TRUMP - Just because.....................Naw, I just can't say it!
POSTED BY: SHINYGOODGUY
UPDATED: Monday, March 9, 2026 20:06
VIEWED: 244478
PAGE 141 of 170
Quote:Please add this to your signature, Signym: Why is Trump being friendly toward Russia? What is Trump getting out of this? Because the USA is getting nothing.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
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.
Rex Tillerson, Trump’s future Sec State, already got paid by Russia. Remember Tillerson’s oil deals in Russia before you, Signym, say he has not been paid. Since Trump’s entire life is about money, why is Trump not getting paid, too? We can’t know because Trump, unlike Tillerson, keeps his business secret. Remember Trump hides his tax returns? Remember Trump hides his business dealings? Trump is definitely a guy who can be bought and sold. So how much did he get paid? That is what Swiss bank accounts are for, to hold the illegal wealth of rulers.
www.nytimes.com/1998/10/23/world/ferdinand-marcos-s-swiss-bank-legacy-
tighter-rules-for-despots-and-criminals.html
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:Well, you see SECOND, this is where your inability to even imagine "American interests" is a serious deficit, because I can imagine America getting a LOT of things out of reaching a detente with Russia. So you go toddle off and think about it some.
Please add this to your signature, Signym: Why is Trump being friendly toward Russia? What is Trump getting out of this? Because the USA is getting nothing. - SECOND
Oh by the way, I changed my signature to quote your anti-American statement.
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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"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
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Taking a page out of SECOND's playbook, I'm going to start posting other people's articles. This will save me a lot of typing-time, and demonstrate to SECOND and other proto-neocons on the board that I'm not the only patriotic American who holds these opinions.
Quote:
Neocon Panic and Agony
There are clear signs that the Neocons running the AngloZionist Empire and its “deep state” are in a state of near panic and their actions indicate they are truly terrified.
The home front
One the home front, the Neocons have resorted to every possible dirty trick on the book to try to prevent Donald Trump from ever getting into the White House: they have
organized riots and demonstrations (some paid by Soros money)
encouraged the supporters of Hillary to reject the outcome of the elections (“not my President”)
tried to threaten the Electors and make them either cast a vote for Hillary or not vote at all
tried to convince Congress to refuse the decision of the Electoral College and
they are now trying to get the elections annulled on the suspicion that the (apparently almighty) Russian hackers have compromised the election outcome (apparently even in states were paper ballots were used) and stolen it in favor of Trump.
That is truly an amazing development, especially considering how Hillary attacked Trump for not promising to recognize the outcome of the elections. She specifically said that Trump’s lack of guarantees to recognize the outcome would threaten the very basis of the stability of the US political system and now she, and her supporters, are doing everything in their power to do just that, to throw the entire electoral process into a major crisis with no clear path towards resolution. Some say that the Democrats are risking a civil war. Considering that several key Republican Congressmen have said they do support the notion of an investigation into the “Russian hackers” fairy tale, I submit that the Republicans are doing exactly the same thing, that this is not a Democrat vs Republican issue, but a “deep state vs The People of the USA” issue.
Most experts agree that none of these tactics are going to work. So this begs the question of whether the Neocons are stupid, whether they think that they can succeed or what their true objective is.
My guess is that first and foremost what is taking place now is what always happens when the Neocons run into major trouble: they double down, again. And again. And again. That is one of the key characteristics of their psychological make-up: they cannot accept defeat or, even less so, that they were wrong, so each time reality catches up to their ideological delusions, they automatically double-down. Still, they might rationalize this behavior by a combination of hope that maybe one of these tricks will work, with the strong urge to do as much damage to President-Elect Trump before he actually assumes his office. I would never underestimate the vicious vindictiveness of these people.
What is rather encouraging is Trump’s reaction to all this: after apparently long deliberations he decided to nominate Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of Defense. From a Neocon point of view, if General Michael Flynn was bad, then Tillerson was truly an apocalyptic abomination: the man actually had received the order of “Friend of Russia” from the hands of Vladimir Putin himself!
Did Trump not realize how provocative this nomination was and how it would be received by the Neocons? Of course he did! That was, on his part, a totally deliberate decision. If so, then this is a very, very good sign.
I might be mistaken, but I get the feeling that Trump is willing to accept the Neocon challenge and that he will fight back. For example, his reaction to the CIA accusations about Russian hackers was very telling: he reminded everybody that “these are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”. I think that it is now a safe bet to say that as soon as Trump take control heads will roll at the CIA.
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REPOSTED:
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.)
ETA: So stop bitching, whining, gnashing your teeth, and trying to overturn the elected government. Start planning how to enhance Americans' prospects. ALL Americans, not just your precious hyphenated-identity subgroups. (That is, if you can get over your disdain for Yankees.)
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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"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
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Quote:Not that it will stop you, but you're not using "straw man" correctly: A straw man is based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent. Now I will erect a true "strawman" by reading your mind and writing your response for you: Signym replied that she was using "strawman" correctly.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
REPOSTED:
SECOND, calm down. I can hear your head exploding all the way over here.
Paul Krugman, stawmanning his way through an entire article.
Will Trump’s Fiscal Policy Really Be Expansionary?
By Paul Krugman, December 18, 2016 1:49 pm
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/12/18/will-fiscal-policy-really-
be-expansionary/
It’s now generally accepted that Trumpism will finally involve the kind of fiscal stimulus progressive economists have been pleading for ever since the financial crisis in 2008. After all, Republicans are deeply worried about budget deficits when a Democrat is in the White House, but suddenly become fiscal doves when in control. And there really is no question that the deficit will go up.
But will this actually amount to fiscal stimulus? Right now it looks as if Republicans are going to ram through their whole agenda, including an end to Obamacare, privatizing Medicare and block-granting Medicaid, sharp cuts to food stamps, and so on. These are spending cuts, which will reduce the disposable income of lower- and middle-class Americans even as tax cuts raise the income of the wealthy. Given the sharp distributional changes, looking just at the budget deficit may be a poor guide to the macroeconomic impact.
Given the extent to which things are in flux, I can’t put numbers on what’s likely to happen. But I was able to find matching analyses by the good folks at CBPP of tax and spending cuts in Paul Ryan’s 2014 budget, which may be a useful model of things to come.
www.cbpp.org/research/the-ryan-budgets-tax-cuts-nearly-6-trillion-in-c
ost-and-no-plausible-way-to-pay-for-it
www.cbpp.org/research/chairman-ryan-gets-66-percent-of-his-budget-cuts
-from-programs-for-people-with-low-or?fa=view&id=3925
If you leave out the magic asterisks — closing of unspecified tax loopholes — that budget was a deficit-hiker: $5.7 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years, versus $5 trillion in spending cuts. The spending cuts involved cuts in discretionary spending plus huge cuts in programs that serve the poor and middle class; the tax cuts were, of course, very targeted on high incomes.
The pluses and minuses here would have quite different effects on demand. Cutting taxes on high incomes probably has a low multiplier: the wealthy are unlikely to be cash-constrained, and will save a large part of their windfall. Cutting discretionary spending has a large multiplier, because it directly cuts government purchases of goods and services; cutting programs for the poor probably has a pretty high multiplier too, because it reduces the income of many people who are living more or less hand to mouth.
Taking all this into account, that old Ryan plan would almost surely have been contractionary, not expansionary.
Will Trumponomics be any different? It would matter if there really were a large infrastructure push, but that’s becoming ever less plausible. There will be big tax cuts at the top, but as I said, the push to dismantle the safety net definitely seems to be on. Put it all together, and it’s extremely doubtful whether we’re talking about net fiscal stimulus.
Now, you might think that someone will explain this to Trump, and that he’ll demand a more Keynesian plan. But I have two words for you: Larry Kudlow.
Kudlow is the darling of the right-wingers, who praise him as demonstrating “statesman-like character and resolve, who can promote an agenda of growth and prosperity. The need of the hour is Larry Kudlow.” That huge load of ring-wing bullshit actually got uploaded today on Forbes.com. Where money can be made, there are no l
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Quote:Perhaps you are thinking of a Russian Poodle? That would surely benefit the USA.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Well, you see SECOND, this is where your inability to even imagine "American interests" is a serious deficit, because I can imagine America getting a LOT of things out of reaching a detente with Russia.
Donald Trump: The Russian Poodle
by Nicholas Kristof
www.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/opinion/sunday/donald-trump-the-russian-poo
dle.html?rref=opinion
In 1972, President Richard Nixon’s White House dispatched burglars to bug Democratic Party offices. That Watergate burglary and related “dirty tricks,” such as releasing mice at a Democratic press conference and paying a woman to strip naked and shout her love for a Democratic candidate, nauseated Americans — and impelled some of us kids at the time to pursue journalism.
Now in 2016 we have a political scandal that in some respects is even more staggering. Russian agents apparently broke into the Democrats’ digital offices and tried to change the election outcome. President Obama on Friday suggested that this was probably directed by Russia’s president, saying, “Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin.”
In Watergate, the break-in didn’t affect the outcome of the election. In 2016, we don’t know for sure. There were other factors, but it’s possible that Russia’s theft and release of the emails provided the margin for Donald Trump’s victory.
The C.I.A. says it has “high confidence” that Russia was trying to get Trump elected, and, according to The Washington Post, the directors of the F.B.I. and national intelligence agree with that conclusion.
Both Nixon and Trump responded badly to the revelations, Nixon by ordering a cover-up and Trump by denouncing the C.I.A. and, incredibly, defending Russia from the charges that it tried to subvert our election. I never thought I would see a dispute between America’s intelligence community and a murderous foreign dictator in which an American leader sided with the dictator.
Let’s be clear: This was an attack on America, less lethal than a missile but still profoundly damaging to our system. It’s not that Trump and Putin were colluding to steal an election. But if the C.I.A. is right, Russia apparently was trying to elect a president who would be not a puppet exactly but perhaps something of a lap dog — a Russian poodle.
In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair was widely (and unfairly) mocked as President George W. Bush’s poodle, following him loyally into the Iraq war. The fear is that this time Putin may have interfered to acquire an ally who likewise will roll over for him.
Frankly, it’s mystifying that Trump continues to defend Russia and Putin, even as he excoriates everyone else, from C.I.A. officials to a local union leader in Indiana.
Now we come to the most reckless step of all: This Russian poodle is acting in character by giving important government posts to friends of Moscow, in effect rewarding it for its attack on the United States.
Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, is a smart and capable manager. Yet it’s notable that he is particularly close to Putin, who had decorated Tillerson with Russia’s “Order of Friendship.”
Whatever our personal politics, how can we possibly want to respond to Russia’s interference in our election by putting American foreign policy in the hands of a Putin friend?
Tillerson’s closeness to Putin is especially troubling because of Trump’s other Russia links. The incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, accepted Russian money to attend a dinner in Moscow and sat near Putin. A ledger shows $12.7 million in secret payments by a pro-Russia party in Ukraine to Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort. And the Trump family itself has business connections with Russia.
It’s true that there will be counterbalances, including Gen. James Mattis, the former Marine commander who has no illusions about Moscow and is expected to be confirmed as defense secretary. But over all it look
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Quote:That's you, SECOND.
My guess is that first and foremost what is taking place now is what always happens when the Neocons run into major trouble: they double down, again. And again. And again. That is one of the key characteristics of their psychological make-up: they cannot accept defeat or, even less so, that they were wrong, so each time reality catches up to their ideological delusions, they automatically double-down.
-----------
"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"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
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Quote:Hell’s Angels was about left-behind people motivated only by “an ethic of total retaliation.” Sound familiar?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
That's you, SECOND.
Most people read Hell’s Angels (1966) for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.
What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren’t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.
But though Thompson’s depiction of an alienated, white, masculine working-class culture — one that is fundamentally misunderstood by intellectuals — is not the only one out there, it was the first. And in some ways, it is still the best psychological study of those Americans often dismissed as “white trash” or “deplorables.”
Thompson’s Angels were mostly working-class white men who felt, not incorrectly, that they had been relegated to the sewer of American society. Their unswerving loyalty to the nation — the Angels had started as a World War II veterans group — had not paid them any rewards or won them any enduring public respect. The manual-labor skills that they had learned and cultivated were in declining demand. Though most had made it through high school, they did not have the more advanced levels of training that might lead to economic or professional security. “Their lack of education,” Thompson wrote, “rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy.” Looking at the American future, they saw no place for themselves in it.
In other words, the Angels felt like “strangers in their own land,” as Arlie Russell Hochschild puts it in her recent book on red-state America.
More of the story here:
www.thenation.com/article/this-political-theorist-predicted-the-rise-o
f-trumpism-his-name-was-hunter-s-thompson/
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SECOND
Just summarizing some of your posts with my response.
TRUMP WANTS BETTER RELATIONS WITH RUSSIA !!!
So? Or do you prefer to escalate tensions over things that don't materially affect the US in a 'game' of nuclear brinkmanship? Why?
REPUBLICANS NOW THINK BETTER OF PUTIN !!!!
And?
CHINA IS TWEAKED ABOUT TAIWAN !!!!
And? (fwiw the US drove China and Russia into each other's arms. This could be an opening to split them apart.)
No Americans care about Russia, but they do care that Trump is obsessed with Putin and Putin is sneaking stolen emails to Trump !!!!
That argument is as phony as a Nixon penny, and worth less. Apparently shillary thinks A LOT about Russia. So does obmanation. And so do you. And Thuggr, 'g', and krappo. The only people who really don't get all exercised about Russia are Signy and myself. As for Putin sneaking stolen emails to Trump - my god. You've disgraced yourself with that insanity.
THE NYT WROTE AN ARTICLE ABOUT MARCO'S SWISS BANK ACCOUNTS IN 1998 !!!
And?
PEOPLE SPECULATE ABOUT TRUMP'S POSSIBLE ECONOMIC PLAN AND THEN BLAST HIM FOR THINGS THEY IMAGINE !!!
They react to non-existent things as if they were real? That is the definition of insanity.
THE HELL'S ANGELS MIGHT BE BAD PEOPLE !!!
OMG. Who would have guessed?
In all of your posts, was there anything relevant? Useful? Interesting?
No.
And ...
... How DID your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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As our #1 prize idiot would say: "Cites please!"
SGG
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
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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