted" by the predictable posts in here either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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