Trump's America, March 2017: Using His Inside VOICE

Meantime the Wall Street Journal has gotten aggro all of a sudden. At least with Flynn:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-flynn-worked-for-other-russian-companies-besides-rt-documents-1489683618?mod=e2tw

President Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Flynn, was paid tens of thousands of dollars by Russian companies shortly before he became a formal adviser to the then-candidate, according to documents obtained by a congressional oversight committee that revealed business interests that hadn’t been previously known.

I know its the liberal media but this headline continues a trend.. (strokes beard)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/16/if-youre-a-poor-person-in-america-trumps-budget-is-not-for-you/

think yr making a mistake in thinking that Trump voters are under/unemployed (they aren't). The unemployment rate is way down (oh no, facts!), they will not be swayed by any reports to the contrary. He can fail to deliver and then blame it on the usual suspects, as is his wont.

xp

Granted if there's a fantasy that a certain strain of voter has always clung to, it's that they're surrounded by lazy people of all stripes who live off the sweat of their own honest toil. (Which is why they spend so much time in comment sections insisting this -- an unusual way to monetize but I perhaps am unaware of a new exchange rate.)

despite my prior disagreements w other posters here about the likelihood of Trump manufacturing an invasion to drum up support (largely due to incompetence and a lack of obvious + handily defeatable enemies to hand), I do think this will become more and more of a risk as the presidency goes on. the temptation to resort to the most tried and true method of "uniting" the country may prove too much, esp if there's any kind of provocation/terrorist attack. I dunno who it would be, cuz it doesn't seem v likely that the military will be all gung ho to invade Iran or North Korea or China (lol) and Trump isn't going to come up with any kind of coherent, carefully orchestrated plan on his own but it does seem that he would be susceptible to "well, gotta attack SOMEBODY" logic.

why else does movement "conservatism" want to de-fund and cut to the bone the State Department?

what's Grenada been up to?

I hear a Foot Locker needs re-liberating

hey let's not go putin the cart before the horse now

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/16/politics/michael-flynn-payments-rt-russia-tv/index.html?adkey=bn

if-youre-a-poor-person-in-america-trumps-budget-is-not-for-you/

see here's the problem -- a goodly number of poor white people don't think they're poor

-- and a goodly number of wealthy white people think they are overburdened with taxes and barely making ends meet, what with nannies and private school tuition being so expensive these days.

unless there's a major attack of some kind i would doubt that either party is in the mood for a foreign adventure

Of all the batshit things about Trump, the endless rallies are some of the batshittiest.

Really? I think it makes perfect sense. Team Trmp has been clear that he feeds of the energy of the Red Hat crowds; nothing else can sustain him. Without that drug he gets listless and bored. They spin it as nobly taking politics directly to the people, bypassing the snooty elites and the lying media. But really it is just an elaborate drug-delivery system.

As tetrahedron says, hootin and hollerin is the beginning and end of the phenomenon. It started with the Red Hat doodz hollering "build the wall!." It will end with a few thousand of them, standing in the cold drizzle in a minor-league baseball stadium somewhere, still chanting "lock her up! lock her up!" when everyone else has moved on to something else.

Also Pres. Keyes OTM with

what looks to us like fucking up and failing looks to his base like trying to fulfill his campaign promises and being thwarted by his enemies

Yes, exactly. Outic and Aimless also OTM on this subject. The more enemies the better (from the perspective of the perpetually embattled Fighting Fighters Who Fight).

comrade combover thinks he's mick jagger, and he lives to rock the stage. he's itching to go on his 'you can't always get what you want budget' tour

yes I see no evidence that he will lose the people who think Congress and the media are thwarting him. Posters and Dems who think otherwise are as deluded as HRC was in thinking she could convert "moderate" Republicans.

Senate Intel Committee re: wiretapping: *Nelson laugh*

https://twitter.com/AP/status/842431957107634181

btw NRO responds!

It’s easy to think of the 1990s as just a rollicking good time, a roaring dot-com economy, salacious sex scandals and a comforting if illusory sense that the world was at peace. Certainly, our recent experience with the Obama presidency probably persuaded some Republicans that Bill Clinton was not the worst Democratic president of our lifetime and in fact there’s a good chance he was the best, depending on how long your life has been. Welfare reform, a budgetary surplus, crime dropping – in a lot of ways, times were good.

But there was this nagging problem of Bill Clinton lying habitually and breaking the law pretty regularly. The Lewinsky scandal is remembered the most, but there were plenty: firing the White House travel-office staffers, the “accidental” access to the FBI files of prominent Republicans, the suspicion of financial misdeeds and fraud in the Whitewater Development Corporation, Paula Jones, the Chinese money in the 1996 campaign, the de facto renting out of the Lincoln Bedroom, the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

Even when there was no crime proven, things looked odd and troubling and highly unusual for the White House. Vince Foster was the highest-level government official to commit suicide since Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in 1949. (And as with Foster, there was a lot of speculation that Forrestal’s death wasn’t a suicide.)

During all this time, when Republicans objected to the behavior ranging from tawdry to illegal, most Democrats and plenty of apolitical Americans would just shake their heads with a smile and sigh, “Oh, that rascal! Our president is just incorrigible!” It’s not that they applauded much of that behavior; they just didn’t think it was worth getting upset about. If the economy was rocking and rolling, and everything else seemed to be going well, then we could all “compartmentalize” the way the president did and disapprove of him as a man but approve of the job he was doing.

There aren’t a lot of conservatives who LIKE Trump making a shocking claim of illegal wiretapping and offering no supporting evidence. They just don’t see it as something worth getting that upset about. Trump is a vessel to enact their goals, and everybody knows this is the way he operates. The Red Sox used to say, “That’s just Manny being Manny.” This is just Trump being Trump. He’s karma for all the times figures on the Left told lies and the fact-checkers were asleep at the switch. Is this a good way to think of our leaders?

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/445834/how-gop-crack-happens

silly url but lowry on the stalemate trump and the GOP are in is good http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/how-the-gop-crackup-happens-214919

there's nothing trump can do that some tax cuts can't fix

Do you think some day in the future the red baseball cap will be spray painted under bridges by edgy teens and tattooed on the heads of bald white men in jail?

"No way, man, I just love Limp Bizkit."

is NRO stooping to Vince Foster rumor-stirring a new thing for them? kinda thought they imagined themselves the Thinking Man's Conservatives or whatever

http://s3-origin-images.politico.com/2013/06/13/rich_lowry_gettyimages_328.jpg

LOLwry, you may recall, was so dazzled by Sarah Palin he saw starbursts of joy emanating from the TV.

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

hahahah

Oh riiiiiight, that guy. In the Politico piece cake just linked he keeps it together most of the way through but the wheels come off at the end with the same fantasy I was rolling my eyes at on here yesterday, that the GOP Congress has any chance of offering a revised AHCA that'll "get the coverage numbers up and make it a sturdier vessel for the turbulence ahead." The entire thrust of their relationship to Obamacare is to get the coverage numbers down because paying for health care is anathema to them. The only kind of improved coverage they could stomach would I guess be getting everybody on really shitty, worthless plans, which certainly isn't sustainable and which won't play any better for those reps who are getting cold feet based on their constituents back home.

Yeah I'm not saying he's got the solution to the GOP/trump problem. But I think he identifies the problem.

Lowry looks like a man forever in search of his first successful gay blowjob.

I think he identifies aspects of the problem but he misidentifies it insofar as he is unwilling to admit who the GOP's congressional delegation actually are and what kind of legislation they are going to actually support. He's right that there are hopeless contradictions but they're more hopeless and more contradictory than his coda admits, IMHO. Not to say they'll never pass anything at all, but the structural problems go deeper than the particular language of this particular bill.

a President Trump who would, presumably, be happier to work with Speaker Dave Brat

this guy is a stone cold moron

Re: taxes, it's so stupid (well, yeah) that Trump has/is wasting his political capital (as such) on travel bans and ACA repeal, among other boondoggles, rather than on tax reform. Employment is solid, and the market is doing insanely well, not due to Trump (obv.) but due to Obama. If Trump was smart (again ...) he would have made tax reform a priority, both to assuage corporations and high income people but also to link the ongoing recovery to policies *he* put in place to keep things moving. Then, with America's economic stability secured, and taxes cut, he should have moved on to the ACA, which would have given the GOP more time to get its shit together and perhaps even time to devise a plan to make it better. But no, they are all such shortsighted idiots. Build a wall, ban the Muslims, cut cut cut!! Just all asshole, all the time, when economic security via jobs or even the illusion of jobs would have earned him enough capital to float him a couple of years. As it is, he's the stupid nouveau riche of politics, wasting his resources on fancy cars, McMansions and the political equivalent of gold plated toilets. Instead of linking the ongoing recovery to policies *he* put in place to keep things moving, Trump will be linked and dragged down by stupid policies he pushed through or put in place that will make America *less* economically secure, so by the time he moves on to taxes - assuming he lasts that long - he'll (maybe) be unable to convince his supporters on the most basic of GOP red meat staples.

the market is doing insanely well, not due to Trump (obv.) but due to Obama.

you sure about that? i assumed the market was doing well since his election because everyone knows that deregulation is coming

"insanely well" is due to coming deregulation

The market is doing well thanks to Obama's general good sense. But to sustain its gains they are salivating for tax cuts and maybe deregulation. But mostly those high end tax cuts on 1% people and corporations currently getting hit with 35% or whatever.

(This from a couple of fancy pants portfolio managers I know.)

xpost

and after a few years of financial ecstasy, it will all come crashing down again. that's why i'm not so eager to jump on the optimism train re: trump's incompetence. wild animals can be very dangerous and act erratically when they're wounded. a financial crash seems inevitable regardless of what trump does (although i'm sure deregulation will hasten its arrival), but he still has the power to do incredible damage in other ways before he gets voted out, regardless of his approval rating or internal power struggles with the GOP

DOW doing insanely well hasn't always translated to jobs in recent years either

No, it's hasn't! I'm not saying it's a good gauge or that lowering taxes would be good for anyone. Just saying as far as Trump and GOP maintaining Trumpmentum, it would have been a smarter first move. All their policies will end in ruin and destruction and disappointment, but why start with the stuff most likely to do that immediately. Build a wall! Ban immigrants! Repeal and replace! All those things are instantly bad, but it would take a couple of years before people paid the price for lowering taxes, and for those couple of years ... taxes would be lowered. So people would have the illusion of greater financial security. Again, it is not sound policy, just would have been a purely strategic move. Don't start with the stuff that will immediately take things away - freedom, health care, immigrants - you've got to work your way up to that. But again, Trump is an asshole, not at all cooperative or conciliatory or compromising, so he missed whatever chance he ever had to build up good will and get his bad ideas passed further down the line. All he's done is generate things people don't or won't like, and will/can run against. You never see tens of thousands in the street protesting lower taxes.

plus with tax cuts you can basically send out 'vote for trump' checks like gwb did early on.

Have fun with that:

https://twitter.com/costareports/status/842440961833766913

Several WH players increasingly turning to Meadows and Cruz as they work through health care, how to revise the plan

fuck the market, ain't done shit for me

fuck the world, don't ask me for shit

Don't start with the stuff that will immediately take things away - freedom, health care, immigrants - you've got to work your way up to that.

on the other hand, an administration's ability to push through controversial legislation is generally at its peak at the beginning, just after the election. so typically what is considered most important is tackled first. it's possible that the most important thing to trump is taking away the rights of people who aren't straight white christian men

reading that WaPo article on the budget... it's just so cruel. It's hard to take in the kind of cruelty that budget reflects.

idk occasionally it's good to see pure evil in all its nakedly unabashed shamefulness

Today's press briefing is FUCKING INSANITY.

dunno why they even bother w those tbg, just an exercise in mutual embarrassment for all involved

tbh