Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2015, 08:15:12 PM
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I know there will be some humorous banter about my opening this thread, especially after what I said yesterday, but I must say I was rather impressed with DT on the Sean Hannity show this evening.
The whole hour was dedicated to the interview with him.
Example:
QUESTION What about ISIS?
ANSWER: A big part of what makes them effective is they have a lot of money, in great part because of the oil they seized. Solution? Bomb the oil fields. This cuts off their money, and after ISIS falls the oil capabilities can be rebuilt.
My initial reaction to this is a) that is a good insight about the money b) the solution is simple and politically and militarily rather straightforward c) excellent prospects for attitude adjustment around the region and the world.
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His hair is more authentic than Elizabeth Warren's Native American ancestry.
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on the one hand: http://13cgunreviews.com/
on the other hand, apparently he is against "assault weapons" and wants longer waiting period.
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Trump and I have a few things in common. One thing is neither one of us will ever be president.
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Apparently he let some woman touch his hair today to verify it was not a toupe (sp?)
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The ugly tone to his comments about Mexico and Mexicans in his announcement speech will not be forgotten. If Trump does well, the Reps can kill the Latino vote goodbye forever.
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I like Dana a lot, but she lost composure a bit here.
http://www.bizpacreview.com/2015/06/18/fireworks-on-the-five-dana-perino-flips-out-at-eric-bolling-over-trump-deal-215206
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6R-7-W2W90
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The ugly tone to his comments about Mexico and Mexicans in his announcement speech will not be forgotten. If Trump does well, the Reps can kill the Latino vote goodbye forever.
The illegal alien vote is already rock solid dem.
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A retort not without wit, but the issue remains. The Latino demographic is growing and the current Rep demographic is declining.
We lost the Latino vote here in CA by passing Prop 187 (for the record I voted for it) and now we are a one party state.
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So voting for open border chaos on a national level will do what for this country? The same great things it's done for California?
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Not only is he wrong to call them all criminals
Trump makes a huge mistake about speaking of the "Mexicans". Many Republicans do the same thing when they speak of Mexicans. It is about all illegals immigrants where ever they are from. South Central American, Caribbean, Africa, Europe (50K Irish here illegally one est. in NYC alone), Asia.
The debate need not focus on the *Spanish* speaking ones (though they are the majority).
That would IMO be a good Republican counter to Trump.
BTW Michael Savage just called Trump the "great white hope". Wow. Huge mistake. That gives the left much fodder.
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The vast majority of illegal aliens in the U.S. are from Mexico.
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According to this article it is 52%. My point is if we keep talking Mexicans we sound like we are picking on them. Why not speak about anyone from anywhere who doesn't belong here? I think this will divert this from being an "hispanic" issue somewhat. If we were on the border with India or Indonesia or Ghana most of the illegals would be them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/11/21/7-charts-that-explain-the-undocumented-immigrant-population/
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How is a demand to enforce the laws of this nation "picking" on someone?
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Look, everyone here is for strong and decisive enforcement of our border and our laws, so to criticize Trump is not to criticize that.
Go back to Trump's announcement speech and listen to the passage where he speaks about Mexico and the people who come here from there. It made me cringe.
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Everything about Trump is cringeworthy. He isn't any kind of leader I am interested in, but I am beyond tired of letting the left enforce newspeak on us.
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http://townhall.com/tipsheet/danieldoherty/2015/06/23/suffolk-nh-poll-n2016268?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=
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https://www.facebook.com/abcnews/photos/a.10150095914943812.286215.86680728811/10153546333158812/?type=1&theater
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http://reviveusa.com/trump-rises-to-second-in-iowa-poll/
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His points about Mexico are not wrong but made very crassly. If only he were more careful about singling out and categorizing Mexicans the way he did he might score more points.
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http://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/donald-trump-s-business-relationships-with-new-york-city-under-review-administration-says-1.10599748
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His points about Mexico are not wrong but made very crassly. If only he were more careful about singling out and categorizing Mexicans the way he did he might score more points.
That's right, it was inartful, as they say. Indelicate. Within the flood of millions still coming in unchecked are rapists and thieves, etc., even Middle Est terrorists. That's unacceptable and it will stop immediately after inauguration, he could have said, and not impugn the others for lawbreaking other than coming here illegally.
Maybe it's good that Trump is soaring early in the polls (farther to fall). He will therefore be on the debate stage until he does fall. I don't get his popularity, didn't watch any more than a highlight of his show and I hold a personal grudge against because I once paid real money to buy his book, 'how great I am / art of the deal'. But if he has low information segment appeal, he may draw viewers to the debates, and that is good. Also good that he is running within the party, not as a 3rd party candidate. They should all make that promise in order to appear in a GOP debate. Let whoever should look responsible and Presidential on the stage do so.
Maybe a serious candidate like Carly Fiorina or Bobby Jindal will get left out while Trump takes a seat. Let them make that case and earn their way in.
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MEDIA HIDE FACTS, CALL EVERYONE ELSE A LIAR
July 1, 2015 - www.anncoulter.com
When Donald Trump said something not exuberantly enthusiastic about Mexican immigrants, the media's response was to boycott him. One thing they didn't do was produce any facts showing he was wrong.
Trump said: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems to us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
The first thing a fact-checker would have noticed is: THE GOVERNMENT WON'T TELL US HOW MANY IMMIGRANTS ARE COMMITTING CRIMES IN AMERICA.
Wouldn't that make any person of average intelligence suspicious? Not our media. They're in on the cover-up.
A curious media might also wonder why any immigrants are committing crimes in America. A nation's immigration policy, like any other government policy, ought to be used to help the people already here -- including the immigrants, incidentally.
It's bad enough that immigrants, both legal and illegal, are accessing government benefits at far above the native rate, but why would any country be taking another country's criminals? We have our own criminals! No one asked for more.
Instead of counting the immigrant stock filling up our prisons, the government issues a series of comical reports claiming to tally immigrant crime. The Department of Justice relies on immigrants' self-reports of their citizenship. The U.S. census simply guesses the immigration status of inmates. The Government Accounting Office conducts its own analysis of Bureau of Prisons data.
In other words, the government hasn't the first idea how many prisoners are legal immigrants, illegal immigrants or anchor babies.
But there are clues! Only about a quarter of California inmates are white, according to a major investigative piece in The Atlantic last year -- and that includes criminals convicted in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, when the vast majority of California's population was either black or white.
Do immigration enthusiasts imagine that more than 75 percent of the recent convicts are African-American? Blacks have high crime rates, but they make up only about 6 percent of California's entire population.
A casual perusal of the "Most Wanted" lists also suggests that the government may not have our best interests in mind when deciding who gets to live in America.
Here is the Los Angeles Police Department's list of "Most Wanted" criminal suspects:
-- Jesse Enrique Monarrez (murder),
-- Cesar Augusto Nistal (child molestation),
-- Jose A. Padilla (murder),
-- Demecio Carlos Perez (murder),
-- Ramon Reyes, (robbery and murder),
-- Victor Vargas (murder),
-- Ruben Villa (murder)
The full "Most Wanted" list doesn't get any better.
There aren't a lot of Mexicans in New York state -- half of all Mexican immigrants in the U.S. live in either Texas or California -- and yet there are more Mexican prisoners in New York than there are inmates from all of Western Europe.
As for the crime of rape specifically, different groups have different criminal proclivities, but no one takes a backseat to Hispanics in terms of sex crimes.
The rate of rape in Mexico is even higher than in India, according to Professor Carlos Javier Echarri Canovas of El Colegio de Mexico. A report from the Inter-American Children's Institute explains that in Latin America, women and children are "seen as objects instead of human beings with rights and freedoms."
All peasant cultures have non-progressive views on women, but Latin America happens to have the peasant culture that's closest to the United States.
The only reason our newspapers aren't chockablock with reports of Latino sexual predators is that they are too busy broadcasting hoax news stories about non-existent gang-rapes by white men: the Duke lacrosse team (Crystal Gail Mangum), University of Virginia fraternity members (Jackie Coakley) and military contractors in Iraq (Jamie Leigh Jones).
In fact, the main way we find out about Hispanic rapists is when the media report on dead or missing girls -- hoping against hope that the case will never be solved or the perp will look like the rapists on "Law and Order." When it turns out to be another Latino rapist, that fact is aggressively suppressed by the media.
New Yorkers were horrified by the case of "Baby Hope," a 4-year-old girl whose raped and murdered body turned up in an Igloo cooler off of the Henry Hudson Parkway in 1991. After a 20-year investigation, the police finally captured her rapist/murderer in 2013. It was her cousin, Conrado Juarez, an illegal alien from Mexico, who disposed of the girl's body with the help of his illegal alien sister.
New York City is the nation's media capital. But only The New York Post reported that the child rapist was a Mexican.
In 2001, the media were fixated on the case of Chandra Levy, a congressional intern who had gone missing. All eyes were on her boss and romantic partner, Democratic congressman Gary Condit. Then it turned out she was assaulted and murdered while jogging in Rock Creek Park by Ingmar Guandique -- an illegal alien from El Salvador.
There was a lot of press when three Cleveland women went missing a decade ago. By the time they escaped in 2013 from the sick sexual pervert who'd been holding them captive, it was too late for the media to ignore the story. The girls hadn't been kidnapped by the Duke lacrosse team, but by Ariel Castro.
Now, get this: While investigating Castro, the police discovered that he wasn't the only Hispanic raping young girls on his block. (All in all, it wasn't a great street for trick-or-treating.)
Castro's erstwhile neighbor, Elias Acevedo, had spent years raping, among many others, his own daughters when they were little girls. The New York Times' entire coverage of that case consisted of a tiny item on page A-18: "Ohio: Life Sentence in Murders and Rapes."
The media knew from the beginning that the monstrous gang-rape and murder of Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, in Houston in 1993 was instigated by Jose Ernesto Medellin, an illegal immigrant from Mexico. But over the next decade, with more than a thousand news stories on that case, the fact that the lead rapist was a Mexican was not mentioned once, according to the Nexis archives.
Only when Medellin's Mexicanness was used to try to overturn his death sentence did American news consumers finally find out he was an illegal alien from Mexico. (After years of wasted judicial resources and taxpayer money being spent on Medellin's appeals, he will now be spending eternity way, way south of the border.)
Who is this media cover-up helping? Not the American girls getting raped. But also not the Latina immigrants who came to the U.S., thinking they were escaping the Latin American rape culture. So as not to hurt the feelings of immigrant rapists, the media are willing to put all girls living here at risk.
No wonder the media is sputtering at Trump. He broke the embargo on unpleasant facts about what our immigration policies are doing to the country.
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Wouldn't it have been far greater if Trump spouted off all these facts and statistics instead of simply categorizing all illegals as Mexicans and all Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists?
And only sort of grudgingly say that I guess some Mexicans are good people. And later tell us he loves Mexico and Mexicans?
Just think of the shot across the bow that would have been.
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Spouting all of the facts and statistics Ann did in her column cannot be done in a sound bite. Trump is the master of this - and he's not backing off of it, either. Good for him. Rush Limbaugh asked an open question of his listeners today - Is Donald Trump hurting the Republican "brand" with his comments - as so much of the media is claiming? The overwhelming consensus from his listeners was - "Hell, no! If anything - Trump is revealing in stark contrast the wimps and cowards the present crop of Republican "leaders" are for refusing to go anywhere near his commentary - much less agree with any of it." I couldn't agree more.
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It would appear he is going to stir things up plenty , , ,
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Trump 2008: Bush Is Evil, Talk to Iran, Obama Cannot Do Worse Than Bush
You may have gathered that I remain a skeptic about Donald Trump. Trump fans look at us skeptics with incredulity that we could possibly object to their man, and his ability to “change the debate” and force the media to discuss topics like sanctuary cities. Those of us not so enamored with Trump pause at how that quality suddenly outranks all other qualities in a potential Republican presidential candidate — including consistent conservatism.
Permit me to remind you about Donald Trump’s assessment of President Bush back in 2008:
Bush has been so bad, maybe the worst president in the history of this country. He has been so incompetent, so bad, so evil, that I don’t think any Republican could have won.
Evil? Evil? Of course, in the same interview, Trump endorsed. . . diplomatic outreach with Iran.
You know, you can be enemies with people, whether it’s Iran, Iraq, anyplace else and you can still have dialogue. These people won’t even talk to him. It’s terrible.
Wait, there’s more! Check out his assessment of Obama!
VAN SUSTEREN: The new president-elect, what are your thoughts? Pretty exciting, it's always exciting when we have a change of power, a transition, but what are your thoughts.
TRUMP: It's very exciting we have a new president. It would have been nice if he ended with a 500 point up instead of down. It's certainly very exciting.
His speech was great last night. I thought it was inspiring in every way. And, hopefully he's going to do a great job. But the way I look at it, he cannot do worse than fBush. [Emphasis added.]
VAN SUSTEREN: We know how you feel about this.
TRUMP: It's not me, it's everybody. It's been a total catastrophe. That's what happened to Republicans. They got run are [sic] out of office because we have a president that's been so bad.
And he's been a catastrophe, there's no question about it. He got us into a war we didn't need. You look at the money, we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a war, and then people wonder why the economy isn't doing well.
OPEC is ripping us off left and right, the oil countries are just ripping us off left and right.
So you have wars, you have OPEC, all of this stuff. He didn't do anything about it. He sends Condoleezza Rice. She gets off a plane and waves to everybody and then leaves. It's ridiculous.
VAN SUSTEREN: Governor Palin — do you think we'll see her back in 2012? What are your thoughts on that?
TRUMP: I don't know. There's a real question — she certainly made things interesting, but the question is, did she help? I met her a couple of times. She's really nice. I just don't know. I just have no answer for it.
And then here’s his thoughts on health care back in 1999. . .
TRUMP: I think you have to have it, and, again, I said I'm conservative, generally speaking, I'm conservative, and even very conservative. But I'm quite liberal and getting much more liberal on health care and other things. I really say: What's the purpose of a country if you're not going to have defensive [sic] and health care?
If you can't take care of your sick in the country, forget it, it's all over. I mean, it's no good. So I'm very liberal when it comes to health care. I believe in universal health care. I believe in whatever it takes to make people well and better.
KING: So you believe, then, it's an entitlement of birth?
TRUMP: I think it is. It's an entitlement to this country, and too bad the world can't be, you know, in this country. But the fact is, it's an entitlement to this country if we're going to have a great country.
And then, as you probably saw, Trump’s post-2012 comments on illegal immigration:
“Republicans didn’t have anything going for them with respect to Latinos and with respect to Asians,” the billionaire developer says.
“The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it,” Trump says. “They didn’t know what the policy was, but what they were is they were kind.”
Romney’s solution of “self deportation” for illegal aliens made no sense and suggested that Republicans do not care about Hispanics in general, Trump says.
“He had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,” Trump says. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote,” Trump notes. “He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”
The GOP has to develop a comprehensive policy “to take care of this incredible problem that we have with respect to immigration, with respect to people wanting to be wonderful productive citizens of this country,” Trump says.
Yet I see people comparing Trump to Reagan. Donald Trump has been a conservative for about ten minutes.
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Dear Reader (and those of you with better things to do),
There have been times in the past when I’ve gotten crosswise with certain segments of the conservative base and/or with the readership of NATIONAL REVIEW. And, because, like the Elephant Man, I am a not an animal but a human being, I have always had at least some self-doubt. That’s as it should be. People who share principles should not only hear each other out when they disagree; they should be able to see each other’s points and hold open the possibility that one’s opponents have the better argument.
This is not one of those times, at least not for me.
I truly, honestly, and with all my heart and mind think Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are making a yuuuuuuge mistake. I think they are being conned and played. I feel like a guy whose brother is being taken advantage of by a grifter. I’m watching helplessly as the con artist congratulates him for taking out a third mortgage.
Anger Is Not an Argument
Now, before I go on, let me clarify a few things. I get it. The base of the party is angry. They’re angry about Obama’s lawless chicanery on immigration. They’re angry about the GOP’s patented inability to cross the street without stepping on its own d*ck and then having to apologize for it. They’re angry that the Left’s culture warriors are behaving like an invading army that shoots the survivors even after they’ve surrendered. They’re angry that Republicans have to bend over backward so as not to offend anyone, while Democrats have free rein (and at times free reign) to do and to say as they please.
Enter Trump, stage left. He makes no apologies. He’s brash. I can understand why some see him as a breath of fresh air. If you want to give him credit for starting a worthwhile debate about sanctuary cities and illegal immigration, fine. I think that argument is way overdone, but certainly reasonable enough.
Maybe you just like him. On that, we can respectfully disagree, as there is no accounting for taste. Perhaps you just like his musk and the way it assaults your nostrils, which is fitting, given his line of cologne. Fine.
I, on the other hand, find him tedious, tacky, and trite. He’s a bore who overcompensates for his insecurities by talking about how awesome he is, often in the third person. Jonah can’t stand that.
You see the next Teddy Roosevelt and all I see is someone who talks big and carries a small schtick.
‘Sup Britches?
In words George Will shall never write, this is a good moment to talk about my pants. Earlier this week, Donald Trump attacked Charles Krauthammer and me. By the way, I don’t blame Trump one bit for his hostility. I’d hate me too, if I were him. Still I do marvel at how this supposed Master of the Universe can be unnerved by such criticism. If it takes so little effort for me to set up shop in his head, by all means, let’s give him thermonuclear weapons.
Anyway, when asked about me, he said:
I’m worth a fortune….I went out, I made a fortune, a big fortune, a tremendous fortune… bigger than people even understand….Then I get called [a failure] by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?
As the intern said to Bill Clinton, this puts me in a weird position. I don’t like to brag, but I’m actually quite adept at buying pants. I don’t enjoy it. But I can do it. It never occurred to me to put it in my bio or anything — “Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a successful pants-buyer” — but maybe I should.
Now, I will say that I sometimes choose not to wear pants, and not just because I’m so fond of my spaghetti-strainer codpiece (which affords me the satisfaction of telling really attractive women, “Hey, my eyes are up here. Thank you very much.”) But these are my choices. If I want to identify as a pantless American, who are you to say otherwise?
More to the point, what I find so gaudy about Trump is his constant reference to the fact that he made a lot of money, and his expectation that it somehow makes him immune to criticism or means that he’s a better person than his GOP competitors, never mind yours truly.
The Trump-Pets Blare.
Moreover, I find it horribly disappointing that his fans like this about him. If you met someone in real life who talked this way, you would think he’s a jerk. But somehow he’s awesome when he does it on TV?
His biggest fans disappoint in other ways as well. I marvel at how they can simultaneously despise Obama’s arrogance but revel in Trump’s. (I chuckle at all of the people who tell me he’s a heroic truth-teller for “telling it like it is” and “calling it as he sees it” but who at the same time fume at me when I tell it like it is about Trump and call it as I see it.)
But most grating of all are the people who sincerely think he should be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.
On this, I’m afraid we’re going to have to disrespectfully disagree. First of all, he’ll never be President of the United States. I won’t go into all of the reasons I think this, but a few off the top of my head: his enormous negatives, even among Republicans; the Midas’s hoard of oppo-research material that surely lurks beneath the surface; and his comments about women, which alone would turn the gender gap into a chasm. To borrow a line from Mark Steyn, a President Trump would have more ex-wives than the previous 44 presidents combined
But my objection isn’t to the political analysis of Trump supporters. It’s their judgment of the man that stews the bowels.
The Purest RINO
Which gets me back to the grifter thing.
I’ve written many times about how I hate the term RINO because conservatives should consider themselves Republicans in Name Only. The Republican Party is a vessel, a tool for achieving conservative ends. It’s nothing more than a team. Conservatism is different. It’s a body of ideas, beliefs, and temperaments. The amazing thing is that Trump is both a RINO and a CINO. I’m sure he has some authentic and sincere conservative views down in there somewhere. But the idea that he’s more plausibly conservative — or more loyally Republican — than Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Scott Walker, or any of the others is just flatly absurd. It is vastly more plausible that he is a stalking horse for his dear friend Hillary Clinton than he is a sincere conservative.
Trump supporters need an intervention. I want to sit them down at the kitchen table, reach into a manila envelope, and pull out the proof that he’s a fraud. The conversation would go something like this:
Immigration: You seem to think he’s an immigration hardliner, and he’s certainly pretending to be. But why can’t you see through it? He condemned Mitt Romney as an immigration hardliner in 2012 and favored comprehensive immigration reform. He told Bill O’Reilly he was in favor of a “path to citizenship” for 30 million illegal immigrants:
Trump: You have to give them a path. You have 20 million, 30 million, nobody knows what it is. It used to be 11 million. Now, today I hear it’s 11, but I don’t think it’s 11. I actually heard you probably have 30 million. You have to give them a path, and you have to make it possible for them to succeed. You have to do that.
Question: Just how many rapists and drug dealers did Donald Trump want to give green cards to?
Abortion: In 1999 he said, “I’m totally pro-choice. I hate it and I hate saying it. And I’m almost ashamed to say that I’m pro-choice but I am pro-choice because I think we have no choice.”
Man, it’s like he’s channeling Thomas Aquinas there.
Now he says he’s pro-life. But I’ll spare the mocking on this because at least he’s flip-flopping in the right direction, and I don’t like to second guess peoples’ professed religious convictions.
Obamacare: The man wrote in his own book and said elsewhere that he was in favor of Canadian-style socialized medicine — which would put him to the left of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and on pretty much the same page as Bernie Sanders.
Hillary: Speaking of her, Trump praised Hillary Clinton and her healthcare reform plan — in 2007! She attended his (most recent) wedding. He donated to her campaigns and to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, he couldn’t get his head around the fact that Obama didn’t pick her for VP. “I’m a big fan of Hillary. She’s a terrific woman. She’s a friend of mine.”
Economics: People tout the guy’s business record. But he represents almost exactly what his supporters think he opposes. He’s a crony capitalist par excellence. He gives to whatever politician can grease the skids for his next deal — and he makes no apologies for it. He’s an eminent domain voluptuary. He abuses bankruptcy laws like a stack of homemade get-out-of-jail-free cards.
Parlez vous Conservative?
The most troubling defense is this claptrap that he “tells it like it is.” Well, first of all, no he doesn’t. He tells it the way you want to hear it, which is an entirely different thing. He is like William Jennings Bryan, only his cross of gold has an all-you-can-eat buffet under it, and looks remarkably like a capital “T.”
'The people of Nebraska are for free silver, and I am for free silver,' Bryan announced. 'I will look up the arguments later.' That is Trump’s approach. He’s saying what understandably angry people want to hear him say.
He reminds me a lot of Mitt Romney, at least in one respect. I always said that Romney “spoke conservatism as a second language” (a line some people ripped off, btw). That’s why Romney called himself a “severe conservative,” talked about how he “likes to fire people,” and anathematized the “47 percent.”
Trump is even less truly conservative, but he’s trying to speak in an even grubbier dialect of conservatism. And, having grown up in the tabloid politics of New York, he’s better at faking it.
Eventually, I suspect, this will be the cause of his undoing. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know about conservatism, and at some point he will say something that even his biggest fans will recognize as a damning revelation about the real man beneath the schtick. The only question is whether he implodes before or after he does permanent damage to the GOP’s chances in 2016.
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http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/celebrity/deferments-helped-trump-dodge-vietnam
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What's not to like?
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Much ado about nothing. Trump can't possibly do more damage to the Republican brand than its leadership has already inflicted on it over the past 20 years. Is Trump a bona fide conservative? No. Do I think he'll last long as a candidate? No. But he is doing one thing right that no other conservative candidate for President (save Newt Gingrich for a short time during the last campaign) has done in the last 20 years: standing up to the press forcefully and without apology.
Republican candidates need to understand (as now possibly only Trump and Walker and maybe Cruz do) that the media is NOT their friend. In fact - it is their mortal enemy - orders of magnitude more powerful and dangerous than any Democrat or Republican challenger. It is in effect an extension of the Democrat Party with virtually unlimited resources in terms of money, talent and good little liberal soldiers ready to take orders and repeat talking points.
Ronald Reagan was the last presidential candidate to understand this, and to beat the media at their own game by going over its head directly to the American people. The Republican candidate who fails to do this places himself in a precarious position, hoping to benefit from the missteps of his opposition. When was the last time a conservative candidate for President went on offense, selling conservative ideas to the voters? A huge cohort of voters now under 45 to 50 can't remember any such time in their lifetimes.
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Funny enough, the public will respond when it appears a candidate is actually willing to advocate on their behalf.
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Apparently his clothing line is made in Mexico :roll:
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http://m.weeklystandard.com/blogs/trump-attacks-mccain-being-prisoner-war-i-people-werent-captured_993092.html?nopager=1
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http://m.weeklystandard.com/blogs/trump-attacks-mccain-being-prisoner-war-i-people-werent-captured_993092.html?nopager=1
Trump said something stupid? NFW!
:-o
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http://m.weeklystandard.com/blogs/trump-attacks-mccain-being-prisoner-war-i-people-werent-captured_993092.html?nopager=1
Trump said something stupid? NFW!
:-o
At least Trump tells the truth. Was McCain a vet? Certainly. Was he a hero for being a POW? (Trump's problem was that he was classified as a hero for being a POW). Was Bergdahl a hero? You tell me...he was also a pow.
Trump has spoken more truths in the last three weeks than the whole of American politics have in the last 7 years.
Also.... Trump supports vets.... and vets support Trump - http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/07/18/trump-right-about-hanoi-john-mccain/
"As a former active duty Naval aviator who had over 150 carrier landings on the USS Ranger in the early 1960's ~ John McCain was considered by his fellow aviators an accident prone loose cannon who only survived as a pilot because of his father and was considered a below average pilot by his fellow pilots.."
I am failing to see where Trump has been mistaken.
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I do not like McCain, but surely his response to torture was heroic?
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I do not like McCain, but surely his response to torture was heroic?
Negative.... then again, my jury is out in regard to torture.
About Trump (or anyone else willing to tell the truth and spark public enmity in what I view to be the correct direction), is a breath of fresh air.
Edit: "Torture." It happens. The correctness of it depends on one's moral compass, there is no "right," nor "wrong," in it.... and if you are willing to serve, you better be willing to be tortured.... one gets no special cookies for having been captured and being tortured. Goes with the territory. It's one's duty.
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I am going to disagree. My understanding is that his response to the torture was exemplary.
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http://time.com/3962799/donald-trump-hillary-clinton/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420981/donald-trump-third-party-spoiler
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I am going to disagree. My understanding is that his response to the torture was exemplary.
McCain says he wasn't a war hero and doesn't want Trump's apology. War heroes don't call themselves war heroes. From where I sit, average performance in the our military makes you a war hero. (Bergdahl, not a hero). McCain's service was exemplary. Trump's disrespect for service and his verbal diarrhea disqualies him from being Commander in Chief.
McCain's political career OTOH has been less than exemplary.
Same for Trump.
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I heard part of this rant from Rush yesterday while driving to an office. He does make an excellent true point. It IS refreshing to see a public figure tell the "establishment" to take a hike.
Though I would not have dishonored McCain's service to us all, he has done absolutely nothing as a politician to advance conservatism (as per Levin) who would of course many other so called Republicans. I agree with Rush on this aspect of his points.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/07/20/trump_teachable_moment_how_come_liberals_can_savage_mccain_s_service
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Saw a poll on FOX last night that said that overr 60% of Rep voters say they NEVER will vote for Trump.
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http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/donald-trump-speaks-to-the-silenced-majority-of-america-is-anyone-listening/
If the racial database being gathered collected and analyzed by academic racialists and quietly approved by Obama, his wife , and crew is not proof of what is going on I don't know how else to wake people up.
We are being plundered.
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http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/donald-trump-gives-out-lindsey-grahams-cell-phone-number-120414.html
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http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/donald-trump-gives-out-lindsey-grahams-cell-phone-number-120414.html
I am willing to bet that number has been passed around in more than a few alternative lifestyle nightspots
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I don't know. I kind of think it is funny. Besides Lindsey Graham is barely better than Hillary in my view.
We get spit on by our politicians from both sides of the aisles for so long I don't care for them much anymore.
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http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/donald-trump-gives-out-lindsey-grahams-cell-phone-number-120414.html
I am willing to bet that number has been passed around in more than a few alternative lifestyle nightspots
I should clarify; that was before Trump made the number public.
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Apparently Donald has threatened to run third party if he thinks the Reps are unfair to him.
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Apparently Donald has threatened to run third party if he thinks the Reps are unfair to him.
Play Perot and put a Clinton into the White House?
Almost like we've seen this before.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/07/22/watch-donald-trump-insult-cnns-anderson-cooper-to-his-face-the-people-dont-trust-you/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%207-23-15%20FINAL
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If Trump wants more attention, here goes...
Trump supports the Kelo decision where big business partners with big government to Trump the liberties of small people. Is that populism?
Trump is hugely pro-choice. How is that trending with Republicans and independents?
Trump was pro-Pelosi, meaning he favored a Democratic Congress.
Trump was pro-Hillary.
Trump is pro-amnesty. Ask him. What do you do with those here who didn't break laws other than illegally coming or staying. Reasonable position possibly, but not likely what the hard core he stirred up want to hear.
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Has he attacked Hillary yet? If not, why not?
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"Has he attacked Hillary yet? If not, why not?"
Good question. But I am glad he is in race and want him to carry on.
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Yes, very good question.
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http://freakoutnation.com/2015/07/donald-trumps-attorney-to-reporter-publish-the-story-and-what-ill-do-to-you-will-be-fcking-disgusting/
http://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-donald-trump-wealth-net-worth-2015-7?nr_email_referer=1&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_content=PoliticsSelect
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The Trump Card — Ace of Anger Affirmation
Legitimate Concerns v Trumped-Up Rhetoric
By Mark Alexander • July 29, 2015
"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." —George Washington (1796)
(Publisher's Note: Trump supporters, before sending hate email, see the disclaimer posted below this column.)
Given that his celebrity name recognition and contentious remarks have landed billionaire Donald Trump at the top of pop-presidential polls, I'm now being asked by some grassroots leaders across the nation, "What about Trump?"
First, his support reflects very little about his qualifications, but a lot about how dissatisfied a growing number of disenfranchised grassroots conservatives are with Republican "leadership." Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have, in effect, underwritten Trump's rising stardom. Despite greatly increasing the numbers of conservatives in the House and Senate in the historic "Republican Wave" elections nationwide in both 2010 and 2014, the much-loathed "establishment types" still hold the reins. They continue to marginalize or ignore the concerns of the Republican base — grassroots conservatives — and we are rightly outraged.
Second, Trump can be brash, and he brings some much-needed debate, humor and levity to an otherwise distinguished but dry quadrennial Republican presidential field. Of course, he takes himself much more seriously than I take him.
And third, he has the potential of being a spoiler in 2016 if his campaign lasts beyond 2015, because Trump, like the current White House occupant, is a textbook pathological narcissist. He will, predictably, generate a lot of damaging fratricidal attacks against genuine Republicans and conservatives, rather than focus on Democrats.
As noted by George Will, “If Donald Trump were a Democratic mole placed in the Republican Party to disrupt things, how would his behavior be different? I don’t think it would be.”
Unlike Barack Obama however, if Trump makes it to the 2016 primary, he will rate low single-digits because, unlike Democrats, most Republicans still have the aptitude and acuity for discernment and can distinguish between a charlatan and a genuine conservative presidential candidate. However, post-primary, this egomaniacal celebrity might refuse to throw his residual support behind the party nominee. In a close election, that could hand the presidency to Hillary Clinton, assuming that enough low-information Democrat voters make this loathsome liar their nominee.
That is precisely what happened the last time a Republican billionaire entered the race when another lying Clinton was on the Democrat ticket.1
Can the nation survive four more years of Obama's failed domestic and foreign policies?
You're fired
So who is Trump?
In the words of Samuel Adams, "The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men."
Let's take a look at this public man's character.
The 69-year-old was born into wealth just after World War II, the son of New York real estate mogul Fred Trump and his Scottish immigrant wife, Mary Anne. Trump attended the finest schools, though he was expelled from high school for "disciplinary violations." Like his contemporary, Bill Clinton, Trump dodged the draft with college student deferments, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 and then receiving a medical draft deferment.
“I had a minor medical deferment for feet, for a bone spur of the foot, which was minor,” said Trump. Minor indeed, given that he can't even recall which foot: “You’ll have to look it up."
He was handed the keys to his father's company in 1971 and renamed it The Trump Organization, amassing enormous wealth in real estate assets in the ensuing years. His worth is estimated at $4 billion today, with annual income of $250 million (Mitt Romney's entire net worth).
Trump presided over the failure of two marriages prior to his current administration.
In 1977 he married Czech immigrant Ivana Zelníčková, and they had three children. They were divorced in 1992 after Ivana discovered his affair with celebrity actress Marla Maples. He married Maples in 1993, and they had one child. They were divorced in 1999, and in 2005 he married Slovenian immigrant Melania Knauss. They have one child.
In 2003, he became host of the hit show "The Apprentice," where his fame reached new heights for yelling "You're Fired!" at contestants who fail. He even filed a trademark application for the term.
But Trump himself has presided over four major failures — Chapter 11 bankruptcies at his Taj Mahal casino (1991), Trump Plaza Hotel (1992), Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts (2004), and Trump Entertainment Resorts (2009). (Note that the latter two came after his Apprentice fame. One wonders why he didn't fire himself.) Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago was also a financial disaster, but he was able to walk away from that one. Of those failures, Trump says, "I've used the laws of this country to pare debt. ... We'll have the company. We'll throw it into a chapter. We'll negotiate with the banks. We'll make a fantastic deal. You know, it's like on 'The Apprentice.' It's not personal. It's just business."
Unless, of course, you are one of his creditors or have your pension or savings invested in one of those businesses.
On his religious views, Trump says: “I’m a religious person. I go to church. Do I do things that are wrong? I guess so. [Seriously, he said "I guess so."] If I do something wrong, I try to do something right. I don’t bring God into that picture. ... When we go in church and I drink the little wine ... and I eat the little cracker — I guess that’s a form of asking forgiveness.”
So what exactly is the Trump appeal?
Well, as noted, it's celebrity, demagoguery and the fact he's clearly not from the Republican mold and brand.
But when announcing his candidacy, Trump hit this note on an issue that is a concern for millions of grassroots Americans: "The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems [to] us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
While most of the Republican field appear equivocal on the illegal immigration issue, as do Republican congressional ”leaders,” Trump is clear on his objections, which resonates with a lot of Americans.
Of the estimated 11.3 million illegals in our country, 8.1 million hold jobs. At the same time, there were an average of 9.6 million unemployed Americans in 2014. It's easy to understand the grassroots groundswell this issue generates for Trump.
And the recent murder of California native Kate Steinle on a pier in the "sanctuary city" of San Francisco by an illegal immigrant released once again after seven felony convictions and five deportations, rightly has stirred outrage across the nation. Her murderer is among more than a million illegal aliens who have committed crimes, some 690,000 of whom were charged with serious crimes but are today on the loose.
This, understandably, has kept Trump's immigration platform front and center.
McCain: POW in Hanoi
On the other hand, in his unmitigated arrogance, Trump has succeeded in alienating the handful of grassroots military Patriots who supported him.
Apparently forgetting that he himself was a draft dodger, Trump challenged the notion that Sen. John McCain deserves any recognition for his service in Vietnam. According to Trump, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
Recall that as a naval aviator, McCain, the son and grandson of Navy admirals, asked for additional combat missions over Vietnam. After being shot down, a badly injured McCain refused his captors' propagandistic offers to leave his fellow POWs and return home — meaning he was a target for additional torture.
McCain responded brilliantly: “I think [Mr. Trump] may owe an apology to the families of those who have sacrificed in conflict and those who have undergone the prison experience in serving our country. ... In the case of many of our veterans, when Mr. Trump said that he prefers to be with people who are not captured, well, the great honor of my life was to serve in the company of heroes. I’m not a hero. But those who were my senior ranking officers ... those that have inspired us to do things that we otherwise wouldn’t have been capable of doing, those are the people that I think he owes an apology to.”
Trump's callous remarks fall into the "Hanoi Jane" Fonda category of slandering American POWs, and the rest of the Republican field rightly condemned Trump's remarks.
A Wall Street Journal editorial opined, “It came slightly ahead of schedule, but Donald Trump’s inevitable self-immolation arrived on the weekend when he assailed John McCain’s war record."
But as the inimitable humorist Mark Twain once quipped, "The report of my death was an exaggeration." And so it may be with Trump's campaign, as it continues to gain traction.
The real significance of Trump's campaign is that it's a barometer of just how deeply disgusted grassroots conservatives are with the Republican Party, and a litmus test of what issues motivate grassroots conservatives.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson concludes, "Trump is a transitory vehicle of the fed-up crowd, a current expression of their distaste for both Democratic and Republican politics, but not an end in and of himself. The fed-up crowd is tired of being demagogued to death by progressives, who brag of 'working across the aisle' and 'bipartisanship' as they ram through agendas with executive orders, court decisions, and public ridicule. So the fed-ups want other conservative candidates to emulate Trump’s verve, energy, fearlessness of the media and the PC police, and no-holds-barred Lee Atwater style — without otherwise being Trump.
Trump to Republicans
But the hard, cold fact is, Trump is all about Trump, and his record of public policy support is that of a big-government tax and spend liberal, who is far to the left of those much-maligned establishment Republicans, including his support for ObamaCare, raising taxes and a plethora of social issues abhorred by grassroots conservatives.
But the real test of Trump's legitimacy as a Republican is how he measures up against the Gold Standard of 20th century presidents, Ronald Reagan. Unlike the rest of the large Republican field, Trump doesn't even register on the Reagan scale.
On August 3, the nation would have gotten its first look at Trump on stage with genuine conservatives at the Voter’s First Forum in New Hampshire. However, after one of the event sponsors, the New Hampshire Union Leader, appropriately eviscerated Trump for his absurd remarks about John McCain, Trump backed out.
Charles Krauthammer laments, “This is the strongest field of Republican candidates in 35 years … and instead all of our time is spent discussing this rodeo clown."
Shame on Dr. K. for insulting rodeo clowns!
Oh, and the short answer when I'm asked about Donald: Remember the words of George Washington: "Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." Don't get Trumped. Tell him "You're fired!"
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"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." —George Washington (1796)
Could easily apply to the present President of the US.
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https://www.facebook.com/116687955016786/videos/vb.116687955016786/1148994545119450/?type=2&theater
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second post
July 30, 2015 8:14 p.m. ET
4 COMMENTS
I had a conversation this week with a longtime acquaintance who supports Donald Trump. She’s in her 60s, resides in north Georgia near the Tennessee line, lives on Social Security. She voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and was in fact the first person who alerted me to the breadth of his support. In 2012 she voted Republican, disappointed in Mr. Obama not from the left or the right but the center: He couldn’t make anything work or get anything done.
So, why Trump? “The whole country will be in better shape. And ISIS won’t like it that he’s in charge. He’s very wealthy and can turn around the economy. He’ll get things moving. The Donald will kick a—.” She knows other supporters locally and among friends of her son, an Iraq vet. “They’re completely disgusted and just furious, and he’s igniting their passion. He’s telling them ‘I will make this country great again,’ and they believe him.” Mr. Trump is dismissed as exciting, but “we have to get excited to get up out of the chair to vote.”
Does he strike her as a serious man, a patriot? Yes. “All he does is talk about how great this country is and how greater he can make it, how he wants to get good trade deals and take care of veterans. . . . He doesn’t need this job, he’s already got everything, it’s a pay cut. He doesn’t need the stature. I think he wants the job because he wants to do it.”
Does he have common sense? Yes, she says, he is concerned about what everyone is concerned about, except politicians. “A lot of deals have to be made and he knows the art of the deal. The biggest problem is all the illegal immigrants.”
Is it OK with you that the next president could be a reality star who plays the part of himself, who acts out indignation and fires people on TV? “It doesn’t bother me and it doesn’t bother the American people. And if you asked the people down South here, they don’t care either. They just want somebody in who’s plain and simple who can get the job done.” Otherwise, she worries, “we’re gonna be Greece in another four, five years.”
Does it bother her that Mr. Trump has never held elective office? She paused half a second. “It bothers me a little bit. But I think we need a very tough businessman with great business acumen. We can restore the highways and tunnels and airports, he’ll rebuild them. He’ll build a wall with Mexico. If he was a reality TV show guy that’s OK. Get it done.”
Afterward, a longtime GOP operative underlined her comments on infrastructure, but from a different angle: “Trump intuits that the Republican base loves this country and yearns for an American restoration. The GOP once was a party of industry—bricks and steel—and Trump, the builder, connects with that narrative.”
Some Trump anomalies that have to do with the tropes people use to categorize others:
He was born to wealth and went to Wharton, yet gives off a working-class vibe his supporters admire. He’s like Broderick Crawford in “Born Yesterday”: He comes across as self-made. In spite of his wealth he never made himself smooth, polite. He’s like someone you know. This is part of his power.
His father, a buyer and builder of real estate, was wired into New York’s Democratic machine and its grubby deal making. Donald knew the machine and its players and went on to give political donations based on power, not party. Yet his supporters experience him as outside the system, unsullied by it. He’s a practical man who did what practical men have to do.
He never served in the military yet connects with grunts. He has lived a life of the most rarefied material splendor—gold gilt, penthouse suites—and made the high life part of his brand. Yet he doesn’t come across as snooty or fancy—he’s a regular guy. A glitzy Manhattan billionaire is doing well with Evangelicals. That’s a first.
His rise is not due to his supporters’ anger at government. It is a gesture of contempt for government, for the men and women in Congress, the White House, the agencies. It is precisely because people have lost their awe for the presidency that they imagine Mr. Trump as a viable president. American political establishment, take note: In the past 20 years you have turned America into a nation a third of whose people would make Donald Trump their president. Look on your wonders and despair.
Mr. Trump’s supporters like that he doesn’t in the least fear the press, doesn’t get the dart-eyed, anxious look candidates get. He treats reporters with courtesy until he feels they’re out of line, at which point he calls them stupid. They think he’ll do that with Putin. His insult of John McCain didn’t hurt him, and not because his supporters have any animus for Mr. McCain. They just saw it as more proof Mr. Trump will take the bark off anyone.
They’re not nihilists, they’re patriots, and don’t experience themselves as off on a toot but pragmatic in a way the establishment is not. The country is in crisis, we can’t keep doing more of the same. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” We have to do something different. He’s different. If it doesn’t work we’ll fire him.
Trump’s power is not name ID. He didn’t make his name in this cycle or the last, he’s been around 35 years. He’s made an impression.
His ideological incoherence will not hurt him. His core supporters don’t prize him for his intellectual consistency. He has called himself pro-choice but so are some of his supporters, and no one sees him as a ponderer of great moral issues. In the past he has described himself as “quite liberal” on health care. That won’t hurt either. An untold story right now is that everyone was “right” about health care. The Republicans were right that ObamaCare would not and will never work. Democrats—though they haven’t noticed because they’re so busy clinging to and defending ObamaCare—were right that America would support national health care, but not as they devised it. We’ll get out of ObamaCare by expanding Medicare. Most of America, after the trauma of the past five years, won’t mind.
The GOP is waiting for Mr. Trump to do himself in—he’s a self-puncturing balloon. True, but he’s a balloon held aloft by a lot of people; they won’t let it fall so easy.
The first GOP debate looms, next Thursday in Cleveland. If Mr. Trump were on the stage with the second tier, who have nothing to lose, one or two would go at him. But he’ll be with the first tier, who will treat him gingerly. A guess: He will come out with friendly dignity, shake hands, wait quietly for a question, attempt to demonstrate a statesmanlike bearing to anxious and opposed Republican viewers. But he won’t be able to sustain it. And his supporters won’t really want him to. They’ll want him to be The Donald. Bombast will commence.
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Probably not a reliable source, but , , ,
https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats/photos/a.517901514969574.1073741825.346937065399354/904479802978408/?type=1
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Probably not a reliable source, but , , ,
https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats/photos/a.517901514969574.1073741825.346937065399354/904479802978408/?type=1
Does anyone take Trump seriously? Looking for intellectual consistency from the Donald is like looking for legitimate athletic competition at a professional wrestling show.
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Audio and transcript on Hewitt's blog: http://www.hughhewitt.com/
Mostly a softball interview except that Hewitt takes the occasion to persuasively make the case that Trump should rule out running as a third party candidate. I think Trump heard that and will do that. Also Hewitt is pinning candidates down on planned parenthood funding de- funding. SInce Obama will veto it, the question is whether you would shut the govt down over this and Trump said he would.
As a professor of constitutional law, why doesn't Hewitt push or at least expose Trump on Kelo and takings? Or about past support for Hillary, a Pelosi congress, etc. No, just popular issues.
For the most part, Trump handles himself well and it's easy to see why people take him seriously as a candidate.
Trump does not agree with me or us on everything but he would stand up to anyone and stand up for what he thinks is right. People are tired of weasels and wimps.
Like Rubio and others, Trump believes this country could be great again if we would just stop screwing everything up.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422116/donald-trump-and-american-id-kevin-d-williamson
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second post
By
Karl Rove
Aug. 5, 2015 6:23 p.m. ET
352 COMMENTS
Which Donald J. Trump will show up at Thursday night’s Republican debate in Cleveland?
There’s the Trump who calls the other GOP candidates “clowns” and responds to criticism with schoolyard insults. Then there’s the Trump who last week tweeted about the coming debate: “it is certainly my intention to be very nice & highly respectful of the other candidates.” Mr. Trump seems to have recognized that as the candidate atop the Republican heap, he now will be held to a higher standard than he was as a celebrity polling in low single digits.
Even more interesting than the style Mr. Trump brings to the stage is what opinions he has with him. Over the years he’s held many conflicting positions on many important issues.
Will the Trump who walks on stage Thursday night be the one who in 1999 told CNN’s Larry King that “I’m quite liberal and getting much more liberal on health care”? The one who wrote in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” that the U.S. should consider a single-payer health system like Canada’s government-run plan? That system “helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans,” this Trump wrote. “We need, as a nation, to re-examine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing.” Or will debate viewers instead get the Donald Trump who earlier this year called ObamaCare a “filthy lie” and “total catastrophe”?
The Trump who shows up Thursday night could be the one who in 1999 told NBC’s “Meet the Press” during a conversation on abortion that “I’m very pro-choice.” Or it could be the Trump who told Bloomberg Politics in January that “I’m pro-life and I have been pro-life,” and who now says he’s willing to shut down the federal government to defund Planned Parenthood.
The Trump who in 2000 wrote, “I support the ban on assault weapons and I also support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun” might be there. Or it might be the Trump who told AmmoLand last month that “the Second Amendment is a bedrock natural right of the individual to defend self, family, and property.”
On Thursday night Trump the taxman could show up. “I would impose a one-time, 14.25 percent tax on individuals and trusts with a net worth over $10 million,” he wrote in that 2000 book. But so might the antitax Trump. “I fight like hell to pay as little as possible for two reasons. Number one, I’m a businessman,” he said on Sunday. “The other reason is that I hate the way our government spends our taxes. I hate the way they waste our money. Trillions and trillions of dollars of waste and abuse.”
One Trump opposed the flat tax offered by Steve Forbes in 2000, writing in his book that “only the wealthy would reap a windfall.” The other Trump said on Fox News earlier this year that he favors “a fair tax, a flat tax or certainly a simplified code.”
The Trump who tweeted last Sunday that GOP presidential candidates who spoke at the Koch donor conference were “puppets” might attend the debate. But so might the Trump who was a registered Democrat for most of the 2000s, who donated thousands of dollars to Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, and who explained those gifts recently by saying, “I’ve contributed to everybody. They did whatever I said.” It would be worth knowing what this Trump told Sens. Reid, Clinton, Kennedy and Kerry to do.
This may be the same Trump who gave $20,000 in 2006 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to help elect a Democratic majority in the House and make Rep. Nancy Pelosi speaker, and the one who says he knows politicians are controlled by their big donors because “I used to be one of those people.”
Thursday night, Americans could see the Trump who criticized Mitt Romney in a November 2012 interview for his “crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal. It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”
In this same interview, this Trump said Republicans need to back comprehensive immigration reform “to take care of this incredible problem that we have with respect to immigration, with respect to people wanting to be wonderful productive citizens of this country.” Or viewers could see the Trump who characterized immigrants this way in June: “You have people coming in, and I’m not just saying Mexicans—I’m talking about people that are from all over that are killers and rapists, and they’re coming into this country.”
There’s even a Trump out there who was a registered Democrat in 2004 because, as he told CNN, “It just seems that the economy does better under Democrats.”
Whichever version of Trump appears at the debate Thursday, it will be interesting to see how Republicans react—and whether the moderators drag any of the other Trumps on stage, too.
Mr. Rove, a former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads.
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George de Luna
George de Luna 2 minutes ago
This is a fair article by Karl Rove.I was expecting more trashing of Trump.
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Jeffrey Krause
Jeffrey Krause 7 minutes ago
I'm a big fan of Trump but this one bothers me a lot.
"Trump who was a registered Democrat in 2004 because, as he told CNN, “It just seems that the economy does better under Democrats.”
I would like to see him explain that.
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Robert Morris
Robert Morris 9 minutes ago
As has been pointed out below, politicians often change their minds. However, I have trouble believing that Trump's current statements reflect his true beliefs.
John Maynard Keynes famously said that when the facts changed, he changed his mind. What facts have changed that would have made Donald Trump change his mind 180 degrees since 2000 on so many issues as pointed out by Karl Rove? Part of conservatism is the belief that certain principles are timeless, so changing with the political winds, as Trump has appeared to do, looks mighty suspicious to me.
If the GOP had followed through on their 2014 election promises, i.e. reign in Obama's executive orders, do something about illegal immigration, do something about IRS abuses, etc. then Trump wouldn't have a candidacy. The fact that they have done nothing, and I could argue worse than nothing given their support for DOA trade agreements and the idiotic Corker bill, gives someone outside the GOP a better chance than someone inside. Sorry dedicated GOP'ers, that is just a fact, they blew it, and only Trump can give it back to them, either on purpose or by self destructing. But all of this criticism that he isn't "disciplined" like regular politicians misses the point so badly that it is embarrassing.
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DONALD TRUMP: STILL RIGHT ABOUT MEXICAN RAPISTS
The horrific culture of child rape being imported into America.
August 6, 2015 Ann Coulter
There's a cultural acceptance of child rape in Latino culture that doesn't exist in even the most dysfunctional American ghettoes. When it comes to child rape, the whole family gets involved. (They are family-oriented!)
In a 2011 GQ magazine story about a statutory rape case in Texas, the victim's illegal alien mother, Maria, described her own sexual abuse back in Mexico.
"She was 5, she says, when her stepfather started telling her to touch him. Hand here, mouth there. The abuse went on and on, became her childhood, really. At 12, when she finally worked up the desperate courage to report the abuse and was placed in foster care, she says her mother begged her to recant -- the family needed the stepdad's paycheck. So Maria complied. She was returned home, where her stepdad continued to molest her. When she talks about it, tears stream down her face."
Far from "I am woman, hear me roar," these are cultures where women help the men rape kids.
Maria dismissed the firestorm of publicity surrounding the sexual precocity of her own daughter, laughingly referring to the 11-year-old rape victim as "my wild child." She even criticized the girl's older sisters for complaining about the young girl's promiscuous clothing choices, saying -- of an 11-year-old: "Well, she's got the body, so leave her alone."
In 2013, illegal immigrant Bertha Leticia Rayo was arrested for allowing her former husband, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, to rape her 4-year-old daughter, then assisting his unsuccessful escape from the police. The rapist, Aroldo Guerra-Garcia, was also aided in his escape attempt by another woman, Krystal Galindo. (Kind of a ladies man, was Aroldo.)
That same year, the government busted up a child pornography operation in Illinois being run out of the home of three illegal aliens from Mexico, including a woman. At least one of them, Jorge Muhedano-Hernandez, had already been deported once. (Peoria Journal Star headline: "Bloomington men plead guilty to false documents.")
The Baby Hope case in New York City began when a Mexican illegal alien, Conrado Juarez, raped and murdered his 4-year-old cousin, Anjelica Castillo. His sister helped him dispose of the body. Police found the little girl's corpse in a cooler off the Henry Hudson Parkway, but the case went unsolved for two decades, because none of the murdered girl's extended illegal alien family ever reported her missing. Anjelica's mother later told the police she always suspected the tiny corpse in the cooler was her daughter's, but never told anyone.
In 2014, Isidro Garcia was arrested in Bell Gardens, California, accused of drugging and kidnapping the 15-year-old daughter of his girlfriend, then forcing the girl to marry him and bear his child. The mother had suspected Garcia, then 31 years old, had been raping her teenage daughter, but did nothing. All three were illegal aliens from Mexico, making this another case for the "Not Our Problem" file.
In 2007, Mexican illegal immigrant Luis Casarez was convicted in New Mexico for repeatedly raping a 3-year-old and an 8-year-old. During his sentencing, Casarez borrowed Marco Rubio's talking points about hardworking illegal immigrants with roots in America. "I have been here for many years," Casarez told the judge -- incongruously, through a translator. "That's why," he added, "I've been working instead of getting involved with problems." Other than that one thing.
Two weeks after Luis Casarez was indicted for child rape, his son, Luis Casarez Jr., was indicted in a separate case of child rape.
When the crime is this bizarre, it's not "anecdotal." "Child rape perpetrated by more than one family member" isn't your run-of-the-mill crime. It's rather like discovering dozens of cannibalism cases in specific neighborhoods.
How many fourth-generation American father-son child-rape duos do we have? How many American brother-sister teams are conspiring in child rape and murder? How many mothers are helping their boyfriends and husbands get away with raping their own children?
And how many 12-year-old American girls are giving birth -- to the delight of their parents?
In some immigrant enclaves, the police have simply given up on pursuing statutory rape cases with Hispanic victims. They say that after being notified by hospital administrators that a 12-year-old has given birth and the father is in his 30s, they'll show up at the girl's house -- and be greeted by her parents calling the pregnancy a "blessing."
This happens all the time, they say.
And yet, in the entire American media, there have been more stories about a rape by Duke lacrosse players that didn't happen than about the slew of child rapes by Hispanics that did because Democrats want the votes and businesses want the cheap labor. No wonder they hate Trump.
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Trump Can Win
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on August 6, 2015
Donald Trump isn't going to drop out or suddenly leave the race. And he might just win it.
Trump has firmly planted his feet on the no-man's-land between the reality all Americans see around them and the fiction the conventional wisdom and politically correct speech define. In the process, he has increased his vote share to a lead in the Republican primary and improved his favorability rating by 17 points.
In the July 30 Quinnipiac Poll, he registered a 50-33 favorable rating among Republicans and a 27-59 among all voters. This rating was a big improvement over the 20-69 rating he had with all voters in their previous poll.
The establishment is waiting for Trump to make a mistake. But even as he tip-toes over the line of political correctness, his detractors need to understand that he - unlike they - is a media pro. Where they may occasionally appear on camera, Trump does it every week. He constantly threads his way between critics and says what he thinks. Doing so in a political context is no big deal for him.
Trump has taken the care -- whether by learning or intuition -- to align his own attitudes with what the people are thinking. He reacts to events with the same visceral understanding of what is going on as does the man in the street. In this, he is a throwback to Harry Truman.
He says what we think and what the other politicians do not dare to say.
He speaks openly and plainly about the link between illegal immigration and crime. The fact is that 800,000 people who are illegally in the United States have been convicted of a felony or a serious misdemeanor. Why are they still here? We had them in our custody -- why did we let them go? How many times must we throw them out before we devise a system that blocks their re-entry?
These are the questions Americans are asking. But the political establishment goes into a panic when crime and immigration are mentioned in the same sentence, lest they appear racist. But facts are facts. We would likely have one-third less crime in the United States if we had no illegal immigrants within our borders.
While politicians fret about income inequality and the left speaks of raising taxes on wealthy people in order to give more to the rest of us, Trump boldly faces the question of how China is decimating the manufacturing industries of America. Why won't the others discuss this fact? Because they are allied with corporate management that makes money from importing its products rather than producing them in the United States at a decent wage.
Trump correctly states that the major factors in depressing the wages of our American workers are imports on the one hand and illegal immigration on the other. How can Americans expect to get a decent wage when there are people willing to work dirt cheap as long as they can get a job?
This is the age-old question Republicans like Abraham Lincoln have been asking since slavery. You cannot permit so large an influx at the bottom of the pay scale and expect the rest of us to earn decent living.
There are other areas Trump needs to explore.
Disability: While there are many truly disabled people getting needed benefits, a great many of those who have recently joined the rolls are not truly needy. To some extent or another, they are faking their way to benefits.
There has been virtually no increase in the number of people with real diseases like cancer, heart disease, or strokes that are claiming disabilities. All the increase has been in hard-to-measure problems like back pain and psychological trauma. President Jimmy Carter stopped requiring a medical exam or even a note from a doctor to apply for disability. Since then, the way has been open for a massive influx onto the rolls. There are very, very few who ever get off disability and go back to work.
Obama wants to encourage the maximum use of disability and other programs to increase the number of people who depend on the government and will, likely, vote as they are told.
Welfare Benefits: Entitlements of all sorts used to comprise one-third of the federal budget, 20 years ago. Now they make up two-thirds.
About one-third of our entire population is receiving welfare benefits - payments tied to need. This does not include those on Social Security or Medicare or veterans benefits -- benefits we have paid into during our working years or have earned by our service in the military. The stat includes over 50 different welfare programs, many of which are beset with massive fraud. Particularly, the Earned Income Tax Credit program has been found, in government audits, to be paying out almost a third of its money to people who are no eligible.
In the past, when America began to recover from recessions and unemployment dropped, the number of people on food stamps has decreased as well. But that hasn't happened now. Obama is signing up people for food stamps and encouraging them to stay there regardless of their need.
ObamaCare: Polling shows that the American people value certain aspects of the program: the guarantee that coverage will be possible regardless of pre-existing conditions, the prohibition against raising rates or dropping coverage when you get sick, the coverage of kids up to 26. The polling also shows that Americans are very unhappy with the requirement that everybody buy insurance and that businesses have to provide insurance for all full-time workers. If the GOP concentrated on repealing these dual mandates, they could probably get 60 votes in the Senate to pass it and, very possibly, get enough to override Obama's veto.
Trump goes where the others fear to tread. It is their timidity that makes Donald's courage obvious. He's not getting out of the race. Indeed, he could win.
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/donald-trump-is-winning-the-polls-and-losing-the-nomination-2/
the “election” these polls describe is hypothetical in at least five ways:
They contemplate a vote today, but we’re currently 174 days from the Iowa caucuses.
They contemplate a national primary, but states vote one at a time or in small groups.
They contemplate a race with 17 candidates, but several candidates will drop out before Iowa and several more will drop out before the other states vote.
They contemplate a winner-take-all vote, but most states are not winner-take-all.
They contemplate a vote among all Republican-leaning registered voters or adults, but in fact only a small fraction of them will turn out for primaries and caucuses.
(more at link)
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I find it remarkable that virtually no one in the Pravdas, FOX, or the Rep candidates themselves are not making a major point of showing how Trump and the other candidates are polling against Hillary.
IIRC there are 4 or 5 Rep candidates who are beating Hillary by a point or two in certain major primary states while Trump is down about 14%.
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I find it remarkable that virtually no one in the Pravdas, FOX, or the Rep candidates themselves are not making a major point of showing how Trump and the other candidates are polling against Hillary.
IIRC there are 4 or 5 Rep candidates who are beating Hillary by a point or two in certain major primary states while Trump is down about 14%.
That could be right. But another electoral angle is that if Trump can carry New York state, the math left for the Dems gets real scary.
People on the right need to start focusing soon on who can win. That is one thing people can try to visualize as they see each one at the debate podium. Trump failed and was covering up his failure in the post debate by making the story into a war between himself and the evil media. But the evil media happened to be the conservative's favorite, Fox News and all their top headliners. As someone said, if you can't handle Megyn Kelly, how are you going to handle Vladimir Putin?
Funny that he accused someone else of blowing hot air.
Another observation is that Trump is the Barack Obama of this cycle. Walk right in with no experience. Stay vague on the issues and positions and win by name calling and lashing out with personal insults on anyone who challenges you. Just what we need... (
It bugs me that shows like Rush and Hannity (along with everyone else) are giving him more than even a frontrunner's share of coverage, and mostly without real scrutiny.
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I continue to entertain the notion that Bill Clinton's phone call to Trump the week before he announced may indicate a truly nefarious plot by the Clintons for Trump to play Ross Perot and by so doing tip the election to Hillary , , , if she isn't on trial or in jail , , ,
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"It bugs me that shows like Rush and Hannity (along with everyone else) are giving him more than even a frontrunner's share of coverage, and mostly without real scrutiny."
Also Michael Savage and to lesser extent Mark Levin.
That is because he is the only one saying the things that need to be said.
Yes he has a temperament problem and name calling is not going to help but he IS a good orator. None of the others hold his candle in this regard IMO. And that includes Rubio.
And he is right about some things like no other - immigration probably would have not even been mentioned in the debate without him.
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With regard to Crafty's concern that Trump is secretly in cahoots with the Clintons - I find that very hard to believe at this point - since IF that were true, we never would have even heard about the phone call in the first place. Note well that it was a CLINTON aide that leaked that story. Highly unlikely scenario in my opinion - plus - no one seems to be able to pin down the date of this phone conversation more precisely than within a 3-month period.
Rush addressed this specific concern on his program yesterday, as he had two callers in a row advancing Crafty's hypothesis. His response was that he finds it highly unlikely that this is the case - that he suspects the phone call never even occurred - but that ultimately, he understands the concern that Trump is a phony (not who he says he is) and that all of this will come out in the wash before long if that is in fact the case. We have a LONG time to go before the election. It's still quite early, and I also believe that if Trump's candidacy is a Democrat plot, it's an almost unbelievably stupid one, and will be exposed sooner rather than later.
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Staffers seeking to appear important to reporters leak things they shouldn't all the time , , ,
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Something tells me a graphic designer just got fired:
http://20committee.com/2015/07/15/trump-and-hitlers-recreated-bodyguard/
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I heard that Trump says Warren Buffet will be in his cabinet?!? :x
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP6S3KE2DaI
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Whatever you think of Savage - and often I don't think much of him - here IMHO he makes some excellent points in a hilarious manner:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yawAyr4Ch-o
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My take:
A lot of 'Bushees' work for Fox. They must all be pissed their guy is not doing well so far. Gutfield must think he has an in with his pal Perrino:
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/08/17/gutfeld-like-the-left-trump-is-using-emotional-stances/
A long way to go.
Far more likely than not Donald will eventually shoot himself in the foot. Personally I hope not.
And yes. I would rather Donald negotiate with Putin the Jeb at this time. And if Donald can sustain this I would even feel more that way.
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(ccp) Far more likely than not Donald will eventually shoot himself in the foot. Personally I hope not.
Sometimes it seems inevitable that he will fall to his own words or temperament and other times in interviews he seems just as knowledgeable on a wide range of issues as the average governor or senator running - and far more passionate about it than most.
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http://www.dickmorris.com/trump-teaches-chuck-todd-about-china-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
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I know we have discussed this previously. Can someone find where?
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Birthright Citizenship?
By Mark Alexander · Aug. 26, 2010
Print Email Bigger Smaller
Only if your mother was “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (Ciudadanía por Nacimiento – sólo si su madre estaba sujeta a su jurisdicción)
“The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.” –George Washington
Coming to America
Given the far-reaching implications of illegal immigration, and more recently the Left’s objections to enforcing immigration law in border states like Arizona, the 14th Amendment of our Constitution is receiving some long-overdue attention.
Like every contemporary political debate, the questions raised concerning the meaning of the 14th Amendment are, essentially, about whether we are a nation subject to Rule of Law codified in our Constitution, or we are subjects under the rule of men, subject to a “living constitution” amended primarily by judicial diktat and legislative mischief, rather than amended by the people, as prescribed in Article V.
Does the 14th Amendment mean what its framers intended and the states ratified, or does it mean whatever the courts and Congress have construed it to mean today?
Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which pertains to immigration and naturalization, reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
To discern the authentic meaning of this amendment as originally intended by its framers, we must first start with its plain language, and then further examine the context under which it was proposed and passed. Any debate about the authority of our Constitution must begin with First Principles, original intent.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States…”
This language is plain and easily understood.
“[A]nd subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
This language, too, is plain and easily understood, unless there is a contemporary Leftist political agenda, which does not comport with that understanding, in which case benefactors and beneficiaries of that agenda will interpret (read: misconstrue) it to fit their purposes.
So, what does “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” actually mean? Beyond the apparent plain language definition, a factual interpretation is supported by the context in which this amendment was framed and ratified.
After the War Between the States, freedmen (former slaves) may have been liberated by Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, but they didn’t enjoy the same rights as those who freed them. Though slaves were in the United States legally, and thus, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” they had no assurance of equal rights.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was designed to rectify this injustice by noting in part, “All persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States. … All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, penalties, taxes, licenses, and exactions of every kind, and to no other.”
The first definition of “citizenship” in legal references is “nationality or legal status of citizenship.”
The 1866 act defined “persons within the jurisdiction of the United States” as all persons at the time of its passage, born in the United States, including all slaves and their offspring.
However, concern that the Act might be overturned by a future Congress motivated its sponsors to make it more resistant to the arbitrary rule of men, so they proposed the 14th Amendment to our Constitution, which upon ratification, would protect the provision of the 1866 Act from legislatures and the courts.
Michigan Sen. Jacob Howard, one of two principal authors of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment (the Citizenship Clause), noted that its provision, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” excluded American Indians who had tribal nationalities, and “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”
According to University of Texas legal scholar Lino Graglia, the second author of the Citizenship Clause, Illinois Sen. Lyman Trumbull, added that “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” meant “not owing allegiance to anybody else.”
Thus, in the plain language of its author, those who are born to parents who are legally in the U.S., who have no allegiance to a foreign power (as diplomats), are thus, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” and have claim to birthright citizenship. Just as plain is the fact that the 14th Amendment would exclude those born to illegal aliens.
Despite the confidence of the 14th Amendment’s authors that it wouldn’t be subject to legislative and judicial mischief, subsequent generations of legislatures and judges have so twisted its plain language as to all but alienate it from its original intent – as they have likewise done with the rest of our Constitution.
For that reason, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) is now proposing a measure to restore the original intent of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause by way of another amendment.
The problem is that Boehner and likeminded conservatives still erroneously rely on the Rule of Law, an assumption that our Constitution is still the Supreme Law of the land. Unfortunately, it has been thoroughly subordinated to the rule of men.
Where does that leave the birthright citizenship debate?
Today, more than 20 percent of all children born in the United States are born to those who have entered the United States unlawfully, and who are, by any authentic definition of the 14th Amendment, NOT subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. because they are not citizens. Yet Barack Hussein Obama and his Socialist Bourgeoisie assert that the “anchor babies” of illegal immigrants are owed all the entitlements of an American citizen.
The near-term consequences of this fallacious assertion have dire implications for the future of Liberty, for the Rule of Law, and for the very survival of our nation. But this is consistent with Obama’s objective of “fundamentally transforming” our nation by breaking the back of free enterprise, which is a foundational component of Liberty.
In 1776, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson proposed the national motto, “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”), but that unity will not last much longer if we do not take dramatic action to restore the Rule of Law.
In 1919, Theodore Roosevelt penned these words: “We should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
Indeed.
Now, writes Graglia, “It is difficult to imagine a more irrational and self-defeating legal system than one which makes unauthorized entry into this country a criminal offense and simultaneously provides perhaps the greatest possible inducement to illegal entry,” making a child born to that immigrant “an American citizen, entitled to all the advantages of the American welfare state.”
For the record, according to both the Justice Department and Homeland Security, “A person born in the United States to a foreign diplomatic officer accredited to the United States, as a matter of international law, is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. That person is not a United States citizen under the 14th Amendment.”
So, according to current laws and regulations, consistent with the original intent of both the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment as duly ratified on 9 July 1868, the child of a diplomat born in the United States, though that diplomat is legally on U.S. soil, has no birthright entitlement to citizenship.
However, according to Obama and his Leftist cadres, inconsistent with both the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment, a child born to anyone who enters the U.S. illegally has a birthright entitlement to citizenship.
Which will it be, then: Rule of Law or the rule of Obama?
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I know we have discussed this previously. Can someone find where?
================================================
A couple of references to anchor babies, birthright citizenship and the origin of the 14th amendment:
Patriot Post
"...The 14th Amendment does not confer citizenship on the children of illegal aliens born on U.S. soil as we implied.
Patriot reader and Harding University political science professor Cheri Pierson Yecke wrote in to clear up the matter. She noted that birthright citizenship "began with the Supreme Court decision of United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). SCOTUS shamefully ignored congressional intent and gave the following opinion: 'A child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States, by virtue of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."'"
Dr. Yecke added, "As can be seen in the Senate debate on the 14th Amendment (39th Congress, First Session), a provision for 'anchor babies' was never the intent of Congress." Sen. Jacob Howard (R-MI) argued for adding the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" to the Amendment, saying, "This [Amendment] will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors, or foreign ministers..."
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1709.msg29121#msg29121
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Ann Coulter:
The very author of the citizenship clause, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, expressly said: "This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers."
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1850.msg39499#msg39499
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We all know the wave of people swarming over the boarder and overstaying their visas will turn into a tsunami of even greater heights now.
There has to be *at least* a half a million illegals in NJ alone. I am not talking just the obvious people from South of the Border. I am talking from all over the world.
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Heh:
http://cafehayek.com/2015/08/another-open-letter-to-donald-trump.html
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That is quite cutting :lol:
That said, the question remains about the American working and middle classes in a globalizing world which destroys their jobs and pushes them towards minimum wage.
Marco Rubio has dialed in on this too.
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(Where have we already heard this? http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2551.msg88495#msg88495)
Now the Washington Post chimes in:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/08/19/donald-trumps-abuse-of-eminent-
Trump celebrated the Kelo decision upholding government takings for private purposes:
“I happen to agree with it [the Kelo decision] 100 percent,” he told Fox News’s Neil Cavuto
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/265171/donald-trump-and-eminent-domain-robert-verbruggen
That puts him at odds with roughly 100% of constitutional conservatives.
Most notably, that puts Trump to the left of Bernie Sanders on government power over private citizens, and most startlingly puts Bernie Sanders is to the right of Donald Trump on constitutional protections of private property rights. http://volokh.com/posts/1120223955.shtml
John Stossel had one story of Trump's, government-backed takings of private property for private use, pre-Kelo, in March 2004 (below): Is this really who conservatives want to rally around? Is this an insignificant issue or is it a sign of core principles (lacking)?? How would you like Trump's tough talk aimed at you - in your home? These people were living legally in a home they owned. For the 'crime' of not agreeing to sell to this bully at his price on his schedule they got to have Donald Trump publicly call out their home as ugly, "terrible stuff, Tenement housing", and with his economic and political clout he got the Atlantic City government lawyers to take legal action attempting to force these residents to vacate. Read below. The 'win' the residents had in court was prior to the Supreme Court's Kelo decision upholding this power - that Trump supported "100%". These residents would lose in court now. - Doug
http://reason.com/archives/2004/03/01/confessions-of-a-welfare-queen/4
(Stossel) Sometimes citizens fight back, and when they do they can win -- even against a foe as big as Donald Trump and the Atlantic City politicians in his pocket. In the early 1990s, the billionaire already owned Trump Plaza, Trump Tower, Trump Parc, Trump International Hotel, Trump Palace, Trump World’s Fair, and Trump Taj Mahal. But he wanted more. He wanted to expand one of his casinos in Atlantic City.
Vera Coking was in the way. The elderly widow had lived in a house in Atlantic City for more than 30 years, and she didn’t want to move. Trump offered Coking $1 million if she’d sell. She said no.
This annoyed Trump. He told reporters her house was ugly, and it would be better if it were torn down to make room for a parking lot for limousines waiting outside his casino.
I wouldn’t think that was "public use," but before you could say "corporate welfare," New Jersey’s Casino Reinvestment Development Authority filed a lawsuit in 1994 to "acquire" Coking’s property. It told Coking she must vacate her home within 90 days or the sheriff would forcibly remove her.
Suddenly the $1 million offer was off the table. The authority said Coking’s house was worth only $251,000 -- one-fifth what Trump paid for a smaller lot nearby.
It looked to me like the government was robbing Vera Coking to pay off Donald Trump. The government officials wouldn’t talk to me about it, but Trump did.
Stossel: In the old days, big developers came in with thugs with clubs. Now you use lawyers. You go to court and you force people out.
Trump: Excuse me. Other people maybe use thugs today. I don’t. I’ve done this very nicely. If I wanted to use thugs, we wouldn’t have any problems. It would have been all taken care of many years ago. I don’t do business that way. We have been so nice to this woman.
Trump said Coking turned down his offer because "her lawyer wants to get rich, and everybody wants to get rich off me."
Stossel: So don’t pay it. Let them stay. Basic to freedom is that if you own something, it’s yours. The government doesn’t just come and take it away.
Trump: Do you want to live in a city where you can’t build roads or highways or have access to hospitals? Condemnation is a necessary evil.
Stossel: But we’re not talking about a hospital. This is a building a rich guy finds ugly.
Trump: You’re talking about at the tip of this city, lies a little group of terrible, terrible tenements -- just terrible stuff, tenement housing.
Stossel: So what?
Trump: So what?...Atlantic City does a lot less business, and senior citizens get a lot less money and a lot less taxes and a lot less this and that.
Sadly, claims that people will be deprived of "this and that" can now be used by politicians to condemn your house. It didn’t seem right to Vera Coking. "This is America," she said. "My husband fought in the war and worked to make sure I would have a roof over my head, and they want to take it from me?"
Usually the Donald Trumps of the world and their partners in government get what they want. But Vera Coking was lucky enough to get media attention -- and to have a public-interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, take her case to court. In 1998 a judge finally ruled against Trump and the government, finding that taking the property would benefit Trump, not the public. Vera Coking got to keep her home. She still lives there, surrounded by Trump’s hotel.
Such victories against the awful advantages that government loves to grant to the wealthy and well-connected are possible. But to see more of them will require a great deal of diligence on the part of citizens -- and the news media. If we want to live up to the old saw that the press should "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," the TV cameras need to spend more time focused on the ugly realities of welfare for the rich.
- John Stossel, March 2004
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TRUMP DOING BETTER W/LIBERALS, MODERATES AND DEMOCRATS THAN JEB BUSH
Trump and Jeb Bush get the same amount of the non-white vote
August 21, 2015 Daniel Greenfield
The consultant class messaging is that Trump would scare away far too many moderate and minority voters. So far there's no sign of that. In matchups against Hillary, the latest CNN poll shows Trump and Jeb Bush getting the same amount of the non-white vote (very little).
It also shows Trump having a slight lead among liberals, moderates and Democrats. The amount is within the margin of error and insignificant, but it shows that the claim that Trump will alienate middle of road voters isn't currently being reflected in polls. Or rather, Trump is not any more alienating than Republican candidates to a demographic that is thoroughly media injected.
Trump however does somewhat worse than Jeb Bush with independent voters and he appears to move a few percent of Republican leaning voters to Clinton.
Trump does much better with the 35 to 49 age group voters than Jeb Bush. His performance is terrible with younger voters though. And there is a troubling warning sign in the poll. Trump performs worse than Jeb Bush among under $50K voters, the people he's supposed to be appealing to with immigration populism.
Trump's biggest problem appears to be the South. Clinton and Bush are neck and neck there. With Trump, Hillary has a solid poll lead.
He does pick up more Tea Party support than Jeb. And Trump does significantly better in the Northeast than Bush, but that may matter less in an election. Trump is somewhat better in urban areas, but much worse in rural areas. It looks like that may be a hole in his campaign that he needs to fix.
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All right........in the email group that CD and I are in, they are not discussing Trump. Maybe I can get it going here. Here is why I am supporting Trump.
1. I am fed up with the GOPe throwing "electable" candidates at me that lose. I have had to hold my nose or take disinfecting showers in every election year starting in 1988. All GOP candidates have been jokes. (1976 also.)
2. I remember the GOP taking the same type of negative position with Reagan. He did not turn out too bad.
3. I watch RINO politicians like Boehner and McConnel throw away every advantage that they have in the House and Senate because they are afraid to make Dems mad.
4. I look at JEB and he is pro amnesty, big government, Commoncore and global warming. Enough of the Bushes.
5. Fiorina is man made global warming, Cap and Trade and Amnesty driven. Rubio is Bush lite.
6. Cruz is better but he cannot win. He will be destroyed by the Dems for Tea Party support.
7. Walker can't win. And the other dwarfs are no better, nor can they win.
As I go around my more "liberal" middle class neighborhood, I cannot believe the support that Donald is drawing. People, unless they are far left, are really getting behind the Trump campaign. Simply put, Trump is echoing their concerns.
A good part of my neighborhood is Hispanic. They are overwhelmingly supporting what Trump is saying, especially about anchor babies. They want illegal immigration to end. They also believe that he will not be bought, give in to the political parties, and can help the economy.
IMO, this election is the most critical election since Lincoln. The country faces obstacles that are driving conditions, financial and social, out of control. If we do not get a grip on the problems, then the country will not survive as a republic much longer. Yet, if we have either the Dems or GOPe selecting the nominees and ignoring the people, then we cannot attack the issues of concern. This is because the "elites" only care about themselves, power retention, and money. They care nothing for the values that made this country great.
If Bush is the nominee, I and large numbers of conservatives will sit out like what happened in 2012 with Romney. Better to have a Dem in and know I will get screwed than to vote for a GOPe praying that the nominee will win, while knowing that even if he does win, he will go RINO.
Can Trump do anything if he wins? Who knows? But at least he is not a weasel politician..............
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Crafty,
I believe you will find this particularly illuminating:
SUPERB examination and explication of this subject by Mark Levin interviewing Professor Edward Erler on this topic on Levin's radio show - August 19, 2015:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dzzi3s9vJ4
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FYI,
I spend most days doing consulting work for attorneys. The work mostly involves developing arguments on foreclosure and lending law, but it frequently crosses over into the realm of fraud and other subjects. To do this work, I have had to develop a firm understanding of how to read and understand statutes, regulations, and case law. This has been especially important since I am often retained to be an Expert Witness in various cases.
Since the subject of Anchor Babies arose, I have been reviewing the Constitution, 14th Amendment, the Intent of the legislation and of course, SCOTUS case law. Based upon my own non-professional observations and readings, I believe:
1. As has been represented by Levin and others, the 14th did only address the issue of Slavery. It did not expand further rights to other parties.
2. The fact that in 1924, Congress passed additional legislation giving all Indians the right of citizenship that did not exist prior thanks to SCOTUS rulings is further proof of the 14th Amendment intent.
3. The 14th Amendment does not need to be repealed. From the wording, Congress can enact laws to either expend or shrink the scope of the Amendment.
Now, talking with friends who are legal immigrants currently, some Green Card and others who have been awarded Citizenship, I have yet to hear any say that illegals and anchor babies deserve Citizenship. More over, most like the idea of Trump sending them back, and this includes two who have their own businesses and who actually employ illegals.
On a more personal level:
1. My wife is first generation from El Salvador. Her mother and father came over in the 1930's legally. 7 sisters also immigrated legally. All support Trump and his policies.
2. My son-in-law is first generation from Italy. His father, mother and grandparents all came over during WW2, legally. They support Trump.
3. My son married a Canadian. She came into the US and went through all citizenship requirements. The cost was incredible for them but she did it. They support Trump.
I can go on ad on, but you get the idea.......
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ppulatie,
Thanks for that excellent post. Agree 100% and that is one big reason I could never vote for Bush, Kasich, or Graham.
They have surrendered to the identity politics of the Democrat party at the expense of the rest of the country.
Trump is the only one standing up to this and that is why he is, so far, popular among us.
The intent of the 14th amendment is obviously not to allow us to be walked all over by people flooding into our country illegally.
And yes, they are "anchor babies". The OB floors in our hospitals are revolving doors of illegals having babies. It is absurd and nothing less.
I have one niece from England. Another from S. Africa. They had to go through a lot to become citizens.
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Loved what Trump did with Ramos last night in Iowa. Can;t wait to see Black Lives Matter try their act on Trump.
Trumps support will increase to 40% now and if he does the same to BLM, then it is over 50%.
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"The 14th Amendment does not need to be repealed. From the wording, Congress can enact laws to either expend or shrink the scope of the Amendment."
I like this approach - or any other way to get the Supreme Court to revisit this mistake. Still it would take significant support from Dems to override a veto. Obama isn't going to sign it and R's don't have 60, much less 67 votes.
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Getting tossed out of a Trump event for interrupting it is better treatment than Vera Coking got for the 'crime' of owning a house where Trump wanted a parking lot.
How one behaves when no one is watching is one window into character. In the case of Donald Trump and Vera Coking, the bullying was in full public view. Trump called Coking's home "ugly", "tenement housing". He did it loudly, in public, in trademark Donald Trump style.
Trump used his purchased political connections and hefty economic clout to join forces with government officials for the purpose of forcing this owner/resident out, using eminent domain by government taking - from a private citizen for the purpose of turning it over to their preferred private project, a Trump casino limosine parking lot. Welcome to Donald Trump's career.
The developer-in-bed-with-government alliance became famous about 10 years later with the Supreme Court case of Kelo v. New London, CT where Suzette Kelo lost her house and her Supreme Court case to a Pfizer project - that never happened. Donald Trump insists he agrees 100% with that decision.
When those with the most economic clout make alliance with bigger and bigger government power and use that power to enrich both themselves and the government, while tromping (Trumping) over the private property rights of the 'smaller' people - that is the worst kind of crony capitalism that makes the right, left and middle angry and cynical. Yet we keep letting it happen and supporting the perpetrators.
Trump (and the 5 Justices that upheld Kelo) have economic policy and private property rights wrong and backwards. We aren't better off when our government partners up with the most powerful businesses like they do in the most corrupt, third world countries of the world. We need our government to govern. Maintain a safety net, security, public services and infrastructure, but mostly we need government to maintain a level playing field that doesn't favor one class of participants over the others.
Mr. Trump, there is no such thing as a Big Government Conservative, nor will there ever be a head of government who "creates the most jobs in history". What will make our country great again is to right-size our government down to its proper functions and restore a fair path and reward for honest work and risk taking.
Trump is a serious contender for President so his (lack of) character and principles matters. When faced with a choice between calling in purchased government power and favoritism over conserving private property rights - even for people who don't contribute millions to both parties, Donald Trump didn't flinch, and has no regret. Instead he jokes about what he bought with all his contributions, from condemnation of people's property in his way to buying the attendance of the Clintons at his wedding.
It's really not that funny. My two cents.
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I like Trump's ballsiness and lack of groveling, but he sure isn't my choice.
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Answer me this...............
Is there anyone else who could be elected (and this is the key criteria) that would change things?
Carly is a closet liberal who supports amnesty, cap and trade and health care.
Bush is amnesty, global warming and commoncore.
Rubio is Bush lite and supports amnesty and commoncore.
Cruz can't win. He will be Tea Party papered with all the derogatory comments destroying him.
Walker is falling apart. On immigration, in a 30 minute speech, he flipped flopped 3 times.
Carson would be good, but otherwise cannot win. His lack of knowledge and experience would get him bounced out quick. Plus being a black conservative would really go against him.
This country needs a radical change from where we are now. But there are no "leaders" that can do so among the political elite. Sure, Trump has his bad points, but you are not going to find a true conservative anywhere that can get elected. Purity and the ability to be elected does not exist.
All I know is that if Bush or Rubio is the nominee, then I am sitting the election out and for the first time since I could vote in 1972.
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OTOH Trump is a crony capitalist narcissist of little discernible principals.
I am interested to know more about Fiorina on illegals, immigration, global warming etc. Please post info on her thread.
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PP, First, glad you're in on the discussion! Second, I think I'm with you on policies and issues, just not all the conclusions.
You are kind of tough on some of the other mortals trying to be President, so let's apply that same standard to Trump. He is a Rino in as many ways as the others who commonly earn that title; he's just not a wishy-washy one. Most notably, he earns that mark by siding with big government solutions whenever it suits him. The term Cino is now emerging, conservative in name only. Trump makes Romney look consistent - and "severely" conservative. (
"Purity and the ability to be elected does not exist." - True. But Trump is also a Rino on constitutional issues, to the left of Sandra Day O'Connor(!), and I don't consider the right to pick the next Supreme Court Justices to be a minor part of the job. Most of what is wrong with the country today can be traced back to bad Supreme Court decisions.
Yes, I think electing Rubio could change the mindset and direction in this country, and he polls better than Trump and the others in the general election matchups. In that sense, it is Trump who is unelectable (looking at it today). Losing the election, by definition, means not being able to change things. Conversely, the country will have to change its mindset in order to elect a Republican in these new demographics. So the question becomes, who can make that case most persuasively - to the people who are most persuadable? Trump is hitting a chord right now with people that are already pissed off. To me, it is Rubio who has a chance to change minds without evoking the usual negative reaction so many voters tend to have toward conservative candidates. We can discuss Rubio further on his own thread; I sense you disagree.
On immigration Trump says he will send them all back but it isn't going to happen. Pressed for details he says start with the gangbangers, murderers and rapists. I think we can get Rubio, Cruz, Fiorina, Carson and others to agree with at least that. Rubio went soft on amnesty trying to get a deal (there goes purity) but also got a real world lesson on how Democrats don't negotiate in good faith and how you have to win more elections and bigger ones to make positive changes. Now he says, secure the border first. Like Trump, he may actually mean that and accomplish it especially if a like-minded congress got on board. In the end, I don't see a real policy difference left on immigration beyond that one is going to alienate everyone along the way, and one might win and get border security done.
PP knows many Hispanics who support Trump. But most Hispanics know someone pretty closely who is vulnerable to mass deportation talk. Trump's polling is net -51% with Hispanics. http://www.gallup.com/poll/184814/hispanics-frown-trump-not-rest-gop-field.aspx (chart below) We need to start enforcing the law without the grandstanding to scare everyone (IMHO).
Jeb Bush has stubbornly stuck with Common Core long after everyone else on the right figured out it is a big leftist government takeover. I don't know where Rubio is on that but I know his underlying principles are not big, federal government centric. No one speaks out better on liberty than Rubio, IMHO. Having the federal government bully the states on state issues doesn't match anything else Rubio is saying or doing. I don't know where Trump is on it, but taking from his other positions, he will head up the best federal government run schools in the world!
I don't know if Walker survives his latest flipflops. I've also wondered if Carly is a closet liberal and if statements she made trying to ease the left in California will come back to haunt her. Now I suspect it is the opposite; she tried sounding moderate in Calif but really was a closet conservative. She may have some explaining to do along the way but sounds very good to me right now. I like Cruz but he doesn't seem to know the full political game or have enough appeal, especially crossover appeal to go it alone. I have the concerns with Carson that PP expressed, does he know enough to survive the process? It is a long process though and perhaps the answer will be yes. And when you hear that he lost his two older cousins on the streets of Detroit before he figured out to set his own life on a good path, maybe he knows things about turning things around that the rest of us could never know. If a significant number of the people currently unproductive by choice suddenly jumped into our economy, amazing things would happen. Being a black conservative is a GREAT thing! All of those, Rubio, Carson, Fiorina, Cruz, Walker, would be fine with me, and Jindal too, though I don't see him catching on. As PP said, just pick the one who will win - and the one who will get the right things done if they do win.
Jeb Bush is a topic all his own. He was a good governor but is wrong about the two issues mentioned and declared he doesn't need the support of people like me to win. So he can win the nomination without the support of people like me. Kasich is perhaps in a similar situation. Let's deal with the question of sitting out the general election only if it comes to that. Our job right now is to make sure we don't need to.
Gallup Chart:
(http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/6-swa7y0k02i1yrwiq0iaa.png)
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Very good discussion going on here gentlemen.
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/08/26/this-is-a-first-donald-trumps-response-to-glenns-interview-invitation/
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DougMacG,
Yes, I am hard on the other mortals, but why should I not be? They are all professional politicians except for Carly and Carson. And look what professional politicians get us. Nothing good.
There is a deliberate GOPe strategy going on with this election. They are all in the tank for Bush and will do anything to get him elected, but they know that he is not well liked by the "commoners" in the party. So they have engaged in a deliberate strategy to get him nominated. That strategy involves getting enough candidates in the key states to dilute the vote against Bush so that no one will have a majority, and therefore the delegates go to Bush. And this plan was going to work except for one problem.......no one counted on Trump.
Now the GOPe is trying ways to stop Trump. One is in Virginia, North and South Carolina. The potential candidate must take a "loyalty oath" to not run as a third party if they lose, or they do not get on the primary ballot. Now, the RNC is talking about any candidate who does not win at least 8 primaries cannot be nominated at the Convention. What this does is ensure that if anyone not meeting this criteria but has won states, those delegates are now freed up to go where "they" want.
Now people are picking on Trump on the immigration plan. He cannot deport 11m people. Doesn't anyone realize that Trump is a "negotiator"? He throws this out, but you can bet he has "fall back" positions for when he wins. Never give out your bottom line position at this stage.
Kelo is an issue, but if eminent domain is available and there is benefit, why not?
FYI, I was originally completely against ED, but the housing crisis changed my opinion. In cities like Richmond CA, Camden NJ, and many others, there can be no housing recovery because the homes are underwater still and the people cannot afford the mortgages. Lenders are not working with the people. Why not use ED to take the homes, pay the Investors fair market value, and then get someone in to rework the loans for the people? It is possible and I know it is because I have been involved in discussions among a major investor who would rework the loans, a servicer willing to go along with it, and a local government ready to engage the ED. But guess what? The damned Congress and Obama enacted legislation that if a city did ED to help the crisis locally, the homes involved could never again be eligible for GSE or FHA funding. Wells Fargo and the other banks win again.
What Trump is doing is bringing all these issues to the light, but that is exactly what the GOPe and the Dems do not want. it threatens their own interests and that is heresy.
We are at a crossroads in the US. This election is likely the most critical election since 1860. The fate of the US hinges on it, but if we have a GOPe candidate, it matters not whether the new President and Congress is controlled by either party. They will all do the same as now. So we have to consider all alternatives.
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Here is a thought:
Donald should announce that if elected he contemplates making Ted Cruz the Attorney General, Ben Carson the Sec of HHS to handle health care, and Carly Fiorina to something that calls upon her considerable talents.
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CD,
What makes you think that he would not get the best for each area? That is what he says he would do, and I believe him there.
As another point to DMG,
People are looking at Trump not for his "detailed" positions, they are looking at him for a reason that escapes most. They are looking for leadership. For so long, we have had no leadership. Politicians have taken a position of getting along or or just acting, often out of spite. None show true leadership capabilities like Reagan, and even JFK for a period of time.
As well, I don't know how old you and others are, but there is something else going on that should be considered. For those who are old enough and worked though this period of time, go back to 1975 through 1980 and think of the economy and what we were go though. Some points about that time:
1. Ford presents his program for reducing inflation. WIN. Whip inflation now. A slogan which meant nothing. ( I don't remember the inflation rate, but it was poor.)
2. 1975 with Ford, the Tax Rebate of $200 (maybe $300 but my memory is not so good). I remember being in a meeting with Senator Tunney, Dem from CA. He was touting how great an idea this was. It would help the middle class. I got up and challenged him about it, stating that the money meant nothing. it would not help the middle class and it would only be spent on food or bills. Needless to say, he had no response. (His brother was the fighter. May he got it too many times fighting his brother and it addled his brains.)
3. 1973, Gas rationing. We had to buy gas on alternative days and you waited in line for an hour or more. If you ran out of gas on the no buy day, you were SOL.
4. Jimmy Carter, a President who had no leadership ability. Control freak who actually filled out the White House Tennis Court Usage schedule. He was voted in simply as a reaction to Nixon and an incompetent Ford who stated in a debate that Poland was not a satellite of the USSR.
5. Under Jimmy Carter, the Misery Index of 19.72%
6. The Iranian Hostage situation.
(BTW, here is an interesting factoid. When the hostages were taken in Nov 2008, I was stationed at RAF Bentwaters. There, we had 67th Air Rescue which had evacuated US personnel from Iran in the year before. When the hostages were taken, my squadron was recalled for possible action in hostage recovery. At the same time, Airborne and other Army troops were in Germany for the Reforger exercises. We could have sent Airborne from Germany and our own squadron from Bentwaters with C 141 and C 130 aircraft, supported by 5 Bentwater A10 squadrons, F-15s out of Bitburg, F111s from Mildenhall and other support aircraft to get the hostages within the first few days. Even in April of 1980, we could still have gone, but Carter wanted to use Navy choppers which it was well known would have had problems with the sand getting in their engines. But Carter did not have the guts to do what was needed.)
7. A National Election in 1980 where the GOP tried for the second time to keep Reagan from being the nominee. Instead, they want the Senior Bush to be the nominee. Yet the 'commoners" wanted Reagan.
The conditions of 1980 match what is occurring today in all too many ways. We have a populace looking for leadership and a bunch of politicians that offer no leadership. Even worse, they continuously ignore or insult those who disagree, calling us vulgar, low information votes, idiots, and who knows what else. They are the Elitists who know what is best for us and they are not to be challenged.
To hell with them all. As far as I am concerned, the professional politicians can go to hell. BURN IT DOWN!!!!!
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"FYI, I was originally completely against ED, but the housing crisis changed my opinion. In cities like Richmond CA, Camden NJ, and many others, there can be no housing recovery because the homes are underwater still and the people cannot afford the mortgages. Lenders are not working with the people. Why not use ED to take the homes, pay the Investors fair market value, and then get someone in to rework the loans for the people? It is possible and I know it is because I have been involved in discussions among a major investor who would rework the loans, a servicer willing to go along with it, and a local government ready to engage the ED. But guess what? The damned Congress and Obama enacted legislation that if a city did ED to help the crisis locally, the homes involved could never again be eligible for GSE or FHA funding. Wells Fargo and the other banks win again."
Interesting take on this PP. I can see why you like it but I see a few problems too. Some of this belongs in our housing/mortgage thread, but it ties back to Trump as well - by his choice.
a) I don't really see someone as a homeowner if they have zero equity or less.
b) There is a difference between underwater and being delinquent or in default. Underwater, I guess, is none of my business as long as they are making the required payments. I think you deal with situations where they are not.
c) The central problem with delinquent, underwater properties in default is that government rules make it difficult and sometimes impossible for a lender to take back a property.
d) That the lender took a bad risk and made a bad loan and the property won't cover their costs is not my problem or concern.
e) A mortgage IS the right to take back a property in default. If it can't be taken back in a reasonable time, process and cost, it is an unsecured loan. When the collateral means nothing, that is when loans don't get made, hurting everyone. Again, the rules of foreclosure are the problem, not market fluctuations or anything else.
f) Instead of fixing the central problem caused by government rules, we establish new government powers.
g) Assuming you cannot change the rules tying the hands of lenders to get back their rightful collateral and the strategy you suggest is perfectly executed, I can see how a bad situation is dealt with and resolved.
g) On the flip side of giving government the power to take private property for private purposes without limits are all the moral hazards that come with that and eventually take down all great, centrally planned economies:
1. With expanded government power comes expanded government corruption. Without a doubt.
2. Large industrial and economic players can buy that power for their own benefit. And they do. The richest counties in the United States are mostly in the DC area. Buying power isn't a small industry; it has become our largest industry.
3. Government officials can sell that power for their own benefit.
4. People without power get Trumped on, like of Suzette Kelo in New London, Vera Coking in Atlantic City, and Nancy MacGibbon in Minneapolis.
5. When victims of eminent domain get 'fair market value' for what is taken from them, they don't get fair market value.
6. And when government powers have no limit, well, we don't know and can't even imagine all of where that will lead...
Donald Trump is a great "negotiator", (he says). The victim examples listed above did not consent to entering into "negotiations with Trump or Trump-like entities. Assuming they owned their property, paid their taxes, followed the laws, kept up their homes, paid their mortgages and all that, do they have a right of privacy? Do they have a right to be left alone? Are these rights what the constitution calls unenumerated rights that areprotected by the 9th amendment in the constitution? Of course they are. Is this a small matter? No.
Now back to the 5th amendment:
" If such “economic development” takings are for a “public use,” any taking is, and the Court has erased the Public Use Clause from our Constitution, as Justice O’Connor powerfully argues in dissent. Ante, at 1—2, 8—13. I do not believe that this Court can eliminate liberties expressly enumerated in the Constitution "
- Justice Clarence Thomas in dissent on Kelo
And if you feel the opposite, you believe the Court can eliminate liberties expressly protected in the constitution. You are President Trump appointing judges who will do just that.
PP: "Kelo is an issue, but if eminent domain is available and there is benefit, why not? "
I hope I have answered that.
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...
As another point to DMG,
People are looking at Trump not for his "detailed" positions, they are looking at him for a reason that escapes most. They are looking for leadership. For so long, we have had no leadership. Politicians have taken a position of getting along or or just acting, often out of spite. None show true leadership capabilities like Reagan, and even JFK for a period of time.
As well, I don't know how old you and others are, but there is something else going on that should be considered. For those who are old enough and worked though this period of time, go back to 1975 through 1980 and think of the economy and what we were go though. Some points about that time:
1. Ford presents his program for reducing inflation. WIN. Whip inflation now. A slogan which meant nothing. ( I don't remember the inflation rate, but it was poor.)
2. 1975 with Ford, the Tax Rebate of $200 (maybe $300 but my memory is not so good). I remember being in a meeting with Senator Tunney, Dem from CA. He was touting how great an idea this was. It would help the middle class. I got up and challenged him about it, stating that the money meant nothing. it would not help the middle class and it would only be spent on food or bills. Needless to say, he had no response. (His brother was the fighter. May he got it too many times fighting his brother and it addled his brains.)
3. 1973, Gas rationing. We had to buy gas on alternative days and you waited in line for an hour or more. If you ran out of gas on the no buy day, you were SOL.
4. Jimmy Carter, a President who had no leadership ability. Control freak who actually filled out the White House Tennis Court Usage schedule. He was voted in simply as a reaction to Nixon and an incompetent Ford who stated in a debate that Poland was not a satellite of the USSR.
5. Under Jimmy Carter, the Misery Index of 19.72%
6. The Iranian Hostage situation.
(BTW, here is an interesting factoid. When the hostages were taken in Nov 2008, I was stationed at RAF Bentwaters. There, we had 67th Air Rescue which had evacuated US personnel from Iran in the year before. When the hostages were taken, my squadron was recalled for possible action in hostage recovery. At the same time, Airborne and other Army troops were in Germany for the Reforger exercises. We could have sent Airborne from Germany and our own squadron from Bentwaters with C 141 and C 130 aircraft, supported by 5 Bentwater A10 squadrons, F-15s out of Bitburg, F111s from Mildenhall and other support aircraft to get the hostages within the first few days. Even in April of 1980, we could still have gone, but Carter wanted to use Navy choppers which it was well known would have had problems with the sand getting in their engines. But Carter did not have the guts to do what was needed.)
7. A National Election in 1980 where the GOP tried for the second time to keep Reagan from being the nominee. Instead, they want the Senior Bush to be the nominee. Yet the 'commoners" wanted Reagan.
The conditions of 1980 match what is occurring today in all too many ways. We have a populace looking for leadership and a bunch of politicians that offer no leadership. Even worse, they continuously ignore or insult those who disagree, calling us vulgar, low information votes, idiots, and who knows what else. They are the Elitists who know what is best for us and they are not to be challenged.
To hell with them all. As far as I am concerned, the professional politicians can go to hell. BURN IT DOWN!!!!!
59, and a student of economics in the 70s.
Yes, Whip Inflation Now was perhaps the most economically ignorant policy in history. And the Price wage freeze concocted on Friday the 13th, Aug 1971 was perhaps the most damaging. The inflation they couldn't control was 7%. By the end of the decade it was 14%. With Reagan and Paul Volcker they whipped unemployment and inflation almost simultaneously, proving almost everything Keynesian to be false.
That said, I don't like putting all elected politicians into one category. Some have sold out and some haven't (yet).
The GOP establishment isn't is a formal club, just a concept. There isn't anyone there big enough to pull any real strings. If nothing else, Trump proved they aren't controlling this process. Money has been irrelevant to the process so far too. Money has nothing to do with Trump's success so far.
Hugh Hewitt said it straight up. He would lead off every show with a Trump interview if he could. It's good radio. Rush has been all over the Trump story. Hannity is a friend of Trump. Mark Levin loves Trump's boldness on immigration. None of them I think would choose him at voting time. It's the story of the day and Trump is smarter than everyone thought.
Like GM said, Trump has balls, so to speak, and we need our candidate (of any gender) to have that. But the details matter.
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"CD, What makes you think that he would not get the best for each area? That is what he says he would do, and I believe him there."
Forgive me, but that does not address my point-- which is the suggestion that Trump ANNOUNCE this NOW. Reflect upon what the reaction to this might be in various quarters and amongst voters.
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"Ted Cruz Attorney General, Ben Carson the Sec of HHS to handle health care, and Carly Fiorina to something that calls upon her considerable talents."
Let's assume that Trump makes an announcement like this today. What is the response?
1. Cruz, Carson and Fiorina all three denounce Trump and saying that they are running for President and not a Cabinet post.
2. The rest of the candidates and the GOPe all accuse Trump of trying to bribe his competition to not run any longer.
3. The media goes nuts, accepts the GOPe claims, and then jumps on Trump and his "Cabinet Choices", claiming that this would be harmful to liberals and minorities. The uproar would be more harmful than good.
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Disagree.
Of course the other candidates would say the predictable things, but I think the case would be this:
It shows Trump can work with others and underlines the depth of the Rep bench. Those who like those candidates but wonder about their completeness to be president (and IMHO that is many people) may well come to feel that Trump isn't so bad after all.
Cruz as AG would be a truly inspired choice , , , Imagine him handling the illegal alien, 14th Amendment issues for Rep candidate Trump, or Ben Carson handling Obamacare replacement and race issues, and Fiorina getting in a cat fight with Hillary or Buffoon Joe.
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You are much more positive about things than I am. The GOPe and the Media are looking for anything to stop Trump and this would provide them much attention.
Now to go walk the dog. He needs to do a Bush and Hillary.
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I have heard but not yet verified that Trump speaks very highly of his sister who is both a federal judge and an aggro abortion supporter.
I wonder what kind of judges he would nominate for SCOTUS?
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Hints about his tax policy. Lower taxes on middle class, simplify the code and raise it on the wealthy. I am not for the latter part of this unless he means, and I think he does, raise their rates by reducing deductions. Especially deductions the rest of us do not have.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/28/donald-trump-im-king-tax-code/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS#!
Like I have posted on the board before neither party represents me - the Democrats or Republicans. Trump comes the closest. He is by reason of exclusion the top choice at this time for me. With regards to leadership, salesmanship, showmanship, and strength, a giant among kids. Sorry, but it is obvious. That said his ego and mania is of major concern and frightening in many ways.
Also I wish Jindal would get more traction. He represents America the beautiful.
I agree with PP about Bush. The Bushes while wonderful people, seemingly honest, and great Americans have done quite a bit to hurt conservatism. The father was never a conservative: "voodoo economics".
And I am 58 and remember the 70's all too well. I am sorry Carter has cancer but he was the worst President since Warren G Harding.
However that title now belongs to yours truly Barack Obama.
Carter can now think, "thank God for Obama". I am off the bottom of the list.
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http://www.dickmorris.com/can-trump-win-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
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CD,
Here is one thing to consider about Trump revealing full details of programs.
If you are fighting against an opponent, are you going to reveal what moves you will make in detail so that your opponent can be prepared to counter?
If you are Eisenhower and prepping for D-Day, are you going to reveal that you are using Patton as a deception so that you can attack elsewhere?
You only provide enough details to win the nominee. Too reveal too much opens you to more aggressive attacks.
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OTOH "Trust me, I'm rich, I know how to get things done" is not too different from "Hope and Change".
Looks like he is beginning to flesh things out.
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DMG,
My replies to you.
a) I don't really see someone as a homeowner if they have zero equity or less. Equity levels change as values change. In 2006, everyone who had bought the year before had over 15% equity, even if they used a 100% loan to value. So zero equity could be simply a "temporary" condition. (Of course, that does not address risk level.)
b) There is a difference between underwater and being delinquent or in default. Underwater, I guess, is none of my business as long as they are making the required payments. I think you deal with situations where they are not. Herein is the problem with that. Underwater "begs" delinquency. At 140% LTV, strategic defaults come into play. At 120% LTV borrowers who are financially stressed behave differently and will make mortgage payments based upon the perceived future. For example, prior to the Crisis, borrowers made sure to pay the mortgage first and let other debt go delinquent. Once the Crisis hit, borrowers began to pay the other debt and to let the mortgages go delinquent, especially if Negative Equity existed.
c) The central problem with delinquent, underwater properties in default is that government rules make it difficult and sometimes impossible for a lender to take back a property. This is actually not true. HAMP and other programs did delay the foreclosure process timeline, but all one needed was a Negative NPV Test result, and the foreclosure could continue. In reality, for the servicers, delaying foreclosure was profitable compared to foreclosing. As well, the terms of Trusts and even the GSEs caused delays, not government regulations.
d) That the lender took a bad risk and made a bad loan and the property won't cover their costs is not my problem or concern. But there is another problem with this statement. In most cases, it was government programs designed to encourage housing that caused a large part of the problem. Granted, by 2005, things had gotten totally out of hand, but if lenders did not make loans to sub standard borrowers, there could be liability from Government Regulatory actions like discrimination and disparate impact. So it is not a yes/no decision.
e) A mortgage IS the right to take back a property in default. If it can't be taken back in a reasonable time, process and cost, it is an unsecured loan. When the collateral means nothing, that is when loans don't get made, hurting everyone. Again, the rules of foreclosure are the problem, not market fluctuations or anything else. Not true. The loan is not unsecured at that point. Losses are incurred, but there is still recovery of funds no matter how long the foreclosure action has gone on. So it is not unsecured. (Courts have not ruled on that except in the case of 2nd mortgages, and there are now cases overturning that argument in the BK courts.) As to your when the "collateral means nothing" statement, you are making the assumption that collateral has no value based upon your preceding statement. But loans don't get made if there is no collateral. So how can people otherwise be "hurt"?
f) Instead of fixing the central problem caused by government rules, we establish new government powers. Agreed. Dodd Frank needs to be revamped or repealed and the CFPB disbanded.
g) Assuming you cannot change the rules tying the hands of lenders to get back their rightful collateral and the strategy you suggest is perfectly executed, I can see how a bad situation is dealt with and resolved. I will cover this and the rest below.
g) On the flip side of giving government the power to take private property for private purposes without limits are all the moral hazards that come with that and eventually take down all great, centrally planned economies:
1. With expanded government power comes expanded government corruption. Without a doubt.
2. Large industrial and economic players can buy that power for their own benefit. And they do. The richest counties in the United States are mostly in the DC area. Buying power isn't a small industry; it has become our largest industry.
3. Government officials can sell that power for their own benefit.
4. People without power get Trumped on, like of Suzette Kelo in New London, Vera Coking in Atlantic City, and Nancy MacGibbon in Minneapolis.
5. When victims of eminent domain get 'fair market value' for what is taken from them, they don't get fair market value.
6. And when government powers have no limit, well, we don't know and can't even imagine all of where that will lead...
Donald Trump is a great "negotiator", (he says). The victim examples listed above did not consent to entering into "negotiations with Trump or Trump-like entities. Assuming they owned their property, paid their taxes, followed the laws, kept up their homes, paid their mortgages and all that, do they have a right of privacy? Do they have a right to be left alone? Are these rights what the constitution calls unenumerated rights that areprotected by the 9th amendment in the constitution? Of course they are. Is this a small matter? No.
Now back to the 5th amendment:
" If such “economic development” takings are for a “public use,” any taking is, and the Court has erased the Public Use Clause from our Constitution, as Justice O’Connor powerfully argues in dissent. Ante, at 1—2, 8—13. I do not believe that this Court can eliminate liberties expressly enumerated in the Constitution "
- Justice Clarence Thomas in dissent on Kelo
And if you feel the opposite, you believe the Court can eliminate liberties expressly protected in the constitution. You are President Trump appointing judges who will do just that.
Each case must be examined and determined upon the merits of the claim. There is no one rule of law that can cover every situation. (I have not read the cased of ED that you cite in depth, so I don't have an opinion on them specifically.)
As to Richmond, I do have specific knowledge of this.
When I first heard about ED and Richmond, I was viscerally opposed to the idea. I was astounded by the claim like you are with ED. But that did not last.
On a Saturday morning about two years ago, Martin Andelman of Mandelman Matters and I had a long phone conversation. He wanted to discuss ED and Richmond with me. He supported the concept and I was totally against it. Towards the end, I agreed to look at the issue closely.
Since I lived about 40 miles away, I took a drive to Richmond, going into the different areas where ED was being considered. As I looked around, while literallly in fear for my life, I saw how the Crisis had totally destroyed the city in many ways. After this look, I began to really consider alternatives.
Richmond, which has always been a "hellhole", was even worse then. Incredibly high unemployment, 20% of homes were vacant and awaiting foreclosure. Home values dropped to under $200k and often $120k, 65% of the city was severely underwater. Gangs everywhere. The common person could not leave. Heavy delinquency on loans about 25%. Anything that a person could conceive, was happening in Richmond. (Camden NJ and other cities also.)
I began to run financial and default algorithms to see how bad it really was. The results were stunning:
Essentially, all of the vacant homes were "gone". A foreclosure on the property, considering what was needed to bring the home back to livable status and to sell afterwards meant that there would be very little "recovery" of funds. In most cases, the loss on the loans would be greater than 75%, yet the servicers would not modify the loan. The loans in delinquency and default were in the same situation. Losses were such that an investor would lose the majority of money invested and would recover little.
I then ran the numbers based upon ED and paying 80% fair Market Value to the Investor. (The rest would be for new loan costs, commissions, and 5% equity to the homeowner.) In every case, the Investor would recover more money than what would be achieved through foreclosure. Plus they would not have to try and find buyers for homes in a "dangerous" area.
An additional advantage for the Investor was he was now out from under a loan in a bad area. This was something that could not even be accomplished with a modification, so for the Investor, all would be great.
The new Investor would be taking a loan whereby they knew all the risks. It would be fully disclosed, and the loan would be underwritten to a strong standard with the homeowner having a true ability to repay the loan. Both would benefit greatly.
The city then would benefit from a cleaning up of the foreclosure crisis. Tax bases would increase. Crime would decrease. city costs would decrease from the associated problems. Businesses and employment could even increase.
This was a win-win situation for all. But the Big Banks, the Mortgage Banker Association and other groups wanted nothing to do with it. They feared that it would trickle down to other cities, even ones that did not have all the problems of Richmond. (There were reasons for why this would not happen.) So they go to Congress and get legislation enacted to prevent ED in Richmond and other cities.
What I am trying to present is that every case of ED is specific to the facts and must be viewed in that manner. Yes, there is a chance of government going too far, but with a legitimate government, this can be countered if the government is not "bought and paid for" by lobbyists.
Trump admits to "using" government programs and laws to benefit himself. If it is legal, why not if the facts of the case show a clear benefit to the community of the action? If it is just about "greed", then that is different. But the difference is that Trump admits that he does this, but he also realizes that there are ways to prevent the abuses.
FYI, in 1964, I lived in San Bernardino. I remember the home we lived in and thousands other being taken under ED for a freeway to be built. Probably Fair Market Value was paid. The new freeway did serve a great benefit to the city and economic conditions. Yet today, it would be fought to the bitter end.
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Too bad he didn't mention all her close family members who are part of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, but pretty funny nonetheless:
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-takes-aim-huma-abedin-perv-anthony-weiner-n418116?cid=sm_tw&hootPostID=c265eaee0df9ecf8638ec10a5c39c090
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http://www.americasfreedomfighters.com/2015/07/30/breaking-trump-just-announced-his-pick-for-attorney-general-this-is-huge/
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CD,
That was dated Jul 30, 2015. Since I have seen nothing else on it, how accurate is it? I would think that both side would be discussing it.
That said, Trey Gowdy would be a great pick. it would send fear to crooked politicians and lobbyists everywhere.
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Oh. :oops: Good eye-- thanks for the back up.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10qbt0LHmvE&feature=youtu.be
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Does it matter to Trump fans that their man was a pretty big cheerleader for the stimulus, bailouts, and limiting executive pay? Here he is back in February 2009:
Larry King: Is Obama right or wrong to go after these executives with salary caps?
Donald Trump: Well, I think he’s absolutely right. Billions of dollars is being given to banks and others. You know, once you start using taxpayer money, it’s a whole new game. So I absolutely think he’s right.
King: What about the whole concept of bailouts?
Trump: Well, it’s a little bit different. A lot of people are not in favor of bailouts. You know, we talked about all the different things going on in this country. Let’s face it, Larry, we are in a depression. If they didn’t do the bailout, you would be in depression No. 2 and maybe just as big as depression No. 1, so they really had to do something. The problem is they’re giving millions and billions of dollars to banks and the banks aren’t loaning it . . .
King: If you were in the Senate, would you vote for the stimulus plan?
Trump: Well, I’d vote for a stimulus plan. I’m not sure that all of the things in there are appropriate. Some of the little toys that they have are not really appropriate, and they’re a little surprising that they seem to want it, because the publicity on it has been terrible.
And then he said to Greta Van Susteren, after the president made the pitch for his plan, “This is a strong guy, knows what he wants, and this is what we need.”
He sounded pretty amenable to the final package when talking to Neil Cavuto . . .
CAVUTO: Are you for this Obama stimulus that was signed into law today?
TRUMP: Well, something had to be done. And whether it’s perfect or not, nothing is perfect. And it’s a whole trial-and-error thing, Neil.
Talking to Wolf Blitzer, Trump contended it was too small.
BLITZER: What about the president of the United States? How is he doing?
TRUMP: Well, he’s having a little bit of a tough time. I have great respect for him. And I love the way he ran the campaign. He’s having a few stumbles now and then. But I think he’s going to be really terrific. I certainly hope he’s going to be great. And I think he will be.
BLITZER: And you like this economic stimulus package? The banking package? The home foreclosure package? God knows, there’s so many economic issues out there.
TRUMP: Wolf, it’s a step. And it’s a big step. But relatively speaking, it’s not very much money when you look at the overall economy. But it is something he inherited, a total mess from Bush. And you know, we have to remember, he didn’t cause this problem. He’s trying to fix the problem. It’s not going to be easy. It’s very deep seeded, and it’s even beyond this country.
Do we not care about this stuff anymore? How does the guy who allegedly represents fury with business and economic elites get to endorse TARP? Why do the other guys’ deviations from conservative orthodoxy disqualify them, but Trump gets a pass?
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CD,
About TARP, I supported it with all its fails, and I will still defend the need for it at the time. Here is why:
1. When Lehman failed in Sep 2008, the world was at the brink financially. Bear Sterns had caused major problems in Mar 2008, but it was nothing compared to Lehman.
2. At the same time as Lehman, the GSEs were collapsing. Merril Lynch was in trouble, facing collapse. Indymac failed in the summer of 08 annd taken over by the FDIC. There were no buyers for it. Wachovia/World was collapsing and would go. Deutsche Bank was in serious trouble. Many Wall Street owned Mortgage Bankers had already collapsed. Washington Mutual was failing. This list goes on and on.
3. Financially, all the banks were insolvent. They would collapse if nothing was done. (FYI, I have confirmed this time and again with discussions with major bank officers, but all conversations must remain confidential otherwise.)
4. The FDIC had only $25b available to prop up failing banks covered by them. This would have been used up by one or two failures. The Treasury covered the Top 5 banks, but it would have had to spend $100's of billions in propping them up. Citibank, which was the worst of the Top 5, would have consumer $100b plus immediately.
People argue that the banks should have been allowed to fail and that things would work out, but this is just not true. What would have happened:
1. All credit would have (and most did) dry up. Major corporations that depend upon credit lines and other financial instruments to keep liquid on a daily basis would have failed within two weeks. Say goodbye to those companies and hello to major unemployment.
2. Mom and pop businesses would have collapsed due to liquidity issues caused by the major bank failures, and the drying up of credit lines.
3. The FDIC Insurance only covered $25k in different accounts so above this, the money is "gone". Both small business and personal accounts would be subject to severe losses.
Unlike in the 1920's, the US is no longer a rural society where the populace is stretched across large swatches of land. Nor are there local farms everywhere capable of supplying food sources in times of emergency. Imagine what would have happened if money had dried up, employment lost, food distribution services broken down due to the financial collapse and all the other issues. The food riots alone would be fearful, especially in the large cities. (Just imagine an EMP Pulse hitting the US across the country and what would happen.)
This is the scenario that the Treasury and the Government and Fed feared would happen if action had not been taken. Did they dare take the risk? No. TARP, for all its faults, was designed primarily to ensure that a complete financial collapse did not occur. It would pump liquidity into the economy while more importantly it would install "confidence" in the ability of the financial community to ride out the storm. (This was also what QE was about, saving the banks by various financial manipulations, including buying toxic assets on the bank's books. Then QE evolved to other things as well.)
One cannot believe how close we did come to a complete financial collapse. People have already forgotten what occurred and the severity of the collapse. Yet, this is still the same scenario that we face today. Whether it begins from China, Germany (a strong possibility with the financial status of Deutsche Bank) or in the US, the financial system is still in the same shape.
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Pat:
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I am on my way out the door for several hours of training and do not have the time for a thoughtful reply on this point.
That said, there are MANY other points on which Trump has said and done things that normally we would find utterly disqualifying. We may like much of what the man says now, but will he still say it tomorrow?
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CD,
Such could have been said about Reagan also.
BTW, just had a phone call from the RNC seeking money. Went like this.
RNC: "Hi, Reince Priebus the head of the RNC asked me to personally give you a call. He is counting on your support to win the election in 2016."
Me: "Supporting Rep candidates like Bush, Boenher, McConnell and others?
RNC: Absolutely! Can we count on your support and a donation?
Me: Why would I do that? We have had enough Bushes, and Boenher and McConnell act like neutered pigs.
RNC: They are doing what they can to support Conservative values?
Me: Amnesty, opposing border fences, Common Core, increasing Big Government, Not opposing Obamacare, giving in to Dem positions, Corker giving in the the Iran Agreement, why would I want to support that?
RNC: We need more Conservatives elected to help them, and to get a Republican President to move forward........
Me: Like McCain, Romney, and I am expected to support another loser like Bush, Rubio or Christie? I will give any donations directly to a candidate that I like. In this case, it will be Trump. He speaks to issues that need to be addressed, and not by phonies like Bush.
And, if the GOP and RNC push Bush on me as the nominee, I will not vote, nor will my family. We will not accept Bush.
RNC: But Hillary could be President.....
Me: So what? You are all the same. It is all about power and money. They don't care about me.............
RNC: Hang up............
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Heh heh. I have had similar phone calls too.
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Perhaps the biggest flaw in Trump in my eyes is his failure to rule out a third party run which would be almost a guarantee that the Dems win. He thinks more of himself than America.
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Trump isn't Reagan. Trump isn't anyone I would normally vote for. These are not normal times.
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At this point, I don't really care about the 3rd Party run. I am not going to vote for Bush, Rubio or any of the others outside of Cruz or Carson. If Bush or the others are pushed down my throat, it doesn't matter because the results will be the same as if Hillary were the President.
We have a uni-party system and I am not going to support it.
BTW, Carly is immigrating supporting, man made global warming believer, and closet big government. I will not support her either.
LET IT BURN or BURN THE GOPe DOWN
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"Trump isn't Reagan..."
We won't need a full thread for Reagan - Trump similarities? :wink:
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"Trump isn't Reagan..."
We won't need a full thread for Reagan - Trump similarities? :wink:
Lol
Even Reagan's hair was better and more realistic .
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But Trump's wife is better looking........with clothes and without!!!
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No argument there!
Question: Was their marriage an anchor for her to get into the US? :lol:
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A bit of a human interest story , , ,
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423337/trumps-pal-al-sharpton
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Melania became naturalized in 2006, one year after getting married to Donald. She was a European super model.
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Melania became naturalized in 2006, one year after getting married to Donald. She was a European super model.
Trump's future wives are genetically engineered and being grown in a vat as we speak.
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I can believe it Pat. She's pretty spectacular.
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But Trump's wife is better looking........with clothes and without!!!
(http://images.jewelry.com/2010-04-melania-trump-jewelry-2.jpg)
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(http://www.startrek.com/legacy_media/images/200307/worf03/320x240.jpg)
Well, our current first lady has a distinctive sense of style.
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Uhhh , , , careful there please. That could be taken amiss , , ,
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PP'S like of Donald Trump has added some energy to the forum. Trump leads national pols by a huge margin. His staying power has been much greater than other early leaders in the recent past, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, etc. He comes through with a seemingly clear voice in a crowded, muddy field. Yet it is still summer and pre-Labor Day - of a non-election year. The Trump phenomenon makes everyone wonder, can he actually pull it off, and if not, why not?
Without a doubt he has massive strengths. But I see three areas of trouble for Trump:
1) Unfavorability = Unelectability. Latest poll: 37 favorable, 59% unfavorable. That drops to 17 - 79% for non-whites. Unlike pp, primary voters are going to switch at some point to the candidate they think can win. Republicans have let us down hugely, but the two parties are not the same. A Rubio Presidency is not the same as another Obama - Bernie Sanders-like administratiopn.
2) Vagueness. He speaks with clarity but rides on a level of vagueness that will likely get flushed out in the campaign. Obama got away with letting voters fill in the missing colors to fit their own vision; I don't think Trump will. I see his Republican popularity dropping in half based on purity requirements of the Republican primary voter.
3) Past statements and new ones. A certain amount of what Trump has said, he can explain away or pull off. And there are some out there that get him.
If a combination of those 3 should get him down a little, downward movement has an unstoppable momentum.
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"That drops to 17 - 79% for non-whites"
Unfortunately that is the number for all Republicans not just Trump.
I have come to the conclusion for Asians who vote predominately Democratic it is ALL about race for them.
For other minorities that is a huge factor but I suspect government benefits are the biggest factor.
Bush thinks "love" is going to change this. Perhaps he has concluded it is too late to stand up to the Democrat Party focus on identity politics and vote buying.
He may be right. I agree with Levin that we have to take a stand. And probably a 'last' stand.
I dunno. Doug what do you think?
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DMG,
You are working from old data. (Yes, I am a shit disturber.)
1. Trump's Unfavorable Ratings have fallen tremendously from the 59%. They are down to about 33% and in some polls, even lower. In fact, Pollsters are now saying that they have never seen a person turn around unfavorable ratings in one month like Trump has.
2. Vagueness? Like Bush? Rubio? And Purity? Seems that Purity did not stop the GOPe from having Romney or McCain. And the Purists stayed home with them. Now, we are seeing such dissatisfaction that Trump is actually pulling in Dem's, and he is doing good with "legal" hispanics. And, he does not have to speak Spanish to potential voters, pandering to them like Bush.
The vagueness issue is a tactic to stop Trump. If he gives details, then the left and GOP will want more details. As he gives more details, it is not enough. They will keep going until they have enough to derail Trump, but they will not do the same with other candidates.
Would Sun Tzu reveal details? This is war and one does not give up the strategy for others to develop counter measures at this stage.
3. Past Statement may be an issue with some people. But there is a "change" in the public's perception of politics. They have had it with tradition and are electing to go in another direction. That direction is to throw out conventional politics and look for someone new, refreshing, and won't take the b.s. commonly thrown at them. Will it work? It remains to be seen. But since both the media and the traditional politicians are riled up and in fear of Trump, that alone is good.
Seems so far that everything thrown at Trump causes him to go up, and not down. Latest poll shows him at 37% nationally.
http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2015/09/01/new-national-poll-donald-trump-37-bush-and-carson-9-full-poll-data-pdf/ (http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2015/09/01/new-national-poll-donald-trump-37-bush-and-carson-9-full-poll-data-pdf/)
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CCP,
I agree with you and Levin. Time to take a stand.
My own belief is that this is the "last stand" for the US as we know it. If we don't start with change in the next election, it is over.
1. We have a uni-party, bought and paid for by crony capitalists and by special interest groups. There is no concern for the common person. Instead, the concern is about retaining power and money.
2. We are in the midst of a race war that is just beginning. It will get worse unless action is taken. But so far, neither party is willing to act. In fact, both the RNC and Dems are meeting with Black Lives Matter to come to some accord. And the Dems are giving in to them.
3. Illegal Immigration is a real crisis, not just here but in Europe. Today's pattern of immigration and the lack of assimulation into society and instead holding onto old beliefs only serve to weaken the host country, eventually destroying the "bonds that tie" and then balkanism takes place. (Just watch the immigration protests. A sea of Mexican flags, and no US flags.)
4. Illegal Immigration leads to No Borders, which will ultimately lead to consolidation of Countries into "continental" entities. Think the EEU. (And as we now see, the backlash to the EEU and immigration is leading to major issues.
5. Unsupportable economic and social policies that if not stopped will only lead to financial ruin. (Probably already here.)
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"Illegal Immigration leads to No Borders, which will ultimately lead to consolidation of Countries into "continental" entities. Think the EEU. (And as we now see, the backlash to the EEU and immigration is leading to major issues."
Well the goal of the liberals and Obama isn't continental entities but *one* world government. I realized this listening to the Columbia Professor give his speech at a graduation event I think in 2007.
One must keep this in mind as we see the gradual giving away our sovereignty to the world by Bamster. Opening up the borders and simply not enforcing the law just accelerates this of course as we all know.
Reading some stories in Scientific American celebrating the 50th anniversary of his publication of his general theory of relativity I learned that Eintsein was for a single world governing body. :cry: Other than that I am mostly a fan of his.
The minorities cannot see the forest for the trees I guess. Sell out the country for some temporary chump change.
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Back in the mid 70's, I remember writing a paper in college that discussed how to implement global government. It postulated that to achieve global government, the first objective would be to "consolidate" nation states into one by continent. The Northern Hemisphere State would be Canada, US, Mexico and the numerous small Central American countries. Southern Hemisphere would be all the remainder states. This would spread to each continent.
When the EEU was created and in 2001, entry controls between states essentially eliminated, I remembered what I had written. Little did I expect when writing it that it would ever come to be. Now, I see it happening in real time.
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DMG,
This may have been the most recent poll that you cite on Trump Unfavorability. This poll is substantially different from what other Polls are reporting. The question that comes to mind is which polls are outliers, or else manipulated.
http://www.langerresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/1144a51ClintonTrumpBushBiden.pdf
This poll offers a different perspective.
http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2015/09/01/new-national-poll-donald-trump-37-bush-and-carson-9-full-poll-data-pdf/
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_NH_82515.pdf
The polls are all over the place and much depends upon the poll bias.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/09/01/donald-trump-has-a-question-for-fox-news-and-host-bill-oreilly/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%209-2-15%20FINAL&utm_term=Firewire
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Okay, time for everyone to get serious about Donald. Here is the Washington Post really destroying the candidacy of Trump. He cheats at golf. Takes mulligans, giveme's, improves the lie in a divot.......
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/does-donald-trump-cheat-at-golf-a-washington-post-investigation/2015/09/02/f8a940b2-50c4-11e5-9812-92d5948a40f8_story.html
Far as I know, everyone does that except the pros in a tournament.
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"He cheats at golf. Takes mulligans, giveme's, improves the lie in a divot......."
My turn to defend Mr. Trump. He does own the course and it's not a USGA event - so the rules that apply are Trump-rules.
Some followup points:
1. No intent to choose an outlier poll. I offer all of this early prognostication with a wait and see premise. It was just a poll that happened to catch my notice this morning - ABC News via a link from Real Clear Politics with a headline, "Trump Polarization Grows": http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/clinton-water-trump-polarization-grows-poll/story?id=33461702 Dated today, Sept 2, 2015. (I meant to include the link in the post, sorry.)
2. By vagueness, I'm not blaming him, really I'm credited him for successfully getting a divergent range of political views to support him based mostly on his get-things-done personality. What I'm saying is that IF his support begins to fall off, a reason will be that as he gets pinned down on specifics, people will find he's not the best fit for their views. For example, your point in this thread about crony capitalism. ("We have a uni-party, bought and paid for by crony capitalists and by special interest groups. There is no concern for the common person. Instead, the concern is about retaining power and money.") He IS a Crony Capitalist by profession and by admission and tromp all over the common person is what he did. Like Romney and Romneycare, it takes away from the ability to win that case against the Clintons. Clintons sold influence. Trump bought influence. All other things equal, someone a little cleaner can make that case better. Trump has a tax plan coming out in a few weeks. Those who wanted Fair tax won't like a flat tax and those who wanted a flat tax won't like graduated rates, and so on. Generalities work better for as long as you can get away with them. That part of the campaign is likely coming to an end. Others like Cruz don't lose on specifics because they are already out there on most of it.
This will be interesting to watch...
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From Presidential, 2016:
The WSJ has made it clear that it despises Trump, for various reasons...
Interestingly, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, the two top radio shows have had non-stop favorable coverage of Trump during this frontrunner period of his. Hannity works in NY and openly considers Trump to be a friend of his. Rush admitted something like that today, that he knows him well and has been hosted many times for golf by Trump (a 6 handicap). Rush said Trump uses his same style of bragging while golfing and it's all received in good fun. Both like him for his ability to stand up to anyone. Neither has endorsed him though it sounds like they do as they keep defending him.
Hugh Hewitt has been doing that too but came at it from a different angle. On Meet the Press, Hewitt was asked if Trump had the temperament to be President and Hewitt said no. Since he is impartial on his show and a questioner in the next debate, he has awkwardly backtracked on that and gives Trump as much air time and fair questions as he wants. The backtrack was that Trump has a different temperament than we have seen in our Presidents, not a disqualifying one. Now they are great, over-ther-radio, friends.
As specifics and differences emerge, some influential conservatives may not defend Trump as much as they are now. MHO
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DMG,
The difference is that Trump
1. Admits to being a crony capitalist in using the rules that exist to benefit his business.
2. Decries those same rules as allowing lobbyists and crony capitalists to influence politicians.
3. Says that he will not allow the donations that causes the influence in his campaign.
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The RNC is now demanding that potential candidates sign a Loyalty Pledge to not run as a third party if they lose the nomination. Another attack against Trump.
http:/][url]http:/ (http://[url)[/url]/www.politico.com/story/2015/09/republican-national-committee-2016-campaign-pledge-213283
Questions:
1. What about Lisa Murkowski of Alaska? She lost to the Tea Party candidate in the primary, then ran as an independent and was supported by the RNC.
2. What about Tadd Cochrone in Mississippi, where the RNC took out his challenger in the runoff?
3. What about McCain in 2008 when asked about if he lost and whether he would support the nominee. His response was that it would depend upon the candidate and who was running for the other side.
I guess the Loyalty Oath requires a stretched out Arm Salute last seen in Germany in WW2. Maybe a Hydra Salute.
And people wonder why I hate the GOPe.
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How about the GOPe sign a loyalty oath to the Republican base?
*crickets*
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"Clintons sold influence. Trump bought influence."
Pithy.
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Oaths only go in one direction. And the GOPe are the only ones who know what is in the best interest of the people.
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https://mobile.twitter.com/ratherironic/status/639144032325636096
Yuuuuuuuuuuge!
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Took me a bit to realize that the website was was playing games with the logo of Obama. I knew I had never seen that for a Trump logo.
G.M.
as Sister Mary would say............."go sit in the corner for trying to deceive me".
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Took me a bit to realize that the website was was playing games with the logo of Obama. I knew I had never seen that for a Trump logo.
G.M.
as Sister Mary would say............."go sit in the corner for trying to deceive me".
Well, hardly the first time I have been sent to the corner.
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And you enjoyed it too much.
I am not going to spank you, no matter how much you want it or beg me!!!
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Aaaaaaaasssssaanddddddd moving on......
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423405/donald-trump-communications-style-republicans
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GM,
The other candidates cannot speak to the people like Trump. They are used to lecturing people and speaking down to them. In other words, they speak to with people.
Donald speaks "with" the people. He interacts and does things that are instinctual. This is a process that cannot be learned.
Additionally, the key to Donald is that he speaks off the cuff. He does not need a teleprompter, nor notes to follow just about word for word. Therefore, it inhibits their ability to speak as Donald.
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Trump will be signing the Loyalty Pledge. You can bet that there are other things going on behind the scenes. He is not doing this because the RNC has him over the barrel.
It will be interesting to see what occurs down the road.
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https://www.facebook.com/jerrydelvillar33/videos/10205319223433535/
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Just dealt with an undocumented democrat a short time ago.Out on a PR bond for driving under revocation. Previously deported for crimes in el Norte and free as a bird now.
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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/09/02/business-genius-trump-wouldve-been-richer-if-he-never-touched-his-inheritence-money-analysis/
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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/09/02/business-genius-trump-wouldve-been-richer-if-he-never-touched-his-inheritence-money-analysis/
Not everyone has Hillary's cattle futures trading ability.
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The author, Jameson Parker is a liberal hack who has been attacking anything conservative. He quotes from an article written by SV Date, an NPR hack.
To achieve this claim, Date and others dismiss the Trump financial statement filings and instead use other measures to arrive at a net worth far lower than what is on the filings. Then they take the $200m that Trump inherited in 1974 and make the claim that if the money had been put in a SP 500 index fund of Mutual Bonds, it would now be worth nearly $3b.
Of course, this measure stick would mean that Trump never bought and sold other businesses, created jobs, built buildings and all other things that create wealth for the people of the country.
Damned liberal hacks that don't understand the reality of business operations, risk, wealth creation, and all the benefits that others receive from such activities.
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A) Very funny GM;
B) We need to be able to handle these. Good response PP;
C) Just caught his press conference announcing his pledge to support the Rep nominee and take questions. I must say I thought it a very strong performance.
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TRUMP AND "REJECTING" CONSERVATIVE VALUES
This isn't about values. It's about crisis.
September 3, 2015 Daniel Greenfield
There have been numerous pieces in the conservative media that blast Trump supporters for "rejecting" conservative values.
Now conservative values have been in flux for a while and some of the same people attacking Trump supporters as RINOs claim that illegal alien amnesty and transnational trade policies are conservative values. In the battle of the RINOs, this gets very confusing.
But a key point that is being missed here is that Trump is getting support from conservatives who believe it's more important to stop and roll back the damage that Obama has done in two terms than in advocating positive conservative values.
So they're less concerned by Trump's calls for tax hikes on the rich than they are by Obama being able to ram through amnesty. It's not that they don't care about free market principles, it's that they know these will be an abstract if the left wins its demographic war on America. The common denominator among many Trump supporters is that they see this as a final conflict, a battle at the gates.
That makes them less concerned with long term value policies and just looking for an emergency solution to stop the left's takeover.
It's that sense of urgency which divides many of them from a Republican leadership that appears not to sense this emergency.
Of course their calculation assumes a lot about Trump that isn't in evidence, but they are reacting to a legitimate crisis and looking for a crisis manager. And it's a fundamental flaw in the Republican field that few politicians in it have communicated their sense of crisis.
Trump projects confidence. The ability to get things done without caring about procedure and niceties. While the analogy may make some people moan, he's tapping into Andrew Jackson type populism with its revolution against the elites. (Even if Trump lacks Jackson's common background.)
In a sense, we've been divided between those who still see a long view in which America would be viable 50 or 100 years from now, and those who don't. The polls show more people who don't believe the future will get better.
That's the elephant in the room.
A lot of Republican elites are taking the long view. So are a lot of upper rank conservatives. But the Republican base isn't. It's worried about what will happen now.
This isn't about values. It's about crisis.
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CD,
I liked the press conference myself. Some are already saying that it was a mistake to sign the Pledge and Trump will lose support, but I don't believe that to be the case. The Trumpeters realize that this was the smart move to take an issue off of the table. Plus, the GOPe is now faced with treating Trump "fairly". They don't do it and Trump can really go after them.
Object:
For most Trumpeters, it is more about having been sold out by the RINOs and GOPe. We are tired of listening to the GOPe select the candidates for us, telling us that they are electable, and then finding them to be idiots who can't get out of their own way. Think McCain and Romney.
Now, they have tried to ram Bush down our throats, and that will not be accepted.
There is also the issue that the GOPe claimed give us the Senate and the House, and we will stop Obama. Instead, we have the traitor Corker Bill that has given Iran the bomb.
We also have to deal with the crybaby Boehner who only wants to get along with the opposition and with McConnell who has cajones the size of an atom, and has courage equivalent to that size.
The pundits really don't understand the anger and frustration of the base. We are tired of being back stabbed at every turn, and then tired of being called every name in the book when we complain.
Burn the GOP down.......!
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Ppulatie,
I agree 100%. That is the way I feel as well. I was just offering Greenfield's article as a response to those such as Erick Erickson who continue to slam Trump for not being "a real conservative." It's beyond that now. We DO know he's not a liberal. And yes - frankly, these Republicans haven't done jack sh*t to stop Obama and the Democrats from accomplishing everything they set out to do. The country is truly at the brink. We're about to lose it. Someone has to oppose and roll back this devastating agenda that has us at the precipice. While I don't think ANY President can stop the economic collapse and resulting devastation that is coming, regardless of his/her economic policies, Trump, IMHO has the best understanding of how to mitigate the damage to whatever extent it's possible.
Further - I strongly believe that a silent majority is sick to death of political correctness. Trump has no use for this cowardly tactic either. This appeals to people in a way that those living inside the Washington D.C. beltway cannot understand. They live in their own little hermetically-sealed universe where it's just politics as usual, and everything will be just fine if we are "bipartisan."
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When I look at the immigration issues in the US, I must look to what is happening right now in Germany and other European states. Illegal immigration is overwhelming the European continent. It is causing the people to react against it and the government in ways that will invariably lead to "civil war". We are no different in that aspect, just a couple of years behind.
I also look at the Black Lives Matter crowd. It is only a small portion of the population, with blacks and whites included in the movement, but the aggressive nature of BLM is growing rapidly. Add to this the Anarchists, the Occupy Wall Street and other radical movements, we are seeing the forming of an army for a civil war in the US. This mix of volatility is spreading and something is going to trigger it if action is not taken now to stop it. But the question is how do disarm the movements.
If we do nothing about immigration, the fuel mixture will detonate and cause the war, just as we are beginning to see in Europe. At that point, the other movements will become involved as well. We will have to act in a reasoned manner that will allow for a reduction in the volatility of the illegal immigration movement. Done correctly, it would not trigger the other radical movements to act.
Essentially, we are damned if we do, and damned if we don't.
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ObJ:
Very impressive analysis by Greenfield.
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http://m.weeklystandard.com/blogs/trump-confuses-irans-quds-forces-and-kurds-fighting-isis_1024759.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=20150903_TWS-blog-donald-trump-hewitt-foreign-policy-interview-4_facebook.com&utm_content=TWS
I score that a clear win for Carly.
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Okay CD. Yes it is a "win". But let's talk reality.
Hewitt said that Carly did not know the questions. But if she has any sense, she or a staff member would have listened to the Trump interview, and then looked up the names and positions, so I don't by the claim that she did not know what was coming. I would have been more impressed if he had asked Carly about her support for Cap and Trade, Man Made Global Warming, and why she supported Hillary in 2008. Oops.....
Hewitt pulled the same crap in each previous election. He asked about the far east, and 43 could only name one of 4 countries. McCain had his own issues.
Hewitt is a Bushie. He has worked with 43 before back in the 2005 time frame. He falls in the fashion of Erickson with Red State, another Bushie and avowed Trump hater.
Hewitt thinks that he is the smartest man in the room, and wants everyone to know it. So he plays these type gotcha games.
BTW, most pundits are reporting this, but they are also saying that not knowing the names is not a big deal. Instead, on Day 1 of the Presidency, everything changes with the "first" real briefing. All presidents learn things about what is going on that is not in the public realm.
One final point. Back in the 1920's, Ford was on trial in a civil matter. (I don't remember all the details.) He was on the stand being grilled by opposing counsel. Opposing Counsel was asking all types of questions and each time, Ford would answer I don't know. The purpose of the line of questioning was to show how "stupid" ford was.
Finally, fed up with the process, Ford told the attorney that he had no need to know the answers. If he needed to know, he called in the right people who could answer the questions for him. So would be the same with Trump.
Let's just see what happens to Trump's support from here.
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To Trump, anything he doesn't know is a gotcha question. His attack the questioner reactionis as reflexive as the Clintons' attack the accuser modus operandi. By instantly switching the focus to the questioner, we don't get to know what Trump does or doesn't know. It's not a gotcha question because as pp points out, Trump's support is not going to go down based on not knowing the answers to those questions.
BTW, I disagree, Hewitt isn't a hack or a Bushie. Sure he has a shtick, but he is better than your average radio host or questioner, among the best, I think. He is a Harvard grad, Michigan law school, teaches constitutional law, clerked in the DC Court of Appeals, served in the Reagan administration. I listen and near as I can tell he is trying to ask tough, fair, relevant questions to all the candidates. Here he was tough on Jeb over supporting Justices appointed by his father and brother, not letting him weasel off with excuses: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/jeb-bush-john-roberts-supreme-court-119487 Hewitt has offered Trump all the time he wants.
What about Trump's birther chapter that Obama was poking fun at. We looked at that question here and easily figured out a) there was nothing to it, Obama is the son of a woman from Kansas, b) nothing was going to come out of it, and c) it was a distraction from all the real issues we should have been fighting. That wasn't a childhood error; it was one Presidential term ago, and it was his lead issue, not immigration, taxes, regulations or big government. When a guy doesn't listen to aides, shoots from the hip and doesn't care about what he doesn't know, what else is he going to get wrong?
DMG,
The difference is that Trump
1. Admits to being a crony capitalist in using the rules that exist to benefit his business.
2. Decries those same rules as allowing lobbyists and crony capitalists to influence politicians.
...
No. In the case of private takings he used that to his power and advantage and then celebrated the Supreme Court upholding the same power. Where has he attacked loose bankruptcy laws that allow an admitted multi-billionaire to escape his own agreed, contractual obligations? Nowhere.
Also, I am looking forward to an answer of how a private taking is constitutional (Trump's view) or how we can enjoy the 'benefit' of righting a government wrong (inability of a lender to foreclose a loan) with an another government wrong (private taking) without setting up endless and limitless abuses of crony government power with the legalization of private use takings. How Trump views the constitutional protections of individual liberties is not a small or peripheral issue for the person in charge of appointing Judges and Justices.
Immigration may be the most crucial issue today and Trump has been out front on that, yet we don't know he will build a bigger wall or send more people home. What we do know is that the next Republican President if there is one needs to carry something like 40% of the Hispanic vote. Scaring all Hispanics when you are only sending back rapists is a sure way to lose an election IMHO and never get a wall or increased enforcement.
CCP, These are old figures but we spend more money in this economy advertising laundry soap than we do protecting our liberties at home. We DON'T spend too much money on elections. We spend too little, giving those with larger special interests who give wildly (like Trump) disproportionately large voices.
Did anyone here give money to a celebrity (Trump to Hillary) to get them to come to their wedding? That gaffe was just last month. Did that expose unbelievable shallowness or was it covering up his real reason for giving millions? Both, I presume. This is not a guy the ordinary voter can relate to.
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Doug writes,
"This is not a guy the ordinary voter can relate to"
Maybe. But the latest poll shows he increased his favorability rating from 20 to 59%. Poll error or bias? I don't know. He was on MSLSD this Am. Frankly I thought he was spectacular. He blew all the libs away with his answers which were spot on and even Joe Scarboro was giving him high marks. After he wiped Eugene Robinson's smirk off his face with an unexpected and terrific answer to his question (about the Kentucky clerk news item) he later charmed Robinson so much that Eugene could not stop laughing and having a great time.
Clearly Trump is a VERY quick study and getting better by the month.
The Spanish vote is not one block.
He said he "will win the" Spanish vote. I would not count him out on this. So far he is doing great. I don't see how caving in to radical Latino demands is going to help us with the Spanish vote. They keep coming and coming and turning around and demanding more and more.
That said immigration is not the only issue important to me. I think he can be strong on the debt, taxes, health care, and foreign policy despite he doesn't know the names of some Arab leaders in the Middle East.
Surely that was a "gotcha" question. Even the left leaning David Gergen had to admit it was.
I don't see how Trump didn't handle the question well IMO.
Doug, your strong reservations and even dislike and distrust of Trump are understandable.
He is either for real, or the world's second greatest con artist. The claim to the 'world's greatest con artist' will always belong to slick Willie.
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CCP,
Good reply.
As to Hewitt being a Bushie, he donated $100k to the 43 campaign in 08.
Then, there is this.
1. Salem Media Group owns Red State, Hotair, Hugh Hewitts show/website, and others. All of Hotair contributors are on the anti Trump bandwagon. Red State also.
2. Salem is partnering with CNN on the next debate. That is why Hewitt is moderating.
3. Salem supports Bush and is a Super Pac contributor to Bush.
4. Red State's Erickson disinvited Trump from his gathering, and then invited Megan Kelly to appear.
5. If you don't toe the Red State line and do support Trump, you get banned.
6. Salem broadcasts many Spanish programs on radio.
7. Hewitt supports Common Core.
8. Hewitt supports Anchor Babies - http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/07/make-the-border-kids-americans-109045#.U8kjXV7EdBU (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/07/make-the-border-kids-americans-109045#.U8kjXV7EdBU)
9. Hewitt does want a fence. (See, I am fair and balanced.) But he says to let all who are here now stay. (Amnesty)
10. Hewitt wants a more aggressive stance against the terrorist groups. He advocates for a Declaration of War.
As to the two interviews, they were not as bad on Trump as it was made out to be. And if you listen to the Quod' question and response, one could easily mix the two up as Trump did.
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Dear Reader (if there are any of you left),
Well, if this is the conservative movement now, I guess you’re going to have to count me out.
No, I’m not making some mad dash to the center. No, I’m not hoping to be the first alternate to Steve Schmidt on Morning Joe, nor am I vying to become my generation’s Kevin Phillips. I will never be a HillaryCon. And I have no plan to earn “strange new respect” from the Georgetown cocktail-party set I’m always hearing about but never meeting. But even if I have no desire to “grow” in my beliefs, I have no intention to shrink, either.
The late Bill Rusher, longtime publisher of National Review, often counseled young writers to remember, “Politicians will always disappoint you.” As I’ve often said around here, this isn’t because politicians are evil. It’s because politicians are politicians. Their interests too often lie in votes, not in principles. That’s why the conservative movement has always recognized that victory lies not simply in electing conservative politicians, but in shaping a conservative electorate that lines up the incentives so that politicians define their self-interest in a conservative way.
But if it’s true that politicians can disappoint, I think one has to say that the people can, too.
And when I say “the people” I don’t mean “those people.” I mean my people. I mean many of you, Dear Readers. Normally, when conservatives talk about how the public can be wrong, we mean that public. You know the one. The “low-information voters” Rush Limbaugh is always talking about. The folks we laughed at when Jay Leno interviewed them on the street. But we don’t just mean the unwashed and the ill-informed. We sometimes mean Jews, blacks, college kids, Lena Dunham fans, and countless other partisan slices of the electorate who reflexively vote on strict party lines for emotional or irrational reasons. We laugh at liberals who let know-nothing celebrities do their thinking for them.
Well, many of the same people we laughed at are now laughing at us because we are going ga-ga over our own celebrity.
Behold the Trumpen Proletariat
Yes, I know that there are plenty of decent and honorable people who support Trump. For instance, my friend John Nolte over at Breitbart is one. He constantly celebrates Trump because Trump has all the right enemies and defies the conventional rules governing politics and media:
But this is not an argument for Trump as a serious presidential candidate. It is really no argument at all. It is catharsis masquerading as principle, venting and resentment pretending to be some kind of higher argument. Every principle used to defend Trump is subjective, graded on a curve. Trump is like a cat trained to piss in a human toilet. It’s amazing! It’s remarkable! Yes, yes, it is: for a cat. But we don’t judge humans by the same standard.
The Tempting of Conservatism
I’ve written many times how the phrase “power corrupts” has been misunderstood. Lord Acton’s original point wasn’t that power corrupts those who wield power, it was that it corrupts those who admire it. In a letter to a historian friend who was too forgiving of the Reformation-era popes, Acton wrote:
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Popularity -- which in democracy is a very important kind of power -- works the same way. We routinely forgive the rich and famous for sins we would condemn our neighbors for. Trump’s popularity apparently trumps all standards we would apply not just to our neighbors, but to our leaders. A small example of what I am talking about can be found in Ted Cruz’s vow not to criticize other Republicans -- if by “Republicans” you mean “Donald Trump.” I have a lot of respect for Cruz, but this doesn’t pass the laugh test. The Texan has been lambasting the entire Republican party for his entire time in office. Some of his critiques are valid, of course. But he has shown not an iota of reluctance to criticize fellow Republicans when it’s in his interest. Cruz isn’t criticizing Donald Trump because, as a smart politician, he wants to woo Trump’s followers when/if Trump eventually falters. Similarly, I’m constantly hearing from Trump fans that it’s “disrespectful” for me to criticize the Republican front-runner -- as if these fans would refrain from criticizing Jeb or Rubio or Kasich if they were in the lead.
The Bonfire of Principles
If I sound dismayed, it’s only because I am. Conservatives have spent more than 60 years arguing that ideas and character matter. That is the conservative movement I joined and dedicated my professional life to. And now, in a moment of passion, many of my comrades-in-arms are throwing it all away in a fit of pique. Because “Trump fights!”
How many Republicans have been deemed unfit for the Oval Office because of comparatively minor character flaws or ideological shortcomings? Rick Perry in 2012 saw his candidacy implode when he couldn’t remember the third item on his checklist of agencies he’d close down. Well, even in that “oops” moment, Rick Perry comes off as Lincolnesque compared with Donald Trump.
Yes, I know Trump has declared himself pro-life. Good for him -- and congratulations to the pro-life movement for making that the price of admission. But I’m at a total loss to understand why serious pro-lifers take him at his word. He’s been all over the place on Planned Parenthood, and when asked who he’d like to put on the Supreme Court, he named his pro-choice-extremist sister.
Ann Coulter wrote of Newt in 2011: “If all you want is to lob rhetorical bombs at Obama and then lose, Newt Gingrich -- like recent favorite Donald Trump -- is your candidate. But if you want to save the country, Newt’s not your guy.” Now Ann leads a chorus of people claiming that Trump is our only savior. Has Trump changed, or have Ann and her followers? Is there a serious argument behind the new thinking, or is it “because he fights!”?
It is entirely possible that conservatives sweat the details of tax policy too much. Once in office, a president must deal with political realities that render the fine print of a campaign pamphlet as useful as a battle plan after the enemy is met. But in the last month, Trump has contemplated a flat tax, the fair tax, maintaining the current progressive tax system, a carried-interest tax, a wealth tax, and doing nothing. His fans respond, “That shows he’s a pragmatist!”
No. It shows that he has absolutely no ideological guardrails whatsoever. Ronald Reagan once said, “Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.” Trump is close to the reverse. He’s a mouth at the wrong end of an alimentary canal spewing crap with no sense of responsibility.
In his embarrassing interview with Hugh Hewitt last night, Trump revealed he knows less than most halfway-decent D.C. interns about foreign policy. Twitter lit up with responses about how it doesn’t matter and how it was a gotcha interview. They think that Trump’s claim that he’ll just go find a Douglas MacArthur to fix the problem is brilliant. Well, I’m all in favor of finding a Douglas MacArthur, but if you don’t know anything about foreign policy, the interview process will be a complete disaster. Yes, Reagan delegated. But he knew enough to know to whom to delegate.
If you want a really good sense of the damage Donald Trump is doing to conservatism, consider the fact that for the last five years no issue has united the Right more than opposition to Obamacare. Opposition to socialized medicine in general has been a core tenet of American conservatism from Day One. Yet, when Republicans were told that Donald Trump favors single-payer health care, support for single-payer health care jumped from 16 percent to 44 percent.
I’ve written a lot about my problems with populism. One of my favorite illustrations of why the populist mindset is dangerous and anti-intellectual comes from William Jennings Bryan. “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver,” Bryan announced. “I will look up the arguments later.” My view of conservatism holds that if free silver is a bad idea, it’s still a bad idea even if the people of Nebraska are for it. But Trumpism flips this on its head. The conservatives of Nebraska and elsewhere should be against single-payer health care, even if Donald Trump is for it. What we are seeing is the corrupting of conservatives.
Homework Is for Losers
I agree that presidents don’t need to be experts on everything. But they do need to do their homework. This is a standard I’ve held for years:
This is my biggest gripe about some of the GOP candidates in recent years. They don’t think they have to do their homework, perhaps because they aren’t so much running for president as running for greater celebrity.
Consider Herman Cain. I love listening to him, and so do a lot of conservatives. He’s smart enough to be president. But he simply didn’t do his homework, and he acted like that was something to be proud of, as when he of bragged about not knowing the names of leaders of “small, insignificant states” like Uzbekistan (which he jokingly pronounced “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan”).The one thing you cannot buy in politics is charisma. If you could, Mitt Romney would have bought a pallet of it at Costco and he’d probably be president now. Cain and Perry had the charisma, the natural political talent, and they squandered it by thinking all they needed was the sizzle without the steak.
Trump has the charisma, I’ll grant him that. But there is no evidence he’s thought deeply about the job beyond how much classier it will be once he has it. His whole shtick is an eminence front (“It’s a put on!” -- The Couch).
When running for president, doing your homework is a question of character and even patriotism. If you love this country and want to be the president, quite literally the least you can do is be prepared.
So let’s return to the issue of character.
In 2012, Mark Steyn wrote that a President Gingrich would have “twice as many ex-wives as the first 44 presidents combined.” If that (quite brilliant) line resonated with you three years ago, why doesn’t it for a President Trump?
I understand the Noltean compulsion to celebrate anyone who doesn’t take crap from the mainstream media. But when Newt Gingrich brilliantly eviscerated the press in 2012, there was a serious ideological worldview behind it. Trump’s assaults on the press have only one standard: whether the journalist in question is favorable to Trump or not. If a journalist praises him, that journalist is “terrific.” If the journalist is critical of Trump he is a “loser” (or, in my case, a loser who can’t buy pants). Not surprisingly, Hugh Hewitt is now “third rate” because he made Trump look bad. I’m no fan of Arianna Huffington or Gail Collins, but calling them “dogs” because they criticized you is not a serious ideological or intellectual retort. (It’s not even clever.) I think Trump did insinuate that Megyn Kelly was menstruating during the debate. He denies it. Fine. But what in the world about his past would lead someone to give him the benefit of the doubt? This is the same man who said, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
Trump’s glass-bottom id lets the whole world see his megalomania. He talks about himself in the third person all the time. He explains that Trump is great because Trump is rich and famous. He’s waxed profound on how he doesn’t want blacks counting his money (he prefers Jews in yarmulkes). He makes jokes on national TV about women fellating him. He pays famous people to attend his wedding and then brags about it as if he got one over on them. He boasts in his books how he screwed over business associates and creditors because all that mattered was making an extra buck.
If your neighbor talked this way, maybe he’d still be your friend, because we all have friends who are characters. But would you want him to be your kid’s English teacher? Guidance counselor? Would you tell your kids you want them to follow his example? Would you go into business with him?
Would you entrust him with nuclear weapons?
Remnant Here I Come
Karl Marx coined the term lumpenproletariat to describe working-class people who could never relinquish their class consciousness and embrace the idea of a classless socialist society. Hence, they were useless to the revolutionary cause. I’m no Marxist, so I don’t buy the idea that anybody -- never mind a whole class of people -- are beyond persuasion. But I am tempted to believe that Donald Trump’s biggest fans are not to be relied upon in the conservative cause. I have hope they will come to their senses. But it’s possible they won’t. And if the conservative movement and the Republican party allow themselves to be corrupted by this flim-flammery, then so be it. My job will be harder, my career will suffer, and I’ll be ideologically homeless (though hardly alone). That’s not so scary. Conservatism began in the wilderness and maybe, like the Hebrews, it would return from it stronger and ready to rule. But I’m not leaving without a fight. If my side loses that fight, all I ask is you stop calling the Trumpian cargo cult “conservative” and maybe stop the movement long enough for me to get off.
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Who wrote this?
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Sorry. Jonah Goldberg.
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Figures............Goldberg is so far in the tank for Bush, he needs Windex to clean Bushes stomach so he can see out.
Goldberg does not recognize the faults of the GOPe. Instead, he promotes their beliefs and the current crop of elected officials are just great. He talks about supporting Conservative Principals,but ignores that Boehner, McConnell and others just ignore principals. Goldberg has also attached the Tea Party and anyone who disagrees with mainstream GOP thoughts.
Goldberg and the entire staff of National Review can shove it up their collective asses.
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If Townhall radio, National Review, WSJ, (and Doug :wink: ) are all too liberal, you are planning to build a majority out of a mighty thin sliver.
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"Doug, your strong reservations and even dislike and distrust of Trump are understandable. "
Yes, thank you. He stole from me twice as I see it. I was a victim of a private taking which he supports with his cavalier disregard for the constitution and secondly I will never forgive him for the $10 I gave him via some big retailer for the best selling 1987 book, 'Art of the Deal'. All the way through that book I was saying he should have named it, "Aren't I Great" and "Don't I know a lot of Important People". There was absolutely nothing in that book even intended to help a young real estate investor interested in 'the art of the deal'. In helpfulness, I would rate at it well below the Andre Agassi and Keith Richards autobiographies. (That was meant as an insult to all of them.)
"As to Hewitt being a Bushie, he donated $100k to the 43 campaign in 08. "
I think you mean '00 or '04 but I don't see it there either. I also supported both Bushes - after all good candidates were eliminated.
http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/contributions/hugh-hewitt.asp?cycle=14
"He is either for real, or the world's second greatest con artist."
And I see him as somewhere in between.
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Pat:
Goldberg's book "Liberal Fascism" has been an influence on me and I do not recognize most of your description of him when I see him on the panel of Bret Baier Special Report.
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Doug,
It is not a matter of whether those groups and writers are conservative, liberal or space alien dictators. It is all about having candidates rammed down our throats because it is good for the special interest big donors. And it is about those officials that are elected actually trying to work for the people who elected them, not ignoring them.
For example:
What happened to reducing government spending?
What happened to repeal or reforming Obamacare?
What happened to controlling the borders? Stopping amnesty?
Four years ago, we were told that if we gave the GOP the House, they could stop a lot of the dimwit programs. So we gave it to them. Then it became, oh, we need both the House and the Senate to stop the dimwits. So we gave it to them. Now, we need the House, the Senate and the White House to change things. I DON'T BELIEVE THEM ANYMORE!!!
The GOP promised us that the following were "electable".
Bush 41 in 1992. And this even after his Read My Lips, No New Taxes pledge that he broke. (The claim is made that it was Perot's fault. Recent studies now show that Perot pullled just as much from Clinton as Bush, so it would have made no different.)
Dole in 1996. (It was Dole's turn. He had been a good GOP soldier.)
Bush 43 in 2000. (Jeez....he could not even beat Gore in the popular vote.)
Bush 43 in 2004. (The only saving grace was he was running against "I was in Vietnam" Kerry. And then the idiot "reported for duty" with a salute at the Convention.)
McCain in 2008. (The only reason it was not worse was Palin. Otherwise it would have been a bigger route. Even then, the McCain people were stabbing Palin in the back during the campaigning.)
Romney in 2012. (Mr. Nice Guy. Would not go after Obama. Let Candy Crowley wipe him out in the debate.)
We are tired of the Uniparty that only cares about keeping in power and not willing to risk their comfy lifestyles for doing what their constitutes want. We are tired of being told that certain candidates are electable and that we must vote for them. If not, we are rubes, rednecks, lo info voters, vulgar and all the other things that we are called.
The GOP is corrupted like the Dems. It needs to be replaced. We will not take it anymore, even if it means that Hillary will win. We will sit out the election in numbers far larger than with Romney.
BTW, when I get mad like this, you know it is serious because I can usually accept anything.
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CD,
Read all of his articles now. He is anti anyone who is not GOPe.
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Yeah. The GOPe is not plotting to take down Trump and put in their own candidate, usually Bush. Nor are they denigrating the people who want Trump. In fact, they are supporting all candidates in the hope of getting an acceptable candidate that can win, and will actually try to do what he promises. (Sarcasm off now.)
From the New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/05/us/politics/talk-in-gop-turns-to-a-stop-donald-trump-campaign.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0 (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/05/us/politics/talk-in-gop-turns-to-a-stop-donald-trump-campaign.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0)
Talk in G.O.P. Turns to a Stop Donald Trump Campaign
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE SEPT. 4, 2015
Quiet conversations have begun in recent weeks among some of the Republican Party’s biggest donors and normally competing factions, all aimed at a single question: How can we stop Donald Trump?
Republican strategists and donors have assembled focus groups to test negative messages about Mr. Trump. They have amassed dossiers on his previous support for universal health care and higher taxes. They have even discussed the creation of a “super PAC” to convince conservatives that Mr. Trump is not one of them. But the mammoth big money
network assembled by Republicans in recent years is torn about how best to defuse the threat Mr. Trump holds for their party, and haunted by the worry that any concerted attack will backfire.
In phone calls, private dinners and occasional consultations among otherwise rivalrous outside groups, many have concluded that Mr. Trump’s harsh manner and continued attacks on immigrants and women were endangering the party’s efforts to compete in the general election. Yet after committing hundreds of millions of dollars to shape the Republican primary contest and groom a candidate who can retake the White House, the conservative donor class is finding that money — even in an era of super PACs
and billion dollar presidential campaigns — is a devalued currency in the blustery, post policy campaign fashioned by Mr. Trump, driven not by seven figure paid advertising campaigns but by Twitter feuds and unending free publicity.
“People are somewhat perplexed by the whole Trump phenomenon,” said Ray Washburne, a Dallas businessman who is Gov. Chris Christie’s finance chairman. So far, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group and a Republican media buyer, there has barely been any advertising targeting Mr. Trump. Out of $90 million worth of ads reserved or bought in the Republican primary, just $1,300 has been spent attacking Mr. Trump — an ad in Spanish that ran briefly in California that was sponsored by a Spanish language
television network.
The Club for Growth, which has spent millions of dollars on feisty intraparty campaigns attacking Republican candidates who deviate from conservative economic orthodoxy, appears closest to moving against Mr. Trump, soliciting advice from among its members and researching potential lines of attack. The group helped torpedo the populist presidential bid of Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, in 2008, and has long been a thorn in the side of Republican leaders — making it, many Republicans believe, a
credible foil to Mr. Trump.
But the club’s president, David McIntosh, said his group was still grappling with how to handle the protean Mr. Trump, whose appeal is based less on policy positions than on tapping into the raw anger of Republican voters against Washington leaders. Mr. McIntosh said some members had even told him they agreed with Mr. Trump’s critique of Washington’s ineffectual establishment even if they did not regard him as very principled. “Part of our research has been why would a conservative Republican voter find this appealing,” Mr. McIntosh said. “A wonkish explanation that trade is actually good for the country probably won’t assuage them.”
In interviews, several savvy and typically confident Republican donors and strategists seemed puzzled about how to topple Mr. Trump, increasingly worried about the feelings he has stirred among the activist base and uneasy about the consequences for the party. Andy Sabin, a New York supporter of Jeb Bush, said the question of what to do about Mr. Trump had come up repeatedly on the Hamptons fundraising circuit this summer, as what seemed like a summer romance by disenchanted
blossomed into a full blown insurgency. “He’s been a topic, and he obviously disgusts a lot of people, because he’s been vile,” said Mr. Sabin, who is also a donor to American Crossroads, the party’s leading super PAC. “But he’s also been able to bring out what people feel about their government.”
The cost of an anti Trump campaign would be daunting: Reshaping opinions about Mr. Trump, a candidate with universal name recognition and a knack for garnering free airtime and column inches, could cost as much as $20 million. A sustained campaign aimed at Fox News viewers could cost $2 million a week, one Republican consultant working for a rival candidate estimated, while a more targeted effort, aimed at Iowa caucus goers later this fall, would require as much as $10 million. And there is no certainty of success: A group identified with the Republican establishment would risk ending up in a war with Mr. Trump, while a new group — such as a political nonprofit to which other donors and
organizations could secretly funnel cash — would play into Mr. Trump’s comments about lobbyists and corporations scheming to prop up his rivals.
Mr. Trump also has begun to preview such attacks. This week, he lambasted both Karl Rove, a Crossroads co-founder, and the Club for Growth, which he said once asked him for a million dollar contribution. (A club spokesman said that Mr. Trump asked for the meeting with Mr. McIntosh, which took place in May.)
“Many Super Pacs, funded by groups that want total control over their candidate, are being formed to ‘attack’ Trump,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday on Twitter. “Remember when u see them.” Some Republican leaders continued to hold out hope that the improvisational Mr. Trump would prove unable to convert his popularity and name recognition into a campaign organization capable of winning primaries next year, as the lazy summer months give way to a grinding ground campaign in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. But several donors and strategists acknowledged that their earliest hope — that Mr. Trump would fade away on his own — was looking less likely every day. “Obviously the discussions have changed to say, ‘He’s someone who’s going to be there right to the end,’” said Ronald Weiser, a real estate developer and former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party.
While many Republican leaders and donors are convinced that something must be done to stop the billionaire Manhattan developer, few seem ready to take him on directly, given Mr. Trump’s tendency to counterattack viciously. Allies of Mr. Bush, arguing that Mr. Trump helps the former Florida governor by stealing voters and attention from other anti establishment candidates, remark that perhaps donors to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, or Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, might take the lead in financing a Trump takedown. Mr. Walker’s supporters, in turn, suggest that the work might best be handled by a super PAC with plenty of cash but an under performing candidate — like Rick Perry, the former Texas governor. “Everybody’s got different agendas and different conflicts,” said Austin Barbour, an adviser to a group of super PACs, known as Opportunity and Freedom, that have raised more than $17 million to back Mr. Perry, whose own campaign is floundering and bankrupt. “Our No. 1 priority is to go take this fight to support Governor Perry. There’s a lot of time here.”
The biggest outside groups not tied to a specific candidate — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the political network of Charles and David Koch and the Rove founded
American Crossroads — are for now staying clear, although the Koch organizations have conspicuously snubbed Mr. Trump in several ways, declining to invite him to their policy forums or give him access to the network’s state of the heart voter database.
Among Republican strategists not working for the campaign, the emerging consensus was that voters would need to be persuaded by the candidates themselves, not by super PACs. But candidates like Mr. Cruz have not only avoided criticizing Mr. Trump, but have praised him, hoping to position themselves to pick up his supporters should Mr. Trump falter.
One Republican strategist described “a sigh of relief around town that the Bush campaign finally did something,” referring to Mr. Bush’s decision this week to release a video of Mr. Trump looking askance at Iowa, describing himself as “very pro choice,” and calling for tax increases on the rich.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
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http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Donald-Trump-Nuclear-deal-calls-for-US-to-defend-Iran-against-Israeli-attack-415079
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http://www.westernjournalism.com/trump-just-made-a-surprise-statement-about-kim-davis-thatll-have-many-people-furious/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=TeaPartyNewsletter&utm_campaign=PM1&utm_content=2015-09-04
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I am so sick of the whole Same Sex Marriage garbage. The Supremes have ruled and that is that.
Trump was right. She could have resigned, but she wanted her 15 minutes of fame. She had no authority to refuse to issue the licenses, and when she ignored the Court's order, then Contempt was present and she should have gone to jail.
The Same Sex Marriage issue now becomes like the Abortion Issue. It is something that opposing sides can use to establish their own special interest groups, receive donations, and no longer have to work for a living.
Keep the people divided, and you can have "everything", or at least money.
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http://www.theamericanmirror.com/shock-poll-trump-receives-25-of-black-vote-in-general-election-matchup/
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Interesting.
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PP writes:
"It is all about having candidates rammed down our throats because it is good for the special interest big donors."
I haven't done any research to verify or confirm but someone recently cited a statistic that is 400 families are responsible for 80% of the national political donations. At least I think it refers to national politics but I am not sure.
Reminds me of Churchill in his own autobiography writing that 200 or 300 families control all of England (circa ~ 1900). I wouldn't call it "control" but would certainly call it remarkable influence now.
Back to Trump. His ego is a huge concern. Could, if he was to be elected (still a long shot) be even more of megalomaniac than Obama? More of an autocrat than the present "One"?
Just some food for thoughts?
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http://www.ontheissues.org/Donald_Trump.htm
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From a conservative Republican's point of view, the endorsement from hell.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/09/paul-krugman-endorses-trump.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/07/opinion/paul-krugman-trump-is-right-on-economics.html?action=click&contentCollection=Corrections&module=MostPopularFB&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article
SEPTEMBER 7, 2015
Paul Krugman: “Trump Is Right on Economics.”
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Doug,
Come on. Krugman did not say a word about Trump's economic policies. Instead, he does his typical rant about how good things are now, and then makes comparisons to Bush.
Sounds to me like Krugman is scared of Trump, so he tries a piece like this.
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Doug,
Come on. Krugman did not say a word about Trump's economic policies. Instead, he does his typical rant about how good things are now, and then makes comparisons to Bush.
Sounds to me like Krugman is scared of Trump, so he tries a piece like this.
Fair enough. I didn't read it - until now. Still learned nothing from Krugman. What a waste of time he has become. This is another case of the headline writer misleading the reader. I have my own reasons to believe Trump is a big government (non)conservative.
Where is it, after all the rhetoric, that Trump gives his view of how to maximize growth in the economy?
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"I have my own reasons to believe Trump is a big government (non)conservative."
Very possibly true.
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Read Trump's book...Time to Get Tough. (I have the epub version.) Though written in 2012 when he was thinking about running, it gives a good idea of what he is pushing for, including tackling the debt and also taxes. He does not get overly specific, but it does give a good idea.
If someone sends an email to me at ppulatie@pacbell.net, who knows what might happen.
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Donald's new Bush Instagram ad.
https://instagram.com/p/7YV_u_mhWB/
Not even a contest between the two on who is better at the ads.
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Gotta give the man that!
OTOH concerns remain , , ,
http://thefederalist.com/2015/09/08/donald-trump-and-the-war-on-the-brains-of-the-right/
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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/09/08/trump-says-training-at-his-prep-school-was-better-than-what-military-members-get/
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So according to Tracinski, I am an "unthinking man". Must add that to the list of names I am being called. And also Trumpenproletariat.
Tracinski knocks Trump's comment about finding out once he takes office. The truth is that once every president takes office, they are briefed on different things and their entire world view quickly changes. Happened to Reagan all the way through Obama. If Tracinski does not understand that, then maybe he is the "unthinking man".
As to those who write for The Federalist, and the implication that Federalists are conservative, what a bunch of b.s. I would recommend that people read the writings of The Federalist Papers and then read the writings of the Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists literally predicted what would happen in the Judiciary, Executive and Legislative branches over the years and to the extent that we see their predictions born out today.
Federalists were for greater government power over the states when the Constitution. They were not for a lesser government.
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I'm guessing you're not a typical Trump supporter - or anything else that starts with 'typical'. ) When I sided with Dick Cheney about deposing a genocidal dictator in Iraq I was supposedly in bed with Haliburton and big oil and yet oddly I never received the payoff.
Even if they change when they get to office, we get to vet them the best we can in advance. He may change, but from what to what, we would like to know. He won't likely get to office if he doesn't first show interest in some of the minutia of foreign policy.
So far we have identified more examples of Trump favoring greater government power than we have for The Federalist.
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Jumping on the Krugman bandwagon, Elizabeth Warren is endorsing Trump's tax plan.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/09/08/elizabeth_warren_donald_trump_and_i_both_agree_there_ought_to_be_more_taxation_of_the_billionaires.html
Calling him out on his generalities is how we pursue specifics and clarity.
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Doug,
You really need to read the Section on Taxes in his book, Time to Get Tough. It spells out his thoughts on taxation. He cites:
The problems with High Corporate Taxes and overseas issues.
Hidden taxes that the consumer pays.
How when taxes increase, the smart people turn to Tax Free Bonds and Tax Free Havens for investments.
Eliminate the Death Tax
Lower Tax Rates on Capital Gains and Dividends and keep at 15%
Lower Tax Rates on Corporations to 0
For companies who outsource to other countries, 20% tax rate. If they return, 0%
Imports get hit with a 20% "tax".
For the Income Tax:
Up to $30k, 1%
From $30k to $100k, 5%
From $100k to $1m, 10%
Over $1m, 15%
After that, he writes about reducing the size of government.
Bet you have never seen this info posted anywhere. That is because the media is lazy and also supports big government.
Hmmm, since both Krugman and Warren support Trump's Tax Plan, perhaps someone should now start saying that they agree with Trump on these issues. But, not gonna happen.
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Doug,
When you say that you guess I am "not a typical Trump supporter", it appears that you may have a misconception of Trump supporters. The media and pundits are trying to promote this theme, but it is not true.
Trump supporters are all across the spectrum. The common factor is that they are fed up with DC politicians and the lies. They are looking for answers to the many problems, beginning with Immigration and going from there.
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Pat:
You forgot to mention his 14% "wealth tax" , , ,
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That is not in the book. Of course, it was proposed in 1999. Perhaps he has changed his mind on it.
As to the hedge funds, he makes a very good point on the "interest carried" issue. I am not a tax guy so I do not understand all the details, but one Tax Attorney I work with says it is a major issue, and he has no problems with going after the hedge funds on it. He also likes all the other reform proposals. Perhaps it is because he is also ready to retire so he does not need to worry about a future loss of income.
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I really just meant that no one is a typical Trump or anything else supporter, not that the others are illiterate.
"Trump supporters are all across the spectrum. The common factor is that they are fed up with DC politicians and the lies. They are looking for answers to the many problems, beginning with Immigration and going from there."
Agreed.
"Eliminate the Death Tax
Lower Tax Rates on Capital Gains and Dividends and keep at 15%
Lower Tax Rates on Corporations to 0
For companies who outsource to other countries, 20% tax rate. If they return, 0%
Imports get hit with a 20% "tax".
For the Income Tax:
Up to $30k, 1%
From $30k to $100k, 5%
From $100k to $1m, 10%
Over $1m, 15%
After that, he writes about reducing the size of government."
Mostly looks great. But not the import tax.
"Bet you have never seen this info posted anywhere. That is because the media is lazy and also supports big government."
No. We haven't heard about this because he's not running (so far) on this platform. The plan he has coming out won't be this plan, I predict.
I wonder what the static-CBO says about taxing everyone near the median at 5% and most of the top 1% at 10%. Which programs and departments will he cut and eliminate to balance this - and get elected?
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This was in the updated Time to Get Tough that came out Aug 31. Will see if I can get a copy of it.
This is all a part of negotiations. Put out for consumption the most outrageous plan, let the opposition puke on the demands, and then work out a reasonable settlement. Heck, I did it all the time when I was in sales.
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...
This is all a part of negotiations. Put out for consumption the most outrageous plan, let the opposition puke on the demands, and then work out a reasonable settlement. Heck, I did it all the time when I was in sales.
True that a tax plan will have to go into negotiations with the new House and Senate for any winning candidate. If this is not the Trump plan, then we still don't know the plan.
If the plan is "outrageous" or preposterous, the candidate will have to explain why he/she is blowing open a new deficit or closing half the government. The rules of the game, at least for the others, are that they have to explain how, if passed, their plan would work and make us better off than under the status quo and opponents' plan.
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http://www.thetribunepapers.com/2015/09/05/trump-plans-crack-down-on-muslim-immigration/][url]http://www.thetribunepapers.com/2015/09/05/trump-plans-crack-down-on-muslim-immigration/ (http://[url)[/url]
This should disprove any pundits who claims that Trump will bring in large numbers of Syria refugees and especially Muslims.
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Add Glenn Beck to the list of conservatives who are not buying the Trump product.
Ripping Trump on radio this morning. Considers it brilliant of Ted Cruz to invite Trump to share the same stage yesterday.
Trump brought in the cameras and attention. People saw one candidate full of himself and the other focused, prepared and on-message.
Is Beck secretly part of the GOP establishment? lol.
http://www.glennbeck.com/
http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/09/08/glenns-co-host-predicts-when-trumps-campaign-will-meet-its-demise/
http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/08/25/glenn-to-trump-stop-demonizing-the-companies-and-start-fixing-the-problems/
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Beck "yawn". Grew tired of him years ago.
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Listening to Geraldo this AM (heck I was in the car and bored) callers to his show did wish Trump would tone down the name calling. One said he prefers a gentleman and not someone with 5th grade talk.
Geraldo I think hit it squarly on the mark. His response was that those of us on the right (and left apparantly too) are not looking for humility. The conservatives have had enough of humility. We are looking for a strong leader who will fight back.
Just like the Left has decided honesty, truth, and the people of the US do not matter as much as their political agenda, the right will throw out humility in order to win.
Trump is at least honest.
As for the comment about Fiorna's face:
First didn't he say this behind the scenes? If so what is the big deal?
Second I happen to agree with him. I've seen pictures of her that make me cringe. At one point I thought she was a shoe in for the Joker.
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Trump's comment this morning was that people insult his hair, so what's the problem?
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I thought I would wait to respond until someone else did. Otherwise I would not want to wear out my welcome.
Trump was in a private office with friends and campaign people watching tv. When others came on ahead of Carly, he made comments on them as well. The Rolling Marshmellow reporter was present in the office and was doing an article about Trump. He heard the comment and wrote about it.
The article was actually pretty good for the Rolling Marshmellow. It gave some good points on Trump, but every so often, there was the dig put in.
For the critics, what is not mentioned is that Carly attacked Trump first, complaining about his hair and whatever......(slipped that one in nicely.) Actually, this "attack" was not a publicized "attack" until the reporter wrote about it. So I would not consider that an attack.
As to the critics, who the hell has never made the same type of comments, especially about Piano Legs Hillary? Heck, women can be the worst offenders. And when I look at Carly, I see horse face John Kerry's younger sister staring back at me. Could not imagine waking up to her and feeding her oats each morning. Riding her would be even worse.
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Trump's comment this morning was that people insult his hair, so what's the problem?
Classic Trump non-apology.
Trump's wife (roughly the age of Donald Jr.) is better looking than Fiorina - in her 60s. So he should continue being husband to Mrs. Trump. What does that have to do with wanting to be President?
Trump trivializes the process. He'll learn about security threats after the election, if then. He may just choose the best staff to do it. He is all over the map on economic issues. What he knows for sure is that he is the best. What I know from that is Trump should vote for Trump.
The man we will choose for the next generation to look up to as a model of success and leadership has 4 bankruptcies, and 5 children with 3 different women.
Where's the beef?
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"Who the hell has never made the same type of comments, especially about Piano Legs Hillary? Heck, women can be the worst offenders. And when I look at Carly, I see horse face John Kerry's younger sister staring back at me. Could not imagine waking up to her and feeding her oats each morning."
I have written about Hillary's looks, paused while writing knowing it was out of line, and know that I'm not running for President. This isn't an isolated slip up; it is the core of his strategy.
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Doug,
They were casinos and were Chp 11, designed to restructure and to eliminate debt. Two were in 91 and 92, another in 2004 and then 2009.
I remember going to Vegas in 2000, and one of the newly built casinos, open only a year, was already in bk. Casinos can be a really risky business.
Companies go BK 11 all the time. Changing economic conditions can easily cause it.
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Bobby Jindal going after Trump today. 1% support? Just trying to get some publicity for a floundering campaign.
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/bobby-jindal-calls-trump-unstable-narcissist-n425071 (http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/bobby-jindal-calls-trump-unstable-narcissist-n425071)
Caveat: I do like some of Jindal's positions, but he hasn't got a chance. Get the hell out along with the other losers.
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PP,
FWIW I would trivialize some of the slurs that Trump comes out with.
Many people including myself do, and in my opinion rightfully so have to stand back with some reservation about Trump's temperament.
One of my patients said in the same sentence, "I like Trump but it's just that we will be at war in 15 minutes".
Clearly many other people are just a wee bit scared frankly of the extremism of his temperament.
Jindal makes a fair point. And Rush was reading the article today on his show. I did not hear the later portion of his show but it sounded to me that Rush thought Jindal makes fair points.
Are YOU 100% comfortable with Trump's hand on the nuclear button?
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CCP,
The "hand on the button" argument was brought out against Goldwater, Reagan, and so many others. Nothing happened.
Nuclear launch is more than just the President pushing the button at his whim. It, like all things nuclear, require a two man permissive action link. In the case of the President, another Nuclear Launch Code yielder must confirm the action if Trump wanted weapons free. If the others, including SecDef, the Joints Chief, NSA are against the action, nothing is going to occur.
One just not make the decision to press the button. It requires a full assessment of the situation, and agreement that the action must be taken by at least more than one person. For a nuke to be fired, things would have gone to hell in a basket and the circumstances to warrant it would be highly visible.
Now, if the President went nutso, the others would know this and would not approve the launch. This is especially true if circumstances did not warrant the action.
So no, this is not a problem for me, as it would not have been with me on Bush 43 after 9-11. In fact, I don't think that I would have been concerned with any President we have had, and I cannot think of any candidates either, except for perhaps Lyndon LaRouche, who had no chance.
Hmmm, maybe Slim Pickens.....but he would hitch a ride on the bomb.
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"FWIW I would trivialize some of the slurs that Trump comes out with."
Sorry I meant I would NOT trivialize....
PP, we will see over time how Trump does. I like him overall, but many people are concerned about him.
The more he keeps up the name calling the more people question him IMO as right for the job as leader of the free world.
I am not used to or expect to see this from someone I want as a role model. Yet I like everything else so far.
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CCP,
Are you from New York? Ever know a New Yorker? All I have ever met are like Trump. Attack them and they attack back.
BTW, Trump had the perfect response to Jindall.
Not worth responding to someone with less than 1% of the vote. (Then the sound of a slap in the face with a fish.)
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"Are you from New York? Ever know a New Yorker? All I have ever met are like Trump. Attack them and they attack back."
I am from New Jersey. So you are saying everyone from NY is like Trump?
Come on.
I don't recall a single mayor from NY who was like this.
Perhaps I can say it another way. He is up now. But no one stays up for ever. Just wait his turn.
And by the way. Many New Yorkers are assholes. Everyone knows this.
I want a leader. Not an asshole. That said I would still vote for him at this time.
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I said that all I have met are like Trump. They are feisty and fight back.
Of course, I "could" say that all New Jersey people are like Christie.......lol. Or Joe Piscopo.......
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Upstate New Yorkers are quite friendly and nice. More like Midwesterners. Like Doug.
Downstate New Yorkers are rulers of the world.
As for us from New Jersey well what can I say.
:-D
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Q: How many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None of your fg business.
Speaking as a born and raised New Yorker, I think it a fair point to attribute part of Trump's way to his being a New Yorker. New York is a different , , , ecosystem of humanity :wink:
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Q: How many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None of your fg business.
Speaking as a born and raised New Yorker, I think it a fair point to attribute part of Trump's way to his being a New Yorker. New York is a different , , , ecosystem of humanity :wink:
In the northeast, fcuk is a helping verb.
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So that is why CD barks with an attitude.
Jindal came out tonight and said that Trump looked like he had a squirrel on his head. Waiting for the Trump Take Down.
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I thought it a good move for Jindal. He was dead in the water so why not take a chance in the run up to the second debate? We'll see how it plays out.
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Here is the question to ask.......
Why are Gilmore, Jindal, Perry, Graham, Pataki, Christie, Santorum and Kasich still in the race? None of them have more than 2%, and most at 0 or 1%. They have no potential to win.
According to many, this is a part of the GOPe strategy. Split the vote so that Bush can win with no more than 25% support himself. If not for Trump, this would work.
Now why would Rubio continue to run? He is dropping like flies himself. He does not have the luxury of running for Senator at the same time like Paul does? IOW, what is the payoff to Rubio when he loses and is no longer in the Senate?
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Here is the question to ask.......
Why are Gilmore, Jindal, Perry, Graham, Pataki, Christie, Santorum and Kasich still in the race? None of them have more than 2%, and most at 0 or 1%. They have no potential to win.
According to many, this is a part of the GOPe strategy. Split the vote so that Bush can win with no more than 25% support himself. If not for Trump, this would work.
Now why would Rubio continue to run? He is dropping like flies himself. He does not have the luxury of running for Senator at the same time like Paul does? IOW, what is the payoff to Rubio when he loses and is no longer in the Senate?
No. This looks like split the vote so Trump can win. There is no conspiracy as to why so many good candidates want to be President IMHO.
Pataki sounded sharp on foreign policy. Would make a better Pres than any of the Dems. But I don't know why he's running. Perry had the best governing record, but didn't cut it in the national campaign. Graham is irrelevant. Santorum also missed his chance. I don't like Christie, kind of Trump-like, without the media skills. Jindal is a good man; isn't going to catch on. Kasich has amazing experience, but not my cup of tea.
I like Rubio. He put it all on the line for this. On his only bad issue - immigration, he would likely accomplish as much as Trump, secure the border and send back the criminals. He has crossover appeal without caving on principles. He understands freedom, a word Trump hasn't used yet. He isn't establishment; he beat the establishment to get there and is running against it now. He stepped in it over abortion and I don't know why or where that leads. The word about the Thursday vote came from Rubio canceling an event here at the Minneapolis Club for a vote that didn't happen in the Senate. His numbers are down even though most gave him the win in the last debate. Hard to get traction when Mitch McConnell won't let you leave Washington and talk to voters and contributors. He already gave up that Senate seat. He can run for Governor or serve in the cabinet if he loses, plus he was everyone's VP choice.
Trump has poll numbers and his opponents have poll number envy. Like Clintons, Obama, Biden, he also seems to survive every mis-step. The other candidates need to take down Trump without attacking his supporters. Whoever wins has to unite all the factions plus pull from voters outside the party. Which ones are keeping that all in mind now?
The race they say starts after Labor Day. The first full week after Labor Day is next week. It's all going to happen fast, but it hasn't barely started yet.
Your friend Hugh Hewitt is preparing a good foreign policy question for Mr. Trump in the debate next Wednesday. How about if the frontrunner prepares for the test instead of just sharpening the personal insults? Which method did they teach at the Wharton School he likes to mention? Like the Bushes, did he just get in because of a rich Daddy? His school records are buried next to Obama's: http://fortune.com/2015/08/14/donald-trump-wharton/
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Conservative Treehouse has written a series of articles about how the GOPe has stacked the deck for Bush. The reason for the many candidates is that the GOPe understands that Bush is not welcome, so if they can split the vote of the anti Bush crowd, Bush can get nominated with the support that he had before Trump entered.
If the GOPe continues the attack against Trump and nominate Bush or Rubio, the Dems win. We will stay home and not vote except perhaps for Cruz and maybe Carson, but Carson is more liberal as will be shown if he gets in the lead and knocks off Trump.
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PP,
I love the spirited debate on the board.
You said: "The "hand on the button" argument was brought out against Goldwater, Reagan, and so many others. Nothing happened"
Well something did happen. Goldwater lost big time. And part of the reason was his suggestion of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
My father voted for Johnson. Many years ago I asked him why since he was mostly voting Republican. His answer:
Goldwater would use nuclear bombs in Vietnam and I thought that was crazy.
I am sure many others felt the same way.
As for Reagan lets make one thing clear. Trump is NO Ronald Reagan. Not even close.
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Goldwater also lost due to the Kennedy assassination. There was a sense of "Camelot" that would continue with Johnson. (Thanks to Theodore White for the concept of Camelot. A few days after the JFK funeral, White asked in an interview with Jackie, how she would like the time of JFK to be remembered. She remarked that Camelot was his favorite movie or play, can't remember, but that was how she would like it to go down....as Camelot. So, it became Camelot.) So it was almost the Goldwater loss being just as likely as Ford losing after Watergate.
No, Trump is no Reagan, but who cares if he can destroy the GOPe.
http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2015/09/11/tickets-sold-out-for-trump-dallas-rally-team-rombush-prepares-gope-death-star/
(http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2015/09/11/tickets-sold-out-for-trump-dallas-rally-team-rombush-prepares-gope-death-star/)
Now, from Conservative Treehouse, to support my claims that the GOPe is going after Trump:
Tickets Sold Out For Trump Dallas Rally – Team RomBush Prepares GOPe Death Star…
Posted on September 11, 2015 by sundance
Deep inside the bowels of the GOPe machine, the Death Star formerly controlled by Romney – now Bush, the storm troopers are working diligently to charge the Vorlon Ray and prepare to eliminate Planet Trump.
[…] an army of former aides and advisers from Romney’s long political career — are arrayed among a host of Republican presidential campaigns. But, through no concerted effort, they are curiously aligned once again in common cause, a stem-to-stern effort that has united old comrades even as they nominally play for different teams: stopping Donald Trump.
[…] “It would be ironic if it wasn’t like every single person in the political wing who can stare more than five seconds into the future wasn’t mortified or petrified at the prospect of Trump being the nominee,” said Florida-based GOP strategist Rick Wilson who called a Trump nomination “an existential threat” to the party.
[…] Trump is, in a sense, the anti-Mitt. And he is leading, by no small margin, the would-be heirs to Romney’s throne as sovereign of the party’s moderate, establishment, country-club wing.
[…] Jeb Bush appears to have garnered the most former Romney hands, including longtime advisers Beth Myers and Peter Flaherty; his top 2012 New Hampshire and Iowa strategists Rich Killion and David Kochel; and Mike Murphy, a veteran GOP consultant with longstanding ties to both Romney and Bush who is leading a super PAC backing Bush. His campaign manager, Danny Diaz, was a senior adviser to Romney in 2012.
[…] Henry Barbour, a Mississippi-based GOP strategist who helped write the party’s post-mortem on the 2012 campaign, pointed to an interview Trump gave last week with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt
[…] “Romney’s the one candidate who, if he was on the stage with Donald, he would bulldoze him,” said Scott Reed, senior political strategist at the US Chamber of Commerce
[…] “Not only would Donald Trump not win the White House next year, he’s also doing a great deal of harm to the Republican Party”
[…] “I think you’re going to see more concerted efforts against him in the future,” said Rick Wilson, the Florida-based strategist. “A very broad and decentralized movement coming from a surprisingly diverse set of different buckets of Republican voters and communities” is, he said, beginning to mobilize financial efforts to take out Trump. (link)
Meanwhile the Rebel Alliance is organizing, coordinating, rallying and preparing to mount the assault….
[…] Well, there are no tickets left for the Republican presidential front-runner’s rally at the American Airlines Center. So it’s certain that thousands of North Texans will jam into the place to hear Trump’s stump speech. The AAC holds about 20,000, but it’s unclear if that number of tickets were distributed. (link)
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"Who could vote for that face", Trump of Carly Fiorina.
"Bleeding out of her wherever"*@, Trump describing Megyn Kelly.
Ungallant. James Lilaks describing Trump's comment of Fiorina.
- lacking in courtesy or chivalry, (rude).
Indecorous. From the movie Imitation Game, applies here.
- improper, unseemly, unbecoming, undignified, indelicate,, ungentlemanly.
Words never used to describe Pres. Reagan. Give the megaphone and podium to someone else.
Meanwhile, Dallas event 'sold out' for Trump.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-primaries/253389-no-tickets-left-for-trumps-dallas-rally
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BJ Clinton dumbed down the Office of the Presidency with lie after lie, with sleeze after sleeze.
The really big concern I have about Trump is he could dump it down more if he were to win. What kind of a role model does he offer our children? Our culture is so degraded as it is.
Yet as Doug points out he soars in the polls. And as Geraldo points we are NOT looking for humility.
We are looking for a warrior. Someone who will stand up to the *F*ing left and shove PC back down their throats. He does this like no other. (If he keeps it up).
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My key points for voting:
1. Immigration and Wall
2. No GOPe candidate
3. Stop the McConnell/Boehner wimp out alliance.
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Trump was on Jimmy Fallon last night. No substance, but a good lighted-hearted interaction.
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https://youtu.be/SoZQfoXhbc0 (https://youtu.be/SoZQfoXhbc0)
Ya don't like this............"Trump and Give Me 20"!!!
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Club for Growth is hardly R. establishment, just one of the anti-establishment forces competing to move and change 'the establishment' - in a pro-freedom, pro-growth direction sympathetic with some of us here. Many of these claims against Trump are old and they ignore pp's points made in Trump 2012 book. Nonetheless, all over the map is no path to approach leadership of the free world, IMHO.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/09/a-word-from-the-club-for-growth.php Excerpting from a Club for Growth letter to members:
The Club believes that Donald is the worst Republican candidate on economic issues – plain and simple.
Not only has Trump been all over the map on some of the Club’s key issues – but he has taken several positions that are downright horrendous!
Trump came out for socialized medicine that was to the left of Obamacare, and he still thinks it works.
Trump proposed the largest tax increase in U.S. history. That’s not easy to do, but Trump did.
Trump not only supported eminent domain to take people’s private property so developers could use it for casinos and amusement parks, he’s tried to do it himself!
Trump jumped on board with Obama’s tax-the-rich mantra, dismissing a flat tax because he wants rates that “graduate upward.” Note to Donald: that’s the system we have in place.
Trump doesn’t just saber-rattle about trade wars, he wants to take up the sword and rush the U.S. into massive trade wars with huge tariffs that would be a devastating tax on American businesses and consumers.
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Is it honest for Club for Growth to present the old positions and not reveal the new positions?
CFG is raising money for:
Jeb
Rubio
Walker
Cruz
Paul
CFG is seeking donations for anti-Trump ads.
CFG sent Trump a letter asking for a $1,000,000 contribution.
How does one reconcile all of this with the CFG?
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"Is it honest for Club for Growth to present the old positions and not reveal the new positions?" - Fair point, I mentioned it too. Still it shows lack of consistency and convictions - on ALL topics.
They also didn't mentioned the birther nonsense. He was born to a mother from Kansas. What was that all about? Trump was the leader of the movement and then dropped it.
"CFG is raising money for:
Jeb
Rubio
Walker
Cruz
Paul"
- True. Candidates they think are pursuing their agenda.
CFG is seeking donations for anti-Trump ads.
- True. Candidate they think is not pursuing their agenda.
"CFG sent Trump a letter asking for a $1,000,000 contribution."
- Good idea. I should too. ) Why didn't he support them (prior to running), different agenda(?), or did he?
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The Birther Movement was not started by Trump. It was started by Hillary in 2008, trying to put the pressure on Obama.
Trump wanted to use the birther argument to 1) get the birth certificate released; 2) then get transcripts etc that stated Obama claimed he was of foreign birth, and then challenge his credibility. Did not work.
If Rubio and Jeb are pursuing the CFG agenda, then it makes me worry about them even more.
Trump did not give them money. He has not explained why.
The CFG still works through traditional GOPe politics. Though MacIntosh does blame Boehner and McConnell for the rise of Trump, if CFG was so strong, could they have not otherwise forced them to act differently?
Also, CFG puts out "generic" statements like immigration reform, etc, but they never go into depth on what they want. In fact, there is talk that their positions are like Jeb and Rubio.
I trust the CFG like I trust any other group....and expect the knife in the back at any moment.
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One followup point on Trump's old economic positions, socialized medicine, wealth tax, private takings, liberal judges, big spending, economic growth through trillion dollar government stimulus, etc. versus his new positions. He told us he would apologize if he was ever wrong and hasn't, so all old positions stand - by his own math.
Trump gave big money to elect the Pelosi Reid congress. He did it to "ease the gridlock". Good for him, as Elizabeth Warren might say. No apology means he wasn't wrong about that, according to him. Fair enough, but I wouldn't forgive him if he did apologize.
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/06/28/trump-i-gave-money-to-pelosi-reid-because-im-a-business/
http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/personal/02/05/lkl.donald.trump/index.html?iref=24hours
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ilanbenmeir/that-time-donald-trump-praised-the-stimulus-package-on-fox-n#.jt2Axn37k
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Doug,
Karl Rove needs your contact number. He wants to bring you aboard to attack Trump!
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Here is a real Donald Trump/Wall Street Journal interview. None of the media garbage. Just serious talk. The interviewer is a real professional and should moderate debates.
Well worth the look.
https://youtu.be/NwIL6imI6EU (https://youtu.be/NwIL6imI6EU)
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Doug,
Karl Rove needs your contact number. He wants to bring you aboard to attack Trump!
Funny. Maybe he already has my number. :wink: But I'm not attacking Trump, I'm just taking the time to read him.
National Review, Karl Rove, Townhall, Red State, Club for Growth and Ben Carson are all too far left and not deserving of our trust... but not Pelosi, Reid and Obama?!
I don't happen to believe Trump will send back all otherwise law-abiding illegal aliens (11 million?) even though he gave us his word. That removes a major distinction (to me) between Trump and others like Carson and Rubio.
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Watch the video interview I posted on Trump. He talks about his position papers and how he cannot be detailed because things change. What he is doing with his plan for immigration is setting the stage. Here is the "extreme" position. I want this. Then after getting in position, negotiations occur.
It is like buying a car. Do you walk into the dealership and say I want this car and this is what I will settle for paying? Or do you "low ball" and negotiate to an acceptable deal? Does the dealership give you its bottom line price? Or does it high ball knowing that you will "want" to negotiate?
It all marketing. Reminds me of a class I took in Marketing at Troy State, long ago. The final exam was one essay. How would you market someone running for "President of the US"? Of course, all of us answered in a more traditional approach for running for President. Wonder what that professor, if still alive, would think of the Trump run?
BTW, this photo gives every reason for voting for Trump. In it, he has his photo taken with his cabinet choices.
(http://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2015/09/Turmps-Cabinet-copy.jpg?zoom=3&resize=580%2C349)
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NATIONAL REVIEW
Trump: The Art of the Bluff
By John Fund — September 11, 2015
“I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.”
— Donald Trump, in an interview for Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, by business journalist Michael D’Antonio.
“Trump was willing to say and do almost anything to satisfy his craving for attention. But he also possessed a sixth sense that kept him from going too far.”
— D’Antonio’s conclusion to the book.
One often-underappreciated virtue of U.S. presidential campaigns is that their extreme length makes it very difficult to conceal what makes a candidate tick. (Barack Obama in 2008 was an exception, and he had help from an actively complicit media.)
This reality is finally catching up to Donald Trump.
As good as his “sixth sense” may be, Trump seems unlikely to avoid “going too far” in the long four-month stretch between now and the Iowa caucuses in February.
On Wednesday night, it came to light that Trump had made fun of rival candidate Carly Fiorina’s looks to a Rolling Stone reporter. “Look at that face,” he was overheard to say. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” Trump now claims he wasn’t talking about Fiorina’s appearance, but her “persona.”
Before the news of his Fiorina remark broke, Trump spoke at an afternoon rally protesting President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and blasted Obama for failing to secure the release of four Americans jailed in the Islamic Republic. Then he misapplied a lesson from history: “If I win the presidency, I guarantee you that those four prisoners are back in our country before I ever take office. I guarantee that. They will be back before I ever take office, because [the Iranians] know what has to happen, okay?”
Trump no doubt remembers that Iran released the hostages it had held for 444 days at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in for his first term as president. But foreign policy experts I’ve spoken to say that for Trump to “guarantee” a similar outcome for the four Americans imprisoned there today will likely lead to one of two disappointing outcomes: a) the Iranians stubbornly refuse to lose face by appearing to knuckle under to Trump; or b) Trump will feel pressure to use military force against Iran after he is sworn in so he won’t lose face.
“Reagan was careful not to comment on the hostages before he became president,” Martin Anderson, his late policy advisor, once told me. “That allowed him to exploit a vacuum and helped bring them home.”
In addition to the nationalistic fervor he can’t help whipping up, much of Trump’s support is predicated on his self-proclaimed genius in business deals. But National Journal reported this week that his business instincts are greatly exaggerated:
If he’d invested the $200 million that Forbes magazine determined he was worth in 1982 into (a mutual fund of S&P 500 stocks), it would have grown to more than $8 billion today. . . . That a purely unmanaged index fund’s return could outperform Trump’s hands-on wheeling and dealing call into question one of Trump’s chief selling points on the campaign trail: his business acumen.
Then there is the matter of Trump’s net worth itself. In June, Trump announced his presidential bid brandishing a document that claimed he was worth more than $8.7 billion. By August, when he filed reports with the Federal Election Commission, the number had ballooned to $10 billion.
#share#The game of hide-and-seek Trump plays with his “billions” was described by Tim O’Brien, a former New York Times reporter, in his 2005 book TrumpNation. The book quoted sources close to Trump as claiming he “was not remotely close to being a billionaire.” Trump promptly sued O’Brien for $5 billion in damages.
During the resultant litigation, O’Brien’s lawyers deposed Trump for two days in 2007. “Among the documents discussed was a Deutsche Bank assessment that pegged Donald’s net worth at $788 million in 2005,” O’Brien recalled in a Bloomberg View article this past July. “At the time, Donald was telling his bankers and casino regulators that he was worth $3.6 billion; he was telling me he was worth $5 billion to $6 billion.”
When Trump was asked about the wide discrepancy between his claimed net worth and the various independent estimates of his wealth, he revealed how his mind works. As D’Antonio reports in the excellent new Never Enough, “[Trump] explained the wide swings as a function of market conditions, and his own sense of the value of his name. This brand valuation — [Trump] estimated it was worth $6 billion.” Trump said in the deposition that the value of his brand “goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.” He then added some thoughts about his net worth:
[Wealth] can change when somebody writes a vicious article like O’Brien. I mean, I didn’t feel so great about myself when I read that article. I would have said that — after reading that article I would have said that this psychologically hurt me.
Trump is perfectly suited for the current media age. He provides enough outrageous quotes and distractions to remain such a source of endless fascination that the press has trouble catching up with his contradictions. D’Antonio says Trump “understood that in the media age, the frontier that might challenge a man or woman was found, not in the wilderness, but in the media. The boundary of this wilderness was marked by propriety, which was an elastic concept.”
Donald Trump has tested the media’s limits of propriety for three decades, and he’s usually succeeded in expanding them.
We will learn in the next four months just how far Trump can expand the equivalent political limits. As much as he may have mastered many of the lessons of the Robert Ringer classic Winning Through Intimidation, he might have forgotten a key one. “The secret to bluffing is knowing when not to bluff,” Ringer told me. “Some people don’t know when to stop, and they always regret it.”
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for National Review
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John Fund is GOPe. He is supporting the Bush/Rubio wing. Same as the entire National Review, Federalist, Hotair, Powerline and other websites.
I will not bother with things I have responded to before. Just some new stuff going to Brand Value.
Fund talks about what others have said about the Trump net worth and what he claims he is worth. Trump is using GAAP accounting rules, which certainly accepts “brand value”. As for those fools like Fund who don’t thing this is anything, think about this. Trump being in the Fox debate led to 24 million watchers and for a primary debate. Without him, it would have been a miracle to reach 4 million. That is BRAND VALUE!
BTW, remember “The Pledge”? All GOP candidates will support each other if elected. Pataki has already broken ranks with that.
Pat
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The One-Man Roadshow of Donald Trump
Presidential hopeful flies high as rivals’ hostility increases; ‘Everybody who attacks me is doomed’
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump spoke about his tax plan, his rising poll numbers and how he will handle the next phase of his presidential campaign. Photo: Chris Buck for The Wall Street Journal
By
Monica Langley
Sept. 13, 2015 1:23 p.m. ET
555 COMMENTS
NEW YORK— Donald Trump skipped breakfast one recent morning, blow-dried his hair in his Trump Tower penthouse and headed out to his personal Boeing 757 jet, dubbed “Trump Force One” since he emerged as the Republican presidential front-runner.
Seated in his plane’s living room, with its pearlwood and 24-carat gold trim, Mr. Trump worked alone, watching the big-screen TV and reading the day’s political news, mostly about him, with no binders of policy positions or talking points in sight. Upon landing, he waded alone into a throbbing mob desperate for his autograph at a packed Nashville rally.
It all fit the rule for staffers scrawled on a white board at campaign headquarters: “Let Trump Be Trump.”
The 69-year-old billionaire has soared to the top of the Republican field flying solo—a man and his plane, propelled forward by a gust of free media attention and virtually devoid of the staff, position papers, opposition researchers and ad budgets of modern campaigns. Now, though, with the time for summer flings ending and more serious voter examination just ahead, the Trump effort has reached an inflection point, at which he must decide whether he can continue to prosper as this kind of one-man show or whether the time for that is running out.
Travels and extensive conversations with Mr. Trump in recent weeks show that, while he is slowly beginning to bend to some candidate norms—opening state offices, readying ballot-access drives and preparing a tax plan—he continues to resist the experts’ view that he needs a conventional campaign apparatus.
“A lot of what I’m doing is by instinct,” Mr. Trump said in one of several interviews. “I assimilate a lot of information…and I believe in being strategic.” Instead of surrounding himself with what he called “political hacks,” Mr. Trump said, “I don’t need an inner circle.” His rationale: In an “age of specialization, I am tapping phenomenal people in every field.”
His tax plan, likely to come in the next couple of weeks, will reflect this approach. Figuring that “no candidate ever has known the tax code better than I do,” the longtime businessman issued directives: Simplify and cut taxes, help the middle class, solve the problem of corporate “inversions” in which companies move headquarters abroad, and “tax the paper-pushing hedge-fund guys.”
Without much staff, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has worked with outside advisers to flesh out the details of the tax plan, particularly to end up with a revenue-neutral result that neither raises nor lowers overall receipts. “We’re running an efficient organization with a business mind-set,” Mr. Lewandowski said. “We don’t need high-priced staff or consultants when leading authorities are volunteering to help Mr. Trump.”
Regarding his own tax rate, Mr. Trump said, “I would be happy to pay a lot more if it would help solve our country’s many problems.” He hasn’t released his tax returns but said he definitely would, without specifying when or the number of tax years.
Despite the bare-bones framework he has in place, Mr. Trump vows: “I will build a successful campaign for the long haul…I’ve never lost in my life.”
Republican strategist Kevin Madden said Mr. Trump faces new and serious threats. “One big question is whether he can turn momentum from celebrity fandom into an actual infrastructure to organize voters in cold gymnasiums in the dead of winter in Iowa…Trump hasn’t seen a full-on assault, which is just beginning, with millions of dollars in paid advertising and their relentless attacks.”
Criticism by his opponents is intensifying, calls for him to spell out what policies he believes in are growing, and Mr. Trump is entering the phase of the campaign cycle in which previous early GOP sensations have either faded or crashed.
Mr. Trump is reacting with characteristic bravado. “I hope they attack me, because everybody who attacks me is doomed.”
Surprise success
When he stood in Trump Tower’s marble-and-bronze lobby on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to announce his long-shot bid in June, few predicted the success Mr. Trump has had, not even him. “I had no idea I would do this well this fast,” he said, particularly after he was pummeled for calling some Mexican illegal immigrants “rapists” and “murderers,” which led Macy’s to drop his clothing line and Univision to end the Spanish broadcast of his Miss Universe pageant.
“The first two weeks were very bad for my brand,” said Mr. Trump, whose Trump Organization line of luxury properties includes hotels, golf courses and both residential and commercial high-rise buildings. In his office on Trump Tower’s 26th floor, the walls, tables and floors brim with testaments to his success—his best-selling books such as “Trump: the Art of the Deal,” magazine covers, the chair from which he told contestants “You’re fired!” on the hit reality-TV show “The Apprentice.”
After that rocky start, his poll numbers rose all summer, shaking up the GOP race and drowning out coverage of other contenders. The presidential bid is turning out to be “very good for the brand,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m No. 1.”
Jenny Beth Martin, chairman of the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, said the appeal is simple: “A lot of what Trump is saying is what many outside of D.C. are thinking.”
With fall arriving, Mr. Lewandowski is building what he calls an “atypical bottom-up model” of a campaign structure that has as many staff members in Iowa as in Trump Tower. “We get zero votes in headquarters,” said Mr. Lewandowski, from the sparse campaign office on the unfinished fifth floor in Trump Tower.
National political director Michael Glassner, who along with Mr. Lewandowski is among the few seasoned campaign operatives on the staff, said he has been Skyping with potential hires and renting space in states based on the electoral map. He is overseeing the nitty-gritty of ballot access in all 50 states and petition drives in the 11 that require voter signatures.
Press secretary Hope Hicks, a onetime Ralph Lauren model who was communications director in the Trump Organization’s real-estate and hotel division, juggles a demanding national press corps and a boss with a penchant for doing his own media. Daniel Scavino, who started as Mr. Trump’s caddie in high school and rose to operate one of his golf clubs, is running social media, in which he has been flooded with résumés and 98,000 messages in a month.
Donald Trump at his campaign headquarters in the Trump Tower in Manhattan, where his staff remains small. ENLARGE
Donald Trump at his campaign headquarters in the Trump Tower in Manhattan, where his staff remains small. Photo: Chris Buck for The Wall Street Journal
When a court overturned the NFL suspension of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady over “deflategate,” Mr. Lewandowski reminded his boss, a friend of the football star, “Don’t forget to tweet how happy you are that Brady is vindicated.” When Mr. Brady gave his first press remarks, a red Trump “Make America Great Again” hat was visible in his locker.
So far, the campaign website holds exactly one position paper, on the candidate’s now-well-known ideas for stopping illegal immigration. Besides a tax plan, Mr. Trump said he would begin releasing proposals on trade, health care and military and veterans issues.
But he added, “People don’t care about seeing plans. They have confidence in me.” There is little sign his is turning into anything like a conventional campaign.
Over Labor Day weekend, Mr. Trump stayed out of sight while other candidates paraded and picnicked in early-primary states, “That’s the exact opposite of what works for you,” Mr. Lewandowski advised Mr. Trump. “We want you where massive numbers of people can hear you and your messages, not a few watching you walk down a street.”
Instead, Mr. Trump huddled with advisers who volunteered to prep him for Wednesday’s debate on military and foreign-policy issues. Mr. Trump said he wasn’t cramming, though: “I’ve been prepping for 30 years.”
He limits his appearances largely to those before big crowds to ensure maximum media coverage. He will speak to about 20,000 in Dallas Monday night and then fly to Los Angeles to address veterans in front of the USS Iowa battleship. After Wednesday’s debate at the Reagan Library, he plans to fly overnight to New Hampshire for a rally in the first primary state.
Donald Trump took WSJ's Monica Langley on a tour of his office in the Trump Tower in Manhattan. Among his memorabilia: one of Shaquille O'Neal's sneakers. Photo: Jarrard Cole/The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Trump’s penchant for mocking opponents in his own party, as well as media figures, shows little sign of abating. Asked about a report of his disparaging former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina with the line “Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?” Mr. Trump said: “She’s got the wrong persona. I’m not talking about her looks. She failed miserably at HP and in her Senate race.” Ms. Fiorina later said she didn’t worry about what he meant but suggested she was getting under his skin.
Mr. Trump also has belittled former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s “low energy” style but now says he is losing interest because “Jeb is just single digits” in the polls. Instead, he now directs fire at former neurosurgeon Ben Carson : “Jeb looks like the Energizer bunny compared to him.” Mr. Carson declined to comment; Mr. Bush has said Mr. Trump can’t “insult [his] way to the nomination.”
Sometimes, Mr. Trump simply ignores the conventions. Before the first GOP debate, candidates were invited to go for a walk-through, microphone check and makeup stop. Mr. Trump skipped it all, getting off his plane in time to line up with his rivals right before walking on stage, a campaign aide said.
His circle of outside advisers is equally unorthodox. Mr. Trump recently dined with activist investor Carl Icahn to “energize Carl about dealing with China, Japan and Mexico,” he said. Mr. Icahn hosted the dinner on his apartment terrace and recalls telling Mr. Trump, “You’re striking a nerve with the people who are tired of getting screwed.”
But, Mr. Icahn added, “The rich guys in the Hamptons don’t like you too much.” Mr. Trump’s reply was, “Who cares? They are all giving money to Hillary and Jeb anyway.”
Mr. Trump said he is talking with some of America’s “biggest corporate names and finest negotiators” about renegotiating trade deals and making sure the U.S. isn’t disadvantaged. “I’ll give you each a country” to deal with if he wins, he said he has told them.
Another close adviser is his 33-year-old daughter Ivanka Trump, who oversees Trump Organization real estate and hotel development in addition to heading her apparel and accessories brand. She introduced her father when he announced his candidacy and talks to him several times a day. On Thursday, she stopped by to ask him to meet with a business client in the building.
In the meantime, Ms. Trump’s work leading the renovation of Washington, D.C.’s Old Post Office into a luxury Trump hotel is giving her dad an applause line on the stump: “I got it from the Obama administration—can you believe that? And it’s ahead of schedule and under budget!”
Irked by a sign
One of Mr. Trump’s themes has been his willingness to fund his own campaign while others “take money from lobbyists and special interests.” So when he swooped into Boston recently for an appearance hosted by a local auto magnate, he grew angry at a sign asking for $100 donations at the door to cover the event’s costs, and had his staff remove it. Even so, media reports called the gathering a fundraiser.
On on the flight back, Mr. Trump told his campaign manager, “I’ve turned down a $5 million donation, and then that stupid sign. My trip cost more than the $2,000 raised to cover their food.” Mr. Trump said he has spent around $2 million of his own money to date.
The next day, he headed to Nashville for a rally on his 757, which was largely empty as usual but for his four top campaign aides and five security guards sitting in back. There were no flight attendants or drinks served, but a binder of Miss Universe contestants was stacked in a corner with luxury magazines.
In Nashville, he told the audience, “I’m going to make this country rich again” and joked to them, “I need your friggin’ votes.”
Back home in New York, Mr. Trump said his real-estate business is evolving as he campaigns: “As the days go by, I give more and more to my children to run, and my executives.” His three older children with his first wife, Ivana, run divisions from the 25th floor. His fourth child, with ex-wife Marla Maples, is a student at the University of Pennsylvania, where Mr. Trump graduated from the Wharton School.
After work, he rode the elevator to the 68th floor to the penthouse home, decorated in Louis XIV style, that he shares with wife Melania and their 9-year-old son Barron. He emptied his pockets of germicidal hand wipes and $100 bills he sometimes hands to volunteers on the trail.
He caught up on news and the other candidates’ actions, as well as some of his own speeches recorded by his wife, who is more technologically adept. Mr. Trump doesn’t use a computer. He relies on his smartphone to tweet jabs and self-promotion, often late into the night, from a chaise longue in his bedroom suite in front of a flat-screen TV.
Later, in a rare moment of reflection, he likened being a candidate to the real-estate business and said he considers himself a better builder than marketer:
“Just as I’ve built great buildings that sell themselves, I believe in my product now. I’m prepared that if my truth doesn’t sell, the campaign won’t succeed. As in my buildings and my presidential campaign, the people will buy if they want the product. I don’t have to be the best salesman.”
Write to Monica Langley at monica.langley@wsj.com
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LEFT FEARS TRUMP COULD STOP REPUBLICANS FROM PRO-CRIME "REFORMS"
Norquist getting a bloody nose is always a good thing
September 14, 2015 Daniel Greenfield
Trump is bad news at Koch HQ for a long list of reasons. One of them is the shameful alliance with the left to free drug dealers could be in big trouble.
Criminal justice reform, a perennial lost cause for civil rights lefties, had its surprise bipartisan moment this year. Conservative Republican voices like antitax activist Grover
Norquist and the Koch brothers led campaigns against mass incarceration and mandatory drug sentences. GOP presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Rick Perry have
embraced the pro-reform Right on Crime initiative, while Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have co-sponsored reform bills with liberal Democratic senators.
But the Kumbaya reform moment may not survive the Summer of Trump...
Good.
It was sickening to see so many Republicans pen pieces for the Brennan Center. And Norquist getting a bloody nose is always a good thing.
Backing amnesty for drug dealers was even crazier than backing amnesty for illegal aliens. And it was a testament to how far the conservative movement had gone off the rails that so many of the candidates had even signed on to it. And that some conservative sites still continue to promote "sentencing reform".
This is one of the few areas where New York City conservatives get it more than a lot of the Red State conservatives do. Because out here you have to live with it. It's not some hypothetical problem that happens a hundred miles away.
New York City conservatism is often weak in other areas, but it's tough on crime. Which is bad news for Rand Paul, the Koch Brothers and Grover Norquist who formed a bizarre alliance with the ACLU to give the pro-crime group everything it wants without actually getting anything in return.
The rest of this reads like a wish list for an angry base lashing out at the establishment. Killing TPP and Common Core top the list.
Rick Perry is gone now. Jeb Bush is in big trouble. Rand Paul's campaign is flailing badly. Scott Walker's Brennan Center piece skipped freeing drug dealers and actually offered some useful conservative solutions. That leaves fewer options for the pro-crime crowd. And that's the way it should be.
Republicans should not be pushing pro-crime policies.
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"John Fund is GOPe. He is supporting the Bush/Rubio wing. Same as the entire National Review, Federalist, Hotair, Powerline and other websites."
Bush and Rubio are not at all the same to me and they were running against each other before this became all about Donald. I post from Powerline here (and have contributed there). John Hinderaker and Steve Hayward in particular make a lot of sense to me. Powerline ripped Rubio mercilessly over immigration in at least a dozen posts by Paul Mirengoff, some linked below, and no one there supports Jeb, fyi. GM links to Hotair quite quite a bit. There is not a great deal of general election political space to the right of our GM, I am afraid to say. It is better if we judge specific content rather than just label and exclude authors and entire publications, IMHO.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/05/marco-rubios-embarrassing-appearance-on-fox-news-part-one.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/04/how-chuck-schumer-ran-rings-around-marco-rubio.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/05/marco-rubio-our-republican-says-chuck-schumer-and-with-good-reason.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/04/rubio-surges-but-tough-questions-about-immigration-linger.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/04/the-case-against-marco-rubio.php
One pro-Trump photo (from Powerline):
(http://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2015/09/Turmps-Cabinet-copy.jpg)
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Powerline is owned by Salem, which is in the tank for Bush.
As to Bush and Rubio, I must ask:
What is the "payoff" to Rubio for running? Here is why I ask:
1. Rubio is a sitting Senator, who is up for election. If he is so strong, then he could get easily reelected.
2. Bush has been the "chosen one" since last year. Until Trump, he was the overwhelming favorite to win.
3. Rubio knew that Bush was the Chosen One. Why would he announce to run when it was "obvious" at the time that Bush would be the one? Did he know something that Bush did not know?
4. Why would Rubio "stab" Bush in the back by announcing?
5. What is the benefit to Bush by Rubio running? (It splits anti Bush voters.)
This does not make any sense at all unless Rubio has been promised something. Why would he give up a sure thing for nothing?
Also, the key criteria for me, immigration, both are alike. And both are supported by the GOPe.
If a person does not accept the idea that the GOPe is looking to do anything to key Bush or another "favored son" in the running, while keeping control of the party and going against the wishes of the base.
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Powerline is owned by Salem, which is in the tank for Bush.
As to Bush and Rubio, I must ask:
What is the "payoff" to Rubio for running? Here is why I ask:
1. Rubio is a sitting Senator, who is up for election. If he is so strong, then he could get easily reelected.
2. Bush has been the "chosen one" since last year. Until Trump, he was the overwhelming favorite to win.
3. Rubio knew that Bush was the Chosen One. Why would he announce to run when it was "obvious" at the time that Bush would be the one? Did he know something that Bush did not know?
4. Why would Rubio "stab" Bush in the back by announcing?
5. What is the benefit to Bush by Rubio running? (It splits anti Bush voters.)
This does not make any sense at all unless Rubio has been promised something. Why would he give up a sure thing for nothing?
Also, the key criteria for me, immigration, both are alike. And both are supported by the GOPe.
If a person does not accept the idea that the GOPe is looking to do anything to key Bush or another "favored son" in the running, while keeping control of the party and going against the wishes of the base.
Rubio is running to win, IMHO. If they are the same as you say, he splits the Bush vote, not the anti-Bush vote. The Rubio view no doubt is that Jeb and others are splitting HIS vote. Jeb isn't going to win; maybe Rubio was first to know that. I think the publications you list know that. I don't see anyone breaking their back for him. The game theory aspects of why so many are running and splitting different votes I'm afraid have not been fully contemplated by any of the candidates - except for Trump who instantly capitalized on that.
Every Senator thinks they should be President. Not many have won a swing state by a million votes. Rubio believes we aren't going to have a country to save if he waits for 'his turn' or for someone else to do it. When Bernie, Biden, Hillary or Grandma Warren reach out for the youth vote, they will have to reach about 40 years back. I would love to see Rubio go head to head with any of them. Unlike Trump importing his third trophy wife, Rubio is stuck with his first wife, high school sweetheart, (Miami Dophins cheerleader), mother of his children. NY Times photo:
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2015/06/05/us/politics/05firstdraft-rubio-and-wife/05firstdraft-rubio-and-wife-tmagArticle.jpg)
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Very interesting. Telling that no one would go on the record criticizing Trump. This tells me these Wall Street executives believe Trump is quite serious about what he says:
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/donald-trump-2016-wall-street-reaction-213614
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Doug:
Shouldn't that be in the Rubio thread?
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The search for chinks in Trump's teflon armor continue:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/was-donald-trumps-education-venture-trump-university-a-scam/2015/09/13/299ed9c8-52c0-11e5-933e-7d06c647a395_story.html
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Nate Silver, who was the whiz kid of Obama era poll analysis, says Trump has about a 5% chance of winning Republican nomination.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/09/15/nate_silver_trump_has_about_5_chance_of_winning.html
This should be an easy one for pp to shoot down. )
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Glenn Beck (already discredited?) explains his view that since Obama and Trump are offering many of the same empty platitudes, those members of the Tea Party who claim to oppose Obama and support Trump might be the actual racists in the GOP.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/09/16/glenn_beck_if_you_hate_obama_and_love_trump_you_might_be_a_racist_they_are_the_same.html
This is why I don't like blanket generalities. Trump is not like Obama but is using the blank canvas strategy of letting the voters paint their own picture of how great he will make America.
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Anti-Republican establishment group, Club for Growth, has an anti-Trump ad running based on the Kelo decision. Kelo to the regular voter is just some obscure, inside baseball, Supreme Court decision of the past until someone puts it in front of them, explains it and spells out the consequences of it. This is a very powerful argument to those who are not fans of big, powerful, crony government.
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/15/video-club-for-growth-ad-slams-trump-as-just-another-politician/
Still waiting for an explanation from Trump (or pp) as to how we can enjoy the benefits of having our government redirect the ownership of private property for the greater good, (defined by them) without inviting abuse of that power. Why have private ownership if government knows the best use?
Watch for a debate question on this tonight.
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Doug,
Working on a few other things right now, but in regards to Kelo.
Conneticutt law states that Eminent Domain can be used to take private property when in the best interest of the public domain. This was much of the basis for the USOC upholding the case.
Now as to your comment about "eminent domain and use of government power". Since Kelo came down, the anti Kelo forces decried the ruling, stating that it would open the door for massive Eminent Domain abuse across the country. Can you please point out where this has occurred? I must have missed it otherwise.
And in the case of Richmond, Camden and other hard hit foreclosure cities where I actually changed my mind to support ED, the Congress stepped in and enacted legislation to stop it from going forward.
I hear from all sides about how if such and such is allowed, it will open the gates for all sorts of abuses. But it never seems to happen. Heck, so far with the Qualified Mortgage, I thought that lending for the GSEs would be loosened almost immediately so that anyone could again obtain a loan as long as a person was breathing. So far, it is only occurring with FHA (and at least 98.6) and not the GSEs.
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pp: "Doug, Can you please point out where this has occurred? I must have missed it otherwise."
Yes. 1) It happened to us in Minneapolis. PPL ("Project for Pride in Living") a phony, government "non-profit" used the City of Minneapolis Takings Power to take an apartment building from us instead of procuring it the old fashioned, consensual way. The corrupt, quasi-government group advances "affordable housing" by kicking out low income tenants. Go figure. http://www.ppl-inc.org/
2) Minneapolis took prime, private, downtown properties to give title to preferred donor, Target, instead of making them buy it the old fashioned way, with the consent of the sellers. Target is now facing major layoffs - just like 3) the Kelo house is an empty field.
4) In the suburbs here across from Mall of America, the City of Richfield forced out private businesses to make way for their preferred use, a new Best Buy headquarters. Then the Best Buy chief left in a sex scandal and the company faces major layoffs. Smart planning at its best.
5) Cconstruction of Coors field was almost complete before the City of Denver completed the taking of the real estate where home plate sits. Take from a little old lady and to give to Major League Baseball. Source: WSJ. They didn't have to buy it or even try to entice her to sell because they are a preferred, private use. They faced no backlash because everyone except the owner of the property preferred the new private use.
Just some examples I am aware of, all but one local. I'm sure it goes on nationwide. Because the mainstream media doesn't cover it doesn't mean that crony government companies aren't using their 1% leverage to bully ordinary people all the time: Buy at our price or we will have government take it for us and you will get less - after lengthy and expensive court battles.
Victims of takings are paid their "value" calculated by looking back out the rear view mirror, but people hold an investment based on their projection of future value. In these case of takings, the owner gets old value and the new owners takes the new value difference to the bank. In our case, we held something for decades to get cheated out of ever receiving its real, intrinsic value, the reason for holding it all those years.
The controlling authority of taking private property in America is not Connecticut law; it is the U.S. constitution. Please see the multiple dissents in Kelo already posted here and in 'Constitutional Issues'.
Politically, having the Republican standard bearer take the crony government side boosts the standing of phony advocates of the little guy like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The leftist justices favored it and the conservative justices opposed it. Spineless Kennedy joined the left. We will lose the general election over things like this when R's get caught supporting economic cronyism while the Dems (say they) support the little guy.
If Trump doesn't see the wrongness in this after doing it, and is inclined to make Supreme Court appointments in the direction of expanding government power and diminishing individual liberty as basic as private property rights, then I will do what I can to stop him. I'll check back with you on this after the developers take your house or business without your consent.
A corrupt third world kleptocracy is what you have after private property rights lose their meaning. Don't go there.
Here is that GOP establishment puppet, Heritage Foundation, caught reading the forum:
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/06/a-decade-after-kelo-time-for-congress-to-protect-american-property-owners
Cronyism at Its Worst. A developer can use the government as its middleman to seize properties and avoid paying what likely would be their true costs. Cronyism is bad enough when favors are provided to politically connected interests through subsidies and other special treatment. Kelo has made it easy for government officials to benefit their friends and politically connected businesses using the awesome power of eminent domain. A family’s home could be demolished and their property rights trampled to help a developer. On top of that, the government can use this power in a haphazard manner, with the court unlikely to question the merits of the takings, regardless of how unnecessary or poorly conceived the takings might be.
pp, An aside for the housing thread: I am right that the loan default use of this that you pointed to is way of treating the symptom, not the problem, of lenders being blocked by government from their necessary, contractual right to take back property when the required payments are not made? Why not fix the problem instead of committing additional crime in the coverup?
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Okay, it has happened. I stand corrected.
But as I have said previously, each case must be determined on the merits of the situation. If one person holds up what is truly a beneficial action for the entire community, should the project be canned just for that?
These are not black and white "property rights" decisions. There are huge grey areas, and all factors must be considered.
As to whether the compensation was correct or not, that is a grey area also. I know because I do damage calculations in homeowner litigation cases all the time, once per week, sometimes more. I do commercial as well.
It is not simply a matter of saying that this was the worth of a property or the damages suffered by the person was such and such an amount. Every scenario must be examined, the circumstances related to each scenario considered, and then an assessment made as to damages or net worth.
I have had many times where someone thought the value of an action or damage would be one amount, and when reviewed, it was half or less of what they believed, and in some cases, there were no warranted damages. I have also arrived at values or damages 3 to 5 times what was believed.
The same would be true of Eminent Domain cases, values or damages.
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Thanks Pat.
Where you see grey, I see right and wrong. It isn't for the somewhat rare one who is taken from that we look out for their interest. It is for all of us.
It isn't just for the .0047% of us that get murdered each year that we maintain all these laws, police, courts and prisons. It is for all of us.
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Do you see any time when Eminent Domain is warranted? And under what circumstances?
You see black and white on Eminent Domain, but look at the 2nd Amendment. You have said that you are against felons and the mentally disturbed from having access to them, so there, you are seeing grey.
Even where the Constitution is involved, things are never black and white, but are open to interpretation.
I am "torn" with regards to the Constitution and also with the current laws and even court rulings. I don't believe in the concept of the Living Constitution, but at the same time I recognize that the 1780's and the 2010's are entirely different times. The difference in the times and technology must necessarily mean that there must be some mitigation on past rulings and considerations.
For example, I wrote in one article in 2010 that Innovation and Technology "leads" the law. What I said was that with the innovation of new financial instruments like mortgage backed securities and the development of MERS, the current laws were not prepared for the innovations. As a result, the changes must be litigated out and a new understanding reached upon what is proper, applicable, and lawful or not.
The same goes for the changes that we see in society as a whole. Let's take my favorite example, building a new freeway, or in the case of LA, a new subway system. The new freeway would certainly be a benefit, taking two parts of a city and bringing them closer in travel time, expense and other factors. It could reduce travel time across the city from 1 hour to 10 minutes, increase business viability and commercial pursuits that otherwise would not exist.
500 homes have to be purchased for the new freeway. 495 homeowners are willing to sell. The others have no desire to sell and will not. The lack of a freeway does not bother them, they are retired and do not work, and have no reason for traveling to the other side of the city. What is the solution?
Black and white, nothing gets done. The city does not get the freeway, business and commercial opportunities are lost, and people do not have the convenience and loss of time and gas money for the lost ease of travel.
Grey, and eminent domain is used. The benefits occur to the city, the people and business, at the detriment of 5 homeowners, who will almost always get some compensation for their properties at a minimum.
Which is better?
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The distinction here is the taking of private land for other, private ownership. The power of the govt to take for public facilities like freeways, with compensation, is certainly constitutional, whether I like it or not.
The distinction is gradually lost as we nationalize all industries.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/09/17/rachel-maddow-says-donald-trump-is-either-in-on-some-kind-of-scheme-or-his-campaign-just-got-duped-and-taken-for-a-ride/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%209-17-15%20FINAL&utm_term=Firewire
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Trump just released a position paper on gun control. Now, even Doug can show his support.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/second-amendment-rights (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/second-amendment-rights)
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From the Walker thread. PP writes:
"As well, it is only the more wonkish who want the details. Everyone else wants the "hope" that he can do something no one else will do."
We will see if simply getting up on stage for the next year plus and saying I am at such and such percent and he or she is only such and such percent and I want to make America great again will be enough.
I want a warrior too. But just being bombastic alone at this point makes me nervous.
I would have to say it is between Rubio and Trump for at this point. I would like Cruz or Jindal but their chances are pretty low to zero I am afraid.
Fiorina gives me the willies fro some reason. I actually trust Trump more than I trust her.
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Now, in all fairness to the other candidates, Trump does need to:
1. Quit bashing Fox and Meghan Kelly at every slight. It is getting old. I understand why he does it, but he needs to reduce the bashing.
2. It is fine to attack the other candidates, but again, he needs to reduce the personal attacks. It will backfire at some point, and probably already is.
3. He should be a bit more specific on plans, but only in a general sense.He should not release too much detail for TMI gives ammo to attack him.
Now, Bush has been generally marginalized. Rubio must be marginalized now since he is about the last GOPe candidate standing with a chance, unless one considers Kasich. And, he must watch for a push by the GOPe for Romney to enter. (Yes, there is talk of all things. And if the GOPe pushes Romney, it shows just how pathetic the party is, and how it is owned by the Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street.)
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Here is the Trump Tax Plan.
TAX REFORM THAT WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
The Goals Of Donald J. Trump’s Tax Plan
Too few Americans are working, too many jobs have been shipped overseas, and too many middle class families cannot make ends meet. This tax plan directly meets these challenges with four simple goals:
Tax relief for middle class Americans: In order to achieve the American dream, let people keep more money in their pockets and increase after-tax wages.
Simplify the tax code to reduce the headaches Americans face in preparing their taxes and let everyone keep more of their money.
Grow the American economy by discouraging corporate inversions, adding a huge number of new jobs, and making America globally competitive again.
Doesn’t add to our debt and deficit, which are already too large.
The Trump Tax Plan Achieves These Goals
If you are single and earn less than $25,000, or married and jointly earn less than $50,000, you will not owe any income tax. That removes nearly 75 million households – over 50% – from the income tax rolls. They get a new one page form to send the IRS saying, “I win,” those who would otherwise owe income taxes will save an average of nearly $1,000 each.
All other Americans will get a simpler tax code with four brackets – 0%, 10%, 20% and 25% – instead of the current seven. This new tax code eliminates the marriage penalty and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) while providing the lowest tax rate since before World War II.
No business of any size, from a Fortune 500 to a mom and pop shop to a freelancer living job to job, will pay more than 15% of their business income in taxes. This lower rate makes corporate inversions unnecessary by making America’s tax rate one of the best in the world.
No family will have to pay the death tax. You earned and saved that money for your family, not the government. You paid taxes on it when you earned it.
The Trump Tax Plan Is Revenue Neutral
The Trump tax cuts are fully paid for by:
Reducing or eliminating most deductions and loopholes available to the very rich.
A one-time deemed repatriation of corporate cash held overseas at a significantly discounted 10% tax rate, followed by an end to the deferral of taxes on corporate income earned abroad.
Reducing or eliminating corporate loopholes that cater to special interests, as well as deductions made unnecessary or redundant by the new lower tax rate on corporations and business income. We will also phase in a reasonable cap on the deductibility of business interest expenses.
DETAILS OF DONALD J. TRUMP’S TAX PLAN
America needs a bold, simple and achievable plan based on conservative economic principles. This plan does that with needed tax relief for all Americans, especially the working poor and middle class, pro-growth tax reform for all sizes of businesses, and fiscally responsible steps to ensure this plan does not add to our enormous debt and deficit.
This plan simplifies the tax code by taking nearly 50% of current filers off the income tax rolls entirely and reducing the number of tax brackets from seven to four for everyone else. This plan also reduces or eliminates loopholes used by the very rich and special interests made unnecessary or redundant by the new lower tax rates on individuals and companies.
The Trump Tax Plan: A Simpler Tax Code For All Americans
When the income tax was first introduced, just one percent of Americans had to pay it. It was never intended as a tax most Americans would pay. The Trump plan eliminates the income tax for over 73 million households. 42 million households that currently file complex forms to determine they don’t owe any income taxes will now file a one page form saving them time, stress, uncertainty and an average of $110 in preparation costs. Over 31 million households get the same simplification and keep on average nearly $1,000 of their hard-earned money.
For those Americans who will still pay the income tax, the tax rates will go from the current seven brackets to four simpler, fairer brackets that eliminate the marriage penalty and the AMT while providing the lowest tax rate since before World War II:
Income Tax Rate Long Term Cap Gains/ Dividends Rate Single Filers Married Filers Heads of Household
0% 0% $0 to $25,000 $0 to $50,000 $0 to $37,500
10% 0% $25,001 to $50,000 $50,001 to $100,000 $37,501 to $75,000
20% 15% $50,001 to $150,000 $100,001 to $300,000 $75,001 to $225,000
25% 20% $150,001 and up $300,001 and up $225,001 and up
With this huge reduction in rates, many of the current exemptions and deductions will become unnecessary or redundant. Those within the 10% bracket will keep all or most of their current deductions. Those within the 20% bracket will keep more than half of their current deductions. Those within the 25% bracket will keep fewer deductions. Charitable giving and mortgage interest deductions will remain unchanged for all taxpayers.
Simplifying the tax code and cutting every American’s taxes will boost consumer spending, encourage savings and investment, and maximize economic growth.
Business Tax Reform To Encourage Jobs And Spur Economic Growth
Too many companies – from great American brands to innovative startups – are leaving America, either directly or through corporate inversions. The Democrats want to outlaw inversions, but that will never work. Companies leaving is not the disease, it is the symptom. Politicians in Washington have let America fall from the best corporate tax rate in the industrialized world in the 1980’s (thanks to Ronald Reagan) to the worst rate in the industrialized world. That is unacceptable. Under the Trump plan, America will compete with the world and win by cutting the corporate tax rate to 15%, taking our rate from one of the worst to one of the best.
This lower tax rate cannot be for big business alone; it needs to help the small businesses that are the true engine of our economy. Right now, freelancers, sole proprietors, unincorporated small businesses and pass-through entities are taxed at the high personal income tax rates. This treatment stifles small businesses. It also stifles tax reform because efforts to reduce loopholes and deductions available to the very rich and special interests end up hitting small businesses and job creators as well. The Trump plan addresses this challenge head on with a new business income tax rate within the personal income tax code that matches the 15% corporate tax rate to help these businesses, entrepreneurs and freelancers grow and prosper.
These lower rates will provide a tremendous stimulus for the economy – significant GDP growth, a huge number of new jobs and an increase in after-tax wages for workers.
The Trump Tax Plan Ends The Unfair Death Tax
The death tax punishes families for achieving the American dream. Therefore, the Trump plan eliminates the death tax.
The Trump Tax Plan Is Fiscally Responsible
The Trump tax cuts are fully paid for by:
Reducing or eliminating deductions and loopholes available to the very rich, starting by steepening the curve of the Personal Exemption Phaseout and the Pease Limitation on itemized deductions. The Trump plan also phases out the tax exemption on life insurance interest for high-income earners, ends the current tax treatment of carried interest for speculative partnerships that do not grow businesses or create jobs and are not risking their own capital, and reduces or eliminates other loopholes for the very rich and special interests. These reductions and eliminations will not harm the economy or hurt the middle class. Because the Trump plan introduces a new business income rate within the personal income tax code, they will not harm small businesses either.
A one-time deemed repatriation of corporate cash held overseas at a significantly discounted 10% tax rate. Since we are making America’s corporate tax rate globally competitive, it is only fair that corporations help make that move fiscally responsible. U.S.-owned corporations have as much as $2.5 trillion in cash sitting overseas. Some companies have been leaving cash overseas as a tax maneuver. Under this plan, they can bring their cash home and put it to work in America while benefitting from the newly-lowered corporate tax rate that is globally competitive and no longer requires parking cash overseas. Other companies have cash overseas for specific business units or activities. They can leave that cash overseas, but they will still have to pay the one-time repatriation fee.
An end to the deferral of taxes on corporate income earned abroad. Corporations will no longer be allowed to defer taxes on income earned abroad, but the foreign tax credit will remain in place because no company should face double taxation.
Reducing or eliminating some corporate loopholes that cater to special interests, as well as deductions made unnecessary or redundant by the new lower tax rate on corporations and business income. We will also phase in a reasonable cap on the deductibility of business interest expenses.
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Thanks PP for getting this posted so quickly.
I approve of this plan - it is far better than the status quo.
It moves Trump out of the fog and into clarity as a serious candidate. We will see how well he can sell it and how what kind of opposition he runs into.
There is a chasm between Trump's earlier rhetoric and this plan. A person making 150k, pretty normal pay among my contemporaries, pays at the same rate as the guy making trillions. I'm okay with that but it is Trump who has to explain it to the liberal, redistributionist, mainstream media. I hope that goes well for him.
The thing he gets wrong is to repeat Reagan's mistake:
"If you are single and earn less than $25,000, or married and jointly earn less than $50,000, you will not owe any income tax. That removes nearly 75 million households – over 50% – from the income tax rolls. They get a new one page form to send the IRS saying, “I win,” those who would otherwise owe income taxes will save an average of nearly $1,000 each."
That sounds great for selling the plan. Reagan used the same line. The problem is that adding 75 million workers to the 94 million adults who don't work at all makes two thirds of the electorate who don't have a stake whatsoever in the size, scope or cost of government. That model doesn't work for governing. We need more stakeholders.
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On first glance, a serious and interesting plan.
Some questions:
"A one-time deemed repatriation of corporate cash held overseas at a significantly discounted 10% tax rate, followed by an end to the deferral of taxes on corporate income earned abroad."
MD: Not sure what this means.
"Reducing or eliminating corporate loopholes that cater to special interests, as well as deductions made unnecessary or redundant by the new lower tax rate on corporations and business income."
MD: The devil will be in the details here.
"We will also phase in a reasonable cap on the deductibility of business interest expenses."
MD: I look forward to reading serious analyses of this.
Also, I heartily second Doug's concerns about greatly increasing the numbers of people who don't have a direct stake in limiting government. Contrast Ben Carson with his everyone pays the same %.
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Doug,
In theory, I would agree about people having a stake in the game. But from a practical point, I have to bring in my own observations in the last three years.
One of the models that I have built for lending purposes is an Ability to Repay model. It is far more extensive than what lenders currently use and in the case of first time home buyers, it evaluates both prior to purchase and after purchase financial status. To validate the model, I used over 8 million GSE loans. Here is what I know that is applicable to Trump's Tax Plan.
1. $25k per year for a single person is equivalent to just over $2k per month. Forgoing TRS taxes, but leaving in state and FICA, figure about 10% deductions would still remain. Figure $1,900 per month for living expenses for a single person. From that amount of money, subtract:
Health Care expenses
Rent
Utilities
Food Costs
Auto Payment
Auto Expenses
Insurance
Phone/Other
Child Support
Misc Expenses
The end result is that a single person is left with very little income per month for savings or other emergencies. Now, if that person has a child or children, there is nothing left over. Take out even a small amount of taxes, and the situation becomes much worse.
2. For the $50k for married filers, the same as above will apply in most cases. Though After Deduction Income increases, so do living expenses because these are going to be families in most cases, with extended costs, especially since these will also be two car families, and will have additional costs associated with having children.
The simple fact is that most of these people will be subjected to remaining in the lower income classes no matter what.
The $50k to $100k bracket is worrisome. People at the lower level of $50k will pay 10% or $5k. (But people at $49k will pay nothing.) There are going to be problems with meeting expenses for these people.
The plan is a good start, but it is going to require a lot of tweeking, adjustments, and likely "tax deductions" at the lower income levels in the $50k brackets.
Simplify the tax code? Yes, especially at the upper levels. It will eliminate large portions of the code and hopefully put a lot of tax attorneys and tax accountants out of business, as well as reducing the IRS personnel levels and budget.
It will certainly benefit businesses and hopefully allow them to flourish. Maybe it will bring back the overseas inversion money as well.
It shall be interesting to see what the pundits will say.
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CD,
Your first question refers to those businesses in the US with overseas operations. They have tons of cash held overseas and that if they bring the cash back to the US, the funds are taxed at extreme rates, over 28% and it may be much higher. So the money stays overseas and does not benefit US interests. By reducing the tax down to 10%, this would bring the funds back into the US for our own purposes. (Some have said offer no taxes on the return, but that will never fly.)
As to corporate loopholes, etc., you are correct. The devil is in the details. Already, that is why the hedge funds are against Trump due to his desire to eliminate the Carried Interest rule.
As to everyone paying their fair share, I point to what I wrote below. We tend to forget how little $25k per year of income is. Yet there is a huge portion of adults who make that little of gross income. I see it all the time. So when living expenses are factored in, there "ain't" much if anything left over.
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Just another comment:
On the Tax Brackets, I screwed up. I made the assumption that the brackets would "not be marginal" in calculating income. If they are "marginal" then going into the $50k bracket would not involve the $49,999 amount being taxed at the greater amount.
The more I look at it, the better I like it.
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" $25k per year for a single person is equivalent to just over $2k per month. Forgoing TRS taxes, but leaving in state and FICA, figure about 10% deductions would still remain. Figure $1,900 per month for living expenses for a single person. From that amount of money, subtract:
Health Care expenses
Rent
Utilities
Food Costs
Auto Payment
Auto Expenses
Insurance
Phone/Other
Child Support
Misc Expenses
The end result is that a single person is left with very little income per month for savings or other emergencies. Now, if that person has a child or children, there is nothing left over. Take out even a small amount of taxes, and the situation becomes much worse."
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All true, but that doesn't address my objection.
There are many ways to get to income just under 25k/yr. Here is one example: 50 hours/wk x 50 weeks/yr x $10 = 25,000
So the under 25k bracket is for people working very hard, sometimes 2 jobs or more PT jobs at near minimum wage.
God Bless them.
We also learned that 12% of minimum wage workers live at or below the poverty line as a household.
Young workers often share living expenses with family or friends until they are able to make it on their own or marry.
For older workers making not much above minimum wage, sharing a household with family or friends is also common or necessary.
A married couple and a single person pay roughly the same rent or house payment.
No one is saying the low end or starter level of income affords one his or her own house.
Yet we let them lower income earners live in America and vote equally with everyone else.
So give them SOME stake in income and expenses of running our government.
My 2 cents. )
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Thank you for fleshing that out Pat.
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Doug,
They will still pay Federal Taxes in one way or another. Gas taxes, FCC communication taxes and others will still apply. Plus they will be paying state and local taxes. So it is not as if they are getting anything for free.
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Doug,
They will still pay Federal Taxes in one way or another. Gas taxes, FCC communication taxes and others will still apply. Plus they will be paying state and local taxes. So it is not as if they are getting anything for free.
Pat, All true. I'm not saying this group is under-taxed. I'm saying they are being sold on the idea that they can get something (everything) for nothing and Trump is perpetuating that. Note the way he is selling his plan by highlighting its worst feature (IMO), playing on gullability and false populism.
Just within your list, (Health Care expenses, Rent, Utilities, Food Costs, Auto Payment, Auto Expenses, Insurance, Phone/Other, Child Support, Misc Expenses), government is driving up the base cost by possibly double with hidden taxes including the tax of over-regulation. My home phone tax was 60% by the time I let it go. No one with a low income could pay that; instead they are offered a cell phone for free. We could have removed the outdated tax instead but didn't. Go figure.
After all the government escalation of basic living costs, housing, healthcare, college, etc., lower income people are sold the false promise that someone else will pay their basic living expenses, from cell phones, to healthcare, to transportation, to child care, with no end in sight.
Democrats drive up the 'demand' for services and Republicans keep driving up the idea that people don't have to pay in at all, much less their fair share.
The federal income tax is a big deal and the state income taxes are based mostly on the same formula. The whole payroll tax / social security system is another can of worms, and excise taxes, but no one is going there yet.
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So if Trump proposes an income tax on those who do not now pay, how does he get elected?
As to whether the other taxes lie, incremental steps. It cannot all come at once.
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"So if Trump proposes an income tax on those who do not now pay, how does he get elected?"
I'm not the one pretending to be a straight talker beholden to no one. If you're going to buy off 75 million votes (or households as they keep mixing up the terms), just say so.
Another approach would be to do no harm.
Reagan made a mistake on immigration and Trump learned from it.
Reagan made this same exact mistake, bragging that he would take millions of Americans off the tax roll altogether, and it grew to DOMINATE our politics. Everything about Obama and Hillary in campaign mode is to grow services and make you think someone else will pay for it. Trump is happy to open that hole even wider, not because it's right, but as you say, to get elected.
To answer your question, YES, he could say that every dollar of income is going to face SOME tax, and that if you need help from the government - that needs to be dealt with on the spending side. At a bare minimum, the stated goal could be to not tax your first dollars of income so that people will move up and out of low income status, not to avoid taxes altogether (YOU WIN??!!). Under pro-growth policies, we have seen 86% of low income people move out of that status with 10 years. It is counter-productive IMHO to ask people to support this with the static economic idea that 75 million 'benefit' from this because of their (presumed permanent) low income status.
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A line from radio this morning "I liked it better when it was Obama's tax plan".
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lol.........tax everyone something, and for those who cannot make it, address that on the spending side. Will that not probably increase those on some form of the dole even more?
For single people earning $25k or less, that is $12.50 per hour. Large numbers of these people will be moving up on the scale as they age and become more productive. For filing Married and the $50k, there would be more reason to your argument, especially if no children are present.
Look, this is a beginning to what is ultimately needed to be done. But to implement even this, one must get elected.
I am likely very biased on this because I deal daily with people in a position where due to the economy, they have lost well paying jobs and just are struggling to make things work. I see people working 2-3 jobs just to get by. Others working in chain grocery stores with a union making $14.50 per hour, and that is all that they have coming in.
G-d, I am sounding now like a progressive and that is scary, but imo opinion, we have to look at these things in a more realistic view of whether a person or family can survive or not. I have just seen too much in the last eight years to take a hard nosed view that everyone must pay some income taxes to ensure that they are contributing, especially since there are so many other ways that they do pay and contribute.
I guess that we will just disagree on this........like on other things.
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Others are saying that it was more like Reagan's..........
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Here is an actual file I have been working on today. It is a family of 4 with the 2 kids in school with Gross Income yearly almost $48k. These numbers are typical expenses for a family of four. They have a home, but the total monthly payment is less than $800 per month. (They live in North Dakota.) They cannot rent for less than that. With current taxes and deductions, they have negative cash flow. (Imagine if they were living here in CA and what the expenses would be.)
Gross Income $3,944
Net Income $2,958
Debt Service
1st Mtg $ 588
Taxes & Ins $ 175
Installment/Car $ 309
Total Debt $1,072
Disposable Income $1,886
Expenses
Utilities $325
Water/Sew/Trash $100
Food $750
Phone/Int/Cable $118
Cell $ 85
Auto Exp $300
Household $75
Clothing $125
Medical Ins $425
Auto Ins $ 85
Life Ins $ 55
Total Exp $2,443
Residual Income $ -557
This family was one of those who lost jobs in the 2008 recession. They managed to find other jobs, but again, those jobs died as well. They both work in the service sector now, and they exist only by using up all of their savings over the last five years.
This is your $48k per year family. Imagine if it was $35k where they would be. One could argue that they could further cut expenses, but how much more can reasonably cut? Not much, maybe a couple of hundred.
This is not an unusual occurrence. In fact, it is extremely common for almost all under the Medium Income that the government so proudly announces. The truth is that this country is so screwed for the real middle class working man earning under $50k per year.
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A fair point, reasonably argued.
Also a fair point are the risks of increasing the moral hazard of voters to a full 50% of the voting population.
Separately, is it true the Trump has come out for single payer?!?!?
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Single Payer, no.
He is promoting mostly private plans, with something throw in otherwise.
Here is something to consider..................
Obamacare did exactly what the Dems wanted. That was to destroy the Insurance Industry as it stood at the time. They have totally achieved that through:
1. Increased premiums for those with private plans.
2. Increased deductables across the board.
3. Loss of competition.
4. Restricted plans that limit doctor choice.
5. Massive numbers of newly insured, through Federal subsidies.
6. Increased Medicaid at the State level.
Essentially, Obama destroyed health care in the US.
What is the solution? For the Dems, it was to ultimately transition to Single Payer. Let the system fail and the people would demand Single Payer. But, that will not be accomplished without a Dem Congress and President.
What is the practical solution? With the destruction of the old system and the newly insured under subsidies, a different approach is now required. The approach will have to "blend" the two different options. This would involved:
1. A private system that would increase competition and drive down rates and deductibles, while increasing doctor availability.
2. A more governmental plan to address the increasing costs of the uninsured or currently subsidized enrolled.
What the new plan must do is factor in the costs of using the emergency for the uninsured and the subsidies being paid otherwise. Then, a "voucher" system could be created in conjunction with the insurance companies to create a "limited" insurance plan.
Caveat: I am not an ideologue but instead, pragmatic. I look at issues and then determine what is the best outcome for the country as a whole. You see that in my thinking here, and then with the Trump Tax Plan. With Immigration, I look at it as requiring control of the borders, and then some type of action to get rid of the bad apples and for the good ones, to create a way for them to become legal, but not through a blanket amnesty and citizenship. I also don't want to see them coming in and immediately going on the dole.
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PP, I have tenants with similar financial challenges. But the point of tax reform (IMO) isn't for more people to escape paying a share. The point is to grow opportunities and incomes so they can pay their own bills and part of ours. The Trump plan does that, but this isn't the feature that grows the economy. I was pointing out a small glitch but it turns out it is the center of his sales pitch. Trump rhetoric misses the point.
BTW, the federal tax on that family is less than $200/mo. http://calcnexus.com/federal-tax-calculator.php Eliminating that does not solve their problem.
W Bush had the same problem Trump is showing here. By the time his tax rate cuts were fully in place, federal revenues started growing at a double digit rate, growing over 33% in 3 years. But W didn't understand his own tax plan even after it was in place and couldn't articulate how or why it worked. The result was Pelosi, Reid, Obama, and the unraveling of everything that worked. Now here comes our frontrunner selling his plan by touting the only non-growth aspect of it.
I'm not arguing for higher taxes on anyone - or more free rides. The burden of big government is the reason why people don't make more and why 48k doesn't support a family anymore - even in North Dakota - and we need to fix that. Unfortunately, that isn't Trump's message.
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I await further details, but I heard something that sure sounded like Trump backing single payer-- maybe I got tricked by some older footage?
Anyway, I like what I have heard so far from Dr. Ben in this regard.
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Doug,
Right now, 45% of all the US pays NO federal tax. None. Zip. Nada. The Trump Plan increases that to 50%. Here is the first question,
Can Trump or any Republican get elected by promising to increase federal tax rates on those who are currently paying nothing? Hell no!!! It will not happen. So if you want a Dem back in office, just try to run a Pubbie promising to increase taxes on the non payers.
Next question. How did we get here with 47% not paying taxes in the first place?
The reason for where we are now is the stupidity of 43 and the policies enacted after 9-11.
When 9-11 occurred, the economy fell back into recession almost immediately. Something was needed to be done to stimulate the economy. So Bush instituted a plan that would reduce tax rates, give every tax payer a $600 rebate and also had the Fed cut interest rates. And guess what? It worked!!!
The tax cuts lowered the rates by 50% on low income earners. Over 80% of the dollar amount of the tax cuts hit the low income earners. This led to the 47% of wage earners not paying any taxes by 2010.
The tax cuts were not sustainable however. In fact, that was the purpose of "sunsetting" them 10 years later, in 2012. Of course, this was also after presidential elections through 2008 which would have found it likely that a Dem would have been elected anyway. (Just like Obamacare not fully enacting until 2016.)
There was a small cadre of conservative republicans advocating that the cuts be discontinued by 2005, long before the sunset date. They understood that the cuts were otherwise unsustainable and that the budget would begin to experience larger and larger deficits otherwise. This would be greatly enhanced if Dems got into power, which actually occurred in 2006.
In 2012, the sunsetted tax cuts were supposed to expire. But the Republicans found out very quickly that it was impossible to allow them to be restored, and so they were left alone to stay in place. Attempting to restore the taxes would mean complete unelectability of Repubs everywhere.
This is the situation that we face today. It is impossible to restore the tax cuts on the 47% at this time. And Trump knows it.
What has to be done is to put together a plan that will grow the economy, the wages and will allow at some point to then begin to restore the taxes that had been cut. There is simply no other way to do it.
How to stimulate the economy and accomplish this goal? Make businesses economically viable again. Get businesses to return the capital that is overseas and reinvest it. Cut taxes on business so that they can invest more capital into their businesses from the decreased tax rates.
Also, cut capital gains, eliminate the estate tax and other things as pointed out in the Trump Plan. Then attack government regulations. Also of this together should reinvigorate the economy and create a new era of expansion.
However, this cannot happen if there is an immediate demand the increase taxes on the 47% that do not yet pay them. Any attempt to do so will result in the candidate not being elected.
Going to be interesting............
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Latest poll: Trump down to 21% of Republicans, still first place. 79% of Republicans not sold. Losing to Hillary by 10%!
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton-5491.html
NY Times today, Joe Nocera, Trump can't handle losing, will be out before Iowa.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/opinion/joe-nocera-is-donald-trump-serious.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
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Pat: "Right now, 45% of all the US pays NO federal tax. None. Zip. Nada. The Trump Plan increases that to 50%.
- No. Trump says it "removes" 75 million. Others say it removes 31 million that currently pay. In any case, (as Crafty and others suggest) going over 50% is a BIG deal politically. "We will buy your vote" is not a winning mantra for the Republicans or the Republic.
"Can Trump or any Republican get elected by promising to increase federal tax rates on those who are currently paying nothing?"
- That is not the only alternative to not making a bad situation worse.
"This is the situation that we face today. It is impossible to restore the tax cuts on the 47% at this time. And Trump knows it."
- The lower income earners kept their Bush tax cut and the higher earner ones lost theirs under Obama. The way you get more people to have skin in the game is to leave the floor the same and grow the incomes past that threshold.
"Next question. How did we get here with 47% not paying taxes in the first place?
The reason for where we are now is the stupidity of 43 and the policies enacted after 9-11.
When 9-11 occurred, the economy fell back into recession almost immediately. Something was needed to be done to stimulate the economy. So Bush instituted a plan that would reduce tax rates, give every tax payer a $600 rebate and also had the Fed cut interest rates. And guess what? It worked!!!
The tax cuts lowered the rates by 50% on low income earners. Over 80% of the dollar amount of the tax cuts hit the low income earners. This led to the 47% of wage earners not paying any taxes by 2010.
The tax cuts were not sustainable however. In fact, that was the purpose of "sunsetting" them 10 years later, in 2012. Of course, this was also after presidential elections through 2008 which would have found it likely that a Dem would have been elected anyway. (Just like Obamacare not fully enacting until 2016.)
There was a small cadre of conservative republicans advocating that the cuts be discontinued by 2005, long before the sunset date. They understood that the cuts were otherwise unsustainable and that the budget would begin to experience larger and larger deficits otherwise. This would be greatly enhanced if Dems got into power, which actually occurred in 2006.
In 2012, the sunsetted tax cuts were supposed to expire. But the Republicans found out very quickly that it was impossible to allow them to be restored, and so they were left alone to stay in place. Attempting to restore the taxes would mean complete unelectability of Repubs everywhere."
- It started with a (rare) mistake Reagan made, W learned nothing and made worse and Trump is determined to complete, playing perfectly into the leftist hand. Don't worry you poor working people, we will have the rich pay all your expenses. Also like W, we see all tax rate cut with no spending rate cut. ("Big Government Conservatism"?)
The Bush tax rate cuts were given a sunset because of antiquated, static economy, congressional rules, not because they were unsustainable. In 2005 revenues were growing at double digit rates. They became unsustainable when Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Hillary, Biden et al took majority in congress with the promise to raise rates back up. At that point, income was still taxed at the lower rate while investors were making pullback decisions based on the higher, future marginal rate, and growth collapsed.
"How to stimulate the economy and accomplish this goal? Make businesses economically viable again. Get businesses to return the capital that is overseas and reinvest it. Cut taxes on business so that they can invest more capital into their businesses from the decreased tax rates.
Also, cut capital gains, eliminate the estate tax and other things as pointed out in the Trump Plan. Then attack government regulations. Also of this together should reinvigorate the economy and create a new era of expansion."
- This is exactly right. Trump hit about the right percentages for the high end needed to grow the economy. But then why lead with the worst part of the plan that plays right into your opponents' hand? As pp has said, any tax plan is a starting point. Like 1986 immigration 'reform', people will lock onto the free ride up to 50k even if the pro-growth, higher income rate cuts never materialize. They can that with any Democrat.
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Doug,
I think we both agree that any Repub candidate that proposes to tax the 45% is going to lose in the general election. So why even hold an election. Let's just hold a coronation and name any Dem as ruler for life.
I predicted exactly what would happen when Trump position papers were released. Some would claim more specifics were needed and others would attack the specifics that were released. Now, let's see if the Dems or if the other Rep candidates are required to release such strong position papers and what will happen if they do. I can easily predict that result.
IMO, the country is now completely screwed. The next President is going to be one of the Uni-Party no matter what. (Trump will not win now.) He/she will be controlled by Wall Street, Party officials, Chamber of Commerce and other big money establishment types. Illegal Immigration will continue. Amnesty will be granted again. The rich get richer and the middle class continues to get screwed.
The 2016 election is the break point, the final chance to plot any type of change of course. And with either Uni-Party candidate, the course will remain the same.
Carson cannot win, and even if he could win, he would be easily manipulated by the "controllers" to get what they want. (Plus, Carson appears to be questionable on understanding the Constitution and Bill of Rights.)
Fiorina might win, but it would be a difficult road. Even then, the more I study her, the more of a "decepticon" she appears to be, much more liberal that she appears. Weak on immigration control, big on man made Global Warming, Amnesty, Common Core and other issues. For her supporters, beware of what you think she represents.
Cruz has no hope of winning. He will be hit with the Tea Party brand. And the others including Jeb and Rubio, they are establishment types.
Time for me to dig a hole, climb in, and pull it over me...............
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I think Trump did himself a lot of good with his tax proposal. On first look, it is quite appealing and appears to be a serious piece of work.
No doubt there will be accusations it increases the deficit. The Donald will need to be able to defend it effectively.
BTW, I like Rubio, but must say he himself has allowed his tax plan to sink without a trace. If Trump can defend his proposal, will Rubio be able to defend his when Trump attacks?
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Rubio has a big problem with his plan.
Individual Filers:
Over But not over Marginal Rate
$0 $75,000 15%
$75,000 And over 35%
Joint Filers:
Over But not over Marginal Rate
$0 $150,000 15%
$150,000 And over 35%
Ya think that Rubio can promote federal taxes on the 45% that don't pay taxes? Dems will kill him on this. No wonder he is hiding.
BTW, it matters not that there will be child care and child penalty provisions. People will only look at the basics.......I don't pay taxes now, but I will at 15% under Rubio. I am voting for the Dems. Screw the Rich Loving Repubs.
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You may be right, but first let's see what comes out with regard to whether Trump's plan can be sold as deficit neutral or positive.
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Doesn't matter whether it is revenue neutral or positive. The media and the GOPe are pulling out all stops to prevent Trump from winning, and instead installing a RINO as candidate.
There are many more machinations going on in the Primary rules for each state. It is all designed to stall the Trump insurgency. Eventually, it will be the undoing of Trump. And it will let probably Rubio in as the nominee since Jeb is pretty much toast right now.
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Sure it matters; if Trump can be painted as increasing the deficit, then that is no good.
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I did not mean it from the deficit aspect. I meant it from getting the nomination as the Republican candidate.
I believe that now, the GOPe will do everything to stop Trump, pulling out all the stops.
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... Rubio ... has allowed his tax plan to sink without a trace. If Trump can defend his proposal, will Rubio be able to defend his when Trump attacks?
I think Rubio doesn't push it because it is version 1.0 and he sees the problems pointed out. Trump's plan has better rates. Rubio's will stand up better to the static economic fact checkers and be more electable. Rubio's plan eliminates capital gains taxes, which I hope instead leaves him room to negotiate personal rates down.
Run Pat's 48k family of 4 through Rubio's plan. He skipped mention of the 4000 Tax credit for the couple and 2500 tax credit per child, making a $9000 tax credit for family of 4. The 7200 tax bill (15% of 48k) becomes an $1800 'tax' refund. The family of 4 under Rubio's plan doesn't pay anything in until they pass 60k. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2015/03/04/the-rubio-lee-tax-plan/
Maybe they all are trying to buy votes.
I would like to see them take the best features from the best proposals and form one, solid, consensus plan or at least agreed parameters for a plan. So far the Trump, Rubio and JEB plans are all good. The candidates should be arguing against the left and the status quo instead of against each other.
____________________________________________
"Doesn't matter whether it is revenue neutral or positive. The media and the GOPe are pulling out all stops to prevent Trump from winning, and instead installing a RINO as candidate."
- They accused Bush's plan of 'costing' 3.4 trillion. Trump will either argue successfully against the static economic chorus or he will fall on this sword.
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"GOPe will do everything to stop Trump, pulling out all the stops."
- There isn't an organized GOPe anymore, IMHO, but the gist of that is true. He is not the first frontrunner to run into enhanced scrutiny.
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Thanks for the comparative breakdown Doug.
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Doug,
About the tax credit, etc., that is correct.
But it must be remembered that the tax credits only comes back to them at the end of the year when taxes are filed. Day to day, the w-4 deductions are taken out, and that forms the basis for the cash flow over the entire year. Then, that money typically is spent going towards needed purchases that have been delayed.
Also, lets say the family makes only $3k instead of $4k per years. It is even worse.
Organized GOP no more? I would certainly disagree. We can see it through the machinations of the primary rules in each state, run by the vassels of the party.
And to show how it works, Reince is now saying that the next election cycle, 2020, New Hampshire, Iowa and the other two early states will not be the first primaries. Of course, such an action would tend work in favor of the desired nominee and not the potential upstart.
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How so?
Anyway, please figure out a more relevant thread for this interesting conversation.
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Trump’s tax plan would raise deficit $12 trillion: analysis
By Yaron Steinbuch
September 30, 2015 | 1:23am
Trump’s tax plan would raise deficit $12 trillion: analysis
Donald Trump
Photo: Reuters
Donald Trump’s tax plan would cost a staggering $12 trillion over 10 years — despite his pledge not to increase the deficit, according to an analysis released Tuesday.
The Tax Foundation found that Trump’s changes to the individual tax code would reduce net revenues by about $10.14 trillion, after accounting for higher incomes due to an 11 percent jump in the gross domestic product.
The billionaire businessman’s corporate tax cuts also would bleed $1.54 trillion over the next decade, and his plan to dispense with the estate tax would cost $238 billion, the group said. - NY Post today
My comments on this are in a previous post.
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Yes, but it will be the Yuuuuugest, classiest, most luxurious deficit ever!
Trump’s tax plan would raise deficit $12 trillion: analysis
By Yaron Steinbuch
September 30, 2015 | 1:23am
Trump’s tax plan would raise deficit $12 trillion: analysis
Donald Trump
Photo: Reuters
Donald Trump’s tax plan would cost a staggering $12 trillion over 10 years — despite his pledge not to increase the deficit, according to an analysis released Tuesday.
The Tax Foundation found that Trump’s changes to the individual tax code would reduce net revenues by about $10.14 trillion, after accounting for higher incomes due to an 11 percent jump in the gross domestic product.
The billionaire businessman’s corporate tax cuts also would bleed $1.54 trillion over the next decade, and his plan to dispense with the estate tax would cost $238 billion, the group said. - NY Post today
My comments on this are in a previous post.
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It certainly looks bad. Also,
Mr. Trump’s tax plan would substantially lower individual income taxes and the corporate income tax and eliminate a number of complex features in the current tax code.
Mr. Trump’s plan would cut taxes by $11.98 trillion over the next decade on a static basis. However, the plan would end up reducing tax revenues by $10.14 trillion over the next decade when accounting for economic growth from increases in the supply of labor and capital.
The plan would also result in increased outlays due to higher interest on the debt, creating a ten-year deficit somewhat larger than the estimates above.
According to the Tax Foundation’s Taxes and Growth Model, the plan would significantly reduce marginal tax rates and the cost of capital, which would lead to an 11 percent higher GDP over the long term provided that the tax cut could be appropriately financed.
The plan would also lead to a 29 percent larger capital stock, 6.5 percent higher wages, and 5.3 million more full-time equivalent jobs.
The plan would cut taxes and lead to higher after-tax incomes for taxpayers at all levels of income.
Here is the analysis on the Jeb Plan. Has not reviewed the Rubio Plan.
Key Findings:
Governor Jeb Bush’s tax plan would reform both the individual income tax and the corporate income tax and eliminate a number of complex features in the current tax code.
According to the Tax Foundation’s Taxes and Growth Model, the plan would significantly reduce marginal tax rates and the cost of capital, which would lead to a 10 percent higher GDP over the long-term.
The plan would also lead to a 28.8 percent larger capital stock, 7.4 percent higher wages, and 2.7 million more full-time equivalent jobs.
The Governor’s plan would cut taxes by $3.6 trillion over the next decade on a static basis. However, the plan would end up reducing revenue by $1.6 trillion over the next decade when accounting for the additional economic growth created by the plan.
The plan would cut taxes and lead to higher after-tax incomes for taxpayers at all levels of income.
Comments:
Obviously, this looks far worse for the Trump Plan. But here is something I have found in building such models.
- None of the above means much without looking at "The Vetting Book". This book details in full the methodology used, the assumptions used, how the assumptions were derived, and all the other factors that could influence the outcome. One hopes that the assumptions are fair, but there are inherent biases built into determination of each assumption.
- The Tax Foundation does try to provide some info in the Notes Section, but they do show the limitations of their assumptions in some categories.
In all, this is all moot. Bush is cooked and over, and even if he wasn't, the fact that he is calling for a 10% bottom tax (no matter the deductions) means that he would get blasted on this in the general election and would lose to the Dems.
I have conceded that Trump will not be nominated. The GOP through the state RNC's are manipulating the primary rules weekly to give the preferred candidate the best shot at gaining the nomination. This will probably be Rubio. Yet Rubio's Plan calls for a bottom tax rate of 15% and then 35%, so he will not win the Presidency either.
Cruz wants a Flat Tax, but has not identified what the Rate would be. Nor whether it would be on Gross Income, Net Income after Deductions, nor what deductions would be allowed. Again, the 45% of non-payers would not vote for Cruz because they would be paying federal taxes again.
I now concede that Biden will be the next President.
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Deck chairs. Titanic.
Doesn't matter anyway.
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PP: "I now concede that Biden will be the next President."
When I said I couldn't ever tell when pat was joking, he didn't know I was joking. )
We're going to get through this and Biden ISN'T going to be the next President.
We both called this static analysis, but they tried to head that off by saying:
" after accounting for higher incomes due to an 11 percent jump in the gross domestic product."
I wrote previously:
"Trump will either argue successfully against the static economic chorus or he will fall on this sword."
Other than the small point I nitpicked, the Trump plan is a great plan. His job now is to show how this plan does not blow up the deficit for the reasons that follow. Undermining the seriousness of the arguments he now needs to make are all the silly 'bragadacious' things he has already said.
1) Trump Plan will double the GDP, not grow it by 11%. He needs experts, real analysis, serious projections to show real consequences of a changed system, and especially needs to speak the language of supply side economics in a persuasive way that brings people over to the viewpoint of optimism and trust in the human spirit.
2) It doesn't blow the deficit because the growth in opportunities and income will dramatically lessen the need for federal government social spending and poverty programs.
3) Federal programs (that shouldn't be federal) can be turned back to the states with the revenue surge they will see with this kind of a growth surge.
4) Ditto for Obamacare, the current driver of future deficits.
5) Federal interest expense as a percent of GDP falls quickly as economic growth surges.
6) Defense spending as percent of GDP actually costs less when we engage wisely and consistently than when we project weakness and then pay the price for it.
Will Trump make these arguments? We will see. He is starting to make sounds about leaving the race and going back to run the business. For his own ego, he would like to get out while he is still in first place.
The question never asked of Trump: If he is so good, how can his business run without him for 4-8 years plus this year. I assume they need him back at the office. )
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Doug,
I am serious now. It will be either Hillary (if she survives the email scandal) or Biden.
You make good points on the Trump Plan. But the problem is that Trump will not be "allowed" to defend his plan in a rational manner. The liberal media will claim that it is unworkable, and they will drive the narrative. Meanwhile, the GOP will push the narrative that everyone must pay something, so that will drive off those who don't pay anything now.
It is becoming more apparent that the GOP ticket will likely be Rubio/Fiorina. With this ticket, the GOP can claim support for women and hispanics and for them, hopefully increase hispanic and women support. It might work to a degree, but it will be offset by the tax issue.
The problem is that Rubio/Fiorina is no better than what the Dems offer. They are all indebted to Wall Street and K Street. So nothing will really change.
What the GOP is ignoring is that with Rubio/Fiorina, once again a large part of the GOP electorate will stay home and not vote. I will be one of them. Why vote if nothing will change? It is all the Uni-Party.
With my post yesterday, I am really coming to the conclusion that the GOP would prefer to lose the Presidency again. After all, we all recognize that the next 4 years are fraught with economic danger, homeland security dangers, and society dangers caused by the ethnic divide. The next President will face all of these issues and reality suggests that there will be no easy solution.
Would you want to be President for the next four years, or eight and be responsible for handling what is coming? I would not...........and I bet that the GOP actually feels the same way.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/09/30/after-professing-disgust-for-trump-these-hillary-supporters-learn-they-just-endorsed-his-tax-plan/
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CD,
Kimmel proves the other part of the problem with politics.
People are STUPID!!! They are conditioned by the government, the schools and the media to one particular belief system and will not consider other alternatives. Just take into consideration what is said about Congress.
"They are all crooks. They only look out for themselves. They should be voted out of office. But, my Congress Critter is GOOD! He/she is the only reputable one."
We are so screwed................
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Interesting listening in line at the local supermarket this morning. People were talking about the Trump Tax Plan. 7 people for it, some because they would no longer pay taxes on the income they have, others because it would help the economy, and 2 people against it because others would not be paying taxes at all.
A fight almost broke out..........
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Interesting listening in line at the local supermarket this morning. People were talking about the Trump Tax Plan. 7 people for it, some because they would no longer pay taxes on the income they have, others because it would help the economy, and 2 people against it because others would not be paying taxes at all.
A fight almost broke out..........
He has brought two big issues to the public awareness. Maybe he has accomplished something big and positive whether he wins the nomination or not.
"... and 2 people against it because others would not be paying taxes at all."
It shouldn't be presented as millions of people paying nothing at all. It really is that everyone's first dollars are earned tax free - helping people to move above and beyond that minimum level.
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By Daniel Henninger
Sept. 30, 2015 7:44 p.m. ET
654 COMMENTS
The oddest moment in the second GOP debate was when the first thing Donald Trump did was to launch an assault on Sen. Rand Paul, who was standing about three miles away at the end of the podiums: “Well, first of all, Rand Paul shouldn’t even be on this stage. He’s number 11, he’s got 1% in the polls, and how he got up here, there’s far too many people anyway.” Ummm, what was that all about?
Since that Sept. 16 debate, as measured by the RealClearPolitics polling average, Mr. Trump has lost about a quarter of his support, down to 23% from 30% on the eve of the debate. In this week’s Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, he is at 21%.
It’s not going to get better. The Trump numbers are going to drift sideways, or fall.
A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump tweeted that getting his business out of Atlantic City before the casinos collapsed was “great timing.” The moment has come for the timing master to recognize it’s Atlantic City all over again. For his phenomenal presidential campaign, it’s time to go.
In politics, there’s that famous thing known as Big Mo—momentum. Donald Trump had Big Mo like no one’s ever seen. It’s gone. The odds are he’ll soon be in second or third place, behind someone he insulted as a loser, as the heartless, mocking media will note. He’s not going to enjoy not being on top.
Politics is about winning at the margin. It is about securing a base of voter support and then finding ways to attract additional voters at the margin. In the highly partisan presidential elections since 2000, the Republican and Democratic nominees both have had a base vote rotating in the mid-40s. Then the candidates have to add marginal votes toward the 50% threshold. (In 2000, with third-party candidate Ralph Nader getting 3%, George W. Bush and Al Gore both finished with about 48%, hanging chads and a generation of political bitterness.)
The Trump candidacy is pure base, and Mr. Trump has not built out from that base, which topped out at about 30%. It’s become obvious that this third of angry conservative voters is volatile. Mr. Trump’s famous support base has eroded, dispersing to the other outsider candidates, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina.
More important, it is now clear that Mr. Trump is personally incapable of doing what is necessary to expand beyond his early burst of support. The tax plan he released this week, admirable as a broad outline, is supposed to show he’s getting serious. That’s the problem. His core base didn’t want that kind of serious.
Even at the level of performance art, what’s happening now is the slow-motion disintegration of “Trump.” His candidacy is detouring into weird and confusing fights, such as the “boycott” of Fox News. News reports on the Trump candidacy increasingly note remarks from admirers who essentially say: I really like that he tells it like it is, but I’m not sure he’s a good fit for the presidency.
The pace of volatility in contemporary politics is unprecedented, as a 74-year-old Vermont socialist is revealing to the preordained candidacy of Hillary Clinton. That the improbable Mr. Trump could rise and then flatline in so little time is startling but not surprising. What Mr. Trump ought to recognize is that his place in the 2015 moment—his political legacy—is secure, unless he lets it evaporate.
Donald Trump was the first person to tap into the zeitgeist of disgust coursing through politics everywhere. The fed-up voters of Guatemala have just made a TV comedian with no political experience the top finisher in their first-round presidential vote. In Spain, a referendum last Sunday revealed many in Catalonia would jump off the political cliff to separate from Madrid, their version of despised Washington.
In the 1996 presidential campaign, the Republican nominee, Sen. Bob Dole, coined a political phrase for the ages: “Where’s the outrage?” That’s the question a lot of Republican voters were asking themselves about their declared presidential candidates earlier this year: Where’s the outrage? With Donald Trump’s June 16 presidential announcement, they finally got it.
Mr. Trump’s singular personality is simply at odds with the political skills necessary to carry that mood any further than his mere arrival accomplished. His support is moving to candidates who are variations on the Trump theme. What people saw and heard in Carly Fiorina was your basic straight-razor woman. Her rage looks to be about one degree below boiling. Ben Carson radiates an intelligent everyman’s bemusement at a gridlocked system.
When the primaries arrive early next year, the Trump vote will subdivide further among the other Republican tortoises. If he stays in, Donald Trump becomes another presidential also-ran. With ostentation suitable to his stature, Mr. Trump should retire to a skybox, and enjoy what he has wrought.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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is this the 6th time Trump has been declared finished? The 20th?
Henninger should look at the latest polls and not just CNN or NBC. Their results are completely different than what is otherwise being reported.
That said, the new post on the Primaries I am working on will show how Jeb will still be the nominee. (Maybe Rubio.)
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http://nypost.com/2015/10/01/trump-ill-drop-presidential-run-if-i-fall-behind-in-polls/?utm_source=jolt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Jolt10022015&utm_term=Jolt
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See my last post on the GOP thread how Rubio/Jeb will win the nomination even though Trump wins and might have greater support.
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Somin nails it:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/10/04/trump-polls-immigration-taxes-column/72755896/
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I'm not a big Trump fan, but IMHO that article is rather snide (which is fine) and emotionally self-indulgent. There is more to Trump I think than for which the author gives him credit.
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Actually, the author was really going after the Trump supporter. We are now ignorant along with all the other things we are called.
All I know is that there is a huge disconnect between the middle class and the "sexual intellectuals".
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https://www.facebook.com/frienddogstudios/videos/1627096487540629/
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I am the guy sitting next to him.
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A limo parking lot for a privately held casino is equal to building a public highway?
This will be a major contributor to his eventual downfall, and you heard it here (almost) first.
He will never be my candidate with this view. Supreme Court appointments are perhaps the President's most powerful duty, above CinC, in the big government era we have created. Big Government Power and Crony Government Power is something this non-conservative wants more of.
"for instance you're going to create thousands of jobs" ... Ends Justify Means.
Just happens to be false in his two prominent examples, Pfizer in New London and casinos in Atlantic City.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/10/06/trump_eminent_domain_wonderful.html
"I think eminent domain is wonderful if you're building a highway and you need to build as an example, a highway, and you're going to be blocked by a hold-out or in some cases, it's a hold-out, just so you understand, nobody knows this better than I do, I built a lot of buildings in Manhattan and you'll have 12 sites and you'll get 11 and you'll have the one hold-out and you end up building around them and everything else," Trump said Tuesday on Special Report.
"I think eminent domain for massive projects, for instance you're going to create thousands of jobs and you have somebody that's in the way. Eminent domain, they get a lot of money," Trump said. "And you need a house in a certain location because you're going to build this massive development that's going to employ thousands of people or you're going to build a factory that without this little house, you can't build the factory. I think eminent domain is fine."
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Doug,
This country is past the tipping point, so it really doesn't matter.
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Except for the Eminent Domain/Kelo discussion, IMHO Trump's interview with Bret Baier showed an improving candidate.
I was glad to hear him mention for the first time that Bush handed over a decent situation to Baraq in Iraq and that had Baraq not thrown it away that things would be very different now.
That said, as Steve Hayes and Charles K. said in the panel discussion, part of Trump's appeal is that he is seen as looking out for the middle class and the working class, but his behavior and position here is pure crony capitalist and as such it runs contrary to the narrative in his favor and therefore could have a surprising amount of negative consequence for him.
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I was just going to post this for Doug. :-D
Some questions:
Is the use of Imminent Domain ever acceptable when a Private Company is concerned? What about the Public Benefit that occurs with a shopping center, a casino, a hospital, etc? After all, such projects do create jobs. Furthermore, they add to the tax base in far greater dollar amounts that a single home could offer.
What happens when a single homeowner is the only holdout of a project with immense public benefit? That homeowner does not want to sell under any circumstances, no matter what the price?
Every case must be considered based upon the merits of the situation. It is not a one size fits all situation.
As to CD's comments about the negative consequences, Imminent Domain is a subject that matters only to a small minority of politically astute people. It pales in comparison to Immigration, Taxes and other things.
In fact, I would suggest that if Imminent Domain was the "deal-breaker", then Trump would not get those votes anyway.
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Doug,
This country is past the tipping point, so it really doesn't matter.
In order to turn the country around, you would have to cause the few remaining non-radicalized Dems and newcomers to this country to actually remember and understand what originally made this country great and change their lives and their voting accordingly. To do anything near that in the face of media, primary education and higher education who have all become 99% radicalized is perhaps, as GM says, past the tipping point.
Our job is to take our best shot at reversing course in the time that we have. Getting behind someone who made his fortune in big government cronyism and doubles down on it now won't ever get us there.
'I will build the best, biggest, most powerful and efficient, crony government the world has ever seen.' - Donald Trump (translated)
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Better to invest your energy into preparing you and yours for what is coming.
Doug,
This country is past the tipping point, so it really doesn't matter.
In order to turn the country around, you would have to cause the few remaining non-radicalized Dems and newcomers to this country to actually remember and understand what originally made this country great and change their lives and their voting accordingly. To do anything near that in the face of media, primary education and higher education who have all become 99% radicalized is perhaps, as GM says, past the tipping point.
Our job is to take our best shot at reversing course in the time that we have. Getting behind someone who made his fortune in big government cronyism and doubles down on it now won't ever get us there.
'I will build the best, biggest, most powerful and efficient, crony government the world has ever seen.' - Donald Trump (translated)
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I was just going to post this for Doug. :-D
Some questions:
Is the use of Imminent Domain ever acceptable when a Private Company is concerned? What about the Public Benefit that occurs with a shopping center, a casino, a hospital, etc? After all, such projects do create jobs. Furthermore, they add to the tax base in far greater dollar amounts that a single home could offer.
What happens when a single homeowner is the only holdout of a project with immense public benefit? That homeowner does not want to sell under any circumstances, no matter what the price?
Every case must be considered based upon the merits of the situation. It is not a one size fits all situation.
As to CD's comments about the negative consequences, Imminent Domain is a subject that matters only to a small minority of politically astute people. It pales in comparison to Immigration, Taxes and other things.
In fact, I would suggest that if Imminent Domain was the "deal-breaker", then Trump would not get those votes anyway.
"Every case must be considered based upon the merits of the situation. It is not a one size fits all situation."
- Every case must be considered and decided BY WHOM? is the question. The final decision of private property ownership transactions is the 5 person city council in my town or the 13 person (all Dem) city council in Minneapolis, etc.? Superior, big government, central planning allied with the largest private interests is what made America great?
No, it was the amazing aggregate wisdom of all the individual participants in a mostly free market that made this country exceptional.
The Kelo decision isn't on everyone radar screen. But it will be when Trump starts receiving return fire for his own attacks.
(https://louisville.edu/landuse/New%20London%202.jpg/image_preview)
Ten Nine years after the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision gutted the right of American property owners to resist eminent-domain seizures, the neighborhood at the center of the case remains a wasteland.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370441/nine-years-after-kelo-seized-land-empty-alec-torres
Bankrupt Trump Plaza Casino Closes in Atlantic City
http://www.ykabankruptcy.com/bankrupt-trump-plaza-casino-closes-in-atlantic-city/
These are his examples of smart growth. Yes, I oppose that - even when it appears to succeed.
Even if you favor big government cronyism, we already have a party for that. What we are looking for is an alternative.
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Under what reading of equal protection under the law does government get the power to prefer one private interest over another?
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Doug,
Let's look at why the development did not occur. Pfizer backed out and the developer could not get financing. How much of this was caused by the litigation and the length of time, publicity, etc? If Kelo had not challenged the development, would it have occurred? Nothing exists in a vacuum.
From Wikipedia. (I know about its credibility.)
Following the decision, many of the plaintiffs expressed an intent to find other means by which they could continue contesting the seizure of their homes.[9] Soon after the decision, city officials announced plans to charge the residents of the homes for back rent for the five years since condemnation procedures began. The city contended that the residents have been on city property for those five years and owe tens of thousands of dollars of rent. In June 2006, Governor M. Jodi Rell intervened with New London city officials, proposing the homeowners involved in the suit be deeded property in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood so they may retain their homes.[10] A group of New London residents formed a local political party, One New London, to combat the takings. While unsuccessful in gaining control of the New London City Council, they gained two seats and continue to try to gain a majority in the New London City Council to rectify the Ft. Trumbull takings.[citation needed]
The controversy was eventually settled when the city paid substantial additional compensation to the homeowners and agreed to move Kelo’s home to a new location.[11] The land was never deeded back to the original homeowners, most of whom have left New London for nearby communities.[2] Three years after the Supreme Court case was decided, the Kelo house was dedicated after being relocated to 36 Franklin Street, a site close to downtown New London.[12] Susette Kelo, however, has moved to a different part of Connecticut.
In spite of repeated efforts, the redeveloper (who stood to get a 91-acre (370,000 m2) waterfront tract of land for $1 per year) was unable to obtain financing, and the redevelopment project was abandoned. As of the beginning of 2010, the original Kelo property was a vacant lot, generating no tax revenue for the city.[2] In the aftermath of 2011's Hurricane Irene, the now-closed New London redevelopment area was turned into a dump for storm debris such as tree branches and other vegetation.[13] As of February 2014, it was still vacant.[14][15]
Pfizer, whose employees were supposed to be the clientele of the Fort Trumbull redevelopment project, completed its merger with Wyeth, resulting in a consolidation of research facilities of the two companies. Pfizer chose to retain the Groton campus on the east side of the Thames River, closing its New London facility in late 2010 with a loss of over 1000 jobs. That coincided with the expiration of tax breaks on the New London site that would have increased Pfizer's property tax bill by almost 400 percent.[16][17]
After the Pfizer announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle in its lead editorial called the Kelo decision infamous:
The well-laid plans of redevelopers, however, did not pan out. The land where Susette Kelo's little pink house once stood remains undeveloped. The proposed hotel-retail-condo "urban village" has not been built. And earlier this month, Pfizer Inc. announced that it is closing the $350 million research center in New London that was the anchor for the New London redevelopment plan, and will be relocating some 1,500 jobs.[18]
The Chronicle editorial quoted from The New York Times:
"They stole our home for economic development," ousted homeowner Michael Cristofaro told the New York Times. "It was all for Pfizer, and now they get up and walk away."[18]
The final cost to the city and state for the purchase and bulldozing of the formerly privately held property was $78 million.[19] The promised 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues had not materialized. As of 2014 the area remains an empty lot.[20]
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For something that is in the government's interest, meaning in the public's interest, there can be an argument for seizing a person's property. Say for the purposes of national defense. This is quite different that seizing the property of a citizen for the profit of a well connected fatcat.
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Under what reading of equal protection under the law does government get the power to prefer one private interest over another?
This is the question. Does equal protection mean that there is never a government power to act in a private interest? Is this even in the event that a Private Interest benefits the Public Interest significantly?
These are questions that will always generate huge debate. And there are no easy answers.
What if Kelo was a private hospital being built that would benefit a community that had no hospital? Would this make a difference? (Actually this reminds me of my childhood. Lived in Sapulpa Oklahoma. Back in about 1962, the local hospital, Bartlett Hospital, needed to expand to meet the community needs. It had to take at least a square city block. What if one homeowner refused to sell. Would Imminent Domain be acceptable when the health of the community was considered?
Again, each case must be taken on its own merits.
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A hospital where there is none is one thing. A mall or sporting venue is quite different. We must get away from the government picking winners.
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https://www.stlouisfed.org/Publications/Regional-Economist/April-2001/Should-Cities-Pay-for-Sports-Facilities
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But what about a shopping center? Building it would create thousands of jobs over 2-3 years. Thousands of jobs would be added after completion of the center with the new stores coming in. Millions would be added to the tax base yearly.
Does the interest of one person outweigh the benefit to the community in such a case? If so, how would this impact future developments if one person did not want to see any development and refused to sell? Tough questions............
As to Sports Facilities.....usually that is put up as a referendum for the public to vote on. Just because it may not be as financially beneficial as another use for the funds does not invalidate it if the public agrees.
Hmmm, maybe a public vote for ED actions when a private use is considered? And if the public votes for it, does that mean the affected homeowners cannot challenge, especially if it is just one person who does not want to sell?
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There is no tyranny worse than the tyranny of the majority. No, I don't want my private property rights (did we even agree there are any?) put up for a vote.
Proponents keep saying hospital and highway, but the issue is private development. Why is there no way the developer can entice the homeowner to sell willingly?
Hospitals are public use in a different way than malls and casinos.
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Just a note. The key determination is the definition of Public Use. Using the definition and cases below, Kelo and other cases like the Casino would fit the Public Use definition. Pe
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/eminent+domain (http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/eminent+domain)
Public Use - The third element, public use, requires that the property taken be used to benefit the public rather than specific individuals. Whether a particular use is considered public is ordinarily a question to be determined by the courts. However, if the legislature has made a declaration about a specific public use, the courts will defer to legislative intent (Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, 467 U.S. 229, 104 S. Ct. 2321, 81 L. Ed. 2d 186 [1984]). Further, "[t]he legislature may determine what private property is needed for public purpose … but when the taking has been ordered, then the question of compensation is judicial" (Monongahela Navigation Co. v. United States, 148 U.S. 312, 13 S. Ct. 622, 37 L. Ed. 463 [1893]).
To determine whether property has been taken for public use, the courts first determined whether the property was to be used by a broad segment of the general public. The definition of public use was later broadened to include anything that benefited the public, such as trade centers, municipal civic centers, and airport expansions. The U.S. Supreme Court continued to expand the definition of public use to include aesthetic considerations. In Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26, 75 S. Ct. 98, 99 L. Ed. 27 (1954), the Court ruled that slums could be cleared in order to make a city more visually attractive. The Court in Berman stated further that it is within legislative power to determine whether a property can be condemned solely to beautify a community.
State courts have also expanded the definition of public use. The Michigan Supreme Court even allowed property to be condemned for the private use of the General Motors Company, under the theory that the public would benefit from the economic revitalization a new plant would bring to the community (Poletown Neighborhood Council v. City of Detroit, 410 Mich. 616, 304 N. W. 2d 455 [1981]).
As to your most recent comment about enticing the homeowner to sell willingly, almost always there have been attempts to do just that..........but there are simply some people who are stubborn and will not sell under any circumstances. Others use the refusal to sell to jack up the price beyond all reason as sort of an extortion attempt. So when either of these happen, does one just stop the project?
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Do people have a right to demand any price they wish for whatever they own?
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They can demand whatever price they want...............sure. But there has to be some reason to it.
Remember, these types of cases go on for years. The cost to litigate climbs into the millions rather quickly. Would a developer prefer to not have those costs? Also, what happens if a developer pays a highly inflated price? The next person demands even more and so forth. Where does it end?
Reminds me of a case I was recently involved in. Value of the property was $200k. I calculated damages to the borrower for improper practices at about $40k. The lender did not want to go to court so they asked what the homeowner wanted for a reasonable settlement. They told their attorney to ask for $5m. The lender puked and said let's go to trial. I was asked to then testify to damages of $5m. When the case ended, the homeowner was awarded damages of $7,500.
I cite this case because this is how unreasonable things could get in ED cases by a single homeowner holdout.
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No, there does not need to be a reason beyond the internal reason of the lawful owner. Not if you want to live in a society where liberty is a real value.
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"....but there are simply some people who are stubborn and will not sell under any circumstances. Others use the refusal to sell to jack up the price beyond all reason as sort of an extortion attempt. So when either of these happen, does one just stop the project."
Yes. And what if I want my new house built where their small sits and they 'stubbornly' refuse to sell? Again, choose between equal protection under the law, and tyranny. WHO decides
How come proponents of big government cronyism never propose AMENDING the constitution instead of just running roughshod over it?
4th amendment in part:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable seizures, shall not be violated...
Yes, what if I stubbornly don't want to move or have time commitments for the next couple of years that don't allow me to do that in a orderly way? I should cancel my life plans for the best interests of Government Motors. Only if I lose elections because I'm not voting for a government command economy.
Kelo takings and major league sports teams getting special treatment that the rest of us can't get are actually areas where conservatives and true liberals agree. Why not lock in and grow that agreement rather than piss it all away in the false promise of a better economy brought to you by superior, central planning?
This is a fundamental difference between Trump and liberty seeking free markets conservatives - like the founders.
A Pfizer or General Motors plant is not public use - even if both already have an inbreeding of crony government collaboration. A key part of competitive business expansion planning is the acquisition of real estate to expand. Valuable land goes to General Motors instead of a bakery because that is best use - based on their willingness to pay the highest price for the parcels. Only in a dictatorial, socialist country is private business land acquisition (an oxynoron) a government function. Oops, now I understand ...
NEVER answered is where else to draw the line that effectively prevents abuse if not to honor the words and meaning of the constitution.
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Like I said, there are never any answers to these types of questions.
We leave it up to the Courts to decide based upon the Constitutiion, Bill of Rights, Common Law interpretations and statutory law and then hope that they can unravel the mess.
A problem that I have resolving is that the Constitution was written in a time and period that is radically different that what exists today. Does that mean that the interpretation can never change to meet today's needs, and then as you suggest, amending it through the Bill of Rights, which as we know is probably a losing proposition? Or can the Courts interpret it to meet the new challenges.
One thing I have discussed with attorneys about the financial crisis is Innovation and Law. For example:
In the financial arena, financial innovations such as loan securitization, MERS, derivatives and other instruments push the boundaries of the law into areas that have not existed before, or else it challenges existing law. (I have directly seen this with securitization and MERS.) The innovations are such that current law is not properly equipped to handle the innovations, so Courts must interpret and rule, often making new law. For the "traditionalists", this represents overreach, but for the innovators, this represents an evolving of the law.
In the case of Kelo and other ED decisions, this may very well be occurring. ED was generally not an issue prior to the urbanization of the country. But with urbanization, especially in the bigger cities, land becomes a premium. Finding usable land for projects both private and public is difficult to acquire in areas that the projects could benefit the Public Interest. And even one person could stop the project from occurring just by refusing to sell. This would hurt not just the Public Interest, but also all other homeowners involved who could not sell their properties to benefit their own interests.
Now, with the different urbanization situation, the Courts must step in and decide what is correct.
No easy answers and lots of controversy to continue...
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"Under what reading of equal protection under the law does government get the power to prefer one private interest over another?"
Exactly so.
As far as I am concerned this is all that matters. Pat's logic here is the one of crony capitalism, fascist economics (state direction of the private sector/means of production etc.) and is thoroughly mistaken IMHO.
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CD,
I am trying to figure out how to respond to your post. I just cannot accept that there can never be a position whereby the private interest of one person could not be infringed upon when another's private action could benefit to the rest of a community. This just seems too black and white.
Guess I am just a crony capitalist and fascist economics supporter....
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One final comment:
If the 5th Amendment Private Property Rights Section is inviolate, then my question must be:
1. Why is the 2nd Amendment not inviolate? Why discriminate against felons, the mentally disturbed, etc? Why can't a person own an rpg, fully automatic machine gun, etc?
2. Why is Freedom of Speech not inviolate? Why can I not yell Fire in a crowded theater?
3. Why is the Search and Seizure provision not inviolate?
One can argue that the Courts keep getting it wrong, or it is government overreach in each and every case, but there has to be circumstances when a private interest becomes for the public good.
And that is my final comment.
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When you look at one Suzette Kelo, one Vera Coking, one Nancy MacG, each individually standing in the way of progress, it looks kind of silly and petty versus getting the immense public benefit of a new Pfizer facility, a new Trump parking lot or new yuppie housing where none existed before, but that is not the issue.
When you look at the aggregate of EVERYONE having the right to feel safe and secure in their home all their life, especially against the threat posed by their own government, that is an enormously valuable liberty, bigger than the Mall of America and Coors field combined - by many times. That is what separates us from the third world countries and what separates us from the tyrannical regime of Iran or the fascist regime of Nazi Germany. Having that enshrined in the constitution means that no simple majority can ever take that away from us - although one Justice Kennedy in a room full of liberals can.
"Guess I am just a crony capitalist and fascist economics supporter...."
Joking aside, this isn't personal. Even if you don't see it this way, I think it is important for you to know how strongly other people see it. You've seen good projects get done and the rest of us have seen small people get trampled on. Those people who do get all militant about property rights tend on the side of the political spectrum where Donald Trump is trying to build his coalition.
We just lost a Presidential election and two of the reasons for that loss were that our candidate couldn't make the case for important conservative principles. He couldn't advocate his economic plan including tax cuts because he was rich and couldn't make the case against Obamacare because of his own Romneycare. Now as we try to swing slightly back in the direction of founding principles, individual rights and limits on government, our front runner is a bigger advocate for expanding government power than every Supreme Court liberal we have seen. Trump courting conservatives is not a good fit. He can go the way of JEB who said he can win the general election (as a Republican) without winning the base. Good luck with that.
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To the final point, those who have seen their 2nd amendment rights chipped away, the first, the 9th, the 14th, those who saw the Court in Wickard Filburn define growing wheat for your own cattle as interstate commerce, etc. are READY for a fight. None of that is an excuse to erode rights further. In fact any further imagined encroachment might set off a political firestorm. The reaction some talk about goes a beyond voting...
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/07/donald-trump-claims-taking-of-property-for-private-development-is-not-taking-property/
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Trump interview on Fox News Sunday yesterday. He looked and sounded very good.
http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2015/10/18/donald-trump-talks-taxes-trade-11-and-why-takes-personal-shots-at-political/
Some humor in the fact that Chris Wallace is one of the 'journalists' Trump ripped after the Fox debate, and they included an old clip of Trump interviewed by Mike Wallace.
Still he couldn't jump past the eminent domain question that apparently will dog him until his demise.
The limo parking lot for the big project is more important than the homes of small people, even though in both examples, the so-called 'smart planning' for economic growth failed economically. He tried unsuccessfully to compare that with building highways and pipelines.
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If the innuendo in this next piece was about a candidate I favor, I would consider it very unfair. They never really come out and accuse Trump of anything and have no evidence or smoking gun. http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/trump-swam-in-mob-infested-waters-in-early-years-as-an-nyc-developer/2015/10/16/3c75b918-60a3-11e5-b38e-06883aacba64_story.html
That said, this quote fits nicely with their story:
“I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me,” he said. “And that’s a broken system.”
Then they go on to describe how Trump's big projects were built in mob controlled areas. In particular, Trump Tower was constructed of concrete while the mob controlled the concrete contractors in that area.
Trump swam in mob-infested waters in early years as an NYC developer
"Nearly every major project in Manhattan during that period was built with mob involvement, according to court records and the organized crime task force’s report. That includes Trump Tower, the glittering 58-story skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, which was made of reinforced concrete."
Agenda driven Washington Post planting the seed that things eventually will come out of Trump's business dealings that were better left under the table.
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WaPo and others are going to make claims like this, and also the fact that he dealt with unions. But they will not admit that if you are doing business in NY, NJ and other East Coast cities, unions and mobs are a fact of life and cannot be gotten around. Trump did what he had to do.........just like any developer would have done.
From what I am hearing, there is a YUGE contingent of union members supporting Trump at the local levels. He will apparently be pulling the union members into his camp in numbers far larger than normal, and probably greater than Reagan. Bodes well for cross party support.
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"Trump did what he had to do.........just like any developer would have done."
Agree. So did Mitt Romney as CEO of a private equity firm - in a much cleaner way than Trump.. Yet he could not relate that to the common person, answer his critics or overcome it in the general election.
Now Trumps fails to answer the distinction between highways, hospitals and private development.
" I’ll be honest with you. And remember, you’re not taking property, you know, the way you asked the question, the way other people—you’re paying a fortune for that property. Those people can move two blocks away into a much nicer house."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/07/donald-trump-claims-taking-of-property-for-private-development-is-not-taking-property/
Swing and a miss. Strike Two.
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Only a very tiny percentage of the electorate care about this subject. Immigration is much more important.
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Only a very tiny percentage of the electorate care about this subject.
Including the founders, and most of them are dead.
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I have to ask.....
If Trump met your position on Eminent Domain, would you support him, or is there another issue or three that you have against him?
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I have to ask.....
If Trump met your position on Eminent Domain, would you support him, or is there another issue or three that you have against him?
It's a good question. To the first part, no, he wouldn't be my first choice anyway. I see the private use takings issues as a symptom of a bigger government view than mine. He has shown many more examples over the years, giving money to the Clintons, and supporting the Pelosi Reid congress, etc. He had his reasons every time but I don't see him politically as on my side, even though most of his positions now line up pretty well. He has the right to change his mind and I have the right to not be fully convinced.
On the second part, the guy rubs me the wrong way. In 1987, I bought his bestseller, 'Art of the Deal', thinking I was going to learn something important about making real estate deals from the best in the profession and I was severely disappointed. Even back then I re-named his book, 'Aren't I Great and Don't I Know a Lot of Important People', by Donald Trump. It contained nothing to help the reader except to be aware of how great Donald Trump is. On his second chance to make a good first impression, take an honest look at the off-topic material in this campaign like his answer to why he gave so much money to both sides. The example he came up with was that he got celebrities to come to his wedding - Clintons, nonetheless. It doesn't work for me.
He is the strongest candidate on immigration, but other than building a fence and deporting murderers and rapists, what is he going to get done more than under several of the other candidates? Nothing I think, especially if he loses.
The immigration issue is polarizing already and Trump made it more so. There is going to be some kind of political settlement in the end. He can head into those negotiations with the most hardline stance, but it doesn't help the outcome if it causes him to lose the election.
If polls matter in the ones where he is winning - every state right now for the nomination, why don't they matter in general election matchups? He trails Sanders by 9 points in polls where others are even or better. That's not going to close the border or get any illegals sent home.
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Okay, I can accept your position. But I would say this..............
1. No one is going to win the election on the Pubbie side without being able to drawn from normal Dem supporters.
2. Cruz cannot win in a general election. He will be destroyed for his Tea Party connections. Even winning the nomination will be difficult.
3. Jeb cannot win against Biden. His support is dropping so fast that he cannot bring out the anti Bush pubbies to vote for him.
4. Rubio is Jeb lite. He is the most likely to win the nomination. But his ability to appeal to the base is very questionable, especially since he waffles on immigration and supports Common Core.
5. Carson appears on paper to be a good candidate, but he is very liberal on immigration with statements suggesting he would support amnesty. His views on health care in the past show a more liberal position. Views on Affirmative Action tend to be more moderate. His comments on Ferguson were disturbing. His statements after 9-11 about not going into Afghanistan but that negotiations and jobs would be more effective with the Taliban were very problematic. Likely, he will not be able to deal with the politicians on either side in Congress. he will get rolled time and again.
6. The others have no hope at all.
Again, I expect that Rubio will end up the nominee. GOPe manipulations in the convention will deliver the nomination to Rubio, no matter how Trump or Carson performs. Then, Rubio loses in the general election.
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Panicked establishment gets ready for war against Trump
By BYRON YORK (@BYRONYORK) • 10/19/15 6:02 PM
This weekend was an inflection point in the Republican presidential race — a moment in which some significant part of the GOP establishment came out of denial and realized Donald Trump might well become their party's nominee.
"The Republican establishment, for the first time, is saying, off the record, this guy can win," noted Joe Scarborough on MSNBC Monday morning. "I've heard that from everybody. I don't hear anybody saying he can't win the nomination anymore."
That doesn't mean Republicans have made their peace with a Trump victory. On the contrary — some are preparing to do whatever it takes to bring him down. Which could lead to an extraordinary scenario in which GOP stalwarts go to war to destroy their own party's likely nominee
"Massive resistance," was the answer. "He's not a conservative."
Insiders have watched as Trump defied what many believed were immutable laws of the political universe. First they thought Trump wouldn't run. Then they thought voters wouldn't take a reality-TV star seriously. Then they thought gaffes would kill Trump as they had other candidates. None of that turned out as expected.
But there is one belief Trump has not yet tested, and that is the political insiders' unshakeable faith that negative ads work.
"I don't think Trump can withstand 10,000 points of smart negative in Iowa and New Hampshire," says one veteran Republican strategist who is not affiliated with any campaign. "It would force him to spend money. That's when this starts to get real for him." ("Points" refers to gross ratings points, a way of measuring TV ad buys; 10,000 points would be a really big buy, meaning the average viewer would see an anti-Trump ad many, many times.)
There is no central anti-Trump conspiracy. But one group that would like to play a leading role in taking him down is the Club for Growth. In September, the Club ran two ads against Trump in Iowa — 2,000 points — with one arguing that Trump is not a true conservative and the other hitting Trump for his support of the Supreme Court's Kelo decision on eminent domain.
McIntosh is looking for donors to fund an anti-Trump campaign that would hit hard in the month before voting begins. It might be a Club for Growth production, or it might be a combination of efforts. "There is no other group that has decided to do it," says McIntosh. "There are a large number of donors and political activists who want to do it."
The triggers for the anti-Trump onslaught would likely be: 1) if next month arrives with Trump still in the lead, and 2) if Trump begins airing his own ads. "Once that starts, you'll see a lot of people saying we've waited long enough," notes McIntosh.
While that is going on, officials at the Republican National Committee vow to stay out of things. Asked what role the RNC might play in any movement against Trump, strategist and spokesman Sean Spicer said, "None. None. Zero. It is up to Republican voters to decide who our nominee is, not the RNC." Indeed, other sources inside the RNC say chairman Reince Priebus has stressed to staff that they must stay out of candidate fights.
The anti-Trump campaign will face several challenges. The biggest is the voters who support Trump. Conservative groups like the Club believe they can convince those voters that Trump is not a true conservative. Perhaps they can. But what if a large number of his voters are not wed to conservative orthodoxy as defined by Washington-based organizations?
The other problem is Trump himself. If he decides to spend serious money on his campaign — and some GOP veterans still aren't convinced he will — he can launch a serious counterpunch to any anti-Trump campaign.
And then there is the fact that Trump is improving as a candidate. Just look at Sunday's interview on "Fox News Sunday" in which he was sharp, focused, and forceful. A talented candidate who does something over and over again will get better at it. Trump is better than he was just a month ago, which is not good news for his opponents.
Some anti-Trump Republicans still harbor hope Trump will begin to fade all by himself. Yes, Trump, who has been atop the RealClearPolitics average of national polls for three months straight, has outlasted the various flavor-of-the-months from the 2012 GOP race. But opponents point out that Rudy Giuliani led the poll average for an incredibly long time four years earlier — from February 2007 to January 2008 — before sinking when voting actually began. Their hope is the same will happen to Trump.
It could. But a closer look at the 2007-2008 polls shows that Giuliani was almost always trailing in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. And of course, ignoring the early states killed his candidacy. Trump, on the other hand, is on top in those three states, plus Nevada — all the states that will vote first in February. His organization is growing. He is hiring smart operatives. The Giuliani analogy doesn't apply.
Which makes it more likely that the anti-Trump forces will ultimately have to take it on themselves to go on the attack. Their core belief is that Trump cannot withstand a long and withering bombardment of negative ads. But core beliefs have been cast aside repeatedly in this race. That might happen again.
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To show that I am fair to Doug, I will save him the trouble and post this for him............Trump reversed himself on Afghanistan. Just more ammo for the Anti-Trumps. He is the only way who makes these mistakes.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/20/politics/donald-trump-afghanistan-war-not-a-mistake/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/20/politics/donald-trump-afghanistan-war-not-a-mistake/index.html)
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Everyone wonders what the appeal of Trump is. This article does perhaps the best job so far of explaining his appeal. His support comes from the blue collar wing.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/next-america/newsdesk/trump-lead-alienates-white-collar-voters?mref=home (http://www.nationaljournal.com/next-america/newsdesk/trump-lead-alienates-white-collar-voters?mref=home)
I have no problem with this analysis, and it actually supports my own observations of those who support Trump. Watch his rallies and you see blue collar, middle class everywhere. They are readily identifiable. What one would assume to be white collar are less so.
Around my own community, the same divide exists. Those who are better educated will visibly recoil when people mention that they are supporting Trump. And those willing to voice their support are certainly middle class.
The divide between the pro and con Trump forces reflect a divide that currently exists across educational and economic levels throughout the country. In many ways, it reflects the differences in the GOPe and the Tea Party factions, but goes much deeper because it affects Dems as well as Reps. One could probably compare this to the divide between the Coasts and the Fly Over Country.
The problem is that for the elitists, it is too easy to dismiss the Trump supporters as lo info voters, rubes, under educated and income wise, lower middle class. The Trumpkins just simply "don't understand the world" and what is really going on. So the elitists must guide them through the morass for their own protection.
Where this will lead remains to be seen. If one believes that a 4th Turning in America is around the corner that will radically change the direction of the country, then the divide certainly will play a huge role in what happens over the next 15 years. However, if one believes that everything will "be okay" with just a few hick ups along the way, then a different perspective exists.
In the end, I still expect that at this point, it will be Rubio due to some major GOPe manipulation. And if this happens, the GOP is finished as a major party and force for decades. The GOPe risks the party if it ignores the Trumpkins and Carsonistas forces.
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PP, Good posts. I'm not out to get him. We all need to know more about his appeal. He sounded rather Presidential in the Chris Wallace interview and most of the time in the second debate. But that was made possible because Wallace gave him a pass on the previous Fox insults. Any candidate that might win the nomination needs to keep in mind they need to unite very soon with the other candidates' supporters to win the general election. The so-called blue collar vote or blue collar Dems or Reagan Dems are already part of the 40-something percent of the vote counted on our side. To win, one of these candidates needs to really turn out all sectors of the conservative coalition (if there is one) and reach at least a part way into the traditional support of the other side. Polarization turns out the opponents as well, so appealing to both is a delicate balance.
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But none of the other GOP candidates can pull together the party either.
1. Cruz represents the Tea Party. The GOPe has no intention of accepting that. And the Dems will demonize him.
2. Bush........the base does not want another Bush. And Bush cannot bring them into the fold.
3. Rubio.....Bush lite. He waffles on immigration, wants Common Core and is the alternative for the GOPe. Can he bring together people? I doubt it.
4. The dwarfs..............forget them....ain't going to happen.
5. Carson can bridge some of the different sections. But as more attention is paid to him, the more liberal his views will be shown to be. And.....does he have the toughness to go against the Dems......and if he were to win all, against his own party in Congress?
As to Trump, his appeal is simply among the blue collar workers. He says the non PC things that they have been feeling for decades. He represents their views that are totally ignored by both parties.
The blue collar worker finds himself under threats from all sides. Economically, he is going backwards. Socially, he is becoming more and more castrated. The elites have no respect for his views and believe themselves to be far superior.
All the blue collar worker wants is to be respected and treated fairly, something that has not occurred for decades. They don't want political pandering to special interests, social welfare programs that only benefit non working groups who have no intent of improving their own lot in life, nor programs that only serve to worsen their lot. They want a fair shake.
Simply, they believe the system is broken in favor of Wall Street, the Banks, and those who can afford to buy politicians.
Trump, will all of his warts, represents to them a hope of a change in direction. Whether change occurs or not, if Trump really tries, then they will consider him a success. If he folds like a cheap suit, then they will walk away entirely from the political process and never return. After all, if Trump folds, it means that every person and institution is corrupt and there is nowhere to turn. So for them, the country is lost.
Heck, I even feel that way. The country is out of control and the political masters don't care. They are in it all for themselves, and their cronies. For me, Trump is a "long shot hope" and nothing else. If he can upset the apple cart, great. If he fails, let it burn.
This comes from someone (me) who has been an eternal optimist since his first presidential election in 1972. Now, the optimism is gone, replaced by a feeling of betrayal, disillusionment and despair. If the Uni-Party continues at its present course, the country's demise is unstoppable. Why continue doing the same things over time and again, voting for the same idiots when the results never change? For me, it is "try something new" or walk away from it all.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/10/20/watch-morning-joe-hosts-stunned-reaction-to-donald-trumps-chillingly-accurate-prediction-made-in-book-months-before-911/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=FireWire%20-%20HORIZON%2010-20-15%20FINAL&utm_term=Firewire
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1. Cruz represents the Tea Party. The GOPe has no intention of accepting that. And the Dems will demonize him.
The left demonizes everyone that opposes them, including Trump.
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http://pjmedia.com/diaryofamadvoter/2015/10/22/donald-trumps-foreign-policy-for-dummies/?singlepage=true
(http://cdn1.pjmedia.com/diaryofamadvoter/user-content/47/files/2015/10/trump_foreign_policy_for_dummies_desktop_10-21-15-1.jpg)
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y Karl Rove
Oct. 21, 2015 6:42 p.m. ET
136 COMMENTS
Having led the polls for three months, Donald Trump has shown he’s no flash in the pan. Voters and the media should therefore treat him as a traditional front-runner, examine his temperament and require him to go beyond sound bites.
A governing agenda is essential to win the White House. Candidates must demonstrate mastery of the issues and cannot wing it. Platitudes don’t cut it for swing voters. Inquiring minds might like to hear Mr. Trump explain what specifically he would do as president.
He has said that he would deport the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., and in two years or less, thanks to “really good management.” But what exactly is Mr. Trump’s plan to arrest, detain and deport—with all the litigation that entails—15,000 people a day? That’s roughly 10 times the number of daily arrests in the U.S. for violent crime. How will Mr. Trump round up these people in a way that is, as he promises, “very humane” and “very nice”? And how many tens of billions will this cost?
Mr. Trump says he will then “expedite” the return of “the good ones” and proclaims that he doesn’t mind “having a big beautiful door” in his border wall to hasten their return. Question: Wouldn’t it be more practical to identify the “good” illegal immigrants first, to thereby avoid the cost of deporting them merely to expedite their return? Wouldn’t it be easier to determine who qualifies as “good” before deportation?
Then there’s the billionaire hotelier’s pledge to build that wall on the southern border. Mr. Trump has neither said how much it would cost nor dealt with practical considerations. For example, would Mr. Trump build a wall along the 1,254 miles where the Rio Grande separates Texas and Mexico? Would he wall off Lake Amistad and Falcon Lake, two reservoirs straddling the border where Americans go fishing and boating? What would he say to Texas officials who, instead of a wall along most of the Rio Grande border, would prefer to spend money on more Border Patrol agents, air assets and technology?
He is similarly vague on health care. In a Sept. 27 interview on “60 Minutes,” he said health care should be a universal, government-provided right. “Everybody’s got to be covered,” he said. “I don’t care if it costs me votes or not.” When the interviewer asked how, and who would pay for it, Mr. Trump answered, “I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people,” and pledged that “the government’s gonna pay for it.” During the Aug. 6 GOP debate Mr. Trump praised socialized medical systems elsewhere. “As far as single payer, it works in Canada,” he said. “It works incredibly well in Scotland.”
So how would TrumpCare operate? How many Americans would be eligible? What would it cost? It isn’t enough for Mr. Trump to go on “60 Minutes” and claim, “They can have their doctors, they can have plans, they can have everything.” Americans have heard empty promises before. They want an actual proposal that works.
There are already huge gaps between what Mr. Trump says and reality. For instance, he has complained about “hedge fund guys that are making a lot of money that aren’t paying anything” in taxes. Yet when he released his tax plan, he proposed dropping the top rate on hedge fund fees to 25% from 39.6%. True, the plan would raise taxes on their performance bonuses to 25% from 23.8%. But the result would be a generous tax cut provided to people Mr. Trump claims pay no taxes despite “making a hell of a lot of money.”
What about entitlements? “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican,” Mr. Trump says. “And I’m not going to cut Medicare.” But the Social Security Trust Fund will go bankrupt by 2034, and the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be exhausted in 2030. The only way the next president can save these entitlements is to reform them and help America avoid a debt crisis.
Mr. Trump has proven he can do outrageous. But soon Mr. Trump must demonstrate that which he has so far avoided: substance.
Republicans, too, face a test: Will the party choose a nominee with a conservative agenda or one reflecting populist anger? The two are hardly the same. Conservative principles provide a winning path to the White House. Populist outrage alone will end in defeat. In three months, Republican primary voters will begin deciding which they want. A good start would be to demand more from The Donald.
Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads and is the author of “The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the 1896 Election Still Matters,” out in November from Simon & Schuster.
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Coming from the Head Jeb supporter............
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Well, duh-- but what of the points he raises?
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...but what of the points he raises?
The details of mass deportation are unanswered because they are unanswerable. Toothpaste back in the tube, as they say in non-human terms. Healthcare, same thing. There isn't a simple or easy answer after the government takeover already took hold.
Details of the wall, fence or border will need to be worked out - with the Congress and with those states. Not with the county precinct chairs in Iowa.
Both the Rove piece and the Roger Simon piece, PJ Media, in GM's post on foreign policy indicate that Trump hasn't thought all these things through yet. (Nor has Carson.) Further it indicates that he is as surprised as anyone that his frontrunner status had stood this long.
Rove's opening is right, the frontrunners have earned the most scrutiny. See Hillary's discomfort with Trey Gowdy's Blumenthal questions. No one looked into Herman Cain or came forward to discredit him until he took the lead.
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Trump doing a rally in Florida right now. Jorge Ramos is pissed. Trump would not let him in to the rally. Of course, Trump owns the property so to hell with Ramos.
That is good non pc behavior. :lol:
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Who is Jorge Ramos?
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Who is Jorge Ramos?
Someone even more pro-illegal invader than Jeb.
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He was the reporter for Univision who got tossed out of a previous rally, but let back in.
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Ah yes, now I remember :-D
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3rd poll shows Trump trailing in Iowa, Monmouth, losing by largest margin ever.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-carson-now-holds-15-point-lead-over-trump-in-iowa/
Trump built his whole brand name and reason for existing as a candidate around polling and being a winner.
What's a frontrunner to do?
If past experience is any guide, the role of the frontryunner is to be everyone's target, face the most scrutiny, fail to rise above it and relinquish first place to someone else.
Normally what a leader does in anything, sports, etc., is do more of the same. Do what you did to take the lead.
In Trump's case that was: 1) Identify the sleeper issue illegal immigration, and take the boldest and strongest position on it right out of the gates. 2) Tear everyone down that challenges you. No. 2) has gotten old. No. 1) is still a very important issue but filling in the details actually weakens it while building up the opposition against him.
The traditional role of the successful frontrunner is to ignore everyone else and go about the business of telling people how you will govern and why that is good. For Trump that would mean stop being Trump and start being a conventional politician, something he has never done, isn't very interested in and isn't very good at.
It's hard to imagine a better position to be in than sustained frontrunner nationwide and in almost every state for more than 100 days coming into the final stretch before the primaries begin. 3 polls in Iowa don't change that , but they change the trend line and the story line. Trump looks stuck, has used up his opening strategy, run out of new ideas, and seems to have nowhere to turn.
As usual, we will see.
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DMG,
Good points. It does provide talking points. But there are only two other states where Carson is leading, Oklahoma and Louisiana, both of which are heavy evangelical as well.
Everywhere else, Trump is generally kicking ass.
Iowa has not shown any predictive values in the last two election cycles, going for candidates who did not survive Super Tuesday. So though Carson is showing well, it means little at this point.
Everything boils down to being able to win 8 primaries so that their names can go into nomination at the Convention. Then the real games begin.
Can Carson win 8 primaries? Can Rubio? Can Cruz? (Ain't gonna happen with the Bush/Shrub/Tumbleweed)
Trump with his leads in almost every state must be derailed prior to Mar 15 so as to blunt his chances. Otherwise, he goes to the convention and his name is placed into nomination. But how to do it remains the question.
Can Carson win 8 states? Not likely without a major failure by Trump. And the only way to denigrate Trump is to challenge his "attacks" and "childish behavior". But the problem is that the Trump supporter does not care on this. They are more focused upon Illegal Immigration and understand that the attacks against Trump are about taking him down and implementing the typical Repub agenda that hasn't worked in the last two national elections, and just barely in prior elections.
Rubio must have Carson out of the process to pick up his votes so as to challenge Trump in the primaries and pick up 8 wins. Or else, he has to rely upon the GOPe changing Rule 40 at the convention to allow those without 8 wins the have their names placed into nomination.
At this point, there are both strategic and tactical goals being fought over with each side. Tactical is the day to day arguments, fights, etc. Strategic is the strategy to obtain the 8 wins necessary for having the candidates name placed into nomination.
So far, Trump has the strategic goals well in hand. Only good tactics by the opposition can derail his strategic goals, and so far, there seems little on the horizen to suggest a change.
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Very relevant points on tactics.
What of Trump's support for Single Payer? And if Carson drives home his HSA based program, how will that play out politically?
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The single payer was long ago. Now, he speaks of a different story, including what I imagine has been discussed here in depth.
Trump wants the artificial lines of state boundaries that prevent health care companies from offering programs in different states to be eliminated. That would allow for competition across state lines, with a likely reduction in costs.
That alone would negate claims of single payer support.
But let's be realistic as well. Obamacare has really screwed up the entire health care system, as it was designed to do. It brought in greater numbers of medicaid users at the expense of state governments and eliminated many insurance programs forcing people into government run programs. So what can be done?
There will now have to be a hybrid system developed now that can work to resolve these issues created by Obamacare. It is not possible to totally repeal Obamacare without a hybrid system to ensure that those affected by Obamacare will still be taken care of. Over time after the hybrid system is put into place, can changes be made that will further mitigate the problems created by Obamacare.
What this program will be is up in the air. It will have to be negotiated out like all other legislation. Who knows what form it will take, but it will not be single payer, and it will entail private insurance options.
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"There will now have to be a hybrid system developed now that can work to resolve these issues created by Obamacare. It is not possible to totally repeal Obamacare without a hybrid system to ensure that those affected by Obamacare will still be taken care of. Over time after the hybrid system is put into place, can changes be made that will further mitigate the problems created by Obamacare."
Here we disagree. I see Carson's solutions as Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot whereas your step by step strategy IMHO will lead to endless skirmishes with endless class and race warfare tactics by the Dems sapping Rep will-- this is not a winning strategy for freedom.
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CD,
Always the optimist? You seem to be denying the political realities in getting anything done........... :-D
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There is no fix until the system collapses of it's own weight.
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GM,
Agreed fully....
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If we control the Congress and the White House much can get done.
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Yeah...........lots done with politicians who are bought and paid for by Wall Street and the COC and will only work on their agenda.
BTW, 6 years ago, it was give the GOP the House and we will stop Obama. 4 years ago, give us the Senate and we will stop Obama. Each time, the base responded and gave the GOP what it needed and look at the results. Now they expect the White House and they will finally do what we want.
1. We want an end to illegal immigration. Yet with Ryan as Speaker and McConnell in the Senate, that will not happen. Especially with Rubio, etc.
2. We want real government reform, not b.s. Ryan, McConnell and Rubio will not deliver that.
3. We don't want TPP, but that will occur under Ryan, McConnell and Rubio.
Why should we believe the GOP this time? They are like
- the cheating spouse who gets caught and says it won't happen again.
- the alcoholic who promises to never drink again.
- the driver pulled over by a cop for speeding and who promises the cop he will never do it again if he is not ticketed.
- the child who promises he will never lie again.
- the pedofile who promises never to touch a child again.
- the criminal who promises to go straight if he is paroled.
- the politician who promises he will always vote for your interests and tell the truth.
- the employer who promises that when he can afford to, he will give you a raise.
- the military commander who promises if you get into problems on a discreet mission, he will pull you out.
Give me one GOOD reason why I should believe any of these professional politicians? Then give me one GOOD reason why all of them should not be hung, drawn and quartered?
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2015/10/26/trump/0zMqF3cIfYrYGX5q1a3pTJ/story.html
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http://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2015/10/28/trump-walks-backs-low-immigration-high-wage-plan/
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CCP,
I did not view it as Trump changing his mind. He has always supported H1B visas legally done, when the need existed.
If Trump changes his stand on illegal immigration, then he is finished.
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PP,
I hope you are right.
It could be a msm interpretation too.
Notice how the msm news on the debates is all about how Jeb was not good. Nothing positive about the other candidates. On the Democrat side all we heard was how wonderful Hillary was. Now all we hear is how bad Bush was. Nothing constructive about any of other of the Repub candidates most of whom did well.
the bias continues.
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Not only is he right, but he has tremendous instinct for the political jugular
https://www.facebook.com/FoxNews/videos/10153816849336336/
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This thread sure has slowed down. Hmmm...
I watched Donald trump host Saturday Night Live. He did fine. Was likable. Is a big celebrity and a New Yorker so I'm sure the ratings were great. He was mostly the straight guy while they made jokes around him. Not that funny, not that memorable. They brought out a couple of their Trump imitators who I'm sure they've used often preciously. Larry David is too convincing as Bernie Sanders. Very real, but not very funny. They had Trump dance badly as a small part in a skit were the point was to dance badly. He did fine. They poked fun of his frown which must be his trademark from 'you're fired', or whatever his big show was.
My main observation is that if this is the biggest celebrity of our time, and this is the funniest comedy show of the last several decades... then we live in kind of sad, unimaginative, unmemorable times.
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I kept up my record......never have watched SNL. Was going to record it for later, but screwed it up. Guess I missed nothing.
Don't worry, after the Fox debate, there will be more to say about Trump...Bartiroma is going for a knock out blow. She is still pissed that Trump did not marry her after Marla Maples.
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She's cute enough but IIRC she was a real **** in her questions to the Reps in 2012 (or was it 2008?)
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By Donald J. Trump
Nov. 9, 2015 7:33 p.m. ET
3 COMMENTS
If we are to make America great again, we must do all we can to make sure that American interests are protected and that all Americans benefit from the actions of their government. Sadly, that is currently not the case. The incompetent, rudderless Obama administration’s negligence in foreign policy, trade and national security is making America less confident, less prosperous and less safe. Americans deserve better, and a Trump administration will turn us into winners again.
In late September, President Obama signed an agreement with the Chinese head of state that was intended to add a layer of protection to intellectual property in both countries. The ink was not dry before Chinese-sponsored agents began cyberattacks on private companies in the U.S. That agreement is not worth the paper it is printed on and the Obama administration is not doing a thing to fight back. Unfortunately, this has become an all-too-common pattern of behavior for President Obama.
The American people need to be told the truth about our “partner” China. China holds over $1.4 trillion in U.S. debt. The Chinese are, by far, the largest foreign debt holder. As of the end of August this year, the U.S. trade imbalance with China is already at $237 billion, on the way to an annual trade imbalance north of $350 billion. China’s economy is controlled by the government. Any notion that their economy is based on a free-market system is simply not true. If an American company wants access to the Chinese consumers, that company must share its intellectual property, a condition that violates international fair-trade standards, World Trade Organization rules and common sense.
But the worst of China’s sins is not its theft of intellectual property. It is the wanton manipulation of China’s currency, robbing Americans of billions of dollars of capital and millions of jobs.
Again, special interests and crony capitalism have weakened the resolve of the Obama administration in confronting China over its currency ploys. Economists estimate that the yuan is undervalued anywhere from 15% to 40%. Through manipulation of the yuan, the Chinese government has been able to tip the trade balance in their direction by imposing a de facto tariff on all imported goods. Imagine the impact these practices have had on our weakened manufacturing base, our agriculture industry and every small business unable to compete internationally.
By watching the Obama administration, you might think that nothing can be done about all this. What is most alarming is that much can and should be done, but the White House chooses to do nothing to protect American workers and companies.
On day one of a Trump administration, the U.S. Treasury Department will designate China a currency manipulator. This designation will trigger a series of actions that will start the process of imposing countervailing duties on cheap Chinese imports, defending American manufacturing and preserving American jobs. Add to these actions direct and focused protection of intellectual property and we will be back on the path to being the world standard for economic liberty and growth. But these actions alone won’t ensure Americans’ long-term security and prosperity.
When I am president, I will go to the American people and ask them to join me in getting Congress to reform our oppressive tax code. Specifically, capital held offshore will be brought back at a one-time tax rate of 10%. Corporate tax rates will be cut to 15%. This will spur immediate investment in America as we will once again be competitive. We will also need to attack deficit spending through budget discipline and begin the painful, but necessary, process of reducing our debt—especially reducing the debt held by foreign countries. To ensure the security of the nation and our investments, we will build the military we need to contain China’s overreach in the Pacific Rim and the South China Sea.
The American people need an administration that will tell them the truth and a president who will put America first. That’s what I intend to do.
Mr. Trump is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
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A well written article. I like that he takes on the Obama administration. Trump has economics and the policy implications about half figured out. I get a little nervous when he promises us the best Smoot Hawley jobs preservation Act this country has ever seen.
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I keep hearing people that Trump is incorrect about the trade issues. I wonder how many of those complainers would lose money if Trump's policies were initiated and that is the reason for their opposition.
However, I do have concerns about a full scale trade war being initiated............
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I keep hearing people that Trump is incorrect about the trade issues. I wonder how many of those complainers would lose money if Trump's policies were initiated and that is the reason for their opposition.
However, I do have concerns about a full scale trade war being initiated............
Acknowledging already that he is half right on economics and policy, I am skeptical about his main point. Many prominent economists agree with him about the currency manipulation point.
One possibility if Trump is elected is that the Chinese will fix this as their response to his threat. But the threat isn't worth anything if he isn't willing to do it, see Obama's red line in Syria. So let's take him at his word, the currency exchange rate is off by 40%. Either Trump will impose a 40% tariff or the Chinese will adjust their currency up by 40%. Think of a 40% price increase at Walmart for example for all the blue collar Trump voters across the heartland, and everyone else, and a 40% increase in iphones and solar panels for all the liberal voters.
Percapita income is measured in PPP, purchasing power parity. That is a 40% hit in how far your paycheck goes to buy things. Of course, not everything is made in China, but again taking Trump at his word, everything is made there and nothing is made here anymore.
Meanwhile our domestic production isn't ready to step it and fill that void, see his other points, overtaxation and over-regulation to name a couple.
PP: "However, I do have concerns about a full scale trade war being initiated............ "
PP is correct with that concern; that is what went wrong in Smoot Hawley mentioned, triggering the great depression. But the first 40% hit in our purchasing power comes before the really bad stuff happens, taking the assumption that the other player would just sit there and take it.
The issues about intellectual property rights, ending cyber warfare and basic human rights of their own people are far more pressing.
Another view, mine, is that these currency issues will take care of themselves. No country can build wealth by devaluing itself and no centrally planned, crony command economy will ever out-perform its free and dynamic competitor. Our problem and main challenge is to get our own act together.
Regarding the rising conflicts in the China seas, there is a reason why the US is supposed to have the most feared Navy and fleet in the world that is lost on current management in Washington.
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This being also about an election, no China critique should be complete without mention of Hillary Clinton on a crusade as first lady for women's rights around the world removing the chapter of her book critical of China in order to get it printed and sold in China. What a worthless windbag.
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Thanks for the reply. It gives me a bit more clarity.
I do agree that Intellectual Property Rights and Cyber Warfare is much more pressing. The problem is how to approach those subjects?
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The Trump Plan Will Achieve The Following Goals:
Bring China to the bargaining table by immediately declaring it a currency manipulator.
Protect American ingenuity and investment by forcing China to uphold intellectual property laws and stop their unfair and unlawful practice of forcing U.S. companies to share proprietary technology with Chinese competitors as a condition of entry to China’s market.
Reclaim millions of American jobs and reviving American manufacturing by putting an end to China’s illegal export subsidies and lax labor and environmental standards. No more sweatshops or pollution havens stealing jobs from American workers.
Strengthen our negotiating position by lowering our corporate tax rate to keep American companies and jobs here at home, attacking our debt and deficit so China cannot use financial blackmail against us, and bolstering the U.S. military presence in the East and South China Seas to discourage Chinese adventurism.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/us-china-trade-reform (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/us-china-trade-reform)
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The Trump Plan Will Achieve The Following Goals:
Bring China to the bargaining table by immediately declaring it a currency manipulator.
Protect American ingenuity and investment by forcing China to uphold intellectual property laws and stop their unfair and unlawful practice of forcing U.S. companies to share proprietary technology with Chinese competitors as a condition of entry to China’s market.
Reclaim millions of American jobs and reviving American manufacturing by putting an end to China’s illegal export subsidies and lax labor and environmental standards. No more sweatshops or pollution havens stealing jobs from American workers.
Strengthen our negotiating position by lowering our corporate tax rate to keep American companies and jobs here at home, attacking our debt and deficit so China cannot use financial blackmail against us, and bolstering the U.S. military presence in the East and South China Seas to discourage Chinese adventurism.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/us-china-trade-reform (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/us-china-trade-reform)
With a little digging I'm sure we can find that same message in two Obama campaigns.
What is an example of the Chinese caving in negotiations? When they helped is with North Korea? Gave up false claims on islands? Freed political prisoners? What if they call our bluff as they always do. Pres. Trump can impose duties against them as he promises which are a tax on the American consumer. The Chinese will retaliate by doing whatever they can, unload more American debt? Open up some other claim against us? Who wins? Who loses? Who needs whom the most? None of that is clear. What happens if Trump takes bold executive action, then prices go up and his popularity tanks? Who caves then? What happens when Politburo popularity falls in Communist government China? Nothing. Trump may be on the right track here, but the PRC and PLA are not analogous to dealing with a pipefitters union that wants a hotel construction contract.
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My daughter is a hair dresser and she loves the comb over. In fact, she claims that a couple of her older men clients are now using it.
And hey, so women say they hate it, but if Trump were not married and was available and interested in them, they would love it. Money makes up for appearances........
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So that wasn't one of my better posts...
It works for him.
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You are just jealous. You would have taken Trump's rejects like most guys....... Ivana or Marla....... :lol: :lol: :lol:
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During the Tuesday debate, Trump was asked about the $15 minimum wage. He went into a rambling answer and said that "wages were too high" referring to the minimum wage.
This statement is being taken out of context by pundits and by foes. The statement may be the first chink in the armor for Trump. Not from his supporters, but from others.
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During the Tuesday debate, Trump was asked about the $15 minimum wage. He went into a rambling answer and said that "wages were too high" referring to the minimum wage.
This statement is being taken out of context by pundits and by foes. The statement may be the first chink in the armor for Trump. Not from his supporters, but from others.
Yes. That is the fear of nominating those without this type of experience, that they can't anticipate how their bungled words will be used against them in advertising and attacks. Even for the experienced, Peggy Noonan recently said something very cutting about Romney acting like a political neophyte with his 47% comment and generally being a gaffe machine. No one has fully landed a punch on Trump yet but it's all on tape.
Regarding minimum wage, Trump misses the point entirely anyway. The issue is not how high or how low the wage should be; the issue in a free country is who gets to determine that.
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Certainly the issue is who gets to determine "minimum wage", but revoking minimum wage is not going to sell in any election. It is just like having everyone pay taxes. Those that do not pay will never support even 1% tax rates.
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This is the kind of story that, if true, can bring down the former front runner, IMO. Maybe he brings them both down.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/13/donald-trump-begs-iowans-not-to-believe-ben-carson-dont-be-fools-okay/
FORT DODGE, Iowa — As Donald Trump took the stage in a community college theater on Thursday night, something was off.
The usually punctual executive was nearly 40 minutes late. His voice was hoarse, his hair mussed, his tone defensive. He promised to take questions from the audience but instead launched into a 95-minute-long rant that at times sounded like the monologue of a man grappling with why he is running for president — and if it's really worth it or not. Even for a candidate full of surprises, the speech was surprising.
He scoffed at those who have accused him of not understanding foreign policy, saying he knows more about Islamic State terrorists "than the generals do." He took credit for predicting the threat of Osama bin Laden and being right on the "anchor baby situation," a position he says "these great geniuses from Harvard Law School" now back. He uttered the word "crap" at least three times, and promised to "bomb the s---" out of oil fields benefiting terrorists. He signed a book for a guy in the audience and then tossed it back at him with a flip: "Here you go, baby. I love you."
Trump called Republican rival Carly Fiorina "Carly whatever-the-hell-her-name-is," accused Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton of playing the "woman's card" and said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is "weak like a baby." He then devoted more than 10 minutes angrily attacking his chief rival, Ben Carson, saying the retired doctor has a "pathological disease" with no cure, similar to being a child molester.
"If I did the stuff he said he did, I wouldn't be here right now. It would have been over. It would have been over. It would have been totally over," Trump said. "And that's who's in second place. And I don't get it."
For months, Trump has defied the traditional rules of politics, saying and doing things that would end the presidential ambitions of most candidates — and often to the chagrin of Republican leaders who can't believe that a billionaire reality television star has built such a dedicated following and dominated the polls for so many months. As some waited for an implosion of Trump's improbable campaign, the Republican front-runner began to show much more composure and control on the campaign trail. During the latest debate, he largely refrained from attacking those on stage with him, instead focusing on the policy questions asked.
[As challengers approach, a different Donald Trump emerges]
But Trump appeared to unravel on stage Thursday evening before a crowd of roughly 1,500 in Fort Dodge, a small industrial town 100 miles northwest of Des Moines. Many in the crowd were community college students who have never voted in a presidential election, along with teachers, local politicians and a number of farmers from the area. Rather than sticking to his usual, tidy 60 minutes, Trump kept going and going. Campaign staffers with microphones had planned to solicit questions from the audience, but instead stood waiting in the aisles, then sat for a while, then stood again at attention. Those standing on risers behind Trump — providing a backdrop of Iowan faces — eventually gave up and sat down in a falling cascade.
At first, the audience was quick to laugh at Trump's sharp insults and applaud his calls to better care for veterans, replace the Affordable Care Act and construct a wall along the Mexican border. But as the speech dragged on, the applause came less often and grew softer. As Trump attacked Carson using deeply personal language, the audience grew quiet, a few shaking their heads. A man sitting in the back of the auditorium loudly gasped.
The tirade came amid one of Trump's busiest weeks yet on the campaign trail. Trump hosted "Saturday Night Live" last weekend and then spent Sunday doing interviews. Monday night he had a rally in Illinois. Tuesday night was the fourth GOP debate in Milwaukee. Wednesday morning, after about 90 minutes of sleep, Trump attended a breakfast in New Hampshire. Thursday he arrived in Iowa for a tour of a factory, television interviews and the rally at the community college.
Trump's tear started hours before the rally. On Twitter, he slammed Carson, "dopey Karl Rove" and the Wall Street Journal editorial board. In a CNN interview, Trump accused Rubio of supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants already in the country simply because he's Hispanic. A few of Trump's fans learned about the rally speech on Twitter and accused reporters of fabricating the quotes and tweeting them out in unison. Video later posted online showed that Trump indeed had said these things.
Trump opened the rally with a defense of his often-criticized proposal for dramatic immigration reform. He explained how other countries punish illegal border crossers: North Korea requires 12 years of hard labor, he said, while Afghanistan shoots people and Canada assess a fine of $5,000.
"If you cross the United States border illegally you get a job, you get a drivers license … you get food stamps, you get a place to live, you get health care, housing, child benefits and in many cases education," Trump said. "You wonder why we're a debtor nation. You wonder why our country is going to hell."
Throughout the evening, Trump kept coming back to this point: The country is going to hell and something must be done. And it was a message that the audience seemed to savor.
"We're in this thing together, folks. We've got to get out of it," Trump said at one point. And later: "We're just not going to take it any more."
Trump described traditional politicians as "stupid" and told the crowd that he is "competent." That's why he got so angry when journalists forced him to share his strategy for fighting the Islamic State, even though he wanted to keep such plans secret so as not to tip-off the enemy. Journalists, he said, are "scum" and "garbage."
"I know more about ISIS than the generals do," Trump said. "Believe me."
Trump said he would go after the oil fields in Iraq and Syria that he says nets the terrorist group "millions of dollars a week."
Play Video0:54Trump on the Islamic State: 'I would just bomb those suckers'
At a rally in Iowa, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would take an aggressive stance against the Islamic State, vowing to "bomb the s---" out of their oil-rich territories. (Reuters)
"I would bomb the s--- out of them," he said to raucous applause. "I would just bomb those suckers. And that's right: I'd blow up the pipes, I'd blow up the refineries. I would blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left."
The applause was nowhere near as strong as Trump launched into a lengthy critique of Carson, who is well-liked in Iowa and has at times beat Trump in polls here.The Iowa caucuses are often dominated by evangelicals, many of whom have been captivated by Carson, who talks endlessly about his faith.
[Trump's attacks on Carson turn personal]
Carson wrote in his autobiography that as a young man he had a "pathological temper" that caused him to violently attack others — going after his mother with a hammer and trying to stab a friend, only to have the blade stopped and broken by the friend's belt buckle. In recent days, those accounts have come under scrutiny, and Carson has had to clarify or correct some of the details.
Trump said Carson has a "pathological disease" with no cure, comparing it to the incurable mental conditions of child molesters.
"A child molester, there's no cure for that," Trump said. "If you're a child molester, there's no cure. They can't stop you. Pathological? There's no cure."
With his voice growing louder and louder, Trump questioned what sort of person would attack his mother. He questioned how a belt buckle could stop a blade, stepping away from the podium to demonstration how such an attack might happen and how his own belt buckle wouldn't stay in place long enough to stop a knife.
"Anybody have a knife?" Trump asked the audience, which was screened by Secret Service agents who began protecting him this week. "You want to try it on me?"
Trump was flabbergast: "How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?"
And Trump said he doesn't believe that after just a few hours of reflection, Carson found God and overcame his violent temper.
"He goes into the bathroom for a couple of hours and he comes out and now he's religious," Trump said. "And the people of Iowa believe him. Give me a break. Give me a break. It doesn't happen that way. It doesn't happen that way. … Don't be fools, okay?"
Trump told the audience that while he might not be "a perfect Christian" like Carson, he has leadership abilities that Carson does not have.
"I know how to do it," Trump said of the presidency. "I really know how to do it."
After 95 minutes, Trump drew to a sudden but long-awaited end. Gripping the podium, he promised to unify the country and win. He also wondered aloud if he should just move to Iowa and buy a farm.
"I've really enjoyed being with you," Trump said. "It's sad in many ways because we're talking about so many negative topics, but in certain ways it's beautiful. It's bea
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I am listening to this speech right now. Will have more later so that I can understand the full context of it. Just don't trust the media on anything, like I don't trust politicians either.
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I am listening to this speech right now. Will have more later so that I can understand the full context of it. Just don't trust the media on anything, like I don't trust politicians either.
Good. That was just one Washington journalist's account. But it is what people see - in the biased news area, not the opinion section.
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We await your assessment Pat.
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or "bump" him to the bottom of my list.
Trump has now lost me. I no longer favor him. I heard part of his take on Carson and it was petty, grade schoolish and just plain poor political strategy. And he is wrong. I DO believe Carson's stories.
Rush had a good montage today of all the damn msm outlets using the word "tirade" to describe Trump's speech. There is no more obvious example of how the MSM coordinates their attacks on all things and persons Republican. The journalisters are all out in force.
But back to Trump his speeches should be about the integrity of Hillary not Carson.
Cruz is rising.
He is first for me. He has clearly gotten to be excellent in the debates.
Yet I am not sure he could beat the Democrat mafiosos.
Rubio would be second for me ahead of Carson. I guess we are stuck with the illegal problem with him. What else can I say?
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Okay, I listened to the entire 95 minutes so that I could understand the article. The bottom line is that the writer, Jenna Johnson has taken things entirely out of context.
1. This was Trump's typical stump speech with a few additions. Nothing more. He hit on all his favorite topics and using the same basic lines.
2. He was not haggard, tied, hair mussed, any of that. And he did not go off on a 95 minute rant that was any different from his normal speeches. The delivery style was his normal style.
3. The Carly whats her name line was nothing. It was as if he did just forget her last name, nothing more. In fact, there might have been only two sentences about Carly the entire time. A nothing burger.
4. The remark about knowing more than the generals on ISIS was a throwaway line, nothing more. It was made in the context of how he would go after ISIS, in the oil fields, etc. To focus upon that single statement, done in an off handed way, is a deliberate attempt to distract from what he was suggesting about how to handle ISIS.
5. The book toss, another nothing burger. The guy was next to the stage, and the stage is elevated. So he just did a quick toss like anyone would do. It was not done as Johnson tried to suggest, in a derogatory manner.
6. Hillary is playing the woman card and the race card. Is it wrong to point that out?
7. The statements about Rubio were not as derogatory as Johnson tried to make it. So he said Rubio was weak as a baby. He also cited that Rubio would be a terrible poker player, giving away his hand by his tell, and would be a terrible negotiator. He hit Rubio hard on immigration. Again, nothing different than his has cited before about Rubio.
For everyone, the key point will be the attack on Carson and how it is being represented. One must listen to the entire piece to understand it and the context used.
- The child molester comment was cited solely as a reference as to how pathologically sick people don't generally change. Trump was not calling Carson a child molester.
- Trump accurately cites that in the Carson book, he called himself pathological in his anger. So Trump simply called him on it and was using his own words against him.
- Trump was also challenging the stabbing story in the book that Carson admitted to, and then also attempting to hit his mother in the head with a hammer. He was linking the events to the pathological anger and how it was not reasonable to believe that 2 hours in a bathroom and Carson was suddenly cured by God.
- Trump also went into the stabbing, calling into question the story itself. First the guy was named Bob, but all of a sudden it is a false name used. He was also a friend, and then that was changed to a cousin. Finally, he talked about the knife breaking and not sliding off the belt buckle and hitting the kid. Then he showed how his own belt buckle would move if hit by a knife.
This all went to credibility issues. If the stories are not true or have been ramped up for better effect, then that is something to be considered.
8. As to calling the people of Iowas stupid, it was in context with the stabbing incident. "What's wrong with the people of Iowa? The US?" if they are accepting this story?" It was not as bad as Johnson has tried to make it.
In the end, this was a hit piece against Trump and nothing more. Everything was taken out of context so at to put Trump in a worse light.
Should Trump have attacked Carson like he did? That is a personal decision for each person to make. But it should be made only after reviewing the speech at that point and then rendering an opinion.
BTW, Carson responded today to Katie Couric. He said that he would identify the person if:
“I do have this deal to make. If the media will promise that they will not bother this person or any of the other people, and if they promise that they will be honest, truthful and apply everything to everyone equally from now on, I will reveal the truth. Is that fair?”
So Carson will reveal the person and details and the media cannot further vet the story. So his version lives if the deal is taken. Carson knew full and well that this deal would not be taken. So he through it out as a diversion and nothing else. He is learning the political ropes very fast.
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Thank you Pat.
Though what we see of Trump in these things underwhelms me and IMHO diminishes him as a candidate, especially against Hillary, I too find myself doubting the belt buckle story. Frankly it smells to me to be a bit of a whopper, perhaps by an Erkel looking to thug up his story a bit and add zip to his story of redemption.
What concerns me more are things like Trump's apparently specious grasp of the meaning of Putin's play in Syria.
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I must say that image if it was Trump who did the knife and hammer thing. Everyone would be screaming for him to quit the race.
Actually I am in agreement with Trump on Syria. We have no business getting involved if we don't know the good guys from the bad. Furthermore, if we remove Hassad, who takes over the country? Which bad group? AQ? ISIS? Hezbollah?
We are not going to get assistance from other countries for Syria. It would be us again, primarily alone. And we would have to put large numbers of forces on the ground. In turn, all the bad guys would turn back on us. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Just another Libya or Egypt coming up..............
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Discounting the sugar coating, PP has this about right. He wasn't that much out of character. Still it shows an abysmal lack of focus and self discipline.
PP supports Trump because he is strong on immigration and would lead or negotiate with great strength in other areas as well.
Trump is for Trump because he is Trump, not because of one issue or another. It's about him. (That is true for all of them but much more obvious with Trump) Carson's junior high escapades and trouble with the press over his story have nothing to do with Trump, who just can't believe he is losing his lead or sharing his lead with this guy. It's so wrong and so unfair to him. It threatens him and his reaction isn't pretty.
But Carson doesn't threaten him. Carson has his own challenges and is highly unlikely to ever become President. If this story was going to take him down, it would do it without Trump's help. If Trump is to lose this, it won't be because of Carson and a knife and a belt buckle!
Trump jumps in with 'pathological', says Carson called himself that, but Trump is happy to expand on it. Great idea, have a real estate developer discuss medical terms with a neurosurgeon, what could possibly go wrong. There are times I think I know more than my doctor or lawyer, but I don't let it sound like I do and usually find out that I don't.
Trump throws in the "child molester" term next, directly following Carson being pathological. No, he didn't call Carson that but what kind of undisciplined political rookie wouldn't know that people, especially irresponsible journalists, would make that connection. You don't throw Hitler/Nazi analogies to current affairs around easily (Carson did it once), and you don't compare your opponent to a child molester - unless you mean it. I guess you can but it won't end well.
Trump's problem is that the gaffe fits his pattern and the perception. Fiorina interrupting Rand Paul was none of Trump's business either but he couldn't stay out of it, and got booed.
Opponents would call all Republican speeches a tirade. This one gives them reason, even it is unjustified and was just a typical stump speech.
I digress to profanity when I get rattled about political differences. I did it just the other night. But I'm not running for President, and I lowered my voice saying it to one person, not through a microphone to a packed auditorium. It was a serious point, how to deal with ISIS and our strategy in the Middle East. If your strategy is to bomb the shit out of them, you will have more opportunity to do that if elected than if you stumble and look undisciplined out on the trail.
Same goes for calling Iowans stupid. He was calling them to not be stupid, but too late. Who could see that might come out wrong in a Washington Post or Real Clear Politics headline. Probably everyone.
Trump's candidacy has lost meaning. Phase I: He wanted to shake things up and promote himself on the biggest stage. He did that. Phase II: His defining theme was that he is a winner and leads in all the polls - and it was true. Trump doesn't know how to shift into Phase III which is to act like you are President, be the President. Be the only person people can see as being the next President. In fact, he has been rewarded all the up for acting the opposite. In the early going Trump would rip anyone who ripped him, even in the most juvenile ways, and his numbers would go up. Sometimes we learn the wrong lessons
PP says this was nothing. I say he will never recover.
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Yes.
Trump is a narcissist.
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Forget the Trump personna. It matters no. If you remember, I have constantly held that Rubio will be the nominee due to Rule 40 and the RNC ability to manipulate the convention rules.
That said, do you believe that Rubio, Cruz, Carson or Fiorina will make any difference in DC if any one of them win the election? I say no. There will be no difference because the pull of special interests are too great and they will find themselves going with those interests.
The last time I though good of any politician was Dubya. I thought he would be different that previous presidents and that he would cause positive change. Dumb ass me. He turned out to be terrible on economic policy and almost as bad with foreign policy.
Everyone is missing the anger in the middle and lower classes and how it is festering, waiting to explode. They are tired of being screwed by politicians on both sides. They see policies and programs being implemented that benefit either the well off, or else those who are of certain ethnic groups. Meanwhile, their lot in life is getting worse, not better.
The middle class sees that their children and grandchildren will be worse off than their generation, not the promise which America has offered that the next generation would be better off.
This anger manifests itself by support for both Trump and Carson, true outsiders, and this amounts to 50% plus of the perceived Republican voters. How will the current crop of Republican professional politicians going to appease this group while trying to serve their masters?
Add in the frustration on the left represented by supporters of Sanders and the college students who are demanding free tuition, forgiveness of student loans, $15 an hour minimum wage and new government social programs, this country is set to explode and evolve in unknown ways.
The truth is that no one of any party running for president is going to prevent this powder keg from going off. All that can be done will be to limit the damages.
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https://www.facebook.com/cnninternational/videos/10153670453169641/
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http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/11/16/3722454/trump-morning-joe-mosques/
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http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/11/16/3722454/trump-morning-joe-mosques/
I like it!
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My concerns are:
1. Rules of Engagement - Hopefully kill them all and let God sort them out.
2. What type of support? A-10's, fighters, Wild Weasels, Bombers?
And what areas? Countries?
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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trump-steakhouse-hit-51-violations-article-1.1203653
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"Fornicate America-- I'm The Donald and my personal grievances matter more than the America I want to make great again."
:x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x
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By Laura Meckler
Nov. 22, 2015 5:00 p.m. ET
16 COMMENTS
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump suggested Sunday that he would be open to running for president as an independent if he concludes Republicans aren’t treating him “fairly.”
The real-estate tycoon made his comments on ABC when asked about a Wall Street Journal article published online Friday that reported an effort by Republican establishment figures to unite to knock Mr. Trump out of the race.
The group plans a “guerrilla campaign” backed by secret donors to “defeat and destroy” his candidacy, the Journal reported.
The notion of an independent Trump bid worries many Republicans, who fear he would siphon votes from the GOP nominee and help elect a Democrat.
Asked if he would reconsider his vow not to run as an independent, Mr. Trump didn’t give a direct answer. “Well, we’ll see what happens,” he said. “It will be very interesting. But I’m leading every poll by a lot. It’s not even a little bit anymore, it’s a lot.”
Nationally, Mr. Trump is favored by 27.5% of Republican voters, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average, with retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 19.8% and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio at 12.5%.
Asked again if he was open to an independent run, he repeated, “Well, I’m going to have to see what happens. I will see what happens. I have to be treated fairly. You know, when I did this, I said I have to be treated fairly. If I’m treated fairly, I’m fine. All I want…is a level playing field.”
Mr. Trump’s loyalty to the GOP was questioned after the first Republican presidential debate in August, when he was the only candidate unwilling to promise support for the party’s eventual nominee. He put those questions to rest in September when he signed a GOP loyalty pledge, vowing not to run as an independent.
Allison Moore, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said: “All of the candidates seeking the Republican nomination have pledged to run as Republicans and support the nominee.”
Democrats were outright gleeful at the prospect of an independent Trump run next fall.
“The GOP can be very mean. If the Donald’s feelings are hurt by them, he absolutely should run as an independent!” said Democratic consultant Hilary Rosen.
Mr. Trump also said he would bring back waterboarding, the controversial interrogation technique that simulates drowning and that is considered torture by many. President Barack Obama barred waterboarding and other techniques at the start of his presidency.
To justify his view, Mr. Trump cited brutal acts by Islamic State. “They don’t use waterboarding over there; they use chopping off people’s heads,” he said on ABC. “I would bring it back. I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they’d do to us, what they’re doing to us, what they did to [journalist] James Foley when they chopped off his head. That’s a whole different level and I would absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation.”
Opponents say the U.S. has an obligation to hold itself to a higher standard than its enemies do and that torture is ineffective and undermines American values.
Mr. Trump also repeated his claim, forcefully denied by authorities, that “thousands of people were cheering” in Jersey City, N.J., when the World Trade Center towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. He made that claim at a Saturday rally.
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos told him that police say that never happened and that this has long been just an Internet rumor, but Mr. Trump didn’t back down.
“It did happen. I saw it….It was on television,” he said. “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as…those buildings came down.”
Write to Laura Meckler at laura.meckler@wsj.com
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I makes me happy he isn' apologeticv....nor should he be. Liberals should be put into internment camps and sent into exile.
Don't know how to make that much clearer.
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Apparently Donald has threatened to run third party if he thinks the Reps are unfair to him.
He has, but the Republicans can't win without Donald. To do so, would guarantee a Clinton win. Who wants that?
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CD,
Let's look at this in a practical manner.
I know you and others do not believe in a GOPe effort to dictate the outcome of the primaries so as to have their choice to be the nominee, but even The Atlantic and Forbes have documented the changes to Rule 40 and how it would affect the nominating process.
1. The truth is that we do not have a two party system. Instead we have one party with two branches. Each branch is influenced by Wall Street and Big Business to meet their demands. The only difference then is how fast the two branches get the country to the same point.
2. Whether Hillary wins or Rubio or even Cruz (who really has no hope), we will continue on the course we are on. No changes.
3. Only Trump offers any hope of change in the direction of the country, and even then, the changes would have to come on the basis of what Max Weber described in the 1920's, reverent power. What this means is that the direction is changed because he can combine force of personality and the executive position to begin to turn the ship of state. Now will this happen? Probably not, but at least it offers hope whereas the other candidates offer no hope.
Now for Trump and his comments:
4. Trump is clearly running the table at this time. He continues and he will win the popular vote in each primary, though thanks to Rule 40, he would not have even 1 state of the 8 needed to qualify for having his name in nomination. Every other candidate would be worse off.
5. If this happens and the convention starts with no one able to be on the ballot, then a brokered convention begins. Rule 40 changes occur that allow for Trump and other candidates to have names placed into nomination, at the discretion of the RNC. Then the convention turns to someone other than Trump, probably Rubio, even though Trump had the popular vote.
This is the scenario that Trump is worried about and why he holds the threat of a 3rd Party run against the GOPe and Dems.
Would Trump win? Probably not and in fact the election would go to Hillary. But her or Rubio are two sides of the same coin. They will both get us to the same place but at different speeds.
Now, what happens if Trump does not go 3rd Party and simply ceases one the nomination for Rubio occurs? Hillary will win BIG! And why? That is easy........
The GOPe will have once again acted to thwart the wishes of the people, whether through people like Boehner, McConnell and now Ryan, or by manipulating the convention for Rubio. As a result, Trump supporters will stay home or if the do go to vote, will write in Trumps name or else not vote for a Presidential choice. It will be worse than with Romney in 2012, with at least 6% saying screw it, and probably lots more.
All Trump wants is a "fair shake" and nothing more. He wants a real chance to win and if he loses, let it be through voter choice and not GOP manipulation.
BTW, look at Trump rallies. The venues are overflowing with people. People waiting outside but who can't get in....waiting hours in the sun or rain for a Trump appearance. Yet, what do we see with Rubio, Jeb, Cruz or others?
Trump is holding daily rallies in all the early states. Does turnout for the rallies matter? The Trump deniers say no, but after a point, one must reconsider what is going on. And he is building up a grassroots organization unlike any type seen before.
This is going to be an interesting ride over the next 6 months.
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http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/behind-trumps-iowa-crowds-vigorous-outreach-effort-n466266 (http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/behind-trumps-iowa-crowds-vigorous-outreach-effort-n466266)
Trumps ground game.
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No difference between Hillary and Rubio or Cruz?!? What the hell are you smoking Pat?!? :lol: I know Trump is your guy, but the bottom line here is he is willing to put the good of America second to his own vanity. THERE IS NO WAY HE WINS A THREE WAY RACE!!!
FWIW IMHO as the number of contenders goes down we will see most of the votes that were going to them go to someone other than Trump.
The simple fact is that that Rubio, Cruz, Carson, and Bush (!) do better against Hillary than Trump and given the stakes in this election for the future of our country it is a rational thing to want to go with the candidate most likely to win. This is an election for the job of most powerful person on the planet-- and, as the saying goes, "Politics ain't bean bag" and Trump needs to dig down and find some character and realize that the country is more important than the man in his mirror.
Certainly he gets some things right, but he has not defended his tax plan, his grasp of the Middle East is devoid of understanding that Putin is building an axis of Iran, Shiastan Iraq, Alawitestan Syria, Hezbollah Lebanon, and Russia. Until quite recently he held many positions that were an anathema to us here. There are good and honorable reasons to prefer someone else to him.
PS: Watched the Walters interview. Liked his children-- which speaks well of him.
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CD,
You seem to believe that there is a difference between the parties. Look at the last 15 years. There is no friggin difference.
I don't give a damn what party the professional politicians belong to.......they are the same. They are all bought and paid for by big business and Wall Street.
Look who are funding the PACs supporting each candidate on either side. Do you believe that those people are throwing millions upon millions to help the little guy? Or that they are only interested in their own interests? Both parties have been bought off by the Crony Capitalists and this is not going to change.
Everyone thinks Cruz is so great.............just pay attention to him.
1. He was for TPP before he was against it. Oh, he was misled on it? Yeah, right.
2. He was on the border with Glenn Beck giving teddy bears etc., Think he is going to be hard on illegals?
3. His PACs are big money people with ties to financial firms. Is he going to do anything against their interests? I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you if you belief that.
As to the entire GOP, look at their record in the Obama years. They say one thing and then do another. And their excuse is that they can't win because Obama will veto things. So they don't even try.
Look at Reid in the Senate when he had a majority but not even to pass legislation. So he goes nuclear and gets things done. McConnell won't do the same. Why? The media will attack him so they need to get along. Right. Pure bullshit.
Look at financial reform. If you look at Dodd Frank closely, it did not do anything to fix the problem. In fact, it only made it worse. Now, no one can start up a bank and the little banks cannot afford the compliance costs, so they are being bought out by the big boys. To big to fail? That remains.
Look at TPP. Everything coming out and it is all bad, but these idiots are going to pass it.
DC and all the politicians on both sides have destroyed this country. Now they are leading us to an American Economic Union with both NAFTA and TPP. (BTW, Mrs Cruz apparently had a hand in writing an American Economic Union Plan.)
Back in the early 1970's, I was reading the Quarterlies put out by the Council of Foreign Relations and other groups. I saw the trends then and remember writing a paper in a politics course about the future. The gist of the paper was:
Create a world government by:
1. Unite countries by treaties to work with one another.
2. Create geographic government by bringing together countries through the Treaties. (This was the EEC.)
3. Create new treaties and governments by bringing together countries on a hemispheric level.
4. Once hemispheric levels were achieved, world government would soon be achieved.
Where are we right now? We are following that progression step by step. The only thing that I did not consider is the Islamic threat, but all else is following that pattern.
What is for the good of the country? To be part of a global system that subrogates the rights of a US citizen to what the UN and others believe? To promote "free trade" and "global warming" actions that only serve to harm the US and benefit other countries?
I look at the US of the 1950s, 1960s, and then onward, and I see nothing but a steady progressive march towards socialism and world government controlled by special interest. Even during the Reagan era, it was only slowed, but still kept moving forward. And this continues under both parties.
I hope that you and I are both alive 20 years from now. Then we can see who was right. (Actually, I don't want to be alive then because I fear the future too much, but I don't have the courage to ensure I would not be alive.)
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What I said was there is a big difference between Rubio & Cruz and Hillary.
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"you [Crafty in this case] seem to believe that there is a difference between the parties. Look at the last 15 years. There is no friggin difference."
Not true, but if you believe that, then look back beyond 15 years, look beyond federal government at state differences, look forward, not just backward.
I posted a long list of outrageous things Dems believe in today. Republicans mostly don't. Their problem is more about not having will to stand up to Dems after being elected; it's not that they agree with them. Not all R's are centrists and RINOs. We need to win more elections and also win more primaries.
Politicians including professional politicians misbehave because people don't hold them accountable, so the real problem isn't in Washington, it is closer to home. Meanwhile people in some of the most conservative communities vote for some of the strictest curtailments on individual liberties in the form of things like zoning ordinances.
But take a look at the tax rate differences between California,New York and Texas/Florida. Take a look at the fracking boom in ND versus none in NY.
In Washington, obviously both sides have screwed up. Going back a ways, JFK was a Republican (in some ways) and Nixon was a Democrat (in most ways). No, we wouldn't have been better off under Humphrey, we were screwed either way. Reagan made an amazing difference, yet went RINO on a couple of things. Clinton tried liberal tax increases and national healthcare and failed, then brought economic credit to the Dems by passing free trade, welfare reform and massive capital gains tax rate cuts. Bush grew the revenues with tax rate cuts but grew spending more. That is either not Republican or not conservative depending on what meaning we attach to what terms. The financial crash was largely caused by free money (allowed by both sides) combined with governmental on lenders to make bad loans, a Dem program that covered with Republican fingerprints. We didn't hold our own politicians accountable and they just kept getting drunker, and when we don't offer a noticeable difference, we lose.
Trump is great on some issues and not on others. He also chose to be polarizing which makes him less likely to be President.
"Everyone thinks Cruz is so great.............just pay attention to him.
1. He was for TPP before he was against it. Oh, he was misled on it? Yeah, right.
2. He was on the border with Glenn Beck giving teddy bears etc., Think he is going to be hard on illegals?
3. His PACs are big money people with ties to financial firms. Is he going to do anything against their interests? I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you if you belief that."
1. Already mentioned, there is a HUGE difference between supporting the tradition of authorizing every administration the power to negotiate free trade agreements and supporting the bad clauses of this agreement.
2. People here mostly see Glenn Beck as one of the good guys.
3. I don't want to shut down 'Wall Street'. I want to open up the financial industry to everyone nationwide who wants to be a part of it. Imagine a store front on small town main street offering to take your company public and handle FINRA compliance - on a 2 page document. The profits on Wall Street are out of proportion because Washington makes it impossible for anyone but the largest firms to comply with the massive bureaucracy.
Ted Cruz isn't going to be hard on illegals because, like Trump, he isn't going to be President.
Our job here on all political threads as some of us see it is encapsulated on the title of a couple of threads, the way forward for the American creed. We need to clarify what are the right policies and find some common agreement on that. We need to defeat the opponents of it. We need to hold the proponents on our side accountable. And we need to persuade the persuadable. Even the French know, wars aren't won by surrendering.
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I do agree with you on one thing......Trump nor Cruz will be the nominee. It will be Rubio as I have outlined previously....
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I do agree with you on one thing......Trump nor Cruz will be the nominee. It will be Rubio as I have outlined previously....
I guarantee you it will be better than HW's 2nd term and the Dole, McCain, Romney Presidencies combined.
Trump and Cruz are running for the nomination only, not to win the general election. JEB and Kasich are running for the general election only, not to win the nomination. Rubio is the only one running to win both. (MHO)
Give President Rubio a Republican House and a Senate majority and then we still have the 60 vote problem with the 60 vote problem in the Senate to repeal Obamacare and enact new legislation like tax reform. Budget reconciliation votes only need a simple majority. We will have to define the size and scope of government there - if our own side can come to agreement.
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Here it comes.........time for the GOPe and Media to take down Trump.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2015/11/tv-networks-hold-conference-call-to-discuss-trump-treatment-216156 (http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2015/11/tv-networks-hold-conference-call-to-discuss-trump-treatment-216156)
Waaaah....the media does not like how Trump treats them, but they say little about how Hillary treats them.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/22/us-usa-election-trump-idUSKBN0TB0UJ20151122#o6QFmoJhp57m3ijU.97 (http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/22/us-usa-election-trump-idUSKBN0TB0UJ20151122#o6QFmoJhp57m3ijU.97)
Bush and Rubio donors contributing to Kasich PAC that is going after Trump.
This is exactly what the GOPe did in 2014 to Chris McDaniels from Mississippi, who beat Thad Cochran in the primary. The GOPe went so far as to literally pay Dem voters to cross over and vote for Cochran in the run off primary.
This is what is going to destroy what is left of the GOP party. They go after Trump like this, put Rubio in through a brokered convention and the party is finished. Oh wait.....I forgot.......the GOPe said that they would welcome back Trump supporters and others, but only on their terms.
Damned Professional Politicians............they should all be hung.
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IIRC McDaniels in MS made some pretty unpleasant cracker statements, I can understand why the party would not want its' name stained by him.
Pat, we understand that Trump gives you a thrill running down your leg :evil: but please do consider that good people of good intent can have good reasons for doubting him , , ,
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I accept that there are people who have reasonable doubts, that is not the problem.
This is about the two parties and their professional insiders who care about their own power and the money that they make at the hands of Crony Capitalists. They make changes to the political process that benefits solely who they want to be the nominee and care not about the real people.
What is amazing to me is this: If Jeb or Rubio had 35% of the people supporting either of them, the claims would be that the race is over. With Trump, the same people are trying to oust the Front Leader to foster people with 12% support. Go figure........
The Founding Fathers feared a Professional Political and what would happen if one occurred. And now we have it. I believe in the writings of the Anti-Federalists. They called everything that is going on today.
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Trump does NOT have 35% except maybe in some online polls which are pure GIGO.
Rubio has 50% of the American people against Hillary with an 8% margin, Trump quite a bit less than that. Hell, Chris Christie does as well against the Empress Dowager of Chappaqua as Trump!
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Online Polls have become much better in that past few years. But for the two most recent non-online media polls, both of which are anti Trump sources....clearly, he is gaining strength.
Sun Nov 23 - WAPO 32% Trump and Carson 22%
Fox 28% Trump and Carson 18%
Nov 19 PPP (a democratic pollster) Trump 26 to Carson 19
But Trump is not the real issue. So answer this....
Why is 50% or more of the Party abandoning the professional politicians in the party and going for outsiders? Why do the people see a need to look elsewhere for someone to support? What is the Party missing out on that makes these people look elsewhere?
These are the real questions that need to be answered by the GOPe. But the GOPe ignores the questions totally. Instead, the GOPe and their pundit supporters call those not following their lead "Vulgarians"? And they ignore the causes of the desertion from the party.
There is a social divide in this country occurring now. It is breaking down along income, age and education. And it is reflected in this election on both sides.
Personally, I think that anyone who wants to be President beginning in 2017 is nuts. The coming implosion of the country is going to radically change the US. Who knows what the end result will be.
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What is amazing to me is this: If Jeb or Rubio had 35% of the people supporting either of them, the claims would be that the race is over. With Trump, the same people are trying to oust the Front Leader to foster people with 12% support. Go figure........
You're right. Some people like what Trump has to say, but stop short of being willing to get the job done, so they support others in the hope that it will sway other's opinions.
I'm all for Trump and thinnk he has a legitimate chance to win.
Even Hispanics that came legally aren't willing to give away their country. Imagine that.
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"WAPO 32% Trump and Carson 22%
Fox 28% Trump and Carson 18%"
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High floor, low ceiling. He gained some strength because the terror and Syrian refugee issue fall right into his strength. It also had great timing for Trump, coming the day after the news story of the so-called Iowa tirade.
The question for Trump is how to remove the low ceiling. He needs maybe 51% to win in the general election. To get that with any certainty he needs another 3-4 points of cushion. He needs at least a minor electoral landslide to govern as a party outsider. Obama 2008 won 53-46. Reagan 1984 won 59-41. Hillary is weaker than either of those losers; he needs to shoot for at least Obama 2008 type numbers.
But Trump has gotten to where he is with positions and an attitude that captivating for some while alienating the rest. He is most certainly the nomination frontrunner, but there is no visible path the rest of the way up for him, the way most see it now.
ABC News, this favorability chart shows Trump at 38-59, 21 point underwater as of Nov 10. A few points better now perhaps, since his poll numbers are up a bit, but really these are his numbers while things are going great in the nomination contest. More striking than the 59% negative is that only 3% don't already have an opinion on him: (Carson has fallen since this poll.)
(http://a.abcnews.com/images/Politics/ABCWashPostPolls_1110_PopAmericans.png)
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/carson-leads-popularity-trump-gop-poll/story?id=35084486
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I was under the impression that Rubios favorability ratio was better than that but overall I think Doug's point about Trump's ceiling is quite sound.
Only one candidate going up against Hillary scores 50% and that is Rubio. I know Pat sees Rubio as GOPe because GOPe can support him (especially over Trump!) but when Rubio ran and won for Senate it was scored as a Tea Party triumph. He's only been in Washington a few years and has earned respect for his foreign policy chops. Contrast Trump who a few weeks ago thought it OK to hand off the Middle East to Putin with nary a thought as to the Axis that Putin is forming.
I caught Trump on O'Reilly tonight and O'R was giving him some good advice about not re-tweeting unvetted data and Trump's attitude was "Whatever". Within the Rep primaries he can get away with this because of the depth of Rep voter anger, but in the general it looks to be a different story. There's a reason that his margin over Hillary is only 1-2 points greater than Christie.
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Doug,
Thank you for posting this. It certainly suggests something to be concerned about.
CD,
Good catch on Rubio's favorability.....
Now, here is the rest of the story with this poll.
1. Margin of error on Pubs and Dems 6.00%. Pure garbage, nothing else.
2. Partisan breakdown 33% Dem, 23% Rep, 37% Ind
Say what? 23% Pub? This is absolute CRAP! I can never remember seeing a poll using 23% or even one under 30% for Reps in any election.
This is an Agenda Driven poll, pure and simple. There is no other way to describe it. It was set up to push Carson's favorable ratings at the expense of everyone else.
As to land line vs on line polling, there is something to be aware of. Gallup stopped polling on the election because of the problems with live polling now. People no longer answer their phones, have only cell phones or refuse to conduct the survey.. They found that this pattern has for the past few cycles introduced a "confidence" problem in polling and they could not weight properly for this issue.
On line polls have gotten better because they sample large numbers of people, several thousand, and then they weight for the differences.
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Bloomberg, I know, another commie operation. They all are. )
Trump favorability Nov. 15: 34-61, -27
up from Sept 15: 31-61, -24. Or is that within the margin of error?
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Trump: Need govt program to make college affordable
http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/20/trump-says-we-need-some-governmental-program-to-help-make-college-affordable/
Maybe another government program would have averted the housing crisis too.
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Trump 2004, "I identify more as a Democrat."
"The economy seems to do better."
"Hillary, she's a lovely woman." (Did I hear that right? Who was he talking about? When? Why?!)
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/21/politics/donald-trump-election-democrat/
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Okay Mr. Trump, put your money where your mouth is:
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/donald-trump-donations-democrats-hillary-clinton-119071
Donated to Hillary in 2002, 2005, 2006, 2007.
Was she against illegal immigration?
Donated at least $100,000 to the Foundation. Is that the best charity he could find? If it was just to buy influence, is it deductible?
Also donated to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 2006 cycle, effectively buoying the election prospects of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, respectively. (25 times more than he gave to the Republicans)
For that, I will never forgive him. That is not a the-parties-are-all-the same-view as expressed here on the forum. The 2006 congressional election elevating Pelosi-Reid to majority and setting the table for Obama's election is what brought us Obamacare and all the rest. He has explained his support flippantly. Where is the apology to America?
Hastert-McConnell-Boehner didn't bring us Obamacare and more than 30 tax increases. The parties are both flawed, but they are not the same!
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We can go round and round on the polls and other things you cite, but...
But I ask the same question again, and still wait for a response.....
Why are 50% plus of the people in the Republican Party supporting outsiders like Trump and Carson? Why are they deserting the party? Why is the GOP not responding to this and instead continue with the same old practices?
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We can go round and round on the polls and other things you cite, but...
But I ask the same question again, and still wait for a response.....
Why are 50% plus of the people in the Republican Party supporting outsiders like Trump and Carson? Why are they deserting the party? Why is the GOP not responding to this and instead continue with the same old practices?
Everyone is dissatisfied with the status quo. The early polls show people expressing that frustration. And it has been consistent, ever since the yawn Jeb received when he jumped in early, and especially since Trump got in. Also the stream of past nominees you cite as mediocre at best is true, Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney. Boehner was ineffective and cowardly. McConnell, and so on. Voting in the early primaries is about venting that frustration too, but this quickly becomes a task of finding out who among those we can support has the best chance to actually win and enact positive change.
People are supporting Carson for reasons different than those supporting Trump. Still your point is valid. Cruz and Rubio are not insiders either, no matter who ends up supporting them. This has already narrowed down to 4 outsiders.
I was thinking Cruz is the most pure, but you look a little closer and see a little wavering and political opportunism. Rubio will always carry the gang of 8 baggage. If that is what defines him it will keep him from getting the nomination. Trump seems to have been the most consistent in his positions in the campaign, but that history only goes back to this run for the Presidency. That's why I posted some of those Democratic-tie references. What the hell was he thinking about illegal immigration when he supported Pelosi-Ried-Obama-and Hillary to take the majority in Congress, and he succeeded. That is not how you correct the mistake George W Bush made in not enforcing the border, or that Republicans made in growing spending and adding programs. Did he come to his core principles in his mid-60s?? Trump was thinking of Trump. It turns out he wants another government program to correct another overreach of government, announced in the last few days. Good grief. What was he thinking on the birther issue? That was his lead issue prior to running for President. But Obama's mom was from Kansas living in Hawaii. Isn't Barack Obama still a citizen even if she gave birth offshore in a boat or traveling to Kenya?
Donald Trump is a successful television actor as much as he is a businessman. When I look back at his recent political past, it makes me think he is playing a part right now. He correctly identified a hot issue that gives him 25-35% primary support in a badly divided field. He is having the time of his life living a dream of self-promotion and never imagined it would go this far.
How far will it go? How does he remove the ceiling that is stopping him from going further? By backtracking on what he says are core issues? By adopting a toned-down personality? By suddenly developing an interest in the minutia of Kurds, Quds and his own tax plan? No. He is stuck where he is, and for the moment that is on top.
Pat, you believe more confidently than I do that Rubio will be the nominee. That can only happen if this long time front runner cannot rise any higher and also only if others consolidate into one which right now looks like a long shot.
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Pat:
We are all on the same page with regard to GOPe and the deep and vast discontent with it; I'm not sure why you seem to think otherwise , , ,
All:
Herewith my current take on things.
I have defended Dr. Ben here from what I perceived to be unsound attacks, but always withheld my "support"-- wanting to see more. Now that I have seen his foreign affairs, he no longer is a contender for my support. Last night on The Kelly Show, he was given a chance to counter the damage done by his foreign affairs advisor. He repeated other folks ideas ("Go after their money, go after their oil, build a coalition") but it was the final straw for me when he spoke of giving "the Iraqis" another chance/more arms and training and into the coalition. IMO there no longer is such a thing as Iraq and the government of Baghdad Shiastan is a pawn of Iran.
I hope he stays in for a while though-- I am very much looking forward to his launch of his health care platform to replace Obamacare; it could well be the one around which the Reps should rally!
Rubio took on Charlie Crist when doing so seemed a huge overreach. As a first time senator he has decided to run for President when his mentor Jeb was considered a shoo-in for the GOPe, thus giving up what was likely to be a secure a Senate seat. Don't let the baby face fool you, the man does not lack for killer instinct in taking on the GOPe. Note too his perfectly timed naming Hillary a "liar" in the debate.
His whole message is quite Tea Party and quite American Creed. Watched him this morning on FOX and was, as usual, very impressed with his political skills. Extremely seamless in his ability to turn around questions designed to put him on the defensive and take the initiative (e.g. Aren't you like Baraq in being an inexperienced first term Senator?) He has adjusted his immigration policies to something I am quite comfortable with (listen to what he is actually saying now) and stands to serve the Reps well with Latinos without compromising national integrity. (Contrast Prop 187 here in CA where we "won" and became a permanent Dem state by so doing) His repeated prescience on international issues gives him a good foundation from which to take on Hillary on her one pretense to competence and experience.
Tax policy is good but could be much better.
I'm digging Cruz a lot too. I agree with Art Laffer's analysis of his tax proposal, as best as I can tell it is the best in the field and, UNLIKE TRUMP AND HIS PROPOSAL, he can defend and advocate it well. Superb ability to keep track of Hillary's twists and turns, evasions, deceptions, and lies. He too has what it takes to take her on and take her down in debate. There's more, but I'm running out of time right now.
Trump? I've already said what I think and heartily second Doug's two immediately prior posts. Love his attitude and think he has served the country and Reps well by shaking things up and leading the way when it comes to speaking fearlessly, but stupidities like thinking it was fine to have Putin handle Syria will give Hillary, who already maneuvers to put daylight between her and Baraq, plenty of room to present herself as an experienced mature hand at the helm. The accumulation of stupidities like retweeting unvetted data will bite him, and therefore us should he be candidate, in the ass.
Bottom line-- for me right now a toss up between Cruz or Rubio.
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CD/Doug,
I keep asking why because it seems to me that neither of you understand why the attraction of Trump, other than as a celebrity type personality.
Now I don't understand how one can consider Rubio anything other than a GOPe candidate. The truth is that Rubio has always been the "fall-back" position for the GOP if Jeb failed. Why? The GOPe/Rove is still looking at the "Ohio/Florida/Virginia" strategy that they employed the last two cycles. Win two of those three states, and they win the electoral count and the presidency. That is why Kasich still remains as a potential VP.
When Doug states that "this long time front runner cannot rise any higher and also only if others consolidate into one which right now looks like a long shot", he ignores the "Splitter Strategy" that was developed in 2014 for promoting Jeb in 2016. Rove knew that Jeb could not win a majority of states, so you employ enough candidates to dilute the nomination process so that on the first ballot no one wins. that releases all delegates to go where they want, and then the candidates get "bribed" to through support to originally Jeb, but now Rubio. And if that route is not available to put Jeb/Rubio's name in nomination, then Rule 40 changes.
The GOPe is "machiavellian" in their thinking and will employ whatever means that they can to get their "loser" candidate in place.
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Hard to see Rubio, the candidate with far and away the best numbers against Hillary as the "loser" candidate-- seriously Pat? Especially when Trump is down within a point or two of Christie in his numbers against Hillary :evil:
Look, I think I "get" Trump just fine. I've repeatedly said many good things about him. I also agree with the high floor, low ceiling analysis of his numbers.
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Check out Morning Consult and the other non-media polls. They say a completely different story about Trump, his support and that of his rivals. As I keep saying, the polls are all about the internals. Polls like WSJ/NBC are not revealing the internals to any degree and that should tell you something.
I an not an expert on Statistical Analysis as compared to the pros, but I have learned one hell of a lot over the past three years evaluating 9 million GSE loans. And the biggest thing that I found is it is all about the assumptions that are made about the data. You change a data point here or there, and the results are totally different.
This election is going to about turnout and about cross over votes. Rubio will not motivate the base to get out the vote as needed, and he will certainly not pull cross over votes as needed. That is why he will lose. (Plus, if the GOPe does manipulate things to get him nominated, the Trump voters will stay home. Why bother when it is the GOPe playing games again?)
This is a fight for the soul of the party and for the future.
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Happy Thanksgiving everybody. ... Now back to it!
Previously I attacked Trump for supporting the election of the Pelosi-Obama-Hillary-Reid majority in Congress that brought grave damage to this country. But in the big picture of things, his contributions did not cause that sea change. I was just trying to expose something about him and his politics, not blame the events of history on him.
PP: "if the GOPe does manipulate things to get him [Rubio, Bush, etc.] nominated, the Trump voters will stay home."
This post and similar insights such as that the two parties are no different help to explain why President Obama got a second term. A certain number of voters who 'should' have been Republican voters stayed home in 2012, enough to swing the election to Obama. Romney won the independents by a pretty wide margin. When people who lean conservative can't see a difference between the parties and stay home, we all get leadership by Obama and Hillary. My way or I'll leave the country means we lose the country. [And not that many actually leave.]
What you call manipulation is what others would call getting involved in politics and trying to make a difference. National and state partoies are mostly free to make their own rules about how delegates are allocated. In that process, people are trying to advance the chances of their own candidate, trying to advance the clout of their own state, and trying to get the process to nominate the candidate most likely to unite and win in the general election.
Trump has a 22 point lead today. He has been included in all the debates. What could possibly be unfair in the process to keep him from winning the nomination and the election? Unless it is true that he has a low ceiling. If it is true that somewhere around 35% is as high he can go in the party and the other 65% would prefer any of the others over Trump then that is not a level of support that wins nominations in any convention where I have participated.
In a state convention, it normally takes a 60% support ballot to nominate and generally you stay until someone gets that. It also might take a certain level of majority to change a rule like that. At some point candidates with small and declining support drop out and try to get their delegates to support someone else. The behind the scenes negotiations and out in the open posturing in that process is called politics, not 'manipulation'. )
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Doug,
Disagree entirely with your premise. The problem was that Romney was a bad candidate. He should have won the election, but he lost because he was not good in the debates, especially after Candy Crowley gobsmacked him. Also, the fact that Romney created his own version of Obamacare in Mass, and that was used as the basis for Obamacare, doomed him.
Who do you think controls the State RNC groups? The National RNC has tremendous influence and gets their own people put into place at the state level. Then they do manipulate things to get their own candidate on the ballot.
Look at Kasich in New Hampshire. Kasich is old school GOPe. His own people went to Court to get Trump thrown off the ballot for not being "republican" enough, but lost in under 60 seconds when the judge threw the case out. Go figure.
Look at South Carolina and Virginia trying to get a "pledge" requirement to not run as a 3rd party, or Trump or others could not run on the ballot. Look at Florida and the other states who change the rules for running and delegate selection every four years, doing so to support the GOPe candidate.
This is all about the professional politicians trying to stay in power, and the crony capitalists who support them for their own gain.
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Pat, right, all of that behind the scenes is true and then the votes are cast and, for the most part, everyone gets one vote that goes all or proportionally to the candidate whether the party likes it or not. Trump wants the benefits of running and winning within an established party and none of the responsibilities building it or running it. In fact there is a clear public record of him working against them - recently.
My main point came to me from what you have been saying (and I only know one Trump voter). Trump voters will sit out (future tense) if it isn't their guy. But isn't that what 8 million potentially conservative voters already have in common; they sat out last time and swung the election to Obama. Those who thought there wasn't a difference between Obama and Romney - gave us Obama over Romney.
I wasn't a Romney supporter, but his tax plan was the same as Trump's. He opposed illegal immigration, took a strong stand against it in the primaries. Opposed Obamacare, would have been tougher on Iran, would have insisted on a responsible withdrawal agreement in Iraq, etc.
As local party chair, a couple of young Ron Paul said something similar, they would like to be delegates but will only help if their guy is the nominee. I told them, for one thing, there was some burden on them to win arguments and persuade people and bring them to their side, not just blame them for what you don't like. Secondly, fair weathered help and supporting only one candidate for one office is not how we build a party.
What is Trump doing to reach one more voter than those already in his camp? What did he do previously to help all these Republicans across the country get elected up and down the ballots in other elections? Nothing that I can see, mostly gave to the other side and now threatening to break his own promise to not use the party as his springboard to run against the eventual nominee. And this is how he talks with a 22 point lead.
Frankly, I now believe Rubio would win in a 3 way race against Trump and Clinton, but I don't see exactly how he beats Trump or Cruz in the primaries.
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IMO it is simple: If Trump does a Perot, like Perot he will give us a Clinton and this country is done for.
:x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x
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The GOP left the party faithful long ago. That is why the insurrection is occurring.
The politicians promise one thing, then as soon as they are elected, they do something else. And in the past few years, it has been to give in to Obama wishes, claiming that they can not win, so it is better to not make waves and avoid the media presenting them as obstructivists.
With Trump, we see the same thing occurring as with Reagan. In 76 and 80, the GOP did not want Reagan to run. They made the same type claims as they do now against Trump. And the people who support Trump are subjected to the same type ridicule; we are heathens, uneducated, racist, lo info voters, who haven't got a clue about how the real world works. We should simply get out of the way and let our "betters" handle things and take care of us. Is this any different in the long run than what the Dems propose?
Doug, you wrote that you only know one person, presumably me, who is supporting Trump. Isn't this saying something itself? Doesn't it make sense to seek out other Trump supporters and find out what they think and feel?
What I am seeing among the political elitists is what I experienced when living in the Boston area from 1982 to 1985. Because I grew up in the south and graduated from LSU my degree meant nothing. I was an uneducated idiot who could not understand the real world and only saw things through a myopic tunnel vision. Today, there is the same type of elitism going on within the DC GOP establishment.
Work through the Party to change things? Look what the GOP did with the Tea Party. A group of people who felt we were overtaxed. were simply disregarded and ignored. Now, the group supporting Trump are told that if they do not conform to the Party, then they are not needed.
Look at Karl Rove. Bloomberg is reporting that Rove opened up his rolo-dex and put his money people in contact with Carson. This is an obvious tactic to support Carson against Trump. And who is in the rolo-dex that was given to Carson? Steve Wynn, an admitted democrat who has already indicated that he would vote for Hillary. So Wynn may give money to Carson to derail Trump so that Hillary can win. Or else so that Jeb can be put into a position whereby in a brokered convention, he could potentially be the nominee.
Rubio? Give me a break. He is a professional politician who has never held a real job. He came out of law school and became a City Commissioner for Miami in the late 1990's. Then in 2000, in the Florida House of Representatives, and Speaker of the House in 2005, and finally 2011, senator from Florida. Since then, he has been a flip flopping waffler on different. If he won the Presidency, do you expect him to be any different? Hell no. He will simply serve his financial masters so he can be re-elected. Just JEB and Dubya lite.
The simple fact is that this country is done for any way. The only thing that will prevent the onward march of socialism and world government is a complete collapse of the financial industry, and even then, it will likely usher in the socialism and crony government that the elites desire.
Yes, this is what I believe. I truly think that it is over and what anyone should do is seek places to go to minimize the problems going forward.
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/11/sold-out-lines-form-five-blocks-long-to-see-donald-trump-in-sarasota-photos/
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And of course the GOPe, which includes the Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street, is not doing everything it can to stop Trump. GOP donors may support Hillary over Trump. This is more evidence that the donors, and for that matter the GOPe, only care about doing what benefits them and their coffers. Otherwise, they would not be "faced" with a decision on whom to support.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/261227-gop-donors-wrestle-with-possibility-of-trump-nomination (http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/261227-gop-donors-wrestle-with-possibility-of-trump-nomination)
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Trump supporters include the 8 million conservatives who stayed home against the flawed Romney and swung the last election to Obama.(?) (I was trying to get Pat's view on that.)
Trump enjoys the benefits of running inside a party he actively opposes, then whines when people he punches in the face oppose him.
Hard to argue either way when the bottom line is that it doesn't matter anyway. It matters to me what kind of world we leave our kids.
Crafty wrote: "IMO it is simple: If Trump does a Perot, like Perot he will give us a Clinton and this country is done for."
That is the conventional wisdom and my view until recently. Hillary theoretically would lead that contest 50-25-25. But there are differences in the dynamic between these people now and those of 1992. Bill Clinton and Ross Perot both ran against a not very politically adept Bush Sr. In this case, Rubio and Trump would be running mostly against the status quo, Obama and Hillary. I would put that starting point at 33-33-33 with the best politician of them ultimately winning, which could be Trump or Rubio. The lesson of 92 might be that with a serious third party challenge in the mix, the major party challenger wins over the incumbent party.
For other 3-way races I would look to Rubio's Senate race in 2010 where the R won and to the MN Gov race when independent Jesse Ventura won over two major party candidates who ran hard against each other.
______________________________________
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If I have it right, a three way race might also get the results tossed into the House of Reps.
Anyway, I stand by my analysis that a Donald Perot means a President Hillary and the end of most of what made this country exceptional.
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/08/23/trump_is_no_reagan_127851.html
Trump Is No Reagan
By Stu Spencer and Ken Khachigian
August 23, 2015
Donald Trump’s attempts to burnish his conservative credentials by comparing himself to Ronald Reagan are wildly unconvincing. In his recent “Meet the Press” interview, Trump argued that his metamorphosis from left to right was akin to Reagan’s. He added that the late president was “somebody that I actually knew and liked. And he liked me. And I worked with him and helped him.”
Combined, we had the privilege of working very closely with Ronald Reagan over a five-decade period, and we must have missed the occasions when The Donald “worked with” the president, and overlooked The Gipper’s expressions of affection for him.
But quite apart from whether those assertions of affinity are true, we take even greater exception with Trump claiming the Reagan mantle to advance his political fortunes. Here are our reasons why:
--In his 1966 campaign for governor of California, Reagan popularized the so-called Republican 11th Commandment, stating, “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.” Calling his GOP opponents (or anyone for that matter) “losers,” “morons,” “dummies” or “idiots” would have been unthinkable for Reagan. Those words didn’t exist in his vocabulary—even for Democrats who called him names. He once wrote a note to us saying we had done “d--- good,” not being able to bring himself to spell out the word “damn.” Meanness was not in Reagan’s soul.
--Yes, Ronald Reagan migrated from being a liberal Democrat to the gold standard for conservative Republicans. But Reagan’s views evolved over four decades’ worth of life experience, a philosophical journey that took place gradually. His conservative credentials didn’t emanate overnight to match the political season. His was a slow and thoughtful transformation from the 1930s to the 1960s. Trump’s appears to be a midnight conversion just in time for the Iowa caucuses.
--Reagan vetted his ideas for governing with the likes of William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater and Dwight Eisenhower. He got his information by studying and reading and listening to a wide spectrum of experts. By all accounts, Trump appears to have no policy or philosophical patrons, characterized by his recent statement that his schooling on military affairs comes from “watching television shows.”
--Above all else, Ronald Wilson Reagan was genial and mannerly. He treated others with respect and courtesy. He was a gentleman whose personal decency was exceptional. On the occasions where he disagreed with our opinions or points of view, he did so without sharp words or rebuke, often apologetically. Yes, his political rhetoric could be tough and partisan, but it was never vulgar or personal. Donald Trump would benefit from the light-hearted humor that Reagan used to advantage in his communication.
--In the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan also said it was time to “make America great again.” But he did so while reflecting on what a wonderful country we live in, and that even amid the failure of our institutions, our nation’s promise of hope and opportunity stood out. It would have been unimaginable for Reagan to say, “Our country is going to hell,” as Trump regularly claims. Optimism permeated Reagan’s thinking, and we don’t see any evidence of Trump using the uplifting and aspirational language that was so dominant in Reagan’s communications.
--Ronald Reagan was respectful of all people, but even more so towards women, with whom he was warm and courtly. As a person who believed a soft answer turneth away wrath, his approach to Megyn Kelly on debate night would have been delivered with a wink and a smile. He might have even said, “There you go again.” If Mr. Trump, as he insists on being called, wants to be like Mr. Reagan, he needs to replace churlishness with charm.
--Despite the acclaim he achieved in his motion picture, television and political careers, Reagan was never boastful. On election night 1980, as he prepared his victory remarks, there was no trace of gloating or conquest. And on the eve of his inauguration, it was the stirring emotion and spirit of the moment that moved him, not the notion that he would soon be the most powerful man in the world. It was America that was great, not him – a studied contrast with Mr. Trump’s overwhelming self-absorption.
We find no similarities other than both Reagan and Trump came out of the entertainment industry. We knew Ronald Reagan. We served alongside President Reagan. Ronald Reagan was our friend. And, Mr. Trump, you’re no Ronald Reagan.
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/reagan-sons-interview-donald-trump-213149
http://www.redstate.com/2015/09/16/stop-donald-trump-nothing-like-ronald-reagan/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielkleinman/2015/09/29/despite-comparisons-differences-between-trump-and-reagan/
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2015/08/30/comparing-trump-to-reagan-should-be-a-slappable-offense/
Reagan’s encounters with the Left made him a conservative. Trump’s encounters with the Left made him get out his checkbook.
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Good point about the possibility of the election being thrown into the House. I had not considered that.
If in the House, that poses some very interesting thoughts:
1. All dems go to Hillary so there is not enough to provide her a majority. So she cannot win.
2. How do the Reps go, especially if Trump has won their state? Do they go with Rubio? If so, what happens to their future? If they go with Trump, then what happens with regard to future election prospects and the RNC?
Much horsetrading to happen...........
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Doug:
Quite the zinger there!
Peggy Noonan's biography "When Character was King" captures what these two authors are saying about Reagan quite well.
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Doug,
You want my view on Romney and the 8 million staying at home and Obama winning. Here you go.
1. I was in favor of Romney over the other candidates simply because I was one who thought he might be electable. I did not like his position on many things, including that he created MassCare, and was more of a moderate in the vein of previous republican candidates and presidents. It was a hold the nose scenario, but under the circumstances, what else was there.
2. As the actual campaign began after the nomination, I quickly began to see Romney's failings. He was a "nice" guy, afraid to attack, etc. In the last two debates, he let Obama and the moderators run roughshod over him. Ryan was no better, though I actually had high hopes for him.
3. The biggest flaw of Romney, though people will not talk about it, was that he was a Mormon. This is what led for so many people to fail to go to the polls. Add to that his other positions, and it was a lost cause.
Would it have mattered if Romney had won the election? I doubt that much would have changed. ObamaCare might have had a few changes made to it, but the Chamber of Commerce and other groups would have pulled out all stops to prevent full repeal.
Immigration? There would not have been the huge increase in immigration, but the problem would still exist and no one would have been willing to bring it up as an issue.
The economy? Nothing would change there either. No one had the cajones to do what was needed to improve the economy nor to rein in government spending and the programs.
The result of a Romney presidency is that we would have continued on our current path, but simply at a lower speed.
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1. and 2. It's interesting that we only disagree on maybe one issue and differ on strategy on about one or two more. That isn't very far apart.
3. The House of representatives Presidential outcome is interesting. I suppose the right thing for a representative to do is to cast his or her vote to match the winner is that district. That favors Cruz, Rubio or Christy only if he has carried the district. The third place candidate would have to be winning some electoral votes to trigger that provision.
As to the differences with Obama and Romney, I would refer you to 35 long internet pages in the Glibness thread as all examples of bad governance you would categorically have not had with Romney. And much more over on the Rule of Law thread. Let's take one issue alone that makes the entire point, IRS targeting. That would not have happened to anyone under Ronmey and if it had the perpetrators would have gone to prison.For those who believe in a constitution, are conservative, or just patriotic Americans from any political viewpoint and didn't show up to try to defeat this known jerk, ... shame. Add Fast and Furious to that and perhaps a thousand other abominations, like that crossword puzzles will forever use 'ISIS' as a 4 letter word for 'Obama Legacy'. Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al Qaida in Libya, too. And what if, God forbid, Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas could not serve out the conclusion of Obama's second term.
We aren't just arranging deck chairs here.
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Here is a question for you.
If Trump does win the nomination and goes up against Hillary, what about all of the Party who have said that they will not support or vote for him?
Seems to me that this is no different than 2012.
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If he is either the best candidate or the lesser evil, he will get my vote. Big money people don't matter. He doesn't want their money anyway. He will of course be challenged to bring back people he insulted along the way. That's why you try to minimize that and why he isn't perceived by most as expecting to be the eventual uniter. It's hard to imagine Carly, Jeb, Carson or Kasich traveling the country to rally different groups to his side.
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Can any of the others get the cross over vote and in the numbers that Trump is appearing to attract? Cross overs are going to be required to win this election.
Trump is the "middle class" candidate that appeals to people on both sides of the spectrum. He is the one who is attracting those who feel disenfranchised (how I hate that word) with the system, those who feel that the establishment on either side ignore them and yet take them for granted that they will "fall into line" with the party lines at election time.
The appeal of Trump is that he understands the middle class in ways that the others do not. And the middle class believes that he represents their interests. Not so with any of the other candidates.
Give me good middle class working families any time over the elitists in this country.
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Good questions Pat. We will see. He hasn't reached the Dems and liberals that I know. I asked my daughter who lives in another parallel universe, a college campus, do people like Trump? No, she said, no one she knows does. But I have seen the crowds at the events and the polls.
I watched the Sunday shows yesterday. Apparently Trump had mocked a handicapped reporter. Saw the video several times. Trump denies it. )
Chris Wallace: ... We have been thinking for a long period of time that Trump was going to be saying something that would be over the line. Is this the one?
James Rosen: Probably not. ... "The greatest threat to Donald Trump's viability is the descent into conventionality."
http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2015/11/29/safe-at-home-sen-richard-burr-talks-terror-threat-carly-fiorina-reacts-to/
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I have watched the video as well. Trump has used various physical expressions and movements at different times in his many various rallies, so this is something not unknown. If he was mocking the reporter, then the mockery was far above and beyond the physical deformities of the reporter. (Essentially, his hand is held in a position similar to a person who has an injured arm in a sling.) Was Trump mocking him? Who knows, but we must also consider what else has occurred.
1. The reporter did cite sources and police reports in Oct 2001 that claimed cops investigated these reports. Now he denies that anything happened.
2. WAPO reporting also indicated that these types of Muslim celebrations occurred in NJ as well as in the Middle East. This reporting is now ignored.
3. Large numbers of people in NJ and elsewhere have indicated that they actually saw the celebrations occur. These reports are now ignored. (YouTube videos of these celebrations have been deleted for years and a result of PC complicity.
4. Now the claims are made that since Trump said thousands, and only hundreds may have done so, Trump is lying.
5. The NY Times sent this same reporter out to look at Sarah Palin during the 2008 election. He wrote articles, one of which he spoke to Palin's hairdresser and got some very negative quotes about Palin that were cited in his article. The hairdresser saw the article and then claimed that she never spoke with him about Palin? Would the reporter and the NY Times make this up? You decide..........
6. The reporter did a one day get together in about 1987 where he and many other reporters met with Trump. They spent the day on his plane, helicopter and also in his office.
Now, the reporter claims that Trump knew who he was and was making fun of his disability. Okay, that might be possible, but then here is the other side.
In a group of reporters on a one time activity that occurred almost 20 years ago, Trump is expected to remember everyone there and all the details about each person. Well, when I was in the military, I can't remember but few of the people that I closely worked with daily for years. Nor can I remember people in other activities that I was involved in that lasted months or years. Why should Trump be any different.
IMO, this is likely just another hit piece on Trump. The media and opposition saw a potential weakness and decided to take advantage of it. In all reality, it will mount to nothing either. Actually, once again, it may go to the benefit of Trump if the public perceives it as just another hit piece. (Did not seem to bother the crowd at the Florida rally.)
What is important is the crowds that Trump is attracting at every rally. Each time that a rally is announced, all tickets are taken within a couple of hours (tickets are free). Then, the venue gets changed to a larger setting so that the people wanting tickets can have a chance to see Trump. Even then, like in Florida, the overflow is tremendous. And in Florida, Trump goes outside and does a second speech to those who could not get into the hall.
Compare that to Cruz who held a rally in Iowa in a general store with only a couple of hundred in attendance, or with Jeb in Florida who could only get tens of people to appear. The contrast is certainly indicative of something sweeping the country.
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He was mocking the reporter. Those offended by that are already not in the Trump camp. The reporter deserved something, not that.
Biden told the guy in the wheelchair to stand up so we can all see you. But he was gaffing by mistake. Trump was mocking for fun. Like a Geico commercial, it's what he does.
"IMO, this is likely just another hit piece on Trump."
It was a hit piece handed to them by Trump.
Michele Bachmann used to do stuff like this [the thousands cheered claim]. She was a former frontrunner nationally, considered a flake locally. Very serious woman, well educated and experienced, ran circles around Bernancke and Geithner while chairing a banking committee meeting. Then she would fly with some claim that hadn't been checked and didn't need to be said.
If you look back to all the close elections, Republicans haven't won a decisive one since Reagan was in the White House, we need focus, not distractions. If it's an important point, check it. If it isn't, don't say it. We do a better job checking each other's claims here on the forum than some of them do running for leader of the free world.
Makes you wonder, what will he say or do next? Are his aides afraid to say no to him? Does he delegate help with his speeches to no one? If he can't or won't delegate something this simple, fact checking prior when you know you will be fact checked after, how do you run a $4 trillion bureaucracy?
The answer of course is that he doesn't know what he will say when he walks out on the stage. Unscripted. Just what we want in a world leader...
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DID NEW JERSEY MUSLIMS CELEBRATE ON 9/11?
The facts and the eyewitnesses. Donald Trump's statement has been corroborated.
November 30, 2015 Danusha V. Goska
On November 21st, 2015, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said to supporters in Birmingham, Alabama, "Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down."
Trump's assertion sparked a national verbal wrestling match. Mainstream media and cultural leaders rushed to insist that no American Muslims celebrated 9-11. George Stephanopoulos dismissed accounts as mere "internet rumor." Snopes' Kim LaCapria argued that Muslims celebration of 9-11 is a "claim [that] was long since debunked." LaCapria, quoting an American Psychological Association article, theorized that those who report seeing Muslims celebrate 9-11 suffer from false memory syndrome. The page LaCapria linked to makes no mention of the 9-11 terror attacks and LaCapria cites no research by any scholar who studied self-identified witnesses of Muslim celebrations in NJ. The New York Times wrote that "a persistent Internet rumor of Muslims celebrating in Paterson, N.J., was discounted by police officials at the time.
A search of news accounts from that period shows no reports of mass cheering in Jersey City." Reuters claimed that "Paterson officials promptly issued a statement denying the report." National Public Radio's crack investigators "could not turn up any news accounts of American Muslims cheering or celebrating in the wake of Sept. 11." A Slate headline insisted that Muslims celebrating 9-11 is "one of the oldest 9/11 urban legends." Buzzfeed quoted, with approval, CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper, "This has been one of these vile memes on the anti-Islam hate sites for some time, but there's actually no evidence to support it whatsoever." Buzzfeed also quoted the Anti-Defamation League, "It is unfortunate that Donald Trump is giving new life to long-debunked conspiracy theories about 9/11."
Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution, blogging at Lawfare, is among the most self-righteous, highhanded, and inflammatory in his condemnation of Trump and also Ben Carson. These people, Wittes insisted, are spreading the equivalent of "blood libel … being used … to whip up the ignorant into murderous mobs … They are either lying or they are delusional. And assuming they are not suffering both from the same hallucination, they are lying in a fashion calculated to instill anger and hatred against a minority population at a time when nerves are raw, fears are high, and tempers are short. There are a lot of names for this. None of them is nice."
Wittes' charge of blood libel raises the stakes. Blood libel was used as an excuse to murder Jews in pogroms and it can be associated with tens of thousands of deaths. Wittes identifies blood libel as "medieval" and Christian – his meaning is plain. Christians are bad people who are bigoted against others; bigotry is a relic of the past.
In fact blood libel is neither exclusively Christian nor is it medieval. Blood libel goes back at least to Pagan, Classical Rome. In 1910, in Shiraz, Iran, a Jew was accused of murdering a Muslim girl. Muslims injured and killed Jews, and 6,000 Jews were dispossessed. Blood libel is so popular in the modern Muslim world that a 2001 TV series, "Horseman without a Horse," featured it. But to address actual facts, Wittes writes, would be beneath him. "I'm disinclined to rehash the tawdry history of this episode in any detail. To engage the substance of it feels a little to me like arguing with Holocaust deniers."
Even the Facebook page for Weird NJ insisted that no Muslims celebrated 9-11. Weird NJ is a publication usually dedicated to describing phenomena like the Ghost Boy haunting of Clinton Road. When people who promote belief in the Jersey Devil start insisting that an event never happened, you know something is up.
Prof. Irfan Khawaja of Felician College and Al Quds University acknowledges that some Muslims did celebrate 9-11. The group was much smaller than Trump mentioned, so the entire story can and must be labeled a "lie" rather than "an exaggeration." Khawaja writes, "He said that 'thousands and thousands' of people were cheering in Jersey City. That's a blatant lie."
The intense effort by empowered voices to erase an event matters. It is more than a footnote in the 2016 presidential race. Several factors are at play here. They include censorship of truth in order to meet the demands of political correctness, an utterly wrongheaded attempt to protect Muslims, an attempt that will only harm Muslims, and profound racism – the racism of an empowered elite who are convinced that average Americans are nothing but "ignorant murderous mobs."
In a May 5, 1920 photograph of Lenin delivering a speech, Trotsky is clearly visible. After Trotsky fell out of favor, he was airbrushed out of the photo. The Soviets were also good at smearing any speaker of inconvenient truths as too insane to be heard. We must reject the Soviet concept of truth. Truth is truth, even if it is politically incorrect. And truth is our friend. Truth is the friend of non-Muslims and Muslims alike.
I lived in and worked in Paterson, NJ, in the 1980s to 1990. I loved my Arab and Muslim friends then, and I love them now. In our many hours-long debates, many of my Arab and Muslim friends expressed enthusiastic and unshakeable support for terrorism. Not all did so; my Muslim friend Emmie's utter rejection of terrorism is described here. I wasn't surprised when 9-11 happened. As horrible as that day was, in one small sense, I experienced a pinprick of relief. Finally, I thought, we can start having an honest conversation about the support that even otherwise good but profoundly misguided people can voice for terrorism.
That conversation has yet fully to emerge. We are still too afraid of saying politically incorrect things. This censorship isn't just a bad thing for non-Muslims. It's a bad thing for Muslims as well. Those who witnessed the 9-11 celebrations, their friends and loved ones see much effort being exerted to smear and silence them, and to negate the historically important truth they speak. This silencing will only increase resentment against Muslims. An open and free public conversation will serve everyone's best interests.
People whom I trust told me that they witnessed the celebrations. None agreed to be named here. They know that speaking this truth in public sets them up for attack. One witness is my former student. He is an Italian-American, an A student who attended class regularly and handed in assignments on time. He is a responsible adult who worked during the day and took courses at night. Almost a decade ago, during a long conversation that touched on many topics, he told me of the celebration he witnessed. He named the location, the public library on Main Avenue.
Another witness was a prominent figure in Democratic politics, in which I used to participate. His account was similar to my student's account. The two men don't know each other. A third witness permits me to quote her here. "I stopped for gas in Belleville immediately after the second fall and there were two men in the station cheering at the TV coverage as if they were watching the Super Bowl and their team was winning." I have known this woman for years. I have to rely on her in financial and other matters. She has never lied to me.
There are tried-and-true methods to assess truth. These include Occam's Razor, multiple accounts, cui bono, and consistency with otherwise verified data. All of these can be applied in the accounts of Muslims celebrating 9-11.
Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation is best. Numerous New York and New Jersey residents insist that they or those close to them saw New Jersey Muslims celebrate 9-11. New Jersey radio station 101.5 quotes some of these accounts here. A sampling:
Tom Penicaro: "I worked for PSEG in Clifton on the Paterson boarder and I witnessed it firsthand. They were celebrating in the streets cheering and stomping on the flag. I am a Marine and I remember very very clearly because I was so pissed I wanted to engage them with a bat I had in my van."
William Hugelmeyer: "I was working in the jail when the attacks occurred. Once it was clear it was a terrorist attack, we had inmates celebrating. This instantly caused a lockdown. As you could imagine, many other inmates and officers didn't share their jubilation."
John Pezzino: "They were in the streets banging on the cars trying to drive through the crowd in the street. The Muslims were shouting death to Americans and Allah is great other crap I didn't understand. We were amused until a car with 3 young women mistakenly turned on to main st. The muslims were banging on their windows and screaming, thats when we came out of our car and pushed the muslims off their car helped them back out and get back to the Parkway."
Walter Emiliantsev: "I lived in NJ at the time on Demott Ave., Clifton! When I tried to go to Paterson to my brother in laws shop, I usually took Main Ave. There were so many people dancing on Main, I couldn't get through! I KNOW what I saw!"
Occam's Razor suggests that when numerous people, using their first and last names in a public forum, and providing concrete details that can be checked, all provide similar accounts of public behavior, chances are they are telling the truth. It is possible that all of these people, as Kim LaCapria suggests, are suffering from false memory syndrome, or are all attempting to whip up murderous hatred against Muslims, as Benjamin Wittes accuses, but neither LaCapria nor Wittes provides any support for their smears.
Cui bono directs us to consider "who benefits" from a statement. New Jersey has one of the largest Muslim populations in the US, after Michigan. New Jersey's Muslim population constitutes the second highest, by percent, in the US, after Illinois and above Michigan. New Jersey Muslims wield political clout. Note Republican Governor Chris Christie's nomination of Sohail Mohammed for the New Jersey Superior Court in spite of intense pressure, and Christie's dismissal as "crap" any concerns that New Jerseyans might have about sharia law. Note also that a New Jersey judge ruled that a Muslim man had the basis to beat, torture, and rape his 17-year-old wife because he believed that Islam granted him this right. Muslim political clout may explain why so many empowered voices insist that the 9-11 celebrations never happened.
Too, no decent New Jerseyan wanted to see retaliatory attacks against Muslims in our state. Many speculate, and some report as fact, that police, journalists and local officials downplayed or denied Muslim celebrations to protect Muslims from retaliatory attacks.
In contrast, those who insist that they witnessed Muslim celebrations have nothing to gain by making these statements publicly, and everything to lose. First, many of those speaking out now have no public record of making these statements previous to this controversy. They saw what they saw and they kept it to themselves, or told only those closest to them, for the past fourteen years. It is only the attempt to expunge this historical fact from public memory, and to smear and disgrace anyone who speaks this truth, that caused witnesses to come forward. They are average New Jerseyans simply telling the truth in the face of a wave of censorship and demonization that could cost them their friends or their jobs.
Are accounts of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9-11 consistent with other verified data? Indeed they are.
Palestinians make up a large percentage of Paterson's Muslim population, so much so that the neighborhood where the 9-11 celebration is alleged to have taken place is sometimes nicknamed "Little Ramallah." Local businesses are often named for Palestinian landmarks, for example the Al-Quds restaurant, Al-Quds Halal meat and the Al-Quds bakery. Paterson has a large Hispanic population; there are businesses with the provocative and irredentist name of El Andalus Discount Store and Andalus Islamic Fashion. Paterson Palestinians are not shy about expressing their opposition to Israel, see here. Indeed, Paterson's City Hall famously flew the Palestinian flag. One Paterson resident, Moneer Simreen, is quoted referring to Palestine, not the US, as "our country." Americans, Tariq Elsamma said, "need to obey our needs because we are a large community." Paterson's mayor, Jose Torres, wore a kaffiyeh and supported making Ramallah Paterson's sister city.
Even those who deny that any American Muslims celebrated 9-11 acknowledge that Palestinians overseas did celebrate the attacks. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are familially related to Palestinians in Paterson.
Further, polling data indicate that there is not inconsiderable support for terror among some Muslims, with support varying by group. In a 2005 FAFO Foundation poll, a significant percentage of Palestinian respondents supported "Al Qaeda's actions like bombings in USA and Europe." A 2013 Pew Poll found that 40% of Palestinians support suicide bombing in defense of Islam. In the same poll, only one percent of Muslims in Azerbaijan voiced support for suicide bombing.
Finally, we know that six of the 9-11 hijackers lived in Paterson, NJ, and they used the computers of a nearby campus in planning their attacks.
There are all too many non-Muslims who voice support for terror as well. One notorious example: Ward Churchill, a white American university professor of European, Christian descent called the 9-11 victims "little Eichmanns." Other non-Muslims say that poverty or injustice justifies terrorism.
Good people of all beliefs need to say, without ambiguity or apology, that Western Civilization is worth maintaining, and that terrorism is both immoral and a tactical dead-end. If Muslims don't like an aspect of public life, they can change it through organizing and hard work. But we aren't having that conversation to the extent that we should. Instead too many of our cultural elites are apologetic about Western Civilization, and too eager to make excuses for terrorism.
No, Ms. LaCapria, there is no evidence that the people who witnessed New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9-11 suffer from false memory syndrome. No, Benjamin Wittes, those who witnessed the celebrations are not "lying delusional murderous mobs." Rather, the real bigots and racists are those who demonize the honest New Jerseyans who risk censure by simply stating what they saw. From universities, newspaper suites and think tanks, the erasers of history look down on average Americans and sneer. They believe the worst of the American people. They are convinced that if Americans know one small fact – that some New Jersey Muslims celebrated on 9-11 – we will rise up with our pitchforks and torches and erupt into slaughter. They are the delusional ones.
Americans are nice people. We are not especially bigoted. We know that 9-11 happened. Most Americans probably suspect that some minority of Muslims celebrated, openly or in secret. It's been fourteen years, and the pogrom that some have been perversely hoping for and trying to foment never happened.
What we need is frank speech. We need to talk to our Muslim fellow citizens about why some of them celebrated on 9-11. And we need to – through speech – convince those who celebrated 9-11 that they are mistaken. The day that we do so will be a good day. We delay that day by denying that these celebrations ever happened.
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https://www.facebook.com/WashingtonExaminer/videos/10153455858199160/
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https://www.facebook.com/WashingtonExaminer/videos/10153455858199160/
Follow the money.
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Trump favors pathway to citizenship:
The GOP has to develop a comprehensive policy “to take care of this incredible problem that we have with respect to immigration, with respect to people wanting to be wonderful productive citizens of this country,” Trump says.
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Donald-Trump-Ronald-Kessler/2012/11/26/id/465363/
“He [Romney] had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,” Trump says. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote,” Trump notes. “He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”
Illegals building new Trump hotel in Washington DC:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-one-way-to-take-down-trump/417699/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/they-say-they-arrived-in-the-us-illegally-now-theyre-working-on-trumps-dc-hotel/2015/07/06/9a785116-20ec-11e5-84d5-eb37ee8eaa61_story.html
It's not Trump's fault because he uses 'subcontractors'.
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Trump sides with Rubio, not Cruz on NSA
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-sides-with-rubio-not-cruz-in-nsa-debate/article/2577376
"I err on the side of security", Trump told Hugh Hewitt.
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“It would be an utter, complete and total disaster,” added South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is polling below 1 percent in the GOP race. “If you’re a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot, you’re going to have a hard time being president of the United States, and you’re going to do irreparable damage to the party.”
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/can-trump-be-stopped-171010062.html
Nonsense. It's high time there was a leader who didn't criminalize the act of being born Caucasian, being Christian, or act as though people of Caucasian decent don't deserve their own country for killing people centuries ago, just as every other culture (even Tibetans) has done.
Go Trump....failing that.....give it to Hilary and let it all burn.
The Republicans and Democrats have for far long, fumbled their way through nearly everything.
I'm ok with a world that burns. I am not okay sacrificing principles.
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"I'm ok with a world that burns. I am not okay sacrificing principles."
You sound like Patrick Henry. 8-)
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Quite a bit less than the thousands asserted by Trump, but more than two , , ,
http://www.wnd.com/wnd_video/jersey-city-911-report-on-celebrating-muslims-vindicates-trump/#XdQOrXTQokxmJiX0.99
Amazing how long it took for this to resurface , , ,
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Quite a bit less than the thousands asserted by Trump, but more than two , , ,
http://www.wnd.com/wnd_video/jersey-city-911-report-on-celebrating-muslims-vindicates-trump/#XdQOrXTQokxmJiX0.99
Amazing how long it took for this to resurface , , ,
Because our "professional journalists" have done their best to "memory hole" it. Right Big Dog?
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Muslims shooting up San Bernardino... 3 of them as a matter of fact - hard to blame work place violence with three shooters...
I wonder if that will boost Trump's numbers?
:mrgreen:
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Remember when BROCK mocked Trump's hair at the correspondents dinner some years back. Wouldn't it be something to see him stand there and do comedy mocking BROCK someday.
How I would relish that. :-D
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:-D :-D :-D
http://www.scribd.com/doc/291976357/NRSC-Trump-Memo-From-Ward-Baker (http://www.scribd.com/doc/291976357/NRSC-Trump-Memo-From-Ward-Baker)
This is so funny. After months of beating up Trump and losing, they will now pretend to be Trump.
Latest CNN poll,
Trump at 36%,
Cruz at 16%
Carson at 14%
Rubio at 12%
Jeb at 3%
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2015/images/12/04/cnnorc12042015gopprimarypoll.pdf (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2015/images/12/04/cnnorc12042015gopprimarypoll.pdf)
I guess that Trump is now finished and will leave the race...............for the 450th time.
:evil: :evil:
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Latest CNN poll,
Trump at 36%,
Cruz at 16%
Carson at 14%
Rubio at 12%
Jeb at 3%
PP, I've looked iat the internals and believe they over-sampled Trump, Cruz and Carson supporters. :wink:
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I am glad you caught that. I have not had time to look at the internals. :-D
Interesting commentary by Allahpundit at HotAir......Trump wins blue collar and splits on white collar.
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/04/poll-trump-36-cruz-16-carson-14-rubio-12/ (http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/04/poll-trump-36-cruz-16-carson-14-rubio-12/)
Now back to my newest project. Putting together a proposal to evaluate over 400 MBS Trusts for a lawsuit.
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Latest CNN poll,
Trump at 36%,
Cruz at 16%
Carson at 14%
Rubio at 12%
Jeb at 3%
PP, I've looked iat the internals and believe they over-sampled Trump, Cruz and Carson supporters. :wink:
They found 3% Bush support. :-o
Talk about oversampling....
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:-D :-D :-D
http://www.scribd.com/doc/291976357/NRSC-Trump-Memo-From-Ward-Baker (http://www.scribd.com/doc/291976357/NRSC-Trump-Memo-From-Ward-Baker)
:evil: :evil:
"Special Note: Consider doing some of the jobs workers do in machine shops, small businesses, and factories you visit. Have the employee show you what they do and then try to do it. This changes the visual narrative so it's more personal and engaging."
Politicians attempting to "act" their way into the people's hearts. What's sad, is that people believe it.
People should be able to smell the imposter from a mile away.
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DDF,
And that is why Trump is pulling so much support. People are seeing through the professional politicians.
BTW, last night at the Trump rally in Virginia, Trump took questions from the audience. First Question
Woman: "What would you say to President Obama about" (She did not get to finish)
Trump: "Your fired!!!"
Crowd went nuts..........
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DDF,
And that is why Trump is pulling so much support. People are seeing through the professional politicians.
BTW, last night at the Trump rally in Virginia, Trump took questions from the audience. First Question
Woman: "What would you say to President Obama about" (She did not get to finish)
Trump: "Your fired!!!"
Crowd went nuts..........
Awesome. Loretta Lynch needs to be fired too, along with the rest of his cabinent. To think she has the b.lls to tell Americans what they can and can't say in their own country. The chickens are coming home to roost soon.
The $64,000 question that we're all wondering, (Democrats and Republicans alike, as well as Libertarian types such as myself), is if 1/2 of America is so mad, that Trump will pull votes from both major parties in a sufficient amount to win against Clinton. I am confident that he will as soon as Republicans realize they lose if they don't back Trump, and with the amount of Democrats that are more than displeased with Obama... the only real democratic hurdle for Trump will be winning liberal, latino votes.
My thoughts on the matter. As for Barrack.... I will never have a Kenyan as a president...ever. I left the country over it.
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https://www.facebook.com/theviewersview/videos/569385389877245/
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/07/donald-trump-loves-muslims-if-they-re-rich.html
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Trump: The Explicitly Anti-Constitutional GOP Presidential Front-runner
Here’s the Trump announcement, in its entirety:
Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on. According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population. Most recently, a poll from the Center for Security Policy released data showing “25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad” and 51% of those polled, “agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah.” Shariah authorizes such atrocities as murder against non-believers who won’t convert, beheadings and more unthinkable acts that pose great harm to Americans, especially women.
Mr. Trump stated, “Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again.”
No Muslim tourists either: “Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Trump’s proposed ban would apply to ‘everybody,’ including Muslims seeking immigration visas as well as tourists seeking to enter the country.”
U.S. citizens who are Muslim who are outside the country would not be permitted to return under Trump’s proposal, at least according to his spokeswoman:
Trump, in a formal statement from his campaign, urged a “total and complete shutdown” of all federal processes allowing followers of Islam into the country until elected leaders can “figure out what is going on.” Asked by The Hill whether that would include American Muslims currently abroad, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks replied over email: “Mr. Trump says, ‘everyone.’ “
Trump appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s program last night, defending his proposal, and adding, “I have Muslim friends, they’re wonderful people.”
Greta asked whether this policy would apply to his Muslim friends.
“This does not apply to people living in the country,” Trump said, appearing to contradict his spokeswoman, “except that we have to be vigilant, but when you have people putting bombs, having pipe bombs all over their apartment, and other people see this and they don’t report them, there’s something wrong.”
Regarding Muslim U.S. servicemen who are currently deployed overseas, Trump said, “They would come home.” It appears he means they would be allowed to return, but perhaps he means they would be recalled from overseas duties. It’s hard to tell with Trump’s vague, stream-of-consciousness circular-half-sentences.
Let’s go to the Constitution, starting with Article VI:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
Last night I learned there are self-described constitutional conservatives who believe that the Founding Fathers who explicitly wrote there could not be a religious test for any office would be hunky-dory with one for citizenship or entry into the country.
Then let’s turn to the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
How is declaring “we will no longer allow immigration, entry, or return of U.S. citizens of a particular religious faith” not prohibiting the free exercise of religion?
Wait, there’s more; last night Donald Trump talked about “closing the Internet in some way,” explicitly dismissing concerns about freedom of speech.
“We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet. And we have to do something. We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way. Somebody will say, ‘Oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people.”
Trumpies, your man has no idea what he is talking about. Bill Gates does not “really understand what’s happening,” Microsoft does not control the Internet, we do not need the U.S. government to be ‘closing that Internet up in some way’ and it is not foolish to be concerned about freedom of speech.
Last night, Trump’s New Hampshire co-chairman defended the proposal, citing Internment camps: State Representative Al Baldasaro said, “What he’s saying is no different than the situation during World War II, when we put the Japanese in camps.”
Asked about whether he would have supported or opposed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, Trump told Time:
“I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer,” he said during a recent interview in his office in New York City. “I certainly hate the concept of it. But I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer.”
Trump added that he believes wartime sometimes requires difficult choices. “It’s a tough thing. It’s tough,” he said. “But you know war is tough. And winning is tough. We don’t win anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We’re not a strong country anymore. We’re just so off.”
In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3, in the case of Korematsu vs. the United States that the internment of the Japanese was constitutional. (The lone Republican nominee dissented.) Years later, the American public learned vital details that had been withheld from the Court:
By the time the cases of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu reached the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General had learned of a key intelligence report that undermined the rationale behind the internment. The Ringle Report, from the Office of Naval Intelligence, found that only a small percentage of Japanese Americans posed a potential security threat, and that the most dangerous were already known or in custody. But the Solicitor General did not inform the Court of the report, despite warnings from Department of Justice attorneys that failing to alert the Court “might approximate the suppression of evidence.” Instead, he argued that it was impossible to segregate loyal Japanese Americans from disloyal ones. Nor did he inform the Court that a key set of allegations used to justify the internment, that Japanese Americans were using radio transmitters to communicate with enemy submarines off the West Coast, had been discredited by the FBI and FCC. And to make matters worse, he relied on gross generalizations about Japanese Americans, such as that they were disloyal and motivated by “racial solidarity.”
The Supreme Court upheld Hirabayashi’s and Korematsu’s convictions. And it took nearly a half century for courts to overturn these decisions. One court decision in the 1980s that did so highlighted the role played by the Solicitor General, emphasizing that the Supreme Court gave “special credence” to the Solicitor General’s representations. The court thought it unlikely that the Supreme Court would have ruled the same way had the Solicitor General exhibited complete candor. Yet those decisions still stand today as a reminder of the mistakes of that era.
Korematsu vs. the United States was wrongly decided. The wholesale imprisonment of American citizens because of their ethnic heritage violates the Constitution. If you believe that someone doesn’t have the same civil and Constitutional rights as you do because of their ethnic heritage or religious beliefs . . . what word fits that description?
Banning the immigration of those who belong to a particular religion, perhaps barring U.S. citizens abroad from returning to their own country, “closing that Internet up in some way” . . . let me guess, we’re going to destroy the Constitution in order to save the country?
Here’s that noted softie, former vice president Dick Cheney:
Well, I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in. I mean, religious freedom has been a very important part of our history and where we came from. A lot of people, my ancestors got here, because they were Puritans. There wasn’t anybody here then when they came, but it’s a mistaken notion. It’s a serious problem, this refugee problem is.
It’s a serious problem to make certain that the people coming in don’t represent ISIS. You’ve got to set up a vetting process. And that’s crucial, but I think the way you’ve got to begin to deal with that problem is to go back and look at why they’re here. And they’re here because of what’s going on in the Middle East. And what’s going on in the Middle East is the result of a U.S. vacuum. It’s the result of the rise of ISIS, civil war in Syria. I’ve heard proposals that I think make sense that we ought to establish safety zones, if you will, in the northern part of Syria where you’ve got them secured, you’ve got sufficient forces, hopefully of locals that would be there to protect, the area, but that’s where people who are fleeing the terrible tragedy that’s going on inside the caliphate, a place where they could reside. But it also takes the pressure, then, off of the refugee flow, the move to Europe of thousands of refugees and the move here to the United States. I think that makes a lot more sense than what’s happening now.
ADDENDA: Twelve hours ago, I asked my Twitter followers, “Are Muslims enemies of the United States of America?” So far, with 790 responses, 36 percent say “yes,” 64 percent say “no.”
I think tomorrow I’ll write about something cheerier, like the final episodes of The Man in the High Castle.
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What a garbage article. US law already can be used to exclude persons belonging to a nation at war with the US from entering, emigrating to the US. The religious test only applies to government office, not citizenship.
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Trump Derangement Syndrome is pathological with Geherty and others. Geherty writes an article per week like this with Trump as the target.
What is omitted with the article is that Trump said it was also the job of Congress to figure this out and do something. But that would not fit the tone of the article.
Notice how Geherty tries to claim for the basis of his article Freedom of Religion. But he totally ignores that Congress has the authority to address Immigration and quotas. Seems like he does not know the Constitution.....just like our Constitutional Scholar President.
The reality is that we do not know and have no way of vetting those coming in from Syria and other areas right now. Yet, Obummer wants to bring in 200,000 from Syria in the next two years alone. So are we just to allow anyone to come in without vetting?
Watch Trump shoot up another 3 points or more in the polls....
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Trump did NOT limit himself to nations with whom we are at war. He simply said "All Muslims". This bombastic simplicity is very destructive to our cause.
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Trump did NOT limit himself to nations with whom we are at war. He simply said "All Muslims". This bombastic simplicity is very destructive to our cause.
How is it harmful? We have NO obligation to take anyone into this country. We can set any standard we wish. Most muslims see themselves as members of dar Al Islam. Dar Al Islam is at war with us.
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And he said until Congress figures it out which can also mean:
1. Setting quotas.
2. Establishing true vetting processes.
There was nothing about this being a permanent ban. And it is consistent with Trump and illegal immigration.
I wonder if TDS has been checked out by the CDC to see if it is contagious through the written word?
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And he said until Congress figures it out which can also mean:
1. Setting quotas.
2. Establishing true vetting processes.
There was nothing about this being a permanent ban. And it is consistent with Trump and illegal immigration.
I wonder if TDS has been checked out by the CDC to see if it is contagious through the written word?
I understand what he means, but his words are polarizing. Supporters love it and opponents keep getting more ammunition to call him racist, bigoted, divisive, extreme.
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Polarizing? Maybe......
But each time that Trump goes "rogue", he forces the country to look at problems that exist, but are ignored by politicians for political expediency. Of course, if Trump is not elected, then the politicians will go back to ignoring the same problems for political expediency again.
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Here is what I posted on my FB page earlier:
I trust my hard line credentials with regard to the War with Islamic Fascism are in good order.
Trump has served our democratic process well by shaking things up and speaking plainly and his courage in doing so has improved the quality of the conversation by forcing others to speak plainly.
That said, as can be witnessed by many of my posts on my forum (see the "Trump" thread and the "2016 Presidential" thread, I have consistently opposed him as a glib and superficial narcissist with a short concentration span resulting in a "drive-by" approach to serious issues and for being seriously wrong on a number of issues (and right on some others). I have spoken of him lacking in deep principles and convictions and of the dubious logic of electing a crony capitalist to solve the profound challenge to our constitutional republic of economic fascism a.k.a. crony capitalism.
The true blame for Trump's success (which is much less than it appears due to the fragmentation of the votes of those opposed to him by the unusually large volume of candidates) so far properly falls on the failings, subversions, and lies of the Obama presidency and of the Demogogues and Patricians of the US Congress that have left the American people rightly angry and frustrated.
Turning to the issue of the moment, there most certainly IS a fifth column danger to our country lurking within the larger Muslim community and the cranial-rectal interface of our so-called Commander in Chief in this regard sets the stage for Trump's call of yesterday to block the movements of all Muslims into the US (though he has clarified that US citizens can return-- how white of him oy vey).
I fear what Trump exhibits in this moment and the response it is already triggering will consume all the oxygen in the room and divert us from the failings of Obama, progressivism, and the Washington Cartel and undercut those of us who advocate firm action by putting us on our heels by having to distance ourselves from his bombastic foolishness.
Because the man appears to get his policy briefings from television and form his policies by listening to his gut response to the blatherings emitting therefrom, we now have from him , , , what we have.
To choose one low hanging piece of fruit out of many-- what about the Iraqi and Afghani interpreters-- Muslims all-- whom we deny admittance to America though they are vouched for by our brave soldiers whose lives they saved? Instead we abandon them to be picked off from the battlefield we abandoned. As articulated by Trump, all hope for them is to be abandoned.
Trump would serve America far better if he focused on attacking Obama for abandoning these Muslims.
===========================
Before this piece of blazing stupidity from Trump we were talking about how ridiculous President Obama and Attorney General Lynch were in their phobia about Islamophobia. Indeed, even some of the Pravdas in the Main Stream Media were pointing out that there are 3.5 antisemitic incidents reported for every anti-Muslim incident.
What Trump has done here is hand a giant life line to Obama and Hillary, who will purport to turn Trump's support into "proof" of Islamophobia and the bigotry of the Republican Party, instead of the truth of the matter which would place the responsibility of people's anger at their doorstep.
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"What Trump has done here is hand a giant life line to Obama and Hillary, who will purport to turn Trump's support into "proof" of Islamophobia and the bigotry of the Republican Party, instead of the truth of the matter which would place the responsibility of people's anger at their doorstep."
This is along the lines of the Drudgereport on Huma Aberdin's "I am proud of being Muslim". and of course racism, "xenophobia" (the latest lib war cry) etc.
No the problem Huma is not us. We are not racists etc. The problem is with estimate ? 15% of YOUR OWN who hate us and want to kill as many of us they can. They have the problem and Trump actually is right to say we need to stop all coming here until we can figure this out. Huma should be standing up to the murderers not to any American who disagrees with liberal politics.
I say go for it Donald!
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And he said until Congress figures it out which can also mean:
1. Setting quotas.
2. Establishing true vetting processes.
There was nothing about this being a permanent ban. And it is consistent with Trump and illegal immigration.
I wonder if TDS has been checked out by the CDC to see if it is contagious through the written word?
I understand what he means, but his words are polarizing. Supporters love it and opponents keep getting more ammunition to call him racist, bigoted, divisive, extreme.
The left uses that no matter what. Who cares?
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Well, in that, as usual, he lacks specifics as he gives ammo to the Left and loses us the middle. There is a reason he polls worse against Hillary that other Reps such as Rubio. How about some specific suggested starting points about how to "figure things out"? I heard that in one interview when asked for specifics he said the Customs agent "could ask whether they were Muslim". Seriously???
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Here is what I posted on my FB page earlier:
I trust my hard line credentials with regard to the War with Islamic Fascism are in good order.
Trump has served our democratic process well by shaking things up and speaking plainly and his courage in doing so has improved the quality of the conversation by forcing others to speak plainly.
That said, as can be witnessed by many of my posts on my forum (see the "Trump" thread and the "2016 Presidential" thread, I have consistently opposed him as a glib and superficial narcissist with a short concentration span resulting in a "drive-by" approach to serious issues and for being seriously wrong on a number of issues (and right on some others). I have spoken of him lacking in deep principles and convictions and of the dubious logic of electing a crony capitalist to solve the profound challenge to our constitutional republic of economic fascism a.k.a. crony capitalism.
The true blame for Trump's success (which is much less than it appears due to the fragmentation of the votes of those opposed to him by the unusually large volume of candidates) so far properly falls on the failings, subversions, and lies of the Obama presidency and of the Demogogues and Patricians of the US Congress that have left the American people rightly angry and frustrated.
Turning to the issue of the moment, there most certainly IS a fifth column danger to our country lurking within the larger Muslim community and the cranial-rectal interface of our so-called Commander in Chief in this regard sets the stage for Trump's call of yesterday to block the movements of all Muslims into the US (though he has clarified that US citizens can return-- how white of him oy vey).
I fear what Trump exhibits in this moment and the response it is already triggering will consume all the oxygen in the room and divert us from the failings of Obama, progressivism, and the Washington Cartel and undercut those of us who advocate firm action by putting us on our heels by having to distance ourselves from his bombastic foolishness.
Because the man appears to get his policy briefings from television and form his policies by listening to his gut response to the blatherings emitting therefrom, we now have from him , , , what we have.
To choose one low hanging piece of fruit out of many-- what about the Iraqi and Afghani interpreters-- Muslims all-- whom we deny admittance to America though they are vouched for by our brave soldiers whose lives they saved? Instead we abandon them to be picked off from the battlefield we abandoned. As articulated by Trump, all hope for them is to be abandoned.
Trump would serve America far better if he focused on attacking Obama for abandoning these Muslims.
===========================
Before this piece of blazing stupidity from Trump we were talking about how ridiculous President Obama and Attorney General Lynch were in their phobia about Islamophobia. Indeed, even some of the Pravdas in the Main Stream Media were pointing out that there are 3.5 antisemitic incidents reported for every anti-Muslim incident.
What Trump has done here is hand a giant life line to Obama and Hillary, who will purport to turn Trump's support into "proof" of Islamophobia and the bigotry of the Republican Party, instead of the truth of the matter which would place the responsibility of people's anger at their doorstep.
Let's not act or the left will call us names they would call us anyway. Got it.
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And let's reveal how we would determine whether a person was a Radical Muslim so that new converts could be hidden from scrutiny.
Yeah right..........just like telling Iraq what dates we were pulling troops out. Might be better to not disclose how we would track them.......
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C'mon now gents. WE get called names. Duh. WE can't let that stop us. Duh. Nor should WE foolishly make it easy for the opposition. Duh.
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Some comments from an internet friend:
"I (still) doubt that Trump will get the nomination, and he wouldn't be my 1st choice.... But I think he deserves better than a few sneering interpretations and silly cartoons.
"Why? Because his candidacy is unprecedented. Somehow, he inspired millions of people to do something unique - ignore the opinions of our chattering, journalistic and political consultant classes. I think that is remarkable...
"...And very interesting. My view is that many people are smelling a rat. They were brainwashed into thinking in concepts which have little connection to reality - for example, Fort Hood was workplace violence... Borrowing and spending multiple trillions of dollars is OK - and will help the economy... ISIS has nothing in common with Islam. Etc, etc.
"Trump is a reaction to the subliminal recognition that we are being bamboozled into living in a make belief world, and that this will not end well. At such a time, people are more likely to believe a boisterous rich dude from Queens - who even bullshits like a normal person - rather than all the synthetic robotic pro pols."
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Crafty: "What Trump has done here is hand a giant life line to Obama and Hillary, who will purport to turn Trump's support into "proof" of Islamophobia and the bigotry of the Republican Party, instead of the truth of the matter which would place the responsibility of people's anger at their doorstep."
Yes. I wrote previously: ... opponents keep getting more ammunition to call him racist, bigoted, divisive, extreme.
I should have said: Opponents keep getting more ammunition to call all of us racist, bigoted, divisive, extreme.
Carson said he couldn't support a Muslim for President. He sounded bigoted and off-message to the casual listener/viewer even though people here recognized he was making a crucial point. Sharia Law is the opposite of our core principles and constitution. You have to reject Sharia Law in order to take the oath to uphold our constitution.
In this time of a declared war against us, the same choice must be applied visitors and immigration applicants. We can't take their word for it, so we vet. We have to look for indicators, visiting radicalized areas, radicalized Mosques, radicalized websites, and those questions are different for different people coming from differnet areas for different reasons. Vetting may involve guilt by association but our security is Job 3 (after pandering and giving out goodies). Immigration law is not criminal law; there is no equal treatment clause of requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If it makes us less safe then the right answer is no. If we cannot successfully vet you, you should not get to come in.
But if you don't understand the delicate nature of all of this at the Presidential frontrunner level, then you have become part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Of course the left will use everything we say against us. Don't make that so easy for them!
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Some comments from an internet friend:
"I (still) doubt that Trump will get the nomination, and he wouldn't be my 1st choice.... But I think he deserves better than a few sneering interpretations and silly cartoons.
"Why? Because his candidacy is unprecedented. Somehow, he inspired millions of people to do something unique - ignore the opinions of our chattering, journalistic and political consultant classes. I think that is remarkable...
"...And very interesting. My view is that many people are smelling a rat. They were brainwashed into thinking in concepts which have little connection to reality - for example, Fort Hood was workplace violence... Borrowing and spending multiple trillions of dollars is OK - and will help the economy... ISIS has nothing in common with Islam. Etc, etc.
"Trump is a reaction to the subliminal recognition that we are being bamboozled into living in a make belief world, and that this will not end well. At such a time, people are more likely to believe a boisterous rich dude from Queens - who even bullshits like a normal person - rather than all the synthetic robotic pro pols."
This is a really nice summary of the Trump phenomenon.
I wonder where it goes from here. Even Trump doesn't know that.
I don't find any of the remaining (R) contenders to be " synthetic robotic pro pols". But what a perfect description of Hillary!
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“...some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Many Americans, can be bought, some can't.
I love Mexico, because it's an honest place.... you mouth off to the right person, and they'll cut your head off. They're openly racist, and so is everyone else.
They don't apologize for their culture, they don't accept immigrants unless they WANT to....
And unlike many, a lot of people don't have educations, leading the people with educations to believe that they're somehow better or smarter than everyone else, when really, educations have nothing to do with wisdom nor being honest or any other ethic one might choose. You don't have that problem here....
Trump? He's right you know.
Personally, I enjoy seeing what is happening in the US. So many people deserve it. Talk all this crap online, but won't get shot at to save their lives.
I had a problem with drug cartels and a government that kept telling me "no," because they thought they were my owner.... I laugh now, because I did something about it... personally....and shut people right the hell up.
Trump has irreversibly changed the States, in no small part to Obama's agenda.... This is going to be good.
Some of these high powered IQ's can't even finish a chess game or admit that they've been beaten.
Go Trump.
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https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/campaigns-elections/many-times-donald-trump-rescued-democrats/
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I take issue with this piece. Sounds like written by a liberal.
Take this for example:
"None of this establishes either correlation or causation, but it is remarkably coincidental how often Donald Trump has rescued Democrats from the jaws of a terrible news cycle and the withering scrutiny of the press."
Who on this board thinks the "press" scrutinizes Democrats to any where near the degree they do Republicans? The majority main stream media do not do this.
Secondly where is the evidence this has hurt The Republican party. IF anything Trump is polling much better against criminal Clinton than before.
Besides his ideas are usually logical though I do agree he could cut out much of the name calling.
I agree with Ruppert Murdoch that his idea of temporarily banning Muslims coming here until we figure out better how to deal with this makes perfect sense.
What is logical about England letting Muslims in by the football stadium load makes sense when maybe 15% want to kill them but keeping someone here who is only using free speech from not? We cannot let the left "crowd shame" us into being docile and falling in line with THEIR control mechanisms to just be enablers of their taking our freedoms.
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CCP,
Notice that this new argument that Donald is distracting from the real issues and therefore is helping Obama and Hillary has been picked up by most of the media as well as politicians, and even Dem supporters in some cases. All sides now realize that Trump and the Vulgarians represent a threat to the traditional power structures and the money to be made, so they try to come up with every reason possible to derail him.
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Pop,
Agreed. CNN with their endless "bullying" when it is gays, minorities, etc.
But they bully other Americans when in their view we don't spout the same PC stuff they are ramming down our throats.
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Fair points all, but for all the articles failings, some of its examples have merit , , , and why the hell did Bill call Donald a few days before he announced for the Presidency? Helluva a coincidence in light of the point I made more than once early in this thread. There is a profound narcissism in this man that leads him to put himself above country. Again he threatens to play Ross Perot and put another Clinton in the White House and put an end to America as we know it. THIS IS VILE.
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"profound narcissism"
I agree we don't need another one of these.
Both Clintons and the Brockster profound narcissist all
I wouldn't say that of any of the Bushes.
I agree there is some real concern Trump could pull the whole house down to crash and burn because of his ego.
That is why Cruz and then probably Rubio (with some nose holding, my 2nd choice) are ahead of him with regards to my preference for President.
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Another example of someone for whom the message of Trump's formulation would be bad:
http://www.jerusalemonline.com/news/middle-east/israel-and-the-middle-east/jordanian-opposition-leader-wishes-israelis-a-happy-hanukkah-17636
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428200/donald-trump-overton-window-american-political-debate
Yuuuuuuuuuuge!
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A fair point!
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http://www.vocativ.com/news/259159/the-father-of-a-muslim-war-hero-has-this-to-say-to-donald-trump/
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http://www.vocativ.com/news/259159/the-father-of-a-muslim-war-hero-has-this-to-say-to-donald-trump/
"Khan was one of 14 American Muslims who died serving the United States in the ten years after the September 11 terrorist attacks."
How many American Muslims have engaged in terrorism in the US or internationally since 9/11?
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And of course left wing media are quoting Kareem Jabbar and the now hero draft dodger Mohammed Ali who contradict themselves by calling out Jihadis but at the same time call out the Donald's perfectly common sense proposal to put a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration.
I really don't see if a minority of Israelis or other Jews were hell bent on murdering Americans that I would be against a proposal to protect citizens from them with a ban. I would be pissed about extra scrutiny of me because of it but my anger would be AGAINST those committing crimes putting me in that spot. Ali and Jabbar should not be angry at us but only at the Jihadis. What are they doing about them? What are we supposed to continue being idiots and suckers letting people here who abuse us?
I just read Jimmy Carter put a ban on Iranians during the hostage crises. We probably would agree that as bad as Carter was at least I don't recall anyone questioning his patriotism
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I wonder who wrote the statement for Ali. The last time I saw him on tv, he was "organic".
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Oops. Trump is finished.....again.
New CBS poll
Trump at 35%, up from 22% in Oct.
Cruz is second at 16%.
And to support my claims that the GOPe will not support Trump, S.E. Cupp just came out and said she would vote for Hillary if Trump is the nominee. (Doesn't she realize that being on CNN, she could command more money attacking Trump as President?)
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"Trump at 35%"
But,
That is still not a majority.
And that is primary (Republican) voters not the general.
So say he wins the primary. What are his real chances of winning the general?
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Uhhh, CBS was saying that he would never get above 15%, then it was 20%, then 25%, etc............His support keeps climbing. Why should it "peak now"? And look at the number of candidates in the race. Is there an assumption that when candidates fall out, the supporters will not go to Trump? Uhh, this poll shows that Trump is getting what appears to be a large number of former Carson supporters...........that was not supposed to happen per the pundits.
Uhh, Cruz is at 16%, Rubio at 9%. These are not majority numbers either. Guess that neither can win in the general election either. In fact, since no one has even 50% of primary voters, let's just call the election over now and give Hillary the presidency.
If this was Jeb or Rubio leading with the same numbers, the race would be claimed to be over! With Trump, it is "how can he win"? Why the difference?
In the general election, Trump is already being shown to be getting Middle Class Dem cross over votes. In fact, much more than other Reps. And add one more terrorist attack in the US before the primaries, and Trump will increase much further in support.
Now, as I have said many times before, Trump will not be the nominee. This is so even if he wins all the Primaries and has the total popular vote. That is because the way the primaries are structured, no one can become the nominee without winning at least 8 states with 50% plus one of the vote. So the RNC/GOP will manipulate things under Rule 40 to put someone else in as nominee. And when that happens, here is what to expect.
1. Jeb as the candidate..........game over......Hillary wins. The base will not support Jeb. We have had enough Bushes.
2. Rubio as the candidate.......game over......Hillary wins. The base supporters for Trump will recognize the manipulation of the results and will stay home.
3. Cruz as the candidate.......the game becomes a bit more interesting........ Base supporters may consider going with Cruz if the selection of Cruz over Trump is perceived as "fair", and if Cruz had enough prior support to suggest he could win. If not, game over and Hillary wins.
If Trump is nominated because the GOP is unable to stop him, the very interesting times begin. Rubio and Jeb donors have already indicated that they would go over to Hillary. SE Cupp indicated the same yesterday. And there is even talk of the Reps going over to covertly support a 3rd Party Candidate, maybe even Romney.
What is the outcome? In every scenario, the GOP is finished in the form known today. It will split apart into two parties, and there will be no ability to reunite the two factions. But does the GOP care? If they deny a legitimate Trump nomination and instead covertly support someone else as a 3rd Party, it will prove that the GOP does not care. it is all about retaining their power in a seriously weakened party.
Remember, the GOP has already said that those supporting Trump can only return to the Party under the Party's terms. This is indicative of what they really think.
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PP,
Thanks for your response. Some good points. You paint a bleak picture for the right.
You may be correct in your analysis though it includes many assumptions but then again all analyses do.
We are up a huge onslaught and the left imports from around the world everyone they can to rally behind them.
And they control the propaganda machine.
I can't believe anyone who is really conservative would vote for Hillary. But I admit I came out and said I would NOT vote for Jeb (I would sit it out).
Who knows? :|
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Jeffrey Lord makes some very good points in this article. Chief among them, the GOP has wanted to open the tent to increase the GOP base. The voters supporting Trump on both sides are the people that they want. Yet, the GOP is doing everything possible to turn away those very same people.
As for me, I will only throw my support to Cruz if he wins the nomination legitimately. If it is manipulation to stop Trump, then the GOP is dead to me.
http://spectator.org/articles/64904/gops-trump-derangement-syndrome (http://spectator.org/articles/64904/gops-trump-derangement-syndrome)
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[youtube]Cv1YgVKoqLw[/youtube]
A better question could perhaps be what would happen if people reacted this way to everyone that said "cracker" or "white boy?"
Noteworthy is that the immigrant actually had the nerve to question who Trump thinks he is, in his own country (Trumps land of birth).
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https://www.facebook.com/rondwyersettingtherecordstraight/videos/834417413352941/
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That was a beautiful interview. Could you imagine her as Press Secretary?
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[youtube]Cv1YgVKoqLw[/youtube]
A better question could perhaps be what would happen if people reacted this way to everyone that said "cracker" or "white boy?"
Noteworthy is that the immigrant actually had the nerve to question who Trump thinks he is, in his own country (Trumps land of birth).
Crafty will give him a hug. :-D
Glad to see a moderate Muslim getting well deserved attention.
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Many of the elements I find so distasteful about Trump are well explored here:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/donald-trump-mark-bowden-playboy-profile
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Crafty will give him a hug. :-D
Glad to see a moderate Muslim getting well deserved attention.
[/quote]
It's still, for the moment, a free country....of sorts. Crafty can hug whoever he likes.... hell, let's bring lots of people to hug. End sarcasm.
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Was that Obummers son?
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Was that Obummers son?
:mrgreen:
Or Spike Lee, or Farrakhan, or insert name here....
"You got to kill they white people babies." Black Panther people....hell....starting to think they're all related.
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http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/saudi-prince-prince-alwaleed-bin-talal-calls-trump-disgrace-n478926?cid=sm_tw&hootPostID=d475916b3692d17c3225f215505d507f
My response to the "Prince" would have been much more profane.
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Cruz is a Maniac, not qualified to be (Vice) President. (?) (Vice President being someone qualified to be President)
I wonder who would be good enough to be his Vice President, and matches his see-saw ideology?
---------------------------------
Even Rush L is now turning on his friend Donald Trump over Scalia rip. Who on our side doesn't know that Justice Antonin Scalia is one of the good guys, and that this 'controversy' is leftist media manufactured. (It's hard to read a free market guy who favors the expansion of central power and government takings.)
It isn't better for anybody to have kids with an admittance test score of 25 or 28 to go to a school where the other kids all had 32 or higher, no matter the race of any of them. Racist is to set lower standards for black students. A lot of things go wrong when you head down the other path. But double standards make sense to a guy who thinks Hispanics can make good hotel workers.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgFD03kAA28
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I bet you did not even listen to the speech and interview where this was said. Well, I did:
The maniac portion was actually in reference to Cruz and what he has done in the Senate. Cruz has done his filibustering, which is fine. but Cruz has alienated all the Senate as well. To show how bad it is, on a "second" procedural type vote yesterday, Cruz wanted to have a "second" vote. The entire Senate, both sides, completely rebuked him.
With this type of Cruzitute, how in the hell could he ever work with either side and both sides to get his programs passed?
As to the Scalia question, it was a gotcha type question. One had to know exactly what Scalia said and how it was referenced. And unless one saw a few specific sites that covered it, a person would not know the full context of the statement. Maybe Trump should not have responded without knowing the full sound bite, but this is not a big deal.
As to Ruch, he is a Cruzbot in the full blown mode. He likes Trump for the disruption that is caused, but he is Cruz all the way. And this was expected to happen at some point. And BTW, at the end of the show, Rush was backing down from all the flack.
As for Levin, he went there as well. And with his website, he bans anyone who challenges him and his position on Cruz. Say something anti-Cruz, and you are gone for good.
None of this matters though. The All Powerful Delegates to the Convention are going to change the rules so that their guy can win. After all, the primary voters and their choices mean nothing. We are simply lo info voters who are not smart enough to know what is good for us.
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So when the Donald alienates people, that's good, but when Cruz does it, it's bad?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgFD03kAA28
G M: "So when the Donald alienates people, that's good, but when Cruz does it, it's bad?"
My thought also...
Very odd that Trump picked a fight with Pam Geller and her supporters. Should be natural allies. Trump thinks Geller is irresponsible, provocative, and says Cruz shouldn't be President because he doesn't play nicely with others. For himself he envisions Book of Trump added to the Bible - in front of Genesis.
I believe all this happened before Trump ban on all Muslims entering this country.
What does our Objectivist say about this?
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Alienates people?
Monmouth showing Trump at 41%. Cruz at 14%. And Monmouth's owner does not like Trump......
The people who are "alienated" are the same people who were not going to support Trump anyway. They were simply looking for another reason to bash him.
Cruz cannot win the national election. He will be hammered with Tea Party attacks and his religious/conservative positions. Plus, he will not have any crossover appeal. And crossovers will be the key to winning the election.
If/when Trump hits 51%, what happens? Oh, he is losing to Hillary so we can't have him. Well, what does losing to Hillary tell anyone?
I have been criticized for saying that if the GOP manipulates the results of the convention, I will not support the nominee and not vote in the general election. At least I would do that based upon the fact that Trump had the base behind him, and the base was ignored.
If Trump has 51% of the vote and cannot beat Hillary, it means that the rest are not going to support Trump either. Yet is it for good cause simply because they do not like him? They would throw the election to Hillary out of spite?
So what is good for the goose is not good for the gander? So the GOP elites can do it, but not the Trumpkins?
This is the end of the GOPe as we know it, and good riddance.
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So let's see. Pam Gellar puts together a "convention" that renders drawings of Mohhamad that she knows will provoke a violent response. This puts peoples lives at unnecessary risk.
I understand Freedom of Speech, but isn't this like shouting of fire in a crowded theater? You can have Freedom of Speech which is provocative, but to engage in Speech designed to provoke a violent response is just completely irresponsible.
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PP: "As to the Scalia question, it was a gotcha type question. One had to know exactly what Scalia said and how it was referenced. And unless one saw a few specific sites that covered it, a person would not know the full context of the statement. Maybe Trump should not have responded without knowing the full sound bite, but this is not a big deal."
Interesting take. He was happy to open mouth first and check facts second? Then where did he tweet his correction; he said he would tell us when he is wrong.
When I think Scalia is wrong about something or hasn't fully thought it through, I KNOW to take a closer look.
What it shows is that Trump either doesn't take these things seriously, constitutional law, or he is on the other team, which also means he doesn't take these things seriously. Like answering the objection to Kelo, how would you stop the abuse of that wrongful government power even if you could point to one example of where good seem to come from it?
Equal Protection is not a big deal? Kelo is not a big deal? Or is a good thing? Supreme Court issues and picks not a big deal? Or power grabbing Justices are fine? Sandra Day O'Connor opinion in U of Mich affirmative action case made sense; she is smarter than the Founders? We can change constitution by interpreting it as we wish instead of AMENDING it? And Rubio is the one pretending to be conservative? Good luck with that.
-----------------------------
PP: I bet you did not even listen to the speech and interview where this was said. Well, I did:
The maniac portion was actually in reference to Cruz and what he has done in the Senate. Cruz has done his filibustering, which is fine. but Cruz has alienated all the Senate as well. To show how bad it is, on a "second" procedural type vote yesterday, Cruz wanted to have a "second" vote. The entire Senate, both sides, completely rebuked him.
The point isn't that he is wrong on Cruz. The reason that quote is so laughable is that is exactly what Trump is doing, for example on the debate stage or even in that comment, sabotaging his own possibility of picking even his closest ally in the entire field for VP. Carly also, great VP choice is you want to beat Hillary - sabotaged.
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"The GOP deserves to go the way of the Whigs."
These are the people he needs to unite with to win the general election. He needs to win them over just to win the nomination, but who cares about that...
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Loser Law in several states (44 states?), you can't run in the primary in one party and be on the general election ballot of another. Trump's threat to run as an independent is coming to a head shortly.
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"Monmouth showing Trump at 41%. Cruz at 14%."
- Outlier poll. His ceiling seems to be 35%. But let's call it 41% with rounding.
"Cruz cannot win the national election. He will be hammered with Tea Party attacks and his religious/conservative positions. Plus, he will not have any crossover appeal. And crossovers will be the key to winning the election."
- Agree. Unless he has some magical, Reagan like ability to reach people and change them and he doesn't.
"If/when Trump hits 51%, what happens?"
- He built his own disapproval and strong disapproval to prevent that from happening.
The most obvious, cynical, conspiratorial view of all this is not the GOPe plot theory since they don't even have a horse left to bet on, it is that Trump did this whole thing as a Hillary plant. Trump gains a lot of self promotion, has a ball, turned the whole GOP race upside down and into a circus and a distraction. Did so well even he forgot it was just a prank. When was the last time you heard about her missing emails or a thousand and counting classified ones sent and received unsecured? But if/when Trump loses or quits, a far right tea party Senator like Rubio or even Cruz looks like a responsible choice.
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Outlier poll?
ABC Post 38%
IPSOS/Reuters 37%
Gravis 42%
Zogby 38%
Morning Consult 41%
Let's see, Trumps ceiling was
15%
then 20%
then 25%
then 30%
then 35%
Guess this is it now.........he is finished and should drop out.
To quote Reagan, "Now there you go again" on Kelo. The Supreme Court was specific on this, and what the states needed to do to clarify things. Some states have enacted new laws and others have not. The question that remains is whether the needs of the one is more important that the needs of many in an interconnected society. Of course, you and I will never see this in the same light.
Everyone assumes that Cruz would make a great VP choice, or each Snarly. Why not let Trump chose who he wants? Just because either Cruz or Snarly might look good on paper, that means nothing. After all, Reagan chose Bush, and win Bush became President, he began to unwind what Reagan started.
Trump needs to win over the rest of the Party to win.........maybe, but as in any primary, you run for the nomination and after the nomination is one, you run to win the rest of them.
What I do notice is that you have said nothing about Carly Hoaglund's article about the base and about the Convention delegates? Doesn't this bother you? The Party insiders having such a negative view of the base? And not caring what they want? If Trump has to win over the non Trump supporters, doesn't the RNC need to do the same with the Trump supporters? Instead, they want to screw them, put in their own candidate and expect the base to follow.
Sorry, did that with McCain and then with Romney. Look what happened. I will not do that again.
I want a party that respects the base, not one that has no use for them except as a voter in the general election.
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Thanks Pat.
"What I do notice is that you have said nothing about Carly Hoaglund's article about the base and about the Convention delegates? Doesn't this bother you? ..."
I see the inside of the party differently than you do. Each person there gave up a whole lot of their personal life to be there, there things are VERY time consuming and its not very rewarding. The goal of each is to move the needle in their own direction and they likely don't favor Trump.
Referring to Nate Silver's and Sean Trende's separate analyses, if it goes to the convention, there are 3 scenarios. I don't it happening that the convention or super delegates swing of this in a direction other than where the primary voters were clearly saying to take it. It won't happen but if it did and elites change the obvious, rightful outcome of the race, then I share your view that would be seen as illegitimate and backfire on the party and its candidate. That's why they won't do it. Not because they are impartial referees. As stated, it is not a worry of mine.
Without reading or eavesdropping on all the conversation (Hoaglund etc), of course the 49% who have a strong disapproval of Trump are going to worry about what happens if he is the nominee and privately discuss how to keep that from happening. That doesn't mean the party will abandon the process when the time comes. Trump also talks about how to play around the established rules yet here he is, holding events in the early states, up on stage in the debates and on the party ballots in the primaries. Looks like a professional politician to me. :wink:
Trump needs to be first place in the general election matchups and Rubio needs to be first place in the nominating matchups. It is a stalemate coming into this debate. Let's see who makes the next move...
-----------------
Kelo: "The Supreme Court was specific on this, and what the states needed to do to clarify things. Some states have enacted new laws and others have not. The question that remains is whether the needs of the one is more important that the needs of many in an interconnected society."
- "You and I will never see eye to eye on this." False choice. The right of the one is the right of the many and it is paramount. You disagree but the political point is that Trump is out of step with the base on this, and with the constitution and with the Founders and the originalists which includes all the base. I would love to see both Rubio and Cruz challenge him on this. It is a wrongly decided Supreme Court case whether a person likes the policy or not. The larger question comes front and center, what kind of Justices would he appoint? "Great ones," he says. I think Cruz in particular could pick that to shreds. Trump is saying he would pick those who can't find the 4th, 5th or 9th amendments with both hands. This is a perfect opening for Cruz to talk past Trump to his supporters. For Trump to have used that available power to his benefit in business is explainable, but to stand by it as we choose who chooses the Supreme Court of the next 30 years is another thing. If Ted Cruz is reading the forum, this is your moment!
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You have ore faith in the party than I do.
As to the Supreme Court Justice appointees, let's just say
Kennedy,
Souter
Roberts
They were nominated by Republican Presidents. Each appeared to be strong Constitution supporters, but certainly their decisions often go astray.
As to Kelo, though the Supremes ruled the wrong way according to you, they also cited that states had the authority to pass laws that further defined use of ED. This would suggest that they also viewed it as a States Rights issue. So it is up for the states to take action.
And, the question that comes to mind is that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written in a world of a different time. The Founding Fathers could not see how society would change. So they left in methods that would allow for changes as the world changed.
How would the Father's interpret Public Interest? In a very narrow view, or a more open view? Especially in light of today's urban cities and development.
Of course, the Courts have held that the Bill of Rights is not all encompassing. There can be restrictions on each right.
1. Crying fire in a crowded theater.
2. Felons and other not allowed to own firearms.
3. Search and Seizure exceptions.
If these types of exceptions that trampled on an individual's rights are allowed for the public good, why not with ED?
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"I understand Freedom of Speech, but isn't this like shouting of fire in a crowded theater? You can have Freedom of Speech which is provocative, but to engage in Speech designed to provoke a violent response is just completely irresponsible."
I wouldn't have expected this from you.
IMHO this is EXACTLY when assertion of free speech is of the essence, lest the enemy gets the idea that its intimidations are succeeding.
As for polls, the one that matters most is the one-on-one against Hillary. Here Trump is in third or fourth place and Rubio is in first.
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CD,
I said that with Gellar, her actions were completely irresponsible and led to potential harm to the others with her, so it is all on her. Especially if there were participants who did not know that the objective was to in cite and invite threats.
Does Freedom of Speech allow you to directly put others into harm's way no matter what?
There is an assumption that the Bill of Rights is sacrosanct, and that each amendment applies in every circumstance. But the courts have ruled that there are instances when the amendment may be rendered moot.
What if in the ensuing gun battle that some innocents had been killed? Does Gellar have any responsibility especially if she knew that the threat of violence could occur? Now Gellar is talking about another similar event. She knows the potential outcome. Should she be allowed to still conduct the event with the likelihood of violence?
There has to be common sense with the Freedom of Speech, especially since the threat of violence with Islamic nuts is likelihood, and even more so when the intent is to rile them up to commit violence. This is not intimidation succeeding as you suggest. This is plain common sense.
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So we should cower and self censor lest the jihadis take offense?
CD,
I said that with Gellar, her actions were completely irresponsible and led to potential harm to the others with her, so it is all on her. Especially if there were participants who did not know that the objective was to in cite and invite threats.
Does Freedom of Speech allow you to directly put others into harm's way no matter what?
There is an assumption that the Bill of Rights is sacrosanct, and that each amendment applies in every circumstance. But the courts have ruled that there are instances when the amendment may be rendered moot.
What if in the ensuing gun battle that some innocents had been killed? Does Gellar have any responsibility especially if she knew that the threat of violence could occur? Now Gellar is talking about another similar event. She knows the potential outcome. Should she be allowed to still conduct the event with the likelihood of violence?
There has to be common sense with the Freedom of Speech, especially since the threat of violence with Islamic nuts is likelihood, and even more so when the intent is to rile them up to commit violence. This is not intimidation succeeding as you suggest. This is plain common sense.
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There is a hell of a difference between cowering and self censoring, exercising Freedom of Speech, and with deliberating challenging and inviting them to attack.
Gellar did a deliberate act of provocation designed to lead to an attack. She knew what the expected response would be and planned for it. Notice all of the people there who were armed and ready. And the only two who died were the terrorists.
Again, what would have happened if innocents had been killed? Would Gellar also be held responsible? Should she be?
You don't and deliberately poke the bee hive...........
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There is a hell of a difference between cowering and self censoring, exercising Freedom of Speech, and with deliberating challenging and inviting them to attack.
Gellar did a deliberate act of provocation designed to lead to an attack. She knew what the expected response would be and planned for it. Notice all of the people there who were armed and ready. And the only two who died were the terrorists.
Again, what would have happened if innocents had been killed? Would Gellar also be held responsible? Should she be?
You don't and deliberately poke the bee hive...........
So, did the civil rights protesters murdered in the south poke "poke the bee hive"?
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Come on.........apples to oranges.............
Yes, James Meredith and others were engaged in legitimate protests, but the protests were not designed to provoke a violent response. That is the difference between them and Gellar.
Take BLM and Ferguson. That was absolutely a direct provocation with Freedom of Speech used as an excuse. Should BLM be forgiven?
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Come on.........apples to oranges.............
Yes, James Meredith and others were engaged in legitimate protests, but the protests were not designed to provoke a violent response. That is the difference between them and Gellar.
Take BLM and Ferguson. That was absolutely a direct provocation with Freedom of Speech used as an excuse. Should BLM be forgiven?
So, protest is only legitimate if there is no reasonable expectation of a violent reaction. Yes?
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If it puts innocents in harm's way with an unnecessary threat, and is an invitation to violence, then it has gone too far in my opinion.
She knew what was going to happen and prepped for it.
There is no absolute right to Freedom of Speech.
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http://www.duhaime.org/LegalDictionary/H/HecklersVeto.aspx
Heckler's Veto Definition:
(USA) A controversial legal position taken by law enforcement officers based on an alleged right to restrict freedom of speech where such expression may create disorder or provoke violence.
Related Terms: First Amendment, Freedom of Expression, Speech
In Roe v Crawford, Justice Riley wrote:
"The heckler's veto involves situations in which the government attempts to ban protected speech because it might provoke a violent response. In such situations, the mere possibility of a violent reaction to protected speech is simply not a constitutional basis on which to restrict the right to speak."
In Startzell, Justice Sloviter made the court's repugnance for an alleged heckler's veto clear by adopting these words:
"If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. In public debate our own citizens must tolerate insulting, and even outrageous, speech in order to provide adequate breathing space to the freedoms protected by the First Amendment.
"A heckler's veto is an impermissible content-based restriction on speech where the speech is prohibited due to an anticipated disorderly or violent reaction of the audience."
Similarly, in Hedges, Justice Easterbrook:
"The police are supposed to preserve order, which unpopular speech may endanger. Does it follow that the police may silence the rabble-rousing speaker? Not at all. The police must permit the speech and control the crowd. There is no heckler's veto. Just as bellicose bystanders cannot authorize the government to silence a speaker, so ignorant bystanders cannot make censorship legitimate."
REFERENCES:
Hedges v. Wauconda Community School District, 9 F. 3d 1295 (United States Court of Appeals, 1993)
Roe v. Crawford, 514 F. 3d 789 (United States Court of Appeals, 2007, at footnote 3)
Startzell v. City of Philadelphia, 533 F. 3d 183 (United States Court of Appeals, 2008)
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If it puts innocents in harm's way with an unnecessary threat, and is an invitation to violence, then it has gone too far in my opinion.
She knew what was going to happen and prepped for it.
There is no absolute right to Freedom of Speech.
You do realize by rewarding violence you are creating an incentive system that rewards additional acts of violence to suppress constitutionally protected speech?
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Aaah....but what if the Free Speech is designed to provoke the violence?
Essentially, what I trying to say in a poor manner obviously, is that even with the Bill of Rights, there is no absolute black or white. They are not absolute, but filled with potential exceptions that must be taken on a case by case basis.
99.99% of Freedom of Speech complaints have no merit. But there a cases where there is merit, at least in my opinion. But I differ from most here with my views in case you have not noticed. Just look at ED. I do have different viewpoints for sure.
Maybe it is because of what I do now, consulting on lawsuits in the financial arena. I look at both sides of the issue, determine the facts and what arguments exist on either side. Then I advise based upon case law, current regulations and the circumstances of the case. The one thing I have learned in this, for every compelling argument, there is usually one for the opposition and I just try to point it out.
I am only doing the same thing with Gellar. Does she have a right to free speech? Absolutely so! But can free speech cross a line? SCOTUS has rule it can.
So did it cross the line with Gellar? Based upon my own opinions, when she deliberately acted in a manner to incite violence and knew it would happen, at least for me it crossed the line. However, others may have different opinions.
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2578392?platform=hootsuite
Obvious incitement.
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It seems that the Ruling GOP elite and those that are accustomed to siphoning off independent and libertarian votes think that they can count on insulting Trump, and getting us to vote for someone else.... No thanks.
I'll be voting for Trump in 2016. :mrgreen:
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Did anyone hear Pataki say President Trump? :-D
I have heard this said "mistakenly" several times now. Don't hear President Rubio?
I am a Proud Trumpeter!
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Something to balance all these pro-DT things I have been posting follows.
John Hinderaker or Powerline is neither establishment nor moderate, and doesn't control any puppets. He is struggling with the choices just like people here are. Powerline (Mirengoff in particular, but Hinderaker too) was the most ruthless of anyone on Rubio during the gang of 8 debate.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/thinking-about-the-unthinkable-2.php
DECEMBER 16, 2015 BY JOHN HINDERAKER
THINKING ABOUT THE UNTHINKABLE
It now seems fairly likely that Donald Trump will win the Republican presidential nomination. His success remains, to me, a puzzle. Watching him in the debate last night–I only caught the last portion–and in a post-debate interview, I thought he was a buffoon. His knowledge of the issues is almost non-existent, and I can’t tell whether he actually wants to be president, or is just campaigning as a lark.
But the bigger problem with Trump, in my mind, isn’t that he is unqualified, it is that he isn’t a conservative. Rather, he is a populist. Trump almost glories in his inability to answer questions with any insight or specificity, a classic populist characteristic. I will do a great job as president! Why? Because I’m me!
On the world stage, the politician who reminds me most of Trump is Vladimir Putin. Putin’s campaign slogan was, in effect, “Make Russia great again!” Has he done so? One would think not; Russia’s economy is a mess and the country is run by what in essence is a criminal gang. Yet Putin is very popular. His supporters think he has made Russia “great,” because Russia’s assertiveness in international affairs has discomfited the U.S. and other powers. And, much like Trump supporters, they love his macho shtick. This does not mean, of course, that a President Trump would govern anything like a Putin. He would not. But his appeal to American voters is similar to Putin’s appeal to Russian voters, and in each case, public policy has little to do with it.
Trump does not pretend to be a conservative. He was a registered Democrat for much of his adult life. He has said that he agrees with the Democrats on most issues, especially on the economy, and to my knowledge has never recanted. He has donated to numerous Democrats’ campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s, and has praised Hillary effusively. On the other hand, his attitude toward the George W. Bush administration, the last Republican presidency, is viciously antagonistic, to the point where he blames Bush for the 2008 financial collapse.
If you check the positions he sets forth on his web site, you will find little of substance and little that is conservative. He offers a good tax plan, rather typical for a Republican candidate. He also defends Second Amendment rights, which is almost mandatory for a Republican. But there is nothing on how to shrink the federal government, and there is little reason to think that Trump, a developer who makes his living in bed with government, has any desire to do so. There is nothing on the burden of federal regulations, and nothing on energy policy. The social issues never come up. There is nothing on health care (except for veterans) and, remarkably, nothing on foreign policy other than U.S.-China trade. Compare Trump’s position statements with Marco Rubio’s and ask yourself who is the conservative in the race.
Even on immigration, the issue that, more than anything, has fueled Trump’s rise, he is a squish. Trump’s focus has been almost entirely on illegal immigration, while he has said next to nothing about our legal immigration system, a much bigger problem. On illegal immigration, he wants to deport millions of illegal immigrants, but then turn around and let them back in through the “big door” in his fence. As best I can tell, anyone who is not a convicted felon would get back in. The point of this is hard to see.
As for his popular call to suspend all travel or immigration of Muslim aliens into the U.S., his general idea is defensible, but as set forth by him his proposal is unworkable. There is no feasible way to find out whether one of the millions of aliens who enter the U.S. is a Muslim except by asking him. All a would-be terrorist has to do is say “No.” Trump doesn’t care enough to at least offer a workable proposal, such as suspending all immigration and issuance of visas to residents of Muslim-majority countries, perhaps with specified exceptions.
If Trump gets the nomination, this will be the first presidential race in quite a while in which neither party nominates a conservative. One could argue that was the case in 1988 and 1992, when George H.W. Bush ran against Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton. I would say that Bush was a conservative, although a very moderate one, and certainly in 1992 Republicans had every reason to consider Bush a conservative who would continue the Reagan legacy.
Before that, you probably have to go back to 1968 and 1972, when Richard Nixon ran against Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern. That, too, is questionable, as Nixon was undoubtedly conservative on some issues and was regarded by most of his contemporaries as a conservative, even though his presidential record is moderate at best, and liberal in some key areas.
In any event, what should principled conservatives do if neither party nominates a candidate of the right? I would certainly vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, but I think the most reasonable response is to provide no support to the non-conservative presidential candidate beyond the ballot, and focus instead on other races where true conservatives are running.
Apart from the fact that I don’t think he would make much of a chief executive, a Trump presidency could have the unfortunate effect of further disillusioning many on the right. Voters on the right often say that politicians lie, and sometimes, of course, they do. But usually the “lie” is a case of over-promising. When they are campaigning, conservatives, like liberals, often overstate what they will be able to accomplish in office. This engenders disappointment. But imagine if conservatives were to elect Trump under the misguided belief that he is one of them. He presumably won’t govern as a conservative; he hasn’t even promised to. More likely, he will govern in accordance with his belief that the Democrats are right on most issues, particularly the economy, and consistent with his acceptance of big government. I am afraid that conservatives who vote for Trump expecting something different will be in for a rude awakening, should he win.
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What Hinderaker is missing out on is the obvious.....................the Trump supporters no longer care about the term conservative. They are voting important issues that concern them. And they are voting anti-party because the party is no longer conservative.
Just look at the new budget proposal voted on in the Senate under Ryan? Is it a conservative budget? Hell, it gave Obama everything he wanted and without opposition.
Hinderaker stated that only GHW Bush was the only non conservative in many cycles. What is his definition of conservative?
Dole?
McCain?
Romney?
They have liberal leanings in every which way.
Even Dubya was not much of a conservative. He passed Medicare Plan 4 and Prescription Drugs, let the budget go all to hell and all else. Compassionate Conservatism..............Rockefeller Republican.
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Some valid points there Pat, but this time around there ARE real conservative alternatives.
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"Rockefeller Republican"
Even LBJ preferred Nelson over Humphrey according to Califano's book.
Amazing huh?
W's self description was "compassionate" conservative. Now Christie Todd Whitman calls herself a fiscal conservative (which she was not) and "socially tolerant".
All this implies that real conservatives were not socially tolerant or compassionate. They want to keep down the masses for their rich friends.
These Republicans do more to shoot themselves in the heart than any Cruz's, Trumps, Carsons, IMHO
They are like the hypocrites of the left. Just look at Buffett, Gates, and the newbie world leader Zuckerberg. The former two spent their lives living working capitalism to their advantage with remarkable success. Gates in particular robbed and lied as much as any of them with his scorched Earth tricks. Oh but now capitalism is bad and we should all buckle down for mankind.
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CD,
Alternatives only if you believe that Rubio and Cruz will stop illegal immigration and will not allow Amnesty.
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My brothers from my squad are indeed my brothers...they're all Mexican.
I called my daughter in Russia this morning.... read the news in Russian.... Putin likes Trump and Russia isn't and never has been for sale or suffered liberals wanting to give it away to immigrants, defending their idiotic policies by screaming "racism," which is funny, because most racists I know are Liberal.
It's already too late for the US. People confuse "culture" with "race," and even amongst people more traditional, as with here, there are varying shades, and each....absolutely convinced that their perception is 100% correct.
You have people here that will tell you who can and cannot be armed, so long as they have access to weapons.... hypocrites.
I say we all be honest, divide the country into roughly two to three zones, Liberal, Conservative and a third where anything goes.....and see how things work out.
People will act like someone not liking Obama for being Black is a big deal, but don't even question Blacks using derogatory remarks or Mexicans wanting a Latino president..... to hell with them and their double standards.
Other people will act like because they are a lawyer or whatnot, that they somehow know more about life than you do.... also laughable as we all have our own experiences.
I would have guarded any dictator zealously, so long as he came from my "camp."
Trump is the only one telling it like it is.
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Chelsea's dad, Web Hubbell says 50% of Republicans will flock to Hillary if Trump is the nominee. Remember back in '08 when Bill said a "black man couldn't win" and within hours nearly the entire black vote shifted from Hillary to Brock? (except for Donna Brazille who is on the payroll)
That could happen here too. Dems laughing that 50% of Republicans will switch and vote for Hillary? May instead piss them off to vote for the nominee, Trump Cruz or Rubs.
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Obama was an inevitable after Bush as Carter was after Nixon/Ford. It did not matter who the competition would be, none could win. For Hillary, that is not the case.
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Elections are about more than counting votes. They reveal peoples to themselves. They are democracy’s mirror. And what we see is often disconcerting.
In 2015, for the first time in decades, an angry, disaffected U.S. white working class has found its voice. Xenophobia, nationalism and bigotry are the dominant tones, so it is tempting for the rest of us to turn away in dismay. We should resist that temptation, because underlying the harsh words are real problems that extend well beyond our shores.
Throughout the West, democratic governments are struggling to maintain a postwar order premised on prosperity and economic security. Since the onset of the Great Recession, established center-right and center-left parties have failed to meet that test, opening the door to the far left and the populist right. From Hungary to France to Poland (long regarded as the poster-child for postcommunist democratization), illiberal populism is on the rise.
Western democracies may be on different decks, but we are all in the same boat. In a world of mobile capital and global labor markets, we have not figured out how to maintain jobs and incomes for workers with modest education and skills. In Europe the result has been sustained double-digit unemployment and a generation of young adults on the economic margins. The U.S. has made a different choice: large numbers of low-wage jobs that don’t offer the promise of upward mobility.
Beneath the dry statistics of the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we can see that future emerging. Over the next decade, the service sector will provide 95% of all the new jobs. Manufacturing, which shed more than two million jobs between 2004 and 2014, will shrink by an additional 800,000, to only 7% of the workforce. Of the 15 occupations with the most projected job growth, only four ask for a bachelor’s degree; eight require no formal education credentials; nine offer median annual wages under $30,000.
Few Americans know these statistics, but most of them are living the reality they represent. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the economy has ceased to work for households at and below the middle. A recent report from the Pew Research Center finds that the median income for middle-income households is about where it was in 1997. For lower-income households, median income stands where it did in 1996.
When we look at wealth, the picture is even darker. Since the early 1980s, adjusted for inflation, the median net worth of upper-income families has almost doubled. For middle-income families, by contrast, the story has been stagnation: $96,000 in 1983, $98,000 in 2013. Lower-income families had under $12,000 three decades ago, and even less today.
Baseline macroeconomic projections offer little hope that the next decade will be much different. Echoing estimates from several other sources, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects annual growth of only 2.2%. This reflects a dramatic slowdown in the growth of the labor force. Between 1994 and 2004, the workforce expanded by 12.5%, compared with a projected 5% in the coming decade. The reason is straightforward: With an aging population reaching retirement age, departures from the labor force nearly counterbalance new entrants.
In fact, we are undergoing a historic demographic shift. Throughout the 1990s, the entire baby-boom generation was between 25 and 54 years old—the prime working years. Starting in 2001, the oldest boomers began aging out of that range. By 2019, every baby boomer will be 55 or older, and the share of Americans in prime working years will continue to decline.
Conservative populism in America is a complex phenomenon. Compared with Europeans, Americans have long been less inclined to respect elites. The demographic transformation set in motion by immigration reform half a century ago has reached critical mass, and many white Americans fear that the country in which they grew up is disappearing.
From labor unions to the family, institutions undergirding working-class security have weakened. The U.S. remains immensely powerful, but it no longer bestrides the world like a colossus. The 9/11 attacks 14 years ago smashed the post-Cold War Americans’ confidence that the continent was safe from attack; the Dec. 2 San Bernardino slaughter has reawakened this sense of vulnerability.
Economic anxiety, demographic resentment and fears for physical security make a toxic combination. Donald Trump didn’t create these sentiments. Like demagogues throughout history, he is exploiting them for his own purposes.
The message to the Republican establishment is clear: If you cannot find a responsible way of responding to the concerns of voters you have spent decades attracting to your party, you will lose control—and you will deserve to.
But there is also a message for the professional elites who have flocked to the Democratic Party: Cultural liberalism is not enough. Without a plan that offers the hope of a better life for Americans born to fewer advantages, populism, not progressivism, could capture the future.
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"Economic anxiety, demographic resentment and fears for physical security make a toxic combination. Donald Trump didn’t create these sentiments. Like demagogues throughout history, he is exploiting them for his own purposes."
What does this mean, "like demagogues throughout history"
So Trump who is just saying what many people think is a "demagogue"?? What about Brock or Hillary?
Not a peep about the contribution made by this guys Wall Street friends to the hollowing out the middle class with endless paying people less and less while they wring out every dime they can from their ever enlarging companies and bringing in competition from overseas who are willing to work for less.
Remember Ford when he wanted to give every working man a "living" wage - $5/hour?
Now it is how they give every man as little as they can without almost any hope of doing better.
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Once again this early supporter of Mondale and Jimmy Carter shows why many call him an establishment elitist. Mock Trump and mock millions of voters including me.
So really now. We should not adjust the 14 th amendment to exclude people taking advantage of a law that was intended to protect Blacks who were slaves and Chinese and Indians not to allow anyone to step off a plane, a boat, a bus give birth and then demand they all stay so as not to break up families. News for ya Charles; being American never was meant to be stupid or a sucker. Being tolerant is one thing. Being a moron is another.
So Charles thinks Trump prevented the GOP from an all out takedown of Obama (and Hillary) policies of dealing with ISIS. Oh really? Like how just would these GOP candidates do a "take down" of Obama that is going to win an election?
Why take Charles and other establishment types seriously I ask?
If you want to bother here is Krauthammer's brilliant logic here:
**** Why take Trump seriously?
Donald Trump speaks in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 23. (Paul Vernon/Associated Press)
By Charles Krauthammer Opinion writer December 10
So how exactly does this work, Donald Trump’s plan to keep America safe from Islamic terrorism by barring entry to all Muslims? He explained it Tuesday on TV. The immigration official will ask the foreigner if he’s a Muslim.
“And if they said, ‘yes,’ they would not be allowed in the country?”
Trump: “That’s correct.”
Brilliant. And very economical. That is, if you think that bloodthirsty terrorists — “people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” as Trump describes them — will feel honor-bound to tell the truth to an infidel customs officer. They kill wantonly but, like George Washington, cannot tell a lie. On this logic hinges the great Maginot Line with which Trump will protect America from jihad.
I decline to join the chorus denouncing the Trump proposal as offensive and un-American. That’s too obvious. What I can’t get over is its sheer absurdity.
Condemnation came quickly to Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump's call to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Here are some notable comments. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)
[Zakaria: Trump’s views appall me not because I’m Muslim, but because I’m American]
Here’s a suggestion (borrowed from my Fox News colleague Chris Stirewalt) to shore it up. At every immigration station at every airport in America , we will demand that every potential entrant — immigrant, refugee, student or tourist — eat a bacon sandwich. You refuse? Back home you go!
True, the Stirewalt Solution casts the net a bit wide, snaring innocent vegetarians and Orthodox Jews. But hey, as Trump said Tuesday , “We’re at war — get it through your head.” Can’t get squeamish about collateral damage.
Dozens of others have already pointed out how strategically idiotic is Trump’s exclusion principle. Absent a renewed Christian crusade against radical Islam — with those fabulous Hollywood-wardrobe tunics — the war on terror will be won only in alliance with moderate Muslims. Declaring them anathema is not the best beginning to coalition-building.
To take but the most obvious example: Our closest and most effective allies on the ground in the Middle East are the Kurds. Trump would turn them back at the Orlando airport. No Disney World for them. Or does he not know that they are Muslim?
It is embarrassing even to embark on such arguments. To treat “no Muslims allowed” as a serious idea is to give credit to what is little more than a clever stunt by a man who saw Ted Cruz beating him for the first time in the Iowa Monmouth poll and five hours later decided it was time to seize the stage again.
This got the thinkers going again. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, whom I (otherwise) hold in considerable esteem, spent 1,000 words trying to tart up the ban in constitutional and statutory livery, stressing — hilariously — that he is dealing with the Trump proposal “in its final form.” As if Trump’s barstool eruptions are painstakingly vetted, and as if anything Trump says about anything is ever final.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is not one to back down readily from controversial statements, and the list of those he dislikes continues to grow.
Take his Syria policy. In September, he said we should wash our hands and just let Russia fight the Islamic State. Having, I assume, been subsequently informed that Vladimir Putin’s principal interest — and target — is not the Islamic State but the anti-Assad rebels, Trump now promises to “bomb the s---” out of the Islamic State.
I’m sure there’s a Trump apologist out there working to explain the brilliant complementarity of these two contradictory strategies. Just as a few months ago there was a frenzy of learned scholarship about the constitutional history of the 14th Amendment following another Trump eruption — the abolition of birthright citizenship.
Whatever the final outcome, Trump’s campaign has already succeeded, indelibly affecting both this race and the Republican future. At a time of economic malaise at home and strategic collapse abroad, Trump has managed to steer the entire GOP campaign into absurdities, like mass deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants, and impossibilities, like the exclusion of Muslims from our shores.
“No Muslims allowed” is the perfect example. President Obama’s Oval Office address on Sunday night marked a new low in his presidency. The shopworn arguments, the detached tone, the willful denial that there might be anything wrong with his policy were deeply unsettling for left, right and center. Even the New York Times had to admit “Obama’s Plans to Stop ISIS Leave Many Democrats Wanting More,” which is Timesese for Democrats Stunned by Vacancy in the Oval Office. Here was an opportunity for the Republican field to launch an all-out takedown of the Obama (and Hillary Clinton) foreign policy.
Within less than a day, that opportunity was wiped out. Once again, it’s the Donald Show.
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Charles is an absolute elitist GOPe hack.
1. When Trump said ask them, has anyone thought that he was being sarcastic? What did this fool and others think he should do? Say exactly how these people would be vetted, checked out? If so, our enemy would develop other strategies to get around the checks, Hell, they are alread using fake passports, etc.
2. The 14th Amendment does not need to be changed. It needs to be correctly enforced. Forget the 1985 SCOTUS case where a dissenting opinion stated the case for anchor babies which did not have the power of law behind it. Enforce the damned law properly.
3. Break up the families? No need to. The anchor babies are here unlawfully. Send them back with the rest of the family.
4. On Syria, let the Russians handle things. Then if they can't and need the help, we go in all Jacksonian and kill, kill, kill. Fight like in WW2, or else not at all.
5. The Kurds......what a false argument. The Kurds don't want to come here. They want weapons so they can fight and save their homeland. What part of this does Bride of Chuckie not get. Oh, that's right. He is just parroting what he has read elsewhere without giving it any reasoned thought.
6. And the ban would be temporary until new processes could be figured out. But our brave and bold GOP Senators and Rep don't want to do anything that could invite criticism, or even worse, Obama whining at them. The cowards!!!
7. Take down Obama? They haven't challenged him on anything else. Look at the damned Budget that just passed. They gave everything away to Obama that he wanted. Any of the candidates actually challenged him? Only with a sound bite, and while doing so, pissing their pants.
Charles is a joke. I can't listen or look at that idiot anymore.
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"Take down Obama? They haven't challenged him on anything else. Look at the damned Budget that just passed."
Exactly. What a joke. If it weren't for Trump Krauthammer implies says the greats of the GOP, Bush, Kasich, Ryan, McConnel, and the rest would have been able to destroy Obama politically.
Quite frankly. He has his head on backwards. Looking at it with my head on straight if it not for Trump we wouldn't even be discussing immigration, what China is doing to us, or *Muslim* Jihadists.
So to say the establishment types would be taking down Obama is already proven to have never taken place - despite retaking the Senate and increasing the lead in the House. The Senate is still run by Democrats. How is that possible?
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Someone just said again that Trump support has hit the ceiling and can't go any higher.
I say time to "Raise the Ceiling.........again!"
:evil: :evil: :evil:
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"The Senate is still run by Democrats. How is that possible?"
Filibuster.
I'm open to the nuclear option on some of the issues in play here.
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Why didn't Reps ever use the filibuster when the Dems controlled everything?
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"Why didn't Reps ever use the filibuster when the Dems controlled everything?"
I'm under they impression they did e.g. on Obamacare but the Dems did an evasionary end run via budget reconciliation.
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Per a FOX News poll, last month he was 5 points up against her. This month he is down 11.
:-o :-o :-o
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Well he has no support from his party as well as the propaganda machine from the msm.
But that said if he cannot improve these numbers I cannot support him even though I often agree with him. I agree with CD and Doug, we cannot let Hillary win.
Unfortunately I agree with him on immigration and temporarily suspending new Muslims from coming to the US.
But we cannot even win those battles without the independents and "rightish" leaning Reagan Democrats and a least some minorities.
Unless Trump can do better with these people he is done for.
I just don't want the whole country taken down with him. If Hillary is in for 4 or 8 years.....
OTOH there is an excellent chance of some major catastrophic event coming in the next few years so maybe it is better to let the Dems take that fall. But that is a big if and conjecture all the way around.
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There lies the difference with you and I. When I look at the last few decades and the march towards larger and larger government, and then look at debacles like the Ryan Omnibus, what is the difference between the parties. They all say one thing and do another.
Let's say Hillary wins but the Pubbies retain control of the House and the Senate. How much influence would Hillary have? If you think a lot, then it means that you would expect the House and Senate to continue to give in and not fight her, just like Obama. And if that is so, what the hell good are they? (Sure, she could try the Executive Order bit, but if the Pubbies had any balls, they could put an end to that.)
Why does the Party faithful not support Trump? Because they know that if Trump gets nominated, the GOP gets changed permanently. The power of the Party transfers to the base and not the Establishment. Any if Trump is nominated and loses, then the GOPe can say, "See, we told you so", and thus keep their power. That is why so many are coming out and suggesting that they would vote Hillary and not Trump.
This is a battle for the soul of the Party. It is the middle class base versus the elites and the future of the Party.
Frankly, I expect that we are going to see a major 2008 type collapse again, housing, financial and who knows what else? When it hits, everything will change anyway, whether it be social, economic or political systems. Might as well get it over quickly and start rebuilding.
(BTW, if it is Rubio or Cruz as the nominee and either loses to Hillary, which I expect, the GOP is finished anyway. It will be seen as the GOPe having steered the Party to another "electable" nominee, who once again lost. At that point, Trump becomes the leader of the Party no matter what, and even though he does not run again. The times, they are a changin'.)
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PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY: TRUMP IS 'LAST HOPE FOR AMERICA'
'I don't see anyone else who's eager to fight'
World Net Daily - December 20, 2015
Phyllis Schlafly, an icon of the conservative movement who has been active for half a century, is warning the nation: Donald Trump is the last hope for America.
Schlafly unloaded on Republicans in Congress for passing the $1.1 trillion omnibus bill last week, a move she called a “betrayal.”
“This is a betrayal of the grassroots and of the Republican Party,” Schlafly said in an exclusive interview with WND. “We thought we were electing a different crowd to stand up for America, and they didn’t. We’re extremely outraged by what Congress has done. Nancy Pelosi couldn’t have engineered it any better. I think the people are going to react by electing Donald Trump.”
Trump put out a statement Friday to ABC News saying, “If anyone needs more evidence of why the American people are suffering at the hands of their own government, look no further than the budget deal announced by Speaker Ryan. In order to avoid a government shutdown, a cowardly threat from an incompetent president, the elected Republicans in Congress threw in the towel and showed absolutely no budget discipline.”
Trump continued, “Congress cannot seem to help itself in bending to every whim of special interests. How can they face their constituents when they continue to burden our children and grandchildren with debts they will never be able to repay? Our government is failing us, so we must do something about it. Who knows how bad things will be when the next administration comes in and has to pick up the pieces?”
Schlafly applauded the GOP front-runner’s fighting spirit.
“It sounds like Donald Trump is the only one who has any fight in him,” she said. “He will fight for the issues that we really care about and are very hot at the present time, such as the immigration issue. I don’t see anyone else who’s eager to fight.”
The Republican-controlled Congress just sold America down in river in the “worst kind of betrayal,” Schlafly told WND.
“It’s the worst kind of a betrayal because we thought we elected a bunch of good guys who would shape up the party,” she said. “We had a lot of fancy promises that the Republicans were going to shape up and change course. And they disappointed us. Betrayal is an appropriate word to describe it.”
WND asked Schlafly if she believes Donald Trump is the last hope for America.
“He does look like he’s the last hope [for America],” Schlafly said. “We don’t hear anybody saying what he’s saying. In fact, most of the people who ought to be lining up with him are attacking him. They’re probably jealous of the amount of press coverage he gets. But the reason he gets so much press coverage is the grassroots are fed up with people who are running things, and they do want a change. They do want people to stand up for America. It really resonates when he says he wants to ‘Make America Great Again.’”
Schlafly said it’s not only Republicans who feel betrayed, but Democrats, too.
“They are betrayed,” she said. “There’s no doubt about it. The working man and woman have been betrayed by both parties. They’re ready for a change … anything they think would be better.”
The conservative superstar also blasted leaders of both parties who advocate lax immigration policies while American workers continue to struggle in a tepid economy.
“The rich guys are putting the money in. They want to bring in the low-wage people. That’s the way they think they’ll make money,” she said. “But that’s not the way America will prosper. America was built because we had a great growing and prosperous middle class. We need to rebuild that again. I’m willing to give a new try to somebody else.”
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/12/top-conservative-trump-is-last-hope-for-america/#aEW0gY9owK0jpyyd.99
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https://www.facebook.com/100008147201796/videos/1667421816872709/
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I respect and admire Phyllis Schlafly, a family friend who I agree with on all but a couple of issues. She is a Pat Buchanon conservative, previous endorsements that always resulted in a Clinton being elected. Leans toward protectionism 'fair trade' over 'free trade' and tends to oppose all trade bills. Thrilled over his TPP opposition and probably right about it. The difference being that I'm sure she has read it and Trump hasn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan
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PP: "There lies the difference with you and I. When I look at the last few decades and the march towards larger and larger government, and then look at debacles like the Ryan Omnibus, what is the difference between the parties. They all say one thing and do another."
We agree on this. I just saw the movie 'Divergent' on cable. The parallel analogy of the fictional "Erudites" in the movie, and the Progressive liberal elites is astounding. I don't know if author of the novel the movie is based on (Veronica Ross) meant this to be political indictment of the modern Democrat party and how it is heading towards using mind control to take over the rest of us but that is precisely what is happening to us in real life. In the movie and in real life people lose their freedoms and are controlled and told how to act.
PP: "Let's say Hillary wins but the Pubbies retain control of the House and the Senate. How much influence would Hillary have? If you think a lot, then it means that you would expect the House and Senate to continue to give in and not fight her, just like Obama. And if that is so, what the hell good are they? (Sure, she could try the Executive Order bit, but if the Pubbies had any balls, they could put an end to that.)"
This has been the history for the last 25 years.
PP: "This is a battle for the soul of the Party. It is the middle class base versus the elites and the future of the Party."
True but I am not sure exactly where Trump fits in to redefining the soul of the party as you put it. Yes he speaks about stopping the illegal flood and even reversing it and other things we like but I am just not sure what his principals are. When Levin interviewed way back, he asked him what his definition of a conservative was. Trumps answer was rather vague. So to me the future of the Republican party under Trump remains an "open book"
PP: (BTW, if it is Rubio or Cruz as the nominee and either loses to Hillary, which I expect, the GOP is finished anyway. It will be seen as the GOPe having steered the Party to another "electable" nominee, who once again lost. At that point, Trump becomes the leader of the Party no matter what, and even though he does not run again. The times, they are a changin'.)
First, at this point in time at least Cruz is leading Hillary Clinton while Trump lags. Secondly if Trump loses we are in just as much deep doodoo.
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Yes, if Trump loses as a legitimate candidate and the GOPe votes for him, you are correct. We will still have the same problems. But if the GOPe does not support him and does not vote or else votes for Hillary, the end of the GOP is there anyway.
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Speaking of Trump and Trump getting out, this of course comes from the same people who said he would get out earlier over and over etc. But it is true that he has not yet shown a willingness to put his own money into it. I know it's expensive to fly a 757 around but he is also only doing his own, named events, called it in for Meet the Press yesterday (tacky), for example. He says he is worth what, 11 billion? That probably means 6-8 billion on an average day, and 95-99% of that not liquid. Further it has to be costing him to be away from the business unless he was just a figurehead and his business runs on cruise control anyway, and no business does. You can't do any good government takings while you're running for President. Offsetting that on the positive side is that he is getting the biggest name promotion possible. Offsetting that on the negative is that properties in Dubai etc aren't going to be unaffected by his call to keep all Muslims out of all western countries starting with the United States. His call to round up Mexicans in this country and send them back hurts him there, and his call to threaten trade wars hurts him there and elsewhere. Trump has to be making many calculations everyday. He did not know it would go this far.
This is way too much fun for him now and he is still leading in the nomination contest and still increasing his lead, so he isn't about to drop. But when the momentum turns against him, and it will, these things always tighten up, being a shrewd businessman, he will see the writing on the wall first before we do and poof, he will say hey, I'm a great man, I made my point, and now have better things to do. Also he is 69, pushing 70, like Hillary. This can't be that easy and parts of it aren't fun. Shifting away from being himself to conventionalizing to be more acceptable to more people will NOT be fun and it won't work. Serving one term and handing it back to the Dems is of no use either. Serving two terms plus two years campaigning is a BIG part of any President's life, even bigger than running TCCE, Trump CronyCapitalism Enterprises. It is crazy to start the hardest job and most demanding job in the world in your 70s IMHO. And he is smart enough to know that if you do it half-assed, you will be a failure deserving of all the insults he throws at Obama, Hillary and everyone else.
This is going to get interesting (if it isn't already).
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Doing my own math for Trump if he suddenly wants to fund his campaign with small contributions instead of self funding:
There are no more than 120,000,000 voters paying attention right now (really about a tenth of that).
40% of those are Republican and 30% of those support Trump. (adjust slightly to get your own result)
It would take a $70 contribution from everyone of those 14.4 million to raise the billion he needs.
Not going to happen, so now he needs big donors just like everyone else, or to do it without money, or the unthinkable, sell of Trump assets. (not going to happen, and even it did the perception is that the big money buyer is funding his campaign.)
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In a related vein, he is going after Hillary as having low vitality, but his idea of a campaign trip is to ride the elevator down to his lobby or to take a limo to one of the TV studios around NY. Not a criticism, for sure it's shrewd, but in point of fact his travel load right now is super light in comparison to the others.
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PP made a long, thoughtful post on 2016 Presidential recently about marketing:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2419.msg92581#msg92581
The Trump product IS marketing.
He won't have different marketing for the general election, he will be selling a different product, IMHO.
At his launch where he had to pay people to attend, he boldly announced an all out war on illegal immigration out of the blue, addressing an unserved market that everyone else either feared or underestimated. The rest of his product is his personality, having the boldness to say things that excite some and shock the rest. Also his product is that he is a better candidate and sharper on all issues than expected. Not better and sharper than the others, but better than expected.
Events have turned his way. Immigrants, foreigners and illegals have attacked us in a way that is exaggerated by media coverage. (14 deaths in San Bern compares with how many murders in Chicago, how many abortions, how many traffic fatalities, etc.)
Even though he leads by almost triple, none of us here see how he gets to the nomination. When he doubles down on what got him this far he doubles down on negatives and opposition too. He also carries a constant risk of committing a gaffe or foot in mouth bigger than the ones we have seen so far as he continues. The nuclear triad is a gotcha question, really?
Also the more he is himself in the way it got him this far, the more his general election number fail him, and those HAVE TO improve if he wants the 60% non-Trump side of the party to start breaking his way.
So there is no visible path for him to win (and no visible path for the others either at this point). But let's say he gets the nomination since he is so far out in front. Then what?
I know what happens next. He guilts R's into supporting him no matter what he says while he shifts back to his other self who has said all along, I am independent not a Republican. I've always identified more as a Democrat, just not a Bernie Sanders and new-Hillary Socialiast-Democrat. So he is the perfect crossover, (Republican sellout) candidate. He has a chance to win because Hillary really is that bad.
Pat worries that Rubio will be a sellout. I believe Trump won't have to sellout to be a sellout to switch sides. He won't even deport a single otherwise law abiding illegal, never really said he would, at least not when pressed for specifics. He never said he would shrink government. He supports greater powers for government. He will build the biggest and strongest government we have ever seen. He has been all over the map on taxes and that goes through congress anyway. If Republicans are weak other than Trump, the Senate goes to the Dems anyway. Obamacare stays, new taxes to 'balance the budget' and spending at levels that would John Boehner blush. Affirmative action and all leftist social issues? No problem.
How will we know if he betrays us.
---------------------------------------
"... a mature product stage should soon materialize and the new product brought in.
...he came in as a new product, saying the things that others were afraid to say, but believed. He gained initial support, but still garnered heavy resistance. Once it was confirmed that he was in to stay, support increased because the product was gaining acceptance and credibility.
Promotional marketing continued with a massive media campaign, funded by the media itself, increasing product exposure and gaining more support. Product comparison tests (the debates) further cemented the differences over competing products, gaining further acceptance. Current events (San Bermardino) reflected a further need for the product and support edged upward.
Now, the promotional phase has ended so a new marketing strategy must be implemented to keep from going stale and maturing. There is evidence of it already being implemented……..
1. The statement that the product would not challenge as a 3rd party candidate, but would work and believed in the party.
2. A mellowing of statements in rallies and showing a more subdued personality that previously exhibited.
3. Smaller Town Hall meetings where in more intimate settings, the products true personality showed through.
4. Today’s statement that the product would be less devisive.
5. Going after the other Party candidate.
The purpose of these changes are to expand market segment and favorability.
What is interesting is that he is now transitioning himself to being the Party Leader. This transition is being helped by the other candidates themselves by echoing his positions after having had other positions.
Interesting also is that this transition is taking place while he is still gaining support. He is doing this before he hits the mature stage, the mark of a master marketeer. ..."
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We can see the affect Trump has had on Cruz. Ask Cruz a position question, he says,"I have the same view as Trump".
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We can see the affect Trump has had on Cruz. Ask Cruz a position question, he says,"I have the same view as Trump".
You are talking about the Trump of the past few months and not the liberal Trump of decades, right?
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Zang!
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You mean the "Democrat" Trump of 1988 who spoke at the Republican National Convention?
:evil:
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[youtube][/youtube]
You mean the "Democrat" Trump of 1988 who spoke at the Republican National Convention?
:evil:
[youtube]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tjLWjdqXXRE[/youtube]
I don't know, did he look like that guy in the YouTube video?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tjLWjdqXXRE
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For DMG and CD,
Proof that Trump has hit his ceiling............ :-D :-D
Packed to the rafters.......better raise the ceiling...........don't see Cruz or Rubio getting this type of reception......but Trumpeters are only there to see a celeb.....as the pundits will tell you. They are not voters.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWy7gsNXIAEFvuj.jpg)
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For DMG and CD, ... packed to the rafters.......
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWy7gsNXIAEFvuj.jpg)
Impressive but not quite Grant Park, 2008. Crowds can and often do get it wrong.
(http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200811/r310425_1364923.jpg)
Unfair comparison here, but crowd enthusiasm is not always the best measure of good policies:
(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTEW380cS25wNtmCQBzbqZjGQ5CmBAAXKvXQPTo8SI4tV-m6mXB7Q)
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But it is a measure of support and motivation.
Of course, we could look at Jeb and his "rallies". They can be held in a hotel restroom.
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But it is a measure of support and motivation.
Of course, we could look at Jeb and his "rallies". They can be held in a hotel restroom.
Not the main hotel restroom either. )
It reminds me of the precinct caucus here. We have an all Republican town on the outskirts of Minneapolis with a population 1400. We get no caucus turnout, no volunteer workers and no enthusiasm for the party, real conservatives or RINOs. Yet just a small boost in turnout here would have prevented the Al Franken false recount, prevented the Dems from getting their 60th Senator, and stopped Obamacare before it was ever deemed passed.
Got to hand it to the Trump supporters for showing they care. The one I know is doing a excellent job of defending and supporting him!
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Gotta keep you honest.
Seriously.......you only know one person supporting Trump?
I wonder how many people you know that actually do support Trump, but are afraid to say so. I have noticed that people are afraid to mention their support for him, until another supporter comes forward. Then you hear the sigh of relief that they are not alone.
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Gotta keep you honest.
Seriously.......you only know one person supporting Trump?
I wonder how many people you know that actually do support Trump, but are afraid to say so. I have noticed that people are afraid to mention their support for him, until another supporter comes forward. Then you hear the sigh of relief that they are not alone.
My cousins in Iowa fit the profile - so I am afraid to ask.
Interesting to hear how anti-Trump the college campus is even though my daughter goes to a less liberal school than most. It would be pathetic to lose the youth vote to Hillary when we have a younger, more dynamic candidate available to reach out to them. Is Hillary and 4-8 more years of the same really what is best for the 18-34 crowd? Is it what is best for blacks and Hispanics? Let's get serious and reach these people with a message that resonates.
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For DMG and CD, ... packed to the rafters.......
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWy7gsNXIAEFvuj.jpg)
Impressive but not quite Grant Park, 2008. Crowds can and often do get it wrong.
(http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200811/r310425_1364923.jpg)
Unfair comparison here, but crowd enthusiasm is not always the best measure of good policies:
(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTEW380cS25wNtmCQBzbqZjGQ5CmBAAXKvXQPTo8SI4tV-m6mXB7Q)
" Crowds can and often do get it wrong."
No they don't.
They represent their beliefs. There is nothing wrong with being ultranationalistic, unless of course, your views don't fit that of the country you're living in.
The US right now is seeking the course it will take. There are a lot of compromising, apologetic people, that want to give the country away for their own self interests and sway more power their way, or for their own skewed sense of justice, "white privilege" being chief amongst these, as though White Christians or any Christians for that matter, don't deserve a voice, much less their own country. You see it happening all across Europe, people thinking that others have a right to just immigrate any place they want, and then attempt to change it to the same cesspool they just left.
Trump is right, depending upon your view, which brings up an interesting question which I have asked here before and remains unanswered - "Why not divide the States into zones that represent the views of Liberals, Conservatives, and Independents?"
It's either that, or continue to have people living together that have no interest in doing so, and see where that goes.
I for one, like Trump, inasmuch, as he has the gonads to remove filters and say what is on several people's minds.
The Founding Fathers were right.... the tree of liberty needs to be refreshed with blood from time to time. Saying that is not politically correct and borders on being illegal these days.... which indicative of the entire problem.
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A much bigger crowd got Obama all wrong in 2008. (Doesn't mean Trump is wrong.)
We were going to heal the earth, make peace between the races and the religions, our enemies would see our goodness and our young people would see amazing opportunities. We were going to control guns, raise wages, lower the cost of healthcare. They were all wrong. Those policies had the opposite effect.
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A much bigger crowd got Obama all wrong in 2008. (Doesn't mean Trump is wrong.)
We were going to heal the earth, make peace between the races and the religions, our enemies would see our goodness and our young people would see amazing opportunities. We were going to control guns, raise wages, lower the cost of healthcare. They were all wrong. Those policies had the opposite effect.
You got me. I was mistaken.
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One commentator observed last week, Trump's supporters are the angriest about the direction of the country, rightfully so, really they've had it with both parties. PP, agree? As an aside, that was Perot's strength too, pointing out what was wrong with both sides.
Secondly this commentator questioned, do we make our best decisions when we're angry? No , we don't.
Expressing support for Trump in the year before the election is a great way of telling both parties how sick and tired you are about how things are going in Washington.
Actually picking someone who can win when you vote in your caucus or primary is a way of doing something about it.
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One commentator observed last week, Trump's supporters are the angriest about the direction of the country, rightfully so, really they've had it with both parties. PP, agree? As an aside, that was Perot's strength too, pointing out what was wrong with both sides.
Secondly this commentator questioned, do we make our best decisions when we're angry? No , we don't.
Expressing support for Trump in the year before the election is a great way of telling both parties how sick and tired you are about how things are going in Washington.
Actually picking someone who can win when you vote in your caucus or primary is a way of doing something about it.
Trump is the right person for the job. The rest are just more of the same. The idea that Caucasians have to surrender their countries in Europe, Britian, the States...because of White "privilege" and because those terrible Caucasians conquered everyone else, when every other people and country on earth, has done the same... it's old. It needs to stop....NOW. Affirmative action, loans for women and "minorities, that conversely, we Whites get to pay for, but not enjoy, in our home countries. No thank you....they can get stuffed...and what's more, is that any other person in any country, as long as they were not White, could say any of the aforementioned, and no one would even blink.
F em.
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Saying "F 'em" feels good, until we see the end of America with the election of the Empress Dowager of Chappaqua.
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DMG,
Hell yes we are angry and have had it with the party because the party only represents themselves and the elites. The GOPe has left the middle class behind to fend for themselves.
Why does anyone think that voting for the same old professional politicians would make any difference this time? Oh, Cruz and Rubio are different. Yeah right.
- First time Senators who decide to run for the Presidency after their first couple of years in office, just like O'Bummer did.
- Each are flip flopping on issues as needed to try and hide previous votes that the base would not support.
- Both are weak on immigration reform, and with Cruz, who the hell knows where he really stands.
- Both went for TPA which gave the Fast Track authority and also changed voting requirements that later allowed TPP to pass. (This also allowed for Cruz to claim that he was not for it later............after the damage was done and there could be no accountability.
- Each beholden to Super Pacs consisting of the elitists buying the candidates.
- Cruz whose wife is a permanent fixture with Goldman Sachs,, Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations.
And we are supposed to believe that this time it is different?
Just watch what happens if Trump is taken out of the race and Cruz becomes the front runner. He is going to be taken out by both the GOPe and the Dems, leading to Rubio who is Jeb lite. He will melt and submit to his masters just like all the others.
This is a war for the soul of the party. Either way, whatever happens, the GOPe is finished as it currently is, and that will be a well deserved end.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/the-great-republican-revolt/419118/ (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/the-great-republican-revolt/419118/)
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The end of America? Oh yeah, here we go again with that argument.
Why would it be the end? Oh right, because the GOPe would be afraid to challenge her, like they are afraid to challenge O'bummer. Instead, the GOP comes up with tripe like "this is not the hill to die on", or "we must pick battles that we can win". This was how Vietnam was fought and look what happened. If the same strategies had been applied in WW2, Europe would be speaking German, the Far East Japanese, and Russia would control still most of East Asia.
If the GOP had any scholonges, we would not be where we are now, and America could survive a Hillary presidency. But they have been emasculated on the alter of Political Correctness and fear of losing their power and influence that they have now.
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Saying "F 'em" feels good, until we see the end of America with the election of the Empress Dowager of Chappaqua.
I have made it my business to live amongst people that want to cut off my head. I'm ok with it.
The "end" isn't really then "end." Without exception, it is always the beginning of something new.
My take on the US?
I came from a broken home, exposed to drugs early, got into trouble for it, left home at 16, had to fend for myself....wanted to serve my country, almost aced the ASVAB, have stayed out of trouble for almost three decades now, speak several languages, hunt drug cartels honorably....only to be told by people like GM and others that I'm neither good enough to die for my country nor have the right to own firearms to protect my own home (bearing in mind that I actually survived a home invasion robbery in October of 2002 or thereabouts). There is an irony about not having firearms that I may or may not have had just previously, at that point that precluded me from being able to shoot the people that only didn't return and kill us because there was a five year old boy present. That's a fact.
Nope. Not interested in seeing people like that flourish. Let it fall. I've seen what my investment in being good has bought me there.
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By "End of America" I mean the American Creed.
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DDF,
My story........
Born in Oklahoma. Moved to San Bernardino in 1963. Mother died when I was 14, and Dad worked and had no time for me so I fended at home for myself. By 16, never saw my data because he had taken up and moved in with a woman and her 3 children. So I was completely on my own at that point.
After high school, went to work for a bank as a teller, but it was a job where there was little future. Had no motivation or time for college, so at 23, joined the Air Force. While in, I recognized that I could go to college and did so, graduating from Troy State and then going to LSU Shreveport. After graduation, held positions in a number of different administrative positions in hospitals and start up companies, but never a real future. Made several people wealthy in the start ups, but I never got anywhere. Finally went on my own, and since then have gotten to a good point professionally and monetarily, but three times, the government (both state and federal) has instituted new regulations and statutes that caused me to have to "re-invent" what I do. Each time, it damned near bankrupted me. Now I am at it again from a different direction that may finally give me what I want.
I have never lost my "working class" roots. I certainly identify with the working class more than with anyone else. I find the working class honest, trustworthy, and with more common sense than those who are over educated. I would much rather have a beer with them than with wine guzzling elitists.
I am becoming more and more a "pragmatic" conservative, call me moderate, recognizing that societal and cultural changes make purity conservatism a dinosaur that can never but achieved. For me, it is supporting a candidate that focuses upon the 2 or 3 most important issues that I care about, Security, Illegal Immigration, and Economic/Tax issues. Everything else is immaterial because the division of the country will not allow other change to occur.
You are right that the end is not the end, but is a new beginning. That is what the country is facing and what the politicians have wrought makes it likely that the end/beginning will begin soon. And it cannot be postponed. When it begins, we will need a pragmatic leader who can face the challenges and do what is needed, and not stick to old dogmatic beliefs.
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How do you define the American Creed?
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How do you define the American Creed?
Loved reading your story. I am currently starting my own aerospace company here, because I think it's bs that we have to buy attack choppers from Russia. Was at base and some of my brothers had just gotten back from Novosibirsk.
American Creed?
Freedom more than anything, to Americans, of all colors, so long as they really are Americans and not anchor babies or people that just decided to walk on in and help themselves to our Cheerios. Freedom to succeed, freedom to fail, freedom to pull themselves up from their own bootstraps as my grandfather told me, but notably absent, not allowing others to make excuses for their failures. No "ruling class," and though I don't drink, at all, ever, I too, would much rather have a beer than sip wine. I grew up in Iowa, on a pig farm, as did my brother who is also one of the tribe.
We detassled corn and shoveled a lot of pig dung, and came out of the fields at the end of a long day, with all of the cuts all over our arms, to come home in a few years to a country that isn't even ours and if someone says something, they cry "racism and bigotry."
I won't miss the double standards and ruling class, Hollywood elitists, or any of that crap.
Freedom? Wild west.
Sorry about the bankruptcy, but at least you don't make excuses waiting for someone to rescue you from your plight. lol..... Liberals these days... I have no doubt you will be successful and already are in some ways. I know I am. I have guarded the president in the country I live in and the Dalai Lama. I'm pretty proud of that.
Trump.... at least he is saying what is on people's minds. I'm all for it, even and especially if it opens up uncomfortable debate and challenges the status quo.
Cheers and Merry Christmas.
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quote author=ppulatie
My story........
Thank you for posting that, great story. I didn't pick up on the southern accent in your writing. :wink:
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Thanks. And the accent is gone. But about Oklahoma, don't let me get started on the outhouse and having to go out there at night with a flashlight. Talk about frightening when you are 5 years old.
What I did not say is that though I had a roof over my head when I was 16 to 17, I frequently did not have food to eat and I had few clothes. Most noticed that I would wear clothes until they were about ready to shred. I was lucky that one family took interest in me during that time. They would frequently prepare more than enough food and bring some to me, or else I would have really starved. Can't tell you how many nights a week I had bologna sandwiches. Only when I got a job washing dishes in a greasy spoon did I finally have food that I could count on daily. (They let me eat breakfast and lunch.)
Where I live now is a solid middle class neighborhood. It's a mixture of white and hispanic, working and retired, with a few Section 8's included. I can say with absolute certainty that over half worry about their future and their jobs. Many worry about having a job the next week and are making a decision of which bills to pay weekly so that they can have food on the table. Moreover, they worry what type of country that their kids and grandkids are set to inherit. They fear, an rightly so, that it will be a future where their kids will not be as well off as they are. I have the same worries for my grandkids.
This is why I am so sympathetic to the middle class and why I understand them so well. I have been there and lived the lives that so many have at one time or another. And I can be just like them again with another stroke of a government pen.
Trump has hit upon the concerns of this demographic that others cannot see, probably due to a lack of shared experience. That is why they are going to him in droves. If you look at Trump rallies, it is not just the numbers of people, but it is the make up of the crown. Though mostly white, there are significant numbers of blacks and hispanics. And based upon their clothing and appearance, it is not just middle class but also a significant portion would appear to be upper middle class. Ages are across the board.
Trump has resonated with the people like no one since Reagan or "spit" O'Bama. And as people pay attention, that is why his support is growing.
For the record, I never watched the Apprentice or his other shows. I never paid attention to him, read the book or anything. But it was watching one of his rallies on tv that I realized he was speaking to me.
DDF,
You and I have lived different lives and circumstances, but we do have a shared experience in many ways. Good luck with building your own company. Hard work and long hours, but well worth it. Maybe we can both leave a legacy on the world with our efforts.
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American Creed= Free minds, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of contract, right of self-defense (hence guns and knives, etc) property rights, privacy, all connected with responsibility for the consequences of one's action. All this from our Creator, not the State nor majority vote.
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American Creed= Free minds, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of contract, right of self-defense (hence guns and knives, etc) property rights, privacy, all connected with responsibility for the consequences of one's action. All this from our Creator, not the State nor majority vote.
Responsibility of one's actions...I agree with that. I don't agree with one man telling another man, once he's a law abiding citizen, that he still suffers from a lack of rights. I'll never buy into that, because the 2nd part of what you said is absolutely true....from ONE'S CREATOR....not a man or group of men.
PPULTIE.... cheers.... I've had businesses before and true....many, many hours. Hopefully our future endeavors will bear fruit.
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American Creed= Free minds, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of contract, right of self-defense (hence guns and knives, etc) property rights, privacy, all connected with responsibility for the consequences of one's action. All this from our Creator, not the State nor majority vote.
Simple and brilliant. Not too many writers since the Founders ever stop and express this so clearly.
I would like to share this with my daughter pondering how to approach the issues as she comes out of a confusion called college. Share this with Bigdog too. He runs into a few young people. And Conrad.
Someone please tell the Syrian refugees and the people crossing our border, America isn't just a place on the map, it is a creed we share.
Creed = a set of beliefs that guide one's actions.
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I wish we could get George Will to tell us how he really thinks about Donald Trump instead of sugar coating all the time...
Will Donald Trump End the GOP’s Role as America’s Conservative Party?
GEORGE WILL
If you look beyond Donald Trump’s comprehensive unpleasantness — is there a disagreeable human trait he does not have? — you might see this: He is a fundamentally sad figure. His compulsive boasting is evidence of insecurity. His unassuageable neediness suggests an aching hunger for others’ approval to ratify his self-admiration. His incessant announcements of his self-esteem indicate that he is not self-persuaded. Now, panting with a puppy’s insatiable eagerness to be petted, Trump has reveled in the approval of Vladimir Putin, murderer and war criminal.
Putin slyly stirred America’s politics by saying Trump is “very talented,” adding that he welcomed Trump’s promise of “closer, deeper relations,” whatever that might mean, with Russia. Trump announced himself flattered to be “so nicely complimented” by a “highly respected” man: “When people call you brilliant, it’s always good.” When MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Putin “kills journalists and political opponents and invades countries,” Trump replied that “at least he’s a leader.” Besides, Trump breezily asserted, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.” Two days later, Trump, who rarely feigns judiciousness, said: “It has not been proven that he’s killed reporters.”
Perhaps the 56 journalists murdered were coincidental victims of amazingly random violence that the former KGB operative’s police state is powerless to stop. It has, however, been “proven,” perhaps even to Trump’s exacting standards, that Putin has dismembered Ukraine. (Counts one and two at the 1946 Nuremberg trials concerned conspiracy to wage, and waging, aggressive war.) Until now, Trump’s ever-more-exotic effusions have had an almost numbing effect. Almost. But by his embrace of Putin, and by postulating a slanderous moral equivalence — Putin kills journalists, the United States kills terrorists, what’s the big deal, or the difference? — Trump has forced conservatives to recognize their immediate priority.
Certainly conservatives consider it crucial to deny the Democratic party a third consecutive term controlling the executive branch. Extending from eight to twelve years its use of unbridled executive power would further emancipate the administrative state from control by either a withering legislative branch or a supine judiciary. But first things first. Conservatives’ highest priority now must be to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination in this the GOP’s third epochal intra-party struggle in 104 years.
Theodore Roosevelt campaigned for the Republican nomination on an explicitly progressive platform. Having failed to win the nomination, he ran a third-party campaign against the Republican nominee, President William Howard Taft, and the Democratic nominee, New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson, who that November would become the first person elected president who was deeply critical of the American founding.
TR shared Wilson’s impatience with the separation of powers, which both men considered an 18th-century relic incompatible with a properly energetic executive. Espousing unconstrained majoritarianism, TR favored a passive judiciary deferential to elected legislatures and executives; he also endorsed the powers of popular majorities to overturn judicial decisions and recall all public officials.
Taft finished third, carrying only Utah and Vermont. But because Taft hewed to conservatism, and was supported by some other leading Republicans (e.g., Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, one of TR’s closest friends, and Elihu Root, TR’s secretary of war and then secretary of state), the Republican Party survived as a counterbalance to a progressive Democratic Party. In 1964, Barry Goldwater mounted a successful conservative insurgency against a Republican establishment that was content to blur and dilute the Republican distinctiveness that had been preserved 52 years earlier. Goldwater defeated New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller for the nomination, just as Taft had defeated TR, a former New York governor. Like Taft, Goldwater was trounced (he carried six states). But the Republican party won five of the next seven presidential elections. In two of them, Ronald Reagan secured the party’s continuity as the custodian of conservatism.
In 2016, a Trump nomination would not just mean another Democratic presidency. It would mean the loss of what Taft and then Goldwater made possible — a conservative party as a constant presence in American politics. It is possible Trump will not win any primary, and that by the middle of March our long national embarrassment will be over. But this avatar of unfettered government and executive authoritarianism has mesmerized a large portion of Republicans for six months. The larger portion should understand this: One hundred and four years of history is in the balance. If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2016, there might not be a conservative party in 2020 either. — George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. © 2015 The Washington Post
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428906/donald-trump-threat-republican-party
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Not to pile on here, well maybe...
One observer adds to my point that schlonged really meant raped not screwed because it was certainly not what she wanted, but further than that, the Trump characterization is racist because the one doing the schlonging was a black man. All he really did was eek out a win over her in a somewhat fair election. Hardly a schlonging. The words we choose matter.
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To not know we have a nuclear triad might be inexcusable and disqualifying but how about a big time media mogul not knowing that Putin is having opposing journalists murdered and having the presumed Republican nominee taking Putin's side on that? We criticize liberals for living in their cocoons on the east and west coast and never talking to anyone outside their viewpoint, but Trump seems to live in a cocoon of one. It may include a couple of yes-men and yes-woman, Mrs. Trump, but no one tells him anything beyond what he already thinks he knows - unless they want to hear, 'you're fired'.
Kind words from Doug to our frontrunner on Putin not killing journalists this Christmas Eve: know the facts or shut the *%#* up. Here is what we know:
Who is murdering Russian Journalists?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428916/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-mutual-admiration
That there is no proof that Putin is guilty of murder is an absurdity.
Persons interested in the truth can form a realistic impression of Putin’s guilt on the basis of three well-known murders, those of Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, and Alexander Litvinenko. In each case, the pattern is the same: a serious political opponent, clear evidence of official involvement, and extraordinary efforts to sabotage the investigation. If one adds to this, Putin’s statement in his inaugural speech in 2000 that “in Russia, the President answers for everything,” the reality of the situation becomes completely clear. In each case, the pattern is the same: a serious political opponent, clear evidence of official involvement, and extraordinary efforts to sabotage the investigation. Shchekochikhin was a member of the State Duma and a reporter for the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. He investigated the mysterious 1999 Russian apartment bombings that brought Putin to power and, in his capacity as a journalist, he also investigated the case of the Grand and Three Whales furniture stores, which were founded by the father of a high-ranking FSB (Federal Security Service) official and had reportedly evaded millions of dollars in import duties. He had been in perfect health but became sick after returning to Moscow from a trip to Ryazan in July 2003. The illness progressed catastrophically, from peeling skin to “edemas of the respiratory system and brain” and finally death. His relatives were denied an official medical report about the cause of his illness and forbidden to take tissue samples. At his funeral, no one was allowed to approach the body. Perhaps the best-known killing of a political opponent was that of Alexander Litvinenko, a fugitive FSB agent who wrote about the 1999 apartment bombings and the FSB’s links to organized crime. Litvinenko became ill on November 1 after drinking tea with Andrei Lugovoy, the owner of a Moscow security company, and Lugovoy’s associate, Dmitri Kovtun, in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London. For the next two days, he began to suffer from vomiting and diarrhea. His hair began falling out and he experienced a sharp drop in his white-blood-cell count. Litvinenko’s doctors suspected radiation poisoning, but only gamma and beta particles can penetrate the skin and there was no gamma or beta radiation in his blood. On November 23, he was pronounced dead.
Litvinenko wrote a statement in which he accused Putin of his murder. “You may succeed in silencing one man,” he wrote, “but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.” After Litvinenko’s death, British experts discovered polonium-210, an alpha emitter, in his urine. Polonium cannot pass through the body but is deadly when taken internally. Traces of polonium were subsequently found by the British police at the Pine Bar, at a sushi restaurant where Litvinenko dined with Lugovoy and Kovtun on October 16, and on the seat occupied by Lugovoy on a British Airways flight from Moscow to London on October 25.
At a news conference after Litvinenko’s death but before the polonium was discovered, Putin said there was no indication that Litvinenko had died a violent death and that the case was being used for political purposes. Six months after Litvinenko’s death, the British prosecutor officially requested Lugovoy’s extradition. Putin refused, saying the Russian constitution barred sending citizens abroad for trial, even though Russia had signed the Council of Europe Extradition Convention in 2001. In December 2007, Lugovoy was elected to the Russian parliament. He insisted he was being framed by Britain’s MI5. In an interview with the Russian press about requests that he go to London for questioning, he said, “Why should I drop everything and rush off to England?” Another well-known dissident who was murdered was Anna Politkovskya, who reported for Novaya Gazeta on Russian atrocities in Chechnya. On October 7, 2006, she was shot four times in her apartment building after stepping out of the elevator on her floor.
After her death, Putin said that Politkovskaya’s influence was “minimal.” He also said that her murder “caused much more damage to the authorities than her reporting” — raising the possibility that, in his mind, if it had caused less damage, killing her would have been acceptable. In November 2008, three persons were put on trial for Politkovskaya’s murder: two Chechen brothers, Ibrahim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov, and Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former member of the Russian internal ministry’s organized-crime unit. A fourth person, Pavel Ryaguzov, a former FSB lieutenant colonel, was suspected of taking a leading role in the plot but was not charged due to a lack of evidence. A third brother, Rustam Makhmudov, the suspected triggerman, escaped abroad. Putin hinted that the mastermind was the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a political enemy of Putin’s.
The trial ended on February 19, 2009, with the acquittal of all three defendants amid signs that the FSB had sabotaged the prosecution. The FSB leaked information about the identity of the suspects, making it possible for the triggerman to escape, and prevented investigators from seizing Ryaguzov’s office computer. The ties between the assassination team, the FSB, and the police were also found to be far more extensive than was first revealed. Sergei Sokolov, the deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, which conducted its own investigation, testified that Dzabrail Makhmudov was an FSB agent and that he and his brothers were recruited by their uncle, Lomi-Ali Gaitukayev, also an FSB agent, who reported to Ryaguzov and was in prison for the attempted murder of a Ukrainian businessman. In June 2009, the acquittals were overturned by the Russian Supreme Court, which cited procedural errors. In the meantime, Novaya Gazeta found evidence that Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, a high-ranking Moscow police officer and witness at the first trial, had been hired by Gaitukayev to place Politkovskaya under surveillance. He gave the assassins her address and the weapons and bullets they used to kill her.
Russia’s Weimar Syndrome In August 2011, Pavluchenkov was arrested and charged with Politkovskaya’s murder. He struck a deal with the prosecution: In exchange for naming the mastermind of the crime, the charge against him was reduced from organizing the murder to involvement in it. But he never testified about the supposed mastermind. Instead, Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the Investigative Committee, said that “Pavlyuchenkov . . . testified that he was told by Gaitukayev that the masterminds were Berezovsky and [Akhmed] Zakaev” (Zakaev is the head of the Chechen government in exile). In fact, Pavluchenkov’s deal with the prosecution made it possible to cover the trail leading to the mastermind. There is no evidence to support the official story that Berezovsky was behind the crime. On June 20, 2014, five persons were convicted. Gaitukayev, who recruited the gang, and his nephew Rustam Makhmudov, the gunman, received life in prison. Ibragim and Dzabarail Makhmudov were sentenced to 12 and 14 years respectively for following Politkovskaya on the day she was killed. Khadzhikurbanov received 20 years as an accomplice. None of them is likely to have known who ordered the killing.
The cases of Shchekochikhin, Litvinenko, and Politkovskaya are among the best-known of the political murders in Russia under Putin, but there are many others where the pattern of likely regime or FSB involvement and a subsequent sabotage of the investigation is clearly evident, including the cases of the American journalist Paul Klebnikov, human-rights activist Natalya Estimirov, Duma deputy Sergei Yushenkov, and others. Seen as a whole, these cases make clear that what is involved is deliberate terror against the opposition that, in the unitary Russian system, could only be directed by Putin. Unfortunately, American presidential candidates are often not interested in understanding the details of what is happening in Russia, and a particularly reckless candidate can become what Lenin described as a “useful idiot.” This is a person whose superficiality makes him ideally suited to serve Russian purposes and whose self-confidence is constantly stoked with signs of esteem from the Russian leaders, who assure him that whatever others may think of him, they are and will remain his true friends. — David Satter’s latest book, The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin, Yale Press 2016
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"That there is no proof that Putin is guilty of murder is an absurdity"
I would add, "that there is no proof Hillary is guilty of multiple felonies" is also an absurdity.
There is much corruption here. Not as violent and maybe more behind the scenes but ask any Eastern European immigrant. They see it just about as corrupt here in the good old USA.
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"That there is no proof that Putin is guilty of murder is an absurdity"
I would add, "that there is no proof Hillary is guilty of multiple felonies" is also an absurdity.
There is much corruption here. Not as violent and maybe more behind the scenes but ask any Eastern European immigrant. They see it just about as corrupt here in the good old USA.
I have lived under Putin, my daughter still does.... My only comment is, "what's not to like?" Seriously.
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DDF,
Could you explain more on Putin? I would love to hear what you have to say and have experienced. This is the type of input the media will not give us.
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"I have lived under Putin, my daughter still does.... My only comment is, "what's not to like?" Seriously."
Well people who have criticized him have been found dead. Who would believe this does not occur without his "OK"?
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ccp,
Objection! Speculation!
Judge: Sustained
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Anyone who thinks Putin knew nothing of this guy's murder with polonium (only 3 countries in the world can even produce it) can go ahead and vote for Hillary because she is honest. BTW the polonium trail led back to Russia but Putin refused to let the British police track beyond the airport. Gee I wonder why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko
I rest my case. :wink:
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Rebuttal,
So let's see..........
At some point, the new President will be having to engage in negotiations with Putin. So will Putin be willing to negotiate with someone who has called him a killer? And will this cause him to take a more hardline approach with that person?
Or will Putin respond better to someone who shows a bit of discretion?
I, for one, would want to negotiate with someone who showed the discretion...................
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DDF,
Could you explain more on Putin? I would love to hear what you have to say and have experienced. This is the type of input the media will not give us.
Of course I can.
The last time I was in Russia, they shut down a TV station not far from my house for mocking Putin. I know some people won't like that, but I support it. Russia isn't for eveyone. Putin is not a fan of multiculturalism. He is quiet, doesn't talk and just listens....a trait common to many people in Russia, and smart.
Chechnya and journalists missing? So what? It's a hazardous place to work.
Former KGB agent winds up dead in Britian? Nothing was ever proven.
Besides, show me a government that doesn't kill, and we're going to act like unproven things can be held against one person in particular? Please.
People can say what they want, but Putin is a couple of things, he's PRO Russia and works to presrve Russia for Russians, unlike Obama and Liberals. Putin isn't apologetic, also unlike Barack and Liberals.
The only caveat is that one has to be mature enough to understand that culture does not equal skin colour.
Did you know, that on the busses in Russia, there are pictures of Fallen Russian soldiers, with their names? You can easily differentiate the Muslim soldiers serving in the photos.... they too adopt a Russian culture distinct from their religion because if they don't.... there will be hell to pay.
One culture per country. That is the only way things ever work. Violence will always be an integral part of that. Disagree? Show me a government, soldier, agent or police officer that will leave their weapon at home. They might tell you to, but they won't.
Violence.... it IS the human way. Any saying it isn't is mistaken.... and anyone judging someone else for being human, is a hypocrite.
Putin is good....for Russia.
Ps.... in all sincerity...I applied for the FSB, and wanted to work there with all my heart. When going throught the application process, you have to have a current member working there vouch for you... this person wanted American money more than us being a family in Russia...so...I don't work there and no longer live in Russia, pretty straight forward.
The thing I love about Putin and people that don't like people like him, is that he could care less about feelings, and goes with principles, the way we all should be.
The trick is, living in a country that will accept you guarding the same country. If you can do that, you belong.... if not.... you should find a new country, or fight the one that you're in. Most people lack the sack to do so. It is what it is.
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America (from my perspective), is having a battle over who is, and who is not "American."
That won't be sorted out with words, and it won't last much longer either.
I guarantee it.
Look this post up in say three years. If I'm wrong, I'll admit it.
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Thank you. Interesting points.
When looking at it from a Russian perspective, Putin does make sense.
Unfortunately, we tend to look at things from an American perspective. We forget that Russia has throughout the ages been the victim (yes, I said that) of the Mongols and many other groups. Therefore, security and the fear of neighbors and insurgents becomes a prime factor in thinking.
You are right in my opinion about what is happening in the US. We are becoming balkanized along ethnic grounds and the liberal bias is making it worse every day. I too fear what it will be like in three years.
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Thank you. Interesting points.
When looking at it from a Russian perspective, Putin does make sense.
Unfortunately, we tend to look at things from an American perspective. We forget that Russia has throughout the ages been the victim (yes, I said that) of the Mongols and many other groups. Therefore, security and the fear of neighbors and insurgents becomes a prime factor in thinking.
You are right in my opinion about what is happening in the US. We are becoming balkanized along ethnic grounds and the liberal bias is making it worse every day. I too fear what it will be like in three years.
Balkanization is a good thing.
Victims? Not since World War II vs Germany, and they still got stomped, a country more than a 1000 years old. 8-)
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Merry Christmas everybody! Especially my Jewish and atheism worshiping friends! I have gone into the Christian Church and report back that they are still hiding their real intentions with talk of peace, good tidings and cheer. )
Following up here... The poll cited in Trump's favor still has him losing to Hillary and matching up against her the worst of the top 3 Republicans. The recent poll that oversampled Republicans, pp's words, has Trump losing to Bernie by 13. Huffington, cited by pp as the best compilation, has Trump trailing Clinton by nearly 20. Oh well. Trump wanted Clinton to be President anyway. We'd rather lose, get Hillary and blow the party up than have a liberal like Rubio or Cruz, we are to believe. And George Will, Bill Kristol, Bret Stephens, WSJ, Weekly Standard, National Review, Hot Air and Powerline are all just crazy centrists. Fuck em. We'll build a conservative coalition that doesn't include anybody that called themselves a conservative before we redefined it.
Pat, I deserved the tough replies; I was kind of hard on Trump recently. Regarding your long posts where points 1-273 basically say Trump is leading in the nomination polls and people underestimated him, I say, ... uh ... we know that.
As to not really answering my two questions, I understand. They are unanswerable in defense of Trump. Let's review:
1) What are the limits on government that are left after Trump completely blows off the 4th, 5th and 9th amendments for example on private enterprises using government powers instead of money, markets and consent for their takings? The answer is, nothing limits government when these limits don't apply. It isn't that we disagree, it is that the unanswerable question still remains, without those limits- what are the limits on government? To the followup, what kind of Justices would he appoint if he doesn't have any sense of what our constitution is, what it says or what it is supposed to do, I received this back: Well, Souter and Kennedy were lousy picks too. In case this needs to be said, that is the reason for conservatives' concern, not something that alleviates it.
2) Regarding the illegal immigration roundup for deportation, my question was, how exactly is he going to do this? (We all know he isn't.) The answer received back is that like war, he is going to keep the details of how he will conduct these raids in the neighborhoods secret. Nice try. That answer almost worked for hiding a non-existent war strategy but it doesn't work at all for domestic policy. Democrats and the media will eat him alive on this. How is he going to do this? When he tones the rhetoric down to the point where he is perceived as reasonable to a wider electorate, it will necessarily include some of what you call amnesty, and what everyone can see makes him no stronger or different than Cruz or the other competitors. He has not answered this and if you answer it for him... that doesn't count.
Does anyone remember when the Feds under Janet Reno raided a Miami family home to get Elian Gonzalez? It was an ugly scene. Now we are going to do 20 million of these if you believe Trump. They aren't all kids that just arrived, but they all do have a story. Or will they self-deport - the line that worked so well for Romney.
Six-year-old Elian Gonzalez seized at gunpoint in a raid by 151 BORTAC agents in his Miami home, April 22, 2000:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGIJvGZq_Bc
At a ratio of 151 Federal agents to every 6 year boy seized, we will need 3 billion federal agents to conduct the secret, surprise raids we are promised. At least they won't be constrained by that annoying 4th amendment.
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Six-year-old Elian Gonzalez seized at gunpoint in a raid by 151 BORTAC agents in his Miami home, April 22, 2000:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGIJvGZq_Bc
At a ratio of 151 Federal agents to every 6 year boy seized, we will need 3 billion federal agents to conduct the secret, surprise raids we are promised. At least they won't be constrained by that annoying 4th amendment.
I'm failing to see whatthe problem with this was. A boy was returned to his father.
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DMG, in reply....
1. The poll I posted that have the Rep oversampled, there was an "interesting" factoid found in it by another person. Turns out that in an obscure area of the results, the poll numbers showed that it was the Dems oversampled. This was brought to the attention of the pollster and they admitted that the Dems were the ones oversampled. Just a minor error had occurred on that one line.
2. What are the limits on government power? That really is the question that needs to be answered. And of which there will always be controversy.
When I consider this question, I always go back to the Federalist Papers and the arguments presented for and against the Constitution. The basic argument with the anti-Federalist position was that with the Constitution, it make for a stronger government and eventually that government would usurp the powers of the states. The anti side wanted less government and more state. (Interesting isn't it that now the conservatives promote the Federalist Papers, and the Dems go even more extreme.)
The anti-Federalists who wrote the arguments for their side absolutely predicted what would happen in the future. They literally foresaw that the government would become a monster agency controlling the lives of all and would essentially control the states. They also saw that a new political class would emerge, and they saw that the judiciary would become the problem that it is now. Yet, the anti-Federalists are the ones held in disgrace.
The other side of the coin is that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was written about 240 years ago. (This part is going to set your hair on fire.) Then, there were only about 3.5 million people in the country. The country was rural without even electricity, sewage, and the other conveniences of life. There was no way that the authors of the Constitution could see the progress to be made and the changes to the country. In large part, that is why the Constitution was written with such vagueness in many areas.
The progress of civilization dictates that there must be an ability to adapt to the new changes that will occur in society and technology. And there must be an entity that can lead the way for adaptation. Of course, that entity must be a government that is more centralized rather than spread out fully across the states.
To provide an example on technological changes, let's take the 4th Amendment. Back in the 1700's, weaponry was breach loading firearms and cannon. The 2nd Amendment gave the right to bear arms. There was no question of limitations because the arms were certainly needed for the young country.
Now we look to today. Machine guns, missiles, RPGs, tanks, etc. Does the 4th mean that all are acceptable to own? Why own fully functional RPG's? Also fully functional tanks with the ammo? Are restrictions required? And what about the mentally ill or felons? So the 4th is not all encompassing and inviolate. Then who must decide whether ownership of certain weapons are allowable? The states would have some rights, but also the government.
Look at technology. Computers and the Internet. This has provoked radical change in society. Everything has been affected from privacy rights to freedom of speech. Who and how is this to be regulated? When the changes occur and they affect previously accepted norms, then litigation is required, usually at the state level, but also the federal level. But the courts are not prepared for this nor understand the arguments, so they rely often on previous precedent. Rulings are made that may make no sense in light of the new products, but occur anyway. Who is there to sort this out?
One can argue Article 10 and States Rights, but there are problems with this. Take gun ownership for example. You live in Florida and legally own rifles, shotguns and hand guns. You decide to go hunting in Maine, loan up the SUV and go. Then you hit Maryland and get pulled over for a traffic violation. They notice the weapons in the vehicle. You are immediately arrested and become a felon, because under Maryland law, you must register weapons all weapons. Maryland does not accept Article 10 and Florida law on firearms.
The problem of Governmental Power is the result of incompetent people being elected to Congress and the Presidency. They make policies that establish Federal Agencies to administer the new policies like the CFPB and Dodd Frank, Obamacare, the EPA, DOE, etc. And when the new Agencies get up and running, they are tasked with creating the laws and regulations to enforce the new policies.
You also have the "games" that the politicians play with their electorate and their votes. Take TPA for example.
Both sides wanted TPP to be passed. They knew that they could not get the 67 votes to pass. So they create the TPA bill that essentially says instead of 67 votes to pass, you need 51 votes to deny and they pass it. So they simply changed the rules to avoid their constitutional requirements. (Cruz voted for this bill...later he said he was deceived by it.)
TPP then comes up and with it, 51 votes against cannot be mustered, so it passes, where otherwise it would have been denied. (Cruz votes against it and can provide the excuse that TPA deceived him, or he would have voted against it. Misdirection?) These are the games they play.
Frankly, there are probably few limits left on governmental power. This is because government is like any firm. It must grow or it loses influence and dies. So it grows by assuming more power and responsibility.
The only way to restrain this growth is to cut off funding and to cut manpower. Inefficient agencies must be eliminated and others restructured. If not, continued growth will occur. This is how government has restrained and shrunk the military. But the government will not allow this to happen to them.
Trump has said that he is ready to eliminate 5 different Agencies and wants to restructure others. Then he wants to reduce waste, spending and to make them more efficient. He would be treating the Agencies as a business. Will it work? Certainly the Agencies and the Congress will do everything they can to stop him. And for the Agencies, it is try to delay changes until Trump is out of office. But if you want to restrain Governmental Power, this is where it begins.
As to Supreme Court appointments, he has indicated that he wanted judges who would follow the rule of law. As to anything else, if he cites "who" he would appoint, it would just provide the anti-Trump forces more ammunition to go after him.
Immigration? You want detailed plans....? Whatever he says, he will be "eaten alive" anyway.
Eminent Domain? SCOTUS has effectively ruled on that case. In Kelo, they stated that Connecticutt had laws on the books that governed Eminent Domain and those laws would apply. So in that case, it was Article 10 and States rights that prevailed. But SCOTUS also stated that the States had the authority to change their laws to meet what their states wanted, so Article 10 applied. And SCOTUS also stated that the States had to define Public Interest for themselves. Article 10 again.
You argue that Trump will change all of this. I ask "HOW"? He does not have the power as President to do so. You might say by Executive Order, but that only applies to Federal Agencies, and this would not work.
Frankly, I see the Eminent Domain argument as irrelevant.
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Not sure that this really is the thread for this conversation, but let's run with it , , , for now.
"The progress of civilization dictates that there must be an ability to adapt to the new changes that will occur in society and technology. And there must be an entity that can lead the way for adaptation. Of course, that entity must be a government that is more centralized rather than spread out fully across the states."
This is profoundly wrong. As I understand the central point of the American Creed is that our lives are NOT centrally directed. Free Minds and Free Markets!
There is much that I disagree with it the rest of Pat's post, but this I think is the central point.
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Knew people would not like that statement and all the other I wrote. :-D :-D :-D
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You are missing my point. Maybe I did not put it properly.
There is a need for States Rights and Article 10 protections, but when they conflict with other states and the other states do not accept Article 10 protections, then thee must be a regulating authority.
When technology introduces new innovations that causes conflicts with previous standards and the courts cannot resolve the issues, then there must be a way to resolve the issues.
There are certain needs that only a federal government can take care of like defense. There are other needs that a state is better equipped to take care of. There must be a balance between the two. But unfortunately, government intrudes in places that it should not, and they do it as a need to justify their existence and to increase their power.
With the American Creed, yes, freedom, free markets etc. are the key. But this assumes that people are also honest and through working towards their own goals, they can also benefit mankind. But human nature does not act that way. Far too many will act in ways to benefit themselves at the expense of others. And when you have entities like the banks and Wall Street firms, how does the public get protected from their practices?
Federal Government must be a fine balance between serving the public in its best interests and becoming an overwhelming force that acts against the public good. The problem is that government is now populated by those who have no regard for this balance, but instead to seek an enhancement of their powers and authority.
Government must also seek the same balance in "American Creed" freedoms. It must allow freedom of speech but at the same time, be able to place limits on it like "shouting fire in a crowded theater". It must allow for 2nd Amendment protections, but at the same time, it must have the ability to restrict 2nd Amendment protections in the case of felons, etc.
Again, the problem is that the bureaucrats over exceed their authority and place harmful restrictions based upon a whim or in the case of global warming, false science. And these bureaucrats are put into their places by incompetent politicians who likely believe in their same causes.
The problem is how to restrain government from enacting these foolish policies.
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So the answer is to unleash Donald Trump?
What principles guide him over time? Hard to tell with the many cognitively dissonant positions he has held in the last few years , , ,
What criteria would he apply to the selection of nominees to the Supreme Court?
How would his approach to the Rule of Law differ from Baraq's?
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So the answer is to unleash Donald Trump?
What principles guide him over time? Hard to tell with the many cognitively dissonant positions he has held in the last few years , , ,
What criteria would he apply to the selection of nominees to the Supreme Court?
How would his approach to the Rule of Law differ from Baraq's?
It will be the top people.
His supreme court picks will be the greatest, most luxurious, most classy supreme court justices ever.
Rule of law?
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https://www.facebook.com/ProducerPetersen/photos/a.309300609128926.72545.294291737296480/1010220155703631/?type=3&theater
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Yes, Donald has contributed to all of those Democrats, but at the same time he was also contributing to Republican candidates. That is what business people do, especially those living in the large urban areas.
If you want a purity candidate that has never done the same, fine. But that will eliminate large numbers of very competent people who could run the country quite well. What we are seeing with Donald is exactly the reasons why good competent people do not get into politics. Why put up with the crap and having reputations dragged across the mud? Why waste the time when they could be doing good elsewhere by making money and creating wealth and jobs?
If you want a professional class of politicians who are incompetent and care only about themselves, their party and getting elected, then let's just continue on the same course. Let's elect those who are "party approved" and "party tested" and then have them screw the people on a daily basis by passing legislation that is designed to assist their masters.
The US as it stands now only has a handful of years to change course. Will that happen under Rubio? Hell no. Under Cruz? Hell no. Both are nothing more than pawns in a huge game designed to benefit party interests and to make money.
Will it change under Trump? Probably not. But he has a better chance that the others because he can rally the masses better than most. Unfortunately, this will not be enough either because the entrenched interests that influence current politicians will not let hi prevail.
I am just going to sit back and watch Rubio be given the nomination. Then I will watch his failures and his sell outs and at the end, say I told you so. Hopefully then, I will be in a financial position where I can avoid the worst of the coming collapse.
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The ability of the constitution to adapt to new wisdom and changing times is contained in Article 5, the process for amending it, not in its alleged 'vagueness'.
"Congress shall pass no law abridging..." still means Congress pass no law abridging... .
The 10th Amendment [Article 10?] states:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
I don't know what part of -those powers are reserved to the states and to the people- is confusing to the left or anyone else.
What kind of Justices would DT appoint? What will guide him on possibly the most responsibility of the Presidency? Based on what he has been saying, he will be guided what supporters of limited government (such as the Founders) consider to be wrongheaded thinking.
It isn't the relatively rare occurrence or narrow question of government executed private takings; it is the thinking and (lack of?) core principles that issue reveals.
A man's home is his castle. In the cases discussed the person in the forefront was a woman and it was her castle that was taken. The power of the crony capitalist, whether is isTrump or Pfizer, combined with the power of government is yugely greater than the individual. The power of all of us is greater than the crony and the government only if we honor and stand by our agreed core principles. The 4th amendment couldn't be more clear. From law.cornell.edu: The Fourth Amendment enforces the notion that “each man's home is his castle”, secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. The 5th amendment continues on that any takings are for "public use" and the 9th amendment, if it wasn't clear already, goes further to say that unenumerated rights receive the same protection as the specified ones. Conservatives especially in the context of judicial picks are NOT looking for someone who wants to find wiggle room in that framework. Politically, his support for big government power weakens the political argument that needs to be made against the big government party candidate the way the Romneycare weakened the case against Obamacare, even though arguably there was a difference.
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"Why put up with the crap and having reputations dragged across the mud?"
- Very funny. Who dragged more reputations through the gutter this campaign season than the namesake of this thread?
"care only about themselves, their party and getting elected, then let's just continue on the same course."
- With respect, it is crazy to consider people like Rubio and Cruz establishment, self centered and running to continue the status quo.
"the entrenched interests that influence current politicians will not let him prevail."
- If he wins or loses, it will come down to votes, not evil people behind a curtain.
"I am just going to sit back and watch Rubio be given the nomination. Then I will watch his failures and his sell outs..."
- The table is being set perfectly for a very conservative and inspiring Rubio to emerge with an image of being reasonable and acceptable. All he needs now are the votes! The check and balance against a sellout Republican President would be to elect a wise and conservative congress. This is a big part of what failed during the W Bush years. When he strayed in the wrong direction expanding the federal role in education and continuing the federal role in housing and everything else, no one stopped him. Any failure to reform the country under a Rubio administration will come out of a divided Senate, not the White House.
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Are you going to do a Constitutional Convention for everything that comes up? Or Amendments to the Bill of Rights? Can't happen so there must be another mechanism.
Again, SCOTUS ruled on Kelo. They ruled that the State Laws were valid and it was up to the states to change the laws as necessary or desired. This is Article 10 in full display.
If you want to argue that SCOTUS overplayed its hand, then you might as well go back and force a revision to Marbury v Madison (1803) which set the boundaries for judicial review.
We are a country split into three basic factions now. The middle and extreme left, the moderates, and the middle and extreme right. The left and the right are rigid in their beliefs and want their views absolute. The middle wants compromise. What will be the outcome, who knows? But I am predicting another round of financial and then societal collapse.
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Come on...........the mud raking has been going on long before Trump. And he is saying only what needs to be said to destroy the pc culture.
As to Cruz and Rubio, look at their voting patterns versus what they say. Rubio is especially establishment and Cruz is only marginally better.
You don't believe that the entrenched interests influence everything that occurs? I guess that I just belong to the vast group of conspiracy minded folks who still believe that the moon landings never occurred.
Yeah, Rubio just needs the votes. :-D If he can't beat either Trump or Cruz, where are they going to come from for him to win the nomination? Of course!!! The GOPe changing the convention rules so that they can put in Rubio. And if they do, goodbye GOP. And that will be well deserved.
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I accept judicial review and within freedom of speech, if we still have that one, I reserve the right to point out WRONGLY DECIDED CASES. And that is the reason people like the ones who come here ask about what kind of judges will he or she appoint.
You keep telling me that the protection against state and local government taking my liberty is the government that is taking my liberty.
Just so you know, THAT IS NOT REASSURING.
We are far worse here now than the government the colonists were escaping.
When you form this great new Trump party that has no constitutional protections against new and expanding government abuses of power, please count me out.
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Clinton could be considering a 3rd party. Great news for Trump.
http://www.allenbwest.com/2015/12/look-which-democrat-is-now-eyeing-an-independent-run-for-president/
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I cannot believe that no one caught the deliberate contradiction that I put into my comments.
I wrote about the anti-federalists who did not believe in a strong federal government, and that if you read what Brutus and others wrote, that they predicted what would happen in all three branches of governments, and which has since been proven to be correct.
I also wrote about the need for a "central" government that could sort out the various issues between the states and the contradictions in the laws that might exist between states.
Then I wrote that the problem with government are inherent in all institutions and firms........that they must grow and increase their power and influence or die.
Finally, I mentioned the problem with the politicians and that they are beholden to the special interests that further erode government's responsibility to the electorate.
The contradiction:
1. As proven by the Articles of Confederation, a loose collection of states means that nothing will get done. This is even more true in today's world.
2. A stronger federal government as presented by the pro federalists and which won the day will always lead to the federal government taking control of everything over the years and decades. It is human and corporate nature.
3. The end result is that neither can work over an extended period of time due to human nature.
What is the solution? We certainly can't restrain the growth of government. Many pretend that it is possible, but any measures taken to restrain government will only be temporary and in most cases, token measures only meant to appease a certain group. Yet, we can't allow it continued growth.
Thomas Jefferson was correct that the Tree of Liberty must be replenished from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. But now we have gone too long for such a response to work. Government has become far too strong to allow for rebellion.
The other alternative is to let government and the country crash, and then rebuild again. But how it gets rebuilt and into what form is unknowable until it is finished.
Or, we can go DDF's route and consider three separate countries...........
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Speaking for myself I caught it, but given that you are posting about Trump, I expected it :lol: :evil: :lol:
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Since you caught it, what do you think about the premise?
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A crony capitalist to the core:
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/donald-trump-anti-corporatist-candidate
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Because he is endorsing Rubio.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/trump-benghazi-hearings-were-disaster-for-the-gop-bad-for-the-country/
What a jerk.
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Yes, but he was in business. What was he to do? Ignore the benefits and make less profits?
Trump is now blowing the whistle on same. He is telling what happens and that it must be stopped. Does that not count for something?
When is everyone going to start attacking him for taking tax breaks? I am sure that is coming.
Everyone is also after Trump because he is rick. Well, it is about damned time for the rich to stop having to apologize for being rich. They got rich by making money. And for every dollar that a person like Trump has made, he has put many times that amount into the economy through business operations and taxes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgxlp2UJI5I&feature=youtu.be (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgxlp2UJI5I&feature=youtu.be)
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DMG,
What the hell did Gowdy accomplish? Not a damned thing. He let the Wicked One off. It was a typical DC display of nothing.
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BTW,
For all of those who don't like the thought of having to vote for Trump if he is the nominee and having a wish that it was someone else...........
Welcome to the Club. This is what I and others have had to do with McCain and Romney for the past two elections.
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BTW,
For all of those who don't like the thought of having to vote for Trump if he is the nominee and having a wish that it was someone else...........
Welcome to the Club. This is what I and others have had to do with McCain and Romney for the past two elections.
The implication that anyone here who is not supporting Trump now was backing McCain and Romney at this point for previous nominations is erroneous. Check the record. Speaking for myself, I also opposed Dole, HW Bush and Ford.
Besides, you have the players backwards. Cruz is the more conservative choice and Trump is the prominent centrist they are telling us we should support because he can win. The label Republican in name only certainly fits someone who wasn't one before the campaign, will most certainly pivot in the general election and threatens to leave every time he is criticized.
The one who reminds me of a Reagan is you-know-who (not Cruz or Trump). Conservative, optimistic and electable. Best communicator in the group.
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"The one who reminds me of a Reagan is you-know-who (not Cruz or Trump"
But Doug,
Bobby Jindal dropped out. :-D
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"Rubio is electable."
Where have I heard that before? Presidents McCain and Romney come to mind.
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http://m.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2016/clinton_vs_trump_still_a_dead_heat
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"The one who reminds me of a Reagan is you-know-who (not Cruz or Trump"
But Doug,
Bobby Jindal dropped out. :-D
2 term Governor, Asian immigrant family, Rhodes Scholar. But no reality show experience.
Don't tell me this country doesn't have its priorities straight...
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"The one who reminds me of a Reagan is you-know-who (not Cruz or Trump"
But Doug,
Bobby Jindal dropped out. :-D
2 term Governor, Asian immigrant family, Rhodes Scholar. But no reality show experience.
Don't tell me this country doesn't have its priorities straight...
Just looking forward to the Kardashian political dynasty.
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CD
Ignoring my sarcasm? :evil:
The GOPe told us that Romney and McCain were both electable. Look what is got us. Now they are saying that Rubio is electable. Why should this time be any different?
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Yes I am.
The GOPe has nothing to do with it.
You're enthused with polls when they show your man ahead, but when they show Rubio doing best against Hillary you're not so enthused.
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The GOPe was the ones who pushed McCain and Romney.
And, with the polls, I have always said that Rubio first had to win the nomination, but he is so far down he cannot win at this point.
And remember, I have always said that Rubio will end up being the candidate do to Convention manipulations.
Why is every one in love with Rubio? He is going to break your hearts......and at least I have no illusions about Trump.
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I don't give a flying fornication for what the GOPe says. I do care that as best as I can tell that Rubio looks to have the best chance of beating the Empress Dowager. I do care that at the moment Cruz is but two points behind Rubio against the Corrupt Conniving Cow.
President Dean? President Hillary? President Giuliani? They were all where the Donald was at this point in the cycle.
I'm not making a prediction, nor am I being stampeded by the current numbers.
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"...Rubio looks to have the best chance of beating the Empress Dowager."
"I'm not making a prediction..."
- The polls have been consistent with Truimp strongest for the nomination and weakest in the general election . On this course, Hillary wins. But the delegate count now is 0-0-0.
Cruz and Rubio have different paths to pass Trump that seem unlikely without a dramatic shift. But shifting dramatically is normal, as already pointed out by Crafty. Howard Dean is a great example. He was the clear front runner and leader of his party right up to the first vote. It wasn't just the scream; a moment arrived where people knew he wasn't the guy. And we didn't know it until the vote counts started coming in.
Trump needs votes from people who currently don't like him now and even more in the general election. Which means change from what got you this far, or just try to ride the current support through to the convention, which as Pat says, is stacked against him. He needs to put this away at the beginning or lose. Cruz needs to consolidate the right, but then still has the plurality problem Trump has. Rubio needs votes from people who may like him but are choosing someone else or undecided.
Trump's career record is 0 for 0. Cruz won one very contested primary and one very easy general election. Rubio is 6 and 0 in a much more divided state. How that helps him now, nobody knows. None have competed in or won a national election before. This is all uncharted territory.
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Regarding the question of who can defend and prosecute the 'war on women' issue against on the Clintons best -
Trump might make the strongest case in response, but may also be the most vulnerable to incoming charges. The tie goes to the Democrats. Rubio will make the charge more diplomatically, though there will be plenty of active anti-Hillary groups to go further. I'm not seeing Cruz as a general election candidate. He would attack fine but they will successfully paint him as an extremist no one can work with using quotes from people in his own party.
In any case, this isn't going to be won by proving Hillary is a bad person. People already know that.
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Meet the Press last Sunday
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/dnc-chair-my-daughters-ask-why-trump-is-so-rude/article/2579122
How is it that we intend to concede to this awful woman the moral high ground?
What a trainwreck it is to let her ever be right against us.
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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/12/30/donald-trumps-national-spokeswoman-is-a-welfare-cheat-shoplifter/
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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/12/30/donald-trumps-national-spokeswoman-is-a-welfare-cheat-shoplifter/
So he IS a democrat !
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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/12/30/donald-trumps-national-spokeswoman-is-a-welfare-cheat-shoplifter/
So he IS a democrat !
It is surprising to me that Trump hired a key person from Cruz instead of from Trump enterprises.
Unless he plans to operate the entire federal bureaucracy himself, this undermines his claim that he always gets the best people. I didn't know he could get the best people without vetting.
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'I didn't know the President could issue an Executive Order that changes the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement.'
This guy is a little negative on The Donald. He took voting age young adults with him that also weren't very impressed. I get the idea that his rallies are kind of repetitive and rambling, but his supporters have genuine enthusiasm.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/live-from-council-bluffs-its-donald-trump.php
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(http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/11/23/04/2EB78B4000000578-3329934-image-m-46_1448254316150.jpg)
Doesn't happen to be true and the 'source' doesn't happen to exist.
How much would it cost for a billionaire (11 times over) to hire his own fact checker?
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This is the sort of crap by the Donald that Hillary will use to great effect.
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From Cruz thread: "each of you have also stated that the polls are showing that Rubio can beat Hillary but not Trump. Yet you also challenge those same polls by saying when it comes to Trump beating the other GOP candidates, they mean nothing until the primaries have run their course."
For my part in it... I think the polls so far do have accuracy and meaning. They have certain inaccuracies like sampling error etc but when Trump leads Rubio by 20 points in the nomination contest, he leads without question. The most obvious error in all polls is the timing. If the election were held today is always a false premise. The election isn't held today and this is a poll not a ballot. I have spun that to say Trump clearly won the pre-season, which is the same argument Pat makes to say Trump will address the general election when that time comes.
I have stated the challenge they both face. Trump needs to show he can win the general election to get nominated, and Rubio obviously needs to win the nomination in order for general election polls to matter.
It is Pat who thinks Rubio will be the nominee. I don't currently see Rubio's path unless people start changing their minds soon.
Trump has changed his emphasis the last few days to attack Hillary and the Clintons. That addresses only the challenge he faces IMO. It could close his general election gap with Hillary, but doesn't directly address my contention thatTrump has carved out both positions and a temperament that appeal to a plurality, not a majority. He trails Bernie by 13 in polls Pat cited. Marking Bill Clinton a predatory and Hilary an enabler does not address that.
Of course he can shift back for the general election, he was a centrist-Democrat just weeks ago it seems. But in that case we don't get the candidate who won the primaries to be our general election candidate or President. We get some iteration. Whatever will be his each candidate's positions and core principles in the general election, we ought to know and judge in the primaries.
JEB came out running as a general election candidate and failed. Rubio has been running as a candidate who can be successful in the general election but didn't lock in any major sector of the Republican party along the way. He has remained in third place, relevant and somewhat in contention, but this ends quickly for him and everyone else besides Trump and Cruz if current polling numbers become the primary results.
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While every true conservative (except me) still hates Rubio for trying to settle this issue, you might notice this about the so-called immigration hardliner:
They all favor some form of amnesty after you cut through the political rhetoric.
Trump: (out of context?)
" I would get people out and I would have an expedited way of getting them back into the country, so they can be legal. Let them be legal."
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1507/29/cg.01.html (That is NOT saying - go to the back of the line!)
That is precisely what Trump is proposing. Under his plan, illegal aliens don’t have to go to the end of the line behind those who have complied with our immigration laws. They get an “expedited way of getting them back into the country so they can be legal.” They get to cut the line and then stay in America.
So if you get past Trump’s bluster, the plan he is proposing is so liberal that it earned the support of The New York Times and the opposition of National Review.
... Trump’s plan is in fact a form of amnesty—you just have to leave the country briefly to get it. So when Trump says of illegal immigrants “they all have to go,” don’t overlook the fact that under his plan almost all would be able to immediately return—and stay.
http://www.newsweek.com/who-knew-trump-favors-amnesty-undocumented-immigrants-395512
When asked what he would do about the illegal immigrants already residing in the country once the border was secured, Trump replied, “give them a path.” A path to what? Trump didn’t say. ... the issue here isn’t the merits. The issue is whether Donald Trump is a true hard liner on immigration. It appears that he is not.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/07/trump-it-seems-favors-amnesty.php
Trump wanted to secure the border and didn’t believe in “amnesty,” but wouldn’t explicitly reject a pathway to legalization.
By the definition of the loudest critics of comprehensive immigration reform in the Republican Party — many of whom Trump has won over with his immigration rhetoric — what Trump seems to be proposing would in fact be an amnesty, which these activists define as any pathway to normalizing the immigration statuses of America’s illegal population, no matter whether those illegals would be forced to pay a financial penalty or even prevented from gaining citizenship.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/24/donald-trump-on-amnesty-if-somebodys-been-outstanding-we-try-and-work-something-out-video/
Direct Trump quote was "Give them a path."
https://twitter.com/moody/status/618946895222833152 (CNN)
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Picking further on Trump. He no longer agrees with Bernie Sanders on single payer healthcare, since announcing his run for GOP(e) endorsement. Now he agrees with John Kasich instead on Medicaid expansion: (This is from July 2015, updates welcome!)
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1507/29/cg.01.html
Trump also clarifies his position on health care. Not long ago, while in the Democratic Party, Trump endorsed single-payer health care as the best reform, at one time pointing to the Canadian system as a model. He now disavows that position, but talks about the need to expand government provided health care, potentially in the form of subsidies to providers to care for the poor. That’s basically a Medicaid expansion, which isn’t going to find favor with conservatives angry at other candidates like John Kasich for adopting that very approach.
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/30/trump-deport-illegals-but-expedite-the-return-of-the-good-ones-for-legal-status/
Trump suggested an alternative system for lower-income individuals -- describing what, in the broad strokes, appears to sound similar to Medicaid.
"I want to try to help those people. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I want to try and help those people," Trump said. "And you know what, if I lose votes over that, or if I don't get a nomination over that, that's just fine with me."
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/29/politics/donald-trump-immigration-plan-healthcare-flip-flop/index.html
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2000452/
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Trump is calling for a 45% import duty on Chinese products?
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Trump is calling for a 45% import duty on Chinese products?
I think Trump is the republican Obama. That's not a compliment.
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http://therightscoop.com/mark-levin-stop-chasing-dumbass-issues/
Schooled.
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Trump is calling for a 45% import duty on Chinese products?
I think Trump is the republican Obama. That's not a compliment.
Showman comparison:
http://spectator.org/articles/65101/showman-chief
The point being being it is show and tell about nothing that will solve a problem.
45% duty on Chinese products will do what for the American or global economy?
Trump raised his proposal from 25% to 45% just to make sure everyone knows he is bluffing.
While he threatens action over 'currency manipulation', they devalued further.
For another view on the issue, maybe the Chinese central planners could learn their lesson through market consequence instead of from Trump big government action. But that's not what you think of when your Trump goal is to build the biggest and strongest central government ever.
Like Obama requiring Iranian nuclear self-verification, the main thing is - each got his name in the news controlling the news cycle.
Meanwhile we have real problems needing real solutions.
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https://www.facebook.com/FreedomDailyNews/videos/1056866887708761/
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Interesting theory on Trump pointing out Cruz birther issue: Trump doesn't have the staff to vet his VP picks so he's having the media do it.
My theory is the shiny object explanation. He's got the whole world chasing the shiny object while he sits on his lead and no one else can get traction.
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Trump's attacks on the Clintons is his way of beating them. Isn't that great (with sarcasm). People hate politics and our sides strategy is going to be to nominate the guy with the highest negatives and have him win by driving up the negatives of the other side who is also picking the candidate with the highest negatives.
(How about picking someone who can connect and lead in a positive direction.)
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http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/16/military-strategist-explains-why-donald-trump-leads-and-how-he-will-fail/
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https://www.facebook.com/cliff.medina.39/videos/462888523895053/
BD: Great article! , , , which is why I posted it on December 17thth :-D
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https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats/videos/1041355502624170/?theater
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I heard today that Trump is registering blue collar voters in the parking lots of Walmarts.
Opponents might want to go there and test poll the idea of a 45% Trump Tariff price increase.
We are going to address the nuclear threat of NK by starting (or threatening) a trade war with China.
Interestingly, Walmart is the Dow stock least hurt by the Obama income squeeze. With healthcare costs up another 70% and incomes up by zero, more and more people feel the squeeze of their plowhorse load pulling paycheck, at least who aren't already among the 100 million adults not working at all. The part time, mostly immigrant, Obama economy new hires aren't flocking to Macy's. Trump's tariffs would reduce Walmart to a failed chain of chain of designer boutiques and leave Goodwill to bid up what is left of the consumer goods economy.
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Trump today: "The economy, that's my thing. It will be great!" Following by no supporting argument.
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Bigdog's article (I mean Crafty's) looking at the campaign of Trump from a military strategy point of view is interesting indeed. Trump's unpredictable style is actually perfect for Hillary who is an F student in new situations.
Without her machine support telling her what to say, do, behave, dress she is nothing.
Yet the article points out that Trump may not have the capacity to learn and adapt and that may be his downfall.
So far he has displayed some learning of issues but we shall see in time if he can truly rise above the soundbites.
Voting for him is a VERY big risk.
I feel the risk is lower for Cruz and lower still for Rubio but I just don't see Rubio as a world leader.
I like the comparison of Trump to Putin. There are some similarities. I certainly like Putin's nationalism. Unlike the libs here who are selling there own people down the toilet.
But once again I am not sure how Trump would fare on the world stage. If he insults some in the international community - so what?
Do we want a suck up egg or a leader who represents US?
I want a leader. Not a PC clown.
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"If he insults some in the international community - so what?"
It isn't that I care what they think. It is more like I don't care what they say as long as we are in the right and they are in the wrong. With a lot of Trump's boorish statements, he is in the wrong.
There is a difference between, oh that is just Trump being Trump and that statement coming from an American President, blood coming out of her whatever, etc. As you said with W and most certainly true with Reagan, there is something to the fact that a person winning the election and rising up with humility to serve in the institution of the Presidency. Clinton and Obama degraded the Presidency in different ways. Everyone brings in their own personality. Trump has shown very little ability to grow in that regard as he gets closer to the prize.
As you say with high risk, if it comes down to me voting for him, it will only be out of disdain for the alternatives. Returning the Clintons to the White House is unthinkable and extending the Obama policies through any like-minded successor would be catastrophic to the country.
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I watched DT on the shows this morning and need to concede (again) that anyone who (still) underestimates his political skills does so to their own peril. I agreed with him about 90% of the time in the Fox News Sunday and Meet the Press interviews. Like Perot, his strength is to point out what is wrong, not to lay out solutions. The Iran deal, terrible, for example. He is far more gifted than Perot or anyone else at doing that and the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton record give him never-ending material to keep doing that.
OTOH, His attacks on GOPers have tended to be personal and petty, he welcomes the precedent set by Obama to govern by executive order, and his views on Russia, Syria, China and North Korea seem largely naive and ill conceived to me.
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Doug writes,
"I watched DT on the shows this morning and need to concede (again) that anyone who (still) underestimates his political skills does so to their own peril. I agreed with him about 90% of the time in the Fox News Sunday and Meet the Press interviews. Like Perot, his strength is to point out what is wrong, not to lay out solutions. "
Wow Doug! I didn't see the shows but if YOU were impressed then I am sure I would be.
The last part of your post "not to lay out solutions" is as (I think it was PP who also pointed this out) a big advantage at this stage. We all know the Clinton machine studies their opponents ears, throat, anus, vagina, urethra, retinas and everything else and collect the data and send it to their "war rooms" to look at the data from every freakin angle and poll test it with every conceivable response and then be ready to hit all the adoring media outlets with rapid fire overwhelming blitzkrieg airway and digital saturation propaganda.
So not letting them knwo ahead of time unitl "the last minute" what you are thinking or what your response will be to their blitzkreigs is a great strategy. The question remains though is this really a deliberate strategy or just the only way Trump knows how to work? I am not sure.
Like said Hillary is an A+ student when she has time to have her mafia army figure it all out for her and she is an F student without that. Can anyone trust her as a commander who has to make quick decisions? - NO!
Again military strategy does explain this well.
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By all means, elect a liberal president.
I'm rooting for one....and I'm not a liberal. :evil:
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DDF, I don't get what your saying.
That Trump is liberal?
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DDF, I don't get what your saying.
That Trump is liberal?
Not at all. That Hilary will bring about the destruction of the States much faster.
I'm a d.ck when it comes to other people having an opinion on what rights may be "granted" to others. Those people should generally be exported....people against anyone having firearms for example.
Ps. Those that know how much I was making, and what I walked away from, know, I am hardly joking. By all means, elect Hilary or Sanders. I'm probably wrong.
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https://www.facebook.com/1081327175240237/videos/1099272096779078/
BTW, I just watch DT on the Chris Wallace show. What I missed previously is that his 45% tariff is a THREAT designed to coerce the Chinese into respecting the rules of commerce and other things. He says that we could decimate China's economy with this with much less effect upon us and that we need to appreciate the leverage that we have.
This is a very fair point, though IMHO trade wars tend to end very badly and as best as I can tell DT has a serious propensity towards trade wars. Today for example yet again he was speaking of competitive devaluations by China, Mexico, and Japan (?). Look, I understand the point but IMO Jude Wanniski made a very sound and greatly under appreciated point with his studies of the Crash of '29 and the Great Depression were caused by competitive devaluations and tariff wars and not stock market speculations.
In this light I ask "So what the hell is Donald proposing here?" That we seek to devalue the dollar?!? Hasn't fear of a dollar devaluation been a major concern on this board for the entirety of the Obama Administration?
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"not to lay out solutions" is...a big advantage at this stage."
- It is a political advantage for him to not layout solutions. For us it means we're screwed. Policy details are gotcha questions, off limits. Too soon, not relevant. It will be great, trust me. It makes him the same as Hillary or Bernie, he's going to make everybody so prosperous, just watch, blah, blah.
How about if the candidates tell us what their policies will be and we'll tell them how great we think the results will be. But no, we just change the names of who telling us what the shiny objects of news will be while none of our questions get asked or answered.
On immigration for example he is going to be tough, tough, tough and then the details are the same as Cruz and Rubio, just sound tougher.
On government takings, no problem. What is the limiting principle of that? Huh? Constitutional rights? It depends on which ones. On judicial nominees, no clue. On tax policy, no indication he has read his own, latest proposal. Just a published paper to look serious. On limiting or shrinking government? Not a word. On willingness to govern by executive order? Sounds good. Middle East? Let Russia take care of it. N.K., let China take care of it. Israel? Mexico, trade war. China, trade war. Nuclear Triad? Never heard of it.
How can we tell conservatives they are crazy to support this guy? Nobody likes the person who tells them their crazy. Especially when it's true.
Trump showed amazing political skill to be questioned heavily by two show hosts on two networks as the lead interview every hour and never have any of this come up, just go on and on about how bad everyone else is and how great it will be when he is in charge. Great. Really great - with gallows sarcasm.
Life is way too short to go another 4 or 8 years being ruled by more BS, and the way he tells us he will win is by not telling us the details, just making the case that everyone else is unworthy.
We go way too long between great Presidents.
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"It is a political advantage for him to not layout solutions. For us it means we're screwed."
Not necessarily
Don't you think that if he lays out all the details of policy now that Hillary with her 50 divisions of spinners and an adoring media will not "out wonk" him to death?
I understand the risk if he becomes the Repub nominee, and than does NOT deliver. But wouldn't it be great to see him up in a general election debate knocking her off her skanky scripted perch with one surprise after another. He will kick her off ass all over the stage.
He will get to the policy mountain top before her and lay claim before she can bullshit her way there.
My point is the element of surprise will work great against Hillary. Otherwise she will stake out every poll group tested policy spot that makes her as it did with her husband very difficult to beat.
You just said don't underestimate him.
And we both know not to underestimate Hillary's mafia organization.
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Doug,
PS , at least the Vikings did better than the Giants this year.
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Doug,
PS , at least the Vikings did better than the Giants this year.
Ouch.
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For us it means we're screwed. (Trump policies)
Yes he might beat Hillary, on her way to prison. And yes he is better than Hillary. What I mean is, conservatives who think his policies will be conservative are screwed if he wins.
On the forum, we read, dig deep, find sources, study facts, solutions and alternatives on a whole range of topics for the entire term between elections and then some reality tv guy that doesn't give a rat's ass about policy details, rights or the constitution, facts or unintended consequences, doesn't know a minority in Iraq from a ruling party in Iran, nor a nuclear triad, walks in and takes it all. If this happens, like 8 years under Obama and the rest of it, we deserve what is coming.
8 years of George Bush and 8 years of Obama. 8 years of Bill Clinton before that. This is not a proud period in this country. We defeated Hitler and the Soviet Union. We build the strongest and most prosperous country is earth's history, we had the world turning toward freedom and we squander it by turning against everything that made it great. And now for what little we have learned we about to leap for another big government solution, a candidate who never said he was conservative, against everything we have learned. We really do have an opportunity to make America Great Again and Trump isn't it.
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For us it means we're screwed. (Trump policies)
Yes he might beat Hillary, on her way to prison. And yes he is better than Hillary. What I mean is, conservatives who think his policies will be conservative are screwed if he wins.
On the forum, we read, dig deep, find sources, study facts, solutions and alternatives on a whole range of topics for the entire term between elections and then some reality tv guy that doesn't give a rat's ass about policy details, rights or the constitution, facts or unintended consequences, doesn't know a minority in Iraq from a ruling party in Iran, nor a nuclear triad, walks in and takes it all. If this happens, like 8 years under Obama and the rest of it, we deserve what is coming.
8 years of George Bush and 8 years of Obama. 8 years of Bill Clinton before that. This is not a proud period in this country. We defeated Hitler and the Soviet Union. We build the strongest and most prosperous country is earth's history, we had the world turning toward freedom and we squander it by turning against everything that made it great. And now for what little we have learned we about to leap for another big government solution, a candidate who never said he was conservative, against everything we have learned. We really do have an opportunity to make America Great Again and Trump isn't it.
If you haven't watched the movie "Idocracy", you really need to. It was supposed to be set far in the future, but everyday it's looking more and more like a documentary.
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I am not quite as negative on Trump as you.
Cruz is my first choice.
Rubio is up there with Trump to me.
Somethings I like about Kasich but he is just too much of an appeaser.
So is Christie.
Carson never struck me as really ever viable.
Fiorina........?
Who else?
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If you haven't watched the movie "Idocracy", you really need to. It was supposed to be set far in the future, but everyday it's looking more and more like a documentary.
Like you say, I think I am watching it. (
Also, both the Obama and Trump campaigns remind me of the Pat Paulson campaign, if anyone is old enough to remember that. The campaigns follow that as closely as they do that military strategy theory.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/pat_paulsen.html
https://books.google.com/books/about/How_to_wage_a_successful_campaign_for_th.html?id=q50bAQAAIAAJ
Bill Clinton, 1996, Let's build a bridge to the 21st century.
Pat Paulsen, 1968, As I have always said, the future lies ahead.
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https://www.facebook.com/LouDobbsTonight/videos/10153365037827951/
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second post:
Though he distorts and/or get the facts wrong with some of his particulars, the thought process here in this POTH piece is worth noting:
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Beginning with Ronald Reagan, I have voted Republican in every presidential election since I first became eligible to vote in 1980. I worked in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and in the White House for George W. Bush as a speechwriter and adviser. I have also worked for Republican presidential campaigns, although not this time around.
Despite this history, and in important ways because of it, I will not vote for Donald Trump if he wins the Republican nomination.
I should add that neither could I vote in good conscience for Hillary Clinton or any of the other Democrats running for president, since they oppose many of the things I have stood for in my career as a conservative — and, in the case of Mrs. Clinton, because I consider her an ethical wreck. If Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton were the Republican and Democratic nominees, I would prefer to vote for a responsible third-party alternative; absent that option, I would simply not cast a ballot for president. A lot of Republicans, I suspect, would do the same.
There are many reasons to abstain from voting for Mr. Trump if he is nominated, starting with the fact that he would be the most unqualified president in American history. Every one of our 44 presidents has had either government or military experience before being sworn in. Mr. Trump, a real estate mogul and former reality-television star, hasn’t served a day in public office or the armed forces.
During the course of this campaign he has repeatedly revealed his ignorance on basic matters of national interest — the three ways the United States is capable of firing nuclear weapons (by land, sea and air), the difference between the Quds Force in Iran and the Kurds to their west, North Korea’s nuclear tests, the causes of autism, the effects of his tax plan on the deficit and much besides.
Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them. He has admitted that he doesn’t prepare for debates or study briefing books; he believes such things get in the way of a good performance. No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.
It is little surprise, then, that many of Mr. Trump’s most celebrated pronouncements and promises — to quickly and “humanely” expel 11 million illegal immigrants, to force Mexico to pay for the wall he will build on our southern border, to defeat the Islamic State “very quickly” while as a bonus taking its oil, to bar Muslims from immigrating to the United States — are nativistic pipe dreams and public relations stunts.
Even more disqualifying is Mr. Trump’s temperament. He is erratic, inconsistent and unprincipled. He possesses a streak of crudity and cruelty that manifested itself in how he physically mocked a Times journalist with a disability, ridiculed Senator John McCain for being a P.O.W., made a reference to “blood” intended to degrade a female journalist and compared one of his opponents to a child molester.
Mr. Trump’s legendary narcissism would be comical were it not dangerous in someone seeking the nation’s highest office — as he demonstrated when he showered praise on the brutal, anti-American president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, responding to Mr. Putin’s expression of admiration for Mr. Trump.
“It is always a great honor,” Mr. Trump said last month, “to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”
Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.
For Republicans, there is an additional reason not to vote for Mr. Trump. His nomination would pose a profound threat to the Republican Party and conservatism, in ways that Hillary Clinton never could. For while Mrs. Clinton could inflict a defeat on the Republican Party, she could not redefine it. But Mr. Trump, if he were the Republican nominee, would.
Mr. Trump’s presence in the 2016 race has already had pernicious effects, but they’re nothing compared with what would happen if he were the Republican standard-bearer. The nominee, after all, is the leader of the party; he gives it shape and definition. If Mr. Trump heads the Republican Party, it will no longer be a conservative party; it will be an angry, bigoted, populist one. Mr. Trump would represent a dramatic break with and a fundamental assault on the party’s best traditions.
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This is without question one of the most amusing articles I have ever seen written in the NY Times. I have no fondness for Donald Trump, but...
Jim Just now
Interesting. The GOP required Trump to sign a loyalty pledge to support the GOP nominee even if it wasn't Trump. So now the old-guard GOP...
GXXX
It's becoming tiresome to read yet another Republican shill shocked, shocked I tell you, by Trump's candidacy. The shills express dismay at...
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The Republican Party’s best traditions, of course, have not always been evident. (The same is true of the Democratic Party, by the way.) Over the years we have seen antecedents of today’s Trumpism both on issues and in style — for example, in Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns in the 1990s, in Sarah Palin’s rise in the party, in the reckless rhetoric of some on the right like Ann Coulter.
The sentiments animating these individuals have had influence in the party, and in recent years growing influence. But they have not been dominant and they have certainly never been in control. Mr. Trump’s securing the Republican nomination would change all that. Whatever problems one might be tempted to lay at the feet of the Republican Party, Donald Trump is in a different and more destructive category.
In these pages in July 1980, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator from New York, declared, “Of a sudden, the G.O.P. has become a party of ideas.” If Mr. Trump wins the nomination, the G.O.P. will become the party of anti-reason.
I will go further: Mr. Trump is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to it.
I understand that it often happens that those of us in politics don’t get the nominee we want, yet we nevertheless unify behind the candidate who wins our party’s nomination. If those who don’t get their way pick up their marbles and go home, party politics doesn’t work. That has always been my view, until now. Donald Trump has altered the political equation because he has altered the moral equation. For this lifelong Republican, at least, he is beyond the pale. Party loyalty has limits.
No votes have yet been cast, primary elections are fluid, and sobriety often prevails, so Mr. Trump is hardly the inevitable Republican nominee. But, stunningly, that is now something that is quite conceivable. If this scenario comes to pass, many Republicans will find themselves in a situation they once thought unimaginable: refusing to support the nominee of their party because it is the best thing that they can do for their party and their country.
Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
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Yet with all of the expertise and experience in the encumbents, here we are.
Trump - 2016
or....
Lose your own country to more of the same.
I know what I'll choose. The best argument against sitting politicians, is themselves. One has to seriously question the logic of an article that attempts to refute Trump based on that.
At least Putin has a firm grasp on what it is to be Russian, isn't apologetic, portrays strength, and certainly isn't busy giving Russia away to win votes.
And the author has the nerve to spoeak of "ethics." :mrgreen:
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https://www.facebook.com/1460764617543794/photos/a.1460915150862074.1073741828.1460764617543794/1685000315120222/?type=3
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Our Pat, with his background in both Trump and Real Estate, is uniquely qualified to comment. I gotta say that the description of Trump as having a short concentration span resonates with me. Indeed I have commented on his "drive by" nature here.
What Donald Trump’s Plaza Deal Reveals About His White House Bid
By DAVID SEGALJAN. 16, 2016
Photo
“To me the Plaza was like a great painting,” Donald Trump said of the hotel he agreed to buy in 1988 and later lost in bankruptcy. “It wasn’t purely about the bottom line.” Credit Benno Friedman/Corbis
The day Donald Trump called and asked for a one-on-one meeting in the winter of 1988, Tom Barrack was a relative newcomer to the high-stakes poker game of New York real estate. He had worked for nearly two years for Robert Bass, the Texas billionaire investor, and had played an important role in winning the Plaza Hotel for his boss the year before. Mr. Trump was the country’s most quotable and ostentatious financial celebrity, a guy with a jet, a 282-foot yacht and a fondness for peach-toned marble.
But among the people he negotiated with, Mr. Trump had a reputation for both steeliness and finesse. So Mr. Barrack was wary. A mere four months after Mr. Bass had taken control of the Plaza, he gave Mr. Barrack the go-ahead to put it up for auction. Mr. Trump was calling to say, in effect, skip the auction. We’ll strike a deal, the two of us, right here in my office.
“Just come over,” Mr. Trump said, in Mr. Barrack’s recollection. “Give me half an hour.”
Mr. Barrack was soon sitting in Mr. Trump’s office in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. The two had met a few times, because Mr. Trump had been angling to acquire the Plaza for years. Now that it was going back on the market, Mr. Trump didn’t want to miss out.
“How can I live without it?” Mr. Trump asked, gesturing to the Plaza, which could be seen from his window, just two blocks north. “It’s right in my backyard.”
“You should own it,” Mr. Barrack replied. “But you’re going to have to pay for it.”
Mr. Trump quickly agreed to a price of slightly more than $400 million, an unprecedented sum for a hotel at the time. Just a few years later, the Plaza wound up in bankruptcy protection, part of a vast and humiliating restructuring of some $900 million of personal debt that Mr. Trump owed to a consortium of banks. Never one for regrets, Mr. Trump today regards the purchase as a triumph.
“To me the Plaza was like a great painting,” he said in an interview in late December. “It wasn’t purely about the bottom line. I have many assets like that and the end result is that they are always much more valuable than what you paid for them.”
How Mr. Trump came to own, operate and then lose the Plaza reveals a lot about his business style. For decades, Mr. Trump has boasted of his boardroom skills in self-exalting speeches and books. As the front-runner in the Republican presidential race, he frequently argues that his corner-office prowess uniquely suits him to negotiate with world leaders.
What does this prowess look like up close? In the Plaza tale, Mr. Trump demonstrated both strengths (an ability to charm or strong-arm, as the occasion required) and weaknesses (a kind of hungry impatience that left him searching for new trophies as soon as one had been acquired). His methods as a political candidate mirror his methods as an executive, say those who have dealt with the latter and seen the former. In fact, the more you know about Mr. Trump’s past, the more his run for high office looks like an effort to close the biggest deal of his life.
“He has the ability to imagine what the other party wants him to be and then be that person,” said Michael D’Antonio, author of “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success.” “He presents the Trump that will work in the moment.”
A Disarming Dealmaker
When Mr. Trump made that call to Mr. Barrack he was 41 and New York City’s showiest developer. Then, as now, his braggadocio could sound like a parody of braggadocio. There was, for instance, the moment in 1984 when he told The Washington Post he could handle the United States’ side of nuclear arms talks with the Soviets.
“It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he boasted. “I think I know most of it anyway.”
By 1987, he had casinos in Atlantic City, a mansion in Palm Beach, Trump Tower, all the trappings of an up-and-coming tycoon, along with a best seller, “The Art of the Deal.” What Mr. Trump lacked was the kind of old-money Manhattan landmark that would add prestige to his portfolio.
The Plaza, which he’d been yearning to buy since his mid-20s, was that landmark. The hotel had opened in 1907, a 19-story French Renaissance “chateau” with roughly 800 rooms. It billed itself as “the world’s most luxurious hotel,” and over the years its habitués included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Lloyd Wright, who lived there while construction of the Guggenheim Museum was underway. When the Beatles performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, they stayed at the Plaza.
Mr. Bass came into possession of the Plaza when he, along with a Japanese corporation, bought its owner, the Westin chain. Mr. Bass was enamored with the hotel’s history and cachet, but he had little experience in the hospitality industry.
As Mr. Bass pondered the matter, Mr. Barrack, who was based in Manhattan, started to appreciate that the Plaza could fetch an irresistible price. By February 1988, he was readying an auction.
It was around this time that Mr. Trump picked up the phone and requested that half-hour meeting with Mr. Barrack at Trump Tower.
To understand what happened next, you need to know that in every real estate deal, the two big variables are price and contingencies. The latter come after an initial purchase price is agreed to and are essentially conditions demanded by the buyer after a thorough inspection of the property. A condition could be a problem with the plumbing, the roof or a thousand other particulars, and every condition can reduce the price of the property. With a building as old as the Plaza, a proper inspection could take months and include union contracts and an assortment of licenses for food and drink.
On the phone, when Mr. Trump asked him to abandon the auction, Mr. Barrack initially thought it was a ploy related to contingencies.
“I told him: ‘You’re too good. You’ll want to buy it and it will get tied up in all these contingencies.’ He said, ‘No, it’ll be a real deal.’ I said, ‘No contingencies.’”
Once in Mr. Trump’s office, the haggling began. Mr. Barrack said he expected 10 to 15 participants in the coming auction and an ultimate price as high as $500 million. What if I gave you $390 million today? Mr. Trump asked. Mr. Bass has an offer of $410 million in hand, Mr. Barrack countered. Mr. Trump raised his bid, and they settled on a final price of $407.5 million.
“Then he did something amazing,” Mr. Barrack recalled. “He said: ‘You’ve owned the property for four months. I want you to tell me everything that’s wrong with it and how to fix it. I said, ‘We just said, no contingencies.’ He said: ‘This is not in a contract. Nothing in writing. Just tell me what is wrong with the property and how to fix it.’”
In essence, Mr. Trump was telling Mr. Barrack that he trusted him to disclose everything that a team of lawyers and inspectors would typically need at least 90 days to unearth. It was like asking an enemy for a map of a minefield. And by saying, in effect, “I’m at your mercy and will believe what you tell me,” Mr. Trump was appealing to Mr. Barrack’s integrity. Which was very disarming.
Mr. Barrack thought over Mr. Trump’s question for a moment. He had already worked out most of the major problems.
“The biggest issue,” he told Mr. Trump, “is Fannie Lowenstein.”
He was referring to a woman, who might have been in her 80s, who lived by herself in a tiny, rent-controlled apartment in the Plaza. With Ms. Lowenstein there, reconfiguring the building as a condominium or a co-op, which was Mr. Trump’s plan and the only way to justify the $407 million price tag, would be far more difficult. But she had adamantly refused to give up her rent-control rights and move to a larger apartment in the Plaza.
Continue reading the main story
Donald Trump: Presidential Candidates on the Issues
“I’ll do the deal in a week, for $407.5 million,” Mr. Trump said, “and you take care of Fannie Lowenstein. All I want at the closing is to hear that Fannie Lowenstein is happy.”
Mr. Barrack left the meeting in a daze, both thrilled and anxious.
“It was a genius deal for Trump,” Mr. Barrack said, “because while an auction would have fetched a bigger initial price, it would have been tangled up in contingencies. And he’d just convinced me to fix everything for him.”
Mr. Trump had correctly sized up Mr. Barrack: someone who was trying to prove himself and wanted a major coup.
“He kind of looked at me and said, ‘I’ll make you a star,’” said Mr. Barrack, who now runs Colony Capital, a real estate investment firm based in Los Angeles with 300 employees. “It’s the same talent on display when he gives political speeches. He reads an entire crowd with the same precision that he reads an individual.”
For Mr. Barrack, winning over Ms. Lowenstein was a project. She knew more about tenant law than any lawyer, and for the next two months, the two spoke four or five times a week. He ultimately offered her an apartment in the Plaza that was almost 10 times as large as her studio apartment, with a view of Central Park. Rent-free. For life. Also, new furniture, new dishes, new everything. She grudgingly agreed. But she also wanted a piano. She got a Steinway.
To Mr. Barrack’s amazement, Mr. Trump handled nearly all of the negotiations for the Plaza himself. Much as Mr. Trump is doing in his current campaign, which is notably lacking in consultants and pollsters, he operated largely by gut instinct.
When Mr. Trump did consult outside counsel about the Plaza, his instructions were to make as little trouble as possible, no matter how daunting the numbers looked.
“He toned me down,” recalled Jonathan A. Bernstein, then a lawyer at Dreyer & Traub. “He had come to the conclusion that this was a deal he wanted to do, and he was completely aware of the downsides, and my job was to get him the best legal document I could. You don’t tell him, ‘Are you crazy?’ You say: ‘It’s $400 million and $12 million in N.O.I.,’” or net operating income. “‘Are you O.K. with that?’”
Huge Debt, Lost Prize
Once he owned the hotel, Mr. Trump put his wife, Ivana, in charge of renovating it, paying her, as he put it at the time, “one dollar a year plus all the dresses she can buy.” She and a team oversaw a restoration that included new paint, new furniture and a revival of the major public spaces, like the Palm Court tearoom.
“Some of it came out great; some of it came out kind of chintzy,” said Barbara Res, then an employee of the Trump Organization. “We went about trying to restore it but in a way that didn’t cost too much money.”
Mr. Trump offered design opinions and growled when necessary. After a hotel union put up resistance to changes requested by his wife — that ashtrays be regularly stamped with the Plaza’s logo, for instance — Mr. Trump issued a threat.
“I called these guys up,” he told The New York Times soon after the purchase, “and said, ‘Do it, or I’ll turn the Plaza into a condo with three janitors and a super.’”
Opinion was split over the merits of the deal. Among the many who thought that Donald Trump had overpaid was Donald Trump. In a full-page ad he took out in New York magazine in November 1988, he called the transaction “the first time in my life I have knowingly made a deal which was not economic — for I can never justify the price I paid, no matter how successful the Plaza becomes.”
This proved prescient. By 1990, the Plaza needed an operating profit of $40 million a year to break even, according to financial records that Mr. Trump disclosed at the time. The hotel had fallen well short of that goal, and with renovating expenses, in one year it burned through $74 million more than it brought in.
But Mr. Trump didn’t spend a lot of time sweating over the Plaza’s finances. He was too busy with new challenges. A few months after the Plaza deal closed, he purchased the Eastern Air Shuttle for $365 million, and in 1990, he opened the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, which cost $1 billion to build. Some of the loans he took out to pay for deals were personally guaranteed.
“The fact is, you do feel invulnerable,” Mr. Trump told Timothy O’Brien, author of “Trump Nation,” discussing this period in his life. “And then you have a tendency to take your eye off the ball a little bit and hunt around for women. And hunt around for models.”
A lack of focus was not Mr. Trump’s only problem. The updraft in the real estate market of the ’80s turned into a headwind by the early ’90s, and more than $3 billion in loans — $900 million of which were personally guaranteed — went into default. Dozens of banks came calling and, after lengthy negotiations, a meeting was held in a large conference room in the law offices of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, the firm that represented the largest lender, Citibank. There, some 50 bankers and lawyers watched Mr. Trump sign over nearly all of his properties — the Plaza, other buildings, the shuttle, the yacht, the jet — in exchange for more favorable terms on his personal guarantees.
The banks could have easily toppled Mr. Trump into personal bankruptcy, “but we all agreed that he’d be better alive than dead,” said Alan Pomerantz, then head of the real estate department at Weil. “We needed him to help sell all of his assets, and the deal was that as he sold off more, we’d reduce his personal guarantee.”
In effect, the banks allowed Mr. Trump to remain solvent so that they could get the benefit of his gift for salesmanship. In exchange, the banks provided him with $450,000 a month to operate his business and cover personal expenses. It was so tight a leash that when Marla Maples, his girlfriend at the time, turned up on television waving the costly Harry Winston diamond she’d been given as an engagement ring, the paymasters wanted a word with the groom-to-be.
“I didn’t buy it,” Mr. Trump said, according to Mr. Pomerantz. It was a three-month loaner, given in exchange for on-air mentions of Harry Winston.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump called that story “completely false.”
The banks shopped the Plaza around, without success, for a few years before finally selling it in a deal that valued it at $325 million to a partnership between Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia and CDL Hotels International of Singapore in 1995. None of the proceeds went to Mr. Trump, according to several people involved.
Still, he told me that the sale was yet another victory. The terms were, to use one of his favorite words, fantastic, and relieved him of a vast personal debt.
“One of the great deals was the Plaza, because way beyond the price, I was able to get favors from the banks and from others,” he said. Speaking of Prince Alwaleed, he added: “He paid too much for the hotel. He wanted that hotel so badly, and I put him through the wringer and made a great deal.”
Of course, it cost the Saudi-Singapore partnership $75 million less than Mr. Trump had spent for the same building seven years earlier. Mr. Trump also claimed in the interview that he owned 100 percent of the Plaza until the day it was sold, a version of events totally at odds with published reports at the time and the recollections of others involved in the deal.
This may be yet another parallel to Mr. Trump’s performance on the hustings, where he has bent the truth into so many outlandish shapes that PolitiFact anointed his entire campaign the 2015 Lie of the Year. Among the more memorable whoppers: a Twitter post that 81 percent of whites are killed by blacks (PolitiFact cites the true figure as 15 percent) and that on television he’d seen thousands of people in Jersey City cheering the collapse of the World Trade Center.
Mr. Trump’s prediction that the Plaza would be worth far more than it cost him did come true. Unfortunately for him, it happened in 2004, when the hotel was sold yet again, this time for $675 million to an Israeli developer who carved up the rooms in the way that Mr. Trump had originally imagined. Half of the building was turned into condominiums, which eventually sold for a total of $1.4 billion.
Feuding With the Prince
Today, Mr. Trump’s brief ownership of the Plaza is one of the least-known chapters of a protean career. It was not the last time one of his properties would need the shelter of bankruptcy protection, and it marked the beginning of his transition from an owner of major assets to a manager of major assets. An increasing share of his wealth would come in the future from licensing his name, not just to builders but sellers of suits, cologne, chandeliers, mattresses and more. In professional parlance, he went from “asset heavy” to “asset light.”
The Plaza deal also demonstrated both his intense drive and ambition as well as his tendency to spread himself dangerously thin as he looks for other conquests. Abraham Wallach, a former executive at the Trump Organization, said Mr. Trump was a man without any conventional vices, but he had a hopeless addiction to notoriety and was always prowling for another deal that would gain attention and enhance his status.
“I’ve been shocked he has demonstrated such focus during the presidential campaign,” Mr. Wallach said. “In business, he would focus for about two or three days before the closing, and after that he would lose interest.”
Recently, the hotel and a central character in this narrative have intersected with his presidential run. After Mr. Trump called in December for a “complete shutdown” on Muslims’ entry into the United States, Prince Alwaleed posted on Twitter: “You are a disgrace not only to the G.O.P. but to all America. Withdraw from the U.S. presidential race as you will never win.”
Mr. Trump returned fire: “Dopey Prince @Alwaleed_Talal wants to control our U.S. politicians with daddy’s money. Can’t do it when I get elected.”
That same day, Dec. 11, Mr. Trump gave a speech at a luncheon where he was heckled by protesters waving signs that read, “Stop the war on immigrant communities” and “Trump, making America hate again.” Several people were ejected from the building.
The building was the Plaza Hotel.
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FOX gave his speech a bunch of free time (I don't recall Cruz, Rubio, or any of the others getting this treatment) but I must say he was quite engaging. Indeed, he sounded rather lucid , , , until he showed profound trade protectionist based economic illiteracy on how free trade works , , ,
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http://www.dickmorris.com/trumps-mistake-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
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http://crooksandliars.com/2016/01/gop-strategist-calls-trump-supporters
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430126/donald-trump-conservatives-oppose-nomination
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430126/donald-trump-conservatives-oppose-nomination
Because he is not a conservative.
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For your consideration. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with this analysis:
Trump’s Essence Is Winning, Christ’s Is Sacrifice, Now Choose
By Steve Berman | January 21, 2016
I daresay more words have been spilled on the topic of Donald Trump in the past six months than on any candidate in any race since Ronald Reagan, but it’s been difficult to get to what Aristotle called the “teleology” of Trump. Teleology: It’s the reason for his existence.
Aristotle asked “what causes something to be what it is, to have the characteristics that it has, or to change in the way that it does?” And from that question, he developed his philosophical concepts of substance and form.
We know a table is a table when we look at it because of its form, but the substance is wood, glue and nails.
The substance of Trump is a man obsessed with success. It doesn’t matter what endeavor he’s in, he wants to win. He discards whatever is not advancing him toward a win, and acquires what does advance him. He wakes up every morning with that same belief and goes to bed knowing he’s done all he can do achieve it that day.
And now the form: a man shaped by the power of positive thought. Trump’s religion is the Christianity of Norman Vincent Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking.”
“The great Norman Vincent Peale was my minister for years,” Trump told CNN last July, a sentiment he repeated in Atlanta and in Iowa during stops in Ames and Dubuque.
Peale, for his part, described Trump as “kindly and courteous” with “a streak of honest humility,” and touted him as “one of America’s top positive thinkers and doers.” The minister also called Trump “ingenious” and predicted that he would be “the greatest builder of our time.”
Peale preached a Christianity styled on what today is called “Word of Faith.” I’ve been to some churches where Jesus is the name, but the game is “name it, claim it.” This brand of faith relies on verses like John 14:13-14 “And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”
Oh, and do they ask.
For Trump, who answered “I try not make mistakes where I have to ask forgiveness” when asked for his views on asking for God’s forgiveness by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, it’s all about living for the purpose for which he believes God placed him here. And to Trump, that purpose is to succeed in everything he does.
To win.
He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t do drugs. And he doesn’t believe that his relationships are as important as the service he can give to his country by succeeding. For that, Trump feels he owes no apology to man or to God. Psychologists might call this a narcissistic personality disorder, but it’s really not. It’s his personal brand of faith, based not so much in the Bible as it is in his own ability to picture his success, and then attain it.
Trump has been planning this run for president for a very long time. He’s kicked it around since he was in his late 20’s. It’s never been far from his peripheral gaze: A prize of all prizes, and the success of all successes. That’s his essence. That’s the reason Trump believes God made him for such a time as this.
Substance, form, purpose were Aristotle’s tools. The substance of Trump running for president versus him being president are two different things. But the form and the essence are the same: Trump wants to win, and that’s problematic.
Jesus cautioned against too much success in this life. Matthew 19:23-24:
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
1 Timothy 6:9-10, the Apostle Paul wrote:
Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
Making the deal, building the wall, whatever it is that Trump wants to do is not what God’s Word recommends. Should he become president, Trump will stay true to form, in the Aristotelian sense. Bible-believing Christians must be careful about supporting Trump. It brings to mind the story of the scorpion and frog, which I’ve used before as an illustration.
One day, a scorpion decided he wanted to leave his desert home and live in a forest, so he set out on a journey. Reaching a river he could not cross, he came across a frog, and asked for help. Here’s how their conversation went.
“Hellooo Mr. Frog!” called the scorpion across the water, “Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the river?”
“Well now, Mr. Scorpion! How do I know that if I try to help you, you wont try to kill me?” asked the frog hesitantly.
“Because,” the scorpion replied, “If I try to kill you, then I would die too, for you see I cannot swim!”
Now this seemed to make sense to the frog. But he asked. “What about when I get close to the bank? You could still try to kill me and get back to the shore!”
“This is true,” agreed the scorpion, “But then I wouldn’t be able to get to the other side of the river!”
“Alright then…how do I know you wont just wait till we get to the other side and THEN kill me?” said the frog.
“Ahh…,” crooned the scorpion, “Because you see, once you’ve taken me to the other side of this river, I will be so grateful for your help, that it would hardly be fair to reward you with death, now would it?!”
You can guess what happened. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog.
“You fool!” croaked the frog, “Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?”
The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drowning frog’s back.
“I could not help myself. It is my nature.”
Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river.
We cannot expect Trump to suddenly change his nature or his faith. We can pray for him (we should pray for him, and for President Obama also and a number of leaders who need Jesus), but we should not base our assumptions on what the man says, but on who he really is.
Trump will do what he needs to do to succeed. I don’t believe those who say he’ll trash the Constitution, or go for an authoritarian style. That’s not his nature. He wants his opponents to agree with him and to make the deal. He’ll stake a position, summon supporters, build consensus, fight off attacks, and move forward until the deal is done. That’s what he’s always done, and that’s what he will continue to do.
But for Christians, be careful what you ask for, because it might not be what you’re really getting. To “make America great,” Trump will sacrifice Biblical values, sink the country to a moral low point (defining success as winning in monetary, military, and nationalistic terms), and attack anyone who opposes him.
As one pastor (who I will leave unnamed) put it, “if we elect this man to the White House, the first time Christians disagree with him, we will get everything that’s coming to us.”
Scary words. Now choose.
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"As one pastor (who I will leave unnamed) put it, “if we elect this man to the White House, the first time Christians disagree with him, we will get everything that’s coming to us.”
I agree. This is a very real concern.
Sure many of us can like him now. But what if we become the target for him (once he no longer needs us). When we are called crude names the honeymoon will end fast.
He is a very big risk. His biographer was on cable the other day and more or less stated how in his deals that went bad he always came out better than everyone else. And if he starts to lose he turns tail and runs.
If what is good for him is consistently what is good for America that we are in "good company". If we get a divergence however, we will be left with all the debt.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/23/oops-trump-campaign-ad-highlights-veterans-of-russia/comment-page-1/#comments
Competence.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/23/oops-trump-campaign-ad-highlights-veterans-of-russia/comment-page-1/#comments
Competence.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/01/24/trump-spox-has-history-of-bizarre-bigoted-tweets/?singlepage=true
Only the best!
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A Rush comment on Trump. When he repeats himself he is trying to figure out what to say next, not reiterating the point. This is not a slam, just advice on how to listen to him. I noticed it again when he appeared on Meet the dePressed yesterday.
He reminds me in that of Joe Biden. When he would repeat himself over and over in the VP debates for emphasis, he was always wrong. Trump does it instead of silence or saying uh or um. It works for him, he is obviously he is a very successful speaker. Just don't think that his repetition of a statement means double or triple emphasis. It doesn't. Sometimes it means just the opposite.
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A Rush comment on Trump. When he repeats himself he is trying to figure out what to say next, not reiterating the point. This is not a slam, just advice on how to listen to him. I noticed it again when he appeared on Meet the dePressed yesterday.
He reminds me in that of Joe Biden. When he would repeat himself over and over in the VP debates for emphasis, he was always wrong. Trump does it instead of silence or saying uh or um. It works for him, he is obviously he is a very successful speaker. Just don't think that his repetition of a statement means double or triple emphasis. It doesn't. Sometimes it means just the opposite.
It'll be great to watch American policy shaped by stream of consciousness ramblings.
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It'll be great to watch American policy shaped by stream of consciousness ramblings.
Great, in a gallows humor sort of way.
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It's funny to watch people attempt to slam someone that is worth a conservative 4.5 Billion, as though he "rambles to himself."
One also has to remember, that Trump is selling a popular brand to a pissed off (and rightfully so) public.
Not everyone that ever served a dictator, did so unwillingly.... there was oftentimes, mass public approval....
A good section of the rightful owners of the American States, have had it with the politically correct and systematic raffling off of the country, giving it away to illegals, and others still, attempting to subvert the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.
Maybe a dictator with American first values is precisely what the country needs and let the losers beware (or three zones, Liberal, Conservative, and Free). I support that fully. I am far from alone.
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"Maybe a dictator with American first values is precisely what the country needs"
I profoundly disagree. We need a president who believes in the American Creed and who will apply it.
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"Maybe a dictator with American first values is precisely what the country needs"
I profoundly disagree. We need a president who believes in the American Creed and who will apply it.
I would agree IF it could be decided what that is. The problem is that it isn't. Mikulski (Senator D Maryland just stated "Let's not get involved in constitutional arguments...") just stated that in regard to gun control. There is no definition in a unilateral manner as to what the American Creed is. http://freedomoutpost.com/2016/01/during-gun-control-hearing-senator-blurts-out-lets-not-get-involved-in-constitutional-arguments/
My question then is, how else do you define in a resound manner, what that creed is to be?
It's a fair question. I have proposed my answer.
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"Maybe a dictator with American first values is precisely what the country needs"
I profoundly disagree. We need a president who believes in the American Creed and who will apply it.
I would agree IF it could be decided what that is. The problem is that it isn't. Mikulski (Senator D Maryland just stated "Let's not get involved in constitutional arguments...") just stated that in regard to gun control. There is no definition in a unilateral manner as to what the American Creed is. http://freedomoutpost.com/2016/01/during-gun-control-hearing-senator-blurts-out-lets-not-get-involved-in-constitutional-arguments/
My question then is, how else do you define in a resound manner, what that creed is to be?
It's a fair question. I have proposed my answer.
Defined here by Crafty:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?action=post;msg=92793;topic=1736.750;sesc=4fa5408003f8d5f8290a92723f78fc2b
From another thread:
American Creed= Free minds, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of contract, right of self-defense (hence guns and knives, etc) property rights, privacy, all connected with responsibility for the consequences of one's action. All this from our Creator, not the State nor majority vote.
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It's funny to watch people attempt to slam someone that is worth a conservative 4.5 Billion, as though he "rambles to himself."
**Trump chose his father well. Most people don't have the forethought to be born to a New York multimillionaire.
One also has to remember, that Trump is selling a popular brand to a pissed off (and rightfully so) public.
**Yes, despite what he did and said for years, now he is a conservative, depending when and where you catch him. Is the public pissed? Yes and rightly so, but the cure for 8 years of a narcissistic personality unfit for the office isn't another narcissist unqualified for the job.
Not everyone that ever served a dictator, did so unwillingly.... there was oftentimes, mass public approval....
**I am unaware of this leading to a happy ending, ever in human history.
A good section of the rightful owners of the American States, have had it with the politically correct and systematic raffling off of the country, giving it away to illegals, and others still, attempting to subvert the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.
**I have myself, but we must avoid getting sucked into a cult of personality in our anger.
Maybe a dictator with American first values is precisely what the country needs and let the losers beware (or three zones, Liberal, Conservative, and Free). I support that fully. I am far from alone.
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It's funny to watch people attempt to slam someone that is worth a conservative 4.5 Billion, as though he "rambles to himself."
**Trump chose his father well. Most people don't have the forethought to be born to a New York multimillionaire.
One also has to remember, that Trump is selling a popular brand to a pissed off (and rightfully so) public.
**Yes, despite what he did and said for years, now he is a conservative, depending when and where you catch him. Is the public pissed? Yes and rightly so, but the cure for 8 years of a narcissistic personality unfit for the office isn't another narcissist unqualified for the job.
Not everyone that ever served a dictator, did so unwillingly.... there was oftentimes, mass public approval....
**I am unaware of this leading to a happy ending, ever in human history.
A good section of the rightful owners of the American States, have had it with the politically correct and systematic raffling off of the country, giving it away to illegals, and others still, attempting to subvert the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.
**I have myself, but we must avoid getting sucked into a cult of personality in our anger.
Maybe a dictator with American first values is precisely what the country needs and let the losers beware (or three zones, Liberal, Conservative, and Free). I support that fully. I am far from alone.
Completely valid GM... Don't quite know what the answer is.
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GM - I thought about what you said last night, especially the narcisist portion of it, and I find it to be quite correct.
I think you just swayed me on Trump. He is a narcisist, and perhaps we need someone in office that has a bit more humility.
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GM - I thought about what you said last night, especially the narcisist portion of it, and I find it to be quite correct.
I think you just swayed me on Trump. He is a narcisist, and perhaps we need someone in office that has a bit more humility.
Those who would lead us deserve the strictest vetting. We fail to do so at our peril.
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GM - I thought about what you said last night, especially the narcisist portion of it, and I find it to be quite correct.
I think you just swayed me on Trump. He is a narcisist, and perhaps we need someone in office that has a bit more humility.
Those who would lead us deserve the strictest vetting. We fail to do so at our peril.
I agree. I am limited to one message per hour. I'll generate a proper one within the next 24 hours and send it.
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Trump is running to be the greatest President ever in post-constitutional America.
Since it's all about him, the slogan should be, Make Trump Great Again.
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Taunting Pat to jump back in ....
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GOP might as well nominate a Democrat as Trump. That's who wins.
Trump makes socialism popular.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/
Funny that the polls are all wrong, yet the only reason he is relevant is because of the polls.
What (positive info) is left to learn about him; he has been the central news story for almost a year. All he has left to offer is to bring others down.
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Openness to being persuaded is a very rare quality. Respect DDF!
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http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/250936-trump-defends-planned-parenthood
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Openness to being persuaded is a very rare quality. Respect DDF!
Sir.... thank you. I'm not a big fan of narcisists.... of any flavour, and GM nailed it with that one.
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The recent press conference with Trump essentially boasting and telling off anyone who gets in his way may be a tipping point for me. His total lack of any humility and his big head getting bigger every second makes it hard to fathom that this guy is not potentially very dangerous.
On one hand he says he would deal. On the other hand he shoves anyone out of the way who publicly criticizes him and a really crude and sometimes even vulgar manor.
I would absolutely vote for him over Hillary or any Dem. But I put Cruz and Rubio ahead of him for sure. Too bad because I do like his positions on a number of things such as taxes, immigration (of course), security, maybe trade (I don't understand trade enough to be qualified to really assess this) and looking out for us first the world second.
I wonder if his children think about him what they say. They all seem like great kids and happy. Are they afraid of him? And it is all a facade or is it real? He seems like a great parent. All his kids are privileged but seem very well adjusted and good people.
Trump is the type of guy who one could like until you no longer agree with him. He has potential to be more of a "tyrant" than Obama. Not that he would be but his personality just seems to suck up all the power it can.
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I hear sand can do that.
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January 26, 2016:
TRUMP: Well, I think that I’m going to be able to get along with Pelosi. I think I’m going to be able to -- I’ve always had a good relationship with Nancy Pelosi. I’ve never had a problem. Reid will be gone. I always had a decent relationship with Reid, although lately, obviously, I haven’t been dealing with him so he’ll actually use my name as the ultimate -- you know, as the ultimate of the billionaires in terms of, you know, people you don’t want.
But I always had a great relationship with Harry Reid. And frankly, if I weren’t running for office I would be able to deal with her or Reid or anybody. But I think I’d be able to get along very well with Nancy Pelosi and just about everybody.
Hey, look, I think I’ll be able to get along well with Chuck Schumer. I was always very good with Schumer. I was close to Schumer in many ways. It’s important that you get along. It’s wonderful to say you’re a maverick and you’re going to stand up and close up the country and all of the things, but you have to get somebody to go along with you.
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An intellectually lazy narcissist ? They make the best presidents! Ask any Obama supporter.
January 26, 2016:
TRUMP: Well, I think that I’m going to be able to get along with Pelosi. I think I’m going to be able to -- I’ve always had a good relationship with Nancy Pelosi. I’ve never had a problem. Reid will be gone. I always had a decent relationship with Reid, although lately, obviously, I haven’t been dealing with him so he’ll actually use my name as the ultimate -- you know, as the ultimate of the billionaires in terms of, you know, people you don’t want.
But I always had a great relationship with Harry Reid. And frankly, if I weren’t running for office I would be able to deal with her or Reid or anybody. But I think I’d be able to get along very well with Nancy Pelosi and just about everybody.
Hey, look, I think I’ll be able to get along well with Chuck Schumer. I was always very good with Schumer. I was close to Schumer in many ways. It’s important that you get along. It’s wonderful to say you’re a maverick and you’re going to stand up and close up the country and all of the things, but you have to get somebody to go along with you.
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In that talk he praised Pelosi, Reid and Schumer while ripping Ted Cruz as nasty.
As I have said to Pat, Trump is the one choosing to not be on my side.
Great candidate for people who don't believe in constitutional limits on power and want surprises everyday in their public policy choices.
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Some prime RINO points made here. This is what causes the Trump phenomena, IMO:
http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2015/09/07/an-open-letter-to-jonah-goldberg-re-the-gop-and-donald-trump/
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So, how is voting for Trump the solution?
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I don't disagree with what Trump is saying currently. I don't like that he lacks humility.
Having said that, I don't care that either Cruz or Rubio are Latinos. I work with Latinos every single day and they're mostly great people. I still don't know which one that I would support though....almost certainly the more religious of the two would be my choice. so long as it isn't just talk.
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/donald-trump-op-ed-my-vision-for-a-culture-of-life/article/2581271
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I cannot tell the difference between this being a single soap opera or reality TV show episode and a serious Presidential interview. Why does Trump keep making this about Kelly and Kelly and Fox keep making it tabloid material:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/donald-trump-appear-bill-oreillys-859775
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/361234.php
I like the empty podium idea.
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My first thought is that it is better to not have it. (Not sure of issues concerning bringing someone else in). NO ONE is indispensable, and of Trump does not want to play, then Life moves on.
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2016/01/27/harry-reid-recalls-good-old-days-when-trump-did-a-fundraiser-or-two-for-me/
The combover and Mr. Cleanface.
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http://therightscoop.com/im-just-gonna-put-this-2014-donald-trump-tweet-right-here/
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The Leap of Trump
As the GOP nominee or President, he would be a political ‘black swan.’
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on January 26 in Marshalltown, Iowa. ENLARGE
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on January 26 in Marshalltown, Iowa. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Jan. 27, 2016 7:06 p.m. ET
711 COMMENTS
Financial analyst and our contributor Donald Luskin has described Donald Trump as a “black swan” over the political economy. He’s referring to an outlier event that few anticipated and whose impact is impossible to predict. As the voting season begins in Iowa, this strikes us as a useful way for Republicans to think about the Trump candidacy.
We’ve been critical of Mr. Trump on many grounds and our views have not changed. But we also respect the American public, and the brash New Yorker hasn’t stayed atop the GOP polls for six months because of his charm. Democracies sometimes elect poor leaders—see the last eight years—but their choices can’t be dismissed as mindless unless you want to give up on democracy itself.
The most hopeful way to interpret Mr. Trump’s support is that the American people aren’t taking decline lying down. They know the damage that has been done to them over the last decade—in lower incomes, diminished economic prospects, and a far more dangerous world. But they aren’t about to accept this as their fate.
Americans aren’t Japanese or Europeans—at least not yet. Mr. Trump’s promise to “make America great again” is for many patriotic voters a rallying cry for U.S. revival. In that sense it is motivated more by hope than by the “anger” so commonly described in the media.
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The problem is that Mr. Trump is an imperfect vessel for this populism, to say the least. On politics and policy he is a leap into the known unknown. That so many voters seem willing to take this leap suggests how far confidence in American political leaders has fallen. We can debate another day how the U.S. got here, but with the voting nigh it’s important to address what a Trump nomination could mean for the GOP and the country.
Pundits on the right are stressing the obvious that Mr. Trump is no conservative, but he’s also no liberal. He has no consistent political philosophy that we can detect beyond a kind of relentless pragmatism that is common in businessmen. Mr. Trump calls it “the art of the deal.” The President he may most resemble in that populist pragmatism, if not in manners, is another business success who turned to politics, Herbert Hoover.
Can Mr. Trump win the Presidency if he is the nominee? Who knows? We’ve argued that the GOP nominee should be the favorite this year, and perhaps Mr. Trump can mobilize middle-class voters in Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania and win more states than Mitt Romney did. We certainly know he wouldn’t shrink from flaying Hillary Clinton.
But there’s no guarantee that Mr. Trump would win the mainstream, college-educated Republican voters he would also need to win. His net negative rating with the public is the highest in the presidential field in the latest WSJ/NBC poll at minus-29. Jeb Bush is minus-27, Mrs. Clinton minus-nine.
Mr. Trump might be able to repair this image if he ran a more sober campaign as the nominee than he has run so far, but he could also blow up under months of intense media scrutiny. His biggest test would be showing he has the temperament to be President, and his tantrum this week over Megyn Kelly and Fox News isn’t reassuring.
All of which means that Mr. Trump has the widest electoral variability as a candidate. He could win, but he also could lose 60% to 40%, taking the GOP’s Senate majority down and threatening House control. A Clinton Presidency with Speaker Nancy Pelosi would usher in an era of antigrowth policies worse than even 2009-2010. This is the killer black swan.
And how would Mr. Trump govern as President? Flip a coin. Maybe he would surround himself with astute advisers, work closely with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, and craft a reform agenda to revive the economy a la Reagan. His tax reform outline is close enough to sensible that Mr. Ryan could knock it into shape. He would not want to be a “loser” in office.
But history teaches that Presidents try to do what they say they will during a campaign, and Mr. Trump is threatening a trade war with China, Mexico and Japan, among others. He sometimes says he merely wants to start a negotiation with China that will end happily when it bows to his wishes. China may have other ideas. A bad sign is that Mr. Trump has hired as his campaign policy adviser Stephen Miller, who worked for Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), the most antitrade, anti-immigration Senator.
Foreign policy would also be a leap in the dark. Mr. Trump has said he respects former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, and so do we. But Mr. Trump also admires Vladimir Putin—enough so that even after a British judge found last week that Mr. Putin had “probably” ordered the murder in London of a Russian defector, Mr. Trump defended Mr. Putin because he wasn’t found “guilty.”
***
Mr. Trump has shown great staying power in the polls, and perhaps his campaign organizing talents will be as strong as his social-media skills. But Iowa and New Hampshire are only the beginning of primaries that have weeks or months to run, and a huge chunk of voters haven’t made up their minds.
Ted Cruz has his own electoral and governing issues and he isn’t the only alternative to Mr. Trump, despite what both men would like Americans to believe. Voters could still elevate one of the other candidates. Republicans should look closely before they leap.
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Another piece examining the staid GOP mainstream's role in creating Trump, by contrast if nothing else:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-is-shocking-vulgar-and-right-213572
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WSJ is not really a conservative rag. It is a Wall Street rag. Sells us out for cheap labor brought in from overseas and when that doesn't work they take the companies and use the cheap labor there.
WSJ is only is good for America if it is good for Wall Street.
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http://www.wnd.com/2016/01/the-civil-war-of-the-right/
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Remarkable article :-o
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/donald-trump-timeline.html
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I would not say I am a fan of Beck anymore, but do think he is probably right about this. Since the topic is Trump I post it here rather than under Beck:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/30/2903448/
OTOH Dick Morris thinks that Trump DOES have the temperament to be President.
On this I am with Beck.
Perhaps the best way to get a handle on how Trump would be is to find out from as many of his employees or ex employees as possible how he treated them since he has full power over them.
If he is kind and fair then I think it is reasonable to assume he would be so as President.
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http://thefederalist.com/2016/01/27/donald-trump-let-me-tell-you-about-smaug/
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http://thefederalist.com/2016/01/27/donald-trump-let-me-tell-you-about-smaug/
That was awesome!
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3424519/The-comb-creep-hates-women-know-SELINA-SCOTT-reveals-Donald-Trump-failed-seduce-stalked-20-years.html
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second post
y Kimberley A. Strassel
Jan. 31, 2016 6:27 p.m. ET
232 COMMENTS
Of all the Republicans campaigning in Iowa, perhaps none is campaigning harder than Ben Sasse, a Republican senator from Nebraska. Mr. Sasse isn’t running for president. He’s running against Donald Trump. The particular focus of his opposition deserves a lot more attention.
Mr. Sasse is a notable voice in this debate. He’s a heavyweight conservative—a grass-roots favorite, the furthest thing from the “establishment.” Before winning his Senate seat in 2014, he had never held elected office. He was the president of Midland University in Fremont, Neb., when he decided that he had to try to get to Washington and help restore the constitutional vision of the Founders.
Which is his point in Iowa: “We have a President who does not believe in executive restraint; we do not need another,” said Mr. Sasse in a statement announcing that he would campaign with Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and other “constitutional candidates.” On Twitter, Mr. Sasse issued a string of serious questions for Mr. Trump, including: “Will you commit to rolling back Exec power & undoing Obama unilateral habit”?
That’s a good question for every Republican candidate. President Obama has set a new lawless standard for Washington that might prove tempting for his successor from another party. Why suffer Democratic filibusters when you can sign an executive order? Why wait two years for legislation when you can make it happen overnight? The temptation to cut constitutional corners would be powerful given the pent-up conservative desire for a Washington overhaul.
Here’s another question for the Republican contenders, a corollary to the Sasse challenge: Do you promise to reject dark power?
How the candidates answer ought to matter to every conservative voter. For almost a decade conservatives have suffered under a liberal movement that has honed the tactic of deploying government against its political opponents.
The Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative nonprofits—after Mr. Obama and Democrats encouraged the tax agency to act. Prosecutors hostile to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker staged predawn raids on conservative activists, part of a secret John Doe probe into bogus campaign-finance violations. Powerful Democratic senators harassed and intimidated conservatives for giving money to free-market groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council. Democrats singled out conservative donors, who found themselves subject to government audits.
The Republican presidential contenders would undoubtedly decry those nefarious acts—and be offended if asked whether they would do the same. Yet power is seductive, and plenty of voters are angry enough to embrace a “Republican Obama”—that is, someone who would go after their perceived political enemies. Witness the Washington Republicans who last year called on the IRS to hound the Clinton Foundation. Somewhere, Lois Lerner was smiling.
Mr. Trump’s broadsides are no doubt part of his allure. But how would he conduct himself in a post-Obama White House? Mr. Trump, after all, doesn’t merely call out opponents; in this campaign he has threatened individuals and organizations for daring to criticize him. In September he sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Club for Growth, promising a “multi-million-dollar” lawsuit if the group didn’t stop running ads in Iowa highlighting his tax ideas.
In December Mr. Trump’s representatives sent a letter threatening litigation to a wealthy Florida businessman, Mike Fernandez, who ran an ad against the candidate in a local newspaper. Another Trump letter threatened to sue a political-action committee backing presidential rival John Kasich. The company StopTrump.us, which was selling anti-Trump merchandise, was another object of Mr. Trump’s litigious saber-rattling. He has also threatened lawsuits against newspapers, including this one. Mr. Trump in November threatened to sue The Wall Street Journal if it didn’t retract and apologize for an editorial that criticized him for not understanding the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. The Journal refused, and his lawyer withdrew the threat.
This follows a lifetime of Mr. Trump’s using the judicial branch, or simply the threat of legal action, to try to silence his critics. He (unsuccessfully) sued the author of a book that claimed he wasn’t really a billionaire. He (successfully) sued a Miss USA contestant for claiming the pageant process was “rigged.” He threatened legal action against an activist who had ginned up a campaign to get Macy’s to stop selling Trump-branded products (he didn’t sue in the end).
Sometimes Mr. Trump’s legal actions are less about hushing critics than blocking business competition. He sued New York state for letting bars offer a lottery game that might have cut into his casino revenue. He sued New Jersey for funding a tunnel project that would have funneled more people to a rival casino owner’s resort.
More worrisome is Mr. Trump’s willingness to use government to punish a critic. In September on Fox News, National Review’s Rich Lowry praised GOP candidate Carly Fiorina by saying that in a debate exchange with Mr. Trump, she had “cut his balls off with the precision of a surgeon.” Mr. Trump—who often derides political correctness—called on the Federal Communications Commission to fine Mr. Lowry.
Mr. Trump is a fan of government power generally, as alarmed constitutional conservatives will tell anyone willing to listen. He has never offered deeply considered views about the office of the presidency—on its obligations, the limits of its power, the need to exercise restraint.
“The current administration has resurrected Nixon’s weaponization of the bureaucracies against its opponents,” says Mr. Sasse. “And I don’t have great hope that a guy who brags, ‘If someone screws you, screw them back,’ is going to return to the rule of law.”
Mr. Trump on Friday night last week finally responded, sort of, to Mr. Sasse’s tweeted queries. “@BenSasse looks more like a gym rat than a U.S. Senator. How the hell did he ever get elected?” Mr. Trump tweeted. Mr. Sasse responded: “Thanks. As the sonuva football &wrestling coach, this is high praise.” Then he went back to prodding Mr. Trump about how he would wield power if elected president.
A few of Mr. Trump’s GOP rivals, perhaps caught up in the public anger or desperate to catch him in the polls, have also flirted with suggesting that they would govern beyond the law. Maybe that’s what some voters want. But as those voters weigh their choices, they might spare five minutes to remember the years-long IRS nightmare suffered by dozens of tea party groups, or the fear that grass-roots conservatives felt as Wisconsin police swept into their homes.
Government possesses a terrible power that must be used sparingly. Conservatives should prefer a president who agrees.
Ms. Strassel writes the Journal’s Potomac Watch column.
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Good post CD.
This use of government including the legal side to silence critics is particularly troubling.
It is like using the IRS against those you don't like, like Clinton or Obama.
Filing lawsuits for every criticism he doesn't like is not good for someone running for public office IMHO
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Where is PP?
Sam Altman points out Trump got "shlonged".
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That is very funny!
BTW WTF with the Donald asking for a do-over on Iowa because "Cruz cheated"?!?
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"BTW WTF with the Donald asking for a do-over on Iowa because "Cruz cheated"?!?"
My sense he is wasting his time, sounds like a whiner, and should mover forward. While he can point it out I don't believe he is endearing himself to new voters by dwelling on this. Just my opinion.
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"whiner"
Right! Trump is still out saying Cruz is ineligible and Cruz crossed a line?! Good grief.
Some of us were hoping that seeing the loser side of Trump would not be pretty to his supporters.
Mpls Startribune political cartoon yesterday:
(http://stmedia.stimg.co/ows_145445439220436.jpg?w=525)
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430628/donald-trump-business-record-bully
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Knowing what to think about Trump, with regards to how will he govern is an enigma. It is really hard to tell since he has never governed before. On one hand we think he will be fair though committed to principles and rebuilding America. OTOH we see his personality, the lack of humility, the temper tantrums, the name calling
.
I remember many years ago my Mom and I were walking from the corner bank and we ran into our retired dentist. I don't recall the conversation exactly but I remember word for word something he said to my mother: "one can never know what is going on in the back of a man's mind". Something about that and the way he said it, struck me as words only an older person who has seen a lot could know. I never forgot it though I admit I didn't really understand it.
Now many years later having been through experiences already posted over many years, I now understand it.
I've have read books and spoken to intelligence people who confirm that there are very few people who can be totally trusted.
Sex , money, power maybe drugs can shift what seems to be a person's character to something else.
I've also read that the best, though far from perfect way to know who might be the one who is telling the truth, or stay honest, is the one who has demonstrated throughout his or her life this trait, or similar traits. Always go by how a person has lived and NOT by what they say, such as, "you can trust me", or "I a am a person of God". Unfortunately words mean little to nothing. Character is based on demonstrated living not on words.
All this said, bottom line, is this this National Review hit piece, while another piece of the puzzle, is just one example of Trump's character. One could argue that this is a positive trait and when he commits to something he stands by his commitment. He did offer her to buy her house. Probably offered her a lot of premium.
One could assume from this that if he commits to building a border wall, he will do it. Not just empty words.
The National review sees this as a bully. I agree one could look at it this way. But I counter that one could also look at it as story that shows Trump is a man who sticks to his guns.
BTW, I used to go to Atlantic City when I lived in Camden, NJ and Philadelphia and I would shoot across South Jersey to AC to play blackjack and I remember this scene of two or three giant casinos surrounding this tiny little island of dirt with a tiny house in the middle of these giant concrete monstrosities. Someone in that house refused to sell, it was obvious. So the moguls simply built up these skyscrapers all around her and up to the very and every inch of the property from all sides. Wow. When the little gal who is stubborn butts horns with the big guys who are also stubborn this is what we get. Both stick to their guns.
I still would like to know how Trump is with his employees. If he is fair and kind with them then that IS how he is likely to be as President. In business all I want to know is he good for his word. I am less impressed than if he is forceful.
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Agree with everything this writer concludes about the media and Trump except one. He spends the whole article pointing out how so many people were wrong about betting against Trump and those who were supportive were right.
But then he ironically bets against Trump by saying he will lose the general election.. I don't agree. But other than that I agree with the rest:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/donald-trumps-new-hampshire-win-means-these-media-members-are-winners-losers/
PS I like the sound of "The President Donald" better than "President Trump".
Hey, where is PP?
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Trump’s Eminent Disdain
Donald is wrong about the Keystone Pipeline and property rights.
Feb. 10, 2016 7:06 p.m. ET
29 COMMENTS
You can’t build a real estate empire unless government helps you snatch private property, or so says Donald Trump, who routinely defends eminent domain as an inevitable business reality. Maybe he needs broader business experience.
In Saturday’s Republican debate, Mr. Trump fielded a question about eminent domain and had a ready answer. “You need eminent domain,” Mr. Trump said. “A lot of the big conservatives that tell me how conservative they are,” they “all want the Keystone Pipeline. The Keystone Pipeline, without eminent domain, it wouldn’t go 10 feet, OK?”
Not OK, or accurate. In the decade since TransCanada proposed the pipeline system, which includes the Keystone XL route President Obama rejected last year, the company says it has negotiated voluntary easements with 96% of 2,600 landowners across 3,000 miles and nine states. That includes 100% of landowners on the Keystone XL path in Montana and South Dakota, and 91% in Nebraska. TransCanada has on rare occasion turned to eminent domain, a process that usually involves a panel of experts determining fair compensation.
In other words, market negotiations have determined what TransCanada offers an owner for using his property in an overwhelming majority of cases. By the way, the company plans to build the 1,179-mile Keystone XL pipeline almost entirely underground, so property owners could forget about the gusher once it was buried.
Mr. Trump’s version of eminent domain is to bulldoze your house, and he tends to haul in government when he doesn’t get his way. In the 1990s a house owned by an elderly widow in Atlantic City blocked a potential limousine parking lot outside a Trump casino. After Vera Coking refused to sell, the state casino authority tried to condemn the place. Ms. Coking prevailed against Mr. Trump after a long legal fight. When Jeb Bush mentioned this tale at Saturday’s debate, Mr. Trump assailed the booing audience as Bush partisans.
Mr. Trump is spinning property seizure as the price of admission for economic progress, whether bridges or factories, but it isn’t true. TransCanada shows that not all developers go the Trump route when closing a deal.
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96 % 91 %;
Well what about the few hold outs? They alone could mess up the whole thing.
Just like Atlantic City. Everyone sold except this one old lady.
I am not for kicking people off their land.
Just saying.
He does have a very good point.
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/02/11/trump-lets-slip-were-going-to-keep-common-core/
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:roll:
The most luxurious, classiest common core, though.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/02/11/trump-lets-slip-were-going-to-keep-common-core/
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ccp: 96 % 91 % [selling for the pipeline].
Well what about the few hold outs? They alone could mess up the whole thing.
[The pipeline has become accepted public use. ]
Just like Atlantic City. Everyone sold except this one old lady.
[If the offer is so high it is something that can't be passed up, and holding out means nothing, a rational person sells - or a rational developer DEVELOPS SOMEWHERE ELSE. Without government intervention, these things have a way of working themselves out better than with it!]
I am not for kicking people off their land. [Stay with that point.]
ccp, There is a fine line between the calling the Texas Rangers a public use and a casino. If we were to argue that out further, the only other outcome I see is to not let these sports teams pretend they are a public asset or public use either.
If you want a casino or other private business on my land, buy my land or build somewhere else. There is something very symbolic about the privacy and sanctity of of buying, owning and occupying our own home, and the Founders thought to include it many of the top ten rights in the bill of rights. The casino use seems important compared to one homeowner, but not if we all realize that is all of us and our rights at stake too, when they attack one of us.
Would we have a better economy and a better society if we just let the central planners have a little more power to centrally plan and control us. NO!
In the cases of Suzette Kelo and Vera Coking, it turns out that Pfizer never built and Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. So did the Soviet Union and every other example, but that is not the point. The point is that no amount of cronyism makes Donald Trump's use better than Vera Coking's. The free market allows assets and resources to flow to their best use.
Trump's confusion of putting roads, bridges, hospitals, airports, rail lines and pipelines in the same category with private commercial use is dishonest and misguided. Yes, eminent domain power is a necessary evil. It is a power to be limited, not expanded. In these cases, New London, Atlantic City, Minneapolis, there is no limit if you allow a presumption of general economic gain to be a valid reason for the government to take private property for a preferred private use.
Yes, plenty of precautions should be taken in the case of a Keystone XL pipeline and plenty of homeowners are harmed by it. A 38" inch pipe though mostly does not likely cause the displacement of people off their property against their will, as the above cases do. Despite some denial, oil is considered public use, like transporting wheat or coal over rail, and would otherwise be transported over existing public right of ways at a far higher risk. The public should own these right of way and the selection of the private company operating it should be made only to through an open public process. Enabling a pipeline, IF it is considered a valid public use, does not have anything to do with letting government pick all winners and losers.
[My own experience with government private taking: I owned and operated two small apartment buildings in the Phillips neighborhood.of Minneapolis. Like nearly all our so-called great cities, there are pockets, a short distance from the skyscrapers, where the incomes and values are low. One reason a person buys and endures the hell of managing low income property is the hope, upside risk and belief that someday, when we want to sell, this all will all be valuable. And then when that time finally comes, some big time, well connected operators, instead of buying, entice the local government to perform the takings, pay the owners much later through a wrongful process of courts looking at value through the rear view mirror. But the value of the taking is the new use, not the old use. In my case, I sold one property voluntarily, made many times my investment and the private group still got a good deal. On the second building, they gave a very low take it or leave it offer knowing the City would take it for them. Challenging the decision of the City of Minneapolis as a private landowner is like challenging Saddam Hussein or Leonid Brezhnev in their time and place of rule. A complete waste of time is the best outcome possible, and seeing them target you personally and all your properties is a more likely one. The title changed ownership to the City and them to the sham group performing the redevelopment. The court dates and hearings were held and an undersized check for 'value' was eventually received years later, including nothing for the loss of income during that elapsed time. (How can you have lost income on a property where you already lost title, they ask?) Words can't describe how powerless we were against the machine of big government acting locally but empowered by Supreme Court appointees of which Trump approves and would duplicate. ]
Even if I am wrong on this (?), Trump is WAY out of step with conservatism and the will and intent of the Founding Fathers, siding instead with big government and the cronyists. This on an issue where conservatism is IN STEP with the general public. Cruz gets that. Bush gets that. Even Bernie Sanders gets that. Saying that roads and bridges do it too, even a ballpark, doesn't make it right!
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"A complete waste of time is the best outcome possible, and seeing them target you personally and all your properties is a more likely one. The title changed ownership to the City and them to the sham group performing the redevelopment. The court dates and hearings were held and an undersized check for 'value' was eventually received years later, including nothing for the loss of income during that elapsed time. (How can you have lost income on a property where you already lost title, they ask?) Words can't describe how powerless we were against the machine of big government acting locally but empowered by Supreme Court appointees of which Trump approves and would duplicate. ]
Even if I am wrong on this (?), Trump is WAY out of step with conservatism and the will and intent of the Founding Fathers, siding instead with big government and the cronyists. This on an issue where conservatism is IN STEP with the general public. Cruz gets that. Bush gets that. Even Bernie Sanders gets that. Saying that roads and bridges do it too, even a ballpark, doesn't make it right!"
I hear you. Trump says that an owner can do very well if he/she play their cards right. Easy for him to say. Try going up a city if you are a low income old lady. :cry:
As you point out the need for a baseball stadium and a casino is a fine line. One could say both would benefit the overall economic health of the area they will be in . I think his point about the hypocracy of the Bush family on this point is accurate. I am tired of public money being used for sports stadiums. Yet your broader points I agree with 100%
There is so much about Trump I love but there are so many aspects about him I am shall we say less than thrilled about.
This is somewhat weird. Both Joe Scarborough and Breizinski are friends of Trump. Is this an example of how big money attracts strange bed fellows ? I don't know. MSLSD staff are going nuts over this :lol: :
http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/12/media/joe-scarborough-donald-trump-nbc/
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In the debate last night Trump was asked where he disagrees with conservatives. He actually brought up eminent domain as an example, a very honest and direct answer, though his view of it is still convoluted. Separately he was asked if he had people around him that ever said no to him, told him when he was wrong. He danced around that one since in his mind he has never been wrong, and no, he doesn't hire people who stand up to him. He would consider them to be "nasty".
Considering the passing of Scalia as the breaking news story and the importance of Supreme Court appointments to the job, this would have been a great time for Trump to say he has top advisers who are conservatives who are telling him he is wrong on Kelo and Coking and at their insistence he will humbly reconsider his position on needlessly taking people's properties. Needless to say, he doesn't have top advisers who are conservatives or originalists and this didn't happen.
The debate reinforced Trump's position. He leads the GOP race with a strong plurality and matches up worst in the general election polling. If you believe in polls and he seems to, he should know he will never be President. There is no time left to reintroduce himself and make a new first impression.
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"There is no time left to reintroduce himself and make a new first impression."
Some have voiced for Trump to stop the school yard stuff and start being more Presidential and he would have a much better chance to take this all the way.. The clinton's have proven how polls can turn around very quickly depending on what you say and how you say it.
I keep waiting for Trump to do this - hoping - but I have come to the conclusion it ain't gonna happen. He is incapable of it. He is what he is. He is very flawed as a candidate.
As for surrounding himself with yes men I would guess that is right. Although a few people who claim they "know him" state he will listen to all views before he makes decisions.
Then after he decides if he has people who will consider his word gospel than one would think they will work harder for him and what he espouses.
Doug I agree with your position on the eminent domain topic. It is outrageous that a person's property can be confiscated by the rich and for the rich and only but the rich. And Trump is one of those rich guys not above being a bully.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-says-the-us-should-accept-refugees-from-syria-10493347.html
http://therightscoop.com/trump-we-have-to-accept-migrants-here-because-theyre-living-in-hell-in-syria/
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https://www.youtube.com/embed/UZq3iCn2y74?rel=0
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4lFrk4PbVg
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The Whale That Nearly Drowned The Donald
How Trump schemed to win back millions from a high-rolling—and doomed—Japanese gambler
Michael Crowley
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/japanese-gambler-donald-trump-213635?paginate=false
In January 1992, a Japanese one-time billionaire named Akio Kashiwagi was found dead in his palatial home near Mt. Fuji. The scene was gruesome. The house’s white paper screens were spattered with blood. The 54-year-old had been stabbed as many as 150 times. By some reports the weapon of choice was a samurai-style sword.
The crime was never solved, though it bore the hallmarks of a killing by Japan’s criminal yakuza. Ostensibly a real estate investor, Kashiwagi was a mysterious figure reputed to have underworld connections. He was also one of the world’s top five gamblers, a “whale” in casino parlance, willing to wager $10 million in a single gaming bender.
And that is how he crossed paths with Donald J. Trump, then a budding Atlantic City casino mogul. In 1990 the two men had an epic and remarkably personal showdown in which millions of dollars changed hands in a matter of days, before it all ended in a flurry of recriminations. One of the Japanese mogul’s last statements to the U.S. media, through an aide, involved his plans to burn a copy of Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal.
After his murder, the New York Times reported that he owed at least $9 million to casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. One unnamed casino Atlantic City executive told the paper that Kashiwagi had owed the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino $4 million.
Trump is obsessed with winning, a topic he usually brings up in the context of his merciless deal-making style. But a crucial question about any would-be president who may be confronted with questions of war and peace is his attitude toward risk. Some presidents — Barack Obama comes to mind — are highly averse to it. Others roll the dice, as George W. Bush did when he invaded Iraq.
The story of Akio Kashiwagi, drawn from Trump’s memoirs and news accounts from the day, offers a revealing window into Trump’s instincts. It shows that Trump isn’t just a one-time casino owner — he’s also a gambler, prone to impulsive, even reckless action. In The Art of the Comeback, published in 1997, Trump explains that until he met Kashiwagi, he saw himself as an investor who dealt only in facts and reason. But his duel with the great whale in action made him realize “that I had become a gambler, something I never thought I was.”
Perhaps just as important, when gambling failed him, Trump didn't quit: He doubled down. But he did it shrewdly, summoning a RAND Corporation mathematician to devise a plan that would maximize his chance of fleecing his Japanese guest.
And it worked. Kind of. In Trump’s recollection, which he shared for this story, his showdown with Kashiwagi was another one of his many great wins. Just don’t look too hard at the ledger.
***
In February of 1990, Donald Trump flew to Tokyo, where he was promoting a heavyweight bout between Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas. At a party for friends and business partners the night before the fight, Trump took Tyson around the room for photos. When Trump spotted one man standing alone in a corner, the mogul threw his arm around him and positioned him for a shot with Tyson.
“No picture! No picture!” the man shouted, covering his face.
That man was Akio Kashiwagi. By then Trump had been courting the mysterious businessman for weeks, hoping that, with some luck, his seemingly limitless bank account could help keep Trump’s latest business venture afloat.
A few years earlier, Trump had begun an aggressive move into the Atlantic City casino business. He had three hotel-casinos under his belt, including the Trump Taj Mahal, modestly dubbed the “eighth wonder of the world.”
But those enterprises required huge revenues to turn a profit. Retirees playing their Social Security checks would only get Trump so far. High rollers promised not only quick winnings, but that lifeblood of Trump’s career: publicity.
Kashiwagi fit the bill. His game was baccarat, a fast-paced card game similar to blackjack that is favored by James Bond. And he bet big, wagering up to $250,000 per hand. He was also a murky figure. The son of a carpenter, he claimed income of $100 million per year and assets of $1 billion, owned a palatial Tokyo home and retained a private chef who cooked him marinated monkey meat. But an independent assessment found his real estate business had revenues of only $15 million and a handful of staffers. Rumors swirled about his ties to the yakuza—perhaps explaining his aversion to photographers.
The high-roller world is small, and the highest rollers are discussed among top casino owners. Trump first heard about Kashiwagi from the late Sir James Goldsmith, a European financier and casino owner. Kashiwagi had recently won nearly $20 million at Goldsmith’s Diamond Beach casino in Australia, almost bankrupting it. But he’d also blown $6 million on baccarat at Steve Wynn’s Mirage casino in Las Vegas a year earlier.
Trump’s top casino executive warned him against inviting Kashiwagi to Atlantic City. Too risky, he said. Trump couldn't resist. He told Kashiwagi there was a penthouse waiting for him at the Trump Plaza. Kashiwagi, in turn, was “eager to match stakes with the famous Donald Trump,” John O’Donnell, then the casino’s chief operating officer, wrote in a memoir.
A few days after dodging the photo with Trump and Tyson, Kashiwagi arrived in Atlantic City. Trump greeted him with an autographed copy of The Art of the Deal. Things got off to an odd start, Trump would later recall in his own memoir: Kashiwagi retired to his bi-level penthouse suite—featuring ocean views, butler service, a grand piano and an $800,000 jade Buddha—and didn’t emerge for two days. Finally he reappeared on a Friday night. Piles of $5,000 chips awaited him at a table reserved for his play. One $250,000 stack stood over a foot high, according to Trump’s later account.
With his black hair slicked back, Kashiwagi played marathon sessions at a table roped off for his private use. Surrounded by bodyguards and watchful casino officials, he was supplied with hot towels and given a private bathroom; Trump even hired a Japanese chef to cook for him. Amid the opulence, Kashiwagi cut a modest profile. “Sipping tea amid tuxedo-clad baccarat croupiers, Mr. Kashiwagi, in his rumpled blue-striped shirt and plain black slippers, has the look of a quarter slot-machine player just off the bus from Hoboken,” the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
Dozens of low-rollers peered over a marble wall into a world they could barely fathom. “All that money,” one woman told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “How can anyone… I can't imagine…”
It was just the sort of publicity Trump had been seeking. “That [Kashiwagi] chose Trump Plaza was an enormous coup for us,” O’Donnell wrote. He was “the perfect complement to the world-class image we were marketing, and enhanced the Trump image of elegance and excitement.” Kashiwagi “could propel Trump Plaza into an entirely new realm of action,” O’Donnell believed.
But the great whale Trump had harpooned was threatening to swamp his boat.
“From the very first hand, Kashiwagi started beating the hell out of us,” Trump wrote in Comeback. Trump was down a million dollars within half an hour.
“What the hell am I doing? I asked myself,” he wrote. "Cash flow is way down, and I’m playing with a guy who could win $40 or $50 million in a matter of days.” Suddenly, it became clear that this was a PR triumph that could put the Trump Plaza out of business.
Every casino game has a built-in advantage for the house. But Trump grew alarmed as he focused on the fact that baccarat offers a relatively narrow dealer's edge.
“At that moment I realized for the first time that I had become a gambler,” Trump wrote. Yes, he had speculated on real estate, based on sound judgment. “But this had nothing to do with logic or reason. I was merely sitting on the sidelines watching as one of the best gamblers in the world played against me for $250,000 per hand, seventy times an hour.”
Trump was nervous to his core. In what he says was a first, he called down to the casino floor late that night to check on the ledger. He learned that he was down $4 million—a figure that would soon double. Kashiwagi had so many chips he had to pile them on the floor.
But in public, Trump was typically unflappable. "Have you ever seen action like this?" he told the Inquirer, which had come to document the action at Trump’s behest. He was speaking at 4 a.m.; Trump had stayed up until his casino closed to monitor the first night’s action. "This guy is great, the best in the world. The best."
The ledger swung wildly through the weekend. Kashiwagi went on hot and cold streaks, enduring wild swings of millions of dollars. He played quietly, sometimes just smiling when he lost hands. But at times he flung his cards down in annoyance after losing, or made fists and opened them as if releasing frustrated energy.
He soon decided he’d had enough. He was becoming irritable, and the gawkers and multiplying news stories were spooking a man obsessed with privacy. He abruptly announced that he was headed back to Tokyo.
With $6 million of Donald Trump’s money in his pocket.
“He quit, Jack. What the fuck?” a furious Trump said to O’Donnell. Trump had expected Kashiwagi to play for several days; he’d stayed for only two.
Where many people would retreat into shame and self-recrimination, Donald Trump doubled down. He immediately courted Kashiwagi to make a return visit, like a heavyweight boxing rematch. One Trump executive even publicly proposed a date for Kashiwagi’s return: December 7, the anniversary of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
Behind the trademark bluster, however, Trump grew more calculated. Having looked in the mirror and seen a gambler, he reverted to careful strategy. Trump consulted Jess Marcum, a mathematical probabilities expert who co-founded the Rand Corporation — a government-affiliated think tank then better known for modeling nuclear war with the Soviet Union—on how to maximize his odds in a second showdown with Kashiwagi. Marcum knew the only way to compensate for the house’s very slight baccarat advantage, of just over one percent, was to keep the game going for as long as possible. Time was on Trump’s side.
So Marcum and an Atlantic City casino insider named Al Glasgow prepared a report for Trump proposing a “freeze out” agreement. Under the deal, Kashiwagi would bring $12 million to the table and play until he had either doubled it—or lost everything. Even with huge bets, that would take a long time. Marcum simulated the match in detailed handwritten notes. Kashiwagi might surge ahead early, he estimated, but after 75 hours at the table – far longer than he had stayed the first time - his chances of winning would fall to 15 percent. The key was to prevent a repeat of Kashiwagi’s first visit, when he had walked out while ahead.
Kashiwagi, presumably fuzzier on the probabilities, agreed to the terms. There was no legal way to hold him to such a deal but Trump felt the men were honor-bound. “Gamblers are honorable, in their own way—at least about gambling,” he later wrote.
***
Kashiwagi returned to Trump Plaza in May, and Trump was again on the casino floor. And once again, his Japanese rival hit an early winning streak. One Trump biographer, Harry Hurt III, described the mogul as “impolitely ‘sweating the action’ in view of Kashiwagi and the other patrons” before excusing himself. After falling behind another $9 million—now $15 million in total over the two sessions—a stunned Trump considered stopping the game. But Marcum convinced him to be patient and wait for the probabilities to work.
The gambling continued for more than five days. In Comeback, Trump recalled hearing from a pit manager that Kashiwagi hit a major losing streak, by pure chance, after his dealers changed from a team of men to a team of women. Losing faith in his RAND-generated odds, Trump now seized on the only thing he had left: superstition: “I want those women dealing to this guy all the time,” Trump insisted. “I don’t give a damn if it’s a coincidence or not.” The mogul even called the women directly to make clear he expected them to stay at the table.
Trump’s account, written years later, here diverges significantly from others. In his telling, the Kashiwagi saga unfolded over one epic visit. But several other fuller accounts—including O’Donnell’s detailed recollection and newspaper reports from the time—clearly describe two separate Kashiwagi trips to Atlantic City.
One thing everyone agrees on is that Trump's fortunes took a sudden turn, just as his RAND expert had predicted. After six days, Trump was up $10 million, meaning he’d won back the $6 million from Kashiwagi’s February visit plus another $4 million.
But there is also disagreement over what happened next. “Remembering our deal, I told my people to stop the play.” Trump wrote in Comeback. Kashiwagi “was not particularly happy about this” Trump recalled, “but he agreed.” Here Trump cited the gamblers’ credo: “When a deal is made, they usually abide by it.”
Kashiwagi saw things very differently. His aide told reporters that Trump had dishonorably violated their deal by calling off the game early. The deal had reportedly been for play to continue until Kashiwagi either won or lost $12 million. That’s not what happened: Trump called the game after $10 million.
It’s not clear, then, why Trump would later write that he was “[r]emembering our deal"—or why he would say that Kashiwagi agreed to stop play. But if Trump did change the terms of a deal at the last minute, it would not be for the first or last time.
Kashiwagi departed in a rage, with his aide announcing plans for that autographed copy of Art of the Deal. “We are going to burn it soon,” he said.
Trump might not have cared, except that Kashiwagi owed him a lot of money. He had been playing on credit, and left before a $6 million check drawn from a Singapore bank had cleared. Though the facts are unclear, the check apparently bounced or Kashiwagi canceled it. Trump executives publicly threatened lawsuits. Trump’s account in Comeback never mentions any of this, although concerns about his guest’s credit could explain his decision to end their showdown prematurely.
Kashiwagi suggested that Trump, then in significant debt himself, was the one with a credit problem. His aide told the Journal that Trump Plaza had offered his boss a $5,000 shopping spree at Macy’s in Atlantic City—but that the store had rejected Trump’s credit at the register.
“We pity Mr. Trump’s creditors,” said the aide. “No wonder if they panic.” Eventually, they did. All three of Trump’s Atlantic City casinos were bankrupt by 1992. But Akio Kashiwagi didn’t get to enjoy it. He was murdered in early January of that year.
In Trump’s telling, it was Kashiwagi’s visit to his casino that effectively ruined the secretive gambler’s life. He returned home to a media frenzy in Tokyo over his Atlantic City adventure. “One day he completely lost it,” Trump wrote. “He ran outside to get away from two television cameras peering into his window. He tripped over the curb and broke his ankle. His chauffeur pulled him into his black Mercedes and sped off.”
“Kashiwagi went into hiding and was never seen again until his body was found hacked to pieces by a samurai sword,” Trump continued. “They never caught the killers.”
Japanese authorities did make an arrest in the case, charging a man the Los Angeles Times described as "a reputed local gangster" acquainted with Kashiwagi's son. The motive was unclear, but Japanese media noted that the killer did not steal Kashiwagi’s diamonds or the hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed in the house.
In a statement to POLITICO, Trump expressed respect for Kashiwagi (though no remorse for his death). “I loved our matches with him,” Trump said. “He was a great player who loved big numbers. He made me a lot of money when money was very tight and the economy was crashing.”
But it’s not clear that Kashiwagi made Trump any money at all. The final ledger is murky. But if Kashiwagi won $6 million on his first trip to Atlantic City, then lost $10 million — and died owing Trump $4 million, then Trump at best broke even. If reports that Kashiwagi cashed in nearly $500,000 in chips on his way out of the casino are correct, then Trump finished in the red.
Trump did get the media attention that had always been part of his plan. But it wasn’t enough to save the Trump Plaza or any of his other properties. Within a couple of years Trump would limp out of Atlantic City altogether, narrowly escaping personal bankruptcy. His great gamble — on Kashiwagi, and on gambling itself — can hardly be called a success. Only in Trump’s world can that kind of wager be called a win.
Michael Crowley is Politico’s senior foreign affairs correspondent.
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second post
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/trump-on-there-being-zero-proof-he-opposed-iraq-before-the-w#.juMBBQ4PY
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Third post:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431320/donald-trump-conventional-democrat
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Yes, the debate was a watershed with me concerning Donald Trump.
I would only vote for him as a last resort.
He just soared - to the bottom of my list.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vqFehH1aQU
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05k8bPgOLe0
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Doesn't say too much. Just half a dozen or thereabouts.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/
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http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/dear-trump-fan-so-you-want-someone-to-tell-it-like-it-is-ok-here-you-go/
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Trump keeps citing Carl Icahn as an example of who would advise him.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/22/investing/carl-icahn-oil-cash-crunch/index.html
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Things that make you go hmmm , , ,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/21/donald-trump-consults-with-rudy-giuliani-as-he-builds-political-kitchen-cabinet/
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431915/donald-trump-worth-tax-returns-mitt-romney?z1VIMlFVXcVfVwUA.01
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431915/donald-trump-worth-tax-returns-mitt-romney?z1VIMlFVXcVfVwUA.01
Trump's narcissism will drag us all down.
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First this, Bret Stephens has a recent column telling truth about Trump if anyone has access...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trumpkins-lament-1456184997
------------------------------------------------
Why Donald Trump Is Wrong About How the Economy Works
http://fortune.com/2016/02/19/donald-trump-wrong-economy/
“This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border.”
That’s his campaign’s economic theme. America has been “losing” by letting in immigrants and allowing free trade. Trump would reclaim our tradition of “winning.” But Trump has an outmoded view of economics that was never true and is particularly false now.
It is true in a casino, where Donald Trump’s understanding of economics began, and perhaps ended. A casino is a perfect zero-sum economy. If you win, the house loses. Much more often, your loss is the house’s win.
That’s because a casino is not productive (aside from its employment of a few low-wage workers). Its only activity is gambling. Someone’s win is another party’s loss.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Trump’s other occasional successes, in commercial real estate, have a history of relying on government tax abatements and other breaks. That’s another forum for zero-sum, win-lose economics. One mogul dodges a tax; many ordinary citizens have to pay a little more.
But in the mainstream economy where most Americans work, economics is not zero-sum. Each transaction enriches both sides. When you buy an automobile it enriches the dealer, the manufacturer, the bank that provided financing, the suppliers who contributed parts—an entire web of affiliated parties. You, the consumer, also benefit—because you value the automobile.
In the Trump view of the world, one of those parties—say, the car company—“wins” and everyone else loses. In fact, every one of those parties wins, or rather benefits, to a small degree. And their increased prosperity marginally increases their propensity to spend and notches up growth for all.
The new high-tech and health-care economies are redolent with examples of firms whose success, rather than “taking” from others, has sprouted entire subcultures of spinoff companies. One successful enterprise leads to another. (Think of the iPhone and the gaggle of app developers founded in its wake.)
Although not every industry spawns such a virtuous circle, in a free economy every participant gains, to a small degree, from every trade. And that is true even for the foreign “trade” that Trump routinely disparages.
As Trump might have learned had he paid attention as a student at Wharton, trade bestows the benefits of “comparative advantage.” Let’s say your neighbor is a doctor and you are a carpenter. You would be foolish to diagnose your children’s illnesses, and your neighbor would be foolish to build his own bookcase.
The same holds true for nations: each has different comparative advantages. While this may be hard to visualize on a global scale, it is easy to see on a local level. If a political xenophobe, say in Massachusetts, chose to restrict trade with Connecticut, or to build a wall on the border with Vermont, or to keep local companies from hiring workers from Rhode Island, the Bay State would become, over time, a lot poorer. The same is true for the U.S. in the global economy.
Over the past twenty-five years, and in contrast to Trump’s repeated alarums, U.S. exports have soared from $535 billion to $2.23 trillion. In 1990 exports accounted for less than 9% of the GDP. Now they are 13.5%. Our trade partners have benefitted but so have we—from imports as well as from exports.
Trump says he wants to take jobs “back” from China. But jobs in a world economy stimulate each other. A prosperous China is good for America, no less than a prosperous Vermont benefits Massachusetts. (Notice: our stock market didn’t rise on word of China’s recent troubles—it sank.)
Trump has frequently fulminated about the fact that Mexico is making automobiles. Recently, on CNN, he spliced in a bit of nativism: “If they [the Ford Motor Co] go there … the next thing you know they have the illegals driving right across the border.” Trump loves to imply that the U.S. is besieged with unauthorized Mexicans. Actually, there are 1 million fewer unauthorized Mexicans living in the U.S. than a decade ago. But those that remain here contribute both to the economy and to the tax base—via Social Security.
Trump also told CNN that, while in Los Angeles, he “saw” ships coming in from Japan, “loaded up with cars, thousands of cars. …You know [what] we send them? Beef. And they don’t want it. And we send them wheat; they don’t want it.” The notion that U.S. exports tend to be less valuable, or support only low-paying jobs, is another Trump canard—“a total lie,” as the Donald might say. Our five biggest exports to Japan are aircraft, medical and technical equipment, machinery, electronics, and pharmaceuticals. (As a trade analyst Trump is living in another century. Wheat accounts for one half of one percent of American goods exports.)
Trump’s slogan—“making America great again”—borrows from the Republican demigod, Ronald Reagan. But Reagan projected a fearless optimism and generally tried to open the economy. Trump wants to close the economy. He represents not the economics of hope but the economics of fear. We can only win if our neighbors lose. That’s the sort of narrow, desperate protectionism that, in the 1930s, helped to fuel a world depression.
Trump’s vulgarities and Big Lie deceptions should, alone, disqualify him for the presidency. To cite only one very low example, his claim that he saw “thousands” of American Muslims cheering on the day that the Twin Towers went down is a blood libel, intended to whip up fear against a minority.
Far from bringing America back, Trump, with his disdain for facts and readiness to stir up xenophobia, represents everything that is un-American. But if that’s not enough, there is this: Donald Trump has as much chance of reviving the economy as you do of drawing a jackpot on a slot machine. Not unlike his politics, his economics are based on fear and lies. His way leads to impoverishment not just spiritually, but materially too.
---------------------------------
Comments, Pat?
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GM and Doug,
It doesn't appear that reason, logic, history, vulgarity, disrespect for anyone who disagrees with him is going to matter.
30% or so of the Republican party and a smaller group of Democrats are going to vote for Trump no matter what.
The only thing I can think of that may change this is if he should in some way insult *this* group.
He has insulted so many others and we all know so many despise him. But he has not insulted this same 30%.
I suppose if he backs down on immigration (which appears to be his biggest draw) or perhaps trade etc then that may change the minds of some.
Otherwise we don't see breaking down of this block of voter support.
I am in the Levin camp. I definitely like some of what he says but I cannot stomach his vulgarity his not just being tough but outright cruelty to those who challenge as well as Levin's more important point about that he is not a real conservative.
Yet it looks as though we are stuck . Even if the convention is brokered and someone else is given the nominee we can be sure Trump will go crazy and run as an independent if for no other reason than for revenge.
OTOH some think this would hurt the Dems even more. I don't know. Are we going to have a world with Heads of States saying F you to one another? Of course they do it anyway but at least not in public I suppose.
To me I felt saddened watching the elder Bushes watching the debate and having to listen to this guy. Whatever I thought about them as whether good for conservatism or not; they didn't deserve what this guy did to their son. IMHO
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"looks as though we are stuck"
I say that most of Trump's supporters will stay with him no matter what, but not all.
I wonder what comes out of this debate and out of people starting to see that this isn't a protest anymore; it is a choice of who will be the nominee and who will be the President for the next 4-8 years.
If Trump can keep polling nationally at 36% and every candidate stays in, Trump wins. But if that support can be chipped down to 30% AND if those who can't win get out soon enough, then this could be competitive.
In separate news, Chris Christie just announced he is entering the race to be Trump's VP, his best shot at ever being President. Kasich, Carson and Cruz should switch to running to be Rubio's VP, the best shot each of them has to be President.
But no. They don't call this the stupid party for nothing.
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Chris Christie just announced he is entering the race to be Trump's VP"
Oh my God! I hadn't seen that. :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
However I don't think Trump would dare have one near him who has just as big a mouth and is just as head strong. Also I couldn't see Christie playing second fiddle to anyone.
I am dizzy at the thought of this. Excuse me while I go lay down. :roll:
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Chris Christie...
The whole thing is shocking, no, no one can see him playing second fiddle, nor see Trump as having one, but otherwise a perfect fit. (
This changes everything for Kasich. It's your move, Governor...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvaaeHP9xtQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9PCPtcsgnc
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second post
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/02/28/benghazi-heroes-endorse-trump/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
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Third post
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/taking-names-scott-maxwell/os-pam-bondi-donald-trump-university-scott-maxwell-story.html
Doing business with George Soros
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/02/trump-pals-around-with-george-soros
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton-5491.html#!
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From Levin's conservative review:
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/02/trump-plagiarizes-mccain
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton-5491.html#!
A vote for Trump is a vote for Hillary.
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Jeb Bush now considers a point I raised back when Trump first announced.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/12/09/jeb-bush-jokes-of-trump-clinton-conspiracy-theory-heres-a-look-at-the-evidence/
I asked then and I ask now: What did Bill and he discuss in their phone call the week before Trump announced?
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Trump seems to be improving in late polling. Tomorrow is Super Tuesday. The only group more incompetent at this game than the Trump campaign is the anti-Trump movement.
Crafty, Your point is interesting but there is no way the Clinton campaign likes what it sees coming. Yes, he should be easier to beat than a serious candidate, but win, lose or draw, this is going to be ugly.
If this is what passes for politics and winning in our day, my interest is past tense.
I wish Pat could explain to me why this is a good thing.
It seems to me that there should be one more momentum shift in a process like this. I just can't see it coming.
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Trump's Most Taxing Questions
Super Tuesday — Caveat Emptor
By Mark Alexander • February 29, 2016
"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." —George Washington (1796)
"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts." —Patrick Henry (1775)
Last Friday, after being pummeled in the 10th GOP primary debate, Donald Trump demonstrated once again that he is the undisputed media master. As the mainstream media (MSM) prepared to devote the day's news to the beating Trump took from Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (both of whom defeat Trump head-to-head), the most "establishment" of establishment candidates stepped up to endorse Trump.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose own campaign fell flat, joined Trump at a rally and threw his weight behind the pro-promoter, effectively diverting attention from the previous night's debate.
Christie, in an opportunistic bid for an attorney general appointment, declared, "Always beware of the candidate for public office who has the quick and easy answer to a complicated problem. ... I just don't think that [Trump] is suited to be president of the United States. ... We do not need reality TV in the Oval Office right now. [The presidency] is not a place for an entertainer. ... Showtime is over. We are not electing an entertainer-in-chief. ... [If you vote for Trump] we could wind up turning over the White House to Hillary Clinton for four more years."
Wait, that's what Christie said before he endorsed Trump. But now he has pledged allegiance to Trump, declaring, "The best person to beat Hillary Clinton in November ... is undoubtedly Donald Trump."
"Undoubtedly"? Reputable polls consistently show Trump to be the only remaining Republican candidate who loses to Hillary in a head-to-head matchup.
Trump knows how to work the media as well as he does a crowd. But as I wrote in "The Trump Freight Train," Caveat Emptor: "Virtually none of his adoring media has devoted any bandwidth challenging Trump's long list of prevarications — at least not yet. And the list keeps growing. If Trump sews up the Republican nomination, the mainstream media will stop appeasing and start tearing him apart ahead of the general election — they will eviscerate him. And there is so much to hang around Trump's neck that the barrage will be relentless until the last general election vote is cast."
Mark my words: There's a bottomless pit of Trump material that hasn't YET been aired, and Democrat opposition research teams will hand it all over to their MSM enablers as soon as Trump wraps up the Republican nomination.
Over the last eight months, I have devoted a few columns to the Trump phenomenon and the danger he poses to something far more important than the Republican Party — Liberty. I have assessed the Trump attraction, his "New York values," his inexcusable diversionary tactics of playing the "9/11 Card" and the "Veterans Card," and have asked, "If Trump is the answer, what is the question?"
But beyond that critical analysis, there is the deadly serious issue of Trump's tax returns — which he has perennially resisted releasing. Every Trump supporter should be asking one question: What is my preferred candidate trying to hide?
Trump has refused for years to release any verifiable tax information, particularly anything that might reveal his actual net worth or the organizations he supports. He has implied that it's just too complex and too long for us rubes, or blamed lawsuits, ad infinitum...
In the most recent debate, Trump claimed, "I want to release my tax returns but I can't release it while I'm under an audit." He added (with a straight face, no less) that he's being audited "because of the fact that I'm a strong Christian." Both of those assertions are false.
It's worth noting that he and other candidates did file some information with the Federal Election Commission last July, but that information is so broad as to be meaningless and does not begin to provide insights into who and what Trump has supported in recent years. Notably, over the weekend, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio released profile tax returns for the last five years, which provide much more detail than the FEC filings. They challenged Trump to do the same.
Last week, the pressure to stop evading the tax return requests made news again, when former presidential candidate Mitt Romney pushed for the release of Trump's tax records from recent years because voters "have a right to know if there's a problem in those taxes before they decide."
Romney, who reluctantly released his own records in 2012, insists that the billionaire's failure to disclose tax returns suggest he's hiding something.
"I think we have good reason to believe that there's a bombshell in Donald Trump's taxes," declared Romney. "I think there's something there. Either he's not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is or he hasn't been paying the kind of taxes we would expect him to pay or perhaps he hasn't been giving money to the vets or the disabled like he's been telling us he's been doing. And the reason I think there is a bombshell in there is because every time he's asked about his taxes, he dodges and delays and says, 'Well we're working on it.'"
Trump responded with his standard scorched-earth rhetoric: "Mitt Romney, who was one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics, is now pushing me on tax returns. Dope! I'm going to do what Mitt Romney was totally unable to do — WIN!"
The question of Trump's net worth may account for some of his evasion because he has crafted his entire persona around his billionaire image. He's based his campaign on two central claims: He's rich and he's a populist. The polls prove the latter, but he is very defensive about any encroachment on the veracity of the former.
Trump is so sensitive about his billionaire image that in 2011 he launched a $5 BILLION libel lawsuit against a New York Times reporter who dared suggest that Trump may not be worth as much as he insists he is.
That reporter, Tim O'Brien, wrote in his book, "TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald," that "[t]hree people with direct knowledge of Donald's finances, people who had worked closely with him for years, told me that they thought his net worth was somewhere between $150 million and $250 million. By anyone's standards this still qualified Donald as comfortably wealthy, but none of these people thought he was remotely close to being a billionaire."
Trump insisted that his reputation was severely damaged by O'Brien's claim, but he lost both the original lawsuit and his appeal. According to the New Jersey Superior Court:
"It is indisputable that Trump's estimates of his own worth changed substantially over time and thus failed to provide a reliable measure against which the accuracy of the information offered by the three confidential sources could be gauged. ... The materials that Trump claims to have provided to O'Brien were incomplete and unaudited, and did not contain accurate indications of Trump's ownership interests in properties, his liabilities, and his revenues, present or future."
During the case, Trump refused to allow the court to review his tax returns, which would have put to rest the question of his net worth.
Fortune Magazine, which annually rates the wealthiest Americans, noted the difficulty they have in assessing Trump's wealth:
"That difficulty is compounded by Trump's astonishing ability to prevaricate [emphasis added]. No one is saying Trump ought to be held to the same standards of truthfulness as everyone else; he is, after all, Donald Trump. But when Trump says he owns 10% of the Plaza hotel, understand that what he actually means is that he has the right to 10% of the profit if it's ever sold. When he says he's building a '90-story building' next to the U.N., he means a 72-story building that has extra-high ceilings. And when he says his casino company is the 'largest employer in the state of New Jersey,' he actually means to say it is the eighth-largest." (That was before Trump's bankruptcies...)
So, it's obvious that Trump will go to great lengths to avoid any third-party assessment of what he claims to be worth, and he'll suppress any other assessment that does not fit his altered reality. Last week he declared, "One of the things I'm gonna do if I win, is I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles we can sue them and win lots of money."
But while the speculation about his wealth may seem trivial to some, what cannot be seen as trivial are the questions of who and what Donald Trump has supported with all that wealth over the last five years. Romney might be onto something when he suggests, "Perhaps he hasn't been giving money to the vets or the disabled like he's been telling us," but I think this goes much deeper.
We know for example, because federal law requires access to annual filings by 501-C3 entities like the Trump Foundation, that he's sent at least $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, but over the last five years he only sent $57,000 to veteran support organizations. Some veterans groups are calling Trump out for using them as political pawns — or as I noted previously, playing the "Veteran Card."
Republicans and conservatives should ask, has Trump supported groups opposing the Second Amendment or other leftist assaults on Liberty? We know for a fact that he's personally supported Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and other loathsome leftists.
That said, here is my open letter to Donald Trump, as sent to his campaign last week:
Mr. Trump,
I understand you are very protective of your tax returns because they may indicate a discrepancy between your claimed and actual net worth. Though I believe you should release full tax returns, I am not requesting evidence of your net worth. However, there is important information in your tax returns, which will speak volumes about your political views, and I believe those whom you have asked to support you deserve to better understand those views.
I am, therefore, asking you to release this most basic documentation for each of the last five years:
1. Net income and Federal and State taxes paid.
2. A full listing of all C-3 and C-4 donations and contributions.
This information may be certified by an independent accounting firm of your choosing.
Sincerely,
Mark Alexander
Publisher, PatriotPost.US
Of course, Trump won't respond, and he won't release any of this basic information. In effect, his tax return evasion is a proxy Fifth Amendment assertion of his right against self-incrimination.
In the final analysis, will it make any difference to Trump's loyalists? As I have written regarding the "Obama Effect" on Republican voters, "Seven years of Obama's repressive regime has fomented despair, division and delusion among the ranks of Republican voters — so much so that they some are willing to take leave of their senses and join a cultish movement with a self-promoting charlatan at its head. History is replete with examples of such movements, and the tragic result — the suppression of Liberty." So confused are some Republicans that they no longer can distinguish between "conservative" and "establishment" candidates.
And I believe it's likely that some of Trump's primary voter support is coming not from Republicans but from Clinton crossovers, who want to ensure Trump is her opponent. Political pundits have noted the low primary Democrat turnout — that's because they have been turning out for Trump!
Last week, after his Nevada victory, Trump said two things that jumped out at me. First he declared, "We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated." And then he added, "When others drop out, I will pick up more. Sad but true." These two statements are perhaps the most truthful words he has spoken in this campaign cycle.
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/the-producers-meets-the-trump-campaign.php
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https://www.facebook.com/tedcruzpage/videos/10153925497457464/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nolbmguzvGk
and a bit of silliness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y96iyHBhIe0
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second post
http://thefederalist.com/2016/02/29/donald-trump-is-the-next-barack-obama/
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AN OPEN LETTER TO TRUMP SUPPORTERS
To my friends supporting Donald Trump:
The Trump coalition is broad and complicated, but I believe many Trump fans are well-meaning. I have spoken at length with many of you, both inside and outside Nebraska. You are rightly worried about our national direction. You ache about a crony-capitalist leadership class that is not urgent about tackling our crises. You are right to be angry.
I’m as frustrated and saddened as you are about what’s happening to our country. But I cannot support Donald Trump.
Please understand: I’m not an establishment Republican, and I will never support Hillary Clinton. I’m a movement conservative who was elected over the objections of the GOP establishment. My current answer for who I would support in a hypothetical matchup between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton is: Neither of them. I sincerely hope we select one of the other GOP candidates, but if Donald Trump ends up as the GOP nominee, conservatives will need to find a third option.
Mr. Trump’s relentless focus is on dividing Americans, and on tearing down rather than building back up this glorious nation. Much like President Obama, he displays essentially no understanding of the fact that, in the American system, we have a constitutional system of checks and balances, with three separate but co-equal branches of government. And the task of public officials is to be public “servants.” The law is king, and the people are boss. But have you noticed how Mr. Trump uses the word “Reign” – like he thinks he’s running for King? It’s creepy, actually. Nebraskans are not looking for a king. We yearn instead for the recovery of a Constitutional Republic.
At this point in Nebraska discussions, many of you have immediately gotten practical: “Okay, fine, you think there are better choices than Trump. But you would certainly still vote for Trump over Clinton in a general election, right?”
Before I explain why my answer is “Neither of them,” let me correct some nonsense you might have heard on the internet of late.
WHY I RAN FOR SENATE
***No, I’m not a career politician. (I had never run for anything until being elected to the U.S. Senate fifteen months ago, and I ran precisely because I actually want to make America great again.)
***No, I’m not a lawyer who has never created a job. (I was a business guy before becoming a college president in my hometown.)
***No, I’m not part of the Establishment. (Sheesh, I had attack ads by the lobbyist class run against me while I was on a bus tour doing 16 months of townhalls across Nebraska. Why? Precisely because I was not the preferred candidate of Washington.)
***No, I’m not concerned about political job security. (The very first thing I did upon being sworn in in January 2015 was to introduce a constitutional amendment for term limits – this didn’t exactly endear me to my new colleagues.)
***No, I’m not for open borders. (The very first official trip I took in the Senate was to observe and condemn how laughably porous the Texas/Mexican border is. See 70 tweets from @bensasse in February 2015.)
***No, I’m not a “squishy,” feel-good, grow-government moderate. (I have the 4th most-conservative voting record in the Senate: https://www.conservativereview.com/members/benjamin-sasse/ http://www.heritageactionscorecard.com/members/member/S001197 )
In my very first speech to the Senate, I told my colleagues that “The people despise us all.” This institution needs to get to work, not on the lobbyists’ priorities, but on the people’s: https://youtu.be/zQMoB4aUn04?t=3m8s
Now, to the question at hand: Will I pledge to vote for just any “Republican” nominee over Hillary Clinton?
Let’s begin by rejecting naïve purists: Politics has no angels. Politics is not about creating heaven on earth. Politics is simply about preserving a framework for ordered liberty – so that free people can find meaning and happiness not in politics but in their families, their neighborhoods, their work.
POLITICAL PARTIES
Now, let’s talk about political parties: parties are just tools to enact the things that we believe. Political parties are not families; they are not religions; they are not nations – they are often not even on the level of sports loyalties. They are just tools. I was not born Republican. I chose this party, for as long as it is useful.
If our Party is no longer working for the things we believe in – like defending the sanctity of life, stopping ObamaCare, protecting the Second Amendment, etc. – then people of good conscience should stop supporting that party until it is reformed.
VOTING
Now, let’s talk about voting: Voting is usually just about choosing the lesser evil of the most viable candidates.
“Usually…” But not always. Certain moments are larger. They cause us to explicitly ask: Who are we as a people? What does the way we vote here say about our shared identity? What is actually the president’s job?
THE PRESIDENT’S CORE CALLING
The president’s job is not about just mindlessly shouting the word “strong” – as if Vladimir Putin, who has been strongly bombing civilian populations in Syria the last month, is somehow a model for the American presidency. No, the president’s core calling is to “Preserve, Protect, and Defend the Constitution.”
Before we ever get into any technical policy fights – about pipelines, or marginal tax rates, or term limits, or Medicare reimbursement codes – America is first and fundamentally about a shared Constitutional creed. America is exceptional, because she is at her heart a big, bold truth claim about human dignity, natural rights, and self-control – and therefore necessarily about limited rather than limitless government.
THE MEANING OF AMERICA
America is the most exceptional nation in the history of the world because our Constitution is the best political document that’s ever been written. It said something different than almost any other government had said before: Most governments before said that might makes right, that government decides what our rights are and that the people are just dependent subjects. Our Founders said that God gives us rights by nature, and that government is not the author or source of our rights. Government is just our shared project to secure those rights.
Government exists only because the world is fallen, and some people want to take your property, your liberty, and your life. Government is tasked with securing a framework for ordered liberty where “we the people” can in our communities voluntarily build something great together for our kids and grandkids. That’s America. Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of speech – the First Amendment is the heartbeat of the American Constitution, of the American idea itself.
WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT TO MR. TRUMP?
So let me ask you: Do you believe the beating heart of Mr. Trump’s candidacy has been a defense of the Constitution? Do you believe it’s been an impassioned defense of the First Amendment – or an attack on it?
Which of the following quotes give you great comfort that he’s in love with the First Amendment, that he is committed to defending the Constitution, that he believes in executive restraint, that he understands servant leadership?
Statements from Trump:
***“We’re going to open up libel laws and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.”
***“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak…”
***Putin, who has killed journalists and is pillaging Ukraine, is a great leader.
***The editor of National Review “should not be allowed on TV and the FCC should fine him.”
***On whether he will use executive orders to end-run Congress, as President Obama has illegally done: "I won't refuse it. I'm going to do a lot of things." “I mean, he’s led the way, to be honest with you.”
***“Sixty-eight percent would not leave under any circumstance. I think that means murder. It think it means anything.”
***On the internet: “I would certainly be open to closing areas” of it.
***His lawyers to people selling anti-Trump t-shirts: “Mr. Trump considers this to be a very serious matter and has authorized our legal team to take all necessary and appropriate actions to bring an immediate halt...”
***Similar threatening legal letters to competing campaigns running ads about his record.
And on it goes…
IF MR. TRUMP BECOMES THE NOMINEE...
Given what we know about him today, here’s where I’m at: If Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, my expectation is that I will look for some third candidate – a conservative option, a Constitutionalist.
I do not claim to speak for a movement, but I suspect I am far from alone. After listening to Nebraskans in recent weeks, and talking to a great many people who take oaths seriously, I think many are in the same place. I believe a sizable share of Christians – who regard threats against religious liberty as arguably the greatest crisis of our time – are unwilling to support any candidate who does not make a full-throated defense of the First Amendment a first commitment of their candidacy.
Conservatives understand that all men are created equal and made in the image of God, but also that government must be limited so that fallen men do not wield too much power. A presidential candidate who boasts about what he'll do during his "reign" and refuses to condemn the KKK cannot lead a conservative movement in America.
TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT
Thank you for listening. While I recognize that we disagree about how to make America great again, we agree that this should be our goal. We need more people engaged in the civic life of our country—not fewer. I genuinely appreciate how much many of you care about this country, and that you are demanding something different from Washington. I’m going to keep doing the same thing.
But I can’t support Donald Trump.
Humbly,
Ben Sasse
Nebraska
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2016/03/02/chris-christies-wordless-screaming/?utm_content=bufferfc273&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Breathtakingly awesome.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxZkg0rOWI4&feature=youtu.be&t=2m
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notice the date : July 2015.
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Trump Health Care Plan
Congress must act. Our elected representatives in the House and Senate must:
1. Completely repeal Obamacare. Our elected representatives must eliminate the individual mandate. No person should be required to buy insurance unless he or she wants to.
2. Modify existing law that inhibits the sale of health insurance across state lines. As long as the plan purchased complies with state requirements, any vendor ought to be able to offer insurance in any state. By allowing full competition in this market, insurance costs will go down and consumer satisfaction will go up.
3. Allow individuals to fully deduct health insurance premium payments from their tax returns under the current tax system. Businesses are allowed to take these deductions so why wouldn’t Congress allow individuals the same exemptions? As we allow the free market to provide insurance coverage opportunities to companies and individuals, we must also make sure that no one slips through the cracks simply because they cannot afford insurance. We must review basic options for Medicaid and work with states to ensure that those who want healthcare coverage can have it.
4. Allow individuals to use Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). Contributions into HSAs should be tax-free and should be allowed to accumulate. These accounts would become part of the estate of the individual and could be passed on to heirs without fear of any death penalty. These plans should be particularly attractive to young people who are healthy and can afford high-deductible insurance plans. These funds can be used by any member of a family without penalty. The flexibility and security provided by HSAs will be of great benefit to all who participate.
5. Require price transparency from all healthcare providers, especially doctors and healthcare organizations like clinics and hospitals. Individuals should be able to shop to find the best prices for procedures, exams or any other medical-related procedure.
6. Block-grant Medicaid to the states. Nearly every state already offers benefits beyond what is required in the current Medicaid structure. The state governments know their people best and can manage the administration of Medicaid far better without federal overhead. States will have the incentives to seek out and eliminate fraud, waste and abuse to preserve our precious resources.
7. Remove barriers to entry into free markets for drug providers that offer safe, reliable and cheaper products. Congress will need the courage to step away from the special interests and do what is right for America. Though the pharmaceutical industry is in the private sector, drug companies provide a public service. Allowing consumers access to imported, safe and dependable drugs from overseas will bring more options to consumers.
The reforms outlined above will lower healthcare costs for all Americans. They are simply a place to start. There are other reforms that might be considered if they serve to lower costs, remove uncertainty and provide financial security for all Americans. And we must also take actions in other policy areas to lower healthcare costs and burdens. Enforcing immigration laws, eliminating fraud and waste and energizing our economy will relieve the economic pressures felt by every American. It is the moral responsibility of a nation’s government to do what is best for the people and what is in the interest of securing the future of the nation.
Providing healthcare to illegal immigrants costs us some $11 billion annually. If we were to simply enforce the current immigration laws and restrict the unbridled granting of visas to this country, we could relieve healthcare cost pressures on state and local governments.
To reduce the number of individuals needing access to programs like Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program we will need to install programs that grow the economy and bring capital and jobs back to America. The best social program has always been a job – and taking care of our economy will go a long way towards reducing our dependence on public health programs.
Finally, we need to reform our mental health programs and institutions in this country. Families, without the ability to get the information needed to help those who are ailing, are too often not given the tools to help their loved ones. There are promising reforms being developed in Congress that should receive bi-partisan support.
To reform healthcare in America, we need a President who has the leadership skills, will and courage to engage the American people and convince Congress to do what is best for the country. These straightforward reforms, along with many others I have proposed throughout my campaign, will ensure that together we will Make America Great Again.
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One would think the repubs would rally around a health plan like this.
Levin who has spent the last several years bashing Obamacare give Trump a "bad" rating on health care. Why? because Trump said we have to take care of the very poor homeless?
Why his plan is exactly what Levin has been calling for! :?
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When I posted it I must say I was surprised after Trump's simpleton answer at the last debate at how closely it tracks my own thinking, including my treasured variable about making prices transparent. Has Donald become another one of our famous lurkers?
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When I posted it I must say I was surprised after Trump's simpleton answer at the last debate at how closely it tracks my own thinking, including my treasured variable about making prices transparent. Has Donald become another one of our famous lurkers?
It must be Donald's writers lurking here because, as you say, he didn't have a clue about having a plan just a few days ago.
Smart guy, really smart guy, just wrong on nearly everything by his own standards for the first 69 years.
Maybe we can start tracking what age he was when he saw the conservative light on each issue. He turns 70 this June. Then we can track his trackback in his general election pivot. He still has an open mind...
At 65 he turned pro-life but at 69 still supports Planned Parenthood. "They do good work."
At 69 he dropped the wealth tax and went for supply side economics. Or did he?
At 69 he dropped support Bernies Sanders single payer, socialist healthcare and proposed introducing Ben Carson/Crafty market reforms to healthcare.
Still to go:
At what age will he recognize government takings of private properties for cronies' use is fascism?
At what age will they tell him about the nuclear triad and that Putin doesn't represent our interests in the Middle East?
At what age will he find out it was the "Bush Lied" accusers who lied?
At what age will he learn that trade wars never have and never will 'make America great again'?
At what point will he admit that his support of Pelosi-Reid-Obama-Clinton and government nationalizing industries like the mortgage business is what brought this country down to near destruction?
At what age will he admit being stupid and self centered the first 69 3/4 years?
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http://warontherocks.com/2016/03/open-letter-on-donald-trump-from-gop-national-security-leaders/
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http://warontherocks.com/2016/03/open-letter-on-donald-trump-from-gop-national-security-leaders/
From the letter:
His vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle. He swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.
His advocacy for aggressively waging trade wars is a recipe for economic disaster in a globally connected world.
His embrace of the expansive use of torture is inexcusable.
His hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric undercuts the seriousness of combatting Islamic radicalism by alienating partners in the Islamic world making significant contributions to the effort. Furthermore, it endangers the safety and Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of American Muslims.
Controlling our border and preventing illegal immigration is a serious issue, but his insistence that Mexico will fund a wall on the southern border inflames unhelpful passions, and rests on an utter misreading of, and contempt for, our southern neighbor.
Similarly, his insistence that close allies such as Japan must pay vast sums for protection is the sentiment of a racketeer, not the leader of the alliances that have served us so well since World War II.
His admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.
He is fundamentally dishonest. Evidence of this includes his attempts to deny positions he has unquestionably taken in the past, including on the 2003 Iraq war and the 2011 Libyan conflict. We accept that views evolve over time, but this is simply misrepresentation.
His equation of business acumen with foreign policy experience is false. Not all lethal conflicts can be resolved as a real estate deal might, and there is no recourse to bankruptcy court in international affairs.
------------------------------------------------
76 signatories (?), Trump will just say this is the establishment upset about losing power. But every statement made here is backed up with substance.
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http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/03/03/shock-poll-donald-trump-earns-more-muslim-support-than-rest-of-gop-field-combined/
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http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/03/03/shock-poll-donald-trump-earns-more-muslim-support-than-rest-of-gop-field-combined/
That means the other Republicans aren't winning any Muslim votes either.
Yet 80% of Muslim Americans disapprove of Trump and 70% strongly disapprove.
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http://mashable.com/2016/03/03/move-to-canada-trump/#kJPxHVMpoaqY
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http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/03/politics/donald-trump-small-hands-marco-rubio/index.html
:roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:
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Megan McArdle nails the Trump problem. This strategy works for him until it doesn't. For Republicans, his downfall will most likely be too late.
As ccp asked, how does Trump close his general election gap. By acting like a serious candidate. But at doing that he was about the 16th best Republican and that doesn't erase the tape of this unPresidential circus.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-02/trump-s-shock-strategy-works-till-it-backfires
Trump's Shock Strategy Works, Till It Backfires
1087 MAR 2, 2016 3:30 PM EST
By Megan McArdle
Many Trump followers love that he doesn’t care about being called racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, etc. They’re sick of the media demanding that every Republican in the land disavow some dumb thing said by someone they’ve never heard of. They’re happy when Trump won’t “play the game,” as they keep tweeting at me, including when Donald Trump waffled on denouncing former Klan leader David Duke on CNN this past weekend. Given his big wins two days later, on Super Tuesday, his followers are likely to see vindication that this strategy works.
But this strategy “works” only in a narrow, shortsighted sense. Such thinking is likely to cost the party the election, and saddle Trump and his supporters with costly baggage that will make it harder for them to achieve their goals in this or any other election cycle.
That starts with an observation: Politics is a long game. It’s no good just sweeping up some support, getting your guys in office, and passing some laws. What’s to stop the Other Guys from waiting until you get bored, and unpassing those same laws? There is, to be sure, some amount of stickiness in politics, but certain laws are stickier than others. In particular, laws that require active, ongoing efforts (like border enforcement) are a lot harder to keep around than things that just involve, say, telling the federal computers to send bigger checks to various program beneficiaries.
That means that politicians need to stick around. This is what game theorists call a repeat game. And the thing about repeat games is that you can’t just think about winning the next round; you have to think about what happens in the next round, and the round after that.
Trump has won the early rounds of this race. But you have to remember all the things that had to line up for this to happen: a crowded field that didn’t winnow as fast as it should have, the lack of a beloved ex-president who could rally the party around an establishment figure; Jeb Bush’s insane decision to run with his toxic last name, and then spend over $100 million of donor money attacking everyone but Trump.
Sean Trende and David Byler argue that he was effectively the only candidate in one of the four “lanes” of Republican politics, so he consolidated a lot of support while other folks were trying to claim more crowded lanes.
But he’s also had a particular, weird skill that really helped him: Trump was able to use his monopolization of media attention through outrageous statements to keep that consolidation from happening in other lanes, because no one else could get enough attention to become the obvious choice for the voter base they were pursuing. By the time the race consolidated, it was too late.
But before you start hailing his brilliance, you have to ask yourself why no other candidate has done this in living memory.
Trump is just starting to find out what other politicians have long known: being a front-runner is very different from being a loudmouth in a crowded field. As I remarked after his debate debacle, Trump is not good at debating; he’s good at getting attention, which is valuable when there are 19 people trying to get noticed. But the way he goes about getting that attention is going to be a negative when he’s one on one, and he can no longer “win” by depriving the other candidate of media oxygen. As the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton is going to get just as much airtime as he will.
Trump's debate performance in a shrunken field was so bad that his praise of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi went nearly unnoticed because of all the other cringe-worthy moments. Next summer and fall, however, it will not. It will be running on every screen in the country, as Democrats point out that under Qaddafi, Libya accepted responsibility for the airplane bomb that killed 189 Americans. They’ll be running that Klan clip to horrify Americans and to drive up black turnout. All of those attention-getting, outrageous statements that his supporters loved, the ones that helped him dominate the primary, are going to come back to bite him in the general. Along with all the baggage, such as Trump University, that is only now coming out for Trump, in contrast to the other viable GOP candidates, who have gone through the standard press vetting that any Senate candidate gets. Trump eluded that until now simply because no one really thought he could win.
But Trump fans want to shout at me: He is winning! Ah yes. In low-turnout elections, a very small fraction of highly motivated supporters can swing things. At the moment, Donald Trump has collected about 3.3 million votes, with about a third of the states having voted.
Trump is just starting to find out what other politicians have long known: being a front-runner is very different from being a loudmouth in a crowded field. As I remarked after his debate debacle, Trump is not good at debating; he’s good at getting attention, which is valuable when there are 19 people trying to get noticed. But the way he goes about getting that attention is going to be a negative when he’s one on one, and he can no longer “win” by depriving the other candidate of media oxygen. As the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton is going to get just as much airtime as he will.
Trump's debate performance in a shrunken field was so bad that his praise of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi went nearly unnoticed because of all the other cringe-worthy moments. Next summer and fall, however, it will not. It will be running on every screen in the country, as Democrats point out that under Qaddafi, Libya accepted responsibility for the airplane bomb that killed 189 Americans. They’ll be running that Klan clip to horrify Americans and to drive up black turnout. All of those attention-getting, outrageous statements that his supporters loved, the ones that helped him dominate the primary, are going to come back to bite him in the general. Along with all the baggage, such as Trump University, that is only now coming out for Trump, in contrast to the other viable GOP candidates, who have gone through the standard press vetting that any Senate candidate gets. Trump eluded that until now simply because no one really thought he could win.
But Trump fans want to shout at me: He is winning! Ah yes. In low-turnout elections, a very small fraction of highly motivated supporters can swing things. At the moment, Donald Trump has collected about 3.3 million votes, with about a third of the states having voted.
To win a general, he’s going to need another 55 million or so. And as I noted a few months back, the bigger the coalition you need, the more blandly inoffensive you have to be: the political equivalent of Applebee's, or Olive Garden, or TGI Fridays.
Trump is not doing that. His strategy is all primary, no general. It clearly works … for certain values of the word “work,” which would probably not include “winning a general election” or “winning re-election before the folks with pitchforks descend to chase you out of town.”
And indeed, that’s what we’re already seeing with Trump. He’s alienated a substantial chunk of the Republican base pretty badly, so badly they coalesced into the #NeverTrump swarm. That means he needs more independent voters or disaffected Democrats. Which his primary strategy makes him less likely to pick up.
To sum up: Trump looks like the Teflon candidate largely because none of the traditional political tools have yet been deployed against him. In four short days between Thursday and Tuesday, simply by attacking him loud and long, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz managed to check his momentum and deny him an expected 11-state sweep on Super Tuesday; if Kasich hadn’t been in, Rubio would have won Virginia as well. On Tuesday, before the results came in, I mentally composed a tweet to commemorate the results: “Things fall apart, the ceiling cannot hold.” Then it held; Trump remains stuck around 35 percent, even as the field winnows (bye, Ben Carson!) and his front-runner status ought to be creating momentum.
Meanwhile, his front-runner status means that he is no longer going to be immune from those traditional attacks. His support may begin to slip in the primary, as his opponents finally start doing what they long ago would have done to any other front-runner: hammering him with every bit of oppo research, and rolling out those negative ads.
Even if they don’t, the Democrats certainly will. These ads will be devastating. Most Americans already dislike him even more than they dislike Hillary Clinton, even though most of them probably don’t yet know about the Klan gaffe or the fraud trial. By November, I guarantee that they will.
Which means that casting a vote for Trump in the primary most likely means you’re casting a vote for Hillary Clinton in the general. Trump supporters wrote to me to ask whether #NeverTrump folks understood that not backing Trump was equivalent to backing Clinton. They should start asking themselves whether backing Trump is also equivalent to backing Clinton.
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Because he "doesn't take money from Jews":
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-01/louis-farrakhan-on-donald-trump-i-like-what-im-looking-at
Now where is the public outrage???
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http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/04/politics/donald-trump-reverses-on-torture/index.html
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http://media.townhall.com/townhall/reu/ha/uploads/2016/3/4/0.png
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http://media.townhall.com/townhall/reu/ha/uploads/2016/3/4/0.png
Best friends forever.
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https://scontent-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xla1/v/t1.0-9/12794527_10153535957133869_1424585998154353822_n.png?oh=7d3ae443f4f3036acb4955904231d260&oe=574EF0AA
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As pointed out on Mark Levin tonight Trump is now reversing course on the J1 visa program and appears to be slowly moving left.
Now he is for it.
This is a huge cave. If he keeps this up his 35% will finally see the writing on the wall and start moving (hopefully) to Cruz or my distant second choice Rubio.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/271765-trump-quickly-walks-back-remarks-on-visas
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As pointed out on Mark Levin tonight Trump is now reversing course on the J1 visa program and appears to be slowly moving left.
Now he is for it.
This is a huge cave. If he keeps this up his 35% will finally see the writing on the wall and start moving (hopefully) to Cruz or my distant second choice Rubio.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/271765-trump-quickly-walks-back-remarks-on-visas
Trump has been as conservative as we will see him. This is all about "making the deal". Anyone who thinks Trump isn't going to screw us over, can I interest you in some Trump steaks, or classes at Trump University?
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G M: "Trump has been as conservative as we will see him. This is all about "making the deal". Anyone who thinks Trump isn't going to screw us over, can I interest you in some Trump steaks, or classes at Trump University?"
I wonder if I can get in on the class action fraud lawsuit. I have been almost alone calling his book Art of the Deal a fraud and a scam since 1987. Yes, I am still bitter about my hardcover purchase 29 years ago for somewhere between $10 and $20. Those were hard earned dollars and I expected something of value out of it - to me. I can imagine how the people who are out $36,000 feel, asked to keep putting in more to get the real secrets. Secrets like be Donald Trump. Be as handsomw as Donald Trump. Be as well connected as Donald Trump. Trump calls this book "the No. 1 selling business book of all time, at least I think, but I’m pretty sure it is." It belongs over by People magazine, not by the Harvard Business Review.
PolitiFact dug in and found some people who agree with me:
"Trump is full of B.S.," said Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of business management at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. "The best selling/most important business books would have to be In Search of Excellence by (Thomas) Peters and (Robert) Waterman that started the genre, Built to Last by Jim Collins, The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey."
The Art of the Deal isn’t used in business schools like Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy, nor is it a text business executives find useful like Machiavelli's The Prince, said Lawrence White, a business and economics professor at New York University's Stern School.
When you compare it with books of similar intent, 'How to Win Friends & Influence People' by Dale Carnegie outsold 'Art of the Deal' by 13-fold. And people weren't pissed off about their purchase.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/06/donald-trump/donald-trumps-art-deal-best-selling-business-book-/
"We rate the claim False."
But instead of hearing that the claim was false, we continue to hear he wrote the nest selling business book of all time.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/nyregion/donald-trump-new-york-governor.html?emc=edit_th_20160306&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
Donald Trump Considered Path to Presidency Starting at Governor’s Mansion in New York
By SUSANNE CRAIG and DAVID W. CHENMARCH 5, 2016
In late December 2013, after Donald J. Trump had met with a number of Republicans to discuss a possible run for governor of New York, he received a memo from an attendee, a freshman assemblyman from upstate.
The four-page briefing outlined the challenges that most first-time political candidates face, including “endless chicken dinners” and a high probability of a “loss of income from serving in government.”
But the document also had the particular interests of Mr. Trump in mind: It was titled “Springboards to the Presidency.”
Mr. Trump has a long history of musing about running for office, and then abandoning the idea. His flirtation with the 2014 race for governor was viewed then as another headline-grabbing stunt, much as his current presidential bid had been initially dismissed.
But unlike previous dalliances, Mr. Trump’s deliberation on whether to challenge Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, would be far more than a public-relations trifle.
An examination by The New York Times of contemporaneous documents and emails, as well as interviews with people who met with Mr. Trump during that period, found how he carefully weighed a run, measuring whether the governor’s office was a necessary steppingstone to his long-held goal: the White House. His calculations at the time run contrary to the seat-of-the-pants image he projects on the campaign trail, and offer a look at a formative stage of his presidential ambitions.
Photo
Mr. Trump spoke in April 2014 in Albany against the Safe Act, a gun-control law signed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo the year before. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
He discussed with state Republican leaders the idea of using the governorship as a platform to run for president, a situation in which he would serve for a year or so and be succeeded by his lieutenant governor.
Mr. Trump also foreshadowed themes that have surfaced on the campaign trail, giving a blunt assessment of what he felt was ailing New York State and the country: jobs going overseas, crushing taxes, restrictive gun laws.
During another meeting with state Republican leaders at Trump Tower in Manhattan, the conversation migrated to the nation’s future. Mr. Trump told them he did not think the country could withstand eight years of Hillary Clinton after eight years of President Obama, according to a document summarizing the meeting. Mr. Trump added that he wanted to “save the country” from debt and felt the political left was going to destroy the American work ethic.
“He made it clear he wanted to run for president,” said Daniel W. Isaacs, then the Republican Party chairman in Manhattan, who attended the meeting. “Our pitch was if he runs for governor and makes it, he would be the presumptive front-runner.”
For his supporters, the recruitment drive offered an unexpected look at Mr. Trump’s budding strategy to capture the White House, which he predicted he would begin in 2015. As such, they tailored their local pitch to his national ambitions, saying that his road to Washington almost certainly ran through Albany.
“The most common path to the presidency is through a governor’s office (19 out of 43) and the most common governor’s office to hold is New York (4 out of 19),” Assemblyman Bill Nojay, the freshman legislator who represents the Rochester area, wrote in the memo given to Mr. Trump and a small group of Republicans.
Mr. Trump hosted numerous meetings with state Republican leaders at his office in Trump Tower, used his private jet to attend upstate rallies and even tried to secure the support of another voting bloc, the Conservative Party.
His allies commissioned a poll, and in one meeting even presented Mr. Trump with documentation to register an official exploratory committee, with a notary public at the ready.
Many would-be Trump organizers were convinced that he was serious about unseating Mr. Cuomo. “He came to us,” said Sandra King, chairwoman of the Yates County Republican Committee. “He took our phone calls. He listened to what we had to say.”
Mr. Trump ultimately opted not to run, in part because he was irked that party leaders would not clear a path to his nomination. But in hindsight, supporters said, the experience helped inform his presidential bid as a populist with little regard for conventional politics.
Mr. Trump confirmed in a statement that the state Republican Party’s inability to assure an uncontested race was a deal-breaker, though he played down his interest. “I never looked seriously at running for governor,” he said, adding, “If I ran, I would have won.”
He said d that “even then, what I really wanted to do was run for president, and obviously, now that I am the substantial front-runner, I made the right decision.”
‘Almost Iconic Figure’
Mr. Trump is no stranger to being the object of political speculation. He hinted at running in the 1988 and 2012 presidential races, and his name was also mentioned as a possible candidate for New York City mayor in 1989 and for governor in 2006.
Perhaps his most sustained effort before now, though, involved his establishing an exploratory committee for a possible run as a Reform Party candidate for president in 2000, when he suggested that Oprah Winfrey would be his vice president.
But when Mr. Trump declared his White House bid last year, this campaign was no fleeting thought.
In 2013, New York Republicans were casting about for a candidate to take on Mr. Cuomo, who had amassed more than $33 million by January 2014 for his re-election campaign and was widely expected to win a second term the following year.
David DiPietro, a Republican lawmaker from the Buffalo area, said he and Mr. Nojay were on the floor of the State Assembly that June, lamenting the corruption in Albany, when they first hit on the idea of encouraging Mr. Trump to run for governor.
“We have to find someone to clean up” this mess, Mr. DiPietro recalled telling Mr. Nojay.
A few months later, Mr. Nojay put their thoughts down on paper.
“In many respects Trump is not considered a Republican — he is his brand, an almost iconic figure of Rockefellerian proportions,” Mr. Nojay wrote in October in a three-page memo, “2014 NY Governor Race Analysis,” which he sent to a small group of party members, including Edward F. Cox, the state’s party chairman and a son-in-law of President Richard M. Nixon.
The conditions for a Trump for governor bid, the analysis continued, were ideal. New York City was about to elect Bill de Blasio, its first “truly radical” mayor, whom the memo referred to as a Marxist who honeymooned in Havana. “By 2014 a pro-business, proven executive will be welcome to offset” a Mayor de Blasio, the memo said.
The memo was leaked to The New York Post, and Mr. Trump used Twitter to tell Mr. Nojay thanks, but no thanks.
Behind the scenes, another story was playing out. A member of Mr. Trump’s inner circle contacted Mr. Nojay, and in early November he and Mr. DiPietro found themselves meeting Mr. Trump for the first time, at Trump Tower in a large conference room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park.
New York Governor Race Analysis and Trump
An October 2013 memo sent to senior New York State Republicans urged them to consider Donald J. Trump as the party's nominee for governor.
OPEN Document
The meeting, scheduled for roughly 30 minutes, stretched beyond two hours. The group denounced the Safe Act, far-reaching gun-control legislation that Mr. Cuomo signed into law, and bemoaned job losses and economic erosion.
Intrigued, Mr. Trump agreed to keep talking about a possible bid for governor. A larger meeting was convened in early December.
Path to the White House
Mr. Nojay, armed with data, ran Mr. Trump through a list of presidents and their résumés. “Going back to George Washington, there has never been a president who has not served in high public office,” he said he told Mr. Trump.
Mr. Nojay recalled that while he was speaking, Mr. Trump asked an aide to bring his daughter Ivanka and sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and additional employees into the conference room.
After they entered, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Nojay to repeat his pitch for their benefit.
“He read the political landscape better than anyone,” said Joseph C. Borelli, a Republican councilman from Staten Island who was an assemblyman when he attended the meeting. “He all but said he would enter the presidential race in the summer of 2015 and he would be first in the polls.”
In late December, Mr. Trump received Mr. Nojay’s “Springboards to the Presidency” memo. It included an exhibit titled “Paths to the Presidency,” again outlining the careers of past presidents, all of whom had previous public service. “This is not an accident of history,” he wrote.
The notion of a Trump bid for governor gained more momentum among his supporters when a group that opposed Mr. Cuomo commissioned a private poll, conducted by Kellyanne Conway, a Republican strategist. The poll showed Mr. Cuomo leading Mr. Trump in a head-to-head matchup, Ms. Conway said, but it also highlighted the governor’s vulnerabilities. It suggested that Mr. Trump, with his name recognition and ability to finance a sizable campaign, could be a formidable opponent.
Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including Roger Stone, a veteran political consultant, opposed the run for governor, arguing that Mr. Trump did not need Albany to serve as a prelude to his 2016 presidential bid. But as a sign of Mr. Trump’s interest, one of his top lieutenants contacted Michael R. Long, chairman of the state’s Conservative Party, to discuss the possibility of an endorsement and a crucial extra ballot line.
Mr. Long said he went to Trump Tower in December 2013, “under the pretense that Mr. Trump would be there.” Instead, Mr. Long experienced something even more surreal: He arrived at Mr. Trump’s office, only to realize that Mr. Trump was not there and he would be speaking to him by phone.
It was clear, Mr. Long said, that Mr. Trump was “up to speed” on New York issues, and that he had a real animus toward Mr. Cuomo. But Mr. Trump, unwilling to face competition for the nomination, told Mr. Long that one condition for his candidacy would be to get Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive who was already planning to run, out of the race.
“I made it clear to him, that’s not how politics works,” Mr. Long said. “It isn’t us picking up a phone and telling a candidate you can’t run.”
Around the same time, Mr. Trump reached out directly to Mr. Astorino, whom he knew for many years through his golf club in Briarcliff Manor in Westchester. When they met at Trump Tower, Mr. Astorino said he told Mr. Trump, “Look, my intention is to stay in.”
Eventually, Mr. Astorino recalled, he was asked (though he would not say by whom) to consider joining a “unity ticket” in which Mr. Trump would run for governor and Mr. Astorino for lieutenant governor. Mr. Astorino would become governor after Mr. Trump declared his presidential bid.
“I didn’t think that was fair to me, or the people, or the process,” said Mr. Astorino, who ended up losing to Mr. Cuomo.
Bigger Plans
In January 2014, a small number of political operatives met privately with Mr. Trump in his penthouse at Trump Tower. One participant, Ralph C. Lorigo, the chairman of the Erie County Conservative Party, recalled that he brought the necessary papers for Mr. Trump to form an exploratory committee to run for governor, with a notary stamp in his pocket.
“He toyed with it back and forth,” Mr. Lorigo said. “But I couldn’t convince him.”
Mr. Trump and the group then took the elevator down to his corporate offices, where they huddled with a larger group of dozens of Republicans, including numerous county leaders, who hoped to enlist Mr. Trump.
Not long after these sessions, Mr. Cox, the state’s Republican Party chairman, began to voice his concerns of a Trump candidacy. At a meeting at the University Club in Manhattan, which was attended by some of the same people who had just met with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cox said he told the group, “I am really concerned this is not something he wants to do.”
Mr. Trump’s supporters were livid. “Donald Trump didn’t run for governor because Ed Cox wouldn’t get out of the way,” said Michael Caputo, a political consultant who helped arrange several of the meetings.
Undeterred, Mr. Trump flew to Buffalo and Syracuse, where he headlined local party fund-raisers. In New York City, at a February fund-raising event, Mr. Isaacs unveiled a large blue and red sign that read “Trump For Governor.” The crowd erupted in applause, and many attendees expected Mr. Trump would announce his candidacy that night.
He did not. Several weeks later, over dinner at the mogul’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Cox told Mr. Trump that the New York State Republican Committee could not stop other candidates from competing.
“He made it clear to me that night he wasn’t going to run,” said Mr. Cox, who described Mr. Trump as upset. Mr. Cox would not elaborate further.
A few days later, Mr. Trump ended the speculation via Twitter: “While I won’t be running for governor of New York State, a race I would have won, I have much bigger plans in mind — stay tuned, will happen!”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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I saw DT on a couple of channels this morning and some of it was from campaign speeches.
'We lose on trade. The are beating us by billions and billions of dollars and we get nothing for it', paraphrasing him pretty closely.
Let's examine that. Every trade transaction is what? A mutually beneficial arrangement. What part of, both sides benefit, doesn't he understand?
Yes we would like our exports to be larger, much larger. Yes it is nice if export amounts are similar to import amounts, that makes the balancing of the other side of the equation simpler. But the difference is not a "deficit" and the pronouncement that we get nothing from it is naive and dangerously false
We basically prohibit manufacturing in this country, see EPA and a billion other regulations. That is the main reason for our export dearth, and the second biggest problem is that the rest of the world mostly has screwed up economies. Then we have the tax code with the highest business taxes in the developed world. So when we invent something great like the iphone, we go there to build it. If we are the most prosperous country in the world, we will never have the lowest wage rates either. So we have to build what we build best, not stop the trade of low wage products.
We can increase our exports without stopping imports; these are two partially unrelated phenomena.
Back to imports. Who buys them and why? One generalization is Walmart shoppers, isn't that the heart of Trump's support? Why do we buy there? The low cost of basic supplies lowers the cost of living and raises our standard of living in ways that wage gains haven't for many, many years. Important point here is not just Walmart, but nearly all suppliers in nearly all industries. In building maintenance, we buy large amounts of supplies everyday from the 'big box' stores. I buy custom metal roofing made in Wisconsin, toilets from Chile and plumbing valves made in China. We are always looking for the best price for acceptable quality.
It's called comparative advantage. As Conrad might say, it's covered in Econ 102 and a mental, f'ing 12 year old should be able to figure it out. On the consumer side we want to buy from the people who build and sell it most efficiently and then produce what we can build and sell the best.
Let's look at the Trump 'solution'. Threaten a trade war, levy a 45% tax, cut off all imports, we don't get anything out of anyway!? Really? Who pays the import tax? China? No. An import tax goes straight to the American consumer. He doesn't have taxing jurisdiction over China, only on the importer and the retailer. Then what? Our cost of living goes up, our standard of living goes down, they retaliate and the global economy spirals down the tubes.
Trump's plan is to threaten a suicide trade war with Mexico and China, not actually have one. One problem there is that he sounds like the Executive Order President we have now, but he is running for President of a divided power government, not King, so he can't do that alone anyway, not to mention that he is bluffing, they know it and it would have no effect on them anyway.
There are a number of ways that we could negotiate a lot tougher with the Chinese and work smarter with our Mexican neighbor. Trump supporters see that possibility in him but not from anything he has been saying so far.
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https://www.facebook.com/Sherwood/videos/10153374092897155/?hc_location=ufi
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-tells-supporters-to-raise-arms-with-awkward-result/article/2585047
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http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-07/trump-tower-financed-by-rich-chinese-who-invest-cash-for-visas
Yuuuuuuuuuge!
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I wonder who elected Kristol, Rove, or Larry Page. And i wonder what in the world tech CEOs have got to do with it other than undermining our own tech grads with cheaper foreign workers.
Is countering this why Trump recently did an about face on visas? Levin points out the a large percentage of our grads cannot get jobs. And evidence surely points out that all the new jobs go to foreigners. Well I had many foreign IT workers as patients and none were geniuses that warrant them being hired over US born. Again the GOP (along with the vote hungry crats) continue to sell us out.
Notice that not one mention that while stopping Trump could be conjoined with lets rally around Cruz???? Again the voters are ignored:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/07/tech-ceos-and-top-republicans-take-secret-meetings-to-stop-trump-with-brokered-convention/
PP where are you.
Crafty , can you email PP and ask if he would return to the board. I miss his posts.
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This is absolutely true that some Republicans would vote for Hillary over Trump. Without a doubt many would simply stay home. So for those who tell us he would bring voters to the Republican side there are many he would drive away - in droves - probably much worse then Romney. My own sister is one of them. She is very afraid of Trump. He is nuts she says. Unfortunately I could not convince her to consider Cruz either who she says no one he works with likes him. He was always this way even when he was an aide.
http://www.thewrap.com/fox-news-bret-baier-some-republicans-could-back-hillary-clinton-over-donald-trump/
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This is absolutely true that some Republicans would vote for Hillary over Trump. Without a doubt many would simply stay home. So for those who tell us he would bring voters to the Republican side there are many he would drive away - in droves - probably much worse then Romney. My own sister is one of them. She is very afraid of Trump. He is nuts she says. Unfortunately I could not convince her to consider Cruz either who she says no one he works with likes him. He was always this way even when he was an aide.
http://www.thewrap.com/fox-news-bret-baier-some-republicans-could-back-hillary-clinton-over-donald-trump/
Rush has been making the point that Republicans have wanted to reach and bring in new voters and Democrats etc. and Trump is doing that. What he doesn't say is that Trump is doing that at the expense of driving others away, still scoring worst in general election matchups.
Would I vote for Trump over Hillary? Of course. But my motivation to vote would be VERY low and if something else should come up... pulling the lever for a lesser evil isn't going to be a highest priority or a proudest moment.
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More from Thomas Sowell:
What are the chances that the world's greatest violinist would make a good quarterback? Or that the world's greatest quarterback would make a good violinist? Why then would anyone think that a successful businessman would make a good president — especially when he is demonstrating almost daily why he would not?
https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/03/16/random-thoughts-b2798
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y Damian Paletta
Updated March 8, 2016 9:21 a.m. ET
292 COMMENTS
WASHINGTON—Republican front-runner Donald Trump has sketched out a foreign policy that would mark a sharp change in the way the U.S. approaches global hot spots, mollifying tensions with some leaders and widening fissures with others.
Part of Mr. Trump’s appeal to voters is his rejection of the status quo, but some of his ideas—launching a trade war with Mexico, taking oil out of Iraq, imposing steep tariffs on China—have spooked diplomatic advisers from Democratic and Republican administrations. But Mr. Trump has been unapologetic.
“When I see the policy of some of these people in our government, we’ll be in the Middle East for another 15 years, if we don’t end up losing by that time because our country is disintegrating,” Mr. Trump told MSNBC last week. “We are spending trillions of dollars in the Middle East, and the infrastructure of our country is disintegrating.”
While some of Mr. Trump’s proposals appear to be off-the-cuff, many others, like a temporary a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., are more planned and have formed the basis of a sweeping, if turbulent, foreign policy that would reorder American priorities and relationships.
The basic tendencies in Mr. Trump’s foreign policy are these: confrontations with China and Mexico, particularly over trade and immigration, but cooperation with Russia. He has also expressed reluctance to challenge dictatorships in the Middle East and elsewhere, saying that inevitably drags the U.S. into costly predicaments that unsettle the region.
As Mr. Trump continues to amass delegates toward the Republican nomination, the voices of alarm are increasing. Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP White House nominee, said last week Mr. Trump’s proposals would make the U.S. “less safe.” That sentiment was echoed by more than 100 conservative national security experts in a recent open letter that criticized his proposals dealing with Russia, Japan, and the treatment of Muslims.
“Trump is a throwback to an earlier isolationist age,” said Thomas Wright, director of the Brookings Institution’s Project on International Order and Strategy. “He has a consistent worldview dating back 30 years. He would destroy America’s alliances, close the global economy, and give free license to authoritarian leaders.”
But Mr. Trump’s posture of strength and straight talk appears to be serving him well. His supporters often say they believe he would stand up for America against other countries, and they applaud his assertion that American leaders have for too long allowed the country to be played for a fool by others.
The next president will inherit a plethora of global challenges, including Russian aggression in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the emergence of Iran as a regional power, unstable regimes in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and Islamic State’s large footprint. The U.S. is also grappling with China’s economic struggles and military expansion.
Some Republicans, including presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, have embraced a hawkish approach to these threats, while Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas advocates using force relatively narrowly—a split that loosely reflects the divide within the GOP and the conservative movement.
Mr. Trump’s proposals don’t fit neatly into either category. He has appointed just one person to his national security advisory committee—Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.). And there are gaps in his positions; he hasn’t detailed plans for dealing with the weak governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example.
Just last week, Mr. Trump reversed himself after vowing for months to order the torture of terrorists and the targeted killing of their family members, telling The Wall Street Journal Friday he wouldn’t force the military to perform illegal acts. Legal experts believe that torture and the targeted killing of terrorists’ family members violate U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions.
In many areas, Mr. Trump promises a new toughness, even when it comes to allies. He has said he would demand that Germany, South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia increase payments to the U.S. for military protection.
He has also promised to lead a confrontation with China and Mexico, countries he accuses of fleecing the U.S. by improperly luring manufacturing jobs to distort trade. He vows to build a 1,000-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, to be financed by Mexico’s government, an idea angrily rejected by Mexican leaders.
Mr. Trump would formally label the Chinese government a “currency manipulator” and he has threatened to impose tariffs on its exports. Many economists believe China puts downward pressure on the value of its currency to give it a trade advantage and spur exports.
In contrast, Mr. Trump would look to improve relations with some countries, notably Russia. The U.S. and Russia are at odds in multiple conflicts, including over the fighting in Syria, where Russia has helped prop up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Trump has traded compliments with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a leader most American leaders don’t trust, saying Mr. Putin could help resolve the war in Syria.
Former diplomats and national security experts said they are still waiting for Mr. Trump to outline a unified strategy. Many say the incomplete proposals he offers in his stump speeches don’t make a comprehensive approach.
“I would feel better had he gone out and made a foreign policy speech where he explained these statements he’s made,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
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http://therightscoop.com/report-trump-university-instructed-teachers-to-lie-to-students/#ixzz42MEgnofC
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Certainly the left would love to have us think so.
Frankly we have been out of the "Reagan" era for some time. Has little to do with Trump. "making America great again" is absolutely a theme from Reagan. Making us proud not ashamed of our country certainly are themes from Reagan. So I don't agree with Joe on this:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/video/joe-scarborough-donald-trumps-rise-144831312.html
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYkpQdzWBDI
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https://pjmedia.com/election/2016/03/11/trump-calls-tiananmen-democracy-protests-a-riot-in-defending-praise-of-regimes-strength-during-massacre/
How am I supposed to vote for this fcuktard?
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/12/us/politics/donald-trump-trump-university.html?emc=edit_na_20160311&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
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"How am I supposed to vote for this fcuktard?"
Hold your nose, and keep an image of Hillary Clinton in your mind and the possibility of holding that thought for 8 years.
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Latest Poll, Hillary leads Trump 51-38%.
http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/how-trump-rubio-cruz-would-fare-against-clinton-november-n534191
Trump is wrong on protectionism.
Trump is wrong on property (non) rights.
Trump is wrong on the constitution.
Trump is wrong on defense and doesn't care to know the basics. see nuclear triad.
Trump has been wrong on almost every vote he has taken, by his own standard, having come to our side so recently.
Trump turns good people away with his personality.
Trump has been wrong about Presidential powers. (Has corrected himself some on this)
Trump loses to Hillary.
Trump polls worst against her of the top 3.
Trump is a caricature of what others think the GOP is, hate Muslims, sympathy for KKK, misogyny...
Trump will lose the Senate for the GOP.
Trump will lose future Presidential elections for the GOP.
Barack Obama sold more guns and lost more Democratic seats in America in history. similarly, Trump is the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic party.
"Hold your nose, and keep an image of Hillary Clinton in your mind and the possibility of holding that thought for 8 years."
I don't know G M's state but Trump is not putting MN in play. I don't have to hold my nose and vote for him. His kind of bravado doesn't sell here, but he will cost MN their Republic state legislature and probably two congressional seats.
Trump last known phone call before entering the race was to Bill Clinton. I don't buy the conspiracy aspect that implies, but all the signs are there.
Our party and our country is in the process of making a historic mistake.
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Yes I agree the polling is depressing.
The ones who have polled best against the Dems are rhinos.
Which basically means we have lost the country and it is over anyway.
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I realize Rubio is not perfect, but nonetheless he has polled best against EDC-- he is hardly a RINO. Cruz polls nearly as well and he is most certainly noT a RINO.
Note the poll is a NBC poll, plenty of other polls show Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich all beating Hillary.O
OTOH Trump is a fkg disaster.
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Well Rubio does score well on conservative review. He would be winning if not for immigration probably.
https://www.conservativereview.com/scorecard
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Well Rubio does score well on conservative review. He would be winning if not for immigration probably.
https://www.conservativereview.com/scorecard
[/quote
His pandering to illegals makes him just another selling us out.
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http://www.trump.com/hotel-collection/washington-dc/trump-intl-hotel/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Post_Office_Pavilion
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For better or worse (in my mind's eye.... for the great betterment), one thing is undeniable;
Trump's candidacy is bringing to much needed light, the GREAT disdain the Right and th Left have for each other.
I think that is the first healing step.....except that the losers should all be rounded up, placed in an internment camps and sent to a country more to their way of thinking, "Venezuela" and their wonderfully successful example of socialism, for the left, for example.
I have zero interest in living peacefully with anyone, that thinks that because I was born a certain color, that I owe them something or don't have a right to even express my opinions publicly. I draw the line on that.
When people think they have the right to deny your civil rights, skulls crumbling under boots, seems like a legitimate alternative, because they have already demonstrated that you don't deserve the same rights they demand for themselves.
I'll make know apologies when this all comes tumbling down. It will be th rebirth of something better for the people still around.
Watching what happened last night was disgusting. If the Left wants to be violent, I say let them..... and see where it all goes. I'm accustomed to it, others are too.
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https://www.facebook.com/DailyWire/videos/1530429543919538/
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From National Review:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/12/national-review-white-working-class-communities-morally-indefensible-they-deserve-to-die/
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Frankly, though I prefer Ted Cruz over Donald Trump, I was disgusted over the weekend with BOTH Rubio and Cruz - not to mention the media - for blaming Trump for the violence at the rally in Chicago, which Trump wisely - in my opinion - cancelled. Free speech is the bedrock of this republic. The First Amendment is first for a reason - the Founders understood its importance. Both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio know better - but they are choosing to leverage this to their own political advantage by blaming Trump and his supporters. MANY of those protesters who participated in the altercations at the Chicago event were holding Bernie Sanders signs and chanting "Bernie! Bernie!" Yet no one in the media or anywhere else is placing blame on Bernie Sanders - and rightly so. So reverse the situation for a moment - what if TRUMP supporters were filmed physically assaulting others in the crowd at a Bernie Sanders rally. Do you think we would hear condemnation of Trump for "inciting" this violence? You damn well better believe we would. There is a clear double-standard here, and Trump-haters - including other candidates and the media - are doing their best to promote the absurd idea that Trump is to blame for this situation by "inciting" his supporters. This was CLEARLY an organized protest designed to garner exactly the type of media attention and condemnation of Trump that it did.
Judge Jeanine Pirro did a SUPERB job of exposing this in her opening statement this past Saturday night: http://video.foxnews.com/v/4799320342001/judge-jeanine-words-are-not-an-excuse-to-become-violent/?playlist_id=937116552001#sp=show-clips
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Definitely a double standard.
these protesters show up solely to disrupt and get fight up to the faces of the attendees and they are the ones starting the confrontation. If they want to do it outside where police have designated areas for this fine , but to sneak into the rallies and do this is clear they are the troublemakers
Notice there was not one peep mentioned on CNN about why that guy was being led out by police; the one who got sucker punched. He was no angle obviously.
All the CNN feminazis with their concerned and and troubled looks about the "hate speech" at the Trump rallies.
I would love to see some Trump or Cruz supporters sneak into a Sanders or clinton rally and see how far they get before a mob beats on them.
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However OTOH Trump is playing right into the hands of the left with the way in which he talks. It seems to me he could be firm and strong but smarter about it.
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Exactly so. His blustering bombast taints valid points and by so doing he makes it harder for others to make these points.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432744/donald-trump-evelyn-waugh-rex-mottram
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FROM FERGUSON TO CHICAGO
March 14, 2016 Matthew Vadum - frontpagemag.com
The riot planned and executed by the Left at the canceled Donald Trump campaign rally in Chicago on Friday was just the latest in a long series of mob disturbances manufactured by radicals to advance their political agendas.
Even so, it is a particularly poisonous assault on the American body politic that imperils the nation's most important free institution – the ballot.
"The meticulously orchestrated #Chicago assault on our free election process is as unAmerican as it gets," tweeted actor James Woods. "It is a dangerous precedent."
This so-called protest, and the disruptions at subsequent Trump events over the weekend, were not spontaneous, organic demonstrations. The usual culprits were involved behind the scenes. The George Soros-funded organizers of the riot at the University of Illinois at Chicago relied on the same fascistic tactics the Left has been perfecting for decades – including claiming to be peaceful and pro-democracy even as they use violence to disrupt the democratic process.
Activists associated with MoveOn, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street, all of which have been embraced by Democrats and funded by radical speculator George Soros, participated in shutting down the Trump campaign event. Soros recently also launched a $15 million voter-mobilization effort against Trump in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada through a new super PAC called Immigrant Voters Win. The title is a characteristic misdirection since Trump supports immigration that is legal. It’s the invasion of illegals who have not been vetted and are filling America’s welfare rolls and jails that is the problem.
Among the extremist groups involved in disrupting the Trump rally in Chicago were the revolutionary communist organization ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), National Council of La Raza (“the Race”), and the Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Rights Reform. President Obama's unrepentant terrorist collaborator Bill Ayers, who was one of the leaders of Days of Rage the precursor riot at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, also showed up to stir the pot.
The goal was to help reinforce the media narrative that Trump is a dangerous authoritarian figure who needs to be stopped now before he upsets too many people and proclaims himself emperor, or some fevered fantasy like that. The organized rioters who showed up at UIC to taunt and bait Trump supporters, hoped to generate compelling TV clips that could be used to attack the Republican front-runner.
The people who infiltrated the Trump rally and attacked his supporters weren't mere protesters and were not nonviolent. By now, after decades of getting away with lawlessness and mayhem, nonviolent left-wing protesters are as rare as four-leaf clovers.
They are violent agitators, trained in Alinsky-style disruption, aiming to shut Trump and his supporters down by any means they can get away with. These modern-day brownshirts use force and the threat of force to harass and intimidate, and to provoke people who have come to a peaceful assembly to hear their candidate speak.
"Many of these people come from Bernie [Sanders]," Trump said, pointing out how since the 1968 riot at the Democratic convention street radicals and party radicals have become a seamless force. On "Face the Nation" Trump called them "professional disrupters" a polite name for incipient fascists.
Since the liberal media was already blaming him for the anti-Trump thuggery, he told them, "I don't accept responsibility," Trump said on Sunday TV. "I do not condone violence in any shape."
In speeches since Friday Trump regularly invokes Bernie Sanders when an activist disrupts. He calls them "Bernie's people." At one stop, Trump said, "Get 'em out. Hey Bernie, get your people in line."
Although Sanders supporters are well-represented among the anti-Trump thugs, the self-described socialist senator from Vermont denied the charge. But Bernie’s campaign is so focused on demonizing the rich and blaming them for America’s problems, the hatred he is retailing can reasonably be called an incitement to those who buy his propaganda and support him.
Sanders after all is a lifetime admirer of Communist states like the Soviet Union and Cuba where this kind of thuggery is a political norm. So even if he’s telling the truth and did give the orders to his followers to be there, he’s lying. They came because they hate rich people too.
Major organizations of the left who are backing Sanders, like Moveon.org openly bragged about trampling on Trump's free speech rights in Chicago, and promised more of it.
Incredibly, instead of blaming the Left for the attacks on Trump, all three of Trump's remaining rivals for the GOP nomination are joining the left in blaming him for the violence that unfolded. If the roles were reversed, leftists would call it blaming the victim.
Continuing the scorched earth policy that has damaged his campaign Marco Rubio laid the blame at Trump’s door. "This is what a culture and a society looks like when everyone goes around saying whatever the heck they want. The result is, it all breaks down. It's called chaos. It's called anarchy and that's what we're careening towards."
Breaking of ranks on the right in order to blame Trump is a betrayal that has ominous implications for the future of the conservative cause.
Rubio and John Kasich have gone even further, wavering on their pledge to support Trump if he wins the party's nomination.
Rubio downplays the fact that it's the activist Left that is generating chaos, not Donald Trump and his supporters, a dagger aimed right at the heart of the Republican coalition.
Robert Spencer reflects that these Republican attacks "have tacitly encouraged the rioters by claiming that Trump is at least partially responsible for what they did." It’s a re-imposition of political correctness. Spencer explains: "In that scenario, you see, it becomes incumbent upon Trump not to say anything that Leftist thugs might dislike, or he will bear partial responsibility for what they do. Cruz, Rubio and Kasich, of course, will also have to be careful not to 'create an environment' that might force the Left-fascists to shut them down as well. But unless they become clones of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, they will inevitably end up creating that 'environment' anyway, despite their being more decorous and careful than Trump. And then they will be responsible for what they get, won’t they?"
The left didn’t need a Trump provocation. For the left, the issue is never the issue: the issue is always the revolution, that is, the war against Amerikkka, as an SDS radical put it many years ago. Everything is an excuse to advance the radical cause.
Meanwhile, leftist Alex Seitz-Wald wrote a glowing review at NBC.com of the activists' anti-democratic efforts in Chicago, as if silencing candidates were a legitimate form of political activity as American as apple pie. "What made Chicago different,” Seitz wrote, were its scale and the organization behind the effort. Hundreds of young, largely black and brown people poured in from across the city, taking over whole sections of the arena and bracing for trouble. And as the repeated chants of 'Ber-nie' demonstrated, it was largely organized by supporters of Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate who has struggled to win over black voters but whose revolutionary streak has excited radicals of all racial demographics.”
Seitz urged his readers to "'Remember the #TrumpRally wasn't just luck. It took organizers from dozens of organizations and thousands of people to pull off. Great work,' tweeted People for Bernie, a large unofficial pro-Sanders organization founded by veterans of the Occupy movement and other leftist activists."
Chicago is overrun by radical leftists and is in a constant state of turmoil nowadays so throwing together a demonstration against anyone to the right of Che Guevara wasn't too difficult a task. Sanders backers and Black Lives Matter thugs were easy to find on social media. At the UIC campus, the Black Student Union and a group called Fearless and Undocumented got to work recruiting disrupters.
Illegal alien Jorge Mena, a graduate student at UIC, started a petition at MoveOn.org demanding the school cancel the event. It garnered in excess of 50,000 signatures including UIC faculty. MoveOn paid for signs and a banner and emailed its Chicagoland members, urging them to get involved.
On the night of the rally, activists snuck into the venue and assembled at "designated multiple rallying points around the venue to avoid arousing suspicion of authorities with large congregations," Seitz-Wald writes.
"As activists slipped into the lines, they were told to blend in with the crowd and act natural. Inside, about 100 protesters received coveted orange wristbands allowing them access to the floor. Even as organizers tried to maintain calm, some scuffles with Trump fans started right away, and police began removing people." And that was all that was necessary. The powder was in place and the fuse was lit. But then Trump consulted with his security people and cancelled the event.
This is only the beginning, regardless of whether Trump secures the GOP nomination for president. Socialism is coming to America – at the ballot box and in the streets.
Editors’ note: The Freedom Center is a 501c3 non-profit organization. Therefore we do not endorse political candidates either in primary or general elections. However, as defenders of America’s social contract, we insist that the rules laid down by both parties at the outset of campaigns be respected, and that the results be decided by free elections. We will oppose any attempt to rig the system and deny voters of either party their constitutional right to elect candidates of their choice.
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Hopefully (from my point of view) DT will lose Illinois and Ohio today. In a contested convention, each delegate should switch their vote to the frontrunner on the second ballot and turn a plurality of support into a majority IF they believe that is in the best interest of the party and the country. This could quite turn into a fiasco if the anti-Trump passion in the convention is strong and divided.
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Sean Trende on nominations and contested conventions:
"The common rejoinder I hear is that the will of the people will have been thwarted if Trump wins the most votes, but is not the nominee. This is pure and simple nonsense. There is no expression of the “people’s will” with a plurality of the vote, especially when it is somewhere in the 30 percent range (as Trump’s is)."
...
"The GOP has required that its nominees receive a majority of the vote from its delegates for 160 years now. And this requirement has been consequential: Along the way, multiple candidates have received a plurality of the vote, yet failed to become the nominee. For example (note: The following percentages are of votes cast, not of the total number of delegates, many of whom would abstain in early rounds): William Seward (1860, 41.5 percent of the vote); James G. Blaine (1876, 45.9 percent); Ulysses S. Grant (1880, 41.3 percent); John Sherman (1888, 33.9 percent); Leonard Wood (1920, 45.5 percent); Frank Lowden (1920, 41.5 percent); Tom Dewey (1940, 36.1 percent)."
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/03/15/plurality_wont_entitle_trump_to_the_nomination_129969.html
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If Trump with a majority but under 50% and does not get nominated I would fully expect him to be his asshole self and run as third party.
He would have to be bought off in some way that would benefit him not necessarily America.
IMHO
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Trump winning Illinois is golden.... I wonder if they can send some more "protestors" to his other rallies?
Nothing tastes sweeter than liberal tears.
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But he is getting trounced in polls against all Democrats.
That is the rest that counts. The rest are footnotes for the memories.
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But he is getting trounced in polls against all Democrats.
That is the rest that counts. The rest are footnotes for the memories.
There are a lot of people don't that don't take part in polls. Not at all an accurate reflection, but rather than argue, which is pointless.... we'll just see at the end of the year.
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https://www.facebook.com/brandon.weber.upw/videos/972891679440002/
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second post
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432832/donald-trump-progressives-rethink-government-power?bXp3pLkqFJBrgsVs.01
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Third post-- this one is a surprise.
Pragmatism may yet prevail in America
Five months ago Jon Huntsman, a former Republican presidential contender, travelled to New Hampshire to meet a small group of politicians. He was joined by John Kasich, a current Republican presidential candidate; Chris Christie, until recently another Republican; Joe Lieberman, a former Democratic senator; and Martin O’Malley, a Democratic governor. Their goal was to endorse a bipartisan “national strategic agenda” to revive America and rebuild Washington’s credibility among both voters and global investors.
This meeting, organised by a group called No Labels, did not make waves after all. Other well-meaning bipartisan initiatives have emerged in recent years and failed. But this gathering had an interesting twist: Donald Trump participated and enthusiastically endorsed the group’s bipartisan and technocratic ideals. “I was surprised he came, but he was very positive,” Mr Huntsman observed at a meeting of business leaders in Philadelphia last week, adding that he is ready to work with Mr Trump if he becomes the Republican nominee — which he also thinks is quite likely.
Bond market investors around the world should take note. So should voters. After all, Mr Huntsman is hardly a crazy firebrand. Like Mr Kasich, he represents the more sober, pragmatic, internationally aware wing of the Republican party. The word “sensible” is often tossed around. The fact that he is not ruling out Mr Trump — and that Mr Trump attended the gathering — highlights the fact that there is a chance that Mr Trump may yet become a great deal more bipartisan and technocratic in his style than many people expect.
This may not seem obvious right now, least of all to people outside America. After all, the hallmarks of his campaign have been offensive verbal aggression and a lack of tangible policy ideas or serious advisers. Global investors who want to price the risk of a Trump policy plan, in other words, have almost no hard information right now on what he might actually do if he arrives in office.
People who have dealt with Mr Trump in a business or political context (and I have spoken with many recently) claim that his rhetoric is just a marketing campaign. He has to be loud and brash, the argument goes, to get through the Republican primary. But if he prevails, he could shift tack to widen his appeal.
One likely step is that he will seek to use his daughter, Ivanka, to attract women voters; or at least counter his sexist image. She might be a potent weapon: not only is she is smart, but she runs a website, WomenWhoWork, that promotes soft feminism.
Mr Trump is also likely to wrap himself in more pragmatic language — and to borrow all manner of ideas from places such as No Labels. This includes some surprisingly sensible ones. The platform argues, for example, that the next president should start his or her term by creating a national plan that focuses on four economic goals: creating 25m net new jobs in the next decade; securing social security for another 75 years; balancing the federal budget by 2030; and making America energy secure by 2024.
No Labels calls on the president to pick at least one goal in January 2017, before the State of the Union speech, and retreat to a place such as Camp David with a group of senior politicians of both parties to produce a plan. The idea is that focusing on long-term goals in this bipartisan fashion will help break the gridlock in Washington and create momentum to tackle the other goals.
“[We aim] to put an end to a governing process that simply drifts between divisive debates, political posturing and outright crises,” the manifesto declares. It is a vision not of ideology but of McKinsey-style C-suite governance — pragmatic, bipartisan dealmaking and problem-solving.
Could this work in practice? It is hard to imagine. But the No Labels group points out that presidents such as Ronald Reagan used to cut deals. And the main point is this: if somebody — Mr Trump or anyone else — were to borrow this language, it might just appeal to voters fed up with gridlock. It might even reassure financial markets, which are equally fed up with budget brinkmanship and government shutdowns.
Either way, the lesson for global investors is that they need to watch like hawks to see if Mr Trump’s language does shift in the coming weeks, and whether he can hire “sensible” people such as Mr Huntsman into his team. Future historians may view Mr Trump as a temporary sideshow or dangerous demagogue; but if Trump the opportunist wins power, he might yet be more pragmatic and technocratic than his recent predecessors. That would be irony indeed.
gillian.tett@ft.com
https://next.ft.com/content/e6e60e54-e616-11e5-bc31-138df2ae9ee6
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016. All rights reserved.
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I gotta say I love the Trump ad with Putin laughing at the EDC barking like a dog.
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http://www.factcheck.org/2016/03/trumps-false-muslim-claim/
It ain't the first time:
http://www.factcheck.org/2015/12/the-king-of-whoppers-donald-trump/
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/01/flashback-donald-trump-called-debate-skippers-cowards
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/17/poll-donald-trump-hits-65-percent-in-new-york-more-than-50-percent-ahead-of-ted-cruz/
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/17/poll-donald-trump-hits-65-percent-in-new-york-more-than-50-percent-ahead-of-ted-cruz/
Fact check: Trump loses to Hillary in NY by 19%
- Source: same poll
Trump's celebrity status and does not bring a single, additional state into play including hs home state. Reminds me of how he mocked Rubio for trailing in his own home state.
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https://hotgas.net/2016/03/new-trump-ad-greatness/
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https://www.facebook.com/david.markarian.5/videos/174355765940346/
I am not without familiarity with Mexican immigration laws and this guy is pretty much dead on.
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https://www.facebook.com/Maher/videos/10153561732052297/
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http://www.moneytalksnews.com/why-youre-probably-better-investing-than-donald-trump/
NB: Worth noting is that by taking DT's puffed number for the baseline the numbers are affected greatly, but I suspect the underlying point remains.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q6jHad-XG0
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Third post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOaEGQzFaPg
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Where is the outrage?
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2016/03/17/trump-earns-an-f-for-plagiarism-if-this-was-college-someone-would-say-get-him-out-of-here
http://dailycaller.com/2016/03/16/trump-appears-to-have-heavily-plagiarized-op-ed-from-carson/
More accurately, Trump's people plagiarized. Trump himself isn't a policy guy.
Ben Carson: ‘It doesn’t bother me at all’ if Trump plagiarized my op-ed."
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/trump-carson-plagiarism-141659130.html
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/17/ben-carson-it-doesnt-bother-me-at-all-if-trump-pla/
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http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/22/the-brussels-bombings-highlight-just-how-wrong-trump-is-about-nato/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=*Editors%20Picks
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/trump-responds-to-brussels-attack-by-insulting-the-city-of-belgium-and-calling-for-torture/
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Second post
Brussels and Trump
If only his knowledge began to match his instincts.
By James Taranto
March 22, 2016 2:33 p.m. ET
Last night this columnist attended an off-the-record talk on international relations by a U.S. government official. Terrorism was among the topics discussed, and the talk was heavy on clichés. “Violent extremism” made an appearance, as did “ISIL.” We heard that the lack of economic opportunities was leaving young people vulnerable to “radicalization,” though no information was supplied about the identity of the radicalizers. We were warned of the dangers of “xenophobia.”
Oh, and there were a couple of supercilious remarks about “what the hell is going on in the U.S. presidential election.”
This morning we awoke to the news that terrorists—sorry, “violent extremists”—had murdered at least two dozen people in a series of bombings in Brussels. And it wasn’t long before Mr. What The Hell weighed in. “Do you all remember how beautiful and safe a place Brussels was,” tweeted Donald Trump. “Not anymore, it is from a different world! U.S. must be vigilant and smart!”
Soon enough, at least in America, Donald Trump had become the main topic of conversation. A comparison of his reaction with his rivals’ helps illuminate what the hell is going on with the U.S. presidential election.
The young-adult site Vox has a roundup. “I would close up our borders to people until we figure out what is going on. Look at Brussels, look at Paris, look at so many cities that were great cities,” Trump said on Fox News. Later, on MSNBC: “Waterboarding would be fine and if they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding. You have to get the information and you have to get it rapidly.”
Ted Cruz put out a statement titled “We Can No Longer Surrender to the Enemy Through Political Correctness.” In a tweet, he summed up the point: “We will name our enemy—radical Islamic terrorism. And we will defeat it.”
On the substance, Cruz is right to object to the administration’s obsession with euphemism. But his emphasis seems odd. Why assert that you’re going to name the enemy? Why not just name it? And isn’t defeating it the point? Cruz himself has stumbled into the PC trap of emphasizing semantics over substance.
As for John Kasich, his response was conventional. In a statement, he expressed “solidarity with the people of Belgium,” described terrorism as a threat to “our very way of life,” and said: “We must strengthen our alliances . . . and the international system that has been built on our common values since the end of the Second World War.” That last bit is an implicit rebuke of Trump, who yesterday, as the Washington Post reports, “questioned the United States’ continued involvement in NATO” in an interview with the Post.
Hillary Clinton’s statement was in a similar vein: She expressed “solidarity with our European allies” and concluded: “Today’s attacks will only strengthen our resolve to stand together as allies and defeat terrorism and radical jihadism around the world.” Bernie Sanders tweeted: “We offer our deepest condolences to the people of Brussels and stand with our European allies to offer any necessary assistance.”
The whole episode, it seems to us, is yet another testimony to Trump’s acute political instincts. He is alone among the candidates in addressing Americans’ anxiety that if our leaders are not careful, our country could end up like Western Europe, facing repeated attacks from a deadly internal enemy.
Foreign-policy experts don’t see it this way, and they have a point. Daniel Drezner, a professor at the Fletcher School, summed up the attitude with a tweet mocking Trump’s assertion that he’d close the border “until we figure out what’s going on.” Drezner: “Given the caliber of his national security team, that means he’d have to close the borders permanently.”
That’s a fair hit. Trump’s team, announced yesterday, is by all accounts an unimpressive group. And although some of the common criticisms of Trump strike us as overwrought, the one that does not is that he is sorely—perhaps almost completely—lacking in knowledge of policy substance. We’d feel a lot less uneasy about the prospect of a Trump presidency if we thought his instincts would be tempered by the advice of experts.
That said, even if expertise is a necessary condition for good foreign policy, it is certainly not a sufficient one. No one doubts that President Obama is surrounded by experts, yet they failed to dissuade him from withdrawing fully from Iraq. That contributed to the rise of ISIS, as did his abortive near-intervention in Syria in 2013. In the latter case, as the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reports, he expressly rejected the expert consensus:
Obama understands that the decision he made to step back from air strikes, and to allow the violation of a red line he himself had drawn to go unpunished, will be interrogated mercilessly by historians. But today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction for him.
“I’m very proud of this moment,” he told me. “The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made—and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.”
This was the moment the president believes he finally broke with what he calls, derisively, the “Washington playbook.”
Note that the president does not express regret for damaging American credibility by issuing a serious threat that he ultimately decided not to carry out. He simply pooh-poohs the idea that credibility matters at all. One suspects that Trump, even without expert advice, would know better than to make this mistake. (True, he makes a lot of threats—but his bombastic style always leaves room for doubt that he means them.)
Here’s another example: No one doubts Mrs. Clinton surrounds herself with experts. One day last November, she did so literally, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. During that speech, she asserted categorically: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Has any foreign-policy expert—this columnist does not qualify—pointed out that this statement is simply and obviously false?
When conventional politicians, relying on expert advice, respond to terrorism with platitudes and even outright lies, it’s no wonder that someone like Trump can thrive as the only candidate who senses and responds, however imperfectly, to legitimate public fears. That is what the hell is going on in the U.S. election. Trump is a formidable politician. Somebody with his instincts and a degree of intellectual seriousness would be a formidable leader.
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http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/22/the-brussels-bombings-highlight-just-how-wrong-trump-is-about-nato/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=*Editors%20Picks
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/trump-responds-to-brussels-attack-by-insulting-the-city-of-belgium-and-calling-for-torture/
Interesting comments from Britain.
The only group in the UK that agrees with Trump on questioning the value of NATO is the very far left.
The only group in Britain that agrees with Trump on some other issues is the very far right.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the recent Trump interviews is his lack of focus. Rambling doesn't work on world security issues.
Defending Israel or the west isn't a deal we can walk away from if we don't get it on our terms.
Very odd to back out of NATO instead of the UN.
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http://thedailybanter.com/2016/03/trump-threatens-cruzs-wife/
Not sure why Ted is getting smeared here, but as for the Donald, , , the country is going to pay dearly for the dalliance of his deluded followers for their collective derangement whether he wins or loses.
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second post
Well, I like Walid Phares , , ,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/23/us/politics/donald-trump-foreign-policy-advisers.html?_r=0
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I tried to find out who the people behind, 'Make America Awesome' PAC are. Their website cannot be accessed. My sense it is more of a Bill Crystal or National Review type group behind the picture and not Cruz.
Trump's shoot from the mouth response is I agree, one more reason he should not be President.
Crafty you are right about the *delusional* nature of his supporters. I would still vote for him over any Democrat but I would have to hold my nose and close my eyes.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnpO_RTSNmQ
HBO, Jon Stewart's successor(?). This was from before Super Tuesday, still spot on, unfortunately. No doubt he will be the keynote speaker at the Dem convention.
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After watching this with me on TV my daughter had me buy the Make Donald Drumpf again hat. :lol: :lol: :evil:
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Why Israelis Are Worried About Donald Trump
by Gregg Roman and Eylon Aslan-Levy
The Daily Caller
March 24, 2016
http://www.meforum.org/5921/israelis-worried-about-trump
Most Israelis are wary of Donald Trump.
Where does Donald Trump stand on the Arab-Israeli conflict?
As with so much else, the only consistent feature of Trump's remarks is their off-the-cuff and contradictory nature. Trump's foreign policy thinking might be truly as shambolic as the sentences in which it is expressed. Alternatively, there might indeed be method behind the madness. Yet whether or not one is charitable towards the controversial tycoon, all indications suggest that a Trump presidency would recklessly jeopardize the stalwart alliance between the United States and Israel, and thereby endanger the security of the Middle East's sole democracy.
On the one hand, Trump's comments appear virtually impossible to interpret into coherency. At his AIPAC speech, Trump announced that he would dismantle the Iran Deal, then five minutes later declared that he would enforce it. Sometimes he expresses a certain indifference to the Jewish state: similarly to Bernie Sanders, Trump has announced a policy of neutrality between Israelis and Palestinians, adding that he "want to go in with a clean slate" in lieu of pledging to defend the security needs of the US's most dependable regional ally. Disturbingly, Trump has stated that "a certain amount of surprise, unpredictability" would be key to his negotiating strategy, announcing a game plan involving yet more chaos into an increasingly chaotic Middle East.
At other times, Trump has blamed Israel for the enduring conflict, speculating, "I don't know that Israel has the commitment" to make peace, and effectively exonerating the Palestinian side when he said that peace depends on "whether or not Israel," rather than the rejectionist Palestinian leadership and jihadi forces, "wants to make the deal ... they may not be."
Trump has blamed Israel for its enduring conflict with Palestinians.
To be sure, Trump has made pro-Israel noises — and very loud ones this week at AIPAC's policy conference. "My daughter is married to a Jew who is an enthusiastic Israel supporter," Trump has said, which is about as compelling proof of pro-Israel affinities as "my best friend's a Mexican." With customary braggadocio, Trump has asserted that "the only one that's going to give Israel the kind of support it needs is Donald Trump." But there is little in his other utterances to commend this sweeping pledge. Just before ascending the AIPAC stage, Trump astonishingly hinted that he expected Israel to repay American military aid.
As an analysis of Trump's recent speeches has shown, he commits a "misstatement" every five minutes. How can a man so inclined to mistruths be trusted with the delicate business of diplomacy and global politics? And a man who has suggested that the US should withdraw from NATO, at that.
Those inclined to buy Trump's protestations that he is "currently [Israel's] biggest friend" will struggle to rationalize his ersatz record of public statements. Trump is a man of principles, to the extent that those principles are expediency and opportunism. On the campaign trail, he has demonstrated a remarkable ability to say or do whatever will maximize votes, then shamelessly flip-flop if need be. It is exceedingly difficult to decipher any discernible commitment from Trump to values or causes of any kind, other than his own brand. A President Trump would likely play just as recklessly with America's regional alliances as President Obama, further endangering the growing threats to the liberal world order America has fought so tirelessly to sustain just when it most needs rehabilitating.
Trump thinks he can engineer a diplomatic breakthrough between Israelis and Palestinians.
So much for Trump's seemingly anarchic record of public statements. Yet the real danger may lie in a method, the outlines of which one can begin to detect behind the madness.
Given the historic temptation for U.S. presidents to attempt to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict and Trump's self-perception as a master dealmaker, it appears that Trump is convinced that he can engineer a brilliant diplomatic breakthrough. Indeed, at AIPAC he was at pains to stress his authorship of a book on negotiations. But The Art of the Deal is a shoddy grounds for geopolitical chess-playing. His statements betray no understanding of the nuances of the fragile geopolitics, and every indication that he impatiently and impetuously believes that all that peace requires is that an American president rely on his business acumen to force a deal.
But as Senator Marco Rubio put it, the Arab-Israeli conflict is "not a real estate deal." It is replete with complexities that demand perseverance, trust-building and ingenuity — in short, traits that are difficult to imagine in a presidential candidate who had yet to appoint a foreign policy team until a few days before his March 21 AIPAC appearance.
The collision between Israel's sober realism and Trump's grandiose self-confidence is a recipe for unnecessary friction.
An impatient rush to achieve a final-status agreement without any attention to the underlying, historical and structural reasons underlying the impasse would likely explode spectacularly in Israel's face and risk further conflagration. Israel understands that repeating this "peace summit" strategy will not work without attending to the underlying causes of rejectionism and instability on the Palestinian side, and will resist the imposition of tried-and-failed methods. The collision between Israel's sober realism and Trump's grandiose confidence in his own abilities is a recipe for unnecessary friction between Jerusalem and Washington.
All of the other Republican candidates – and even Hillary Clinton to some extent – believe that the next president must reaffirm and repair the U.S.-Israel relationship. They recognize that Israelis are most willing to make sacrifices in pursuit of peace when they are most secure, while Israel's enemies are least willing to compromise when they see daylight between Washington and Jerusalem. Trump's apathy towards Israel, or else his hubristic belief in his own negotiating powers as a panacea, risks further damage to this irreplaceable transnational alliance.
The writing is on the wall. It is not too late for Republicans to heed it.
Gregg Roman is director of the Middle East Forum. Eylon Aslan-Levy is a British-Israeli writer and political commentator.
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https://www.facebook.com/rondwyersettingtherecordstraight/videos/834417413352941/
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This is the NY Times.
I heard that he was also at WaPo a few days ago and did very poorly. Can anyone lay their hands on that for us?
=====================
Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, said that if elected, he might halt purchases of oil from Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies unless they commit ground troops to the fight against the Islamic State or “substantially reimburse” the United States for combating the militant group, which threatens their stability.
“If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection,” Mr. Trump said during a 100-minute interview on foreign policy, spread over two phone calls on Friday, “I don’t think it would be around.”
He also said he would be open to allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals rather than depend on the American nuclear umbrella for their protection against North Korea and China. If the United States “keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they’re going to want to have that anyway, with or without me discussing it,” Mr. Trump said.
And he said he would be willing to withdraw United States forces from both Japan and South Korea if they did not substantially increase their contributions to the costs of housing and feeding those troops. “Not happily, but the answer is yes,” he said.
Mr. Trump also said he would seek to renegotiate many fundamental treaties with American allies, possibly including a 56-year-old security pact with Japan, which he described as one-sided.
In Mr. Trump’s worldview, the United States has become a diluted power, and the main mechanism by which he would re-establish its central role in the world is economic bargaining. He approached almost every current international conflict through the prism of a negotiation, even when he was imprecise about the strategic goals he sought. He again faulted the Obama administration’s handling of the negotiations with Iran last year — “It would have been so much better if they had walked away a few times,” he said — but offered only one new idea about how he would change its content: Ban Iran’s trade with North Korea.
Mr. Trump struck similar themes when he discussed the future of NATO, which he called “unfair, economically, to us,” and said he was open to an alternative organization focused on counterterrorism. He argued that the best way to halt China’s placement of military airfields and antiaircraft batteries on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea was to threaten its access to American markets.
“We have tremendous economic power over China,” he argued. “And that’s the power of trade.” He made no mention of Beijing’s capability for economic retaliation.
“We will not be ripped off
anymore. We’re going to be
friendly with everybody, but
we’re not going to be taken
advantage of by anybody.”
Donald J. Trump, whose view of the world is “America First.” Read the edited transcript or just the highlights.
Mr. Trump’s views, as he explained them, fit nowhere into the recent history of the Republican Party: He is not in the internationalist camp of the elder President George Bush, nor does he favor George W. Bush’s call to make it the mission of the United States to spread democracy around the world. He agreed with a suggestion that his ideas might best be summed up as “America First.”
“Not isolationist, but I am America First,” he said. “I like the expression.” He said he was willing to reconsider traditional American alliances if partners were not willing to pay, in cash or troop commitments, for the presence of American forces around the world. “We will not be ripped off anymore,” he said.
In the past week, the bombings in Brussels and an accelerated war against the Islamic State have shifted the focus of the campaign trail conversation back to questions of how the candidates would defend the United States and what kind of diplomacy they would pursue around the world.
Mr. Trump explained his thoughts in concrete and easily digestible terms, but they appeared to reflect little consideration for potential consequences around the globe. Much the same way he treats political rivals and interviewers, he personalized how he would engage foreign nations, suggesting his approach would depend partly on “how friendly they’ve been toward us,” not just on national interests or alliances.
At no point did he express any belief that American forces deployed on military bases around the world were by themselves valuable to the United States, though Republican and Democratic administrations have for decades argued that they are essential to deterring military adventurism, protecting commerce and gathering intelligence.
Like Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Trump emphasized the importance of “unpredictability” for an American president, arguing that the country’s traditions of democracy and openness had made its actions too easy for adversaries and allies alike to foresee.
“I wouldn’t want them to know what my real thinking is,” he said about how far he was willing to take the confrontation over the islands in the South China Sea, which are remote and uninhabited but extend China’s control over a major maritime thoroughfare. But, he added, “I would use trade, absolutely, as a bargaining chip.”
Asked when he thought American power had been at its peak, Mr. Trump reached back 116 years to the turn of the 20th century, the era of another unconventional Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, who ended up leaving the party. His favorite figures in American history, he said, include two generals, Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton — though he insisted that, unlike MacArthur, he would not advocate the use of nuclear weapons except as a last resort. (He suggested that MacArthur had pressed during the Korean War to use atomic weapons against China as a means “to negotiate,” adding, “He played the nuclear card, but he didn’t use it.”)
“I wouldn’t want
them to know what
my real thinking is.”
Mr. Trump, who told us his thinking on foreign policy — up to a point. Read the edited transcript or just the highlights.
Mr. Trump denied that he had had trouble recruiting senior members of the foreign policy establishment to advise his campaign. “Many of them are tied up with contracts working for various networks,” he said, like Fox or CNN.
He disclosed the names of three advisers in addition to five he announced earlier in the week: retired Maj. Gen. Gary L. Harrell, Maj. Gen. Bert K. Mizusawa and retired Rear Adm. Charles R. Kubic. Asked about the briefings he receives and books he has read about foreign policy, he said his main source of information was newspapers, “including yours.”
Continue reading the main story
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I wasn't aware that we purchased a significant amount of oil rom the Saudis
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Until recently, Mr. Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements have largely come through slogans: “Take the oil,” “Build a wall” and ban Muslim immigrants, at least temporarily. But as he has pulled closer to capturing the nomination, he has been called on to elaborate.
Pressed about his call to “take the oil” controlled by the Islamic State in the Middle East, Mr. Trump acknowledged that this would require deploying ground troops, something he does not favor. “We should’ve taken it, and we would’ve had it,” he said, referring to the years in which the United States occupied Iraq. “Now we have to destroy the oil.”
Mr. Trump did not rule out spying on American allies, including foreign leaders like Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, whose cellphone was apparently a target of the National Security Agency. President Obama said that the United States would no longer target her phone but made no such commitments about the rest of Germany, or Europe.
“I’m not sure that I would want to be talking about that,” Mr. Trump said. “You understand what I mean by that.”
Mr. Trump was not impressed with Ms. Merkel’s handling of the migrant crisis, however: “Germany is being destroyed by Merkel’s naïveté, or worse,” he said. He suggested that Germany and the Gulf nations should pay for the “safe zones” he wants to set up in Syria for refugees, and for protecting them once built.
Throughout the two conversations, Mr. Trump painted a bleak picture of the United States as a diminished force in the world, an opinion he has held since the late 1980s, when he placed ads in The New York Times and other newspapers calling for Japan and Saudi Arabia to spend more money on their own defense.
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Mr. Trump’s new threat to cut off oil purchases from the Saudis was part of a broader complaint about the United States’ Arab allies, which many in the Obama administration share: that they frequently look to the United States to police the Middle East, without putting their own troops at risk. “We defend everybody,” Mr. Trump said. “When in doubt, come to the United States. We’ll defend you. In some cases free of charge.”
But his rationale for abandoning the region was that “the reason we’re in the Middle East is for oil, and all of a sudden we’re finding out that there’s less reason to be there now.” He made no mention of the risks of withdrawal — that it would encourage Iran to dominate the Gulf, that the presence of American troops is part of Israel’s defense, and that American air and naval bases in the region are key collection points for intelligence and bases for drones and Special Operations forces.
Mr. Trump seemed less comfortable on some topics than others. He called the United States “obsolete” in terms of cyberweaponry, although the nation’s capabilities are generally considered on the cutting edge.
In the morning interview, asked if he would seek a two-state or a one-state solution in a peace accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he said: “I’m not saying anything. What I’m going to do is, you know, I specifically don’t want to address the issue because I would love to see if a deal could be made.”
But in the evening, saying he had been rushed earlier, Mr. Trump reverted to a position he outlined on Monday before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group. “Basically, I support a two-state solution on Israel,” he said. “But the Palestinian Authority has to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”
In his discussion of nuclear weapons — which he said he had learned about from an uncle, John G. Trump, who served on the faculty of M.I.T. and died in 1985 — Mr. Trump seemed fixated on the large nuclear stockpiles amassed in the Cold War. While he referred briefly to North Korean and Pakistani arsenals, he said nothing about a danger that is a cause of great consternation among international leaders: small nuclear weapons that could be fashioned by terrorists.
In criticizing the Iran nuclear deal, Mr. Trump expressed particular outrage at how the roughly $150 billion released to Iran was being spent. “Did you notice they’re buying from everybody but the United States?” he said.
Told that sanctions under United States law still prevent most American companies from doing business with Iran, Mr. Trump said: “So, how stupid is that? We give them the money and we now say, ‘Go buy Airbus instead of Boeing,’ right?”
But Mr. Trump, who has been pushed to demonstrate a basic command of international affairs, insisted that voters should not doubt his foreign policy fluency.“I do know my subject,” he said.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeJ-iv3MOTo
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Nice to know that Mexicans seem to think that their money should be used to influence US politics. They are organizing money and voices of non US citizens in an effort to derail a US candidate.
Sorry the article is not in English, but the Spanish speakers here will get the just of it.
I have to say, I wonder what the reaction would be if Americans were organizing to influence which Mexican candidates would be successful. It's a fair question.
http://ljz.mx/2016/03/27/clubes-de-migrantes-realizan-campana-con-zacatecanos-para-evitar-que-voten-por-trump/
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Nice to know that Mexicans seem to think that their money should be used to influence US politics. They are organizing money and voices of non US citizens in an effort to derail a US candidate.
Sorry the article is not in English, but the Spanish speakers here will get the just of it.
I have to say, I wonder what the reaction would be if Americans were organizing to influence which Mexican candidates would be successful. It's a fair question.
http://ljz.mx/2016/03/27/clubes-de-migrantes-realizan-campana-con-zacatecanos-para-evitar-que-voten-por-trump/
It is a CRIME under Mexican law for foreigners to attempt to influence Mexican elections.
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http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2009/01/13/mexicos-glass-house-2/
J. Michael Waller
Mexico’s Glass House
mexico_southern_border
Articles | January 13, 2009 | Borders
EmailPrint
Every country has the right to restrict the quality and quantity of foreign immigrants entering or living within its borders. If American policymakers are looking for legal models on which to base new laws restricting immigration and expelling foreign lawbreakers, they have a handy guide: the Mexican constitution.
Adopted in 1917, the constitution of the United Mexican States borrows heavily from American constitutional and legal principles. It combines those principles with a strong sense nationalism, cultural self-identity, paternalism, and state power. Mexico’s constitution contains many provisions to protect the country from foreigners, including foreigners legally resident in the country and even foreign-born people who have become naturalized Mexican citizens. The Mexican constitution segregates immigrants and naturalized citizens from native-born citizens by denying immigrants basic human rights that Mexican immigrants enjoy in the United States.
By making increasing demands that the U.S. not enforce its immigration laws and, indeed, that it liberalize them, Mexico is throwing stones within its own glass house. This paper, the first of a short series on Mexican immigration double standards, examines the Mexican constitution’s protections against immigrants, and concludes with some questions about U.S. policy.
Summary
In brief, the Mexican Constitution states that:
Immigrants and foreign visitors are banned from public political discourse.
Immigrants and foreigners are denied certain basic property rights.
Immigrants are denied equal employment rights.
Immigrants and naturalized citizens will never be treated as real Mexican citizens.
Immigrants and naturalized citizens are not to be trusted in public service.
Immigrants and naturalized citizens may never become members of the clergy.
Private citizens may make citizens arrests of lawbreakers (i.e., illegal immigrants) and hand them to the authorities.
Immigrants may be expelled from Mexico for any reason and without due process.
The Mexican constitution: Unfriendly to immigrants
The Mexican constitution expressly forbids non-citizens to participate in the country’s political life. Non-citizens are forbidden to participate in demonstrations or express opinions in public about domestic politics. Article 9 states, "only citizens of the Republic may do so to take part in the political affairs of the country." Article 33 is unambiguous: "Foreigners may not in any way participate in the political affairs of the country."
The Mexican constitution denies fundamental property rights to foreigners. If foreigners wish to have certain property rights, they must renounce the protection of their own governments or risk confiscation. Foreigners are forbidden to own land in Mexico within 100 kilometers of land borders or within 50 kilometers of the coast. Article 27 states,
"Only Mexicans by birth or naturalization and Mexican companies have the right to acquire ownership of lands, waters, and their appurtenances, or to obtain concessions for the exploitation of mines or of waters. The State may grant the same right to foreigners, provided they agree before the Ministry of Foreign Relations to consider themselves as nationals in respect to such property, and bind themselves not to invoke the protection of their governments in matters relating thereunto; under penalty, in case of noncompliance with this agreement, of forfeiture of the property acquired to the Nation. Under no circumstances may foreigners acquire direct ownership of lands or waters within a zone of one hundred kilometers along the frontiers and of fifty kilometers along the shores of the country." (Emphasis added)
The Mexican constitution denies equal employment rights to immigrants, even legal ones, in the public sector. Article 32: "Mexicans shall have priority over foreigners under equality of circumstances for all classes of concessions and for all employment, positions, or commissions of the Government in which the status of citizenship is not indispensable. In time of peace no foreigner can serve in the Army nor in the police or public security forces."
The Mexican constitution guarantees that immigrants will never be treated as real Mexican citizens, even if they are legally naturalized. Article 32 bans foreigners, immigrants, and even naturalized citizens of Mexico from serving as military officers, Mexican-flagged ship and airline crew, and chiefs of seaports and airports:
"In order to belong to the National Navy or the Air Force, and to discharge any office or commission, it is required to be a Mexican by birth. This same status is indispensable for captains, pilots, masters, engineers, mechanics, and in general, for all personnel of the crew of any vessel or airship protected by the Mexican merchant flag or insignia. It is also necessary to be Mexican by birth to discharge the position of captain of the port and all services of practique and airport commandant, as well as all functions of customs agent in the Republic."
An immigrant who becomes a naturalized Mexican citizen can be stripped of his Mexican citizenship if he lives again in the country of his origin for more than five years, under Article 37. Mexican-born citizens risk no such loss.
Foreign-born, naturalized Mexican citizens may not become federal lawmakers (Article 55), cabinet secretaries (Article 91) or supreme court justices (Article 95).
The president of Mexico, like the president of the United States, constitutionally must be a citizen by birth, but Article 82 of the Mexican constitution mandates that the president’s parents also be
Mexican-born citizens, thus according secondary status to Mexican-born citizens born of immigrants.
The Mexican constitution forbids immigrants and naturalized citizens to become members of the clergy. Article 130 says, "To practice the ministry of any denomination in the United Mexican States it is necessary to be a Mexican by birth."
The Mexican constitution singles out "undesirable aliens." Article 11 guarantees federal protection against "undesirable aliens resident in the country."
The Mexican constitution provides the right of private individuals to make citizen’s arrests. flagrante delicto, any person may arrest the offender and his accomplices, turning them over without delay to the nearest authorities." Therefore, the Mexican constitution appears to grant Mexican citizens the right to arrest illegal aliens and hand them over to police for prosecution.
The Mexican constitution states that foreigners may be expelled for any reason and without due process. According to Article 33, "the Federal Executive shall have the exclusive power to compel any foreigner whose remaining he may deem inexpedient to abandon the national territory immediately and without the necessity of previous legal action."
Notional policy options
Mexico and the United States have much to learn from one another’s laws and practices on immigration and naturalization. A study of the immigration and citizenship portions of the Mexican constitution leads to a search for new policy options to find a fair and equitable solution to the immigration problem in the United States.
Two contrary options would require reciprocity, while doing the utmost to harmonize U.S.-Mexican relations:
1. Mexico should amend its constitution to guarantee immigrants to Mexico the same rights it demands the United States give to immigrants from Mexico; or
2. The United States should impose the same restrictions on Mexican immigrants that Mexico imposes on American immigrants.
These options are only notional, of course. They are intended only to help push the immigration debate in a more sensible direction. They simply illustrate the hypocrisy of the Mexican government’s current immigration demands on the United States – as well as the emptiness of most Democrat and Republican proposals for immigration reform.
Mexico certainly has every right to control who enters its borders, and to expel foreigners who break its laws. The Mexican constitution is designed to give the strongest protections possible to the country’s national security. Mexico’s internal immigration policy is Mexico’s business.
However, since Mexican political leaders from the ruling party and the opposition have been demanding that the United States ignore, alter or abolish its own immigration laws, they have opened their own internal affairs to American scrutiny. The time has come to examine Mexico’s own glass house.
– – –
J. Michael Waller, Ph.D., is the Center for Security Policy’s Vice President for Information Operations.
[1] The official text of the Constitution of Mexico appears on the Website of the Chamber of Deputies, or lower house of Congress, of the United Mexican States: http://www.cddhcu.gob.mx/leyinfo/txt/1.txt. An authoritative English translation of the Constitution of Mexico, published by the Organization of American States, appears on the Website of Illinois State University: http://www.ilstu.edu/class/hist263/docs/1917const.html. Quotations in this document are from the OAS translation.
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GM, if you have a moment please post that in the Mexico threads and the Electoral thread. TY.
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GM, if you have a moment please post that in the Mexico threads and the Electoral thread. TY.
Sorry, about to go to work.
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http://thefederalist.com/2016/03/24/10-things-trump-said-but-says-he-didnt/
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Nice to know that Mexicans seem to think that their money should be used to influence US politics. They are organizing money and voices of non US citizens in an effort to derail a US candidate.
Sorry the article is not in English, but the Spanish speakers here will get the just of it.
I have to say, I wonder what the reaction would be if Americans were organizing to influence which Mexican candidates would be successful. It's a fair question.
http://ljz.mx/2016/03/27/clubes-de-migrantes-realizan-campana-con-zacatecanos-para-evitar-que-voten-por-trump/
It is a CRIME under Mexican law for foreigners to attempt to influence Mexican elections.
I am very aware of that, and you are absolutely correct... which is why I posted it. The hypocrisy is mind numbing. They'll flat out through you out of the country for even having a protest, much less influencing an election.
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/trumps-tax-plan-would-add-more-debt-than-obama/article/1038452
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http://thefederalist.com/2016/03/24/10-things-trump-said-but-says-he-didnt/
Maybe he thinks we won't remember what he said, on camera. I think he doesn't remember what he said, on camera.
Besides lying or forgetting, his problem is that he always has cameras on. And tweets can't be untwittered.
Lying by people like HRC, Bill Clinton, Obama, now Trump creates a number of problems, such as lack of trust. Even worse to me is that it makes it boring and a waste of time to listen carefully to what they say. Why should we care what they say when they don't.
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/trumps-tax-plan-would-add-more-debt-than-obama/article/1038452
Yes, but they will be the biggest most beautiful deficits we have ever had. :-(
Or were they just starting points in negotiations by the world's greatest deal maker? :-(
Maybe he plans to make it up with his 45% tariffs... :-(
Higher tax rates from Hillary or Bernie will collapse the economy, bring in lower revenues as well. :-(
With most shelters and loopholes already out, lower rates mostly bring in lower revenues.
Odd to have a deficit analysis without looking at the cause of deficits - spending.
Trump has endorsed spending restraint measures such as the Penny Plan.
http://www.onecentsolution.org/the-one-cent-solution/
Unfortunately his memory and commitment to promises made is lacking.
I would add - the Cruz plan is unworkable and unelectable. Mentioned previously, I am waiting for the Paul Ryan plan. The Republican House may be our last chance. Needless to say, the Ryan plan is also unworkable if we lose the Senate and White House.
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"Lying by people like HRC, Bill Clinton, Obama, now Trump creates a number of problems, such as lack of trust"
Obama is by far the worst because he does not have the interests of America at heart. Our first Black President is screwing us all over royally.
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I spoke to a colleague friend recently who said "thank God" for Trump. Early on I would have agreed.
So I replied that he is losing in EVERY SINGLE poll by double digits to Hillary and he may cost us the Senate, the Supreme Court, and House seats and I have no idea what else as for governorships and state legislatures.
His response is exactly the same as objectivist:
"I don't believe the polls or the news media"
This group of people has been screwed over for so long that there is no stopping them 'in their own minds', literally. That is the problem. They are like Pickett's charge. They will lose the whole damn war.
November will be a blood bath.
Even Alexander the Great couldn't get us out of this jam.
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The polls are right - except for the little preface, if the election were held today. Hs supporters have the belief that when Trump turns his attention to Hillary, he will destroy her. (Just as I know Rubio is the best communicator, won Florida by a million votes, etc.) Trump supporters may be right, but the polls today already take all that into consideration, her felonious existence and his own pluses and minuses. There isn't much left to say about either one of them (that hasn't already been said).
"November will be a blood bath. Even Alexander the Great couldn't get us out of this jam."
Isn't it strange that with 7 months to go, no one can think of a solution.
Our alternatives:
1) Go with Trump now, hope he runs and governs well.
2) Go with Trump after he hits 1237 delegates, hope he runs and governs well.
3) Go with second place Cruz on the second ballot. Lose all Trump supporters. Lose the election.
4) Take Rubio, Kasich, Ryan or somebody else on the second (or 50th) ballot, Lose all and Cruz and Trump supporters. Lose the election.
5) Run a conservative 3rd party candidate against Hillary and Trump, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, anyone who wasn't on the primary ballots. Trump Supporters stay with Trump. Hillary wins.
6) Merge a ticket, Trump-Cruz, Trump-Rubio, Trump-Kasich. But the only one who gains from that is Trump, offering the false promise that any veep will have 2 cents of influence over how he governs.
I lean toward 3) , 4) and 5) above, the not-Trump options.
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http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2016/03/28/begnning-end-donald-trump-cratering-new-california-poll/?utm_content=buffer32f34&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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second post
http://www.investors.com/politics/perspective/trump-may-be-first-since-reagan-to-unleash-americas-animal-spirits/
Trump May Be First Since Reagan To Unleash America’s Animal Spirits
By DONALD L. LUSKIN
It wasn’t so long ago that everyone knew Donald Trump couldn’t possibly be the Republican party’s nominee for president. Now that he may very well be the nominee, everyone knows he couldn’t possibly win in November. Indeed, everyone knows he’ll lose in a Goldwater-esque landslide, handing the White House and the Congress to the Democrats.
But what if that’s wrong, too? What if he wins? Well, in that case, everyone knows he would be a disaster as president.
I’m considering this from the standpoint of an investor. At first glance, it would seem that there are only bleak choices here for the U.S. economy.
If Trump loses and costs the GOP control of Congress, we face at least two years of Democratic one-party rule like 2009-2010. Get ready for higher taxes, more federal regulations, single-payer national health care, union card-check, a ban on fracking and a Supreme Court stacked left for a generation.
If Trump wins, get ready for protectionism and lots of it, and a raft of other loony ad hoc populist assaults on the economy.
Sell everything? Maybe. But then again, maybe what everyone knows is wrong. After all, Trump must have something going for him, given his “yuge” success in the primaries so far.
So maybe it’s time to have a little sympathy for the devil. You remember the iconic Rolling Stones song by that name. Its opening line is kind of like the Trump campaign — “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.” Okay, on the taste part, not so much.
But Trump does introduce himself as a man of wealth, and that simple fact speaks volumes about what it would be like to have him as president.
In the last election, Mitt Romney spent his entire campaign apologizing for his wealth, groveling to the Left’s narrative that branded him an avatar of white privilege. Romney lost because, in the end, he offered only the defeatist vision embodied in President Obama’s “you didn’t build that.”
Trump couldn’t be more different. As a real estate developer, he did, literally, build that. And he’s proud of it, bragging “I have a Gucci store that’s worth more than Romney.”
It is often said that no candidate of either party is substantively engaging with the mission of re-igniting American economic growth. It’s true — for almost two decades, all candidates of both parties have ritually conceded that America is in permanent economic decline and hid or apologized for whatever success they may have had personally.
Trump is the first pro-growth candidate of the new millennium, and his policy platform begins with unapologetically offering himself as an aspirational example.
Yes, obviously, in an important sense Trump appeals to the worst in people. But that’s hardly unique among politicians, especially the current crop. What is unique is that Trump is also appealing to the best in people. Trump’s seemingly jingoistic slogan “Make America Great Again” is a political inflection point as significant as Deng Xiaoping’s exhortation “To Get Rich is Glorious” was for China’s capitalist rebirth.
The leftist economist John Maynard Keynes wasn’t right about much, but he was right when he laid out this enduring axiom of economics: “Our decisions to do something positive … can only be taken as the result of animal spirits — a spontaneous urge to action.”
For all the bluster and buffoonery, Trump’s campaign — his very persona — has the effect of letting it be OK for Americans to embrace their inner animal without fear that economic achievement will brand you as a greedy racist polluting imperialist.
The bluster and the buffoonery are an integral part of his pro-growth program. Trump’s relentless — sometimes tasteless — assault against political correctness is an antidote against the guilt-trip that the Left uses to terrorize and suppress the animal spirits of capitalism.
It’s not just atmospherics. Trump has put forth a tax plan as specific as that of any candidate. No less an authority than Reaganomics guru Arthur Laffer said: “It’s a great plan. And I think it’s better or pretty close to as good as Reagan’s.”
Trump’s plan calls for a top personal tax rate of 25%, a capital gains rate of 20% and a top corporate rate of 15%. I don’t know of many pro-growth supply-siders who wouldn’t crawl across broken glass to get that enacted into law.
To be sure, Trump’s plan has a protectionist edge to it. It calls for a one-time 10% wealth tax on corporate cash held overseas, whether or not it is repatriated. That’s bad news for American multinationals that keep cash overseas to fund operations there — but then again, having the top corporate rate drop from 35% to 15% would likely ease their pain.
Trump’s protectionist tendencies are the dark side of his economics. Happily, his opponents have been eager to point out his seeming hypocrisy here, noting that he hires foreign workers for his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Such hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug. It’s encouraging that he admits shamelessly that employers must do such things, saying that “otherwise, you hurt your business.”
Indeed, as the current Beltway joke goes, his two marriages to immigrants show that he understands there are some jobs Americans don’t want to do.
If Trump faces Hillary Clinton in the general election, no doubt she’ll haul out the TV commercial that Lyndon Johnson used against Barry Goldwater in 1964, showing a little girl holding a daisy, consumed by a mushroom cloud. Trump is a madman, she will shout, at the same time as she rails against capitalism and Wall Street while denying her family’s own wealth.
Meanwhile, Trump will run as a madman for capitalism. He just might win. And by unleashing America’s animal spirits, he just might turn out to be the most effective pro-growth president since Reagan.
Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC in Chicago, a strategic consultant to institutional investors.
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Third post
http://www.xojane.com/issues/stephanie-cegielski-donald-trump-campaign-defector
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http://www.xojane.com/issues/stephanie-cegielski-donald-trump-campaign-defector
Every Trump voter should read this. Trump should read this.
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From some people whom I respect:
Just a handful of months after getting a dream job working on a SuperPac, Trump suddenly demands that all PACs supporting Trump stop operations and that they had been operating without his approval. She lost a job that would have offered the opportunity in the future to open her own PAC and make millions."""""
Well.... I think it would be a terribly sexist thing to say that only because she's a pretty girl, she couldn't possibly be a back stabbing opportunist.
Apparently, she "quit" after Trump disowned a super pack where she was a communications director... What could be a better moment to announce herself as his "top strategist" - and to denounce him.
I do think the lady learned something from Don Trump - how to get a fortune's worth of global media coverage without spending a single dime.
========================The AP reports:
In addition to the new space, Bennett said Trump has hired a veteran political operative to serve as the campaign’s convention manager. Paul Manafort, a seasoned Washington hand with decades of convention experience, will oversee the campaign’s “entire convention presence” including a potential contested convention, said Bennett.
The move marks a major escalation in Trump’s willingness to play by party rules and build alliances in a political system he has so far shunned. It comes as Trump faces a Republican nomination battle that will almost certainly extend until the final day of primary voting on June 7 -- or even to the party’s July national convention in Cleveland -- if he fails to secure the delegate majority needed to become the presumptive nominee.
Say, what’s Paul Manafort been doing these past few years?
From an anonymous office off Kiev’s main square, a seasoned American political strategist who was once a senior aide in Senator Bob Dole’s Republican presidential campaign has labored for months on a [Ukranian prime minister] Yanukovich makeover.
Though the strategist, Paul J. Manafort, has sought to remain behind the scenes, his handiwork has been evident in Mr. Yanukovich’s tightly organized campaign events, in his pointed speeches and in how he has presented himself to the world.
That piece was from 2007; the relationship stretched on for years.
Manafort’s friends describe his relationship with Yanukovych as a political love connection, born out of Yanukovych’s first downfall when he was driven from power by the 2004 Orange Revolution. Feeling that his domestic political advisers had failed him, Yanukovych turned to a foreign company, Davis Manafort, which was already doing work for the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. The former Ukrainian PM and Manafort, the Georgetown-educated son of a Connecticut politician, hit it off.
Manafort’s firm had a set of international clients and produced an analysis of the Orange Revolution that Yanukovych found instructive, according to one operative involved in Yanukovych’s political rehabilitation. Manafort became, in effect, a general consultant to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, shaping big-picture messaging, coaching Yanukovych to speak in punchy, American-style sound bites and managing teams of consultants and attorneys in both Ukraine and the United States ahead of an anticipated Yanukovych comeback. While it’s difficult to track payments in foreign elections, a former associate familiar with Manafort’s earnings say they ran into the seven figures over several years.
After Yanukovych’s 2010 victory, Manafort stayed on as an adviser to the Russia-friendly president and became involved in other business projects in Eastern Europe.
In case you’ve forgotten how things turned out for Yanukovich . . .
Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych has said he accepts some responsibility for the killings that led to his overthrow in February 2014.
“I don’t deny my responsibility,” he told BBC Newsnight, when asked about the shooting of demonstrators in Kiev’s Maidan Square.
He never ordered the security forces to open fire, he said, but admitted he had not done enough to prevent bloodshed . . .
In February 2014 Mr Yanukovych was whisked away by Russian special forces to a safe haven in Russia.
Within weeks Russian troops in unmarked camouflage took over Ukrainian bases in Crimea. Then in April pro-Russian rebels stormed government buildings in the heavily industrial Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, triggering civil war.
His opulent residence outside Kiev, thrown open to public gaze by protesters after he fled, did not belong to him personally, he said.
Receipts detailing millions of dollars spent on the complex were, he said, “political technology” and spin. The ostriches in the residence’s petting zoo, he maintained, “just happened to be there”.
“Yes, there was corruption, no one denies that. But a year and a half has passed, those in power have all the means at their disposal. Show us, where are the bank accounts of Yanukovych? They don’t exist and never have done.”
Interpol placed him on a wanted list in January this year, as Ukrainian officials accuse him of embezzling millions of dollars.
So the guy who’s been advising Vladimir Putin’s man in Ukraine is now running Trump’s delegate-securing operation? Will polonium be involved?
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I read Ms Field's other big claim to fame was also getting up into some ones face. But that said Lewandowski clearly got too rough in the way he grabbed her and yanked her over. I have a feeling this could have been avoided if he simply admitted to it and apologized. Instead he lied about it. Worse Trump also seemed to lie about it despite the video evidence:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/29/police-charge-corey-lewandowski-with-misdemeanor-battery/
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Kinda like when Obama anally raped the bondholders to the benefit of the auto union , , ,
http://conservativetribune.com/trump-threatened-ford-huge/?sc=aat
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Like pressing a mute button. Oddly, there isn't a single video supporting her claim that the old guy "groped" her.
I'm probably wrong for laughing, but I can't help it. Ps....I pepper spray myself all the time for fun....not feeling sympathetic.
[youtube]XuBMWgMn52I[/youtube]
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If we put aside the denial of reality moments for a moment, I thought Trump did quite well for much of his time last night on the CNN Town Hall. He actually sounded intelligent and thoughtful on foreign affairs.
So, this morning I run into this: http://therightscoop.com/not-kidding-donald-trump-just-attacked-scott-walker-for-not-raising-taxes-in-wisconsin/
Ah yes, the Drumpf we know and , , , do not love.
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Speaking of state taxes Jindal is getting creamed in the news for leaving a budget deficit 3 x bigger then when he came into office. His 60%+ approval rating plummets to under 30%.
He was leading as a supply sider. The real question is supply side economics a bust. Or "voodoo economics". Are our problems we cannot grow our way out of this?
George Will on the subject:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will032716.php3
I will also post this to the economic thread.
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I'm guessing the nose dive in oil and gas prices had quite a bit more to do with the situation in Louisiana than tax rates.
=======================
A Few Trump Fans Suddenly See the Man They’ve Been Defending
Something odd is going on among Trump’s most ardent defenders. Start with Ann Coulter in this podcast interview with Breitbart.com’s Milo Yiannopoulos.
COULTER: Moreover, I’m a little testy with our man right now.
YIANNOPOULOS: You are? Daddy’s annoyed you?
[Yes, Yiannopoulos calls Trump “Daddy.” Because that’s perfectly normal.]
COULTER: Our candidate is mental! Do you realize our candidate is mental? It’s like constantly having to bail out your 16-year-old son from prison. Let’s move past last night’s tweet -- you know perfectly well what tweet I’m talking about.
This is the worst thing he’s done. I mean the McCain thing -- I would say there are only really two, liberals would say, “Oh, every day,” no, everything else I could probably defend. I could. I think. Most of that is them overreacting . . . But the McCain thing, that was a dumb joke, it didn’t work. Oh, well. Didn’t kill him. But that tweet last night . . .
YIANNOPOULOS: And he’s retweeting these images that are, like, ‘I don’t need to make implications, you know, the pictures speak for themselves.’ And a picture of Cruz’s wife and a picture of Melania!
COULTER: That’s exactly the tweet I’m talking about! No, you can’t defend it! This is when we’re bailing out sixteen-year-old out of jail!
YIANNOPOULOS: It’s so outrageously funny!
Then Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity:
GINGRICH: Tweeting about, or repeating a Tweet about Mrs. Cruz is just utterly stupid. It has frankly, weakened everything that Trump ought to be strengthening. It sent a signal to women that is negative, at a time when his numbers with women are already bad. It sent a signal of instability to people who may be beginning to say, “Maybe I’ve got to get used to it, maybe I’ve got to rely on him, maybe he could be presidential.” And frankly, it energized Cruz. The interview you just did is as good as I have ever seen Ted Cruz. He was clear, he was vigorous, he was prepared to be combative but at the same time he was getting into big issues and big ideas. My guess is he’s going to do well in Wisconsin. This ought to be a wake-up call for Trump that he had better rethink what seem to be the underlying patterns of his campaign.
HANNITY: For the life of me, I can’t understand when families and wives are brought into it. I’m sure he’s mad about the ad about Melania, I’m sure he assumed it was the Cruz campaign.
Gingrich added, “I’m not sure anybody in the Trump campaign understands yet what a big mistake this is. They can’t keep doing this stuff and think they’re going to get the nomination.”
Now look at Stephanie Cegielski, formerly the communications director of the Make America Great Again Super PAC:
He doesn’t want the White House. He just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House. He’s achieved that already and then some. If there is any question, take it from someone who was recruited to help the candidate succeed, and initially very much wanted him to do so.
The hard truth is: Trump only cares about Trump.
And if you are one of the disaffected voters -- one of the silent majority like me -- who wanted a candidate who could be your voice, I want to speak directly to you as one of his biggest advocates and supporters.
He is not that voice. He is not your voice. He is only Trump’s voice.
Trump is about Trump. Not one of his many wives. Not one of his many “pieces of ass.” He is, at heart, a self-preservationist.
Just FYI, Trump supporters, no one should let you off of that bandwagon now. You should be handcuffed to that Titanic you volunteered to crew.
Donald Trump didn’t suddenly change in the past few days, weeks, or months. He’s the same guy he always was, the same guy that most of us in the conservative movement and GOP have been staunchly opposing for the past year. He didn’t abruptly become reckless, obnoxious, ill-informed, erratic, hot-tempered, pathologically dishonest, narcissistic, crude, and catastrophically unqualified for the presidency overnight. He’s always been that guy, and you denied it and ignored it and hand-waved it away and made excuses every step of the way because you were convinced that you were so much smarter than the rest of us. You were so certain that you were on some superior wavelength giving you special insight into the Donald; only you could tell that it was all an act. Only you could grasp that his constant courting of controversy was just to get attention from the media. Only you could instinctively sense that his style would play brilliantly in the general election and win over working-class Democrats. (SPOILER ALERT: It isn’t.) You insisted that you could “coach him.”
You came to those conclusions not because you’re smarter than the rest of us, but because you’re actually more foolish than the rest of us. You insisted Occam’s Razor couldn’t possibly be true -- that Trump acts the way he does because this is who he is, this is the way he is all the time, and he will always be like this. You fooled yourself into believing that Trump was playing this nine-level chess game that only you and a few others could perceive and understand. Only you could see the long game.
But there is no long game. He’s winging it. There is no grand strategy. There is no master plan. Trump doesn’t look ahead to the next sentence, much less the next step in getting elected.
“Our candidate is mental?” No Shinola, Sherlock, some conservatives said this from day one and all we got for it was the alt-Right vomiting forth endless vitriol and profanity and threats.
Oh, what’s that? Trump’s Twitter behavior is “utterly stupid,” Newt? Thanks for noticing; six days ago you were telling the media there was absolutely nothing about Trump that worries you. Maybe your previous comparison of Trump to Reagan was frankly, fundamentally, profoundly wrong from A to Z.
“Trump only cares about Trump”? Gee, thank you, turncoat former insider, for this shocking bit of secret intelligence. News flash, some of us didn’t need to work for Trump for several months to figure that out. We saw it, we said it, and you called us liars for saying it.
Technically we’re supposed to welcome previous Trump fans-turned-foes with open arms. But barring some miraculous comeback by Ted Cruz, the Trump campaign will have cost the Republican party the presidency after eight years of Obama, and perhaps the Senate and even the House -- not to mention Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court. Years of effort spent attempting to dispel the accusations of inherent Republican misogyny, xenophobia, hypocrisy, ignorance, and blind rage have been undone by Trump’s campaign. And every Trump advocate in front of a camera had a hand in this.
We’re not just gonna hug it out.
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"Conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty." - Louisa May Alcott
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AS Rhett Buttler would say, "frankly me dear, I don't give a damn". This guy Lewandowski lied, Trump is lying, the guy bullied the girl, he owes her an apology and this whole thing would have ended with an apology from day one from a news reporter from the pro Trump Breitbart. I don't want this bully to be my President:
http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/lewandowski-prosecutor-outed-as-hillary-supporter/
PS: his negatives with women rightly or wrongly will go up even more. This guy cannot win since he demonstrates every week if not nearly every day that he not behave like a gentleman.
OH and let me add that Trump and his team sound VERY *Clintoneasque* trying to spin this that she was not knocked to the ground, that she had no expression on her face that maybe he should press charges or sue her. Small bullshit I would expect from Carville, Lani Daivs or forehead Begala.
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FWIW my take:
She got pulled back from harassing Trump as he was trying to walk away. BFD.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/433477/donald-trump-abortion-conservative-blackout
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Third post:
http://www.redstate.com/diary/southernconstitutionalist/2016/03/30/profound-ignorance-donald-trump-thinks-that-judges-sign-bills-conduct-investigations/
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/433477/donald-trump-abortion-conservative-blackout
Another not-ready-for-prime-time moment for the candidate who hasn't bothered to think through the consequences of his views on ANY issue.
--------------------------------------------
I don;t know what to think of the 'battery' incident, but it is one more day in a Donald Trump world where we aren't talking about anything that any of us would put on "the way forward" agenda.
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"I don;t know what to think of the 'battery' incident, but it is one more day in a Donald Trump world where we aren't talking about anything that any of us would put on "the way forward" agenda"
AMEN.
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https://www.facebook.com/foxandfriends/videos/1045728428848086/
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A Syndrome, Not an Ideology
After globalization's economic squeeze on the middle class, after the racism and xenophobia the squeeze brings out, and after the shift from the Political Era to the Economic Era, there is another factor that explains Trump ascendency: A certain psychosexual dynamic that's more complex than your grandfather's sexism. After all, as he'll tell you again and again, Donald loves women.
But the remarks! The denigration of Megyn Kelly! And the macho toleration for roughing up demonstrators! Once again, the important thing to focus on is not so much the man with the baton at the head of the parade, but all those who are so attracted by his outrageous incorrectness. And what we find when we look not at the drum major but at his followers is the emasculation of the middle-class American male.
Several factors add up and reinforce one another: Anxious about the economy and unemployment, threatened by immigrants, frustrated at the lack of efficacy on the part of the leadership in Washington, and fed up with feminism, the blue-collar American male is a ripe target for testosterone-soaked rhetoric. "Make America Potent Again!" and pass the political Viagra.
Yet again, this is not just about Donald Trump, and it's not just about America. I was struck by a Feb. 6 headline in The New York Times: "Wanted in China: More Male Teachers, to Make Boys Men." The article went on to explain that, "Worried that a shortage of male teachers has produced a generation of timid, self-centered and effeminate boys, Chinese educators are working to reinforce traditional gender roles and values in the classroom."
But "traditional gender roles and values" are not likely to return any time soon in China or the United States because gender roles are a function of evolutionary and psychological dynamics that take millennia to unfold. As my colleague, Ian Morris, has explained in this space, both the rise of patriarchy and its decline are not matters of fashion or individual choice. The gender equality of hunter-gatherers gave way to patriarchy with the advent of agricultural societies for a series of social, biological and technological reasons that Morris reviews.
Now, after about 12,000 years, our species is moving back toward gender equality, again for a series of social and technological reasons that have little to do with choice or fashion. As Morris puts it:
"[T]he truly difficult part of this struggle was over long before anyone thought of promoting themselves as champions of a self-consciously feminist foreign policy. The real heroes of this story are the forces that are all too often miscast as villains: fossil fuels, which created an economy that allowed women to be independent, and globalization, which continues to spread the new economic order worldwide."
But if patriarchy really is in retreat, as I agree with Morris that it is, then Trump's parade is marching in the wrong direction. Trump has jumped in front of an angry gang of economically anxious, bigoted, misogynistic people who are united more by a syndrome than an ideology.
Linguist and political analyst George Lakoff has analyzed the syndrome. He has studied the language and the metaphors used in public discourse. He has written extensively about the correlations between conservative values and what he calls the Strict Father model of politics and child rearing, as opposed to the Nurturant Family model favored by progressives. The Strict Father model is hierarchical and authoritarian.
"The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality (the strict father version), and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be (and traditionally has been) a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate. The hierarchy is: God above Man, Man above Nature, The Disciplined (Strong) above the Undisciplined (Weak), The Rich above the Poor, Employers above Employees, Adults above Children, Western culture above other cultures, Our Country above other countries. The hierarchy extends to: Men above Women, Whites above Nonwhites, Christians above Non-Christians, Straights above Gays."
So you see, it is a syndrome more than an ideology. But it is a syndrome that appears to be on the wrong side of history. Trump's parade is marching backwards.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/433477/donald-trump-abortion-conservative-blackout?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Saturday%20Best%20of%204/2&utm_term=VDHM
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http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/04/01/leftists-organize-silence-border-patrol-agents-trump-endorsement/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-would-seek-to-block-money-transfers-to-force-mexico-to-fund-border-wall/2016/04/05/c0196314-fa7c-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html
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http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/trevor-noah-an-found-old-clip-of-trump-describing-his-baby-girls-breasts-that-will-make-your-skin-crawl/
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April 6, 2016 7:24 p.m. ET
5 COMMENTS
New Japanese laws took effect last week that empower Japan’s military to defend U.S. forces that come under attack, even if Japan isn’t targeted. Count this as one of many important facts Donald Trump overlooks when he blasts U.S. allies and proposes withdrawing from the Western Pacific.
“We take care of Japan, we take care of South Korea” and “we get virtually nothing” in return, Mr. Trump said last month. He threatens to renegotiate or abrogate the longstanding treaties under which the U.S. today bases some 50,000 troops in Japan and 28,000 in South Korea.
But these aren’t one-sided or unaffordable deals. Tokyo and Seoul now pay nearly half of local U.S. military costs—some $2 billion a year for Japan and $900 million for South Korea. The U.S. troops based there cost the U.S. taxpayer less than they would if they came home. And that’s without counting their value in sustaining decades of peace and prosperity in a region previously marked by catastrophic wars.
As a builder, Mr. Trump may be interested to know that the four largest U.S. military construction projects in the Pacific are costing U.S. taxpayers only $7 billion because Japan and South Korea are paying more than $30 billion. According to an April 2015 tally from U.S. Pacific Command, Seoul is providing 93% of the nearly $11 billion needed to expand Camp Humphreys, which is set to host almost all U.S. forces in Korea by 2017.
Tokyo is paying 94% of the nearly $5 billion needed at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, in southern Japan, and 100% of the roughly $12 billion to replace the Futenma facility on the southwestern island of Okinawa, near the Senkaku Islands and Taiwan in the East China Sea. In an unprecedented move, Tokyo is even paying 36% of the $3 billion needed for new U.S. facilities on the central Pacific island of Guam, which is U.S. territory.
South Korea spends about 2.5% of GDP on defense, which is lower than America’s 3.5% but still in the world top 10. Its military, backed by universal male conscription, is the world’s front line against the nuclear arsenal, long-range missiles and global-proliferation racket of North Korea. Japan, which during the Cold War was the West’s chief defense against Soviet submarines in the Pacific, today is the leading local bulwark against Chinese domination of East Asia.
Spending 1% of GDP on defense is too little, but Japan has increased spending for four years running. Reformist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has built ties with the U.S., Southeast Asia, Australia and India without which China would waltz to regional hegemony.
At significant political cost, the Abe government reinterpreted Japan’s U.S.-imposed constitution to allow “collective self-defense,” paving the way for the new laws that took effect last week. Tokyo can now defend the U.S. against North Korean missiles. Whenever U.S. ships patrol the South China Sea, Chinese planners now must also account for Japan’s fleet, which is larger than Britain’s.
Mr. Abe and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong have gone public in the past week praising the U.S. role in Asia and warning about the damage from a short-sighted withdrawal. Americans should understand that these countries are not free riders and forward deployments in Asia are crucial to U.S. security.
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I just noticed that Trump's Jewish son in law is the son of the disgraced Democrat realtor who was extorting bribing, tax evading dirt ball who grew up in Elizabeth and went to school around the corner from me. He is a few years older.
Remind me of Hillary's son in law is also a son of a crook. Both Jewish. They make me ashamed. As Levin would say, "alright I said it!"
But they are both obnoxious Democrats so it is ok I guess. I mean they ARE for the party of the "poor".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Kushner
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Krauthammer (paraphrasing) impressed not by Trump's loss in Wisconsin but by how 35% stuck with him even as he imploded and everything turned against him. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/charles-krauthammer-trump-cruz-gop-train-wreck-article-1.2592506
If Trump wins the nomination, we lose. If Trump loses the nomination, we lose. Can anybody visualize a scenario where Cruz (or someone else) clinches later in the balloting after Trump falls and then Trump gets 100% behind that Republican nominee?
Actually I can. He has made quicker turns than that in the very recent past. Nothing about this guy, except his view of himself, is predictable.
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Now it is pointed out that Reagan had 70% unfavorable ratings in early 1980. However I recall that he did very well in the debates with Carter and he never had what to many is a detestable personality or temper tantrums.
I think we have learned that Trump is not capable of rising above his impulsive behavior even if he is smart etc. To be able to change one's behavior one has to have insight or ability for self introspection and at least somewhat objective analysis. He has not demonstrated this ability.
Therefore I doubt he is going to morph into a "Presidential" demeanor.
All this said, as we all know he is NO Ronald Reagan and using Reagan's experience as a yardstick to measure against Trump is going to be fraught with disappointment.
In short I come back to the conclusion we are screwed.
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Now it is pointed out that Reagan had 70% unfavorable ratings in early 1980.
There is no Reagan analogy with Trump or any of these people.
I wonder if the point above is true. I'm sure he was seen as too conservative and he trailed Carter, but that level of unfavorability doesn't sound right to me.
His approval rating was likely upside down during much of the first two years of his administration. 1982 was a terrible economic year before the tax rate cuts that were passed went fully into effect on 1/1/83. Then the economy started roaring.
Maybe Trump should be pushing his tax cut instead of hypothetically punishing women.
Quarterly GDP growth during Reagan's first term before his reelection. Read this sequentially from the bottom or see the graph on page 2 here: http://www.laffercenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Laffer_RevisitingReaganCuts_F.pdf
Sep 30, 1984 6.96%
Jun 30, 1984 7.99%
Mar 31, 1984 8.55%
Dec 31, 1983 7.83%
Sep 30, 1983 5.75%
Jun 30, 1983 3.35%
Mar 31, 1983 1.59%
Dec 31, 1982 -1.40%
Sep 30, 1982 -2.64%
Jun 30, 1982 -1.17%
Mar 31, 1982 -2.42%
Dec 31, 1981 1.29%
Sep 30, 1981 4.39%
Jun 30, 1981 3.05%
Mar 31, 1981 1.70%
http://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-growth-rate/table/by-quarter
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrqLQK7ecNE
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrqLQK7ecNE
There is so much wrong there it's hard to know where to start.
I don't think you get a certificate for being a Republican, but burning it was impressive! (sarc.)
No mention of what he is for or against, all he supports is "Trump".
With that kind of contempt for "GOPe", I assume he sat out for Romney too, gave us Obama.
Trump is running for GOP establishment. Rip GOPe for where they went wrong, not for existing.
If other than Trump (Cruz) is unacceptable, which of the "GOP" principles does he fall short on?
This process has been more open and fair that any, anywhere, you wimpy little helpless, crying victim.
Did he go to his caucus, run for delegate, build the party, etc, or leave the work to others to do that?
Where was he when they made the Colorado rules? Fighting for a primary? I doubt it.
They want the benefits of a strong national party, not the burdens of building or running one.
Trump is person, not a plan or a party.
The not-Trump vote has beaten the Trump vote in every state so far.
Trump built his own disapproval. Assuming this supporter is paying attention, he watched that happen.
Saying f*ck you to every Rubio, Cruz, Bush, Fiorina supporter doesn't make them come back to you.
Your candidate never learned foreign policy. FYI, it's part of the job.
Your candidate never learned the constitution. FYI, it's part of the job.
The endorsement requires 1237, 50% + 1. What part of that is complicated?
Trump loses in the general election. Threatening to take down the party if it's not Trump is the same result.
Therefore your threat is empty.
Who didn't know from the start Trump would cry foul if and when he lost?
Trump hasn't lost yet. Should the rest of us cry foul if he wins. Doesn't matter. He loses anyway.
For the same reason people oppose him now.
But he's only 69. He can change!
Trump favored big government, Democrat policies in 2012. Maybe he still can change.
If we all get mad and go home when our candidate isn't the nominee, it isn't a political party anyway.
Break what pledge? Let's all have regrets about not picking the guy who doesn't keep his word!
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"But he's only 69. He can change!"
Right :roll:
An alcoholic cannot stop drinking if he cannot even realize he is an alcoholic.
Same thing with this guy.
It isn't his big mouth that gets him into trouble - it is always someone else's fault (in his own mind.)
This trait may have helped him in business but it ain't helping him here. And he cannot see it. He is incapable.
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Trump unfavorable rating at 67%
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/14/republicans-like-donald-trump-and-ted-cruz-the-general-public-doesnt/
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The only improvement Trump would bring, is unlike the current president, he does not hate this country.
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Which is a rather important thing.
Moratorium on Muslim immigration is a rather important thing.
Suspicion towards TPP is a rather important thing.
Controlling our border is a rather important thing.
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http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/04/18/donald-trump-threatens-sue-artist-painting-small-penis/?utm_content=buffer32f34&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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http://therightscoop.com/mark-levin-donald-trump-does-not-support-voting/
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http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/04/18/donald-trump-threatens-sue-artist-painting-small-penis/?utm_content=buffer32f34&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
He is a public figure but also isn't truth a valid defense against a slander, libel or defamation allegation?
He has all the symptoms of compensating for something...
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That would be a helluva deposition , , ,
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http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/Limbaugh-GOP-Establishment-Will-Vote-Hillary-to-Keep-Their-Fiefdoms/2016/04/18/id/724581/?ns_mail_uid=95994711&ns_mail_job=1664388_04192016&s=al&dkt_nbr=5iyyludb
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Well, Lets hope the people Trump recently hired can get him in the right direction so he can attract more then 35% of Republicans.
Otherwise it will be a Clinton again and more regulation, more government "policy" more intrusion into our lives, more taxation and redistribution, endless themes about women, and more loss of freedom. Also are there any "public" law firms? their stocks will sky rocked in a Clinton world.
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Well, Lets hope the people Trump recently hired can get him in the right direction so he can attract more then 35% of Republicans.
Otherwise it will be a Clinton again and more regulation, more government "policy" more intrusion into our lives, more taxation and redistribution, endless themes about women, and more loss of freedom. Also are there any "public" law firms? their stocks will sky rocked in a Clinton world.
I not hoping anything for Trump. This is a hold your nose election if he is the nominee and I won't need to vote for him. He won't come within 25 points of Hillary in MN (where Rubio was leading her in the last poll).
Also it is lazy and dishonest of Trump and others to label conservative activists who may be delegates as 'establishment'.
Neither Trump nor Cruz opens up the map beyond where Romney 'won'. There was a time to get serious about this and America didn't.
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"I not hoping anything for Trump."
Doug are you saying you will sit out this election if Trump is nominee?
"Also it is lazy and dishonest of Trump and others to label conservative activists who may be delegates as 'establishment'."
Has he been doing that?
If so you are 100% correct. The "establishment" are not conservative enough. They are appeasers. IMO.
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I don't know where to put this under "Trump" or "wolves, dogs etc." These terriers and the Donald are alike in temperaments too.
The Reverend Jack Russell owned a fox terrier named "Trump":
From Wikipedia on Jack Russell Terriers:
*******"A black and white drawing of a white dog with black markings on the face. The image is in profile with the dog facing left."
A drawing of Trump, the dog purchased by the Reverend John Russell.
The small white-fox working terriers we know today were first bred by the Reverend Jack Russell, a parson and hunting enthusiast born in 1795,[1] and they can trace their origin to the now extinct English White terrier.[2] Difficulty in differentiating the dog from the creature it was pursuing brought about the need for a mostly white dog,[3] and so in 1819 during his last year of university at Exeter College, Oxford,[4] he purchased a small white and tan terrier female named Trump from a local milkman in the nearby small hamlet of Elsfield[5] or Marston[6]). Trump epitomised his ideal Fox terrier,[7] which, at the time, was a term used for any terrier which was used to bolt foxes out of their burrows.[2] Her colouring was described as "...white, with just a patch of dark tan over each eye and ear; whilst a similar dot, not larger than a penny piece, marks the root of the tail."[8] Davies, a friend of Russell's, wrote "Trump was such an animal as Russell had only seen in his dreams".[4] She was the basis for a breeding program to develop a terrier with high stamina for the hunt as well as the courage and formation to chase out foxes that had gone to ground.[9] By the 1850s, these dogs were recognised as a distinct breed.[10]
An important attribute in this dog was a tempered aggressiveness that would provide the necessary drive to pursue and bolt the fox, without resulting in physical harm to the quarry and effectively ending the chase, which was considered unsporting.[11] Russell was said to have prided himself that his terriers never tasted blood.[10] This line of terriers developed by John Russell was well respected for those qualities, and his dogs were often taken on by hunt enthusiasts. It is unlikely, however, that any dogs alive today can be proven to be descendants from Trump, as Russell was forced to sell all his dogs on more than one occasion because of financial difficulty, and had only four aged (and non-breeding) terriers left when he died in 1883.[12]
The Fox terrier and Jack Russell terrier type dogs of today are all descended from dogs of that period, although documented pedigrees earlier than 1862 have not been found, although several records remain of documented breeding by John Russell between the 1860s and 1880s. The Fox Terrier Club was formed in 1875 with Russell as one of the founder members; its breed standard was aspiration, and not a description of how the breed appeared then. By the start of the 20th century, the Fox terrier had altered more towards the modern breed, but in some parts of the country the old style of John Russell's terriers remained, and it is from those dogs that the modern Jack Russell type has descended.[4]*****
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"I not hoping anything for Trump."
Doug are you saying you will sit out this election if Trump is nominee?
"Also it is lazy and dishonest of Trump and others to label conservative activists who may be delegates as 'establishment'."
Has he been doing that?
If so you are 100% correct. The "establishment" are not conservative enough. They are appeasers. IMO.
If Trump becomes the nominee he will be our only hope. Because he won't be competitive in MN I may do something else with my vote but I will still be pulling for him over Hillary.
The Trumpists think National Review is establishment, WSJ opinion page too, Hot Air. Powerline, Thomas Sowell and so on. Like I said, it's lazy and dishonest to say that. Reince Priebus delivered Wisconsin for the tea party - so he's establishment. WSJ opinion page is run by free market advocate Paul Gigot, from Green Bay Wisconsin, with no interference from ownership or the news department, so he is "Washington establishment". Paul Ryan from Janesville WIsc is Washington establishment. Good grief. Trump is running for Washington establishment. Who is the boogeyman if / when he wins?
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I think I would rather have all the looming catastrophic incidents looming happen under her watch.
"I not hoping anything for Trump."
Doug are you saying you will sit out this election if Trump is nominee?
"Also it is lazy and dishonest of Trump and others to label conservative activists who may be delegates as 'establishment'."
Has he been doing that?
If so you are 100% correct. The "establishment" are not conservative enough. They are appeasers. IMO.
If Trump becomes the nominee he will be our only hope. Because he won't be competitive in MN I may do something else with my vote but I will still be pulling for him over Hillary.
The Trumpists think National Review is establishment, WSJ opinion page too, Hot Air. Powerline, Thomas Sowell and so on. Like I said, it's lazy and dishonest to say that. Reince Priebus delivered Wisconsin for the tea party - so he's establishment. WSJ opinion page is run by free market advocate Paul Gigot, from Green Bay Wisconsin, with no interference from ownership or the news department, so he is "Washington establishment". Paul Ryan from Janesville WIsc is Washington establishment. Good grief. Trump is running for Washington establishment. Who is the boogeyman if / when he wins?
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Trump will be all over the airwaves with this one. "I won 60 % of the hispanic vote in NYC!!!" What he won't tell you is the actual numbers means he won the 6 out of 10 Hispanic Republicans in NYC. The other millions all voted Democratic.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/04/21/donald-trump-won-hispanic-vote-new-york-city/
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G M: I think I would rather have all the looming catastrophic incidents looming happen under her watch.
Along those lines, I don't want the next round of wrong and failed policies with failed results to be proof that our policies don't work.
After George Bush, America desperately needed bold change. When we needed a sharp turn to the right, all we were offered was the failed status quo versus a sharp turn to the left.
Said of George Bush, he gave supply side economics a bad name, without ever trying it.
Tax rate cuts brought in phenomenal revenue gains once they were fully enacted. Meanwhile George Bush grew government in a big way. Taxes aren't the only burden of government. Government spending also diverts resources away from their most productive use and so do government rules like stifle industry and make bad loans. Bush and the Republicans did a couple of things right, and then screwed it all up by leaving in place all kinds of bad programs, see Fannie Mae, CRAp and so many other dangerous programs, not to mention the folly of the Fed distorting markets to the point of blowing it up. The Bush administration was enjoying all the distortion effects of that monetary expansion on the way up when they should have been warning against it. While markets and incomes were going up he should have used that opportunity to cut and reform all the programs of proven failure. He didn't do that and he couldn't articulate the things he did right.
My point here is that I don't want my views, our poicies, judged by the success or failure of Trump policies which are largely the opposite. He now admits wanting to "raise taxes on the rich" along with expanding the role, power and scale of government. If that's Republican, I'm not one. If we are going to double down on Democrat failed policies and it fails further, as GM suggests, it should be called Democrat failure.
The failure of George Bush was the failure of Democrat policies (that he wrongly continued) and especially fault of the incoming Democrat Congress with its de facto leaders, Senators Hillary and Barack. Instead they threw out the Republicans.
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Trump is awful.
At least he is for a big increase in military spending, defending the border, a moratorium on Muslim immigration, and strongly for the Second Amendment.
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"He now admits wanting to "raise taxes on the rich" along with expanding the role, power and scale of government."
Doug I haven't seen this. Generally I don't listen to him anymore because it is just too much of the same to me. Indeed I am tired of listening to all of them frankly. I would hazard a guess that many others are tired of the non stop wall to wall day in and out campaigning with the same stuff.
I thought he wanted across the board corporate and personal income tax cuts. Expanding government how ? besides actually enforcing immigration laws and his vague health care promises to even the poor?
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Crafty said,
"Trump is awful."
Yes. yesterday he was shown making fun of the way Kasich eats. He is not only vulgar, but just as ridiculous.
I wonder when Clooney is going to announce he is running for something. 2018? Or maybe he is waiting for an appointment with the Clinton White House first.
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"He now admits wanting to "raise taxes on the rich" along with expanding the role, power and scale of government."
ccp: Doug I haven't seen this.
-------------------------------------
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/donald-trumps-tax-cuts-top-1-set-general-election-fight
Donald Trump is running on a plan to dramatically cut taxes for the ultra-rich while talking up his willingness to raise taxes on the same group. Sooner or later, it’s going to get him into trouble.
“Do you believe on raising taxes on the wealthy?” Trump was asked on the TODAY Show on Thursday morning.
“I do,” he said. “I do. Including myself, I do.”
(2nd source: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2016/04/21/trump-oh-you-bet-i-support-raising-taxes-on-the-rich-n2152154)
------------------------------------
When I read the left I always look for the lie in the first sentence or point they make, but when ripping Trump, now they are able to just run with the truth.
I wrote previously that I like Trump tax plan in some ways better than Rubio's or Cruz'. Rubio massively bumped up a tax credit, didn't lower ordinary rates enough and unrealistically lowered capital gains rates to zero - that will never happen. Ted Cruz creates a new 16% tax on everything certain to be used against us forever by liberals while unrealistically lowering the top tax rate on the rich to just 10% - and that will never happen.
The problems with Trump's tax plan are that it isn't his, he hasn't read it, he isn't pushing it and he doesn't believe in it.
Besides giving the left endless fodder, his wishy-washiness, lack of a core and endless inconsistencies expose more than a tax rate problem.
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Trump is awful.
At least he is for a big increase in military spending, defending the border, a moratorium on Muslim immigration, and strongly for the Second Amendment.
But if I use my gun on the government agents taking my house I will lose my gun too, along with my house and my remaining freedom.
He has already divided and destroyed the Republican party and what was once the conservative movement. He will do much more damage as nominee and President.
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Breitbart has the long inside story on the fight inside Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. Schlafly was a friend of Reagan and a friend of my mom. Brilliant, but I always warned mom Schlafly misguided on trade protectionism, while presciently right on nearly everything else, culture wars, peace through strength, etc. At 91, still very sharp, she endorsed Trump. Many on her conservative board predictably back Cruz. The split and fight on her board, including her daughter siding with the dissidents, is a microcosm of the anger and division on the right.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/04/25/phyllis-schlaflys-last-stand-inside-story-conservative-icons-internal-battle-survival/
Larry Kudlow has a piece today BEGGING conservatives to be civil to each other. It isn't working and the split is all about Trump. Rubio, Cruz, Kasich, Walker and all the rest could have survived this but the vitriol was 'raised' to new low. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/04/25/larry_kudlow_a_plea_to_my_conservative_brethren.html
Conservative talk show hosts feel the anger and the divide. Those who endorsed one or the other are hated by the rest. Those who didn't choose sides are hated by all. We have 6 months to go but the damage is done and it's irreversible.
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We have become Babel. Civil war between the parties. Civil war within the parties. Between families, Father against son son against brother mother against daughter daughter against daughter, race against race, class against class , foreign born vs natural born, and with
a President who doesn't believe in the concept of country or nation and is doing everything he can to accelerate the process.
The world, one nation (not under God) , one world governing body run by elites and their cronies. That is Obama's dream.
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Orange-Hued Makeup on an Orange-Hued Corpse of a Campaign’
Michael Brendan Dougherty, columnist for The Week and sparring partner of our Kevin Williamson, has been somewhat sympathetic to Donald Trump, contending he’s a natural response to a Republican party that has forgotten the white working class.
Somewhere along the line, he feel out of love with Trump, hard, and he’s pretty intensely repulsed by the talk of a Trump makeover:
Becoming an establishment creature now would dispirit many of Trump’s core supporters. It would wreck any momentum his candidacy had at renovating the Republican Party’s stale ideology. Trump will have worse problems than even Mitt Romney did in trying to explain the convenient evolution of his views. Trump’s unreliability extends even to his own stunts. Months ago he skipped a Fox News debate to raise $6 million for veterans. They haven’t seen the money.
Trump cannot succeed in a general election without an unforeseeable intervention from beyond our normal politics -- think a sudden economic crash, a terrorist attack, or the likelihood of war. A little campaign makeover certainly won’t change what is now the most well-defined and lustily disliked campaign in modern memory. The Trump reboot will not make Trump viable. It just makes his new campaign manager viable. This is nothing more than another layer of orange-hued makeup on an orange-hued corpse of a campaign.
Okay, but . . . some of us saw this from the beginning. Some of us are a lot less surprised by the off-the-charts unfavorable numbers and the disastrous outlook for Republicans in November with a Trump nomination. Some of us put enormous effort into trying to avert this scenario, and some of us never wrote:
. . . it seemed that Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency contained the seeds of an ideological revolution. Trump had tapped into something that felt like a fresh European import, an ideological right wing motivated by populist nationalism rather than conservatism . . .
In Trump we suddenly seemed to have the kind of culture warrior imagined by thinkers like James Burnham, who opposed liberalism not because it offends the Constitution or runs roughshod over the little platoons of civil society, but because it is the verbal justification for the contraction of Western societies: the diminution of their military power and the demographic decline of their native populations.
Over in the Federalist, Grant Stinchfield, a conservative talk-show host in Dallas, Texas, suddenly realizes who he voted for:
Donald Trump is off the rails. He is a train wreck. It’s not just his antics and childish behavior that has me so put off, it’s his failure to improve as a candidate.
After nine months on the campaign trail, I expected Trump to fully grasp the issues and have in-depth policy solutions to our problems. Yet he still is “winging it.” He has failed to surround himself with top-notch, respected experts to craft a legitimate conservative platform. The reality is now clear: Trump has no depth, and he fails to grasp even the most basic conservative principles.
I fell victim to my own hatred. Donald Trump offered me a vehicle to stick it to the bloviating bureaucrats I despise. I dedicated my life to exposing self-promoting career politicians and their love of big government programs. Trump was the guy who was going to scare the hell out of the “establishment,” the guy who was going to turn Washington on its head. So I voted with anger in my heart. I gave my vote to Trump with expectation he would find his way by putting smart constitutional conservatives by his side. Trump didn’t find his way; he got lost.
Gee, if only someone had warned him.
There Is No New Trump, Continued
The “improved” Trump talk is all pretty moot, because you can’t change the style of a guy with the impulse control of a toddler.
He doesn’t like hearing he has to do things differently. There is no point to hiring the “best people” if you refuse to listen to the advice of the “best people.”
Let’s check in with the best people:
Donald Trump is bristling at efforts to implement a more conventional presidential campaign strategy, and has expressed misgivings about the political guru behind them, Paul Manafort, for overstepping his bounds, multiple sources close to the campaign tell POLITICO.
Trump became upset late last week when he learned from media reports that Manafort privately told Republican leaders that the billionaire reality TV star was “projecting an image“ for voters and would begin toning down his rhetoric, according to the sources. They said that Trump also expressed concern about Manafort bringing several former lobbying colleagues into the campaign, as first reported by POLITICO.
Now Trump is taking steps to return some authority to Manafort’s chief internal rival, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
Neither Lewandowski nor Manafort responded to requests for comment, though Manafort on Sunday during an interview on Fox News blamed Lewandowski’s regime for shortcomings in the campaign’s delegate wrangling operation.
Lewandowski’s allies responded by privately questioning whether Manafort has done anything to improve the situation. They grumble that Manafort has spent a disproportionate amount of time on television -- just as Trump himself has been avoiding the Sunday morning talk show circuit at Manafort’s urging.
When you hear anecdotes like this . . .
After Trump’s resounding victory in last week’s New York primary, for instance, Manafort handed the candidate a speech he’d written for him that aimed for a more presidential tone, according to two campaign sources. Trump took a quick look at it and told Manafort he’d consider using such a speech down the road, but in the glow of his huge win in his home state, he preferred to wing it.
How long does Manafort stick around? How often does a candidate brag about ignoring his advisers’ recommendations during a speech?
“If I acted presidential, I can guarantee you this morning I wouldn’t be here,” Trump told a capacity crowd of more than 3,000 at Crosby High School, where others stood outside, listening to audio provided for the unlucky.
The gym rocked.
“My wife tells me, ‘Be more presidential.’ My daughter tells me to be more presidential. And Paul Manafort and Corey [Lewandowski, another top aide] and a lot of them say, ‘Be more presidential,’” Trump said. “And now people are starting to say, ‘You know, look what got you here.”
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“Do you believe on raising taxes on the wealthy?” Trump was asked on the TODAY Show on Thursday morning.
“I do,” he said. “I do. Including myself, I do.”
FWIW, Larry Kudlow was on the John Batchelor radio show yesterday and gave 'his' clarification of what Trump meant by this statement. Trump would effectively raise taxes on the rich by closing loopholes while lowering overall personal and corporate rates. Kudlow whose raison de ter (sp?), if you will, is 'lower taxes' and 'growth of the economy'. He said he thought Trump's tax plan was the best one offered though maybe Cruz would have had one just as good.
Two things I don't like about his tax plan is there are 4 brackets and 50% of the population will pay nothing which is just plain wrong:
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/tax-reform
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If we could believe Pres Trump would get the Trump tax plan enacted, then he would be a million times better than Hillary. He also has agreed to the 'penny plan' to limit federal spending. If both were to happent, he could cut tax rates, grow the economy, rein in government AND balance the budget.
I see he is in talks with Paul Ryan on policy. If the nominee and the House can get on the same page, that will help define the choices in the contested Senate races and also set up a mandate in case of a win. If everything were to go right for him in this election, he still won't have anywhere near 60 votes in the Senate to enact real change. In the fights with the Senate, after calling Rubio Little Marco, I wonder what Trump will call Dick Durbin in opposition...
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I suspect not "Little Dick" lest he stir up memories of Rubio's witticisms.
I caught Trump's foreign policy speech this morning. I must say I thought it quite good. :-o
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"I caught Trump's foreign policy speech this morning. I must say I thought it quite good. "
His calling out globalism and claiming he will put America first is EXACTLY RIGHT. He hit the target square on the bulls eye. No freakin' rhino would have said this.
We don't need our President going around the world putting us down, talking up enemies, and giving our country away to the world.
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http://thefederalist.com/2016/04/27/trumps-foreign-policy-speech/
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http://thefederalist.com/2016/04/27/trumps-foreign-policy-speech/
Good points in there. This speech was good only because Obama, Hillary and Trump himself have lowered the bar so far. From my point of view, he is right on some of it, vague on most and wrong in parts.
Vagueness: South China Sea gets a mention. " Look at what China is doing in the South China Sea. They’re not supposed to be doing it." Then what?? Israel gets a mention: "Israel, our great friend and the one true democracy in the Middle East. President Obama has not been a friend to Israel." Right...
Good points: 1) Defense buildup. He starts to mention things like the number of ships: "The Navy has shrunk from over 500 ships to 272 ships." People have been trying to get him to do that for over a year. Keep in mind this is a well prepared script. "We will spend what we need to rebuild our military." Vague but strong.
2) International agreements: "Under my administration, we will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs". This is very good, my points below about trade agreements notwithstanding. We need to be able to negotiate TPP and trade agreements that do not infringe on our sovereignty.
Hypocrisies: 1) Iran deal, 'bad, bad bad, very bad'. But in Iraq he makes clear he would have left Saddam to go nuclear by now because that is some kind of great political selling point of the moment. But would you prefer Saddam in Iraq going nuclear or for Iran to do it The right answer is no, no, no. Do what we need to do to stop both.
2) Willingness to walk in negotiations. What is his leverage over the Chinese when he admits before negotiating that our consumers will not end up stuck with the 45% tariffs threatened. We are willing to walk economically on the Chinese? I don't think so. Willingness to walk in negotiations was one of the few things I took from his book, 'Art of the Deal'. Now I'm 59 and single.
Wrong: 1) He has more criticism of the decision to go into Iraq than the decision to abandon and lose all gains. Trying to set up a western-style democracy wasn't the low moment of the American effort. Handing back all gains to terrorism was. There were 23 reasons to go into Iraq spelled out in the congressional authorization. His answer to that was - do nothing? If he had the same intelligence GWB had, he would have said, hey, we're not nation builders and that's not our problem? I don't think so.
2) Nafta isn't what's wrong with manufacturing here. Before Nafta, Mexico had steep tariffs on American goods and we had virtually none on theirs. He wouldn't have taken that deal? Nafta was the hemisphere wide free trade zone that was a dream of Reagan's. Trump is siding with Perot, Smoot and Halley while Bill and Hillary sided with Reagan.
3) Along those lines is the "trade deficit". In fact we have an export deficit and an enterprise deficit and it is partly because the rest of the world is screwed up and partly because we have made nearly impossible to manufacture here. Taxes and regulations that won't go away by renegotiating with Mexico and China.
4) Punish companies that leave. This is right out of the Bernie, Barack, Hillary playbook. Throw one more tax and regulation on them when it was taxes and regulations that drove them out in the first place. Pure economic ignorance showing big government instincts over limited government and freedom. Let's say Carrier moves to Mexico and Trump slaps a penalty on the air conditioners they send back here. WHO PAYS THAT TAX? Clue: Not the corporation.
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Text of the speech:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/us/politics/transcript-trump-foreign-policy.html?_r=0
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you, and thank you to the Center for National Interest for honoring me with this invitation. It truly is a great honor. I’d like to talk today about how to develop a new foreign policy direction for our country, one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace.
It’s time to shake the rust off America’s foreign policy. It’s time to invite new voices and new visions into the fold, something we have to do. The direction I will outline today will also return us to a timeless principle. My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people and American security above all else. It has to be first. Has to be.
That will be the foundation of every single decision that I will make.
America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration. But to chart our path forward, we must first briefly take a look back. We have a lot to be proud of.
In the 1940s we saved the world. The greatest generation beat back the Nazis and Japanese imperialists. Then we saved the world again. This time, from totalitarianism and communism. The Cold War lasted for decades but, guess what, we won and we won big. Democrats and Republicans working together got Mr. Gorbachev to heed the words of President Reagan, our great president, when he said, tear down this wall.
History will not forget what he did. A very special man and president. Unfortunately, after the Cold War our foreign policy veered badly off course. We failed to develop a new vision for a new time. In fact, as time went on, our foreign policy began to make less and less sense. Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, which led to one foreign policy disaster after another.
They just kept coming and coming. We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama’s line in the sand in Syria. Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper. Very bad. It all began with a dangerous idea that we could make western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a western democracy.
We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of Americans and just killed be lives, lives, lives wasted. Horribly wasted. Many trillions of dollars were lost as a result. The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill that void much to their really unjust enrichment.
They have benefited so much, so sadly, for us. Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster. No vision. No purpose. No direction. No strategy. Today I want to identify five main weaknesses in our foreign policy.
First, our resources are totally over extended. President Obama has weakened our military by weakening our economy. He’s crippled us with wasteful spending, massive debt, low growth, a huge trade deficit and open borders. Our manufacturing trade deficit with the world is now approaching $1 trillion a year.
We’re rebuilding other countries while weakening our own. Ending the theft of American jobs will give us resources we need to rebuild our military, which has to happen and regain our financial independence and strength. I am the only person running for the presidency who understands this and this is a serious problem.
I’m the only one — believe me, I know them all, I’m the only one who knows how to fix it.
Secondly, our allies are not paying their fair share, and I’ve been talking about this recently a lot. Our allies must contribute toward their financial, political, and human costs, have to do it, of our tremendous security burden. But many of them are simply not doing so.
They look at the United States as weak and forgiving and feel no obligation to honor their agreements with us. In NATO, for instance, only 4 of 28 other member countries besides America, are spending the minimum required 2 percent of GDP on defense. We have spent trillions of dollars over time on planes, missiles, ships, equipment, building up our military to provide a strong defense for Europe and Asia.
The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense, and if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves. We have no choice.
The whole world will be safer if our allies do their part to support our common defense and security. A Trump administration will lead a free world that is properly armed and funded, and funded beautifully.
Thirdly, our friends are beginning to think they can’t depend on us. We’ve had a president who dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies, something that we’ve never seen before in the history of our country. He negotiated a disastrous deal with Iran, and then we watched them ignore its terms even before the ink was dry. Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, cannot be allowed. Remember that, cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
And under a Trump administration, will never, ever be allowed to have that nuclear weapon.
All of this without even mentioning the humiliation of the United States with Iran’s treatment of our ten captured sailors — so vividly I remember that day. In negotiation, you must be willing to walk. The Iran deal, like so many of our worst agreements, is the result of not being willing to leave the table.
When the other side knows you’re not going to walk, it becomes absolutely impossible to win — you just can’t win. At the same time, your friends need to know that you will stick by the agreements that you have with them. You’ve made that agreement, you have to stand by it and the world will be a better place. President Obama gutted our missile defense program and then abandoned our missile defense plans with Poland and the Czech Republic. He supported the ouster of a friendly regime in Egypt that had a longstanding peace treaty with Israel, and then helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in its place.
Israel, our great friend and the one true democracy in the Middle East has been snubbed and criticized by an administration that lacks moral clarity. Just a few days ago, Vice President Biden again criticized Israel, a force for justice and peace, for acting as an impatient peace area in the region.
President Obama has not been a friend to Israel. He has treated Iran with tender love and care and made it a great power. Iran has, indeed, become a great, great power in just a very short period of time, because of what we’ve done. All of the expense and all at the expense of Israel, our allies in the region and very importantly, the United States itself.
We’ve picked fights with our oldest friends, and now they’re starting to look elsewhere for help. Remember that. Not good.
Fourth, our rivals no longer respect us. In fact, they’re just as confused as our allies, but in an even bigger problem is they don’t take us seriously anymore. The truth is they don’t respect us. When President Obama landed in Cuba on Air Force One, no leader was there, nobody, to greet him.
Perhaps an incident without precedent in the long and prestigious history of Air Force One. Then amazingly, the same thing happened in Saudi Arabia. It’s called no respect. Absolutely no respect.
Do you remember when the president made a long and expensive trip to Copenhagen, Denmark, to get the Olympics for our country, and after this unprecedented effort, it was announced that the United States came in fourth — fourth place? The president of the United States making this trip — unprecedented — comes in fourth place. He should have known the result before making such an embarrassing commitment. We were laughed at all over the world, as we have been many, many times.
The list of humiliations go on and on and on. President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands further and further with its nuclear reach. Our president has allowed China to continue its economic assault on American jobs and wealth, refusing to enforce trade deals and apply leverage on China necessary to rein in North Korea. We have the leverage. We have the power over China, economic power, and people don’t understand it. And with that economic power, we can rein in and we can get them to do what they have to do with North Korea, which is totally out of control.
He has even allowed China to steal government secrets with cyber attacks and engaged in industrial espionage against the United States and its companies. We’ve let our rivals and challengers think they can get away with anything, and they do. They do at will. It always happens. If President Obama’s goal had been to weaken America, he could not have done a better job.
Finally, America no longer has a clear understanding of our foreign policy goals. Since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, we’ve lacked a coherent foreign policy. One day, we’re bombing Libya and getting rid of a dictator to foster democracy for civilians. The next day, we’re watching the same civilians suffer while that country falls and absolutely falls apart. Lives lost, massive moneys lost. The world is a different place.
We’re a humanitarian nation, but the legacy of the Obama-Clinton interventions will be weakness, confusion and disarray, a mess. We’ve made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before. We left Christians subject to intense persecution and even genocide.
We have done nothing to help the Christians, nothing, and we should always be ashamed for that, for that lack of action. Our actions in Iraq, Libya and Syria have helped unleash ISIS, and we’re in a war against radical Islam, but President Obama won’t even name the enemy, and unless you name the enemy, you will never ever solve the problem.
Hillary Clinton also refuses to say the words radical Islam, even as she pushes for a massive increase in refugees coming into our country. After Secretary Clinton’s failed intervention in Libya, Islamic terrorists in Benghazi took down our consulate and killed our ambassador and three brave Americans. Then, instead of taking charge that night, Hillary Clinton decided to go home and sleep. Incredible.
Clinton blames it all on a video, an excuse that was a total lie, proven to be absolutely a total lie. Our ambassador was murdered and our secretary of state misled the nation. And, by the way, she was not awake to take that call at 3 o’clock in the morning. And now ISIS is making millions and millions of dollars a week selling Libya oil. And you know what? We don’t blockade, we don’t bomb, we don’t do anything about it. It’s almost as if our country doesn’t even know what’s happening, which could be a fact and could be true. This will all change when I become president.
To our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again. America is going to be reliable again. It’s going to be a great and reliable ally again. It’s going to be a friend again. We’re going to finally have a coherent foreign policy based upon American interests and the shared interests of our allies.
We’re getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world. Our moments of greatest strength came when politics ended at the water’s edge. We need a new rational American foreign policy, informed by the best minds and supported by both parties, and it will be by both parties — Democrats, Republicans, independents, everybody, as well as by our close allies.
This is how we won the Cold War and it’s how we will win our new future struggles, which may be many, which may be complex, but we will win if I become president.
First, we need a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam. Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States and indeed the world. Events may require the use of military force, but it’s also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War.
In this, we’re going to be working very closely with our allies in the Muslim world, all of which are at risk from radical Islamic violence, attacks and everything else. It is a dangerous world, more dangerous now than it has ever been.
We should work together with any nation in the region that is threatened by the rise of radical Islam. But this has to be a two-way street. They must also be good to us. Remember that. They have to be good to us, no longer one way. It’s now two-way. And remember, us and all we’re doing, they have to appreciate what we’ve done to them. We’re going to help, but they have to appreciate what we’ve done for them. The struggle against radical Islam also takes place in our homeland. There are scores of recent migrants inside our borders charged with terrorism. For every case known to the public, there are dozens and dozens more. We must stop importing extremism through senseless immigration policies. We have no idea where these people are coming from. There’s no documentation. There’s no paperwork. There’s nothing. We have to be smart. We have to be vigilant.
A pause for reassessment will help us to prevent the next San Bernardino or frankly, much worse. All you have to do is look at the World Trade Center and September 11th, one of the great catastrophes, in my opinion, the single greatest military catastrophe in the history of our country; worse than Pearl Harbor because you take a look at what’s happened, and citizens were attacked, as opposed to the military being attacked — one of the true great catastrophes.
And then there’s ISIS. I have a simple message for them. Their days are numbered. I won’t tell them where and I won’t tell them how. We must...
... we must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything. We’re sending troops. We tell them. We’re sending something else. We have a news conference. We have to be unpredictable. And we have to be unpredictable starting now.
But they’re going to be gone. ISIS will be gone if I’m elected president. And they’ll be gone quickly. They will be gone very, very quickly.
Secondly, we have to rebuild our military and our economy. The Russians and Chinese have rapidly expanded their military capability, but look at what’s happened to us. Our nuclear weapons arsenal, our ultimate deterrent, has been allowed to atrophy and is desperately in need of modernization and renewal. And it has to happen immediately. Our active duty armed forces have shrunk from 2 million in 1991 to about 1.3 million today. The Navy has shrunk from over 500 ships to 272 ships during this same period of time. The Air Force is about one-third smaller than 1991. Pilots flying B-52s in combat missions today. These planes are older than virtually everybody in this room.
And what are we doing about this? President Obama has proposed a 2017 defense budget that in real dollars, cuts nearly 25 percent from what we were spending in 2011. Our military is depleted and we’re asking our generals and military leaders to worry about global warming.
We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. It is the cheapest, single investment we can make. We will develop, build and purchase the best equipment known to mankind. Our military dominance must be unquestioned, and I mean unquestioned, by anybody and everybody.
But we will look for savings and spend our money wisely. In this time of mounting debt, right now we have so much debt that nobody even knows how to address the problem. But I do. No one dollar can be wasted. Not one single dollar can we waste. We’re also going to have to change our trade, immigration and economic policies to make our economy strong again. And to put Americans first again.
This will ensure that our own workers, right here in America, get the jobs and higher pay that will grow our tax revenues, increase our economic might as a nation, make us strong financially again. So, so important. We need to think smart about areas where our technological superiority, and nobody comes close, gives us an edge.
This includes 3D printing, artificial intelligence and cyber warfare. A great country also takes care of its warriors. Our commitment to them is absolute, and I mean absolute. A Trump administration will give our servicemen and women the best equipment and support in the world when they serve and where they serve. And the best care in the world when they return as veterans and they come back home to civilian life. Our veterans...
Our veterans have not been treated fairly or justly. These are our great people and we must treat them fairly. We must even treat them really, really well and that will happen under the Trump administration.
Finally, we must develop a foreign policy based on American interests. Businesses do not succeed when they lose sight of their core interests and neither do countries. Look at what happened in the 1990s. Our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania — and this was a horrible time for us — were attacked. and 17 brave sailors were killed on the U.S.S. Cole.
And what did we do? It seemed we put more effort into adding China into the World Trade organization, which has been a total disaster for the United States. Frankly, we spent more time on that than we did in stopping Al Qaeda. We even had an opportunity to take out Osama bin Laden and we didn’t do it
And then we got hit at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Again, the worst attack on our country in its history. Our foreign policy goals must be based on America’s core national security interests. And the following will be my priorities.
In the Middle East our goals must be, and I mean must be, to defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change. We need to be clearsighted about the groups that will never be anything other than enemies. And believe me, we have groups that no matter what you do, they will be the enemy.: We have to be smart enough to recognize who those groups are, who those people are, and not help them. And we must only be generous to those that prove they are indeed our friends.
We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes, but we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests.
Russia, for instance, has also seen the horror of Islamic terrorism. I believe an easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only is possible, absolutely possible. Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries.
Some say the Russians won’t be reasonable. I intend to find out. If we can’t make a deal under my administration, a deal that’s great — not good, great — for America, but also good for Russia, then we will quickly walk from the table. It’s as simple as that. We’re going to find out.
Fixing our relations with China is another important step — and really toward creating an even more prosperous period of time. China respects strength and by letting them take advantage of us economically, which they are doing like never before, we have lost all of their respect.
We have a massive trade deficit with China, a deficit that we have to find a way quickly, and I mean quickly, to balance. A strong and smart America is an America that will find a better friend in China, better than we have right now. Look at what China is doing in the South China Sea. They’re not supposed to be doing it.
No respect for this country or this president. We can both benefit or we can both go our separate ways. If need be, that’s what’s going to have to happen.
After I’m elected president, I will also call for a summit with our NATO allies and a separate summit with our Asian allies. In these summits, we will not only discuss a rebalancing of financial commitments, but take a fresh look at how we can adopt new strategies for tackling our common challenges. For instance, we will discuss how we can upgrade NATO’s outdated mission and structure, grown out of the Cold War to confront our shared challenges, including migration and Islamic terrorism.
I will not hesitate to deploy military force when there is no alternative. But if America fights, it must only fight to win.
I will never sent our finest into battle unless necessary, and I mean absolutely necessary, and will only do so if we have a plan for victory with a capital V.
Our goal is peace and prosperity, not war and destruction. The best way to achieve those goals is through a disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy. With President Obama and Secretary Clinton we’ve had the exact opposite — a reckless, rudderless and aimless foreign policy, one that has blazed the path of destruction in its wake.
After losing thousands of lives and spending trillions of dollars, we are in far worst shape in the Middle East than ever, ever before. I challenge anyone to explain the strategic foreign policy vision of Obama/Clinton. It has been a complete and total disaster.
I will also be prepared to deploy America’s economic resources. Financial leverage and sanctions can be very, very persuasive, but we need to use them selectively and with total determination. Our power will be used if others do not play by the rules. In other words, if they do not treat us fairly. Our friends and enemies must know that if I draw a line in the sand, I will enforce that line in the sand. Believe me.
However, unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct. You cannot have a foreign policy without diplomacy. A superpower understands that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength. Although not in government service, I was totally against the war in Iraq, very proudly, saying for many years that it would destabilize the Middle East. Sadly, I was correct, and the biggest beneficiary has been has been Iran, who is systematically taking over Iraq and gaining access to their very rich oil reserves, something it has wanted to do for decades.
And now, to top it off, we have ISIS. My goal is to establish a foreign policy that will endure for several generations. That’s why I also look and have to look for talented experts with approaches and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect résumés but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war. We have to look to new people.
We have to look to new people because many of the old people frankly don’t know what they’re doing, even though they may look awfully good writing in The New York Times or being watched on television.
Finally, I will work with our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions. Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.
These are my goals as president. I will seek a foreign policy that all Americans, whatever their party, can support, so important, and which our friends and allies will respect and totally welcome. The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends and when old friends become allies, that’s what we want. We want them to be our allies.
We want the world to be — we want to bring peace to the world. Too much destruction out there, too many destructive weapons. The power of weaponry is the single biggest problem that we have today in the world.
To achieve these goals, Americans must have confidence in their country and its leadership. Again, many Americans must wonder why we our politicians seem more interested in defending the borders of foreign countries than in defending their own. Americans.
Americans must know that we’re putting the American people first again on trade.
So true. On trade, on immigration, on foreign policy. The jobs, incomes and security of the American worker will always be my first priority.
No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Both our friends and our enemies put their countries above ours and we, while being fair to them, must start doing the same. We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism. The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down and will never enter.
And under my administration, we will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs.
NAFTA, as an example, has been a total disaster for the United States and has emptied our states — literally emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs. And I’ve just gotten to see it. I’ve toured Pennsylvania. I’ve toured New York. I’ve toured so many of the states. They have been cleaned out. Their manufacturing is gone.
Never again, only the reverse — and I have to say this strongly — never again; only the reverse will happen. We will keep our jobs and bring in new ones. There will be consequences for the companies that leave the United States only to exploit it later. They fire the people. They take advantage of the United States. There will be consequences for those companies. Never again.
Under a Trump administration, no American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the citizens of a foreign country.
I will view as president the world through the clear lens of American interests. I will be America’s greatest defender and most loyal champion. We will not apologize for becoming successful again, but will instead embrace the unique heritage that makes us who we are.
The world is most peaceful and most prosperous when America is strongest. America will continue and continue forever to play the role of peacemaker. We will always help save lives and indeed humanity itself, but to play the role, we must make America strong again.
And always — always, always, we must make, and we have to look at it from every angle, and we have no choice, we must make America respected again. We must make America truly wealthy again. And we must — we have to and we will make America great again. And if we do that — and if we do that, perhaps this century can be the most peaceful and prosperous the world has ever, ever known. Thank you very much, everybody. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
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Worth pointing out this is written by someone from the W administration. I am not sure any of those people are going to exactly be objective when speaking of Trump:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-america-first-neo-isolationism-113331890.html
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http://www.wnd.com/2016/04/at-last-america-first/
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3565010/Police-clash-protesters-outside-Donald-Trump-rally-California.html
The strongest motivator to vote for Trump.
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http://www.wnd.com/2016/04/at-last-america-first/
America First was our foreign policy before Pearl Harbor, as Buchanan admits. The nice thing about not addressing threats abroad is that they will come to us soon enough - after gaining numbers, strength, confidence, momentum, riches, weapons and a few victories under their belt.
Buchanan was the most anti-Iraq-war of all Republicans, he opposed the first gulf war too, after Saddam invaded and took control of Kuwait. But I haven't heard his answer or Obama's or Trump's to what they would have done otherwise (nothing) about Saddam Hussein joining the nuclear club. Iraq Study Group, said Saddam was 5-7 years away from the capability. From 2002-2003, that makes Saddam's Iraq nuclear in roughly 2007-2010. The 2016 equivalent strategy for 'stability in the region' would be to hand Iran that capability. Thank you President Obama, mission accomplished. (
Buchanan: "Military intervention for reasons of ideology or nation building..."
This is a straw man argument right out of the Obama left vocabulary. Those motives are not among the 23 compelling reasons in the authorization approved by a 3:1 margin in the House and a majority of both parties in the Senate, nor were they the hidden reason. We didn't go into Iraq for ideology or nation building; we were addressing a threat recognized at the time by all the best intelligence agencies in the world as 'grave and gathering'. Saddam had attacked four of his neighbors by the time we deposed him, had gassed the Kurds and given financial support to suicide bombers. The first World Trade Center bombers traveled under Iraqi passports. What threat?
The lesson AFTER overthrowing Saddam, and after he was hanged after a fair trial, is that if we were going to spend hundreds of billions more and lose thousands more lives in pursuit of stability, don't needlessly squander the gains when we're done. We didn't abandon Germany or Japan immediately after that 'surge'.
A couple others (from the right) join my criticism of Trump's foreign policy speech (famous people reading the forum?):
Noah Rothman at Commentary: After again demonstrating that he doesn’t know what a trade deficit is by contending that it should be balanced “quickly,” he asserted that the world should “look at what China is doing in the South China Sea.” Without defining what that is, he noted: “they’re not supposed to be doing it.” You’ve heard the same turn of phrase from Secretary of State John Kerry when he’s utterly flummoxed by the actions of American adversaries and has no way to counter them. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/trumps-flawed-foreign-policy/
Charles Krauthammer: "His foreign policy speech is an incoherent jumble of contradictory ideas."
"Trump...is inconsistent and often contradictory. He pledged to bring stability to the Middle East. How do you do that without presence, risk and expenditures (financial and military)?"
"More incoherent still is Trump’s insistence on being unpredictable. An asset perhaps in real estate deals, but in a Hobbesian world American allies rely on American consistency, often as a matter of life or death."
"Trump’s scripted, telepromptered speech was intended to finally clarify his foreign policy. It produced instead a jumble. The basic principle seems to be this: Continue the inexorable Obama-Clinton retreat, though for reasons of national self-interest, rather than of national self-doubt. And except when, with studied inconsistency, he decides otherwise."
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/charles-krauthammer-world-donald-trump-article-1.2617950
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Some good points and succinct conclusions though he concludes that Trump is akin to Samson who will pull the column on the Right down and the column on the LEFT down on us, the Philistines with everyone dying in the process. I agree that is the risk, though concluding that is the future definitive outcome is fortune telling.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434807/donald-trump-his-supporters
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second post
http://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2016/05/03/donald-trump-just-linked-rafael-cruz-to-lee-harvey-oswald-transcript/
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Behold, ladies and gentlemen, the Republican-party front-runner:
Donald Trump on Tuesday alleged that Ted Cruz’s father was with John F. Kennedy’s assassin shortly before he murdered the president, parroting a National Enquirer story claiming that Rafael Cruz was pictured with Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963.
A Cruz campaign spokesperson told the Miami Herald, which pointed out numerous flaws in the Enquirer story, that it was “another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage.”
“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being -- you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said Tuesday during a phone interview with Fox News. “What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it.”
“I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting?” Trump continued. “It’s horrible.”
The Miami Herald notes, with almost comical understatement, “The explosive suggestion that Cruz’s father would have had any affiliation with Oswald is not corroborated in any other way.
Where are the Republican elected officials willing to say, “This is stupid”? This is a stupid argument from a stupid man, too stupid to support, too stupid to serve as commander-in-chief and the leader of the free world. And if you believe that Ted Cruz’s father was tied to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in the absence of any corroborating evidence, you’re stupid, too.
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Like I said....
[youtube]FahA3C8Xpqo[/youtube]
On a positive note.... going for a passport at the end of next week.... you all will be able to beat me for this in either a couple weeks or months.
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There are a number of things to note about this. One is photoshop, second, the source is the enquirer. Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't known to be the assassin of JFK a week before the assassination. Rafael Cruz is not a bad guy, he is pro-American, anti Castro, this doesn't expose something helpful to know about him. He had an alcoholic past, who knows where he was hanging out in his darker years.
But worst of all is the timing, a minute before the clinching primary. Did Trump need this to win? There was no time to respond. There is no way to respond, the official report is still under seal, and this was an attack against family.
Is the problem with Cruz that he is he is a liar, as painted by Trump? No. Is it that his family has dark, anti-American connections? No. Is Rubio too short? I think he played college football. Is Carly too ugly? Still has a pretty nice figure for a lady in her sixties, and an amazing success story. And so on. The guy is a walking and talking distraction. Did his advisers hand hm this and tell him to run with it? No. This is a peak into his own little brain.
I heard Trump on the radio yesterday during the Indiana primary talking about what is wrong with the economy in Indiana. Carrier is leaving for Mexico apparently because we don't have enough taxes, regulations or penalties on leaving. So he is going to slap a 35% tax on the selling of their air conditioners back here after they leave. But it would be the consumer here who would pay that tax, not the manufacturer there. No matter. He wouldn't have the power as President to do that. No matter. It violates the constitution to target a company. No matters. It would violate Reagan's hemisphere wide vision of a free trade zone written in law in NAFTA. No matter. He opposes Nafta anyway. It is a ratified and binding treaty. No matter. It was badly negotiated. But it was the Americans who got all the tariffs removed from selling into Mexico; we already had super low tariffs. No matter.
So what is the matter with the economy in Indiana after 7 years of Obama? A serious answer is topic for another post and my view is all over these threads. Suffice it to say that none of the real problems came up when Trump was asked and none of the real solutions were advanced.
I disagree with his view of the economy. I disagree with his view of foreign policy. I disagree with his view of the constitution. And there are no remaining alternatives on 'our' side. Is Trump better than Obama or Hillary Clinton? What a miserably low standard to be the last question remaining 6 months before a Presidential election!
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Trump: Generals should be barred from talking to the press. The Presumptive Republican nominee for president doesn’t think the military should tell the American people what they’re doing, or why they’re doing it. And he sure doesn’t want generals on television.
Speaking in Indiana on Monday, Donald Trump said, “I don't want [generals] saying things like ‘our nation has never been so ill-prepared.’ Even though it's true.” He added, “I don't want our generals on television. I will prohibit them.” Trump also flashed his grasp of history, telling his audience, “you think Gen. George Patton or Gen. Douglas MacArthur, do you think they'd be on television saying about how weak we are? Number one, they wouldn't be on television because they'd be knocking the hell out of the enemy and they wouldn't have time.”
For sure. If there’s one thing that we know about generals Patton and MacArthur, it’s how much they hated any hint of self-promotion or media attention.
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Trump: Generals should be barred from talking to the press. The Presumptive Republican nominee for president doesn’t think the military should tell the American people what they’re doing, or why they’re doing it. And he sure doesn’t want generals on television.
Speaking in Indiana on Monday, Donald Trump said, “I don't want [generals] saying things like ‘our nation has never been so ill-prepared.’ Even though it's true.” He added, “I don't want our generals on television. I will prohibit them.” Trump also flashed his grasp of history, telling his audience, “you think Gen. George Patton or Gen. Douglas MacArthur, do you think they'd be on television saying about how weak we are? Number one, they wouldn't be on television because they'd be knocking the hell out of the enemy and they wouldn't have time.”
For sure. If there’s one thing that we know about generals Patton and MacArthur, it’s how much they hated any hint of self-promotion or media attention.
Facepalm**
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In my very humble opinion now is NOT the time for conservatives to turn away from Trump. Some posting just the opposite - that now is the time to distinguish conservatism from Trump.
I think the best thing IS engagement between Trump and conservatives. That is the only way we can influence his thought and moving forward. We may be able to influence him. We know we will not influence the uncompromising left.
Time to rally around the party's leader (what a weird thought - Trump!?!?%#!*@) boys.
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:-o Rush : in my gut Trump wins in landslide in Nov:
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/05/04/my_gut_trump_beats_hillary_in_landslide
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-2uSG1xUEg
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She sure did! PP from this board did too. I wonder how he is doing?
She would have been right about Sanders too, if not for the 'bought and paid for' super delegates that are part of the Democrat mafia machine.
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In my very humble opinion now is NOT the time for conservatives to turn away from Trump. Some posting just the opposite - that now is the time to distinguish conservatism from Trump.
I think the best thing IS engagement between Trump and conservatives. That is the only way we can influence his thought and moving forward. We may be able to influence him. We know we will not influence the uncompromising left.
Time to rally around the party's leader (what a weird thought - Trump!?!?%#!*@) boys.
A different view. Now ends the best time for Trump to rally conservatives and conservatism. Trump opened with a great head fake right on immigration. Ever since has been saying he doesn't need any of us, has his own coalition, distrusts the party, etc.
Here we go again, nominating a RINO. That's his own description, having no ties to the party beyond the R by his name. We went through this with McCain and Romney most recently. Right before the election they remember they neglected to lock down the conservative vote and try to reach right when they need to reach to the center. One way to sweep conservatives votes is to be one. Another way is to fake it.
Strange that it was the Trumpests who first declared that we aren't going to settle or sell out this time. We've done that too many times before and been burned every time. People like Boehner and McConnell were telling us we have no choice but to support them or it will be Hillary Clinton and the Dems in power. What did Donald Trump do when faced with those choices? He gave to Pelosi-Reid-Clinton-Obama of course. That was because of a pending project in NY??
I would rather have Democrats raise taxes than Republicans do it. I would rather have Democrats grow government than let Republicans do it. I would rather have Democrats advance trade protectionism than have Republicans do it. I would rather see Democrats treat Palestinian terrorists and Israelis as moral equivalents than see Republicans do that. I would rather see Democrats advance crony government takings and appoint justices that invent a pro-choice right than see Republicans do it. I would rather see Democrats abuse executive privilege and executive orders than see Republicans do it.
If this is the new Republicanism and conservatism, you can call mine, 'some other viewpoint'.
The time for Trump to tell conservatives how conservative he is has passed. In my view, he failed.
He knocked out the others in the field at the expense of alienating their supporters, not by trying to woo them over. That was his choice. Others were more cautious and lost. Those who chose Trump knew what they were getting and not getting. They are getting the person with the highest disapprovals. They won't be getting 100% turnout from those who have to hold their nose to vote and be told this awful smell is better than something else even worse.
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"Ever since has been saying he doesn't need any of us, has his own coalition, distrusts the party, etc."
I am not so sure. From what I have seen the last week is he is starting to come around to the Republicans more generally. "a 40% chance" his VP pick could be one of his opponents.
OTOH , was it Pat Caddell who actually said he may be converting the Republican Party from a conservative (or a faux conservative party in the last 25 yrs) to a populist party.
" Being told this awful distaste is better than something even worse is a lousy campaign slogan."
I don't disagree Doug. I started out very intrigued by Trump and initially was willing to look past his personality, vulgarity, crudeness, and deviations from conservatism. Then as time went on I found him very tough to palate.
Yet I really do like some of his themes.
Whether we like it or not we are with either him or Hillary. I would pick him over her. I think some on the right may not just sit back and let her take over hoping everything will crash and burn leaving the door open for a real conservative in 4 to 8 years. I don't wish for that. He is big risk but he does seem to have some loyalty to those who support him. So sucking it up seems to me the best bet to influence him and keep him on the right.
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Whether we like it or not we are with either him or Hillary. I would pick him over her. I think some on the right may not just sit back and let her take over hoping everything will crash and burn leaving the door open for a real conservative in 4 to 8 years. I don't wish for that.
Exactly so.... and I do.
What in the hell is that Hindu goddess? Shiva? Destroy everything with one hand and create with the other?
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Newt for VP? Some think he fits because of his experience would support Trumps success. I like Newt but I don't like him for VP. He is too much of a lightening rod and he also has demonstrated
some flaws that always seem to crop up. We don't need that.
I would like Rubio (though obvious issues between the Trump and him that make this problematic)
Maybe Cruz. Definitely NOT Kasich.
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Trump needs someone to round out his skill set. But for the fact he is an anus, Kasich has a great resume in this regard.
Cruz would add nothing, indeed would arouse the secular humanist bigots.
Rubio, appeal to the Latino vote? Maybe , , , but hard to nominate a guy who said you had , , , little fingers.
I have always liked Newt (see the substantial thread on this forum) but not sure what he would add in the way of getting votes.
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Trump needs someone to round out his skill set. But for the fact he is an anus, Kasich has a great resume in this regard.
Cruz would add nothing, indeed would arouse the secular humanist bigots.
Rubio, appeal to the Latino vote? Maybe , , , but hard to nominate a guy who said you had , , , little fingers.
I have always liked Newt (see the substantial thread on this forum) but not sure what he would add in the way of getting votes.
I like Kasich as a prediction, not as a choice of mine. Sort of a Biden 2.0. He's been around the block, if he gaffes, he's just old John Kasich.
Cruz doesn't make sense for a number of reasons.
Rubio? To me, that is sort of the Dole Kemp thing. Rubio won't be at his best trying to defend Trump. If they were on the same page policy wise, and they both wanted to make it work, they could overcome the personal differences. But they aren't and they won't. Rubio doesn't bring Trump Hispanics. I don't see why Trump would think he needs Rubio to carry Florida when he just trounced him there. In that sense, Kasich is more valuable. Trump didn't win Ohio.
Of the vetted 17, I like Carson, but it won't be him either. That would be bold and out of the box. He doesn't have a black following but he would be hard for those who are tired of failed liberalism to ignore.
I hear good and bad with Susanna Martinez, check the boxes for woman, Hispanic and small swing state. I don't see Trump taking a Palin-like risk on a newcomer to the national scene. No one has a better record than Rick Perry and the national scene didn't work for him.
Look through Trump's eyes. While we hope for the best successor, that isn't how he sees it. He doesn't need a successor or help in governing, he needs to get elected. It isn't who gives the best speech; it's who delivers the best attack. Enter Chris Christie, I'm sorry to say. He is the prosecutor who can prosecute Hillary. He took down Trump's biggest rival, Rubio. Fully vetted, he is last of the two term governors. Christie won't deliver NJ but he will make Hillary's life a living hell across the country and throughout the media, and that is the VP nominee's purpose - in Trump's humble opinion..
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http://www.dailywire.com/news/5486/4-signs-last-24-hours-trump-suckered-conservatives-ben-shapiro?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=020616-news&utm_campaign=restlesspatriot
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http://www.dailywire.com/news/5486/4-signs-last-24-hours-trump-suckered-conservatives-ben-shapiro?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=020616-news&utm_campaign=restlesspatriot
Talking out of both sides of his mouth is what he does. Don't knock it - Obama won two terms. That's why I'm not begging to suddenly hear conservative lip service mixed in. It doesn't mean anything. If this gets him elected and then he governs well, great, but he will never be my someone I proudly identify with. The unknown of Trump is better than Hillary or Barack and that's as far as it goes.
He doesn't need my support until Nov 8 and doesn't need it then either because he has no plans to make my state a swing state. Another consideration is that I am a contrary indicator. The direction I think a Presidential election should turn is typically opposite of how it does. (See my bet with ccp that Hillary won't run, won't be nominated, etc.) I believe this election is all about getting things right on issues and communicating more clearly. In fact, chaos and confusion is selling best. What are Hillary's care values, while were at it. Same as Trump's. Get herself in power at all costs. After that, stay in power. What will Barack miss most of the Presidency, he was asked: Air Force One. Not leading the greatest country in the world, but to command that kind of power for himself. Trump already has a jet, but the concept is the same.
While Trump flirts with people who want the government setting private sector wages, and flirts with the tax hikers, trade protectionists, Bernie supporters, big government Democrats and moderates, he can keep in mind that, like others before him, he never locked down the conservative base. As Elizabeth Warren would say with total sarcasm, good for him. Put another way, f. you Donald Trump. )
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/07/us/politics/donald-trumps-idea-to-cut-national-debt-get-creditors-to-accept-less.html?_r=0
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Well, it's an interesting thought.
China or Europe would probably move in.
Dollar replaced by Euro or Yuan?
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Well, it's an interesting thought.
China or Europe would probably move in.
Dollar replaced by Euro or Yuan?
Europe isn't in any condition to do anything. China's ability to project power outside of Asia is limited, except for cyberwar. We might be in for prolonged power outages if they were pissed off. Although this might make a gold backed yuan the new global currency.
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Well IMHO it is not an "interesting thought", it is a profoundly stupid and ignorant thought of the sort the Peronists of Argentina have used to destroy the Argentinian economy various times.
Anyway, here is this piece of Trump propaganda: https://www.facebook.com/politicalq/videos/1781655088788269/
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-07/dilbert-creators-6-reasons-why-trump-will-win-landslide-november
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-07/dilbert-creators-6-reasons-why-trump-will-win-landslide-november
ff
The madness of crowds.
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“I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.”
- Full faith and credit of the US government takes on new meaning. [No meaning]
"Dollar replaced by Euro or Yuan?"
"...not an "interesting thought"[Donald Trump’s Idea to Cut National Debt: Get Creditors to Accept Less], it is a profoundly stupid and ignorant thought of the sort the Peronists of Argentina have used to destroy the Argentinian economy various times."
"this might make a gold backed yuan the new global currency"
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If a currency was truly gold backed, would it matter what country issued it?
Yes, Europe and China are in worse shape at the moment and would be pulled down with us if we collapsed.
As we move toward all transactions being electronic and immediately convertible back to any other currency, is there really going to be a 'world currency' of the future?
Yes, Trump's idea is profoundly stupid, yet we are devaluing our debt continuously at a targeted rate of 2% per year - while we continue to add to it.
Other than having to borrow in some other country's currency, aren't we already following quite closely with the rest of our policies in the footsteps of Peron-Argentina, Chavez-Venezuela, and the other third world failures that could be and should be first-rate economies?
Yet Trump would mostly copy failure the way I hear him.
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In that Trump opposes entitlement reform (yes, yes the issue that Chris Christie ran on-- but I digress) he profoundly adds to the likelihood of such a scenario.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2016/05/06/11-states-flip-toward-democrats-in-latest-cook-political-report-analysis/
11 states flip toward Democrats in latest Cook Political Report analysis
MN doesn't count in the 11 even though Rubio was leading Hillary here.
Saying 'I told you so' to conservative leaning Trumpists isn't very satisfying.
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Pat points out that the Cook poll did not predict his victory.
Anyway, here's this:
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/05/07/paul-ryan-aide-disputes-donald-trump-claim-that-ryan-called-him-after-new-york-primary/
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"Pat points out that the Cook poll did not predict his victory."
It isn't the pollster, it's the people who are polled that are saying this.
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I think Trump's theme could be to make and keep America great again vs the Democrat/liberal/leftist party them which is get rid of the United States and make the world all into one nation.
one world socialist government vs America as it has always been.
A theme based on this could appeal to most people in the country.
I think......
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435138/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-conservatives-never-trump-2016
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON May 9, 2016 4:00
What do conservatives do when there is no conservative candidate? I watched Donald Trump serially blast apart all my preferred candidates — Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz — as if for sport they were sent up in succession as clay pigeons. And now the November Rubicon — vote for Donald Trump, or stay home and de facto vote for Hillary Clinton — is uncomfortably close. Most of the arguments pro and con have been aired ad nauseam. The choice is difficult for principled conservatives, because no sooner should they decide to vote for Trump than Trump will surely say something outrageous, cruel, or crude that would ostensibly now have their imprimatur on it. And note, this matters to conservatives much more than it does to liberals. Few Obama supporters at Harvard or the Ford Foundation or the New York Times worried much in 2008 that their candidate had dismissed his own generous grandmother as a “typical white person” or that he tried to get away with airbrushing out the obscene Reverend Wright and mythologized his close friendships with reprobates like Bill Ayers and Father Michael Pfleger. Aside from his dubious political loyalties, Trump persists in being mean-spirited. He seems uninformed on many of the issues, especially those in foreign policy; he changes positions, contradicts himself within a single speech, and uses little more than three adjectives (tremendous, great, and huge). But the problem with many of these complaints is that they apply equally to both the current president and the other would-be next president. When Hillary Clinton, playing to the green vote, bragged that she would put miners out of work, and then, when confronted with an out-of-work miner, backtracked and lied about her earlier boast, we had a refined version of Trump’s storytelling. The Clinton Foundation’s skullduggery and Hillary’s e-mail shenanigans seem to trump the Trump University con — and involve greater harm to the nation. Her combination of greedy Wall Street, for-profit schmoozing and paint-by-the-numbers progressivism is repulsive. Trump’s cluelessness about the nuclear triad is a lowbrow version of Barack Obama’s ignorance, whether seeking to Hispanicize the Falklands into the Maldives (wrong exotic-sounding, politically correct foreign archipelago, Mr. President), or mispronouncing “corpsman,” or riffing about those Austrian-speaking Austrians; or perhaps of Hillary Clinton’s flat-out lie about the causes of Benghazi, hours after she had learned the truth. I don’t think reset, Libya, Benghazi, red lines to Assad, step-over lines to Putin, and deadlines to Iran attest to Clinton’s foreign-policy savvy. It is easy to be appalled by crude ignorance, but in some ways it is more appalling to hear ignorance layered and veneered with liberal pieties and snobbery. The choice in 2016 is not just between Trump, the supposed foreign-policy dunce, and an untruthful former secretary of state, but is also a matter of how you prefer your obtuseness — raw or cooked? Who has done the greater damage to the nation: would-be novelist and Obama insider Ben Rhodes, who boasted about out-conning the “Blob” D.C. establishment, or bare-knuckles Trumpster Corey Lewandowski? Neither Jefferson, Lincoln, nor Reagan is on this year’s ballot. So voters must deal with realities as well as principles. Neither Jefferson, Lincoln, nor Reagan is on this year’s ballot. So voters must deal with realities as well as principles. Note as well that so-called Republican elites really did help to create Trump: On matters of illegal immigration, offshoring and outsourcing, huge deficits, trade, and political correctness, many conservative pundits, handlers, and politicians sounded about the same as their liberal counterparts. When they debated on TV, it was like listening to two divorce lawyers; in the green room, would they sip bottled water and swap stories about their crazy clients? I recently watched Fox’s star anchor Megyn Kelly, in fawning fashion, interview firebrand Michael Moore as if he were a genuine documentarian. Moore praised Kelly to the skies, and engaged in jocular buddy joshing about her post-Fox career plans, before he waxed on in magnanimous style about how he had felt poor George W. Bush was simply incompetent rather than malicious. His disingenuous mush went unquestioned. Yet Moore remains a reprobate who after 9/11 thundered: “If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for him. Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes’ destination of California — these were the places that voted against Bush.” Of the American dead in Iraq, he once gloated, “I’m sorry, but the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe — just maybe — God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.” Michael Moore cuddles on Fox the way Al Sharpton goes to the Oval Office. What is the difference? In the last five years, I have attended perhaps a dozen lectures by various establishment politicians and pundits (who supposedly believe in the “rule of law”) in which they pompously lectured down to their conservative audience that illegal immigration was a minor problem for the rube wing of the Republican party but for the enlightened was mostly an opportunity to win pro-family new voters. These are politicians and pundits whose children go to private schools, who live in apartheid communities, and whose experience with illegal aliens, to the degree it exists, is via a housecleaner or landscaper. Another dilemma hinges not on the omnipresence of crudity but on how one prefers to have it presented — delivered in a chartreuse monster truck, or by Tesla? One is the gutter sort — besmirching John McCain’s war record, or fibbing about releasing tax returns, or bragging about rank adultery; the other is dressed up with sonorous cadences about why you must be the first presidential candidate to reject campaign-financing-reform rules in the general election, when you vowed you would be the most transparent candidate in history (as you hid both your medical records and your university transcripts and became Wall Street’s most endowed cash recipient). When Obama later was forced to admit that his autobiographical memoir was mostly fiction, or when Bill Clinton was revealed to have jetted around with convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, or when Obama invites as an honored White House guest a rapper whose latest album cover glorifies homies on the White House lawn gloating over the corpse of a white judge at their feet, I think we long ago eroded any notion of presidential decorum. The honest and quite legitimate argument against Trump on this count is the one we never hear: that instead of offering a corrective to the present crudity, he might continue to erode the dignity of the office in the manner of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Even Trump, however, could hardly do more damage with the Iranians than did Obama’s in-house wannabe novelist, Ben Rhodes, who, in the twilight of his one and only policy career, now brags how he misled the Congress and the public by easily salting the media field with phony nuggets of expertise and punditry. The point is that we are worried about Armageddon on the Trump horizon while we are living amid the Apocalypse. No one today much worries that in the 2008 campaign Obama smeared the working classes of Pennsylvania, revved up his supporters in Philadelphia (“folks in Philly like a good brawl”) to bring their guns to a knife fight, and urged others to “get in their face,” and quite unapologetically lied about his supposedly sporadic presence in front of Reverend Wright’s racist and anti-Semitic pulpit — after earlier bragging in a Chicago newspaper interview about his perfect attendance. Few cared about the felon Tony Rezko’s sweetheart discounted sale of backyard real estate to the Obamas — an academic’s downscaled version of something like Trump Steaks. If anyone knows of another case of an obscure underdog Senate candidate suddenly surging ahead of, first, his favored primary opponent and, later, his favored general-election opponent — after both had the details of their sealed divorce and custody records mysteriously leaked — please cite a parallel. Trump is, of course, spring-loaded; he has no safety and can go off at any time. Trump is, of course, spring-loaded; he has no safety and can go off at any time. But whether he is amnestied like Obama or Biden will depend on his ability to limit his insanity to weekly rather than daily outbursts or to dress up his gaffes and blunders in nasal tones in the style of liberal grandees. No one knows how to square the Trump circle of cleaning up his act without ruining it — only that the circle has to be squared. So, the issue for conservatives in November is twofold: One, would a Trump presidency represent a new ethical and cultural low; that is, would he say and do things far beyond what we have come to contextualize and excuse from the Clintons or Barack Obama? In this regard, I grant that how one expresses one’s cruelty — coarsely or with double-entendres and snark — matters in our shallow and media-driven culture. Whether a plagiarist or fabulist ends up wrist-slapped like Fareed Zakaria, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Maureen Dowd or fades like Jason Blair and Stephen Glass, or whether a bad racist joke about CP (“colored people”) is repulsive or merely out there, depends entirely on your buzz and what you represent — and whether you are Hillary Clinton or not. Two, would Trump’s convention-stamped agenda be more or less conservative than that of Hillary Clinton? Trump is certainly no conservative, and he has moved the Republican party leftward in some areas; Hillary’s latest progressive personification is beyond liberal, and has moved the Democratic party much further leftward in all areas. Or, to put it another way, whose most recent opportunistic incarnation now seems the more conservative on matters of illegal immigration, budgeting, defense, domestic spending, and foreign affairs? Not voting for Trump is not just like voting for Hillary Clinton in 2008 but rather like voting for a 12- or 16-year continuation of Obamism. There is also a 30–70 chance that Trump might recalibrate his candidacy in the next six months. It may be easy to continue with the Never Trump movement as long as he daily spins his conspiracy theories and tall tales. But what happens to conservative resistance if by August he has reinvented himself into a more sober Trump and announced that if elected he’d like to appoint Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court, John Bolton as secretary of state, Larry Arnn as secretary of education, and General Jack Keane as secretary of defense? Will we say that it is just a ploy to get our votes, or confess that it is a shameless, naked ploy that is still preferable to the likely Clinton alternative? And what happens if even his more outrageous promises are reified with not-so-outrageous details: Making Mexico pay for the wall could easily be accomplished by slapping a 10 percent federal surcharge on all remittances sent out of the country by those who cannot document legal residence; rejecting the Iran treaty could be couched in terms of reviewing how Ben Rhodes deceived both the public and the media in unconstitutionally rerouting the treaty around Congress. There are six long months to go in what has already become a reckless, grueling, and unpredictable campaign between two iffy candidates. By the time of the election, Hillary Clinton will be 69, she has health problems, and she is mired in a host of scandals, from the shakedowns of the Clinton Foundation to a possible federal reprimand or indictment over her reckless use of her private e-mail server for State Department business; Donald Trump is a year older, with a trail of business controversies, and he is capable of saying anything at any time. Amid that dilemma, my suggestion is to curb the hysteria about “Never Trump,” while watching him closely over the rest of the spring and early summer, in the context of assessing, not whether he is a humane and principled conservative, but whether he is, as alleged by some conservatives, really less conservative and less humane than Hillary Clinton. The Reagan horse left the 2016 conservative barn many months ago, and it is coming to be time to pause and assess whether we are really left with only two bad choices — or with a bad Trump and a far, far worse Clinton. If it is the latter, then it is an easy choice in November. — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435138/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-conservatives-never-trump-2016
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http://cookpolitical.com/file/AW.3.05.png
"Pat points out that the Cook poll did not predict his victory."
It isn't the pollster, it's the people who are polled that are saying this.
67% of suburban women view Trump unfavorably.
Is it Cook or suburban women saying that?
"Trump is viewed negatively by 67 percent of suburban women and 63 percent of white women."
http://cookpolitical.com/story/9588
This is not the first impression of an unknown. It is a studied reaction after 12 months of wall to wall coverage of a guy already the most well-known in the country.
I suppose it is so 2012 to think suburban women decide Presidential elections.
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IIRC, his tax plan was the only thing I liked about Trump.
"By the time it gets negotiated, it's going to be a different plan," Trump told George Stephanopoulos on ABC News' "This Week."
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-walks-back-tax-plan-negotiated/story?id=38959168
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He is going to negotiate even lower rates. :-D
Seriously , I agree we need to hold him accountable. We cannot simply jump on board all blindly gung ho .
We got to repeatedly yank him to as far to the right conservative spectrum just as the left will like drug induced amazon warriors yank him as far to their end of the political spectrum.
The Trump tug of war.
Everyone of us need to man the tug of war rope.
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He is going to negotiate even lower rates. :-D
Seriously , I agree we need to hold him accountable. We cannot simply jump on board all blindly gung ho .
We got to repeatedly yank him to as far to the right conservative spectrum just as the left will like drug induced amazon warriors yank him as far to their end of the political spectrum.
The Trump tug of war.
Everyone of us need to man the tug of war rope.
The actual quote of needing to negotiate his tax plan is true; that is exactly what I was hoping for with Rubio and Cruz. The unrealistic or counter-productive parts of their plans could have been fixed in a conservative-Republican House - then lost in a divided Senate. (
As you suggest with the humor, Trump isn't gong to make a good plan better; he is planning to make it worse because 69 years of his experience come from flirting with the other side. Still, the backing off of a deficit busting plan is a good, get-elected tactic. Te Dems are foaming at the mouth to attack him on details, but he isn't a detail guy.
Maybe he won't need an income tax at all as he gets companies to pay 45% tariffs, neighboring countries to build walls and allies to take their turn at defending us...
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Further to our discussion at 'Freedom to Trade', I'll mark this one down as famous people caught reading the forum. )
I like Mark Levin - only when he agrees with me.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/05/09/mark-levin-trumptrade-bernie-reagan/
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/05/trump-on-trade-more-sanders-than-reagan
Mark Levin on ‘TrumpTrade’: More Bernie Than Reagan
"...when it comes to Trump’s own financial dealings, he is an unrepentant globalist, from which he has made a fortune. But these days, as he runs for president, the billionaire is a radical protectionist who has repeatedly declared his intention to impose massive tariffs aimed at the economies of other countries, such as Japan and Mexico, and a forty-five percent tariff on products from China. Such broad tariffs would most certainly result in retaliation by the targeted countries. This is a sure job-killer that would also drive up costs of everyday products to low- and middle-class Americans. The net result: economic misery, not just for those hard-working, tax-paying Americans who work in industries that rely on international commerce and trade, but mostly everyone."
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Not to belabor this, but I don't get where he calls Nafta the worst trade agreement ever, the worst, where it was mainly Mexican tariffs on USA goods that were lowered. Wasn't letting China into the WTO without agreement to honor patents and trademarks far worse?
Like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the lips move and what comes out has nothing to do with the truth, what they believe, or how they intend to govern. Obamacare will lower family premiums by 2500 and a new round of tariffs on American consumers will make Indiana great again. It is all just noise in the room, insulting to people who study these things.
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http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/10/londons-new-mayor-warns-trump-let-in-muslims-or-they-will-attack-america/?utm_campaign=thedcmainpage&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social
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http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/10/londons-new-mayor-warns-trump-let-in-muslims-or-they-will-attack-america/?utm_campaign=thedcmainpage&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social
Funny how such a peaceful religion can be so easily radicalized.
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Doug writes,
"I like Mark Levin - only when he agrees with me." I really like and fortunately agree with him ~ 90% of the time. But he rather uncompromising and steadfast . If one does not agree with him look out.
BTW I have so far only spent time listening to one of his CABLE TV shows (45 minutes ) on topic of the threat of EMP to our way of life. It was VERY interesting indeed. We could reduce that threat for perhaps a "mere" $2 billion but it would be pennies to pay to prevent the trillions of damage and millions of lives that would be lost. One small nuclear explosion in the atmosphere over the US could do us all in. That is all it would take. Korea might soon be able to do it.
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One small nuclear explosion in the atmosphere over the US could do most of us all in. That is all it would take. Korea might soon be able to do it.
Corrected.
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Even if a President Trump moved American policy generally rightward -- far from a sure bet -- it would probably come at great cost in liberty. Brad Thor, bestselling author and friend of the Morning Jolt, offers his thoughts on the choice before us:
My greatest concern about Donald Trump, though, isn’t a trait he lacks, but a dangerous one he poses -- in spades. Authoritarianism.
Confident people do not bully and demean others. That is the realm of the weak and insecure. Confident people also do not threaten others, especially not their fellow citizens.
Donald Trump has told us to just wait and see what he does to Jeff Bezos once he gets into the White House. He has told us the American military will do whatever he tells them to do no matter what their reservations. He has promised to prevent American companies from moving outside the United States, regardless of what they believe is best for their businesses.
In other words, Donald Trump has clearly told all of us that he will use the power of the presidency to force people to bend to his will. This is not liberty.
In fact, Donald Trump has never even spoken about liberty. Neither has he spoken about the Constitution and the Founding documents. This is an absolute first in the history of the United States.
Instead, Donald Trump talks about hiring the “best people” and making the “best deals.” This, though, isn’t what made America great, and it certainly isn’t what will return America to its prominence.
The blueprint for America’s success is the ideas of the Framers -- limited, Constitutional governance -- an area in which Donald Trump is criminally ignorant.
Let me be clear that I don’t want to vote for Hillary Clinton. I also don’t want to vote for Donald Trump. My preference is to write-in or vote third party. I think they are both terrible for our future.
But between a big government progressive and a potential despot -- every American must ask themselves where liberty has the greatest chance to survive over the next four years.
By the way, Trump fans, once you start posting people’s home addresses and home phone numbers on Twitter, you’re no longer fighting for liberty. You’re using implied threats and the force of the mob to bend somebody else to your will. You’re replacing forced obedience to the state with forced obedience to you.
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"But between a big government progressive and a potential despot -- every American must ask themselves where liberty has the greatest chance to survive over the next four years."
I would pick Trump in a heartbeat. One good reason he can be replaced in 4 yrs. The courts can be used against him as can the legislative branch and the polls and media.
With Hillary she will, like Brock, work behind the scenes to implement INSTITUTIONAL changes, will strategically place their fanatical statist people in all important levers of government, will pack the courts with ideologues, social justice warriors and socialists, and the media will be ON THEIR SIDE doing very little (except fro Drudge Breitbart National Review Conservative Review who basically just preach to the choir).
That is my assessment. Can Trump do great damage with some not thought through decision - of course. But it will not be in a way that is "transformative" with deceitful and dishonest propaganda. With him we will know what we are getting. Big difference. No even a close decision for me.
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What a riot it would be if Trump held on to his tax returns leading to all sorts of conspiracy theories.
Then at the most opportune time release them and they show nothing. Just like Brock did with his long birth certificate and giving rise the faux story the Trump was one of the "birthers".
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435254/donald-trumps-tax-returns-delegates-should-abstain-if-he-wont-release
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Sessions picking the Trump ball and running with it. I know trump is vulgar, and has lowered discourse to name calling, but his theme as nicely outlined by Sessions is EXACTLY what I at least have been pounding the table here for years. The ONLY ONE to tell it like it is. Our country is in a life and death battle from the left that is pushing this one world nation shit down our throats. I am for some form of trade and globalism but not this. I just didn't hear this from any other candidate. That is why I keep staying intrigued with Trump despite his pissing me off so often. In the end he has the message for me. National Review and other never Trump people can talk about conservatism etc (which I agree with too) but what good is any of it if we give our national identity.
I have even thought Sessions for these reasons is the perfect VP choice but I am not sure independents would identify with him:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/05/12/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-jeff-sessions-editorials-debates/84298310/
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The heart of what Trump complains about with China is their currency manipulation. It's perfect because it flies over everyone's head and gives us a boogeyman. Like that one German leader blaming that one religion.
But what about our currency manipulation? Has anyone ever heard of QE? ZIRP? NIRP? (zero interest rate program, negative interest rate program) Going on 20 years of monetary expansion? TARP, temporary emergency spending that became permanent, totally unfunded. Deficit spending to the tune of $19 trillion accumulated and projected to double, triple etc. And all this is enabled by funny money, intentional inflation, borrowings we'll never pay back and Federal Reserve and Treasury collusion supported by the White House and Congress. The Fed says they can't let interest rates go to normal levels yet, after seven years of expansion, because the economy is still too fragile??! That is fair trade?
How about we get our own act together first, then accuse others.
Does Trump think savers should get zero interest?
Does Trump deny that new investment (non-existent) tied to new savings (non-existent) is locked out by our wrong-headed policies?
Has anyone ever heard Trump address this? Or Clinton for that matter, but no one expects truth or solutions from her.
Does Trump deny that labor productivity and labor income are tied to new investment - and that is not happening when an economy has no interest rate and no savings? No. He sees it from his own crony business perspective, just cheap money, a false free lunch like any other government welfare program.
Some of these problems come from our tax code. He addresses that. Some come from our strangulating regulations. But underlying all of it is that WE ARE MANIPULATING OUR CURRENCY.
If Trump were running for 'President' of China, he could propose a tariff war against the US and have just as much ground to stand on.
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Yes.
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http://www.vox.com/2016/5/13/11669850/donald-trump-threatens-amazon
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http://www.vox.com/2016/5/13/11669850/donald-trump-threatens-amazon
Gosh, what if we had a vindictive president? Vox is too dumb for sarcasm.
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http://www.vox.com/2016/5/13/11669850/donald-trump-threatens-amazon
Gosh, what if we had a vindictive president? Vox is too dumb for sarcasm.
This also struck others as funny.
http://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2016/05/13/abject-parody-obama-superfans-at-vox-get-the-vapors-worrying-about-trump-trashing-rule-of-law/
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The point is to put an end to such excrement, not make sure that "our side" gets to crap on American freedom too.
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The point is to put an end to such excrement, not make sure that "our side" gets to crap on American freedom too.
Not many here consider Littlefingers to be on our side.
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Some of these have merit, some do not. All hurt.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/08/trump-university-financial-elder-abuse-charges/?xid=for_fb_sh
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html?emc=edit_na_20160514&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
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http://monsterhunternation.com/2016/05/04/on-the-election/
On the Election
May 4, 2016 correia45
Well, we’re boned. It’s going to be huckster fraud democrat against lying criminal democrat.
Half the GOP hates the jackass. Question now is what percentage of us stay home or make a 3rd party protest vote. All those crossover democrats who voted for that orange half wit in the primaries will go back to voting democrat in the general election. He thinks young Bernie voters are going to vote for him? Fool.
I’ve voted republican in every election of my adult life. I’ve volunteered and donated money. I can’t in good conscience vote for this vile populist demagogue. If even a few percentage points of the GOP feels the same way, that’s it. He’s toast in the general.
So he energizes the democrats, so they’ll feel like they are fighting tyranny (now comes the great part where all the fawning media coverage turns on him) and he demotivates the republican base.
All the kid glove BS from this season is over. Every vile nasty stupid thing he has ever done will be covered 24/7. By November he will be the most laughed at and despised candidate in history. Because he makes it too easy.
So the classless boor probably loses to the sea hag. Not that it matters too much, since they’d both govern as authoritarian democrats, only one has more nationalist rah rah thrown in.
Spare me the nonsense about lesser evils and SCOTUS judges. He won’t make it that far. And by some miracle, like Hillary has a stroke, this rambling ignoramus wins, he would still screw that up somehow in his one term. Big question is does he suck enough to take the GOP with him?
And if you think he is going to actually build a wall, you are a sucker.
Did I love Cruz? No. Because I was hiring an employee, not a god. He was the least likely to rape the Constitution. Instead we get an authoritarian, who is either lying, or made it to 70 before understanding basic American principles about liberty.
You ignorant low information bastards. Motivated by fear and anger, you overlooked every gain made over the last few cycles, and traded it in to a lying huckster democrat for some magic beans. So you could stick it to the establishment, by electing the shit bird who funded them.
Edit to add, don’t bother posting to argue. We are past that. Now we batten down the hatches and get ready for the suck. If you want to gloat, you are an idiot who doesn’t realize what you have wrought. If you feel disrespected, good. You should.
##
I wrote that in a few minutes and posted it on Facebook last night. It had 700 shares a couple thousand comments by morning, and I was holding twenty simultaneous arguments. You can check it out for yourself. It is pretty enlightening. https://www.facebook.com/larry.correia/posts/1230830983594495?notif_t=comment_mention¬if_id=1462327074688692
The posters fell into a few categories.
Republicans who hate the guy, but who will vote for him against Hillary, because he will only probably suck, and she will obviously suck. The real question for most of them is how much is he lying lately?
Then Republicans who hate the guy enough that they will vote 3rd party for president because they don’t want him on their conscience, and yes, they are fully aware that it is a futile gesture.
And finally Trumpkins gloating. Those are especially fun because they give you a great look into the mindset of our enthusiastic standard bearers from now until November. Most of them were obviously low information types, very impassioned, but without even a School House Rock level of understanding how our government functions. Any criticism of Trump was “butt hurt” or “whining” and everybody needed to fall in line or else. I was told four or five times that I needed to leave America (make me, fuckers) and that I must be a welfare check cashing Obama lover.
Now picture the rest of the year. These are the new champions of the national debate. You think the articulate people with a clue are going to spend time trying to explain our candidate’s bizarre ramblings? Nope. It’s going to be the folks like in the thread above. And after Build A Wall and Make America Great, they’re all out of steam. When asked about any of Trump’s many prior liberal stances, they brush that off as being decades ago (2014) and people change!
The important thing now is that they normally feel like losers, but for one bright shining moment, they get to be on the winning team. I’m sure the useful idiots and suckers who elected every populist, tyrant, and despot in history felt the same way. Briefly. Get in line, my ass.
He’s already got the highest negatives of any republican candidate ever. Factor in months of media ridicule and fear mongering, by the time November rolls around the democrats will be super motivated and the regular GOP will be meh.
Hillary is awful. She’s an awful human being and a worse candidate. Her biggest hindrance to winning was apathy among her base. Trump is the best thing that has ever happened to her. Fifteen candidates and you assholes picked the one she was most likely to beat. You picked the one that funded and praised her.
Personally, I’ll still vote, but for the republican candidates downstream. For president, Unicorn Cavalry all the way. I hated John McCain, but I still voted for him because he was pro big government, but still nominally a republican. I thought Romney was a decent man, but a squishy moderate, who sucked on key issues, but I held my nose and voted for him. Trump, lacking in all decency, dignity, intellect, and being a populist demagogue completely without principles is over my line. Can’t do it. Don’t want that stain on my soul.
For the people voting for the lesser of the two evils, fine. I can’t fault your stance and I understand why you’re doing it. Do what you’ve got to do.
In trying to think of a bright side this year, Trump’s antics might not tarnish the entire conservative movement and result in democrats winning everything for a generation… Maybe. Besides that? Well, Hillary and Trump are both really old, so hopefully their VP picks won’t be complete garbage.
Like I said last night, get ready for the suck.
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Trump:
a) Good on illegal immigration
b) good instincts on limiting immigration of groups likely to contain jihadis
c) promises to announce in advance list of potential SCOTUS picks
d) though protectionist, this has the good result of being against TPP which appears likely to sabotage US sovereignty
e) recognizes that dramatic upgrade of US military is necessary
f) recognizes that US tax code is profoundly destructive, instincts are in the right direction
g) willing to take on much of PC fascism
h) recognizes that nuke deal with Iran is a disaster and that stopping Iran from going nuke is a must
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Trump:
a) Good on illegal immigration
b) good instincts on limiting immigration of groups likely to contain jihadis
c) promises to announce in advance list of potential SCOTUS picks
d) though protectionist, this has the good result of being against TPP which appears likely to sabotage US sovereignty
e) recognizes that dramatic upgrade of US military is necessary
f) recognizes that US tax code is profoundly destructive, instincts are in the right direction
g) willing to take on much of PC fascism
h) recognizes that nuke deal with Iran is a disaster and that stopping Iran from going nuke is a must
How many of these statements have been contradicted by other statements? Aside from Donald J. Trump, what does Trump actually believe in?
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I get your point but there are some things he can't go back on without destroying his bond with his base.
And, its' not like he doesn't have counter ammo on being a horn dog , , , http://www.elderstatement.com/2016/05/by-fox-news-may-13-2016-former.html
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And I am aware of his negatives.
Wow GM. In the many years I have been on this thread I believe this is the longest post you have ever made.
I am voting for Trump. Why:
Because he as Crafty pointed out has good positions.
Because he is the nominee like it or not.
Because I believe he can be brought around to our side.
I am not going into this blindly.
I am not low information.
They did not have free speech in Nazi Germany. They killed off their opposition.
We have free speech here. Trump does not control the media. Yes they love him. They have made fortunes off him but they don't like him and they show his negatives along with his positives
He does not the majority of people behind him.
I do not mind some populism either. I don't see why we can not have both Conservatism and Populism
Sometimes I think Conservatism gets mixed up with Libertarianism. I don't like the latter. Not for me.
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Since I quit posting here, I have been lurking, reading the posts on the election and the candidates. Several times I have almost posted, but realized that I would once again subject myself to negative articles about Trump promoting media and political talking points that have taken Trump’s words out of context, his history having been distorted, and rants that Trump is evil incarnate. I can go anywhere for that.
Since Hotair.com blew themselves up by going over Facebook for posting, I have been a part of www.HotGas.net I am a featured commenter and one of the moderators there.
There is no place generally to go and have a reasoned debate on Trump, Clinton and the ongoing election. Go to The Right Scoop, and anyone opposing Cruz is subjected to the vilest comments imaginable. (I went there once and after writing about 50 words on why the article written was misrepresenting a Trump position, I was attacked in ways that would make a sailor blush. And within two minutes, I was permanently banned.)
Conservation Review? The same thing occurs. Luciannel.com? Yep, banned The National Review, pro Trump comments are often deleted. But the same happens with the Pro Trump website, The Conservative Treehouse.
I am writing this because I am extending an offer to anyone here.
At HotGas, we would welcome anyone here to pen a thought out article on your views of Trump, other candidates, or the coming General Election. Then, we can have a reasonable discussion, no name calling, etc.
If anyone chooses to write an article, be prepared to back up claims with proof or facts to support the claims. You will be challenged on what is presented.
Know that HG does support Trump. But know this also…..over 50% of our posters and readers were either Cruz people, as a first or second choice, but most have flipped. We would be happy to discuss why the flipping.
This is your opportunity to present your views to a website that has over 15k unique visits per day, and about 30k hits per day. Just amazing for a website that began on Feb 8, 2016 and has been operational for just 3 months.
If you want to submit an article, just send me an email, and I will get it posted as a Featured Reader Submission. Just make sure it is well thought out and not just a series of rants.
Pat ppulatie@pacbell.net
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And I am aware of his negatives.
Wow GM. In the many years I have been on this thread I believe this is the longest post you have ever made.
*Actually my posts in debates got quite long, but the post above is from Larry Correia, not me. Though I like it a lot.*
I am voting for Trump. Why:
Because he as Crafty pointed out has good positions.
Because he is the nominee like it or not.
Because I believe he can be brought around to our side.
I am not going into this blindly.
I am not low information.
*You aren't, but Trump is a low information candidate. He lacks even basic knowledge of how the US government is supposed to work. He didn't even know what the nuclear triad was.*
They did not have free speech in Nazi Germany. They killed off their opposition.
We have free speech here. Trump does not control the media. Yes they love him. They have made fortunes off him but they don't like him and they show his negatives along with his positives
He does not the majority of people behind him.
I do not mind some populism either. I don't see why we can not have both Conservatism and Populism
Sometimes I think Conservatism gets mixed up with Libertarianism. I don't like the latter. Not for me.
*I am a small "l" libertarian. I don't want big, unconstitutional government weighted against either "side". Will I vote for Trump? Every time I think no way, I see something like this: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-15/mexican-president-warns-war-if-gringo-trump-wins-white-house and it makes me want to get a "make America great again" hat.*
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I doubt anyone here has posted that Trump is evil incarnate. If they did, I missed it. Trump may well win. Prepare yourself for when he fcuks us over to make his "deals".
Since I quit posting here, I have been lurking, reading the posts on the election and the candidates. Several times I have almost posted, but realized that I would once again subject myself to negative articles about Trump promoting media and political talking points that have taken Trump’s words out of context, his history having been distorted, and rants that Trump is evil incarnate. I can go anywhere for that.
Since Hotair.com blew themselves up by going over Facebook for posting, I have been a part of www.HotGas.net I am a featured commenter and one of the moderators there.
There is no place generally to go and have a reasoned debate on Trump, Clinton and the ongoing election. Go to The Right Scoop, and anyone opposing Cruz is subjected to the vilest comments imaginable. (I went there once and after writing about 50 words on why the article written was misrepresenting a Trump position, I was attacked in ways that would make a sailor blush. And within two minutes, I was permanently banned.)
Conservation Review? The same thing occurs. Luciannel.com? Yep, banned The National Review, pro Trump comments are often deleted. But the same happens with the Pro Trump website, The Conservative Treehouse.
I am writing this because I am extending an offer to anyone here.
At HotGas, we would welcome anyone here to pen a thought out article on your views of Trump, other candidates, or the coming General Election. Then, we can have a reasonable discussion, no name calling, etc.
If anyone chooses to write an article, be prepared to back up claims with proof or facts to support the claims. You will be challenged on what is presented.
Know that HG does support Trump. But know this also…..over 50% of our posters and readers were either Cruz people, as a first or second choice, but most have flipped. We would be happy to discuss why the flipping.
This is your opportunity to present your views to a website that has over 15k unique visits per day, and about 30k hits per day. Just amazing for a website that began on Feb 8, 2016 and has been operational for just 3 months.
If you want to submit an article, just send me an email, and I will get it posted as a Featured Reader Submission. Just make sure it is well thought out and not just a series of rants.
Pat ppulatie@pacbell.net
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GM,
When I said evil incarnate, I was referring to articles posted by the media that have called Trump everything in the books. So I apologize if I did not make that clear.
I invite you to put together an article on your concerns about Trump and what you think he should do and how you think he can be influenced to make those changes. Inf fact, I invite everyone here to write something and I will get it posted.
We also welcome Reader Submissions on other topics. A recent one that generated much interest was on the coming financial crisis, and how to prepare for a general societal collapse.
At HG, we are people like all others. We have our fears and our concerns, but we just want to get the US back on the right track.
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(http://a.abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/GTY_trump_wedding_clintons_jef_150806_16x9_992.jpg)
How many times did Melania have to drag Bill's hand back to her waist?
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Pat, I would like to take you up on your offer sometime.
I appreciate the clarification, still this is kind of a serious charge. Would appreciate examples.
"I would once again subject myself to negative articles about Trump promoting media and political talking points that have taken Trump’s words out of context, his history having been distorted"
Trump who constantly complained about the system being rigged, found out it was rigged in his favor. Examples: things like 20:1 and 50:1 media coverage advantage over rivals along the way.
I admit to anti-Trump rants here that focused on his negative traits or counterproductive policies in my view without always mentioning his good traits, like that his third wife is hot and that he is not Hillary. I have praised his tax plan - more so than he has.
I remember this:
"As to sitting home or voting for the lesser of two evils, I have done that too many times."
- That was Pat, Nov 2015.
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2419.msg91059#msg91059
That is my view today.
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GM, Are your taking that media photo out of context? :wink:
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GM, Are your taking that media photo out of context? :wink:
I'm sure I am. Just like the video below is totally out of context.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4lFrk4PbVg)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4lFrk4PbVg
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Doug,
First, I want everyone here to think about writing an article. We at HotGas want a place where we can begin to bring together the divisions within the Party, offering the Cruz supporters especially a place where they can come and discuss with the Trump supporters on how to change the country for the better. And it first begins with defeating Hillary. Well, actually this is not true because I do not believe come the end of October that she will be the candidate.
As to the articles you ask about, I will have to take some time and go back and list them. But I can't do that for a couple of days at least. I need to finish a project I am working on for a presentation this week about taking some of my work products and turning them into Smart Phone apps. A new direction for getting my products to market.
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I might add hotair to my frequent daily internet stops.
PP,
Full disclosure please. Are you working for the Trump campaign in an official capacity?
Thanks
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www.hotgas.net We are not "the other site that will not be named".
No, I do not work for the Trump campaign or anyone else.
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Hotair.com has seriously gone downhill since it was Michelle Malkin's.
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Well Pravda on the Hudson already has egg on its face for its hit piece on Donald-- the main woman in question says the piece mis-portrayed her and that she has no complaints about her time with the Donald.
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Well Pravda on the Hudson already has egg on its face for its hit piece on Donald-- the main woman in question says the piece mis-portrayed her and that she has no complaints about her time with the Donald.
He is lucky this was all aired in May instead of the 1st of November. Not much of a surprise that a man three times married who admits past cheating. owns the Miss Universe contest, claims to be a multi-billionaire, was once hitting on women. It's like accusing Hillary of being corrupt. What did people think she did for a living?
Maybe the personal stuff this time around will be so obvious that we will have to turn back to issues and policies by November.
-----------------
The Times link, just for the record:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html?action=click&contentCollection=Americas&module=Trending&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article&_r=0
Don't click it; that only encourages them.
Washington Post has some 50-60 'reporters' working on similar material. I would expect them to get into his business practices. He already admits he had to buy off politicians to make a living; what more do we need to know?
No word on a similar team being assigned to investigate Clinton Crime Family ties between Foundation contributions and U.S. State Department actions.
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Strange. I've been assured that there are professional journalists, who are fair and objective! With credentials!
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"No word on a similar team being assigned to investigate Clinton Crime Family ties between Foundation contributions and U.S. State Department actions."
On one of the talking head shows Bezos supposedly instructs the WP to be "objective" and "apoloitical" . Yeah right.
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Want to say before being criticized that I admit taking a liking to GM's nickname for the namesake of this thread, "Little Fingers". For all the name calling he did, he can live in that same world, Little Marco, Lyin Ted, Low energy Jeb. Our friend Pat was calling Carly "Snarly" right from the start: http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2419.msg91059#msg91059.
So Little Fingers it is.
Update: I still only know one person who supports Trump without apology, regret or a lesser of two evils approach. The ratio of Bernie Sanders bumper stickers to Trump hats I see is about 100:0. Maybe I need to get out more.
I give Pat credit for seeing something - that I still don't see.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/27/donald-trump-will-get-more-primary-votes-than-anyone-in-history-because-more-people-are-voting/
Trump is setting GOP primary vote records.
More than 10 million people will have voted for Trump in the primaries. That's nearly 1 in 30 Americans.
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I wanted to get this on record, if I haven't already, before it is any more obvious. Media seems fascinated right now about Trump's VP choice and are kicking around all the other names. Hannity is talking with Newt about it as I write. Kasich is my prediction, not my choice.
"Trump will pick Ohio Gov. John Kasich for VP and Kasich will accept." - Doug, May 16, 2016
Trump, in Trump's mind, is about what? Winning. He didn't win Ohio. He has to win Ohio.
Timing? I suppose he will pick him at the last minute to keep the talk going for as long as possible.
Yes, he could use a woman or a black or Hispanic or someone who is two or three of those, but this isn't about window dressing. It isn't about finding someone else who can steal the show. It isn't about having the right person in line for the good of the party, furthering the movement or to protect the country. It is about Trump winning (period).
Kasich had the best general election poll numbers nationwide. Yes those would have collapsed if he started to lead, have a chance to win or come under attack. He helps carry a large swing state. He has large government executive experience, one of the two term governors. He comes from the group of 17 where the vetting is largely done. Why pay your own team? He has congressional and foreign policy experience. This is about as opposite to a bold decision as he can make. Why should DT let someone else's risk add to his own. Kasich is as qualified and likable as Joe Biden, and makes slightly fewer gaffes. His gaffes tend to bounce off. He told women to come out of their kitchens to support him once, well he is just that old. He won't likely be caught with a prostitute or a gambling addiction at this point in his life unless they already have that in his file. Kasich helped knock out Cruz,; that's worth something if you look for the personal side and Trump and Kasich mostly avoided striking at each other. Kasich can help Trump walk back the slams he made against Ohio, that all the growth came from fracking.
Why would Kasich take it? Unlike Newt and some others, Gates, Condi Rice, John Bolton, Rudy G, etc. Kasich currently has the ambition and plans to be out campaigning most of this year -other than the part now about having Trump at the to of the ticket. Kasich doesn't have to agree or pretend to agree with Trump on everything; he can answer the questions about Trump's unconventionality the way Priebus did this weekend. 'People aren't using the old rule book anymore, they are looking for who can set off an earthquake to the status quo in Washington'. Trump (and Kasich) is the only choice left for doing that. What is the better offer Kasich is waiting for if he still has ambition? There isn't going to be one.
Kasich just turned 64, a pretty normal age for this position I would think and young for a person with his experience. He doesn't have rap in his playlist like Rubio, but is younger than Trump, Biden, Hillary, Bernie, Newt, Rudy, Warren, Gates, and quite a few others.
The biggest problem with Kasich is the way he has turned into a moderate in his older age, hardly a slur in a general election and the more the left attacks him for other things the more the base will like him in comparison to Hillary and Castro or whoever.
Christie offers a better attack machine but Kasich helps more directly with winning. In a one on one, Trump can attack by himself and with plenty of willing surrogates. All the gals new or newer to the national scene, Susana Martinez, Nicki Haley, Mary Fallin, etc. bring new risk to the equation. He can't give up a sitting Senator, Kelly Ayotte, unless she loses and that's too late. If one of them had the track record of Kasich and could help carry a crucial state, he would pick a woman. Trump wants the questions to be all about Trump, so he will pick his Joe Biden, John Kasich.
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Speaking only politically, Kasich has a lot to offer in the way of strengthening up some of Trump's weakest links.
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Speaking only politically, Kasich has a lot to offer in the way of strengthening up some of Trump's weakest links.
Kasich is a loathsome turd who makes Trump seem decent and ethical in comparison.
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See, I told you he strengthens some of Trump's weakest links!
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See, I told you he strengthens some of Trump's weakest links!
Good point.
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"Kasich is a loathsome turd who makes Trump seem decent and ethical in comparison."
As Obama calls Biden, an insurance policy.
I may need to borrow some twist or turn of these words when I write my endorsement of Trump.
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Pat Buchanan is a great guy but I have long disagreed with him on trade protectionism. Now and because of that issue he has stepped forward as a self-appointed surrogate for Trump. In that role I post this here, Buchanan's words to distance himself from or not.
This was on Hannity radio. Buchanan says raise tariffs 20% across the board. Repeal corporate taxes altogether with this in their place. The 20% on imports of $xbillion would raise $***. STOP!
1) Our side believes a 20% tax won't change the flow of goods that are assessed the new tax? No disincentive effect? No, it is their side who denies the laws of economics. Actually, he wants it both ways. We raise all that money AND manufacturing here is supercharged by the loss of imports.
The fact is, the cost of living goes up by 20% in the applicable categories, whether you buy it made here or brought in.
2) No other country will retaliate. To the extent that that do retaliate, we will be unaffected by that? Again, it is our side that denies the laws of economics and of human behavior? Our side denies policies like these caused or triggered the Great Depression?
3) Our side believes government intervention is the answer? No. Government over-meddling is the cause, not the solution of the problems across the states where Trump is selling this message. A new tax isn't the answer. Lower tax rates on everything is the answer - to the extent that we can curtail spending to pay for any revenue losses.
4) Our side wants government to pick winners and losers and curtail individual economic freedom? Not me.
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Buchanan is NOT a great guy in my opinion, there have been repeated whiffs of antisemitism from him over the years.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/us/politics/donald-trump-supreme-court-nominees.html?emc=edit_na_20160518&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
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https://www.hotgas.net/2016/05/we-are-the-trump-americans/
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Buchanan is NOT a great guy in my opinion, there have been repeated whiffs of antisemitism from him over the years.
Agreed.
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https://www.hotgas.net/2016/05/we-are-the-trump-americans/
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM
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https://www.hotgas.net/2016/05/we-are-the-trump-americans/
I read it but I am still wondering who are the Trump Americans. It seemed quite general and fluffy. Motherhood and apple pie but no new data.
I read the agenda and it omitted every objection I have had with the candidate which are rather numerous.* Can we vote for only the good stuff mentioned?
Is this hope and Change again only under the words Make America Great Again? Blank easel offered, paint your own picture on it? Will he build a bridge to the 21st century too?
* No word about ending rule by executive order and returning to coequal branches of government.
No word about reform or an end to unconstitutional private takings. Yes I'm still stuck on this as he has doubled down against me and against constitutional limits on government
No word on trade protectionism. This is a divisive question even if the easily deceived support depression era policies.
No word on minimum wage where he has been all over the map, mostly with the big government planners and controllers.
The last big government conservative was G.W. Bush. Trump is offering big government without the conservatism?
No word on whether he ever thought about a different plan to counter Saddam in Iraq while he would have left him in power, supporting terrorism and pursuing nuclear weapons.
No clarification of whether the written plan with tax rate decreases is his tax plan or if the spoken one with tax rate increases supersedes that.
No backtracking on previous namecalling of those he now wants or doesn't want for allies. Is Carly still ugly? Was Ted really the biggest liar? Was Marco too short? Was Megyn bleeding out of her wherever? Did McCain serve his country badly? Did any of these ugly episodes serve to bring down the general level of discourse?
No coverage of the Chris Christie bailout plan where we found out payback was part of the secret backroom deal that got him nominated.
Did Nafta really cost us jobs?
Do the Chinese manipulate their currency any worse than we do?
Does he now know Quds from Kurds? Nuclear triad?
This one from GM, does he know which is the bad Korea?
Is there a new reason we should get excited about the lesser of two evils - that has happened "too many times"?
Should we vote for him for winning, even if the principles that would win aren't our own - or what will make America great again?
If he is so great at winning, why does he need anyone's vote!
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Trump Americans=makes scientologists look like a meeting of a skeptic's group.
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I am chuckling at your reviews, no, I am laughing at them.
The purpose of an article is to communicate a thought to a specific group of people. A technical article requires one type of writing, a “sophisticated” elitist requires another style of writing. And reaching a specific demographic like the middle class requires another distinctive style of writing.
This article was designed to reach the common, middle class person who has been fed the same crap that I have heard time and again about supporting Trump. It was not designed to give “full-throated” defenses of Trump to people who are “my betters”, to people who will only vote for Trump because the alternative is too “unthinkable”.
The article was written to deliver an emotional message.
1. People supporting Trump are not alone. There are millions of people experiencing the same attacks and denigration and we stand together.
2. The use of the term Americans in its many instances was deliberate and specific. Where the elitists use Nationalism as a degrading term, I used the term Americans to deliver a specific definition that was identified by each section and the photos that were used. American in this case meant Patriotic. Seems that the people reading the article caught on to that.
3. The use of the WW2 photo of Americans at Omaha Beach was to show that the people who support Trump are the same ones that time and again, have risked their lives for an ideal, a uniquely American ideal.
4. The Red Cross photo and the catastrophes that we respond to across the world represented the American spirit of generosity and the propensity to lend a hand wherever needed, at home or abroad.
5. The At Home Section represented the people supporting Trump were the same people that you see every day in cities and communities. These are the people who make up the communities, who are the people who hold them together. They are the people who you will find at the core of any successful community.
6. The All We Ask section was self-explanatory. As was what we want.
The message that I delivered was that the people who support Trump want a return to American Values from the 50’s and 60’s. Reagan values, Love of Family, Country, Community and God. We want a financially responsible country where people once again become dependent upon themselves and not the government.
With the supporters, there will be differences, represented by Pro Choice or Pro Life. But those positions do not adversely affect the underlying values that we seek a return to.
I realize that what I wrote did not meet your standards, but I don’t give a damn. You were not my target audience.
I wrote this to a specific demographic which represents the majority of the people in this country, the upper lower class, the middle class person and upper middle class people. These are the people that will Make America Great Again, not the insufferable upper class who believe themselves to be smarter and wiser than anyone else.
BTW, as to Cruz, the guy all of you loved, why don’t you check out his religion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Theology
Read it and you realize that he was the Christians own version of Islam where religious leaders were the only ones fit to rule. Pathetic.
And as I post this, I see GM has commented again. Now I am truly pissed off. I came back just for the last couple of days, and I get this crap.
Well, I am truly through with posting here.
And GM, go fuck yourself, you arrogant bastard.
Now, CD you can ban me. I don't care because I won't be back.
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Pat, I don't expect to change your mind: I never have. With due respect, I think you're operating with a little double standard here. Both you and Trump freely insulted other candidates, with humor, then take offense when it comes back.
On the first part, I see your point that you were appealing to a certain audience with emotion. I read the comments and I think you were successful.
A different argument is needed for this group.
PS, I was for Rubio, not Cruz.
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"the insufferable upper class who believe themselves to be smarter and wiser than anyone else."
That retort was probably easier than addressing my specific objections, where I find him wrong on economic policy, lacking on foreign policy, and oblivious to constitutional limits on government.
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"a specific demographic which represents the majority of the people in this country, the upper lower class, the middle class person and upper middle class people. These are the people that will Make America Great Again, not the insufferable upper class"
I will leave this alone shortly, but once again it is all about class and the politics of division - not unlike what has been used so successfully by the Dems.
I respectfully disagree. Correction, I vehemently disagree. There aren't groups or classes that will make us great again, and others that will not. Nor do the patriots mentioned in the article fall neatly in those classes.
"The majority of the people in this country, the upper lower class, the middle class person and upper middle class people" include Suzette Kelo, Vera Coking and are exactly the people who a new round of regressive tariffs will hit the hardest. Attention Walmart shoppers, prices are going up by 45% in aisles 1-247 if you believe what is said in campaign rhetoric.
"Insufferable" (upper class), meaning intolerable, unbearable, unendurable, insupportable, unacceptable, oppressive, overwhelming, overpowering, conceited, arrogant, boastful, cocky, swaggering. (Synonyms) As mentioned previously, blaming the boogeyman worked for Dems and worked for that one German leader who used emotion and divisiveness to perfection and nearly ultimate power. Our problem isn't the economic activity of the upper class; it is the voting pattern of the whole electorate. And this solves that how?
The GOPe is now Trump and the old guard are now GOPformerE. Trump cut the back room deals with Christie, Carson, Palin, Jindal and whoever he needed to crowd the field and then clear it. Trump is the one who sets the platform, picks the VP, picks the Supreme Court nominees (if he wins). Trump decides if Paul Ryan runs the convention and who speaks on which nights for how long. Trump lines up the sponsors, works the donors and buddies up with wall street, or not. Trump overthrew the (non-existent) establishment. Now he IS the establishment. And guess what? We get to criticize. That's what people out of power do. It's all we have left with no candidate and no path forward.
"Trump Americans=makes scientologists look like a meeting of a skeptic's group." - That was over the top while everything Trump said, bleeding out of her wherever, was Presidential? Good grief.
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"PatrickPu Basileus • a day ago
Thank you all for the kind words. I have just so abused, put upon, denigrated and simply castigated by the "elites" and those who are anti-american that I just had to put this together.
We are different that the Reagan Democrats because we encompass so many different groups. Rep, Dems, Indies, we are it. We are the Trump Americans and damned proud of it."
:roll:
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(http://a.abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/GTY_trump_wedding_clintons_jef_150806_16x9_992.jpg)
http://a.abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/GTY_trump_wedding_clintons_jef_150806_16x9_992.jpg
There is a club. We aren't in it.
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GM: "There is a club. We aren't in it."
If I am an "upper class elite", this economy is in worse shape than we knew!
PP: "Better to have a Dem in and know I will get screwed than to vote for a GOPe praying that the nominee will win, while knowing that even if he does win, he will go RINO."
"I am not going to vote for Bush, Rubio or any of the others outside of Cruz or Carson. If Bush or the others are pushed down my throat, it doesn't matter because the results will be the same as if Hillary were the President."
No empathy for any of us having Trump 'pushed down our throat'. Pat has been ripping the other candidates since August, "neutered pigs", "weasel Politicians", "Burn the GOP down!", but feels "just so abused, put upon, denigrated and simply castigated by the "elites" and those who are anti-american" when someone expressing genuine reservations about his chosen one.
"[Trump] "needs to reduce the personal attacks. It will backfire at some point"
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Without anyone to defend our nominee, we are stuck with words already posted:
"Doug,
You really need to read the Section on Taxes in his book, Time to Get Tough. It spells out his thoughts on taxation. He cites:
The problems with High Corporate Taxes and overseas issues. ...
For companies who outsource to other countries, 20% tax rate. If they return, 0%
Imports get hit with a 20% "tax".
(To be fair, Trump also eliminates and reduces other taxes.)
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php#4 - Pat P.
Brilliant. That's what the world economy needs right now, a shutdown of world trade.
To be fair to Smoot Hawley, the Depression triggering legislation raised tariffs on only 20,000 items by only 6.3% to 19.8%. Trump proposed (in 2011) raising it from 0% to 20% on ALL imports.
What the "emotional appeal" to replay the Great Depression is, is beyond me. Can anyone tell me what the US economy looks like without world trade? (see below only it would be far worse now) What will security issues look like when Europe, China and Mexico all fall into economic collapse? That won't hurt the border issue, will it?
Among other ill-conceived miscalculations, is a tax on an activity you are trying to eliminate a reliable revenue source??
On this important economic point, that wasn't an issue, Hillary Clinton has a better track record and appears smarter. (
"Better to have a Dem in and know I will get screwed than to vote for a [RINO..." and get the same bad policies and results, or worse.
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For those who don't like world trade, take a look at our economy without it. Note that this is a far greater increase and we are far more reliant on trade now than we were then.
U.S. imports decreased 66% from $4.4 billion (1929) to $1.5 billion (1933), and exports decreased 61% from $5.4 billion to $2.1 billion. GNP fell from $103.1 billion in 1929 to $75.8 billion in 1931 and bottomed out at $55.6 billion in 1933.[20] Overall, world trade decreased by some 66% between 1929 and 1934.[21]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act#Tariff_levels
Note that this was a net "improvement" in our "trade deficit", for you trade deficit hawks. Imports fell 66%, exports fell *only* 61%!
GDP (we call it now) fell over 25%! Probably an unrelated development...
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Trump=(http://thewallpaper.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/eagle-with-american-flag-hd-new-wallpapers-free-usa-flag-photos-wallpaper-of-windows-cool-colorful-1920x1200-736x459.jpg)
Don't try confusing us with your elite arguments, Doug.
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Reminiscing about how unfair we were to Trump and his emotional appeal proponents, I recall that nearly all conservative media outlets had to be trashed in order to explain why they weren't jumping on board for Trump. Hot Air, National Review, Wall Street Journal, Townhall, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, and on and on, all bought and paid for by the establishment, or else why wouldn't they see the brilliance of Great Depression economics and letting Saddam Hussein go nuclear? In fact, all of the above regularly rip Republicans especially establishment when they go off the track, based on their own published views.
Ripping conservative media to advance a candidate, even when false, case in point:
Re: Donald Trump on: September 14, 2015, 04:02:16 PM
Powerline is owned by Salem, which is in the tank for Bush. - pp
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2551.msg89597#msg89597
Unfortunately, facts are stubborn things. Paul Mirengoff of Powerline ripped Rubio throughout Gang of 8 more ruthlessly than anyone in media. I wrote to him multiple times to complain. John Hinderaker endorsed Rubio, not Bush. Steven Hayward, the most pro-Trump of the group, doesn't take marching orders from anyone - have you met the guy? Read his work. None of them ever supported or endorsed Bush.
In fact, they aren't "owned by Salem", a right wing conservative group, and they weren't in the tank for Bush. Whatever.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Google search for "Powerlineblog is owned by Salem Communications"
Salem Media Group
Salem Media Group, Inc is an American radio broadcaster, Internet content provider, and ...
Missing: powerlineblog
Power Line
www.powerlineblog.com/
Missing: salem communications
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"What difference, at this point, does it make?"
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"Don't try confusing us with your elite arguments, Doug."
I know, flaunting my elite public school education. Like most upper class elites removed from reality, I worked all the way through college, commuted from my parents house to the nearest public university during the Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter boom years. Today, like a lot of ivory tower elites, after a little writing I will go up to north Minneapolis, clean tenant debris and see if I can get a couple of toilets to flush more smoothly - 2 blocks from where Jamar Clark was shot.
http://www.startribune.com/No-charges-against-police-in-Jamar-Clark-shooting-death/373979481/#1
Economics is all theoretical to me. I already have it made, born like George Bush with a silver foot in my mouth.
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So what you are saying is you weren't smart enough to be born into a wealthy family. Well Trump was! So there!
"Don't try confusing us with your elite arguments, Doug."
I know, flaunting my elite public school education. Like most upper class elites removed from reality, I worked all the way through college, commuted from my parents house to the nearest public university during the Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter boom years. Today, like a lot of ivory tower elites, after a little writing I will go up to north Minneapolis, clean tenant debris and see if I can get a couple of toilets to flush more smoothly - 2 blocks from where Jamar Clark was shot.
http://www.startribune.com/No-charges-against-police-in-Jamar-Clark-shooting-death/373979481/#1
Economics is all theoretical to me. I already have it made, born like George Bush with a silver foot in my mouth.
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How Trump Would Deal with the National Debt
MICHAEL TANNER May 11, 2016 4:00 AM @MTANNERCATO
The candidate’s various plans range from useless to disastrous. The budget deficit is going up. The Congressional Budget Office recently warned that revenues this year are lower than had been expected. This means that the deficit will almost certainly be higher than the $544 billion previously projected. With our national debt now topping $19.15 trillion and likely to reach $29 trillion by 2026, this is not good news. But don’t worry — Donald Trump has a solution for this growing tide of debt. He just won’t pay it. Last week Trump initially said, “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal” to pay bondholders less than full value on the debt owed to them. This is, after all, the sort of thing Trump has done with creditors when, say, one of his casinos went bankrupt. It is also more or less what Greece has repeatedly negotiated with its bondholders over the last few years. But the United States is neither Greece nor one of The Donald’s businesses. There wouldn’t be any outside entity to force bondholders to accept less than face value. And a President Trump would have little leverage in any negotiation without threatening a general default. But even the hint of a default would inject an almost unprecedented level of uncertainty into international markets, causing interest rates to spike for all other kinds of debt, from corporate debt to state- and local-government debt. In this maelstrom of uncertainty, liquidity would probably collapse, since financial institutions, in an attempt to reduce their exposure, would be unwilling to make loans. This, in turn, would lead to a huge drop in business investment and consumer spending. It would be like the last economic crisis on steroids. The last country to try this route was Argentina, which defaulted on some of its debt in July 2014. The result wasn’t pretty. The economy was thrown into recession, contracting by 3.5 percent. Inflation spiked to as much as 41 percent. Consumption fell by 4.5 percent. The country was shut out of international markets. It may be years before Argentinians dig their way out of the mess. Oh, and those bondholders who would get screwed under Trump’s proposal? That would be you and me. Roughly 55 percent of government debt is owned by Americans, mostly through their 401(k) or company pension funds. If Trump reduces the value of those bonds, we can say goodbye to our retirement plans. Moreover, in the aftermath of Trump’s “renegotiation,” investors would obviously be reluctant to take a risk on future U.S. bonds; interest rates would need to be higher to offset the increased risk. But every percentage-point increase in interest rates costs the federal government $120 billion in additional interest payments. Thus, in attempting to lower the debt, Trump’s plan could actually end up increasing it. And not that the Constitution matters that much to Trump, but there is a little provision that says: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, . . . shall not be questioned.” Faced with the utter implausibility of his idea, Trump quickly traded Greece for Venezuela, saying, “You never have to default because you print the money.” Not since Paul Krugman’s trillion-dollar coin has anyone seriously proposed inflating our way out of debt. Massive inflation would mean that the savings and investments of millions of Americans would be wiped out. The cost of living would skyrocket, and low- and middle-income Americans would find it more difficult to afford even the basic necessities of life. Those on fixed incomes, like senior citizens, would be among the biggest losers. Businesses would be forced to offset rising costs by slashing payrolls, throwing millions of Americans out of work. The cost of imports would rise dramatically, which would be a disaster for consumers, but, on the bright side, it would save Trump the trouble of imposing all those tariff hikes. Eventually, Trump backed into his third position on the issue: He would have the Treasury Department reconfigure U.S. debt by issuing new Treasury bonds to buy back older bonds that trade at slightly lower rates. (Because of quirks in the bond market, investors have a preference for newly issued Treasuries.) Such an approach probably wouldn’t disrupt financial markets. But it also would result in only a minuscule reduction in our total debt, and it would do so by increasing the interest rate the U.S. is paying on that debt, so it would basically just be shuffling things around without actually changing anything. Trump’s rapidly multiplying positions didn’t just display how little he knows about how the U.S. government and the U.S. economy really work. It also underscored the fact that Trump has no plan to reduce the size and cost of government. Yes, he has said he would cut taxes, though he has now repudiated his own tax plan, but he has no plans to cut spending beyond vague promises to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse.” In fact, in areas ranging from defense to the VA to border enforcement, he wants to hike spending. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Trump’s plans would add as much as $15.45 trillion to the national debt over ten years, including interest costs. At the same time, Trump has specifically taken reform of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid off the table. Since those entitlement programs account for half of all federal spending, there is no serious debt-reduction plan that exempts them. In fact, given that those programs face more than $70 trillion in unfunded liabilities, Trump’s plans would virtually guarantee that we would continue down the same disastrous road to fiscal collapse that we have been taking for the past 15 years. Trump declares himself the ‘king of debt’ and says, ‘I love debt.’ He must, since he wants to create so much of it. Trump declares himself the “king of debt” and says, “I love debt.” He must, since he wants to create so much of it. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is an old-fashioned tax-and-spend Democrat. The CRFB suggests that her proposed $1.8 trillion in new spending over the next ten years would be mostly paid for by new taxes, with other policy proposals like enacting immigration reform making up most of the remaining difference. Others, such as the Tax Foundation, point out that when you consider the reduced economic growth that would result from Hillary’s tax hikes, her spending increases would add roughly $1.2 trillion to the debt over the next decade. Hillary is no fiscal conservative. A Clinton presidency would mean bigger and more costly government, financed by more taxes and, most likely, more debt. That’s bad news. But on this issue, it’s hard to see that she’s worse than Trump. Either way, the American economy and the American people will be the losers. — Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis. You can follow him on Twitter @mtannercato, or on his blog, TannerOnPolicy.com.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435226/trump-national-debt
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Know that the original on the NRO site has paragraphs! MUCH easier to read.
In my opinion, this matter of nothing serious on spending restraint/reduction by Trump is a huge and glaring weakness. He should talk to Christie on this.
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http://www.redstate.com/diary/freedomrepublican/2016/05/03/four-reasons-donald-trump-cannot-be-trusted-on-gun-rights/
Four Reasons Donald Trump Cannot Be Trusted On Gun Rights
By: goldwaterconservative (Diary) | May 3rd, 2016 at 05:08 PM | 2
Many Donald Trump supporters believe that their candidate has genuinely converted to the conservative persuasion. I am not inclined to agree. On the issue of gun rights and the Second Amendment, which is critically important, I believe that Donald Trump cannot be trusted.
Reason 1: Trump supported an assault weapons ban in 2000
The policy advocated by Trump in 2000 was not simply an off-the-cuff remark to a reporter, he thought about it enough to put it in his book The America We Deserve in preparation for a potential presidential bid. Here is what Trump said:
It’s often argued that the American murder rate is high because guns are more available here than in other countries. Democrats want to confiscate all guns, which is a dumb idea because only the law-abiding citizens would turn in their guns and the bad guys would be the only ones left armed. The Republicans walk the NRA line and refuse even limited restrictions. I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun. With today’s internet technology we should be able to tell within 72 hours if a potential gun owner has a record.”
Reason 2: Trump has been friends with Michael Bloomberg for over a decade
Nobody in America is more anti-gun than Michael Bloomberg. Nobody has done more personally to attack the Second Amendment than he has.
Reason 3: Trump praised President Obama’s remarks following the Newtown shooting
Below is a real, verified tweet. Click on it, it is real.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/280754630047199232
During his speech, Obama introduced his “even if it saves one child” argument for gun control:
I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer’s no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change. Since I’ve been president, this is the fourth time we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by mass shootings, fourth time we’ve hugged survivors, the fourth time we’ve consoled the families of victims.
And in between, there have been an endless series of deadly shootings across the country, almost daily reports of victims, many of them children, in small towns and in big cities all across America, victims whose — much of the time their only fault was being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.
We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, but that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.
If there’s even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that’s visited Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try.
Reason 4: Trump has banned guns on his properties for years
This issue was actually brought up during a debate:
“We called a few Trump resorts, a few Trump properties that do not allow guns with or without a permit. Would you change those policies?” moderator Carl Quintanilla asked.
“I would change them,” Trump tersely replied.
Yet so far the policies haven’t been reversed on Trump properties. “If Donald Trump wants to earn the support of gun owners, he needs to follow through on that promise,” the group’s statement continued.
A number of Trump properties in which the Republican presidential front-runner does still own remain gun-free zones, among them Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, Trump National Gulf Club in Los Angeles and Trump International Hotel Waikiki Beach Walk in Honolulu.
Conclusion:
Do you still trust Donald Trump on the Second Amendment after reading this? All you have is his current word. After his recent claims that convicted rapist Mike Tyson is innocent, and that Rafael Cruz was involved with the JFK assassination, we know how good is word is.
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"Rafael Cruz was involved with the JFK assassination, "
Any one here about the final conclusion of that published photo? Was that really him in the photo standing near Lee Harvey Oswald after his arrest?
It was implied that was him but was it really? I never heard whether it was or not.
If it was him in the photo so what. So he was an anti-Castro guy.
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utterly unfounded, like most of what Trump says.
"Rafael Cruz was involved with the JFK assassination, "
Any one here about the final conclusion of that published photo? Was that really him in the photo standing near Lee Harvey Oswald after his arrest?
It was implied that was him but was it really? I never heard whether it was or not.
If it was him in the photo so what. So he was an anti-Castro guy.
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I am not that impressed with the site PP boasts off 'hotgas'. In any case here is our dilemma. I have personally decided to back Trump. Not as a man blind to his his many faults but as a practical matter. I do understand those who continue to not be able to support him. We do know what Hillary will do to us. We do not know what Trump will do for certain One can argue that we are taking a huge risk in backing him. I say better to take the risk and try to influence the outcome. We will have NO influence with Clinton and we know in advance the outcome. I would like to influence my own destiny rather than be relegated to a back seat, no say, serf who will have everything rammed down my throat.
I just came back from a cross country flight. I sit in the seat in the airplane and have to listen to some PC pitch from United airlines about how they are actively recruiting women and all sorts of jobs are available to them . I then proceed to open a Journal of the American Medical Association (They send it to me for free . I am not and never have been or plan to be a member) and I first see an article written by some apparently Mexican psychiatrist who tells stories about he is confused for the parking valet while waiting on line for his car at a fancy restaurant with his wife and then speaks of the endless "micro aggressions" because of his ethnicity.
How these endless micro aggressions lead to PTSD like symptoms etc. I have to stop and think:
what about the micro aggression to me a white male? I am sitting there minding my own business bothering no one and I have to be under constant assault all day long with this PC stuff.
I don't want Hillary Clinton. If she gets in we will be hearing about girl power from the second we wake up every single day till we go to sleep. Trump is the only thing standing in the way of this. And I don't mean just gender PC I mean the whole onslaught of PC.
I will vote for Trump. One can call it the choice of the lesser of 2 evils. I call it no choice:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435671/donald-trump-supporters-principle-conservatives-triumphalism
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I am still wrestling with this decision. Do I hold my nose and vote for Littlefingers, because the Dowager empress would be much worse, or do I go 3rd party protest vote? I won't tell you not to vote for Trump, but steel yourself for when he fcuks us.
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I am still wrestling with this decision. Do I hold my nose and vote for Littlefingers, because the Dowager empress would be much worse, or do I go 3rd party protest vote? I won't tell you not to vote for Trump, but steel yourself for when he fcuks us.
From my point of view it would depend on what state you are in. Trump is not going to make my state competitive, so why vote for a candidate I don't support. For people in Virginia, Colorado, Ohio, etc. they have to deal with the guilt of getting Hillary elected if they don't vote for the most competitive alternative.
Pat suggests: "Better to have a Dem in and know I will get screwed than to vote for a [RINO] ..."
Trump is proud to be Republican In Name Only. He hates the party, called Bush a liar, helped Democrats take the House and the Senate, didn't want to support the nominee if it wasn't him. Now he is the definition of GOPe; he sits at the head of the table when they cut the back room deals.
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Rumor today that Trump is meeting with Bob Corker of Tennessee. He ran as a conservative then turned into a deal making sell out. Mark Levin for one has been very critical of Corker saying he is no better than say McConnell or Boehner. He helped the gang of 8 immigration deal. So now Trump whose biggest rant was to be tough on immigration might choose this amnesty guy?
https://www.conservativereview.com/members/bob-corker/
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https://twitter.com/GRAAmerica/status/734406891040825344
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CjEjLHkUYAAvEMt.jpg)
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Four Reasons Donald Trump Cannot Be Trusted On Gun Rights (summary)
Reason 1: Trump supported an assault weapons ban in 2000
Reason 2: Trump has been friends with Michael Bloomberg for over a decade
Reason 3: Trump praised President Obama’s remarks following the Newtown shooting
We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.
If there’s even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that’s visited Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try.
Reason 4: Trump has banned guns on his properties for years
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My reaction to reason 2, assault weapons ban, was that one has to be informed through a site like this to know why such an innocent sounding thing is bad. You would not know that living in a city where Michael Bloomberg is considered a Republican and the NY Times is considered objective.
The Obama Newtown reason is different. Instead of coming together as a nation to grieve our loss and ask ourselves how such a shooter could be stopped (shoot the shooter before he shoots again), this President immediately used the dead children tragedy as a political opportunity to push forward with his own pre-ordained, anti-constitutional agenda - and every honest observer knew it. Except Trump, apparently.
Are YOU a second amendment guy (or gal)?
Reminds me of a favorite trick question, WHICH IS YOUR FAVORITE AMENDMENT? If you believe in the constitution, hopefully it is ALL of them!
My favorite clause of the constitution I suppose is Article 5. If the Founders got something wrong, they gave us a process to AMEND it. And it doesn't say have one pandering guy issue an executive order to violate it.
I tried to make the point early on, that a private takings advocate is not going to be overly hung up on any constitutional limit on government. I was told by our own Trump advocate that was not a big issue. In terms of primary votes and nomination, he was right. Still it was illustrative in separating the central planner from the freedom advocates. Even in politial loss, I will hang with the latter.
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" I was told by our own Trump advocate that was not a big issue"
The rationalizations by the Trumpets is to such an extent that it is "irrational". While I have professed I will vote for him I do not just turn the other way about his huge negatives, uncertainties, and repeated contradictions.
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" I was told by our own Trump advocate that was not a big issue"
The rationalizations by the Trumpets is to such an extent that it is "irrational". While I have professed I will vote for him I do not just turn the other way about his huge negatives, uncertainties, and repeated contradictions.
If contested in my state, I might vote for him too but I am not going to sit quietly in my opposition to much of what Trump believes and says.
I like the exposure of an "irrational rationalization"! (I got my name in the WSJ credits for catching Al Gore accuse his opponents of an "explicit implication", James Taranto's column.)
Private takings put our side on the wrong side of the crony economy concern shared by more than 50% of voters, and it puts people like Bernie on the right side. ( THAT SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN!
In tennis, we call these "unforced errors". You don't aim for the last inch of the court when it wouldn't be a winner anyway in the low percentage chance you actually that spot. One casino gets a couple of parking spaces while we all lose a part of being secure in our homes. In sad fact, Pfizer build no plant and Trump paved no lot while we all lost a basic right and freedom - for no God Damned reason.
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/05/23/for-the-records-week-in-review-trump-has-tax-problems-bigly/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20160523GlenBeckDailyV2_FINAL&utm_term=Smart%20List%20-%20Responsive%20Group%20B%20v2
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1. Update for Pat who can't resist sneaking a peak at the forum, I now know two people who support Trump. Pat and my sister-in-law who said she likes Trump and has liked him from the start. She also liked his TV show which I think is an under-appreciated part of his media experience and appeal. Her support I think is not directly about issues but about strength of personality to stand up to the elected politicians currently screwing everything up. The number of people I know supporting Trump could jump to 3 or 4 as I touch with conservative cousins over the summer. Must of the rest of my family voted for Rubio without much push or pull from me. Some liked Scott Walker but that choice was gone before we voted here.
2. The tax problems in the previous post look pretty trivial, disputes totaling 13,000 over many companies dealing with dollars in the trillions. The tax law is open to interpretation and the IRS is the side wrong plenty often. Trump cos. could just pay that if they didn't want to dispute it. Trump is never going to open his private dealings beyond what is leaked or visible from the outside. Hillary jumped on the bankruptcy aspect, but that charge didn't hurt him in the primaries and isn't new anymore.
3. What is up with Trump attacking Susana Martinez, Governor of New Mexico? Woman, Hispanic, head of the Republican Governors Association, re-elected with 57% of the vote in a swing state, get a grip! It looks like loose cannon material but it has to be intentional. Punishing her for not jumping on board and sending a message to others? Whatever happened to humbly asking people for their support, politics of the past?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/05/trump-blasts-susana-martinez.php
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I prefer the party to be for everyone although I don't mind if he includes the "middle class" as part of everyone. I don't know what to make of the term "worker's party". Not good. Sounds like Lenin:
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/26/presumptive-gop-nominee-donald-trump-republican-party-now-a-workers-party/
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I prefer the party to be for everyone although I don't mind if he includes the "middle class" as part of everyone. I don't know what to make of the term "worker's party". Not good. Sounds like Lenin:
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/26/presumptive-gop-nominee-donald-trump-republican-party-now-a-workers-party/
Perhaps in an attempt to win over Bernie voters, he'll call it a national socialist worker's party.
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C'mon GM :-P :-P :-P
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C'mon GM :-P :-P :-P
Why not? I doubt he knows the history of the terms he's using.
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Why not?
Because it goes beyond your mastery of snark into something that lowers the quality of the conversation.
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Respect that Trump did not flinch on this.
Trump: Cameron “not willing to address the problem” of Islamic terror
MAY 17, 2016 7:43 AM BY ROBERT SPENCER103 COMMENTS
“We have a tremendous problem with radical Islamic terror. The world is blowing up and its not people from Sweden that’s doing the damage okay. So we have a real problem.”
It’s amazing that after 9/11 and 7/7 and Fort Hood and Boston and Chattanooga and Garland and San Bernardino and Paris and Brussels and tens of thousands of other jihad attacks worldwide, and numerous boasts of imminent destruction and conquest from al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other jihad groups, that such a statement would be controversial at all.
“Donald Trump Slams Cameron And Khan On Islam Comments: ‘Don’t Pretend It’s Not A Problem,’” Reuters, May 16, 2016:
Donald Trump has said he is unlikely to have a good relationship with David Cameron because the British prime minister cast the U.S. presidential candidate as “divisive, stupid and wrong” for proposing a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. After Trump’s call for an entry ban on Muslims, Cameron criticised Trump in the British parliament and suggested that Trump, who is now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, would unite Britain against him if he visited.
“It looks like we’re not going to have a very good relationship, who knows,” Trump told Britain’s ITV television station in an interview aired on Monday when asked how ties would be if he won power in the Nov. 8 presidential election.
“I hope to have a good relationship with him but it sounds like he’s not willing to address the problem either,” Trump said, although earlier in the interview he said he didn’t care about the Cameron comments.
The United States is Britain’s closest ally and political leaders from both nations often speak of how the countries’ enjoy a special relationship. Cameron earlier this month refused to retract his “divisive, stupid and wrong” comment but said that Trump deserved respect for making it through the gruelling Republican primary process.
“We have a tremendous problem with radical Islamic terror,” Trump told ITV when asked about the proposed ban on Muslims. “The world is blowing up and its not people from Sweden that’s doing the damage okay. So we have a real problem.”…
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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/05/it_is_time_for_trump_to_unify_the_party.html
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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/05/it_is_time_for_trump_to_unify_the_party.html
We are so fcuked.
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As we predicted here months ago , , ,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/us/politics/donald-trump-university.html?emc=edit_th_20160601&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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As we predicted here months ago , , ,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/us/politics/donald-trump-university.html?emc=edit_th_20160601&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
Are the victims here also considered "Trump Americans" ?
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The "marks" or "suckers" would also be appropriate terms.
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This to me is very politically damaging.
"max out" your cards to go to school. :x
Well I haven't heard from the majority of students who Trump says give the University high marks. Where are they? Has anyone seen or heard from THEM?
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This to me is very politically damaging.
"max out" your cards to go to school. :x
Well I haven't heard from the majority of students who Trump says give the University high marks. Where are they? Has anyone seen or heard from THEM?
Actually using credit cards rather than student loans makes better sense. Often better interest rates, and you can discharge CC debt through bankruptcy. Now, it has to be a better school than Trump U to actually be worthwhile...
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My doggy nose smells here Trump as PT Barnum and I agree this has potential to be seriously damaging politically.
Clever idea about credit cards and bankruptcy.
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Larry has been complimentary of the Don on talk radio as well:
The new TEFLON DON. Move aside Gotti!
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/06/01/larry-kudlow-trump-may-not-pure-free-market-guy-hes-growth-guy-opportunity-guy/
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http://www.wnd.com/2016/06/attorneys-suing-trump-u-paid-675000-to-clintons-for-speeches/
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http://www.wnd.com/2016/06/attorneys-suing-trump-u-paid-675000-to-clintons-for-speeches/
No shock here.
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http://www.wnd.com/2016/06/attorneys-suing-trump-u-paid-675000-to-clintons-for-speeches/
http://spectator.org/rigged-the-trial-of-trump-university/
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Check this out:
Lead law firm suing Trump in class action law suit granted by the liberal judge of Mexican heritage gave *$675,000* to Hillary since 2009. Wow. 100K / yr. What do they want?
http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/exclusive-law-firm-behind-trump-university-lawsuit-gave-big-money-to-the-clintons/
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https://i.sli.mg/6Jn2NC.gif
:lol:
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This business of getting in a snark fest over whether a "Mexican" judge can fairly judge him is beyond stupid. :x :x :x
Anyway, let's keep our eye on this site and see what we think:
http://journalofamericangreatness.blogspot.com/p/who-are-we.html
http://journalofamericangreatness.blogspot.com/
I'm intrigued.
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This business of getting in a snark fest over whether a "Mexican" judge can fairly judge him is beyond stupid. :x :x :x
Anyway, let's keep our eye on this site and see what we think:
http://journalofamericangreatness.blogspot.com/p/who-are-we.html
http://journalofamericangreatness.blogspot.com/
I'm intrigued.
The more rioting by illegals and marxists I see, the more I am willing to vote Trump, no matter all my previously stated issued with Trump.
I wonder how many rioters are bringing voters to Trump, that would have voted otherwise.
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"The more rioting by illegals and marxists I see, the more I am willing to vote Trump, no matter all my previously stated issued with Trump." Wow - from GM! :-o
Over the past year that is what happened to me. I have a lot of trouble with his personality and personal attacks and lack of depth. Yet he IS the only one who stands up for some of the Right's issues.
He has been absolutely correct that we wouldn't be talking about immigration if it were not for him. Instead there would be some cowardly references to immigration REFORM. Not enforcement.
Also the overall theme of make America great again is exactly what I have hoped to hear from other candidates most of whom all talk about just getting along with a left that is not about compromise and getting along.
The rest just don't get it or won't get it.
I agree with Crafty about the way he attacked the judge. However the judge and the prosecutor both have conflicts of interest for sure and pointing this out is in my view justified and as a defense is reasonable but perhaps better to let his attorneys do it in a way that is not totally insulting and if anything risking pissing the judge off.
Just my simpleton opinion.
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quote author=ccp
"The more rioting by illegals and marxists I see, the more I am willing to vote Trump, no matter all my previously stated issues with Trump." Wow - from GM! :-o
I am drawing a distinction between supporting Trump and voting for Trump. I don't support him and maybe never will. I will vote for him on election day if that will matter in terms of stopping something far worse from happening.
At this point, I am hoping to mostly support Paul Ryan on matters of the economy, budget and entitlement reform and hope the overlap between the House and a Trump White House becomes good policy and can pass a divided Senate.
On matters of foreign policy, I am praying for good advice to come to a President Trump through the chair of the joint chiefs etc. and that he will choose policies and battles wisely.
On matters of judicial appointments, I don't trust him one bit but must choose what is likely to be better than Hillary.
I hope but doubt he will pick a VP that I would want to be President. Still, whoever he picks will be better than Hillary, Bernie or whoever they pick for a heartbeat away.
If Trump cannot make my state competitive, I will simply write in my real first choice, whoever that is come November.
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"I agree with Crafty about the way he attacked the judge. However the judge and the prosecutor both have conflicts of interest for sure and pointing this out is in my view justified and as a defense is reasonable but perhaps better to let his attorneys do it in a way that is not totally insulting and if anything risking pissing the judge off."
There are TONS of SERIOUS things to be discussing, TONS of hard core ways of seriously going after the EDC, but instead he gifts the Left with this?!?!?!?
:x :x :x
If the judge has a conflict of interest, let his lawyers so move and keep the Trump U. issue off the radar screen! Don't fuel it you fg moron! :x :x :x
PS: It is a civil suit, there is no prosecutor, there is a plaintiff. The attorneys for the plaintiffs are major contributors to Hillary and that is worth noting, but the term conflict of interest does not apply for them IMHO.
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http://gawker.com/photographs-show-trump-supporters-pepper-spraying-prote-1780399845
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"PS: It is a civil suit, there is no prosecutor, there is a plaintiff. The attorneys for the plaintiffs are major contributors to Hillary and that is worth noting, but the term conflict of interest does not apply for them IMHO."
Thanks for clarification.
If a judge in a civil case seems to rule in a way that is not following a "reasonable" interpretation of the law is that grounds for some action of some kind? Such as an appeal?
I am only asking out of ignorance and seeking "counsel" here so to speak. I really don't know.
I mean judge's are expected to be impartial and follow the law right? So what if a judge seems to be biased and goes out of bounds?
Just like we doctors have our biases. Some of us support Obamacare some like me are not fans. I don't recall taking a patient's own political views into account when treating them.
OTOH I never brought up politics unless the patient did and I would agree with them. If I didn't I would nod yes and move on.
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I do not know the law as applies to Trump's claim that the case should have been dismissed when the lawyers sought to withdraw the plaintiff-- sounds like he has a point, but again I do not know the law. Regardless, he should be letting his lawyers do the talking on this.
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Could he make it any easier for the Clinton cartel?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-muslim-judge-could-biased-000000344.html?nhp=1
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http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/06/05/breaking-trump-faces-rico-charges-over-trump-university-scam-could-face-massive-prison-sentence/
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From 2016 Presidential and WSJ Bret Stephens statement:
This is certainly a possibility that Trump could do so much damage that he would in the long game screw it up for good for Republicans.
With the nomination of Trump, I already see the permanent loss of my economic viewpoint of economic freedom and limited government. We lost at least half of the so-called right and all of the center and left. Not much of a reason left to pick up the pieces.
The right is divided and the misguided on economic issues won. Go to a pro-Trump site and read the comments sections. Trump voters HATE Cruz, Rubio and most of the others. Where Reagan tolerated government protectionism is emergency exception situations, Trump big government advocates label those in favor of a dynamic economic based on economic freedom, "free traitors".
Like Suzette Kelo's and Vera Coking's houses, Trump supporters are full force behind the new government knows best movement supposedly on the right. This is not the exception to his view; it is the centerpiece. I will not compare Trump to the German leader with the mustache, but his most enthusiastic supporters certainly remind me of zeal and false righteousness of those in the early days of that movement.
With Trump I am stuck with a) his message to Indiana, they lost their jobs due to free trade competition, not mismanagement at home, and b) the world would be more stable if we let Saddam Hussein continue his reign of tyranny and pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Hillary Clinton knows we can't afford all her ideas and that Presidential popularity is tied to economic growth.
How either one would govern is a complete mystery.
Trump may stumble into success in foreign policy even though his words have been nonsense. HRC may realize that big government requires a big private sector to fund it.
Neither candidate remotely resembles my economic or foreign policy views.
Add to that Trump's temperament, the latest example slamming a judge from Indiana for his heritage. If Trump stumbles because of that, the support for his misguided policies lives on.
Add in a Bill Kristol style third party candidate. The most he or she could do is pick off a couple of so called red states, ensure a HRC victory and take all the blame.
All is already lost.
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The Never-Trump Diehards
Time to admit defeat and fold your tents.
June 2, 2016
David Horowitz
Reprinted from Breitbart.
One would have though that having failed to stop Trump’s nomination and then failed to find a prominent figure to lead their third-party effort, the beltway renegades would have been embarrassed enough to crawl under a nearby rock where they might ponder their lost credibility and squandered influence. Who, after all, could take seriously a movement launched through a tweet announcing an “impressive” candidate with a “good chance” to alter a national election, who turned out to be an obscure writer with no footprint in the political world?
But if one expected the beltway boys to have second thoughts about their nihilism, one would have been wrong, at least for now. Eyebrows had barely settled when the magazine whose manifesto launched the movement published a list of reasons for their anti-Trump sentiment that others must have missed. Why did they miss them? Because they were “obscured by the fog of political war,” and therefore “insufficiently studied and understood.” Preposterous as this explanation might seem after seven or eight months of Trump-pounding by National Review, Commentary, the Weekly Standard and the vast liberal media conspiracy, the actual reasons proposed by Nicholas Frankovich are even more so.
I will confine myself to the three coherent ones:
“The so-called alt-right, a fusion of nationalism with anti-Semitism and white separatism, has attached itself to Trumpism. Feed the host, and you feed the parasite.” That’s the reason, according to Frankovich – insufficiently studied and understood. But this makes about as much sense as blaming Trump for the violent fascists who “protest” his speeches. To be fair, Frankovich concedes that Trump himself is not a racist or anti-Semite, and also that most of his supporters are innocent, as well. But then he leaps to absurdities like this: “One reason that conservative writers are more likely than the average conservative to be Never Trump may be that they know that the alt-right exists. They spend more time in the political corners of the Internet where that particular virus that the Trump campaign has emboldened is still largely confined.”
So the big, insufficiently understood reason for Never Trump is that somewhere in the political corners of the Internet is a virus that Trump has somehow emboldened, but which is still largely confined to those corners. Perhaps the Never Trumpers haven’t noticed that the virus of anti-Semitic, anti-white racism is out in the streets in large and violent numbers, protesting Trump rallies, or swelling the ranks of Bernie supporters, or that Bernie himself has picked three anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist allies to be on the platform committee of the Democratic Party. If Trump’s virus is still confined to fringe characters on the Internet and Bernie’s and Hillary’s are out in the streets and on the Democrats’ platform committee, what reason can there be for opposing the one man (because he’s the candidate, fellas) who can stop them?
This leads Frankovich “to a second under-examined reason that many conservatives oppose Trump’s candidacy: It has had the effect of legitimizing race-based grievance and of expanding the sphere of speech that is considered taboo, or politically incorrect.” In other words, since Trump has had the balls to blast through the orthodoxy of the left-wing party line, he has also expanded the sphere of politically incorrect speech, which includes racism! How about the racism of the Democratic Party, which remains, after all is said and done, politically correct?
Democrats support racial preferences in hiring, in school admissions — in fact, in virtually every aspect of public life. Democrats control every large inner city, every killing zone – Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans, St. Louis – and control them 100%, and have done so for fifty to a hundred years. Every racist oppression in inner-city America, the failed schools that deny minority children a shot at the American dream, the welfare systems that drive fathers out of the homes and encourage dependency at every level, are products of Democratic policies.
Yet, the Never Trumpers are upset not over the perpetuation of this racist nightmare, which their campaign could make possible, but over the fact that Trump has expanded the discourse – the freedom to speak! – of American politicians and their constituents.
Finally, according to Frankovich, “Trumpism reflects a degradation of American culture but also promotes it. Some of Trump’s fans thrill to his transgression of commonly accepted standards of decency and decorum. Others tolerate it, for the sake of some good they hope he might achieve.” Thinking about this transgression, I am put in mind of a quip from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: “Lyndon Johnson is a politician. You know the ethics those guys have. It’s like a notch beneath child molester.”
The transgression is ongoing; only one side gets to do it more than the other. When Democrats warn voters that black churches will burn if Republicans are elected, as they have done in several presidential campaigns, or accuse Republicans of wanting to put blacks back in chains, as Joe Biden did in the last election, does that lie within the bounds of “accepted standards of decency and decorum”?
The degradation of the political culture is now a fact of political life, as Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton knows all too well. Does fighting back in kind equate to a promotion of degradation? If it does, should one not do it? Should Trump fight with one hand tied behind his back like other Republicans? Should Trump’s chief Republican rivals also have refrained from taunts in kind?
What Frankovich and the Never Trumpers refuse to see is that the political contest as waged by Democrats – and not only Democrats – is already a form of war. Trump’s political style and tactics have allowed him to prevail on a primary battlefield where no one thought he could survive.
Now the battle is with a racist party that wants to dismantle our borders and cripple our defenses in the holy war that Islamists are waging against us. There is no neutral ground. Nor is there a referee to impose rules of decorum and punish transgressors. Only the electorate can do that. The Republican electorate, however, has already spoken on this issue. Their nominee is Trump, and anyone who cherishes our constitutional system is bound to respect that.
Or have the honesty to declare their support for the other side. Or sit the battle out. What is not acceptable is to sabotage your own army in the field and pretend that you don’t want the enemy to win.
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Hat tip, (our own) Pat Pulatie, Hotgas.net
https://www.hotgas.net/2016/06/trump-and-the-judge/
http://journalofamericangreatness.blogspot.com/2016/06/trump-and-judge.html
---------------------------------------------------
My view:
Trump University was a rip off. Still, the lawsuit is most likely frivolous. Anyone who bought Trump's book, which is no doubt all of them, (and had they read it objectively) knew they would learn nothing helpful from these programs. Anyone who bought the first program and paid attention should know they would learn nothing. Still I have no regrets if some judge or jury awards the fools their money back. The whole product was a farce. Yet many graduates of this type of program want the certificate for what its worth to go forth and BS others. They learned as victims how to separate fools from their money.
The Judge's parents were Americans. Before that they were Mexicans who came here legally and got citizenship long before the Judge was born. No illegal status or anchor baby issue exists in his family that I can see.
The Judge honored illegal immigrants, he likely supports Obama, and he brags of his Mexican ties maybe more so than his American pride. Had Trump jumped on his views instead of his heritage, then his attack might have been fair. If that what he was doing, he bugled it. Trump did attack him for bias, but allowed his comments to be taken as on his heritage instead of his views.
Trump's history that he can get away with saying anything is not always going to be helpful to his choice of future comments. He needs a wider base to win 270 electoral votes than he needed when he started to win a plurality in a divided field in one party.
Trump appears to be putting the interests of winning his lawsuit ahead of winning the Presidency. He is trying to influence the Judge's next decision by attacking him, but forgot he was running for President? Just like the media and the electorate, Trump is easily distracted.
Meanwhile we head into summer talking about shiny objects instead of a focus on reigning in our runaway government.
One more example of why Donald Trump is not Reagan and is not my choice for President.
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Trump’s Islam Narrative is Just Reality
Islam really does hate us.
June 6, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
Former NSA head Michael Hayden recently joined a chorus of Trump’s critics blasting him for offending Muslims. “The jihadist narrative is that there is undying enmity between Islam and the modern world, so when Trump says they all hate us, he’s using their narrative," he said.
That’s true. It’s also meaningless because in this case the narrative is reality.
Jihadists do hate us. Islam has viewed the rest of the world with undying enmity for over a thousand years. Some might quibble over whether a 7th century obsession really counts as “undying”, but it’s a whole lot older than Hayden, the United States of America, our entire language and much of our civilization.
Islam divides the world into the Dar Al-Islam and the Dar Al-Harb, the House of Islam and the House of War. This is not just the jihadist narrative, it is the Islamic narrative and we would be fools to ignore it.
The White House is extremely fond of narratives. The past month featured Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy guru, taking a victory lap for successfully pushing his “narrative” on the Iran deal. Rhodes takes pride in his narratives. His media allies love narratives. But none of the narratives change the fact that Iran is moving closer to getting a nuclear bomb. Narratives don’t change reality. They’re a delusion.
Narratives only work on the people you fool. They don’t remove the underlying danger. All they do is postpone the ultimate recognition of the problem with catastrophic results.
Islamic terrorism is a reality. Erase all the narratives and the fact of its existence remains.
Instead of fighting a war against the reality of Islamic terrorism, our leaders have chosen to fight a war against reality. They don’t have a plan for defeating Islamic terrorism, but for defeating reality.
So far they have fought reality to a draw. Ten thousand Americans are dead at the hands of Islamic terrorists and Muslim migration to America has doubled. Islamic terrorists are carving out their own countries and our leaders are focused on defeating their “narratives” on social media.
Hayden repeats the familiar nonsense that recognizing reality plays into the enemy narrative. And then the only way to defeat Islamic terrorism is by refusing to recognize its existence out of fear that we might play into its narrative. But Islamic terrorism doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.
You don’t have to believe in a bomb or a bullet for it to kill you. A plane headed for your office building or a machete at your neck is not a narrative, it is reality. If we can’t tell the difference between reality and what we believe, then reality will kill us. And nothing we believe will change that.
We are not fighting a war of narratives with Islam. This is a war of bombs and bullets, planes crashing into buildings and blades digging into necks. And yet the men in charge of fighting this war remain obsessed with winning a battle of narratives inside the Muslim world. They have no plans for winning the war. Instead they are occupied with managing the intensity of the conflict, taking out the occasional terrorist leader, bombing only when a jihadist group like ISIS has become too powerful, while waiting for their moderate Muslim allies to win the war of narratives for them by discrediting the jihadists.
The narrative mistake is understandable. The left remains convinced that it can get its way through propaganda. Its record is certainly impressive. But it’s strictly a domestic record. Getting Americans to believe seven strictly irrational social justice things before breakfast is very different than convincing the members of a devout tribal society with a deep sense of history that they really don’t want to kill Americans. All that the narrative war accomplished was to show that the propagandists who convinced Americans to vote for their own exploitation have no idea how to even begin convincing Muslims to do anything. Think Again Turn Away was an embarrassment. Various outreach efforts failed miserably. American politicians devoutly apologize for any disrespect to Islam, but Muslims don’t care.
Hayden isn’t wrong that there is a narrative. But Nazism also had a narrative. Once the Nazis had power, they began acting on it and their narrative became a reality that had to be stopped by armed force. But at a deeper level he is wrong because he isn’t reciting the Islamic or even the jihadist narrative, but a deceptive narrative aimed at us in order to block recognition of the problem of Islamic terrorism.
The Islamic narrative isn’t just that we hate them. More importantly, it’s that they hate us. Muslim terrorists are not passively reacting to us. They carry a hatred that is far older than our country. That hatred is encoded in the holy books of Islam. But that hatred is only a means to an end.
Hatred is the means. Conquest is the end.
Assuming that Muslims are oppressed minorities is a profound intellectual error crippling our ability to defend ourselves. Islamic terrorism is not an anti-colonial movement, but a colonial one. ISIS and its Islamic ilk are not oppressed minorities, but oppressive majorities. Islamic terror does not react to us, as men like Hayden insist. Instead we react to Islam. And our obsession with playing into enemy narratives is a typically reactive response. Rising forces generate their own narratives. Politically defeated movements typically obsess about not making things worse by playing into the narratives that their enemies have spread about them. That is why Republicans panic over any accusation of racism. Or why the vanilla center of the pro-Israel movement winces every time Israel shoots a terrorist.
Western leaders claim to be fighting narratives, but they have no interest in actually challenging the Islamic narrative of superiority that is the root cause of this conflict. Instead they take great pains not to offend Muslims. This does not challenge the Islamic supremacist narrative, instead it affirms it.
Rather than challenging Islamic narratives, they are stuck in an Islamic narrative. They are trapped by the Muslim Brotherhood’s narrative of “Good Islamist” and “Bad Islamist” convinced that the only way to win is to appeal to the “Good Islamist” and team up with him to fight the “Bad Islamist”.
The “moderate” Muslim majority who are our only hope for stopping Islamic terrorism is an enemy narrative manufactured and distributed by an Islamic supremacist organization. When we repeat it, we distort our strategy and our thinking in ways that allow us to be manipulated and controlled.
It isn’t Trump who is playing into jihadist narratives, but Hayden and everyone who claims that recognizing Islamic terrorism plays into enemy narratives while failing to recognize that what they are saying is an enemy narrative.
The very notion that the good opinion of the enemy should constrain our military operations, our thinking and even our ability to recognize reality is an enemy narrative of unprecedented effect.
And this is the narrative that our leaders and the leaders of the world have knelt in submission to.
Narratives only have the power that we assign to them. No narrative is stronger than reality unless we believe in it. Not only have our leaders chosen to play into the enemy narrative, but they have accepted its premise as the only way to win. And so they are bound to lose until they break out of the narrative.
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Doug:
Thanks for bringing Pat's piece to our attention. Pretty impressive I thought!
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Doug:
Thanks for bringing Pat's piece to our attention. Pretty impressive I thought!
I think he was linking/quoting another author's piece but he is also writing his own series on the case and the judge.
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I read PP post about Trumps comments on the judge. Sometimes it is not what you say but HOW you say it. He states things sometimes as clumsily and curdely as possible which rather than making his legitimate points does nothing but embolden his enemies.
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Clarification to my previous post:
"He states things sometimes as clumsily and crudely as possible which rather than making his legitimate points does nothing but embolden his enemies."
I meant Trump , not Pat
Sometimes *context* is everything.
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I read PP post about Trumps comments on the judge. Sometimes it is not what you say but HOW you say it. He [Trump] states things sometimes as clumsily and crudely as possible which rather than making his legitimate points does nothing but embolden his enemies.
Right. There was a point to be made against this judge and his politics and Trump bungled it. Trump thinks he is immune from the laws of political correctness, but his detractors already think he is a racist and he keeps giving more and more people reason to think that is true.
The judge didn't come across the border yesterday. His parents came, legally, in the 1940s and he was born in Indiana 1300 miles from the border. If there is a case to be made, it is the judge's politics in question, not his heritage.
In fact, what Trump was doing was trying to defeat his competition again by public, verbal bullying. That appeals to some and not to others.
Byron York has a good take on it today:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-trump-self-destructive-rambling-baffles-gop-strategists/article/2593163
Trump spent 10 minutes on this in a San Diego speech bringing it back, unnecessarily, into the campaign. More time than he spent on jobs, military issues or anything else. York quotes the entire 10 minutes at the end of his column and it is rambling. Forget what his point was, being able to speak well without notes or script is quite a skill. Rambling on is not. If I was there to find out how to make America Great Again, I would have been miserably disappointed.
Add to that his Reagan comparisons. Reagan got three things done by doggedly keeping his focus on his short list of three things he wanted to get done. And when he got them done, the US and the world were safer and more prosperous. Trump's three things are get elected, insult others, and I don't know for sure what else.
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Trump is NOT a team player. He is in charge and everyone else must by his disciples who pick up after him and try to clean up his messes.
That has worked for those who are delusional to the point of excusing every bomb shell that comes out of his mouth but for the rest it is slow suicide.
I agree with them on many points but they are delusional to think they are going to win over any independents or moderate leftists with this strategy.
I just don't see how this can avoid losing more from the party then we bring in .
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This could go under the humor thread but here is best. Remember this:
Fake Russian shlongs Trump big time.. Can you imagine him with a real Russian leader?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkxxxuWLSac
laughing out loud.
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FWIW, (and probably a different organization from the Judge's)
http://pamelageller.com/2016/06/san-jose-police-chief-who-admits-allowing-attacks-on-trump-supporters-is-affiliated-with-la-raza.html/
PS: "La Raza" means "the Race" (as in "Meztizo").
Anyway, looks like we are seeing an example of what we feared with Trump as nominee.
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The False Comparison of Trump to Hillary
Unveiling the false equivalence.
June 7, 2016
Bruce Thornton
A lot of Republicans still upset over Donald Trump winning the nomination resort to a false equivalence between Trump and Clinton in order to justify sitting the election out or even voting for Hillary.
Take a recent example by the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru. First he lists Hillary’s manifold sins that Trump is innocent of: lying to the parents of the Benghazi victims, promising to nominate hard-left jurists to the Supreme Court, and supporting Obamas’ high-tax economics and unconstitutional amnesty of illegal aliens.
Then Ponnuru offers a catalogue of Trump’s sins Hillary hasn’t committed: mocking a reporter’s disability, indulging a preposterous conspiracy theory about Ted Cruz’s father and Lee Harvey Oswald, threatening a trade war with China, or threatening war crimes against the families of terrorists. Trump’s list presumably balances Hillary’s flaws, in order to make the point that both Trump and Hillary are equally distasteful, thus making the election a Hobson’s choice for principled conservatives.
But this comparison is false and misleading, for Trump and Clinton have had very different careers with different obligations and responsibilities.
Most obviously, Donald Trump is a private citizen who has never held public office. He is a businessman in a world where decorum and class often aren’t as important as sharp elbows and tough negotiating skills, where making a profit is more important than consistency or sparing people’s feelings. His goal is to make money, and his flamboyant life-style is our culture’s sign of his skills and success at doing so. Moreover, his flaws of personality and character, like his rude bluster and outrageous claims, are not, alas, that exceptional or different from those of millions of other private citizens, which may explain his populist appeal. And in his line of work, especially as a reality television star, such braggadocio and insensitivity may be assets. Intellectuals of more delicate sensibilities and refined manners may not like such déclassé qualities or grubby dealings, but most of them don’t live in a hard, risky world of tough negotiations and profit and loss.
Hillary Clinton is in a very different line of work from Trump’s. Her whole life has been spent as what we laughably call a public servant. In other words, she is supposed to be working not for profit or her own status and enrichment, but for the public weal. For progressives, that means striving for “social justice,” income equality, the abolition of prejudice and bigotry, the emancipation of women, the improvement of the middle class, and the salvation of the planet from the merchants of death by carbon. This is what she tells us over and over, and this is her case for why she should be president.
But while Trump’s character flaws have been assets in his profession, Hillary’s arrogant sense of entitlement, relentless money-grubbing, chronic mendacity, and obvious dislike of people other than her minions all undercut her claims to be a public servant, and help explain why she has serially failed at that role.
Of course, some presidents have shared the same flaws as Hillary, but they at least showed some restraint in exploiting their position for private gain, and at least could pretend to be a warm “people person,” as the ghastly phrase goes. Even Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh In. But Hillary has been inept at camouflaging her unseemly ambitions and even pretending to be a caring tribune of the people––in contrast, say, to Elizabeth Warren, who is just as much a hypocritical one-percenter as Hillary, but manages to come across as sincerely passionate. With Trump, however, you know exactly what you’re getting.
Finally, if a businessman like Trump fails, he reaps most of the damage. But if a “public servant” like Hillary fails, the security and interests of every single one of us are damaged, even as she advances her own political and fiscal interests as much as Trump does. Trump’s alleged shenanigans with Trump University are nothing compared to Hillary’s exploitation of her position as Secretary of State to steer money to her foundation, which is to say to herself, her husband, her daughter, her friends and political cronies, no matter the damage to America’s interests. Trump’s inconsistencies and alleged exaggerations about his net worth or charitable contributions are a dog-bites-man story compared to Hillary’s lies about Benghazi and her private email server. Nothing Trump has publicly said or done is as self-servingly despicable as Hillary’s implications that the grieving families of the four dead Americans in Benghazi are not telling the truth about her personal promise to them to “get” the obscure producer of the on-line video supposedly responsible for the attacks, when she knew that claim was untrue.
In short, Trump has been accountable to the bottom line. Hillary has been accountable to the people. Trump has succeeded in his job; Hillary has failed abysmally at hers. Making the two equally unpalatable to the principled voter is making a false equivalence between two different kinds of public life.
Perhaps Trump’s flaws would make him a bad president. But other presidents who had flaws equally distasteful––such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, or Bill Clinton––managed to do some good things as president regardless. With Trump there’s at least a chance he could turn out to be a better president than his bluster and insults suggest. Hillary, on the other hand, has a long public record of using her position for personal gain, and putting her ambition ahead of her responsibilities to the country she supposedly serves. Her role as First Lady was marked by bungling health care reform, indulging silly fantasies of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and allowing herself––an “I am woman hear me roar” feminist––to be publicly humiliated by her satyr husband while attacking his victims. Her tenure in the Senate lacked any substantive legislative achievements, and her stint as Secretary of State furthered Obama’s destruction of America’s global influence, power, and security from Syria to the South China Sea. It may be possible that she could experience a road-to-the-White House conversion and become a good president, but given everything we know from her 25 years of public “service,” the probability is close to zero.
With Trump, in contrast, we know that at least he won’t be as destructive to our political order as Obama has been. With Hillary the odds are much higher that she will continue Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of our country into an E.U.-like technocratic regime of smug elites whose aim is to erode individual freedom and compromise our country’s sovereignty. Worse yet, if she becomes president, she will most likely nominate two or three Supreme Court justices, creating a court that will gut the and First and Second Amendments and legitimize further the dismantling of the Constitution’s divided powers and limited executive. And don’t put your faith in the Republican Senate that confirmed Loretta Lynch to shoot down every one of Hillary’s picks, even if that means eight years of an eight-member court.
The November election is not a choice between two equally bad candidates. It’s the moment when we reject the candidate who we know, based on her long public record of corruption, lying, and grasping for power and wealth, will take us further down the road to political perdition.
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Hi Objectivist,
Like your posts. I agree with a lot from the above post but I would like to make a clarification of this:
"But this comparison is false and misleading, for Trump and Clinton have had very different careers with different obligations and responsibilities."
But this is misleading. Because now they have identical career paths and obligations and responsibilities. They are both RUNNING for President. And yes I personally expect some level of common decency from a potential leader. How about a bit more tact and politeness.
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The LEFT is having a field day with this. *Trump can't even unify our OWN party let alone the country*. Pass me a double dose of maalox. Yes, I know. All those who criticize the Donald are just a bunch of a holes and Trump is a genius:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
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http://conservativetribune.com/trump-called-my-african-american/
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http://conservativetribune.com/anti-trump-judge-comes-out/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=PostUp&utm_campaign=ConservativeBrief&utm_content=2016-06-08
It does NOT help that it is on the Alex Jones show. IMHO AJ is a disreputable guy.
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STUNNING NEW DEVELOPMENT!!! MEDIA CALLS TRUMP RACIST
June 8, 2016 - Ann Coulter.
Annoyed at federal judge Gonzalo P. Curiel's persistent rulings against him in the Trump University case (brought by a law firm that has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches by Bill and Hillary), Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that maybe it's because the judge is a second-generation Mexican immigrant.
The entire media -- and most of the GOP -- have spent 10 months telling us that Mexicans in the United States are going to HATE Trump for saying he'll build a wall. Now they're outraged that Trump thinks one Mexican hates him for saying he'll build a wall.
Curiel has distributed scholarships to illegal aliens. He belongs to an organization that sends lawyers to the border to ensure that no illegal aliens' "human rights" are violated. The name of the organization? The San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association -- "La Raza" meaning THE RACE.
Let's pause to imagine the nomination hearings for a white male who belonged to any organization for white people -- much less one with the words "THE RACE" in its title.
The media were going to call Trump a racist whatever he did, and his attack on a Hispanic judge is way better than when they said it was racist for Republicans to talk about Obama’s golfing.
Has anyone ever complained about the ethnicity of white judges or white juries? I've done some research and it turns out ... THAT'S ALL WE'VE HEARD FOR THE PAST 40 YEARS.
The New York Times alone has published hundreds of articles, editorials, op-eds, movie reviews, sports articles and crossword puzzles darkly invoking "white judges" and "all-white" juries, as if that is ipso facto proof of racist justice.
Two weeks ago -- that's not an error; I didn't mean to type "decades" and it came out "weeks" -- the Times published an op-ed by a federal appeals judge stating: "All-white juries risk undermining the perception of justice in minority communities, even if a mixed-race jury would have reached the same verdict or imposed the same sentence."
In other words, even when provably not unfair, white jurors create the "perception" of unfairness solely by virtue of the color of their skin.
Innocence Project co-founder Barry Scheck's entire career of springing criminals would be gone if it were generally accepted that we can't question judges or juries based on race or ethnicity. Writing about the release of Glenn Ford, a black man convicted of robbing a jewelry store and murdering the owner, Scheck claimed that one of the most important factors in Ford's death sentence was the "all-white jury."
On the other hand, the evidence against Ford included: His two black friends telling police he'd shown them jewelry the day of the murder, another Ford acquaintance swearing he'd had a .38 in his waistband -- the murder weapon was a .38 -- and the gunshot residue on Ford's hand. His conviction was overturned many years later, on the theory that his black friends had committed the murder, then framed him.
So we know 1) the "real killers" were also black; and 2) any jury would have convicted Ford on that evidence.
Here's how the Times described Ford's trial: "A black man convicted of murder by an all-white jury in Louisiana in 1984 and sentenced to die, tapped into an equally old and painful vein of race."
I have approximately 1 million more examples of the media going mental about a "white judge" or "all-white jury," and guess what? In none of them were any of the white people involved members of organizations dedicated to promoting white people, called "THE RACE."
Say, does anyone remember if it ever came up that the Ferguson police force was all white? Someone check that.
I don’t want to upset you New York Times editorial board, but perhaps we should revisit the results of the Nuremberg trials. Those were presided over by – TRIGGER WARNING! – “all white” juries. (How do we really know if Hermann Göring was guilty without hearing women's and Latino voices?)
The model of a fair jury was the O.J. trial. Nine blacks, one Hispanic and two whites, who had made up their minds before the lawyers' opening statements. (For my younger readers: O.J. was guilty; the jury acquitted him after 20 seconds of deliberation.) At the end of the trial, one juror gave O.J. the black power salute. Nothing to see here. It was Mark Fuhrman's fault!
In defiance of everyday experience, known facts and common sense, we are all required to publicly endorse the left's religious belief that whites are always racist, but women and minorities are incapable of any form of bias. If you say otherwise, well, that's "textbook racism," according to Paul Ryan.
At least when we're talking about American blacks, there's a history of white racism, so the double standard is not so enraging. What did we ever do to Mexicans? Note to Hispanics, Muslims, women, immigrants and gays: You're not black.
Other than a few right-wingers, no one denounced now-sitting Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor for her "wise Latina" speech, in which she said "our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging."
But Trump is a "racist" for saying the same thing.
Six months ago, a Times editorial demanded that the Republican Senate confirm Obama judicial nominee Luis Felipe Restrepo, on the grounds that "[a]s a Hispanic," Restrepo would bring "ethnic ... diversity to the court."
You see how confusing this is. On one hand, it's vital that we have more women and Latinos on the courts because white men can't be trusted to be fair. But to suggest that women and Latinos could ever be unfair in the way that white men can, well, that's "racist."
The effrontery of this double standard is so blinding, that the only way liberals can bluff their way through it is with indignation. DO I HEAR YOU RIGHT? ARE YOU SAYING A JUDGE'S ETHNICITY COULD INFLUENCE HIS DECISIONS? (Please, please, please don't bring up everything we've said about white judges and juries for the past four decades.)
They're betting they can intimidate Republicans -- and boy, are they right!
The entire Republican Brain Trust has joined the media in their denunciations of Trump for his crazy idea that anyone other than white men can be biased. That's right, Wolf, I don't have any common sense. Would it help if the GOP donated to Hillary?
The NeverTrump crowd is going to get a real workout if they plan to do this every week between now and the election.
What do Republicans think they're getting out of this appeasement? Proving to voters that elected Republicans are pathetic, impotent media suck-ups is, surprisingly, not hurting Trump.
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Trump Is Right to be Suspicious of Judge
And sorry, lefties: “La Raza” means “Master Race.”
June 9, 2016 - Matthew Vadum - frontpagemag.com
Donald Trump has every right to question the impartiality of a “pro-Mexican” judge presiding over the Trump University lawsuit and doing so does not make him a racist or a bigot of any kind.
The stampede of weak-kneed Republican office-holders tripping over each other in a frenzied rush to denounce the presumptive GOP nominee for president shows how the Left’s pathological ideas about race continue to dominate the thinking even of so-called conservatives who ought to know better. Yell “racist!” and Republicans run for the hills.
As Pat Buchanan opines, “[t]o many liberals, all white Southern males are citizens under eternal suspicion of being racists. The most depressing thing about this episode is to see Republicans rushing to stomp on Trump, to show the left how well they have mastered their liberal catechism.”
To recap, the real estate magnate has said that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, an Indiana-born U.S. citizen whose parents emigrated from Mexico, is issuing unfair rulings against him in a high-profile class-action lawsuit. Trump claims the trial judge’s prejudice relates to his promise to crack down on illegal immigration and build a wall along the border with Mexico to keep illegal aliens out.
Curiel ordered that internal documents from Trump University be made public. The ruling caused elation among reporters, including 20 from the Washington Post who are digging for dirt about the candidate, as they began fantasizing about winning the Pulitzer Prize for taking down a Republican presidential candidate.
Trump said it is "just common sense" that Curiel’s connections to Mexico explain his anti-Trump rulings.
"He's a member of a club or society very strongly pro-Mexican, which is all fine. But I say he's got bias," Trump said Sunday. "This judge has treated me very unfairly. He's treated me in a hostile manner, and there's something going on." Trump also said it is “possible” a Muslim judge might also be biased against him because he advocates a temporary ban on the entry of Muslims into the U.S.
Trump is right. Judges can be influenced, sometimes inappropriately, by their life experiences.
Besides, Trump was merely echoing remarks by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a person of Puerto Rican ancestry, who said her ethnicity and upbringing affect her rulings. “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
So if Trump’s comments were racist – and in this writer’s opinion they were not – then so were Sotomayor’s. Sotomayor is met with applause; Trump is met with sputtering vituperation.
Despite the hysterical accusations against Trump coming from politicians in both parties, it needs to be pointed out that he never said that there is something about being Mexican or of Mexican ancestry that makes a person incapable of being an impartial judge. It’s not a congenital or a genetic thing. He said that this particular Obama-appointed judge, Gonzalo Curiel, who belongs to a left-wing Latino lawyers’ group, has an axe to grind because his parents came from Mexico.
Curiel is a member of a group called San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association (SDLRLA). SDLRLA’s website identifies National Council of La Raza (NCLR), a race-baiting leftist group that strongly condemns Trump’s immigration policy proposals, as part of its “community.” The group is affiliated with the Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA) which called Trump “racist” last year for promising to secure the border and vowed to target Trump’s “business interests” with boycotts.
Identity politics and whiny racial grievance-mongering is what SDLRLA and possibly every group with la raza (“the race” in English) in its name is about.
The very concept of la raza is racist, but more on that in a moment.
Trump is right to be concerned about the fact that in 2014, when Curiel certified the class action, he appointed Robbins Geller to act for the plaintiffs. That firm has reportedly shelled out $675,000 in speaking fees since 2009 to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzalez (R), said the circumstances of the case “at least raise a legitimate question to be considered.”
“Regardless of the way Trump has gone about raising his concerns over whether he’s getting a fair trial, none of us should dismiss those concerns out of hand without carefully examining how a defendant in his position might perceive them — and we certainly should not dismiss them for partisan political reasons.”
The litigation deals with consumer complaints regarding the now-defunct Trump University, a pricey 3-day seminar about selling real estate. The plaintiffs allege that the school was a scam but plenty of former students give it top marks.
It’s not like Trump can blow off questions about the case because it is before the courts. The legal case has become a political issue and Trump is absolutely entitled to defend himself. His opponents bark endlessly about it every day. During primary season, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called it a “fake university” and used it to support his argument that Trump was a “con artist.”
The presidential campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton has been pounding Trump for days. “Trump U is devastating because it’s a metaphor for his whole campaign: promising hardworking Americans a way to get ahead, but all based on lies,” campaign press secretary Brian Fallon wrote on Twitter.
The great irony in all of this is that the left-wing Latino groups accusing Trump of racism are the real racists.
Created by the far-left Ford Foundation in 1968, the National Council of La Raza argues that la raza “is an inclusive concept, meaning that Hispanics share with all other peoples of the world a common heritage and destiny.” President Janet Murguia claims la raza “simply refers to the Hispanic people and it is a nod to our common heritage.”
Similarly, the SDLRLA claims la raza means “the people” or “the community.”
According to Google Translate, the Spanish noun raza means “race, breed, colorcast.” If these radical groups wanted to express the idea of “people” in their names they could have chosen gente, pueblo, personas, habitantes, nación, or súbditos. For “community,” they could have selected comunidad, colectividad, sociedad, común, union, or mancomunidad.
Of course, Murguia and Judge Curiel’s group are lying. La raza can be translated as “the master race,” and the concept of the “Hispanic” was only invented in 1972 by President Richard Nixon, four years after NCLR was founded.
As Mark Krikorian of the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has explained, the concept of la raza emerged as Nazism gained steam in the 1920s and was the brainchild of former Mexican secretary of public education Jose Vasconcelos. The politician and thinker has been called the “cultural caudillo” of the Mexican Revolution.
La raza “can be traced to the ideas and writings of Jose Vasconcelos, the Mexican theorist who developed the theory of la raza cosmica (the cosmic or super race) at least partially as a minority reaction to the Nordic notions of racial superiority,” New Mexico Highlands University professors Guillermo Lux (history) and Maurilio Vigil (political science) wrote.
They continued:
“Vasconelos developed a systematic theory which argued that climatic and geographic conditions and mixture of Spanish and Indian races created a superior race. The concept of La Raza connotes that the mestizo is a distinct race and not Caucasian, as is technically the case.”
(Mestizo, by the way, is a Spanish word used in Latin America to refer to someone who is of mixed race, usually the child of a person of Spanish descent and an American Indian. One third of U.S. Hispanics identify as mixed-race while mestizos “represent a racial majority in Mexico[.]”)
So la raza really does mean “the Master Race, but rather than based on notions of racial purity, La Raza’s inherent, biological superiority is based on its hybridity, on the mixing in Latin America of, in Vasconcelos’s words, ‘the black, the Indian, the Mongol, and the white,’” writes Krikorian. La raza really means that “Hispanics, and specifically Mestizos, are superior to those of us unfortunate enough not to be part of the cosmic race.”
La raza “was a source of pride for many Latinos, the most militant of whom adopted the motto: ‘Por la raza todo, fuera de la raza nada’ — ‘For the race, everything, outside the race, nothing,’" according to Jerry Kammer, also of CIS. This la raza ideology animates the reconquista movement which aspires to return the territory the U.S. took from Mexico to Mexican sovereignty. Some radicals wish to recreate Aztlan.
A hero of the Left, labor organizer Cesar Chavez, a natural born American of Mexican ancestry, thought la raza was a dangerous, un-American concept.
“I hear about la raza more and more,” he said.
“Some people don’t look at it as racism, but when you say ‘la raza,’ you are saying an anti-gringo thing, and our fear is that it won’t stop there. Today it’s anti-gringo, tomorrow it will be anti-Negro, and the day after it will be anti-Filipino, anti-Puerto Rican. And then it will be anti-poor-Mexican, and anti-darker-skinned Mexican.”
That Chavez viewed this kind of Mexican race-consciousness as destructive was reinforced by his lieutenant LeRoy Chatfield around 1970.
"Everyone should be proud of what they are, of course, but race is only skin-deep. It's phony and it comes out of frustration; the la raza people are not secure. … He said to me just the other day, 'Can't they understand that that's just the way Hitler started?' A few months ago the Ford Foundation funded a la raza group and Cesar really told them off. The foundation liked the outfit's sense of pride or something, and Cesar tried to explain to them what the origin of the word was, that it's related to Hitler's concept."
Donald Trump may not even realize just how right he happens to be.
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"Trump Is Right to be Suspicious of Judge"
Objectivist. I don't disagree with this statement. Any member of LaRaza has to be suspect as believing in radical political activism and most specifically pushing for amnesty etc.
But that doesn't mean the judge believes this or even more importantly rules his Court with this bias.
It was the way in which Trump brought it up that is very hard to defend. He brings up his *personal*Trump University issue at a rally and accuses the judge of being a "hater" and more.
Very crudely done and not thought out well at all. To do it in that manner was embarrassing.
I could go on but I think I make my point.
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CCP:
My point (and Mathew Vadum's in the article below) is that Trump is defending himself, and has very good reasons for doing so. Why Republicans have this obsession with "decorum," when clearly the Democrats have ZERO concern with this - and use it quite effectively against Republicans routinely - is beyond me. It's as if Republicans have chosen to unilaterally disarm themselves in a war - and that's exactly what it is - make no mistake - and the enemy is quite willing and eager to take up those weapons and use them against us, knowing we will not respond in kind. Donald Trump recognizes the folly of this, and refuses to go along with this suicidal mindset. He will fight fire with fire, and is not afraid (unlike most Republicans) to do so. I can't wait to hear his speech on the Clintons on Monday laying out the long, ugly history of their criminal behaviour and record of poor "decorum" that makes Trump look like a saint in comparison. No other Republican has the balls to do this. This is why Republicans continue to lose elections. They have no idea how to fight.
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"Why Republicans have this obsession with "decorum," when clearly the Democrats have ZERO concern with this - and use it quite effectively against Republicans routinely - is beyond me. "
Obj. You and I are on same team. I agree with you in principle. I will vote for Donald.
But decorum is important and in view I will say why. And that is we need to attract those who are on the fence or in the middle or if we call them independent ( which to me are those who don't stand for anything and will vote with the wind or whatever sounds good on any given day)
Trump has to be careful not to offend them
As doctor in NJ I work with many foreign born doctors Indian HIndus, Msulims, Orientals. While I do not bring up politics with most I have some tell me Trump is a "bigot"
I don't think he is but those who are sensitive will. A few of them WERE Republican. They are not now and it is because of him
Do not underestimate what a big vulgar mouth can do to people.
IF he was simply more polite and eloquent and tactful about making his points, this may not have happened.
I can tell you now that with these groups from Asia - it IS ALL ABOUT RACE first!
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CCP:
I must respectfully disagree with you. Democrats are ROUTINELY much more vulgar than Trump has ever been. The media simply don't focus on it endlessly - in fact they treat it as if it's no big deal. Witness Joe Biden's comments about Indians, Harry Reid about Obama being a "Clean, articulate black guy," etc., etc., etc. This idea that independents are SO OFFENDED by vulgarity and will go running straight into the Democrats' arms at the first mean word out of a Republican's mouth is absurd. The Democrats OWN racist, bigoted and vulgar commentary, and it surely hasn't hurt them with independents in any of the last several elections. It's high time someone called out the Democrats for exactly the scum they are - and simply told the truth about how they have destroyed the inner cities of every place they have controlled politically for 50 years or more. I repeat - no Republican has had the balls to simply do this. Trump does.
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Obj,
FWIW his poll #s are bit down this week. Whether significant or related to his criticism of the judge I don't know.
All I can say is I hope you're right. :-)
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Anyone have URL for Trump's speech today?
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I did not listen. I am afraid to her him speak anymore. Never know what comes out of his mouth:
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFIVXkJWzfA
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/06/13/trump_must_be_consequences_for_muslims_not_reporting_potential_terrorists.html
I would love to see the libs dispute this concept. (personally I am not sure about this though)
There are multiple states who make it a CRIME for any health care worker who does not report child abuse or even a *suspicion* of child abuse.
The concept is to err on child safety over possibly falsely accusing someone of child abuse.
Using this analogy one could say the same thing for Muslims who are not reporting suspicious activity.
Lets see what the libs say here. :evil:
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FINALLY: A REALISTIC PLAN FOR FIGHTING THE JIHAD AND PROTECTING AMERICANS
Courtesy of Donald Trump.
June 14, 2016 Robert Spencer
We’ve gotten so used to politically correct obfuscation about Islam being a religion of peace that preaches tolerance and non-violence that Donald Trump’s words in his address Monday were startling: “Many of the principles of radical Islam are incompatible with Western values and institutions. Remember this, radical Islam is anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-American. I refuse to allow America to become a place where gay people, Christian people, Jewish people are targets of persecution and intimation by radical Islamic preachers of hate and violence.”
Trump continued: “This is not just a national security issue. It’s a quality of life issue. If we want to protect the quality of life for all Americans — women and children, gay and straight, Jews and Christians and all people then we need to tell the truth about radical Islam and we need to do it now.”
One may quibble about whether jihad violence and Sharia oppression in Islam are really “radical,” but the fact is that Donald Trump has become the first nominee of either party since 9/11 to reject the usual nonsense about how jihadis believe in and preach a twisted, hijacked version of the religion of peace. Even more importantly, Trump is now the first presidential candidate since maybe John Quincy Adams to recognize that the problem posed by Islam is not just restricted to the specter of violent jihad attacks, but is, given Sharia oppression of women, gays, and non-Muslims, very much, as Trump put it, a “quality of life issue.”
Trump declared his determination to prevent more jihad attacks such as the one in Orlando Saturday night above all by reiterating his proposal temporarily to “suspend immigration from areas of the world where there’s a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies until we fully understand how to end these threats.” CNN huffed: “Critics of Trump's policies, however, have pointed out that the perpetrator of the Orlando massacre was born in the U.S.”
Those critics are not being honest. What Trump actually said was that the Orlando jihad mass murderer was born “of Afghan parents, who immigrated to the United States.” He noted, quite correctly, that “the bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place, was because we allowed his family to come here,” and pointed out, quite rightly, that “we have a dysfunctional immigration system, which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens properly….We’re importing radical Islamic terrorism into the West through a failed immigration system and through an intelligence community held back by our president. Even our own FBI director has admitted that we cannot effectively check the backgrounds of people we’re letting into America. ”
Can any truthful person seriously dispute that? Tashfeen Malik, who, along with her husband Syed Rizwan Farook murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino last December 2, had passed five separate background checks from five different U.S. government agencies. If the U.S. did not have a “dysfunctional immigration system,” she would never have been in the country in the first place. And neither would her husband, about whom Trump noted that he was “the child of immigrants from Pakistan and he brought his wife, the other terrorist from Saudi Arabia through another one of our easily exploited visa programs.”
Trump skewered Hillary Clinton for having “repeatedly refused to even say the words radical Islam until I challenged her yesterday.” He quoted her fatuous words: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people, and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism” and opined “she’s in total denial, and her continuing reluctance to ever name the enemy broadcasts weakness across the entire world — true weakness.” Clinton wants, he said, “to take away American’s guns and then admit the very people who want to slaughter us. Let them come into the country, we don’t have guns. Let them come in, let them have all the fun they want….The bottom line is that Hillary supports policies that bring the threat of radical Islam into American and allow it to grow overseas, and it is growing.”
Trump’s point was sound. In what way was it not? Combining unrestricted immigration and a massive influx of Muslim migrants, among whom the Islamic State has promised to embed jihadis, with a disarmed American population is simply an invitation to jihad massacres on a frequency never hitherto imagined. Could there be an Orlando-style attack every day? Why not, in the America of the near future that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are busy preparing for us?
Trump declared: “The burden is on Hillary Clinton to tell us why she believes immigration from these dangerous countries should be increased without any effective system to really to screen.” Again, his point his sound: all those, including Hillary, who are busy excoriating Trump for the “racism” and “bigotry” of his immigration proposal have not bothered to suggest any alternative plan for preventing jihadis from entering the country. The bottom line, to borrow one of Trump’s pet phrases, is that Hillary and the rest of the political and media elites would rather see Americans subjected to jihad mass murder on a huge scale than do anything that is politically incorrect.
Another foray into political incorrectness in Trump’s speech was his insistence that the Muslim community in the U.S. has “to work with us. They have to cooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad. They know it. And they have to do it, and they have to do it forthwith….The Muslims have to work with us. They have to work with us. They know what’s going on. They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And you know what? We had death, and destruction.”
The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was furious. CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper claimed that “law enforcement authorities have repeatedly stated that they have tremendous cooperation from the Muslim community.” CAIR’s hypocrisy is astounding, as it has more than once advised Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement. In January 2011, its San Francisco chapter featured on its website a poster that read, “Build A Wall of Resistance / Don’t Talk to the FBI.” In November 2014, CAIR-Florida’s “14th Annual Banquet Rooted in Faith” in Tampa distributed pamphlets entitled “What to do if the FBI comes for you” and featuring a graphic of a person holding a finger to his lips in the “shhh” signal.
Another CAIR pamphlet, entitled “Know Your Rights: Defending Rights, Defeating Intolerance” featured a graphic of the Statue of Liberty likewise making the “shhh” symbol. Cyrus McGoldrick, a former official of Hamas-linked CAIR’s New York chapter, even threatened informants, tweeting with brutal succinctness: “Snitches get stitches.” Zahra Billoo of CAIR-San Francisco regularly tweets that Muslims have no obligation to talk to the FBI, and should contact Hamas-linked CAIR if the FBI asks to talk to them.
This is the group criticizing Trump for noting that Muslim communities have not been any significant help in rooting out jihadis from among them?
Trump’s most revolutionary proposal was for an overhaul of our entire foreign policy establishment and the assumptions upon which it rests – assumptions that have led us into numerous blind alleys and failed initiatives. He said: “The decision to overthrow the regime in Libya, then pushing for the overthrow of the regime in Syria, among other things, without plans for the day after, have created space for ISIS to expand and grow like nobody has ever seen before. These actions, along with our disastrous Iran deal, have also reduced our ability to work in partnership with our Muslim allies in the region. That is why our new goal must be to defeat Islamic terrorism not nation building. No more nation building. It’s never going to work.”
Indeed. It didn’t work in Iraq. It hasn’t worked in Afghanistan. We have poured billions into Pakistan since 9/11 to help them fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and the Pakistani government has funneled a good deal of that money to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Trump said it: “And by the way we’ve spent almost $5 trillion over the years on trying to nation build in the Middle East and it has been complete and total disaster.” Yet despite the fact that its policies have failed again and again and again, the foreign policy establishment keeps reappointing and promoting those responsible for those failures, allowing them to make more mistakes in ever-larger arenas. But no candidate has ever challenged that establishment – until now.
Trump offered one more common sense that no establishment politician has thought to or dared to make: he suggested that there needs to be a reconfiguration of our alliances, which are still based on the Cold War. “NATO,” he said, “needs to change its focus and stop terrorism....America must unite the whole civilized world in the fight against Islamic terrorism.”
Indeed. The world is on fire courtesy of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. If America votes in November for more of the same, we will soon be engulfed in those flames as well. On Monday, Donald Trump outlined an unprecedentedly realistic plan for putting out the fire.
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Props to Trump for having the huevos to say the truth.
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https://www.facebook.com/mikedivaofficial/videos/10153705853032913/
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Pamela Geller: Trump Is Right, and He Must Win
by Pamela Geller15 Jun 2016
The post-jihad denial that we see in the wake of every Islamic attack since 9/11 has made possible the wild successes of Islamic groups that are waging jihad in the cause of Islam.
After every jihad terror attack, Islamic supremacists and their paid shills in the media unleash relentless, vicious attacks upon those of us who oppose jihad. Never do we hear or see them go after the Islamic texts and teachings that fuel this war.
A case in point was a Salon article published Tuesday: “Donald Trump’s war with Islam: A campaign rooted in pernicious religious discrimination,” by Simon Maloy. Maloy said that the Orlando jihad massacre gave Trump “the opportunity he needed to define the campaign he intends to run: a campaign that casts the Muslim faith and its practitioners – both inside and outside the U.S. – as antagonistic to American interests.”
He accused Trump of running a campaign “that casts the Muslim faith and its practitioners – both inside and outside the U.S. – as antagonistic to American interests.” Trump’s speech in the wake of the Orlando jihad massacre was, according to Maloy, “a relentlessly ugly diatribe that unambiguously embraced the pernicious and anti-American idea that a person’s religious faith makes them a threat to national security.”
The idea that the depraved left sees the murdered nightclub-goers as an “opportunity” for Trump is as vicious as the attack itself. Trump sounded a warning, and he was right to do so. It was not Donald Trump who made Islamic jihad “antagonistic to American interests”; the jihad doctrine itself is antagonistic to American interest and freedoms. How many thousands have to die in the cause of Islam?
In his speech, Trump said that he would “suspend immigration from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies, until we understand how to end these threats.” He is right. After the Boston Marathon jihad bombing, my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), called for the following:
— AFDI calls for immediate investigation into foreign mosque funding in the West and for new legislation making foreign funding of mosques in non-Muslim nations illegal.
— AFDI calls for surveillance of mosques and regular inspections of mosques in the U.S. and other non-Muslim nations to look for pro-violence materials. Any mosque advocating jihad or any aspects of Sharia that conflict with Constitutional freedoms and protections should be closed.
— AFDI calls for curriculum and Islam-related materials in textbooks and museums to describe the Islamic doctrine and history accurately, including its violent doctrines and 1,400-year war against unbelievers.
— AFDI calls for a halt of foreign aid to Islamic nations with Sharia-based constitutions and/or governments.
— AFDI denounces the use of Sharia law in any Western court or nation.
— AFDI advocates deportation hearings against non-citizens who promote jihad in our nations.
— AFDI calls for an immediate halt of immigration by Muslims into nations that do not currently have a Muslim majority population.
— AFDI calls for laws providing that anyone seeking citizenship in the United States should be asked if he or she supports Sharia law, and investigated for ties to pro-Sharia groups. If so, citizenship should not be granted.
— AFDI calls for the cancellation of citizenship or permanent residency status for anyone who leaves the country of his residence to travel for the purpose of engaging in jihad activity, and for the refusal of reentry into his country of residence after that jihad activity.
— AFDI calls careful investigation of Muslims resident in non-Muslim country who have obtained naturalized citizenship or permanent residency status, to ensure that that status was not obtained under false pretenses.
— AFDI calls for the designation of the following as grounds for immediate deportation: fomenting, plotting, financing, attempting or carrying out jihad attacks; encouraging or threatening or attempting to carry out the punishments Islamic law mandates for apostasy, adultery, blasphemy, fornication or theft; threatening or attempting or carrying out honor murders, forced marriage, underage marriage, female genital mutilation, or polygamy.
— AFDI calls for the U.S. and other free nations to have jihad, as it is traditionally understood in Islamic jurisprudence to involve warfare against and subjugation of non-Muslims, declared a crime against humanity at the U.N., or to withdraw from the U.N. and have its headquarters moved to a Muslim nation.
— AFDI calls for legislating making illegal the foreign funding of Islamic Studies departments and faculty positions in our universities.
How many people would be alive today had American politicians heeded our calls? Instead, we are blacklisted, smeared, libeled, and defamed, while pro-jihad groups are feted on Capital Hill.
But Maloy complained that Trump’s focus was “on Muslims exclusively – not radicalized Muslims, but every Muslim person outside the U.S. He referred to the expanded admittance of refugees from Syria as potentially ‘a better, bigger version of the legendary Trojan Horse.’ Per Trump, Hillary Clinton, as president, would ‘be admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East with no system to vet them, or to prevent the radicalization of their children.’ It’s all fearmongering based on lies and prejudice.”
Such idiocy is without peer. ISIS has vowed to send jihad killers to the west via migration. They are coming — why let them in? No, not all migrants are Muslim soldiers, but enough are to cause unimaginable death and destruction. Would you eat from a bowl of M & M’s if you knew two of them were laced with cyanide?
Muslims groups such as the Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have urged Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement. Muslim groups have demanded that law enforcement agencies dismantle counterterror programs. Muslim groups demand adherence to sharia in the language used in counterterror training material: the Department of Homeland Security issued guidelines just days before the Orlando jihad massacre forbidding agents from using the words “jihad” and “sharia” in connection with terrorism because doing so offended Muslims.
Maloy is likewise interested in policing language to avoid offending Muslims, saying of Trump’s immigration proposal: “It’s reprehensible, and it’s the kind of language that results in people getting hurt… If your goal is to promote the radicalization of a population within your own borders, having a major party presidential candidate talk about them all as if they’re criminals is an excellent way to go about it.”
No. What is reprehensible is how viciously the lapdogs for jihad blame the victim — led by the scrubber-in-chief in the White House. They call upon the targets to change their behavior, to subjugate themselves to Islam. Maloy is saying that Trump has to change his language or else Muslims will become “radicalized.” Last year, the mainstream media likewise said that the jihad assassination attempt on my free speech event in Garland, Texas was my fault, that I was taunting Muslims. Were the gay revelers in the Pulse nightclub last Saturday night taunting Muslims? Based on that flawed logic, yes. Our very way of life taunts sharia-adherent Muslims.
Jihad terror attacks present a unique opportunity for Islamic supremacists and jihadis. First, the kill, which is a great victory in the cause of Islam. The successful jihad attack attracts more Muslims and converts to the cause.
Secondly and most importantly, terror-tied groups like CAIR, their lapdogs in the enemedia, and pro-Islamic politicians like President Obama use the slaughter to push, proselytize, lie, deceive, and talk, talk, talk up Islam (while denigrating all other religions) on every major media news channel.
Trump is right. He was wrong about Garland, but he surely gets it now. And this is why he is so wildly popular — because finally, someone with a huge platform is calling out the enemedia and the dhimmi press, and giving them the long overdue, much-needed middle finger they so richly deserve.
Trump must win in order for this nation to survive. Trump must win if we are to prevail in this worldwide war against freedom.
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Ben Stein:
"Mr. Trump may have been crude in his application, but he hit it right into the grandstands with his legal analysis."
But Ben, that IS the problem. Not what he says but how he says it, IMHO.
http://spectator.org/trump-is-totally-right/
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Trump has accomplished a reset with Putin that Obama Hillary couldn't do after almost 8 years:
Agree with the poster, thanks, Vlad for the heads up: :lol:
https://www.hotgas.net/2016/06/dncs-donald-trump-oppo-research-file/
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Ben Stein:
"Mr. Trump may have been crude in his application, but he hit it right into the grandstands with his legal analysis."
ccp: But Ben, that IS the problem. Not what he says but how he says it, IMHO.
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As we say in tennis, this should have been game, set and match for Trump.
The left wants to talk gun control laws, take away self defense right while we are under attack. Meanwhile they want to leave the borders open for not only the illegal persons invasion but for gun running, drug running, cartel running, human trafficking, and for ISIS, al Qaida, Boko Harem and the rest to enter.
Trump ran on this issue, right from the first day.
Fast and Furious proves the case that the border under Obama not only allows guns and smugglers to cross but that our own DOJ were illegal participants in it. Facts are still breaking; this is not old news or something already addressed. This is just as illegal and twice as dangerous as Hillary giving the world our national security secrets and Hillary is one of the people who knew, nodded her head and looked the other way. Remember them praising eachother about what a great job they both did.
Hillary is running for more of the same, can't barely utter the words radical Islam and wants the border open even worse. Obama and HRC are going to let in the terrorists and let them bring their weapons and let them kill us. Trump is going to stop all that. Choose.
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"As we say in tennis, this should have been game, set and match for Trump. "
Yes Doug exactly. He is up 40-30 and serving for game set match
So he tries to boom an ace and hits it straight into net. Then instead of takin it easy on the second serve he tries to boom another straight into the net ( or into the judge's chair and hits the judge over the head with it)
:|
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The ‘Never Trump’ Murder-Suicide Pact
June 17, 2016
David Horowitz
Reprinted from Breitbart.com.
Barack Obama delivers nuclear weapons and $150 billion to America’s mortal enemy in the Middle East – and every Democrat to a man and woman defends his betrayal; Hillary Clinton violates the Espionage Act and delivers classified secrets, including information on an impending drone attack, to America’s enemies – and every Democrat to a man and woman defends her. Obama and Clinton lie about matters of war and peace – and every progressive publicly swears they are telling the truth.
But when Donald Trump insinuates the president is a man of uncertain loyalties, Republican leaders back away from him. When Trump proposes fighting “radical Islam,” securing America’s borders, stopping unvetted immigration from Muslim terrorist states, surveilling mosques, and scrutinizing the families of terrorist actors, Republicans join Democrats in denouncing him, or take an uncomfortable distance or maintain a silence that leaves him to fend for himself.
The left is blaming Christians, Republicans, and guns for the Orlando slaughter. The president and Hillary are claiming that ISIS is on the run – a lie flatly contradicted by the CIA director himself. They want to disarm Americans. If Hillary is elected, borders will stay open, and protecting Muslims will take priority over fighting Islam’s holy war against us.
In other words, Democrat betrayers of America are on the attack, while Republican leaders who claim to be patriots are on the run. Where, to take one example, is Ted Cruz? He claims to be a patriot and care about the Constitution, but he is AWOL — sulking like Achilles in his tent over personal slights he can’t get past to fight for his country’s survival. The Republican leader of the Senate and his second-in-command have both announced they will not participate in the presidential election, while the leader of the House makes clear his extreme embarrassment over Trump’s proposals to establish immigration policies appropriate to a nation under siege. This is the sad state of the Republican forces in retreat in an election campaign that will decide the fate of our country.
There are actually two wars we are engaged in– one with the Islamic caliphate and the other with an American left that refuses to recognize the enemy we face or the magnitude and nature of the threat. In this internal war, too many on the right have taken a course whose only practical effect can be seen as a betrayal of their cause. Erick Erickson has summed up the view of the Republican renegades in this succinct phrase: “We are in the midst of a murder-suicide pact that will be our ruination.”
This is, in fact, a precise description of what the #NeverTrump right is up to. But in Erickson’s inversion of reality, it is “the Republican Party [that] intends to murder the nation and commit suicide along the way.” What Erickson and his fellow saboteurs, led by Mitt Romney and Bill Kristol, want is for the Republican Party to block Trump and repudiate the record number of Republican primary voters who nominated him. This would actually be a Republican suicide in November – one that would indeed “murder the nation.”
Although the defection of the Republican leadership from the field of battle is still ongoing, there has been a break in the ranks of the #NeverTrump spoilers. Two of their leading intellectual figures, Hugh Hewitt and Andy McCarthy, have finally come to realize not just the futility of their efforts but their destructiveness as well. For the sake of the nation, let’s hope that there are a lot more such reversals on the way.
Meanwhile, the really big problem remains that of the Republican leadership, which thinks that “We’re stuck with Trump but we won’t dump him!” is an appropriate battle cry. As we all know, the Democrats are vicious, unprincipled attack dogs with a kept and unprincipled media in their camp. Passivity in the face of this blitzkrieg is, in practice, no different than a white-flag surrender. Paul Ryan summed up Republican fatuity in his answers to media questions in the wake of Orlando about whether he’s still supporting Trump. Ryan’s answer: he would be defending Republican principles in this election. Well, Paul, principles aren’t running in this election. Candidates are. And unless Republicans rally around Trump, and Trump beats Hillary, Republican principles are going down with him.
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Obj - I agree with DH 's article you post.
But the way in which Trump expresses himself makes it real hard. This is wrong. I don't see how we can win with this :
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/paul-ryan-trump-muslim-ban-sue
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Paul Ryan threatens to sue Donald Trump if he tries to enact temporary ban on Muslim immigration
JUNE 17, 2016 3:06 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER
Paul Ryan and the Republican establishment seem determined to do two things: to elect Hillary Clinton President of the United States this November, and to make sure that nothing impedes the huge influx of Muslim migrants into the U.S.
Yet San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik had passed five separate background checks from five separate US government agencies. Ahmad al-Mohammed and one other of the jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had just entered Europe as refugees. In February 2015, the Islamic State boasted it would soon flood Europe with as many as 500,000 refugees. And the Lebanese Education Minister said in September 2015 that there were 20,000 jihadis among the refugees in camps in his country.
Meanwhile, 80% of migrants who have come to Europe claiming to be fleeing the war in Syria aren’t really from Syria at all. So why are they claiming to be Syrian and streaming into Europe, and now the U.S. as well? An Islamic State operative gave the answer when he boasted in September 2015, shortly after the migrant influx began, that among the flood of refugees, 4,000 Islamic State jihadis had already entered Europe. He explained their purpose: “It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah.” These Muslims were going to Europe in the service of that caliphate: “They are going like refugees,” he said, but they were going with the plan of sowing blood and mayhem on European streets. As he told this to journalists, he smiled and said, “Just wait.”
Paul Ryan doesn’t care. He only cares that the bipartisan politically correct establishment retains its power.
“Paul Ryan says he might sue Donald Trump if he tried to enact the Muslim ban,” by Allan Smith, Business Insider, June 17, 2016:
Paul Ryan considers Donald Trump’s proposal to indefinitely ban Muslim immigration into the US to be executive overreach.
And during an interview with The Huffington Post, uploaded on Friday, the House speaker said he’d “sue any president that exceeds his or her powers.”
Ryan, who said Trump supported the separation of powers when the speaker endorsed the presumptive Republican nominee, released part of his agenda regarding executive overreach this week.
However, Ryan is not totally sure if Trump enacting a ban on Muslims entering the country would be outside of presidential authority.
“That’s a legal question that there’s a good debate about,” Ryan said, pointing to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. That act was meant to exclude immigrants from certain countries from coming to the US in the aftermath of World War II.
On Monday, Trump made the appeal that he could legally enact such a ban as president.
“The immigration laws of the United States give the president powers to suspend entry into the country of any class of persons,” he said at a rally. “I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies, until we fully understand how to end these threats.”…
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NOW Ryan is speaking up!?
Not when we have 8 yrs of Obama ruling like a dictator but now - against his own party's nominee!
Sorry but he has his head on backwards.
:x
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I can remember when I used to like Ryan.
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Ryan is wrong here, very wrong on more than one level.
Legally he is wrong-- the president does have this power
On the merits he is wrong.
Politically he is wrong-- this elects Hillary.
:x :x :cry:
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GOOD move!:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/us/politics/corey-lewandowski-donald-trump.html
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Ryan is wrong here, very wrong on more than one level.
Legally he is wrong-- the president does have this power
On the merits he is wrong.
Politically he is wrong-- this elects Hillary.
:x :x :cry:
People, especially Trump, put the wrong emphasis on his controversial, 'ban all Muslims' statement""
"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on,"
We've been through this since Trump entered the race. That statement was intended to inflame and divide. He should have instantly switched the emphasis to THIS ADMINISTRATION NOT KNOWING OR ADMITTING WHAT IS GOING ON.
The time it takes for our country's representatives to figure out what is going on should be instantaneous. On Day One of the Trump administration, we would figure out what is going on, right? So there was no ban on "all Muslims" coming. Yet Ryan and others are constantly being pressured to respond to whatever the apparent nominee of his own party is saying.
The refugee crisis was caused by this administration's failures in that region. The refugees include some 10% who are jihadists coming here to potentially kill us and a much larger percentage who side with ISIS and the enemies of the US.
e pluribus unem - out of many, one. That is what we are and who we are. It is not what those coming in now seek.
Fine to blame Ryan on the details of his statement, the legal aspects of one branch challenging another (as if Obama appointed judges would side with the law), but his need to distance himself and House Republicans from this assault on all Muslims was Donald Trump's creation.
In fact, we will only solve this global security crisis when all peaceful Muslims (yes, there is such a thing and there needs to be!) are able to separate themselves from the radical jihadists.
G M wrote, "I can remember when I used to like Ryan". Paul Ryan was a protege of Jack Kemp, one of the biggest proponents of opportunity economics and leader of the Reagan reforms that led to a quarter century of greatly increased prosperity. That is my wing of the party. Now, because of the recklessness of Donald Trump, Paul Ryan is reduced to chasing Donald Trump's shiny objects and siding with Democrats over Republicans on key points. WHY AREN'T THEY TALKING ABOUT LOWERING THE HIGHEST BUSINESS TAX RATES IN THE WORLD?
Donald Trump wasn't going to ban all Muslims from entering the country. He isn't going to impose 40% or 45% tariffs on Mexico or China. He isn't going to evaluate female cabinet members by breast size. But he is going to say things that require others to distance themselves from him. That benefits Democrats, costs us the Senate and perhaps the House, in addition to installing Hillary Rodham Clinton in the White House.
This is Paul Ryan's fault? Sorry, I don't see it that way.
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Has Ryan done anything of note to stand up to president pen-and-drone?
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Has Ryan done anything of note to stand up to president pen-and-drone?
Not to my knowledge.
The Obama leftist over-reach brought us the Republican House and eventually the Senate. The failure of both to stand up to him brought us the Trump opening and Ted Cruz as the last reasonable alternative. Neither were ready or positioned to win a general election. The Trump nomination victory is bringing us more leftist over-reach.
Full circle. Stuck on stupid.
Republican-run House. Republican majority Senate (not 60 votes). 31 Republican Governors to 18 for the Dems. 70% of the state houses are now Republican because of distaste for leftism out in the heartland. And we are still ruled by Leftism everywhere.
Politically we were better off watching them run us into the ground than helping them do it.
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So, as I see it, we have the dem machine running this country into the ground and Ryan-o and his peers can only be aroused to fight Trump.
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"This is Paul Ryan's fault? Sorry, I don't see it that way."
Doug, he shares some blame as do most of the Repubs who have been in power for the last 15 years.
or at least last 8.
The reason Trump blew aside the field is not because Ryan or most of the others have done a particularly good job or because they are innocent bystanders.
But I agree Trump does put all of us in positions of defending his vulgarity crudeness and the rest.
His messages are mostly good but again he needs more couth, that he does not have.
So what do we do now? I don't know. Getting rid of Lowendowski certainly signals Trump is listening to more reasoned people around him.
GM: "So, as I see it, we have the dem machine running this country into the ground and Ryan-o and his peers can only be aroused to fight Trump."
Right ; Where was Ryans big mouth and fighting spirit for the last 8 years. Now he is suddenly rock strong? Now that the left can use him to make THEIR points !
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I don't see Ryan as a RINO. I agree (mostly) with him on policy, just not on how to conduct war with the left. To be fair, he led the charge against Obamacare and has been the Speaker for about a minute - in an election year. I expect his policy agenda to be the best available blueprint going forward (it just won't be implemented).
That said, he was soft on illegal immigration - the Trump opening, and soft on de-funding leftism - the Cruz opening.
On the current course, assuming Trump loses and R's lose the Senate and win the House, Ryan may all we have left. I do not expect his long term approach in that situation to be the same as Boehner's. If Trump can win, Ryan will be necessary for anything good to happen.
I have no problem with him presenting the House as a check and balance over a President within his own party. The failure to stand up to Obama is a past mistake from which Republicans may never recover. It divided the movement and empowered the opposition.
"So what do we do now? I don't know."
We picked the wrong guy. 70% negatives. Makes Hillary look popular. Who could have seen this coming? whatever...
The only guy who can solve it now is Trump. If the delegates suddenly switched allegiances and installed Rubio, Kasich, Walker or anyone else as nominee right now we would divide and lose even worse. God help us.
My thought is that I will support and help Trump make his journey to becoming a better candidate and President who will make America Great Again by openly criticizing him on every policy and statement that deserves it. Same goes for Ryan his new role.
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Conservative Review's Liberty score is one way to gauge the leaders politics on a conservative - liberal scale so to speak:
Speaker Ryan's "Liberty Score" is only 55 % which is not high. Looking closely though he scores poorly on spending and more conservatively on other issues. Probably from voting to fund everything Da Bamster wants. I recall Levin talking about how Ryan asked him to read his book and that he and Mark have more in common in political philosophy then Mark gives him credit but Mark was not having it. I am not a blind follower of Levin but I usually do agree with him probably 90 or 95 % of the time so this was telling to me about Ryan:
https://www.conservativereview.com/members/paul-ryan/liberty-card/
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/us/politics/donald-trump-money-campaign.html?emc=edit_na_20160620&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
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One can bash Trump but
can one only imagine how frustrating it would have been if we had had ANOTHER establishment running?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436829/donald-trump-supporters-policy
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This race is Trump's to win. Latest poll shows him leading Clinton on the economy and he most certainly should be able to make the case he would make us more secure.
Regarding the unforced errors, they are correctable. The first thing he addressed after firing his campaign manager is the Warren-Pocahontas mess. First, the joke was Faux-cahontas. Warren isn't some beautiful native princess, she is a phony. He corrected it by saying he was wrong and that it was an insult to Pocahontas. I'm guessing people LOVED hearing him say he was wrong even if it was only about a throwaway line about an irrelevant leftist. He is wrong on some other things too. Correct them and get focused on two things, being the best choice for the economy and best on security. Shouldn't be that hard; his opponent is running to continue our economic and security problems.
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This certainly resonates with me!!!!
No one else Ryan or anyone else has been saying what the left is doing to us.
Including the big tech giants who are happy to spread their business world wide , which is ok with me but not at the gigantic expense of losing our borders and our sovereignty!
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/06/22/2016-election-trumps-policy-americanism-vs-clintons-policy-globalism/
A friend of mine still says thank God for Trump. I don't know I am there yet but four fingers are crossed on two hands behind my back.
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From NPR :-o :
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/22/483090531/trump-just-gave-the-speech-republicans-have-been-waiting-20-years-to-hear
Of course the NYT is already posting their girl's teams response . But who cares what she says. Listening to her is an absurd waste of time.
But here is DJT speech:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/transcript-trump-speech-on-the-stakes-of-the-election-224654
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I caught Trump's speech this morning while stretching out.
Very encouraging!
Particularly catching my attention were:
1) Appealing to gays-- he did this after Orlando, (every American deserves to be protected, every American has a right to be armed to defend themselves)-- this will serve well to blunt the bigotry/homphobia demogoguery charges not only viz gays but also signals that Trump stands aside from the culture wars in this regard, also see how he stood aside from the potty wars;
2) Superb attack on Hillary's treasonous corruption-- great specificity for once!
3) Superb planting of seed of doubt concerning her blackmailability if enemies have her 30,000 deleted emails, or her 20,000 undeleted emails.
4) Superb moment with "Hillary's slogan is 'I'm with Hillary, but I am with America/you"
5) Great opening pitch to the Sandernistas-- we agree, the system is rigged, the EDC is the insider, I am the outsider WE (Sandernistas and Trump) can stand TOGETHER.
Very promising developments!!!
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http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/06/22/finally_a_republican_other_than_me_tells_the_truth_about_hillary_clinton
I have idea. His next hit job should be on Nancy Pelosi. The totally corrupt dishonest minority, ex majority leader. Time to lay out her and her families corrupt history of sweetheart government deals.
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A most worthy target!-- but a tangent for Trump in this moment (and would play into anti-woman irrelevancies) Let him stay focused (always a challenge for him :roll: ) on the EDC now.
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" Let him stay focused (always a challenge for him rolleyes ) on the EDC now. "
Good point. Maybe this guy could write another book to get the ball rolling (over the Pelosi mafia):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Cash
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http://theblacksphere.net/2016/06/lgbt-voters-seriously-considering-trump/
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I posted this in the Politics thread too, but post it here to underline that Trump's appeal to the black vote on the basis of eliminating competition and downward wage pressure from illegal aliens.
https://www.facebook.com/ObamaTheWorstPresident/videos/1101438939899206/?pnref=story
Prediction: Trump will surprise with how well he does with the Black vote.
https://www.facebook.com/ObamaTheWorstPresident/videos/1101438939899206/?pnref=story
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The Left is having a party over this:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/25/politics/george-will-donald-trump-leaving-republican-party-election/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29
I have felt that way about the GOP for 10 years if not longer.
Problem is we don't have 4 to 8 years to "grit our teeth" and wait for 2020 or 2024 as he reasons.
By the, there will be another 25 million voters for the Democrat party in our country (legal and illegal with amnesty) and 2 more liberal Supreme Court Justices.
It is almost too late now. It is unbelievable that bamster is now waving the requirement for people who are trying to become citizens to pledge allegiance to the flag.
THIS GUY IS OUR PRESIDENT? He is doing everything he can to destroy the United States as a sovereign nation.
Obviously the Left agrees with him. Not a peep out of them. Their obvious disgust with the Brexit vote feels like having someone spit in our faces.
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My prediction, John Kasich, is failing because he still hates Trump and because his own star really fizzled after his only win in Ohio. He really won Ohio as the anti-Trump, not a pitch he can use as VP pick.
This story goes over the names:
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/who-will-donald-trump-pick-his-vp-n598736
The only name they add of note to what has already been dissected is Mike Pence who I like. Maybe he can help Trump carry Indiana and not lose in 50 states.
Friends of mine, mostly sane, say they will vote Hillary to stop Trump. Friends of mine on the left are receiving cell calls by the hour from Hillary and Hillary,PAC and GOTV groups while Trump is floundering. Washington Post has him down now by double digits. Brexit vote should have helped him immensely. Orlando shooting should have sealed the deal. He was vacationing when he should have been pouncing. Master of the media message?? Where are you?
Lesson to my side who already lost, you can't wait for every four years to put out a message, then fall off-message and hope to win. Do Olympic champions take the four years off before the main event?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Ap-fdgPuw
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The Left is having a party over this:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/25/politics/george-will-donald-trump-leaving-republican-party-election/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29
I have felt that way about the GOP for 10 years if not longer.
Problem is we don't have 4 to 8 years to "grit our teeth" and wait for 2020 or 2024 as he reasons.
...
Strangely, on the issues where I disagree with George Will, he tends to agree more with Trump.
We've been in general election mode for nearly two months. What kind of conservative party nominee, campaign or election does Trump hope to win that doesn't include having George Will at least lukewarm on your side? Good grief.
The idea that Sanders supporters are going Trump or Republican in large numbers to cover for conservative votes lost is a joke.
The question is presented for conservatives, are you better off seeing your country get 65% more screwed up by a Republican (in name only) or 80% more screwed up by a Democrat?
A Trump failure as President, especially if he consolidates Republican support to win which he must, will not be followed by a political correction to the right. A Trump failure as a candidate only leaves his supporters even more bitter toward conservatives who didn't back him, never to join them again. A Hillary victory and failure will not leave us time to fix the country in our lifetimes no matter what follows.
Screwed and screwed are our two choices. Choose wisely (gallows sarcasm).
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https://patriotpost.us/opinion/43431
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https://patriotpost.us/opinion/43431
"if Trump wants to be compared to Reagan he should act more like him."
Good to see Peggy Noonan on Patriot Post.
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Yes!
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https://www.facebook.com/cnninternational/videos/10154253083199641/
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The libs just are beside themselves:
http://thebrownandwhite.com/2016/02/08/rescinding-trumps-honorary-degree/
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Our foreign competitors are whipping us as per DJT, - 1988:
http://articles.mcall.com/1988-06-06/news/2627195_1_trump-s-new-york-trump-organization-real
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http://netrightdaily.com/2016/03/trump-insisted-on-including-jews-and-blacks-at-palm-beach-golf-course-in-1990s/
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I predicted it would be John Kasich to help Trump get elected but a lot of possible choices are declining.
CONSERVATIVES RALLY AROUND MIKE PENCE FOR VICE PRESIDENT
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/07/conservatives-rally-around-mike-pence-for-vice-president.php
With Ernst apparently off the list, whom do conservatives favor?
In my view, Tom Cotton would be a great choice, assuming he’s willing. However, many conservatives seem to be rallying around Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
In fact, when Ernst withdrew, she suggested Pence should get the VP nod. She told Politico:
I will admit that I am a Mike Pence fan. He is so well-rounded, served as a governor and I think he’s a great conservative. So I don’t think he could go wrong.
Jeff Roe, the manager of Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, also raves about Pence. Roe said of Pence:
I think he’d be fabulous. He’d be a rudder on a somewhat erratic campaign and he would have the right balance of being a full-spectrum conservative, having executive experience and legislative experience. He’s one of the best choices I’ve heard mentioned.
Trump has said he would like a running mate who knows his way around Capitol Hill. Pence served for ten years in the U.S. House, including a stint as chairman of the House Republican Conference.
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Did not know about Pence's congressional background; still favor Newt though. Inter alia, Newt knows the Clintons well, and is well positioned to remind people of how Bill used to say what Donald says now.
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Did not know about Pence's congressional background; still favor Newt though. Inter alia, Newt knows the Clintons well, and is well positioned to remind people of how Bill used to say what Donald says now.
Yes, Newt would be an interesting pick. He can call out both Clintons on what worked and what didn't during the Bill Clinton administration, and why does Hillary now oppose all the policies that worked then?
Newt is 73, would make it two white guys over 70 on the ticket, right while we are losing the youth vote. Mike Pence is only 57 but also white haired, makes roughly the same appearance. Trump is cognizant of appearances but I don't know who can change that appearance and is strong enough and willing to help him.
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"surprising tactful" is the description:
http://theweek.com/speedreads/634748/donald-trump-releases-remarkably-tactful-statement-after-dallas
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http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/08/politics/newt-gingrich-white-americans/index.html?campaign_id=A100&campaign_type=Email
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/07/10/potential-trump-vp-pick-on-abortion-women-have-to-be-able-to-choose/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%207-10-16%20FINAL&utm_term=Firewire
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http://www.westernjournalism.com/florida-lawsuit-reveals-what-trump-thinks-about-discrimination/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=WesternJournalism&utm_content=2016-07-10&utm_campaign=manualpost
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http://nypost.com/2016/07/09/the-military-fired-me-for-calling-our-enemies-radical-jihadis/
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http://townhall.com/columnists/lizcrokin/2016/07/10/trump-does-the-unthinkable-n2190160?utm_content=bufferd928a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/07/10/potential-trump-vp-pick-on-abortion-women-have-to-be-able-to-choose/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%207-10-16%20FINAL&utm_term=Firewire
When I read the above, I thought, no big deal. Reflecting further I think Trump does not need a fight with his base and the VP choice is the clearest signal he can send about how he will choose his team and govern.
Another point about the General, who seems to be a strong pick, is that we value civilian control over the military. A retired general is a civilian but his strength comes from being a general. Besides pro-choice, whatever surprises will emerge?
Earlier I predicted John Kasich because the Ohio Governor can help him win a key state and Trump is all about winning, doesn't need help governing. But Kasich can't him when he won't endorse him. Too much bad blood there, so skip that too.
Newt is 73. When he seeks to follow Trump's two terms, he will be 81. Fine with me but I don't see it happening. I also don't think Newt has the energy now that he did when he was the star 22 years ago. Newt's political strengths are phenomenal but his weaknesses persist. He drifts off focus. Like Trump, he had his own affairs. He was a "historian" for Fannie Mae(?!) and he lost Florida to Romney... He can serve better as an adviser or cabinet member.
Christy? Let's hope not. Christy might be the best prosecutor of Hillary, that is what Trump says he wants, but brings his own baggage.
Rubio? Out. Cruz? No. Carson? Has faded from sight. Condi? No. Jeff Sessions? Why?
Knowing Trump a little, he would like to pick from somewhere completely off our radar screen, his own Sarah Palin, but that hasn't worked.
The right answer at this moment is Mike Pence, hedged only by the fact that no one can predict Trump on anything.
Pence checks all the boxes. He is experienced, level headed, conservative, not extreme, and won't over-shadow the candidate. He has served in Congress, on foreign policy and governed a midwest, rust belt state. He looks and sounds seasoned, but is only 57, about the right age for that job.
The decision has to be made by tomorrow, Thursday, and the actions needed in Indiana to make that possible need to happen on Friday.
Pence was a little cowardly on the religious defense against militant gay crusaders, but is a solid conservative that makes the choice between Hillary and Trump a stark one.
Hillary picks last, can pick a woman, black or Hispanic and can play that card until she is blue in the face and thick in the calves. Trump will make the case that he is ready to disrupt the status quo, and go super negative on Hillary when he isn't busy trying to look Presidential.
For all the possibilities, the media is ready to go with their hit pieces:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mike-pence-sealed-records_us_5786778fe4b03fc3ee4edf55
Critics say Pence has not accomplished anything significant and rather has glided on the coattails of his predecessor, former Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), who is credited with putting Indiana’s fiscal condition in order and growing the economy.
Supporters have cheered Pence's focus on tax cuts and credit him with signing into law one of the largest tax cut deals in state history.
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/287569-five-things-to-know-about-mike-pence
Pence is "a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order."
He led the fight to de-fund Planned Parenthood, a winning conservative issue. He opposed the Bush-Kennedy, no child left behind. He opposed the bank bailout in 2008.
Rated 61% on free trade by Cato. That's about right for Trump.
http://www.ontheissues.org/Governor/Mike_Pence_Free_Trade.htm
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"The decision has to be made by tomorrow, Thursday, and the actions needed in Indiana to make that possible need to happen on Friday."
I will make my announcement Friday 11am:
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/753398572515725312
The timing indicates it is Pence. Ballot juggling needs to be done in Indiana by Friday noon.
Krauthammer prefers Gingrich, Pence doesn't 'move the needle'.
The Pence choice is not bold and takes the pressure off of Hillary to make a risky choice, introducing someone new to the country like Castro or Perez. She should pick Biden. But will pick Warren. Warren unites her left leaving her free to flirt with the center.
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On another note, PAT WAS RIGHT, polls are roughly even now both nationally and in key states coming into the conventions, and Trump hasn't really started or done anything right yet. This race is very winnable.
Trump has been quiet lately, taking just a few minutes to win the argument against Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg who apologized today. He is preparing for his convention. This is the media event of the media life he has led since the 1980s. He has complete control and has had 30 years to visualize and plan for this. It is the summer doldrums of news. Can he attract an audience and put forward a message that will live past the Hillary convention that has the advantage of going last? We will see.
Look for Jodi Earnst to hit it out of the park. Tray Gowdy should make the case against Clinton; he will be Trump's Attorney General. Ted Cruz is going to step up to the plate. Marco Rubio, the one they should have picked, will paint a vision for the future. And look for some surprises better than Clint Eastwood's attempt last time.
Good luck to the Donald. He needs to make a personal and Presidential connection with the people who have doubted him. I wish he wasn't wrong on a couple of key issues.
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"Krauthammer prefers Gingrich, Pence doesn't 'move the needle'."
I think True about Pence. But which way does Newt mover the needle? To full or empty? I like him but I agree with another pundit who asked do we really want to bring back the 90's with Newt and Clinton?
Newt can be great but he also has made bombs that ultimately bring him down.
The Dems are out to get Christy's on the bridge issue and frankly I don't believe his is innocent on this myself.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/business/for-trump-business-leaders-are-more-elites-to-resist.html?emc=edit_th_20160715&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
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"Pence had endorsed Ted:"
The Pence pick is better than taking Cruz, Rubio or Kasich. He gets all the credit without taking any of that baggage. Pence is better than Cruz in that he served longer in Congress, has foreign policy and executive experience, gets along on Capital hill, and hasn't been in any big fights with Trump.
No conservative in their right mind can not sit out or not vote Trump. There is the chance that Trump could either govern well or die. What chance do conservatives have to turn things around if the other side wins? None.
The timing is perfect. They needed to unite, not fight, coming into the convention.
The speaker lineup looks great for the convention. Look for a great show. I hope they get decent viewership and make some kind of a substantive and lasting impression.
Hillary is now free to pick Tim Kaine, the left's Mike Pence. He is a white, middle aged guy that has served as Governor and Senator in Virginia, a key state. That should be a fair fight. Let whoever is right on the issues prevail.
The table is now set for Trump to win in a landslide. (PAT WAS RIGHT.) Trump closed the gap before doing anything right. Now he can step up, be Presidential, rip up a flawed opponent and win. There is a powerful case to be made against the status quo on the economy and around the world and she has no chance to separate herself from it. Trump faulted Romney for not seizing that opportunity. Now is his chance.
Don't blow it.
P.S. Trump is dead wrong on two things in particular, private takings and being or sounding anti-free trade. The first won't come up and he can rip TPP all he wants for its sovereignty issues. If he can get through the convention without ripping free trade on its merits he will go a long way toward winning and governing well. We don't need a trade wall to make America great again.
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Governor Pence -- a Good Choice for VP
I have known and respected Governor Mike Pence for more than a decade, since he was a smart, principled, conservative member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
In 2005, Mike and I held an event together at the American Enterprise Institute about “The Future of Conservatism.” I was impressed by his eloquent case for smaller, more accountable government. He was an early critic of the fiscal excesses of Congressional Republicans during the Bush years and of federal overreach in general.
As Chairman of the House Republican Conference, Mike was the only member of the senior Republican leadership to address the Tea Party rally in Washington, D.C. in 2010. He was instrumental in helping House Republicans win the majority that year.
He also served for a time as chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of conservative House Republicans -- a sign that he was well-liked and respected among his House colleagues.
Mike went on to win the Indiana governorship in 2012 and he has served a very successful term in that role. He signed the largest tax cut in the state’s history, eliminated the estate tax, and significantly reduced income taxes -- all while controlling spending.
Governor Pence’s conservative reforms helped drive an economic boom in Indiana. In just 3 years, the state has added more than 150,000 jobs and reduced its unemployment rate from 8.4 percent to less than 5 percent. Companies like Subaru, Amazon, and Salesforce have added thousands of jobs in the state.
Mike has also been committed throughout his career to defending the rights of the unborn and protecting religious liberty and the role of faith in public life.
As an accomplished governor, a solid conservative, and a former leader in the House who has good relationships with Congress, Mike Pence is a strong vice presidential nominee.
He can help reach out and reassure members of Congress and Republican governors who may be skeptical of Trump’s untraditional candidacy. People who know Mike and have served with him will appreciate his background in the conservative movement.
Mike also brings very practical governing experience which could prove invaluable in a vice president. He knows how to govern from the executive branch, and he also understands the dynamics of a legislative body as a former member of the House leadership.
Mike Pence will make an excellent vice president for Donald Trump. Their partnership has the potential to be transformative, to revitalize our economy and our national security, and to make America great again.
Your Friend,
Newt
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I admit it is a bit odd that Trump said nothing about David Duke etc. but everyone knows it is not because he is racist and there is zero evidence he is anti-semitic unlike Hillary (see Dick Morris on this: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/videos/hillary-clinton-anti-semite-scandal-jews-israel-dick-morris/ ).
The fact is these Jews are all a bunch of die hard Democrats who would never vote for any Republican and the alleged anti semitic convoluted arguments are just a ruse. Like the ridiculous picture of Hillary with the 6 pointed Jewish star somehow a veiled anti-semitic slur. As a Jew I saw that add and it did not even dawn on me about the star at all.
More liberal Jewish propaganda forces Rabbi out of delivering invocation at RNC:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/prominent-rabbi-pulls-out-of-delivering-rnc-invocation-181310880.html
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http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/founder-latinas-trump-latinos-will-put-him-over-top-n611281
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I am glad Glenn said it because I was thinking the same thing. No one could be that stupid to copy another speech word for work and use it again without knowing it would be caught:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/07/19/glenn-becks-theory-on-what-really-happened-with-melania-trumps-now-infamous-rnc-speech/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tI2CE2ivxY
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A star is born; WOW, even my favorite hottie Michelle Malkin liked it!:
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/07/a-gop-star-is-born-donald-trump-jr-rocks-the-convention
Here is the speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tI2CE2ivxY
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Remember when Bill bragged that we were getting both he AND Hillary - two for one?
Now we are getting 5 for the "price" of one. Three children one wife as well as DJT. This is remarkable. How the family members seem to have so much power.
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My impression is that the two sons are worthy members of the team, and will check out the daughter tonight.
As for Melania, she is gorgeous and seems well content to be that and a mom to her children and support to her husband. Good for her!
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https://www.facebook.com/bloodyknucklesoriginal/videos/1097230480329396/
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I thought great speech though I missed part of it as I walked the dogs thinking it was almost over.
2 things I noticed
#1 Ivanka said something about single mothers should have child care - my question - at whose expense.
#2 It was certainly weird while accepting the *Republican * nomination for president of the United States hearing him say "I am neither a Democrat or Republican"!!!! :-o
I go to Conservative review and all I see is Trump bashing and compliments to Cruz. To me Mark is off in dream land somewhere. One now sees first hand why Cruz is so absolutely hated . Was there even 1 Senate colleague who came out and supported him until it was down to him and Trump? I don't blame him for not wanting to endorse but he should have not gone to the convention in that case.
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2 things I noticed
#1 Ivanka said something about single mothers should have child care - my question - at whose expense.
Nice catch. I missed her speech, but Trump's format was a State of the Union speech and the longer those speeches go, the more proposals we get for new federal government programs. Our 'big government conservatives' (oxymoron) can't attract those votes without surrendering principles to the the left. Yes single parents need child care in order to work and be self sufficient. Therefore we need a federal government program? "Life of Julia". We need assistance, really a relationship with the federal government at every point in our life from pre-natal to 6 feet under. This is defied in Article WHAT? in the constitution?
The government is not your husband. To say out loud, Rule 1 of not being in poverty is to marry before starting a family is to lose votes. Leftists want to go back to the 50s for marginal tax rates but not for family structure. And pseudo-Republicans want to emulate Democrats to win votes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-julia-ad-and-the-new-hubby-state/2012/05/11/gIQAcRdoIU_story.html
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/09/opinion/bennett-obama-campaign/index.html
Asking this question in public may win votes, but if you really think this through you will find that a new federal social engineering program is the not best answer. Designing a perfect life for single mothers to raise children without fathers might not even be asking the right question.
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"To say out loud, Rule 1 of not being in poverty is to marry before starting a family is to lose votes."
So if Trump is so blunt why will he not say this?
I say that tongue in cheek.
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Here is my whole-hearted, lukewarm, lesser of evils, unapologetic endorsement of Trump-Pence for President in 2016, and my advice to others on the fence.
I started this as a Rubio supporter. Trump beat Rubio in his own state, in his own party. Trump needs Florida to win in November. Trump needs Rubio -in the Senate. Rubio needs Trump for turnout in Florida, for Commander in Chief and to sign the badly needed reform in Washington. America needs bothTrump and Rubio and all of us or else leftism will be permanent. As unlikely as it seemed a short time ago, this is our team.
These are my biggest objections to Trump (other than his personality) and how he addressed these to win my vote:
1) He is profoundly wrong on Kelo and private, crony government takings.
2) He is profoundly wrong on trade.
3) Trump is not a true, limited government conservative.
(1) On Kelo, his answer was to offer a list of potential Supreme Court picks representing the type of Justices he will appoint. This is not a promise or a perfect answer but it is a great list that addresses that concern as well as it is possible. There is a risk that Trump (or any Republican) will make a bad pick and there is the certainty that Hillary will make nothing but bad picks for the Courts from a constitutional conservative point of view.
(2) On trade, Trump promises to re-open trade agreements bilaterally and get better terms for America. I am not on the same page as Trump in his view of what has gone wrong. America can compete with anyone on a level playing field. Our problems are internal, excess taxation and excess over-regulation. These are both areas that Trump is actively addressing and that Hillary will make worse, much worse.
Trump promises the new agreements will be better for America. They are not better if they include high tariffs paid by American consumers, a trade war, a falling economy or a rising cost of living. He can't let that happen and deliver on his promise. Trump is willing to threaten tariffs with Mexico, China and others. The threat must be real but the end point must be no tariff. If he stands true on his promise, we will win concessions without new tariffs and he will not trigger a trade war or the next Great Depression.
More importantly, the sovereignty loss in "trade" agreements is real and Trump will not give away our country the way President Obama and Hillary Clinton have and would.
(3) Regarding limited government conservatism, Donald Trump was not among my top 100 choices of the 17 running and those who might have. Mike Pence, on the other hand, is as good of a limited government conservative as we can hope for in high elective office and he is Trump's pick for his VP choice. Worst case, no matter how badly Trump governs we are one heartbeat away from a chance at having great, limited government, conservative President. With Hillary there is no such hope or chance. Far more optimistically, the Pence pick and other limited government promises such as relief on taxes and regulations are positive indicators of the direction the Trump Presidency will take.
Then there is the Gary Johnson (non-)alternative. This is a binary choice, Trump v. Hillary. Johnson is disqualified. When asked whether it was wrong for the United States to intervene in WWI? In WWII? Johnson's entire answer was, "I don't know"!
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/highlights-libertarian-party-presidential-debate/story?id=39464103
For all our differences over Iraq, Iran, Syria and ISIS, if you don't know the answer to that one at this point in your life and are running for President, you aren't going to be my choice for Commander in Chief!
Hillary Clinton starts this race with 242 electoral votes in hand out of 270 required, the so-called "Blue Wall". 18 states including NY, Calif, etc. and D.C. have gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections. If she loses within these, she has also loses the swing states and loses the election in a landslide. Trump running with Mike Pence will win all the solidly Republican states, more states but less than half the electoral votes. Gary Johnson and all other minor party candidates combined will win zero states. Trump-Pence will open the contest in the Midwest, so called rust belt states, and can make Clinton spend resources in NY and NJ. But mostly, any Republican ticket needs to run the table in the well-known swing states to win.
Anyone who leans at all right, despises Hillary, lives in any contested state, and then does not vote for Donald Trump, the only alternative to Clinton, is securing her election and a permanently leftist, anti-constitutional country. Sure they say this every year and it's true every year, but the consequences of screwing up this time have never been worse.
Herb Brooks told his gold medal hockey team after they beat the Soviet Union and were facing Finland in the finals, "Lose this one and you will take it to your grave". Complain about Trump all you want, but sit this one, help Hillary win, and ... ditto ... you will take the consequences of that to your grave.
Trump is far from perfect but there is no acceptable alternative remaining. You take all that is wrong with Trump or you and your children and your grandchildren will be ruled forever by leftists. No pressure.
Hillary will open up felon votes, illegal votes, no-ID votes, foreigner votes, maybe pre-school votes, and I barely exaggerate. All but the last is already in motion. This will be the last close election if we give them four more years to transform the electorate.
This Rubio supporter, almost-never-Trump-type will be voting for Trump-Pence on November 8 with no apologies!
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Well said!
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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-putin-yes-it-s-really-a-thing
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"When asked whether it was wrong for the United States to intervene in WWI? In WWII? Johnson's entire answer was, "I don't know"!"
Well I was thinking just today how the US bailed Europe out twice last century. And thinking maybe Trump IS on to something. Europe sure as hell better be carrying their weight with NATO. Maybe a fresh look at NATO is not such a bad idea.
"Herb Brooks told his gold medal hockey team after they beat the Soviet Union and were facing Finland in the finals, "Lose this one and you will take it to your grave". Complain about Trump all you want, but sit this one, help Hillary win, and ... ditto ... you will take the consequences of that to your grave."
Yup. Exactly right Doug. Our friends at the Conservative and National Reviews better wake the hell up. And Cruz made a huge blunder. I don't know what his point was or who he was trying to impress.
He sure wasn't going to win anybody any new friends with his stunt. He should have just stayed home. At least the Bush's know when to be silent. And Cruz simply does not know how to broaden his appeal. He is tone deaf from the right like Rhinos are tone deaf from near the center.
We ain't got till 2020.
What do you think Hillary and crew are going to do by pardoning all the illegals. Millions upon millions more will flood in here and vote for socialism. Do NOT think many will NOT be voting. Certainly millions of their natural born children sure will.
Trump may well be able to reach some groups that the Rhinos can or will not reach out to.
We all better hope so.
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"Our friends at the Conservative and National Reviews better wake the hell up. "
VDH on National Review states my point better than me (who could have thought that?):
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438296/trump-clinton-obama-matter-degree
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http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/289361-trump-backs-10-federal-minimum-wage
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Hillary will open up felon votes, illegal votes, no-ID votes, foreigner votes, maybe pre-school votes, and I barely exaggerate. All but the last is already in motion. This will be the last close election if we give them four more years to transform the electorate.
All of you miscalled whether or not Trump would be the nominee.
I do have one question though.... what's your issue with American citizens voting in their elections, as listed above (the felons)? They are American citizens last time I checked.
I'm curious as to why you feel you deserve a voice in your country, but they do not, especially when they're law abiding and pay taxes. The rights only apply to you per your perspective.... massah?
Edit: It occurs to me, that many so called "Americans," are the very tyrannical government that the Constitution was implemented to protect all of us against. That basically means, that if you support anything other than the original constitution, you're the tyranny of evil men.
I'm ok with that. I've been looking forward to this for a while.
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Hillary will open up felon votes, illegal votes, no-ID votes, foreigner votes, maybe pre-school votes, and I barely exaggerate. All but the last is already in motion. This will be the last close election if we give them four more years to transform the electorate.
...
I do have one question though.... what's your issue with American citizens voting in their elections, as listed above (the felons)? They are American citizens last time I checked.
...
If losing your privilege to vote is one of the lawful penalties of being convicted of a felony or of certain crimes, then one has not fully paid his or her debt when released. Has this particular penalty been struck down in any court as unconstitutional? Oddly, it is put forward by Democrats not out of fairness but out of political advantage. 7 out of 10 felons register Democrat: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jail-survey-nearly-34-felons-register-as-democrats/article/2541412
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Hillary will open up felon votes, illegal votes, no-ID votes, foreigner votes, maybe pre-school votes, and I barely exaggerate. All but the last is already in motion. This will be the last close election if we give them four more years to transform the electorate.
...
I do have one question though.... what's your issue with American citizens voting in their elections, as listed above (the felons)? They are American citizens last time I checked.
...
If losing your privilege to vote is one of the lawful penalties of being convicted of a felony or of certain crimes, then one has not fully paid his or her debt when released. Has this particular penalty been struck down in any court as unconstitutional? Oddly, it is put forward by Democrats not out of fairness but out of political advantage. 7 out of 10 felons register Democrat: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jail-survey-nearly-34-felons-register-as-democrats/article/2541412
Interesting that you use the word "privilege." That's what your rights are, are they? "Privileges?"By the way, they've also shown that most wouldn't even bother voting, and this person typing this, would never vote Democrat.
By the way, they have laws against cruel and unusual punishment. Most people buy into that crap. I don't. Even arguing it or discussing it is ridiculous and leads no where.
I don't think I feel like asking your permission for my rights that YOU grant to no one, especially because you fear that it may not lead to the candidate of your choice being elected, and especially while you expect me to work and pay for it through taxes.
I think there was a war started over that once.
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Hillary will open up felon votes, illegal votes, no-ID votes, foreigner votes, maybe pre-school votes, and I barely exaggerate. All but the last is already in motion. This will be the last close election if we give them four more years to transform the electorate.
...
I do have one question though.... what's your issue with American citizens voting in their elections, as listed above (the felons)? They are American citizens last time I checked.
...
If losing your privilege to vote is one of the lawful penalties of being convicted of a felony or of certain crimes, then one has not fully paid his or her debt when released. Has this particular penalty been struck down in any court as unconstitutional? Oddly, it is put forward by Democrats not out of fairness but out of political advantage. 7 out of 10 felons register Democrat: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jail-survey-nearly-34-felons-register-as-democrats/article/2541412
Interesting that you use the word "privilege." That's what your rights are, are they? "Privileges?"By the way, they've also shown that most wouldn't even bother voting, and this person typing this, would never vote Democrat.
By the way, they have laws against cruel and unusual punishment. Most people buy into that crap. I don't. Even arguing it or discussing it is ridiculous and leads no where.
I don't think I feel like asking your permission for my rights that YOU grant to no one, especially because you fear that it may not lead to the candidate of your choice being elected, and especially while you expect me to work and pay for it through taxes.
I think there was a war started over that once.
DDF, I like hearing your view on this. I also noticed I chose the word privilege over right, had second thoughts about it as I wrote. Is it a right or a privilege? We used to not let 18, 19, 20 year olds vote. It took a constitutional amendment to change that. Can you lose a right? Can a penalty be for a lifetime?
Of course it is controversial and I see your side of it. A lot of the real 'felons' are never caught, never prosecuted. A lot of good people are charged or plea to 'crimes' of no real note or victim. Some are innocent and some guilty people reform. Still we take pride in the rule of law here and the point I made I think explains one side of this issue.
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There does seem to be a pattern with huuuge implications here. Are we willing to go down this road with Donald?
This, from a lefty source, does list some things to keep in mind:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/26/1552616/-Russian-Hackers-Altered-Emails-Before-Release-to-Wikileaks
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Lets be very careful what the LEFT prints.
The link from far left Daily Kos is "russian-hackers-altered-emaisl-before-release-to-wikipedia
but in the body of the article it says, "may have altered"
Obviously this is an attempt by the liberals to ALTER the truth in their favor.
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But I posted it for its reference to various pro-Putin/Russia comments from Trump over the years.
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What Trump I think likes about Putin is that he is a nationalist.. Russia first.
And Trump is saying US first
I worked with some Russians who love Putin despite all the corruption, despite economic woes, why?
because he is a Russia first guy.
Wouldn't it be nice to have someone here who is in charge who feels the same way about the US. Forget about all the phony Us flag waving and declarations on how great the US is the past staged few days.
And to have the Musllim father waving a small copy of the US Constitution around at a DNC convention is hypocracy beyond the pale. Not for him personally but to do it as though the Democrats are Constitutionalists is just typical Clintoneasque BS.
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What Trump I think likes about Putin is that he is a nationalist.. Russia first.
And Trump is saying US first
I worked with some Russians who love Putin despite all the corruption, despite economic woes, why?
because he is a Russia first guy.
Wouldn't it be nice to have someone here who is in charge who feels the same way about the US. Forget about all the phony Us flag waving and declarations on how great the US is the past staged few days.
And to have the Musllim father waving a small copy of the US Constitution around at a DNC convention is hypocracy beyond the pale. Not for him personally but to do it as though the Democrats are Constitutionalists is just typical Clintoneasque BS.
Putin is Fantastic. I lived under him for a while. Great guy. No grey areas with him.
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Jewish Princeton Professor Emeritus on Russian US relations was a guest on Smerconish on CNN, AND actually came out and agreed with Trump and disagreed with Clinton. I thought ok, he is Jewish , he is from Princeton, he is a university professor and the odds are high he will bash Trump and pronounce Hillary the Queen,
But no. He was more neutral. What a pleasant surprise. And he bashed the media for jumping on Trump!!!!!!!
Like I posted on another thread , why shouldn't we take another look at Nato? At our relationship with Russia?
This scholar certainly thinks this has validity:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/07/30/russia_expert_stephen_cohen_trump_wants_to_stop_the_new_cold_war_but_the_america_media_just_doesnt_understand.html
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http://nypost.com/2016/07/30/melania-trump-like-youve-never-seen-her-before/
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http://nypost.com/2016/07/30/melania-trump-like-youve-never-seen-her-before/
Eastern Europe is a poor place with few opportunities. It's similar to the zones of tolerance that operate here in Mexico. Saddest place I've ever seen. I don't judge the women that work there just to have something to eat.
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Jewish Princeton Professor Emeritus on Russian US relations was a guest on Smerconish on CNN, AND actually came out and agreed with Trump and disagreed with Clinton. I thought ok, he is Jewish , he is from Princeton, he is a university professor and the odds are high he will bash Trump and pronounce Hillary the Queen,
But no. He was more neutral. What a pleasant surprise. And he bashed the media for jumping on Trump!!!!!!!
Like I posted on another thread , why shouldn't we take another look at Nato? At our relationship with Russia?
This scholar certainly thinks this has validity:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/07/30/russia_expert_stephen_cohen_trump_wants_to_stop_the_new_cold_war_but_the_america_media_just_doesnt_understand.html
Great article -
"New York Times," which says Russian spies said to have hacked Clinton's bid...There is no evidence for that. None whatsoever. "
Exactly. The media spits something out with ambiguous sources (not unlike people saying that ISIS agents are crossing the southern border....no hard witnessess), just take their word for it. I don't buy it.
"Putin, could do as he pleases, in that part of the world."
As opposed to the US doing whatever it wants in any part of the world with the sole exceptions of Russia, China and North Korea?
"We just say, oh, Trump wants to abandon NATO. "
I'm not seeing the problem with that at all. It should be applied to the UN as well.
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Trump needs a far better rapid fire response to the media team .
Clintons have their people ALL OVER MSM within 24 hrs with coordinated spins when ever they feel the need to . Donald just has himself and a few others allowed to come on like in effective Corey Lowendowski who is a CNN employee.
The libs on the news networks are spinning right around them.
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Which does not speak well of his skills as a CEO , , ,
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An aside in this article is this:
"This came after Colorado Springs firefighters rescued Trump and about ten others from a stalled elevator just before his speech by prying open the top and lowering a ladder, according to KKTV."
What are the odds of a stalled elevator?
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/colorado-springs-fire-marshal-responds-with-grace-after-being-bashed-by-trump-for-doing-his-job/
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I can't find coverage of this that isn't anti-Trump to begin with, but Trump made a series of sloppy statements about Crimea and is paying a price for it in the media.
"Russia isn't going into Ukraine' meaning under his watch. But they're already there, in Crimea. That was under Obama. 'It isn't our fight' - except that is a change in stated policy; the west has not recognized the annexation. But the west, not led by Obama, wasn't taking that fight to Russia or going in anyway.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/facts-behind-trumps-comments-russia-ukraine/
Strange that the left can turn their failures into Trump's disqualifications.
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Oh my God. I can see the Dems dusting off of the "Daisy" commercials now:
http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/290359-megyn-kelly-hits-scarborough-msnbc-show-could-not-have-promoted
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CCP: Oh my God. I can see the Dems dusting off of the "Daisy" commercials now:
http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/290359-megyn-kelly-hits-scarborough-msnbc-show-could-not-have-promoted
The Daisy commercial might work the other way around this time. Hillary won't protect us at the border or from ISIS immigration and there is enough footage of terror bombings to full a 60 second spot.
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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump revealed his initial list of economic advisers Friday, which includes 14 individuals from the worlds of finance and real estate.
https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/TRUMP_ECONOMIC_ADVISORY_COUNCIL_FINAL.pdf
Trump's list includes ...Stephen Moore, the longtime supply-side economist who founded the Club for Growth.
[Also David Malpass is on the list, a good economist and friend(?) or ally of Scott Grannis.]
Trump is set to unveil his policy agenda during a speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Monday. According to the campaign's press release, Trump's speech "will focus on empowering Americans by freeing up the necessary tools for everyone to gain economically."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-unveils-list-of-economic-advisers/article/2598694
Monday we switch to issues. If Trump can't beat Obama/Hillary in the debate over economic policy, we are sunk.
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This will form the foundation for Monday's economic address. I note their numbers are the same I came up with this week, 94 million out of the workforce, 8 million unemployed, 102 million out of the workforce or unemployed!
58% of young African-Americans are either outside the labor force or unemployed.
- Totally unacceptable. Amazing that Trump gets this. This cannot stand in a great nation.
Highest corporate taxes in the world. 6th highest capital gains taxes in the OECD. I'm looking forward to a coherent and persuasive rejection of current policies. No pressure, but we should hear Trump make his case and say game, set, match. Hillary doesn't even wants to fix what's wrong. She promises to double down on it.
- AUGUST 05, 2016 -
TRUMP CAMPAIGN ECONOMIC STATEMENT
"We are in the middle of the single worst 'recovery' since the Great Depression. Economic growth is at 1.2 percent - the third straight quarter of less than 2 percent growth. Many workers today are earning less than they did in 1970, and household incomes are down nearly $2,000 under the Obama Administration.
We have the lowest home ownership rate in 51 years. The number of workers who work part-time because of poor business conditions increased by 5.8 percent last month. 102 million people are either outside the labor force or unemployed. 58% of young African-Americans are either outside the labor force or unemployed.
We hit a trade deficit of nearly $45 billion in the most recent month (an 8.7% increase), and nearly $800 billion last year - shipping millions of jobs overseas. Entire communities have been wiped out by offshoring.
The economy the media and the Clinton Machine is describing is an economy that doesn't exist for most Americans - it's an economy enjoyed by her donors and special interests, and one suffered through every day by millions of Americans."
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http://www.financialsamurai.com/how-much-money-do-the-top-income-earners-make-percent/
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http://www.westernjournalism.com/hannity-to-gop-establishment-you-created-donal/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=PostUp&utm_campaign=WJDailyEmail&utm_content=2016-08-05
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What will he say when asked about it?
https://mic.com/articles/149996/donald-trump-adviser-rudy-giuliani-says-it-s-time-to-start-electronically-tagging-muslims?utm_source=policymicFB&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=WHFacebook&utm_content=inf_10_285_2&tse_id=INF_52a7dcf05be511e6b7dc69ca5c618d1d#.rsIl8dXBe
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Muslim tracking.
The closest thing I can think of to this is maybe a convicted child sex offender where others in a neighborhood can be alerted. Also one can search a criminal background on anyone else.
But these are not people who are suspects.
BTW, notice this link goes to MIC which also has to bring up the phony "star of David" hillary photo over "piles of cash".
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This is very damaging indeed. But I sincerely hope these people are not thinking I am going to turn around and start chanting "Bush for 2020". By then its over. And Jeb as sure as hell is "not the answer".
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/gop-letter-national-security-trump-226801
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http://www.ftportfolios.com/Commentary/EconomicResearch/2016/8/8/trumps-policies-earn-a-b
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http://www.dalecarnegie.com/ebook/secrets-of-success/?&mkwid=srSGx4TmJ_dc&pcrid=104774470837&MatchType=e&pkw=how%20to%20win%20friends&placement=&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=how%20to%20win%20friends&utm_campaign=Search+-+Generic+-+How+To+Win+Friends+-+G&_keycode=Google_How%2520To%2520Win%2520Friends&gclid=CIXZ3tKvwc4CFYVehgodKbYG2w
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https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/08/media-in-frenzy-over-trump-claim-that-obama-and-hillary-founded-isis-ignores-dia-document-showing-how-they-did
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Does It Matter if Ukraine’s Pro-Russian Party Gave Manafort Secret Cash?
Documentation is nice, but it doesn’t really surprise anyone; Paul Manafort worked for a Ukrainian political party friendly to Russia for a long time.
Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials . . .
Anti-corruption officials there say the payments earmarked for Mr. Manafort, previously unreported, are a focus of their investigation, though they have yet to determine if he actually received the cash. While Mr. Manafort is not a target in the separate inquiry of offshore activities, prosecutors say he must have realized the implications of his financial dealings.
Manafort responds that the whole thing is false. If he received official on-the-books payments from political parties, why would they be giving him cash off-the-books, too?
Manafort also insists, “I have never received a single ‘off-the-books cash payment’ as falsely ‘reported’ by The New York Times, nor have I ever done work for the governments of Ukraine or Russia.” That last part seems like a bit of a dodge. If someone does work for the Democratic National Committee or Obama for America in 2012, does that mean they can say they’ve never done work for the U.S. government? In both cases, they’re answering to the president, and it seems reasonable to conclude their viewpoints and interests align.
As noted in a Morning Jolt way back in March, the Manafort-Yanukovych relationship stretched on for years.
Manafort’s friends describe his relationship with Yanukovych as a political love connection, born out of Yanukovych’s first downfall when he was driven from power by the 2004 Orange Revolution. Feeling that his domestic political advisers had failed him, Yanukovych turned to a foreign company, Davis Manafort, which was already doing work for the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. The former Ukrainian PM and Manafort, the Georgetown-educated son of a Connecticut politician, hit it off.
Manafort’s firm had a set of international clients and produced an analysis of the Orange Revolution that Yanukovych found instructive, according to one operative involved in Yanukovych’s political rehabilitation. Manafort became, in effect, a general consultant to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, shaping big-picture messaging, coaching Yanukovych to speak in punchy, American-style sound bites and managing teams of consultants and attorneys in both Ukraine and the United States ahead of an anticipated Yanukovych comeback. While it’s difficult to track payments in foreign elections, a former associate
familiar with Manafort’s earnings say they ran into the seven figures over several years.
After Yanukovych’s 2010 victory, Manafort stayed on as an adviser to the Russia-friendly president and became involved in other business projects in Eastern Europe.
Manafort also declares, “My work in Ukraine ceased following the following the country’s parliamentary elections in October 2014.” Well, yeah, there wasn’t as much he could do for his client after that:
Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych has said he accepts some responsibility for the killings that led to his overthrow in February 2014.
“I don’t deny my responsibility,” he told BBC Newsnight, when asked about the shooting of demonstrators in Kiev’s Maidan Square.
He never ordered the security forces to open fire, he said, but admitted he had not done enough to prevent bloodshed.
“I did not give any orders [to use firearms], that was not my authority… I was against any use of force, let alone the use of firearms, I was against bloodshed. But the members of the security forces fulfilled their duties according to existing laws. They had the right to use weapons,” he said.
More than 100 protesters died in the clashes on Kiev’s central square, where huge crowds had confronted police for months. A year after the bloodshed some witnesses told the BBC that fatal shots had also been fired at the police. In February 2014 Mr Yanukovych was whisked away by Russian special forces to a safe haven in Russia.
After years of supporting Ukrainian resistance to Russian threats, the GOP platform suddenly changed this year. We know Manafort’s worldview is considerably friendlier to Vladmir Putin, Russia, and its political allies than the average American foreign policy maker’s. Is this because of secret cash, past contractual work, or Manafort’s personal definition of American interests? If you see Putin as a threat to American interests, does it really matter?
And if taking money from a foreign interest makes someone unacceptable to be in or near the Oval Office . . . what about the Clinton Foundation and its millions of dollars from the Saudis, Kuwaitis, state-owned Russian companies, oligarchs, and so on?
Of course, in an ordinary year, an accusation like the one in the Times would be a big deal. This year, it will be eclipsed by some new Trump comment by midday.
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Donald Trump Just Overtook The Democrats On Gay Rights
by MILO 15 Aug 2016 - Breitbart.com
The madman has actually done it. God-Emperor Daddy — known to the rest of you as Republican presidential candidate Donald J Trump — has just outflanked Hillary Clinton on the Left and announced what can only be described as an ultra-progressive immigration policy.
I don’t mean progressive as it has come to be used, of course — nannying, language-policing, Muslim-pandering. I mean it’s a policy that could actually make things better for minorities.
Trump’s plan is to introduce a screening process for prospective immigrants to the U.S., testing their ideological commitment to western values like women’s rights, gay rights, and religious pluralism. It’s a brilliant plan. I’m especially inclined to say it’s brilliant because it may have been partly inspired by me.
The test will apply to all immigrants, yet its obvious target is Muslims, who, as we know, get a bit bomby in the presence of gays, a bit rapey in the presence of women who wear skirts shorter than their ankles and generally a bit hostile and violent around anyone who doesn’t have their bum in the air five times a day.
The media won’t portray this policy as progressive, of course — they’ll portray it as stupid, bigoted, and reactionary. The Washington Post, little more than a Hillary mouthpiece this election cycle, has already started, branding the proposal “crazy” and “outlandish.” But it isn’t. Actually, it’s about the most pro-gay policy I’ve ever heard from a presidential hopeful.
Trump has also promised to deport hate-preachers in the U.S. His specific wording (“send them home”) again suggests that he’s targeting Islam. Go Daddy!
It’s odd that leftists are already starting up the outrage machine. After all, isn’t this what progressivism is supposed to be about? All around the world, Muslims are oppressing women, murdering gays, and exterminating non-Muslims. Progressives claim to want to protect the rights of gays, women and minorities, yet are silent on the greatest threat to them in the world today.
Somehow, I doubt they would be outraged if Trump threatened to deport the Westboro Baptist Church. This, despite the fact that the Westboro Baptists haven’t killed anyone, whereas a Muslim, Omar Mateen, carried out the greatest act of homophobic violence in U.S. history.
The Left, of course, think Orlando was a tragic incident of workplace violence, enabled by toxic masculinity and a lack of gun control.
I’m comfortable with people who are uncomfortable with gays, as long as they don’t want to kill us, maim us or throw us off rooftops. (Permission for lesser violence is available upon application.) For leftists, the reverse appears to be true — they’re uncomfortable with people who are uncomfortable with gays, unless they want to kill us and maim us and throw us off rooftops.
Thus, decline to bake a cake for some lesbians and you are a heinous bigot. Murder 50 fags and injure 50 more and you’re a tragic victim, probably reacting to islamophobia, whose dad will be invited to stand behind Hillary Clinton at a rally.
There’s no diplomatic way to put it. In this historic announcement, Donald Trump has dramatically overtaken the chronically Muslim-friendly Democratic Party on gay rights. I predict conservatives across the west will soon follow suit. The right is quickly realising that, thanks to the silence on Islam, it is they and not the left who are destined to safeguard women, gays, and minorities from the barbarians of the East.
As the body counts — and rape counts — in Europe rack up, gays — and others on Islam’s kill-list — will realize that in a world of Muslim migration, conservative immigration policies are actually the most progressive. Meanwhile, the claims of self-proclaimed leftists to champion the rights of women and minorities will ring increasingly hollow.
Voters are starting to take notice of all this.
Throughout this election cycle, Trump has been attacked as a bigot and a reactionary on immigration. With this new plan, though, he has proven beyond doubt that he’s the only person running for President who can stick up for chicks and queers.
Face facts, guys. It is the political Left that wants to flood America with violent homophobes and misogynists, not Trump. No-one with a clear-eyed view of Muslim culture can believe otherwise.
Perhaps this is what the #NeverTrump guys meant when they said Trump was a closet liberal.
Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Hear him every Friday on The Milo Yiannopoulos Show. Write to Milo at milo@breitbart.com.
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I would quibble with details in the plan but the choice between this plan in the form it will come through congress and Hillary's Plan for Recession should clinch the election, (all other things equal). )
Alan Reynolds is one of the best economists out there, works for Cato, is on the editorial board at IBD. This one is in The Hill.
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/campaign/291003-donald-trump-pushes-fiscally-sound-economic-plan
August 10, 2016, 01:06 pm
Donald Trump pushes fiscally sound economic plan
By Alan Reynolds, contributor
Anemic economic growth is the number one issue with the voters. And, as Donald Trump noted in a major policy address in Detroit, “Taxes are one of the biggest differences in this race.” Both candidates favor massive infrastructure spending and grumble about inexpensive imports, but they differ dramatically on taxes.
Hillary Clinton proposes to raise the top tax rate on small businesses to 47.4 percent, to shrink the estate tax exemption by $2 millon, and to impose the highest capital gains taxes in decades.
Imagine you were an economic czar trying to boost incentives for business investment and labor force participation. Would you raise tax rates or lower them? It’s not a trick question, or a hard one. Presidents Kennedy and Reagan answered that question by cutting marginal tax rates on income by 30 percent in 1964-65 and 23 percent in 1983-84. President Clinton cut the capital gains tax by 29 percent in 1997.
Similarly, Donald Trump would “work with” House Republicans’ tax reform plan “using the same brackets they have proposed: 12, 25 and 33 percent.” Capital gains would be taxed at half those rates. Trump would cut the corporate rate more deeply, to 15 percent rather than 20 percent, which could have more bang for very few more bucks.
Unfortunately, partisan critics keep trying to dismiss all such tax reform proposals as “reckless” or “insane” since they promise smaller increases in future revenue than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “projects.” Even the status quo flunks that test, however, because – as the graph shows – the CBO baseline projects that revenues from the individual income tax will keep rising faster than the economy forever.
“CBO projects individual income taxes will generate a growing share of revenues over the next decade,” the agency explains, “and by 2025, they will reach 9.5 percent of GDP, well above the historical average.” After that, individual income taxes keep rising without limit – to 9.7 percent in 2028, 10 percent in 2033, 10.4 percent in 2040 and close to 14 percent by 2090.
These fanciful projections of endless, automatic tax increases, says the CBO, “are mainly because of real bracket creep—the pushing of a growing share of income into higher tax brackets as a result of growth in real (inflation-adjusted) income.”
Since nothing like that ever happened in the past, why believe it will happen in the future?
Individual income taxes averaged 7.7 percent of GDP from 1946 to 2014, and topped 9 percent only five times (1944, 1981 and 1998-2000). The individual income tax brought in just 7.7 percent of GDP from 1951 to 1963 when the top tax rate was 91 percent, and 8.1 percent of GDP from 1988 to 1990 when the top tax rate was 28 percent.
Unlike recent experience, however, the CBO imagines real wages will supposedly rise so rapidly that more and more ordinary people will find themselves shoved up into the top Clinton-Obama tax brackets of 35 percent and 39.6 percent.
The projected future revenues are also “static” which means they assume perpetual tax increases don’t harm economic growth, even though the CBO acknowledges, “Higher marginal tax rates discourage working and saving, which reduces output.”
Every CBO budget estimate warns their “baseline projections are not a forecast of future outcomes.” Yet every attempt to estimate the “cost” of tax reform ignores that warning and misuses these fantastic phantom CBO projections as the standard by which tax reforms are judged.
The Tax Foundation estimates the House Republican tax plan “would reduce federal revenue by $2.4 trillion over the first decades on a static basis.” Due to the larger economy and tax base, however, “the plan would reduce revenue by $191 billion over the first decade.” But note well that such estimates (both static and dynamic) show reduced revenues only in comparison with the rising CBO baseline, not with taxes we actually pay.
Revenues from the individual income tax averaged 8.2 percent of GDP from 2013 to 2015, following Obama’s 2013 tax increase. That 8.2 percent figure is well above any long-term average, partly because of recessions. If receipts remain at that above-average level of 8.2 percent of GDP (which assumes no recessions), then revenues over the next ten years will turn out to be $2.62 trillion smaller than the CBO projected this March.
Keeping individual tax revenues at that relatively high 2013-2015 level (8.2 percent of GDP) would bring in slightly less revenue that over the next ten years than the House Republican plan – even in static terms. And recall that static estimates require pretending (as nobody has) that such dramatic reduction in marginal tax rates on investment, entrepreneurship and education would have zero effect on economic growth.
In short, the House Republican plan is alleged to “lose money” only because it would block “real bracket creep” by repealing the highest tax rates.
Even aside from its vitally invigorating impact on depressed incentives to work and invest, the House Republican tax reform would at most merely thwart a farfetched CBO projection of perpetual tax increases. Relative to recent and historical experience, it would not “cut taxes” at all.
Alan Reynolds is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute.
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If only he can stay on script............
Levin praises Donald's speech:
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/08/16/levin-praises-trump-isis-speech-really-good-things-hes-saying/
Here is the full text:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-terrorism-speech-227025
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Lacking a strong opposition party here, I will post for them. Some of these are explained by vast changes in time, long before he ran for anything for example. Some are clipped. For some the facts have changed, but by and large this is quite damaging to anyone who takes a close look at it. She presumably has a billion or two to blanket the airwaves with it. The negative ads will go both ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSE-XoVKaXg
5+ minutes of Donald at least appearing to contradict himself.
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One more anti-Trump piece, hopefuly to help him get straight on issues where he has been screwed up. This is from last March during the primaries, catching up on what good economists think.
Pat or anybody, do you have a rebuttal to any of this? Better than Hillary but hard to get excited when part of what he's selling is snake oil.
http://www.investors.com/politics/brain-trust/alan-reynolds-donald-trumps-selective-trade-war/
Alan Reynolds: Donald Trump's Selective Trade War
The VW plant in Puebla is the largest and most modern in Mexico. Many of the cars manufactured entirely in Mexico are exported to the USA. But Donald Trump wants to single out Ford for a 35% tariff on vehicles it imports from Mexico if the company goes ahead with plans to update and expand factories south of the border. (Newscom)
3/31/2016
Donald Trump repeatedly promised voters in Michigan and elsewhere that if elected president, he would impose a 35% tariff on Fords imported from Mexico if the company goes ahead with plans to update and expand Mexican factories.
Trump threatened to impose the same tariff on Carrier air conditioners from Mexico, advised boycotting Oreo cookies because Nabisco has a Mexican subsidiary and even boasted, "We're going to get Apple to build their damn computers in this country instead of other countries."
He can’t do that. No U.S. president has any right to tell private companies where they can produce or invest. More obviously, no U.S. President has the legal authority to impose targeted tariffs or taxes on specific firms -- simply to punish business decisions he doesn’t approve of.
When threatening a targeted 35% tariff on Carrier, Trump explained, “I am going to get consensus from Congress, and we’re going to tax you (meaning Carrier, but actually its customers) when those air conditioners come.”
But a president needs more than a consensus to unilaterally repudiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and many related laws (including treaties with Canada) or to withdraw from the World Trade Organization.
Even if such treaties were somehow abrogated by executive fiat, the president would still have no authority to impose a tariff on imports from one specific country (Mexico) by one specific company (Ford or Carrier).
Trump presumes that the president has autocratic authority to impose taxes on imports to punish specific private enterprises and thereby help their competitors. Yet such selective, punitive tariffs would clearly violate the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and would probably also be constitutionally prohibited as a bill of attainder (Article I, Section 9).
Trump’s proposal to misuse presidential power to punish disfavored U.S. companies is particularly glaring in the case of Ford. His threat of trade sanctions against Ford raises three serious questions:
Why does Trump claim that the U.S. auto industry is rapidly declining?
U.S. production of cars and trucks more than doubled since 2009 -- rising from 5.7 million vehicles to 12 million by 2015. The U.S. exported over 2.1 million cars in 2014 and is now the world's third largest auto exporter, after Germany and Japan. (Mexico ranks seventh.)
U.S. vehicle exports to Mexico rose from 101,080 in 2009 to 151,902 in 2014. There were 919,600 U.S. jobs in manufacturing vehicles and parts last December, but only 19% of those jobs were in Michigan (which has lost jobs to many other states, such as Ohio and Kentucky).
Why does Trump single out Ford for criticism and punishment?
General Motors plans to invest $5 billion in Mexico -- twice as much as Ford -- yet Trump is silent about GM. Nearly all of the 13 companies producing vehicles and parts in the United States produce some vehicles and/or parts in Mexico.
The traditional “Big Three” automakers have engaged in joint production in Canada and Mexico for decades (Ford has been in Mexico since 1925), so nearly all their cars contain parts from all three countries. Yet Trump never threatened to slap 35% tariffs on cars made in Canada like the Ford Edge and Flex, Lincoln MKX and MKT, and Chevy Camaro, Equinox and Impala.
Why does Trump focus trade warfare plans on Mexico, never Europe?
Trump says, “I don’t mind trade wars when we’re losing $58 billion a year,” referring to the trade deficit. But the U.S. ran a much larger deficit of $130 billion with the euro area in 2015 -- including $74 billion with Germany alone.
The euro and Japanese yen have been weak -- much weaker than even the Chinese yuan -- yet Trump has not been nearly so enthusiastic about launching a reciprocal trade war with Europe or Japan as he has with Mexico. Why not?
One reason may be that Mexican industry -- though not growing as fast as U.S. industry -- is not stagnant or declining. From early 2010 to late 2015, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, industrial production rose 9.6% in Mexico -- not bad, though not as strong as the 13% gain in the U.S. In the same period, however, industrial production fell 2.7% in Japan and was up only 2.6% in Europe.
Donald Trump’s proposal to apply tariffs in a discriminatory fashion to specific firms in specific countries is unprecedented. Until now, tariffs have been applied to entire classes of products, such as light trucks or tomatoes, not to specific products made by U.S.-chartered corporations in a particular country.
Trump calls his vindictive plan a “tax,” pretending that it would hurt nobody but Ford and Mexico. But it would really be a 35% sales tax paid by U.S. consumers. The main effect of any tariff is to (1) raise the cost of production for U.S. companies using imported parts or materials, making U.S. industry less competitive, and (2) raise the cost of living for American consumers, making us all poorer.
The idea that forcing Americans to pay more for less could “save jobs” is economic nonsense. Tariffs are all pain and no gain. And selective tariffs against specific companies would be imperious and blatantly unconstitutional.
Reynolds is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute.
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Brilliant! Trump Brings Breitbart CEO On Board as Campaign Chief
ByPamela Geller on August 17, 2016
I know Steve Bannon. It’s an inspired choice.
Andrew Breitbart is cheering from heaven.
Brilliant. Steve Bannon is a warrior. He has long understood that this is a war in the information battle-space (something the right has failed to grasp, despite the left’s smear machine against those with whom they disagree.) The media is out to destroy Donald Trump. Trump needs a champion, a “Patton,” a Bannon.
This is fantastic news. Heads are exploding on the left.
“NY Times: Donald Trump, in Shake-Up, Hires Breitbart Executive Stephen K. Bannon for Top Campaign Post,”
Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker write in the New York Times:
LAS VEGAS — Donald J. Trump has shaken up his presidential campaign for the second time in two months, hiring a top executive from the conservative website Breitbart News and promoting a senior adviser in an effort to right his faltering campaign.
Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, will become the Republican campaign’s chief executive, and Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser and pollster for Mr. Trump and his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, will become the campaign manager.
Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, will retain his title. But the staffing change, hammered out on Sunday and set to be formally announced Wednesday morning, was seen by some as a demotion for Mr. Manafort.
[…]
“We met as the ‘core four’ today,” Ms. Conway added, referring to herself, Mr. Bannon, Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates.
People briefed on the move said that it reflected Mr. Trump’s realization that his campaign was at a crisis point. But it indicates that the candidate — who has chafed at making the types of changes his current aides have asked for, even though he had acknowledged they would need to occur — has decided to embrace his aggressive style for the duration of the race.
Both Ms. Conway and Mr. Bannon, whose news organization has been very favorable to Mr. Trump since he entered the primaries, are close with Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the father-and-daughter conservative donors who have become allies of the candidate and are funding a “super PAC” that is working against Hillary Clinton.
[…]
Mr. Bannon has no experience with political campaigns, but he represents the type of bare-knuckled fighter that the candidate had in Corey Lewandowski, his combative former campaign manager, who was fired on June 20.
Mr. Bannon has been a supporter of Mr. Trump’s pugilistic instincts, which the candidate has made clear in interviews he is uncertain about suppressing. He is also deeply mistrustful of the political establishment, and his website has often been critical of Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader.
- See more at: http://pamelageller.com/2016/08/briiliant-trump-brings-breitbart-ceo-on-board-as-campaign-chief.html/#sthash.L11wQqsl.dpuf
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Not sure if the Breitbart guy now coming directly into the campaign is good or not.
Certainly the rumors that Manafort got millions in cash from Russian backed Ukranians is not helpful and fits right into the LEFts narrative about Trump colluding with Putin.
Breitbart has been undoubtedly in the tank for Trump from the start. And Trumps loves that. But will the undecideds get convinced?
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Good to dial back on Manafort in the wake of the Russki $$$ issue.
If Putin invades Ukraine after Trump said "Trust me, he won't" this will be very bad for Trump.
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Wow: :-o :-o :-o
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/08/19/landrieu-i-want-to-thank-mr-trump-for-coming-to-louisiana-i-hope-clinton-and-obama-will-visit/
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DONALD TRUMP’S LINCOLNESQUE MOMENT
A landmark in the emergence of a new Republican Party.
August 19, 2016 David Horowitz
Today in Dimondale Michigan Donald Trump gave what was not only the best speech of his campaign but a speech that will one day be seen as a landmark in the emergence of a new Republican Party – a party finally returning to its roots as the party of Lincoln. If this sounds like hyperbole ask yourself what other Republican leader in recent memory has addressed America’s African American communities in this voice:
The African-American community has given so much to this country. They’ve fought and died in every war since the Revolution. They’ve lifted up the conscience of our nation in the long march for Civil Rights. They’ve sacrificed so much for the national good. Yet, nearly 4 in 10 African-American children still live in poverty, and 58% of young African-Americans are not working. We must do better as a country. I refuse to believe that the future must be like the past.
Trump’s Dimondale speech was a pledge to African Americans trapped in the blighted zones and killing fields of inner cities exclusively ruled by Democrats for half a century and more, and exploited by their political leaders for votes, and also used as fodder for slanders directed at their Republican opponents. This was his appeal:
Tonight, I am asking for the vote of every African-American citizen in this country who wants a better future. The inner cities of our country have been run by the Democratic Party for 50 years. Their policies have produced only poverty, joblessness, failing schools, and broken homes. It is time to hold Democratic Politicians accountable for what they have done to these communities. It is time to hold failed leaders accountable for their results, not just their empty words.
Time to hold the Democrats responsible for what they have done. For twenty years I and many others on the right have waited for Republican leaders to do just this. Until now we have despaired of seeing this happen in our lifetimes. But here is Trump articulating the very message we have been waiting for - support for America’s inner city poor – a message that should have been front and center of every Republican campaign for the last fifty years.
Trump: “Look at what the Democratic Party has done to the city of Detroit. Forty percent of Detroit’s residents live in poverty. Half of all Detroit residents do not work. Detroit tops the list of Most Dangerous Cities in terms of violent crime. This is the legacy of the Democrat politicians who have run this city. This is the result of the policy agenda embraced by Hillary Clinton…. The one thing every item in Hillary Clinton’s agenda has in common is that it takes jobs and opportunities from African-American workers. Her support for open borders. Her fierce opposition to school choice. Her plan to massively raise taxes on small businesses. Her opposition to American energy. And her record of giving our jobs away to other countries.”
Tying the fight to liberate African Americans and other minorities from the violent urban wastelands in which Democrats have trapped them to his other proposals– secure borders, law and order to make urban environments safe, jobs for American workers, putting Americans first – these are a sure sign that Trump has an integrated vision of the future towards which he is working. Call it populism if you will. To me it seems like a clear-eyed conservative plan to restore American values and even to unify America’s deeply fractured electorate.
I love this line: “America must reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton who sees communities of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future.” Yes African Americans and other Americans too are suffocating under the racism of the Democratic Party which takes African Americans for granted and lets the communities of the most vulnerable sink ever deeper into a maelstrom of poverty and violence without end.
Trump being Trump offers this constituency that has turned its back on Republicans for half a century this deal maker: “Look at how much African-American communities have suffered under Democratic Control. To those hurting, I say: what do you have to lose by trying something new?’
In the boldest imaginable way, Donald Trump is doing what Republicans have been talking about doing for a generation but have failed miserably to achieve – creating a “big tent” and opening up the party to new constituencies, in particular to minority constituencies. The fact that at the moment he is nonetheless distrusted by minorities is partly the result of his flamboyant carelessness with language during his extemporaneous riffs, but mainly because of the vicious distortions of his words and character by his unscruplous Democratic enemies and their media whores. These progressives pretend to care about African Americans but are content to let generations of inner city minorities and their children live blighted lives so long as they can be bussed to the polls every November and cast the votes that keep them in power.
Not to forget the #NeverTrumpers on the Republican side. These defectors are among the loudest slanderers, smearing Trump as a racist and a bigot when he is obviously the very opposite of that. In fact, when you look at what Trump is actually saying and actually doing, Never Trumpism appears as the newest racism of low expectations. To turn their backs on Trump conservatives must write off the inner cities and their suffering populations, regarding them as irredeemable, and unpersuadable, while leaveing them to their fate. Fortunately there is a large constituency in the Republican Party that resonates to Trump’s message of a new Republican Party and a new hope for all Americans - white and non-white – who have been left behind.
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I give up. Would someone please take this guy's I Phone away already:
http://theweek.com/speedreads/644297/trump-viciously-attacks-morning-joes-mika-brzezinski-hours-after-campaign-manager-insists-doesnt-insult-people
:x
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Hey Donald . "What have you got to lose?"
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2016/08/18/trump-and-blacks-n2207012
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439228/donald-trump-immigration-plan-amnesty-option
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439228/donald-trump-immigration-plan-amnesty-option
He is taking a more electable path, a Rubio path... That doesn't make previous statements go away.
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VDH is always a good read. This is a particularly good piece on the state of the race today and where it might go from here.
"Trump’s political obituary over the last 14 months has been rewritten about every three weeks. ..."
Hanson sees a scenario where this can still turn in Trump's favor.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439256/donald-trump-unexpected-opportunity?target=author&tid=900280
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Waiting for Pat's outrage.
I doubt anyone here has posted that Trump is evil incarnate. If they did, I missed it. Trump may well win. Prepare yourself for when he fcuks us over to make his "deals".
Since I quit posting here, I have been lurking, reading the posts on the election and the candidates. Several times I have almost posted, but realized that I would once again subject myself to negative articles about Trump promoting media and political talking points that have taken Trump’s words out of context, his history having been distorted, and rants that Trump is evil incarnate. I can go anywhere for that.
Since Hotair.com blew themselves up by going over Facebook for posting, I have been a part of www.HotGas.net I am a featured commenter and one of the moderators there.
There is no place generally to go and have a reasoned debate on Trump, Clinton and the ongoing election. Go to The Right Scoop, and anyone opposing Cruz is subjected to the vilest comments imaginable. (I went there once and after writing about 50 words on why the article written was misrepresenting a Trump position, I was attacked in ways that would make a sailor blush. And within two minutes, I was permanently banned.)
Conservation Review? The same thing occurs. Luciannel.com? Yep, banned The National Review, pro Trump comments are often deleted. But the same happens with the Pro Trump website, The Conservative Treehouse.
I am writing this because I am extending an offer to anyone here.
At HotGas, we would welcome anyone here to pen a thought out article on your views of Trump, other candidates, or the coming General Election. Then, we can have a reasonable discussion, no name calling, etc.
If anyone chooses to write an article, be prepared to back up claims with proof or facts to support the claims. You will be challenged on what is presented.
Know that HG does support Trump. But know this also…..over 50% of our posters and readers were either Cruz people, as a first or second choice, but most have flipped. We would be happy to discuss why the flipping.
This is your opportunity to present your views to a website that has over 15k unique visits per day, and about 30k hits per day. Just amazing for a website that began on Feb 8, 2016 and has been operational for just 3 months.
If you want to submit an article, just send me an email, and I will get it posted as a Featured Reader Submission. Just make sure it is well thought out and not just a series of rants.
Pat ppulatie@pacbell.net
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http://theweek.com/speedreads/644687/donald-trump-supporters-dont-seem-mind-apparent-flipflop-immigration
Waiting for Pat's outrage.
I doubt anyone here has posted that Trump is evil incarnate. If they did, I missed it. Trump may well win. Prepare yourself for when he fcuks us over to make his "deals".
Since I quit posting here, I have been lurking, reading the posts on the election and the candidates. Several times I have almost posted, but realized that I would once again subject myself to negative articles about Trump promoting media and political talking points that have taken Trump’s words out of context, his history having been distorted, and rants that Trump is evil incarnate. I can go anywhere for that.
Since Hotair.com blew themselves up by going over Facebook for posting, I have been a part of www.HotGas.net I am a featured commenter and one of the moderators there.
There is no place generally to go and have a reasoned debate on Trump, Clinton and the ongoing election. Go to The Right Scoop, and anyone opposing Cruz is subjected to the vilest comments imaginable. (I went there once and after writing about 50 words on why the article written was misrepresenting a Trump position, I was attacked in ways that would make a sailor blush. And within two minutes, I was permanently banned.)
Conservation Review? The same thing occurs. Luciannel.com? Yep, banned The National Review, pro Trump comments are often deleted. But the same happens with the Pro Trump website, The Conservative Treehouse.
I am writing this because I am extending an offer to anyone here.
At HotGas, we would welcome anyone here to pen a thought out article on your views of Trump, other candidates, or the coming General Election. Then, we can have a reasonable discussion, no name calling, etc.
If anyone chooses to write an article, be prepared to back up claims with proof or facts to support the claims. You will be challenged on what is presented.
Know that HG does support Trump. But know this also…..over 50% of our posters and readers were either Cruz people, as a first or second choice, but most have flipped. We would be happy to discuss why the flipping.
This is your opportunity to present your views to a website that has over 15k unique visits per day, and about 30k hits per day. Just amazing for a website that began on Feb 8, 2016 and has been operational for just 3 months.
If you want to submit an article, just send me an email, and I will get it posted as a Featured Reader Submission. Just make sure it is well thought out and not just a series of rants.
Pat ppulatie@pacbell.net
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/08/has-trump-blown-the-immigration-issue.php
Has Trump Blown the Immigration Issue?
Through the primary season, illegal immigration was Donald Trump’s signature issue. He loudly promised to deport the millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S., and build a high wall that would keep out future unlawful entrants. I don’t think there is much doubt that it was Trump’s seemingly strong position on immigration that propelled him to the front of the Republican race.
But recently, Trump has softened his comments on illegal immigration, even backing off of his pledge to deport the illegals who are already here. Byron York thinks Trump has made a mess of the issue:
What is the status of his old proposal to deport all immigrants who are in the United States illegally? After days of Trump and his senior advisers talking about it, the answer is entirely unclear.
***
Trump has held many, many rallies in which he talked about building the wall — he’s talked about it so much that it is now a call-and-response with some audiences. But at the same events he said nothing about deportations.
***
His new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, has said Trump’s position on deportations is to be determined. Trump himself has said things that appear to be hardline and things that appear much softer. The problem will not be resolved until Trump lays out, in some systematic way, where he stands on the question and explains in turn where that position fits into his larger immigration policy.
Part of the problem is that Trump has always been a squish on immigration, if you took his proposals seriously. Sure, he said he would deport the current generation of illegals. But remember that his high wall had a “huge door” in it. All those deported illegals who were “good” would promptly be re-admitted to the U.S. In practice, there is no possible definition of a “good” illegal immigrant other than one who has not been convicted of a felony. That means that if you took Trump’s proposal seriously, his much-feared mass deportation of illegals would amount to almost nothing, since virtually all of them would promptly be let back in–this time legally!
Presumably this wasn’t what Trump’s supporters had in mind, but it is what Trump put on his web site. One of our frequent email correspondents made the point in language less delicate than Byron’s, commenting on this InstaPundit post where Trump said he would only deport the “bad” illegal immigrants:
Trump struck a starkly different tone during an interview with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News that aired on Monday night. Trump said he would separate the country’s undocumented immigrants into two groups: The “bad ones” who would be kicked out of the country as soon as he takes office and “everybody else” who would go through the same process that the Obama Administration is currently using.
Our correspondent writes:
OH?? “enforce our laws”? Against the employers? Not bloody likely.
And this is perfect for O’Falafal, too. See, the problem is that they’re not LEEEEE-gal, that’s all. LEEEE-gal immigrants are good because they do the JAWD/JAAND for the employers — like the white farmers, ranchers, homebuilders, America’s Dairymen, contractors, small businessmen, restaurateurs, EWIC —- not like the illegal aliens who are rapists, but with some “good” “productive” people, too, though they don’t work and get welfare while they take “our” jobs. We’ll “deport” them for 10 minutes in the old “touchback” fraud sponsored by Trump’s running mate, but then they’ll come right back in! Through the “big beautiful gate” in the fraudulent wall. And then, comrade, they will be LEEEE-gal. Presto-change-o they’re now good, “productive” LEEEE-gal immigrants, just like that! That’s the magic of being LEEEE-gal which everyone is for.
Think this is what the Trumpen-proletariat has in mind? Universal amnesty, conditional on not being a rapist? Oh, and, of course, once they are LEEEE-gal they are “permanent lawful residents” and eligible for all public benefits! When they don’t work while getting welfare and simultaneously taking our jobs that will then be LEEEE-gal!
Hilarious…and you heard it here first.
There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference —- even on immigration! —– objectively, between Trump and Hillary. It’s the usual contest to stand on a dime in the middle of the 50 yard line.
The answer to the question? What happens next is the unconditional “pathway to citizenship” obviously implied by all but unconditional amnesty…and we don’t need no stinkin’ back taxes either.
Is our correspondent correct when he says there is now little difference between Trump’s position and Hillary’s on illegal immigration? (Note, as always, that the bigger problem is legal immigration, which only Trump has made an issue, but not consistently or clearly enough.) On paper, he can make a good case. But my guess is that both Trump’s supporters and Hillary’s will continue to believe that their candidates are far apart on the issue, and they probably are right. I think that as president, Hillary would essentially waive our immigration laws for the next four years, hoping to establish as many millions of non-Americans as possible as permanent residents (either de jure or de facto), while Trump would make a reasonably good faith effort to enforce our laws.
If that is right, immigration can continue to be a rallying point for the Trump campaign. Still, he has come down a long way from the rhetorical flights of last Fall, and some of his supporters will notice.
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http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/08/24/drive_by_media_salivate_over_trump_softening_on_immigration
conservative review on it . Trump has officially adopted the "gang or 8 position"
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/08/trump-just-officially-adopted-the-jeb-bush-gang-of-8-position-on-amnesty
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Sen. Ted Cruz "I told you so."
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http://www.mediaite.com/online/woman-who-wrote-in-trump-we-trust-goes-on-tweetstorm-about-why-we-cant-trust-trump/
Untrustworthy.
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Flip flop is a ninth inning hail mary.
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EXCELLENT speech today by Trump in New Hampshire.
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Here is transcript of the speech. I like the theme. Now he needs to put his money where his mouth is.
OTOH Trump's "pivot" has to be worrying the Clinton mob and the MSM libs . The MSM will not let him get away with it so easily like they do when ever a Clinton suddenly shifts gears. Never a comment when Bill or Hill do it. Which is every week:
http://heavy.com/news/2016/08/read-full-transcript-donald-trump-speech-rally-manchester-new-hampshire-prepared-text/
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http://theweek.com/speedreads/644687/donald-trump-supporters-dont-seem-mind-apparent-flipflop-immigration
Waiting for Pat's outrage.
I doubt anyone here has posted that Trump is evil incarnate. If they did, I missed it. Trump may well win. Prepare yourself for when he fcuks us over to make his "deals".
Right. Trump takes the Rubio electability position after thoroughly trashing it. I also said then he wasn't going to deport anyone, just send the known criminals first and never get to the rest. First he had to scare everyone and drive up his own negatives.
Say one thing in the primaries and another in the general election. A different sort of politician...(?)
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Just checked over at hottrumpkoolaid.com
Nothing on Trump's flip flop. It's like it never happened.
http://theweek.com/speedreads/644687/donald-trump-supporters-dont-seem-mind-apparent-flipflop-immigration
Waiting for Pat's outrage.
I doubt anyone here has posted that Trump is evil incarnate. If they did, I missed it. Trump may well win. Prepare yourself for when he fcuks us over to make his "deals".
Right. Trump takes the Rubio electability position after thoroughly trashing it. I also said then he wasn't going to deport anyone, just send the known criminals first and never get to the rest. First he had to scare everyone and drive up his own negatives.
Say one thing in the primaries and another in the general election. A different sort of politician...(?)
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"I also said then he wasn't going to deport anyone, just send the known criminals first and never get to the rest. First he had to scare everyone and drive up his own negatives."
Yes you did Doug. You were right all along. He will go back to being a billionaire and the rest of us will be living under totalitarian rule under the IRON thumb of the Democrat mobsters who are hell bent on giving our country away for power. And I will be continuously vilified because I make over 100 K a year, for being white, for being a man, and for being someone who loves America. Shame on me.
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Make no mistake, straight white males are being vilified in the US now like Jews and Gypsies were in 1930's Europe. Why? Draw your own conclusions.
"I also said then he wasn't going to deport anyone, just send the known criminals first and never get to the rest. First he had to scare everyone and drive up his own negatives."
Yes you did Doug. You were right all along. He will go back to being a billionaire and the rest of us will be living under totalitarian rule under the IRON thumb of the Democrat mobsters who are hell bent on giving our country away for power. And I will be continuously vilified because I make over 100 K a year, for being white, for being a man, and for being someone who loves America. Shame on me.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html?emc=edit_na_20160827&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html?emc=edit_na_20160827&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
(http://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/anNnANo_700b.jpg)
Whitewashing the Democratic Party’s History
by Mona Charen June 26, 2015 12:00 AM @monachareneppc
The less racist the South gets, the more Republican it becomes. Here’s what the former president of the United States had to say when he eulogized his mentor, an Arkansas senator: We come to celebrate and give thanks for the remarkable life of J. William Fulbright, a life that changed our country and our world forever and for the better. . . . In the work he did, the words he spoke and the life he lived, Bill Fulbright stood against the 20th century’s most destructive forces and fought to advance its brightest hopes. So spoke President William J. Clinton in 1995 of a man was among the 99 Democrats in Congress to sign the “Southern Manifesto” in 1956. (Two Republicans also signed it.) The Southern Manifesto declared the signatories’ opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and their commitment to segregation forever. Fulbright was also among those who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That filibuster continued for 83 days. Speaking of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, let’s review (since they don’t teach this in schools): The percentage of House Democrats who supported the legislation? 61 percent. House Republicans? 80 percent. In the Senate, 69 percent of Democrats voted yes, compared with 82 percent of Republicans. (Barry Goldwater, a supporter of the NAACP, voted no because he thought it was unconstitutional.) When he was running for president in 2000, Vice President Al Gore told the NAACP that his father, Senator Al Gore Sr., had lost his Senate seat because he voted for the Civil Rights Act. Uplifting story — except it’s false. Gore Sr. voted against the Civil Rights Act. He lost in 1970 in a race that focused on prayer in public schools, the Vietnam War, and the Supreme Court. Al Gore’s reframing of the relevant history is the story of the Democratic party in microcosm. The party’s history is pockmarked with racism and terror. The Democrats were the party of slavery, black codes, Jim Crow, and that miserable terrorist excrescence, the Ku Klux Klan. Republicans were the party of Lincoln, Reconstruction, anti-lynching laws, and the civil rights acts of 1875, 1957, 1960, and 1964. Were all Republicans models of rectitude on racial matters? Hardly. Were they a heck of a lot better than the Democrats? Without question. As recently as 2010, the Senate’s president pro tempore was former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.). Rather than acknowledge their sorry history, modern Democrats have rewritten it. The Democrats have been sedulously rewriting history for decades. You may recall that when MSNBC was commemorating the 50th anniversary of segregationist George Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” stunt to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, the network identified Wallace as “R., Alabama.” The Democrats have been sedulously rewriting history for decades. Their preferred version pretends that all the Democratic racists and segregationists left their party and became Republicans starting in the 1960s. How convenient. If it were true that the South began to turn Republican due to Lyndon Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights Act, you would expect that the Deep South, the states most associated with racism, would have been the first to move. That’s not what happened. The first southern states to trend Republican were on the periphery: North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. (George Wallace lost these voters in his 1968 bid.) The voters who first migrated to the Republican party were suburban, prosperous New South types. The more Republican the South has become, the less racist. Is it unforgivable that Bill Clinton praised a former segregationist? No. Fulbright renounced his racist past, as did Robert Byrd and Al Gore Sr. It would be immoral and unjust to misrepresent the history. What is unforgivable is the way Democrats are still using race to foment hatred. Remember what happened to Trent Lott when he uttered a few dumb words about former segregationist Strom Thurmond? He didn’t get the kind of pass Bill Clinton did when praising Fulbright. Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton told a mostly black audience that “what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to another. . . . Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting.” She was presumably referring to voter-ID laws, which, by the way, 51 percent of black Americans support. Racism has an ugly past in the Democratic party. The accusation of racism has an ugly present. — Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. © 2015 Creators.com
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420321/democratic-party-racist-history-mona-charen
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http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/29/1999-jesse-jackson-praises-trumps-commitment-to-minorities-under-served-communities-video/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html?emc=edit_na_20160827&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
(http://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/anNnANo_700b.jpg)
Whitewashing the Democratic Party’s History
by Mona Charen June 26, 2015 12:00 AM @monachareneppc
The less racist the South gets, the more Republican it becomes. Here’s what the former president of the United States had to say when he eulogized his mentor, an Arkansas senator: We come to celebrate and give thanks for the remarkable life of J. William Fulbright, a life that changed our country and our world forever and for the better. . . . In the work he did, the words he spoke and the life he lived, Bill Fulbright stood against the 20th century’s most destructive forces and fought to advance its brightest hopes. So spoke President William J. Clinton in 1995 of a man was among the 99 Democrats in Congress to sign the “Southern Manifesto” in 1956. (Two Republicans also signed it.) The Southern Manifesto declared the signatories’ opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and their commitment to segregation forever. Fulbright was also among those who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That filibuster continued for 83 days. Speaking of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, let’s review (since they don’t teach this in schools): The percentage of House Democrats who supported the legislation? 61 percent. House Republicans? 80 percent. In the Senate, 69 percent of Democrats voted yes, compared with 82 percent of Republicans. (Barry Goldwater, a supporter of the NAACP, voted no because he thought it was unconstitutional.) When he was running for president in 2000, Vice President Al Gore told the NAACP that his father, Senator Al Gore Sr., had lost his Senate seat because he voted for the Civil Rights Act. Uplifting story — except it’s false. Gore Sr. voted against the Civil Rights Act. He lost in 1970 in a race that focused on prayer in public schools, the Vietnam War, and the Supreme Court. Al Gore’s reframing of the relevant history is the story of the Democratic party in microcosm. The party’s history is pockmarked with racism and terror. The Democrats were the party of slavery, black codes, Jim Crow, and that miserable terrorist excrescence, the Ku Klux Klan. Republicans were the party of Lincoln, Reconstruction, anti-lynching laws, and the civil rights acts of 1875, 1957, 1960, and 1964. Were all Republicans models of rectitude on racial matters? Hardly. Were they a heck of a lot better than the Democrats? Without question. As recently as 2010, the Senate’s president pro tempore was former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.). Rather than acknowledge their sorry history, modern Democrats have rewritten it. The Democrats have been sedulously rewriting history for decades. You may recall that when MSNBC was commemorating the 50th anniversary of segregationist George Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” stunt to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, the network identified Wallace as “R., Alabama.” The Democrats have been sedulously rewriting history for decades. Their preferred version pretends that all the Democratic racists and segregationists left their party and became Republicans starting in the 1960s. How convenient. If it were true that the South began to turn Republican due to Lyndon Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights Act, you would expect that the Deep South, the states most associated with racism, would have been the first to move. That’s not what happened. The first southern states to trend Republican were on the periphery: North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. (George Wallace lost these voters in his 1968 bid.) The voters who first migrated to the Republican party were suburban, prosperous New South types. The more Republican the South has become, the less racist. Is it unforgivable that Bill Clinton praised a former segregationist? No. Fulbright renounced his racist past, as did Robert Byrd and Al Gore Sr. It would be immoral and unjust to misrepresent the history. What is unforgivable is the way Democrats are still using race to foment hatred. Remember what happened to Trent Lott when he uttered a few dumb words about former segregationist Strom Thurmond? He didn’t get the kind of pass Bill Clinton did when praising Fulbright. Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton told a mostly black audience that “what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to another. . . . Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting.” She was presumably referring to voter-ID laws, which, by the way, 51 percent of black Americans support. Racism has an ugly past in the Democratic party. The accusation of racism has an ugly present. — Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. © 2015 Creators.com
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420321/democratic-party-racist-history-mona-charen
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Caught the portion of Trump's big immigration speech last night that was on Hannity. The portion that I caught was REALLY good! A bold political play with the potential for a real paradigm shift in American politics.
In a closely related vein, here is this: By
HEATHER MAC DONALD
Aug. 29, 2016 7:13 p.m. ET
1355 COMMENTS
Hillary Clinton tried to tar Donald Trump as a racist last week by associating him with the “alt-right.” Yet it is Mr. Trump who has decried the loss of black life to violent crime—and has promptly been declared biased for doing so. Whether intentionally or not, Mr. Trump has exposed the hypocrisy of the Black Lives Matter movement and its allies.
Speaking in West Bend, Wis., on Aug. 16, only days after the recent riots in Milwaukee, Mr. Trump observed that during “the last 72 hours . . . another nine were killed in Chicago and another 46 were wounded.” The victims, as in other cities with rising crime, were overwhelmingly black.
Bringing safety to inner-city residents should be a top presidential priority, Mr. Trump said: “Our job is to make life more comfortable for the African-American parent who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets and walk to school. Or the senior citizen waiting for a bus. Or the young child walking home from school.” Mr. Trump promised to restore law and order “for the sake of all, but most especially for the sake of those living in the affected communities.”
The reaction was swift. The progressive website Crooks and Liars deemed Mr. Trump’s speech a “mashup of Hitler and George Wallace.” On CNN the activist and former Obama adviser Van Jones called it “despicable” and “shocking in its divisiveness.” Historian Josh Zeitz told USA Today that “the term law and order in modern American politics is, ipso facto, a racially tinged term.”
Mr. Trump’s acceptance speech in July at the Republican National Convention provoked similar dismay. “Young Americans in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Ferguson,” he said, have “the same right to live out their dreams as any other child in America.”
This defense of black children was too much for Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. “The terrifying vision that Donald J. Trump is putting forward casts him alongside some of the worst fascists in history,” Ms. Garza said. The executive director of the Advancement Project, Judith Browne Dianis, complained that “the speech lends itself to be interpreted as isolating and scapegoating of communities of color.” Political commentator Sally Kohn wrote in Time that Mr. Trump “has basically recycled Richard Nixon’s version of dog whistle racism by insisting he is the ‘law and order candidate’—implicitly protecting White America.”
Why this frenzied effort to demonize Mr. Trump for addressing the heightened violence in inner cities? Because the Republican nominee has also correctly identified its cause: the false “narrative of cops as a racist force in our society,” as he put it in Wisconsin.
Ever since the Black Lives Matter movement burst onto the national scene in 2014, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., violent crime has surged in urban areas. In America’s largest 56 cities, homicides rose 17% last year, the largest one-year increase in more than two decades. In Washington, D.C., homicides jumped 54%; in Milwaukee, 73%; in Cleveland, 90%.
The reason is a drop-off in the proactive policing that activists and academics denounce as racist. While cops continue to rush to 911 calls in minority neighborhoods, they are making fewer pedestrian stops and engaging in less public-order enforcement. Backing off such activity is presumably what Black Lives Matter supporters, including President Obama, want.
Yet the victims of the resulting crime surge are almost exclusively black; whites have largely been unaffected. In Baltimore, 45 people were killed in July 2015, 43 of them black. In Chicago, 2,460 blacks were shot last year, lethally or non-lethally, according to the city’s police department. That’s nearly seven a day. Seventy-eight white residents were shot in 2015, though the white share of the Chicago population is about the same as the black share. Blacks in Chicago were 18 times more likely to be killed last year than whites, up from eight times more likely in 2005.
Police shootings are a minute fraction of this carnage. So far this year in Chicago, they account for about 0.5% of all shootings. Four studies published this year alone have further undercut the claim that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased policing shootings. Harvard economist Roland Fryer, for example, examined data from Dallas, Austin, Houston, Los Angeles and six Florida counties. He found no evidence of racial discrimination in police shootings; officers in Houston were nearly 24% less likely to shoot blacks than whites.
When Mr. Trump pledges to restore law and order, he is not promising to “protect White America,” in Sally Kohn’s words. He is addressing a problem that whites could easily ignore, if they were the bigots that the Black Lives Matter movement and nearly the whole of academia make them out to be.
Strangely, it is Mr. Obama and Black Lives Matter sympathizers who have turned their eyes from the rising black victimization. FBI Director James Comey warned last October that the “chill wind blowing through American law enforcement” was leading to a “huge increase” in urban homicides and shootings. Mr. Obama promptly accused him of “cherry-picking data” and having a “political agenda.”
After Mr. Trump drew attention in his convention speech to the rising urban violence, President Obama again dismissed the casualties as merely an “uptick in murders and violent crime in some cities.” It is hard not to translate this is as: white lives matter; black lives, not so much.
Mr. Trump’s call to restore law and order recognizes the right of inner-city residents to enjoy the same freedom from fear that the rest of America now takes for granted, thanks to the 20-year decline in crime brought on by the proactive policing revolution of the 1990s. Mr. Trump has issued a much-needed warning that the antipolice narrative is putting black lives in jeopardy and undercutting the foundation of a civilized society. It is a message he should amplify.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “The War on Cops.”
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79OAyAc3G-M
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/09/why-catholics-are-dramatically-shifting-to-hillary-clinton
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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/introducing-a-new-series-trump-and-the-truth
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Trump up (within margin of error) of likely voters in CNN poll!
Electoral college still looking bad, but progress is being made!
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After finding out that he was in Goldman Sach's pocket (while digging up dirt on Democrats actually), and starting to see just how much they're all in bed with each other, including Clinton, I don't know how anyone could vote for either of them.
I hope like hell that my predictions were wrong.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U6Pp5iflTs
http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/29/1999-jesse-jackson-praises-trumps-commitment-to-minorities-under-served-communities-video/
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/09/levin-im-voting-for-trump
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Trump Calls for More High-Skill Immigration
By Michael Barone
September 07, 2016
Would he go hard or go soft? That was the mainstream media template for judging Donald Trump's speech on immigration in Phoenix last Wednesday. The verdict: hard. "How Trump got from Point A to Point A on immigration," was the headline in the Washington Post's recap.
Similarly, the often-insightful Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall characterized Trump's discourse as "hate speech." "Precisely what solution Trump is calling for is almost beside the point."
That's precisely wrong. Marshall found the Phoenix crowd's raucous shouts distasteful, and so did I. But a search through Trump's prepared text and his occasional digressions fails to disclose anything that can be fairly characterized as "hate speech."
Instead it discloses some serious critiques and proposals for recasting our immigration laws, which almost everyone agrees need changing.
Start near the end, with the 10th of Trump's 10 points. He notes that we've admitted 59 million immigrants since the last major revision of immigration law in 1965, and that "many of these arrivals have greatly enriched our country." No asides about criminals or rapists.
Then he proposes a major policy change: "to select immigrants based on their likelihood of success in U.S. society, and their ability to be financially self-sufficient ... to choose immigrants based on merit, skill and proficiency."
That's not racism or hate speech, and it's not out of line with American tradition.
Emma Lazarus' oft-quoted poem commends America for welcoming "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" and "the wretched refuse of your teeming shore." But during the great wave of immigration from eastern and southern Europe from 1892 to 1914, the Ellis Island inspectors, in line with national policy, excluded those deemed incapable of supporting themselves as well as those with communicable diseases.
And the United States deported immigrants judged to be terrorists. American immigration policy even then wasn't completely open door.
Trump seems to be calling, in non-provocative language, for changing immigration law to give priority to high-skill immigrants, as do the immigration laws of Canada and Australia. That's not racist: Those countries admit plenty of non-whites. But they do require proficiency in English (or French in Canada).
Both have higher foreign-born percentages of population than the United States, and both have students who score higher on PISA international achievement tests than U.S. students do. No wonder a diplomat from one of those countries told me, half in jest, "Please do not adopt our immigration system."
Every serious expert concedes that the 1965 immigration act resulted in an unexpected huge flow of low-skill immigrants, especially but not only from Mexico. Most serious scholars agree that has tended to reduce, at least a little, wages for low-skill Americans. Do we really need another inrush of unskilled workers in the next few decades?
Near the beginning of his speech, Trump said, "The media and my opponent discuss one thing, and only this one thing: the needs of people living here illegally." That's an exaggeration, but not by much: mainstream media judges Trump hard or soft depending on what he says about illegals. "The central issue is not the needs of the 11 million illegal immigrants -- or however many there may be," he went on. "The only one core issue" is "the well-being of the American people."
To some, this sounds like bigotry, prejudice against foreigners, a preference for a mostly (but far from totally) white populace over a vastly larger (and mostly non-white) humanity. They instinctively prefer Hillary Clinton's version of open borders, allowing anyone who gets here and isn't criminally convicted to stay.
Trump's answer came earlier in the day, in Mexico City, as he shook hands and spoke cordially with President Enrique Pena Nieto. I like and admire him, Trump said; he loves his country and I love mine. Nieto's invitation, much criticized in Mexico, was prompted by his need to get along with whoever is elected U.S. president. That need likewise prompted his cautious remarks about Trump in a joint news conference with Barack Obama earlier this summer.
Trump's threats of trade retaliation and suggestion he might not honor NATO obligations provide rationales for voting against him as irresponsibly reckless. His immigration proposals don't.
His proposals for visa tracking and E-Verify validation of job applicants -- similar to Marco Rubio's -- would marginally reduce the illegal population, as would his deportation of some illegals.
More important, though ignored by mainstream media, is that his policies would produce more high-skill immigrants and Hillary Clinton's plan would produce more low-skill immigrants. Which is better for America?
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM
Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
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http://silenceisconsent.net/mexican-encourages-his-people-to-assassinate-donald-trump-and-kill-his-supporters/#sthash.yucjMpR1.dpbs
“We, Mexicans, have to kill Donald J. Trump before he becomes President. He is a threat to every single one of us. There are many Mexican Americans living in the U.S. right now and I’m asking them to kill Donald Trump before he becomes President. The ones in Mexico who have the means, I’m asking you to cross the border and go and kill Donald Trump, and as many of his supporters as possible,” he states.
Anywhere he goes just try to bomb the place, shoot up the place, do something. If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, and kill the Nazis, would you do it? We have a modern day Hitler, and we have to kill him before he gets into power,” he adds.
“So I want you to spread this message, and I’m encouraging every single Mexican out there who has the guts to stand up for the Mexican people and to kill Trump and his Nazi followers. Let’s do this. Viva Mexico! F**k those motherf***ers,” he concludes.
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The last US-Mexico war didn't go so well for Mexico, pretty sure a second one will turn out the same way.
http://silenceisconsent.net/mexican-encourages-his-people-to-assassinate-donald-trump-and-kill-his-supporters/#sthash.yucjMpR1.dpbs
“We, Mexicans, have to kill Donald J. Trump before he becomes President. He is a threat to every single one of us. There are many Mexican Americans living in the U.S. right now and I’m asking them to kill Donald Trump before he becomes President. The ones in Mexico who have the means, I’m asking you to cross the border and go and kill Donald Trump, and as many of his supporters as possible,” he states.
Anywhere he goes just try to bomb the place, shoot up the place, do something. If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, and kill the Nazis, would you do it? We have a modern day Hitler, and we have to kill him before he gets into power,” he adds.
“So I want you to spread this message, and I’m encouraging every single Mexican out there who has the guts to stand up for the Mexican people and to kill Trump and his Nazi followers. Let’s do this. Viva Mexico! F**k those motherf***ers,” he concludes.
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The last US-Mexico war didn't go so well for Mexico, pretty sure a second one will turn out the same way.
http://silenceisconsent.net/mexican-encourages-his-people-to-assassinate-donald-trump-and-kill-his-supporters/#sthash.yucjMpR1.dpbs
“We, Mexicans, have to kill Donald J. Trump before he becomes President. He is a threat to every single one of us. There are many Mexican Americans living in the U.S. right now and I’m asking them to kill Donald Trump before he becomes President. The ones in Mexico who have the means, I’m asking you to cross the border and go and kill Donald Trump, and as many of his supporters as possible,” he states.
Anywhere he goes just try to bomb the place, shoot up the place, do something. If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, and kill the Nazis, would you do it? We have a modern day Hitler, and we have to kill him before he gets into power,” he adds.
“So I want you to spread this message, and I’m encouraging every single Mexican out there who has the guts to stand up for the Mexican people and to kill Trump and his Nazi followers. Let’s do this. Viva Mexico! F**k those motherf***ers,” he concludes.
I was just discussing this with some partners that put a wall meme, about Trump's wall being built along the northern Oregon border, because that is where the border used to be. I had to remind them, that perhaps it should be placed more to the south, around Distrito Federal, enclosing everything north, or the part we gave back to them. They weren't amused. they're my brothers, but the facts don't change. 82% of the country is unhappy that Trump came here, but if you so much as wave an American flag, don't think for a second, that you won't be deported, immediately... yet, they certainly have a wish to influence American politics. It's more than a little hypocritical.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439864/donald-trump-flight-93-analogy-overwrought-inaccurate
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http://www.westernjournalism.com/retired-general-warns-what-happens-when-you-disagree-with-obama/
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" For lower-income parents, Trump’s team notes, the government will match half of the first $1,000 deposited in the account per year." :-o
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/13/ivanka-donald-trump-roll-new-childcare-maternity-leave-policy-moms-pennsylvania/
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Another reality "showtization" of our political process:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-dr-oz-health-medical-records-141026068.html
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“It used to be cars were made in Flint, and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico,” Trump stated. “Now, the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint.” :-D :-D :-D
On day Ford announces moving manufacturing to Mexico. At least Ford was NOT one of the car companies that took tarp money.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3790116/Mexico-wants-build-border-wall-Central-America-illegal-immigrants.html
Ironic.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3790116/Mexico-wants-build-border-wall-Central-America-illegal-immigrants.html
Ironic.
Make Guatemala pay for it.
"an estimated 2.5 million Nicaraguans out of 5.5 million live in extreme poverty."
https://www.reference.com/geography/countries-poorest-central-america-44c0a1915ab30ff2#
They're coming to Mexico for those Ford manufacturing jobs...
Mexico faces the same problems we do.
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Yes, it's called fcuking over your neighbor. Imagine if we had a national policy of pushing Detroit's underclass into Ontario. Think the Canadians might be a bit pissed? We could then just accuse them of racism.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3790116/Mexico-wants-build-border-wall-Central-America-illegal-immigrants.html
Ironic.
Make Guatemala pay for it.
"an estimated 2.5 million Nicaraguans out of 5.5 million live in extreme poverty."
https://www.reference.com/geography/countries-poorest-central-america-44c0a1915ab30ff2#
They're coming to Mexico for those Ford manufacturing jobs...
Mexico faces the same problems we do.
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My response to Ivanka is know the interviewer before you go in to the interview. If it is someone with a liberal track record that works for a feminist mag then don't expect them to give you an interview that is going to easily let you to come out glowing. Just common sense. You are fired on this one Ivanka!
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ivanka-trump-cosmopolitan-interview-135516762.html
And already one criticism from the liberals is that the plan is misogynist (the term of the year) because it assumes women's roles are in the home. What about men being able to take off for maternity leave etc..........
It just never ends.......
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The Fallout (Non-Nuclear) from a Donald Trump Victory
For anyone with reading comprehension issues, THE FOLLOWING IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT. Some folks chose to see Conrad Black’s last column as him speaking on behalf of National Review as a whole, because they’re hacks and/or stupid. Black has been supportive of Trump all along.
But with Trump having a really good stretch of polling lately, let’s contemplate what would happen if he beat Hillary Clinton.
1. It would be a political earthquake, as big a cultural impact on America as the election of Barack Obama. Many corners of American society would be apoplectic with rage, disbelief and despair; magazines like The Economist, Time, The New Republic, The New York Times magazine will probably run cover essays on “The End of American Democracy” or “The Failure of American voters.” Or maybe simply, “When Evil Triumphs.” A dozen movies featuring sinister and/or bumbling egomaniac presidents would be green-lit by Hollywood. Cultural voices would declare that McCarthyism is back in full force, that Bull Connor racism is thriving, and that World War II–style internment-camps are just around the corner.
2. It would be the most awkward presidential transition in American history, because both Obama and Trump detest each other personally and their staffs almost certainly do the same.
3. The Obama legacy would suddenly shift overnight. American conservatives have argued for a while that Obama is, if not a failed president, something close to it. The Left might suddenly find itself agreeing, at least in part. A prosperous, confident, thriving, and secure America does not elect someone like Donald Trump. He’s the figure a country turns to when they’re desperate and increasingly think they don’t have much more to lose.
The Obama administration has been eight long years of officials insisting things aren’t as bad as they look. “Recovery Summer” is just around the corner. Janet Napolitano assures us, “the system worked.” Of course Obamacare will work; “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan; if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” ISIS is a jayvee team. We’re taking care of our veterans. Our secrets are secure. Obama declared in May, “By almost every measure, America is better, and the world is better, than it was 50 years ago, or 30 years ago, or even eight years ago.”
Nobody believes the happy talk anymore.
4. Hillary Clinton would become one of the most hated Democrats of all time. She would rank not merely as a loser, but as the woman who managed to lose the most winnable presidential race in modern history. Forget Mondale, forget Dukakis, forget McGovern. Trump is probably the worst Republican nominee in history — little or no message discipline, little organization, hates fundraising, isn’t convinced television ads or data analysis is needed, tons of scandals and baggage, can’t carry his home state, the media loathes him with the raging passion of a thousand suns going supernova . . . and somehow he’s still in it, and seems to be gaining strength as the race progresses. She has no excuses. She has unequaled resources. The party is reasonably unified behind her. She had a great convention. If Tim Kaine is making mistakes, no one is paying attention. Her commercials have dominated the television airwaves.
If Hillary Clinton loses, Democrats will hate her. Overnight she will go from the inspiring role model for all of America’s children to a selfish, deeply flawed candidate, blinded by ambition and obsessively secretive. Everything that Democrats now insist is inconsequential — her e-mails, the shady deals surrounding the foundation, Benghazi — they will suddenly realize was extremely consequential. The recriminations will be epic.
5. The Left might just learn a needed lesson. Perhaps this is a wildly optimistic expectation, but the American Left might have to examine why so many Americans were willing to roll the dice on Trump rather than continue the status quo.
Political correctness really has become petty bullying, an attempt to enforce economic consequences for what is a social faux pas. Yes, we’re all supposed to be respectful to others, courteous, and to avoid giving unneeded offense. (The Left would be wise to start practicing what it preaches, to “do unto others as you would have them do.”) There’s nothing inherently wrong with someone declaring, “Hey, that really offends me.” But the Left wants to go further; they want a person who offends their sensibilities to be punished for it. Oftentimes the enforcers of political correctness want the person to lose their job. They want that person to become a pariah and feel constant social ostracization. They want to enforce the most serious of consequences for hurting someone’s feelings. Sometimes they even want “some muscle over here.”
The Left would have to recognize that most of their our political and cultural elites demonstrate epic hypocrisy on a regular basis. Tim Geithner and Charlie Rangel set tax policy while not paying all the taxes they owe. Al Gore runs up a giant electricity bill while telling everyone else they need to reduce their carbon emissions. Obama declares, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say ‘okay.’” And then, in the words of David Axelrod, Obama keeps the Oval Office so warm in winter that “you could grow orchids in there.” Hillary Clinton denounces greed and selfishness while collecting six-figure speaking fees. Bill Clinton gets a free pass from feminists as the sexual-harassment and womanizing allegations pile up. They talk about the importance of equal opportunity while Chelsea Clinton gets a $600,000 part-time gig at NBC News. Mike Bloomberg and Rosie O’Donnell travel the country with armed security guards while touting the need for stricter gun-control laws.
Ordinary Americans look at the elites and conclude they don’t actually believe anything they say, or at the very least, they don’t think they have to live under the rules they want to enforce for everyone else.
The Catch . . .
Some might ask, with all of that as consequence, why not vote for him? Almost all Republicans and many self-identified conservatives will. Trump has maybe a 50–50 shot at nominating good, strict constructionist Supreme Court justices, while Hillary’s odds are roughly zero. I’m #NeverTrump, but I’m not giving much grief to my friends who are voting for Trump as the lesser of two evils.
From where I sit, Trump offers a lot of the same flaws as Obama, just with a different party affiliation. Trump promises the world with little details on how he’s going to get there. In 2008, Obama promised the best of both worlds — the end to the war in Iraq and the elimination of al-Qaeda. This year Trump promises to be less interventionist and to bomb the you-know-what out of ISIS. Both men did this because the American people want both simultaneously, no matter how contradictory those desires are. I think a true leader has to force the public to come to terms with hard truths instead of playing along with their fantasies.
I realize I’m in the minority here. Obama did nothing on entitlement reform, and Trump won’t, either. At some point, when the voting public punishes the people who try to solve the problem and rewards the people who ignore the problem, people stop trying to solve the problem.
Trump is no more interested in the Constitution and limited government than Obama is, and seems every bit as petty and vindictive, every bit as likely to bristle and lash out at the slightest criticism. I just wrote about the insane pretzel-logic of the blind partisans, forgiving every sin on their side but furiously denouncing the same things on the other side.
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But of course NPR and the rest of the traditional media are insisting Trump made this up out of thin air, and it is HE who is guilty of starting the controversy:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/16/hillary-clinton-campaign-manager-admits-birtherism-started/
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Obj:
Even the National Review is giving Trump grief over a non issue. He did not "squandering" anything. The media and journolisters and the Black Caucus were going to "get him" any way they could. Gov. Huckabee said it all correctly on Kelly that it is quite obvious this is a coordinated MSM attack on Trump when so many stations are bringing on their liberal hitmen and women ( I don't want to be accused of leaving out the dames here) and they all say almost the exact same lines word for word.
They are shoving this non issue into our faces traying to make it into an issue by repeating it over and over again . This does reflect desperation and terror amongst the libs in mho. The elite and SJW Blacks are very worried that Trumps' poll numbers amongst Blacks are improving apparently.
If I hear one more time how Obrocster is taking it "personally" when he was the one who perpetuated the controversy by taking years to release details of his birth when it was perfectly reasonable to question it when his mother was running all over the world at that time chasing foreign born men. Cruz and McCain's birthplace were also questioned and rightly so.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440126/donald-trump-birther-moment-squanders-campaign-gains
Oh and did you see that guy on the Clinton News Network saying questioning the place of Brocks birth is just as absurd as saying the Earth is flat! Hardly.
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There is short ad that you have to wait out but it is worth it to see the liberal squirm with anger after all the years of putting up with their complicit Democrat Party spin and lies :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-birther-cnn_us_57dc2301e4b08cb14095847e?section=&
I must admit this makes Trump look like a media genius.
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"There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech—without which identity politics is inconceivable—must be repudiated.
"These six ideas together point to an end to the unstable experiment with supra- and sub-national sovereignty that many of our elites have guided us toward, siren-like, since 1989. That is what the Trump campaign, ghastly though it may at times be, leads us toward: A future where states matter. A future where people are citizens, working together toward (bourgeois) improvement of their lot. His ideas do not yet fully cohere. They are a bit too much like mental dust that has yet to come together. But they can come together. And Trump is the first American candidate to bring some coherence to them, however raucous his formulations have been."
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/donald-trump-ideas-2016-214244#ixzz4KjBESzLE
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook
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http://usuncut.com/news/magician-penn-jillette-work-trump-however-bad-think-hes-worse/
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Trump passed on the invitation of the president of the Ukraine to meet today.
If I have it right, Hillary accepted?
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Trump passed on the invitation of the president of the Ukraine to meet today.
If I have it right, Hillary accepted?
Interesting point. It was obviously a huge potential to build relevance and experience on an international level. OTOH, there are many that think Empress Dowaga would lead the US into a war with Russia. One of Trump's strengths is the so called "bromance" that he enjoys with Putin.
I was debating the Crimea with the Catholic Bishop here one day, who is a wise man of roughly 65 years old. Crimea has a long and storied history where it has changed hands several times, and if anything, is Cimmerian territory, being neither Russian nor Ukrainian. The Crimea, two and a half centuries ago, became part of Russia, having been relased from the Ottoman empire, it because a region with autonomous rule and joined with Russia in 1783. The territory itself wasn't handed over to Ukraine until 1954 by Krushev.
Trump was correct in avoiding this due to what can be gained by a useful relationship with Trump, especially when Ukraine relies on Russia for a number of things, especially natural gas. Trump had too much to lose and not enough to win, being that the subject certainly would have presented itself.
Hillary OTOH, has nothing to lose given the far flung and unsubstantiated rumors of a Russian hacker leaking the Democratic party's misdeeds. Being in the situation she is in, can only benefit from a relationship with Ukraine.
Trump could have went, played a subdued hand of remaining neutral, but that would have been perceived as weakness, especially by the Leftist media and even by his own supporters (Trump is popular because he is seen as unflinching and strong - if he loses that, he loses the election). This was something that he couldn't have won without convincing Putin himself, to give the Crimea back to Ukraine, but from a Russian perspective, that won't happen. Even when Kruschev gave it to Ukraine, the Ukraine was itself a portion of the Soviet Union, so Kruschev was in effect, losing nothing. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it is not until then, that any of this was even a question of who owned the Crimea. Trump was best to avoid the subject altogether.
Edit: And just now, reading this http://uatoday.tv/politics/ukrainian-president-petro-poroshenko-meets-us-presidential-candidate-hillary-clinton-750168.html , (three days ago)
they did in fact discuss exactly that:
"Petro Poroshenko informed Hillary Clinton about the situation in Donbas. The Ukrainian Head of State emphasized that Ukraine today fights for freedom and democratic values, which unite the whole democratic world. The interlocutors agreed that consolidated Transatlantic unity and solidarity with Ukraine is important in resisting the Russian aggression. It was also noted the effectiveness of sanction policy against Russia. Petro Poroshenko thanked Hillary Clinton for continuous and firm supportive stance on Ukraine."
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A thoughtful analysis DDF.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/09/heres-why-ted-cruz-will-vote-for-donald-trump
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Those six reasons could make a good list of talking points for Trump in the debate.
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Well they are "Beauty" contests after all. I mean these pageants could show case their brains and dance and violin playing talents and political prowess for progressive causes ( I wish to end world hunger) and get rid of the bikini part and open it up to very short , very tall, all weights and sizes, and all facial types and try to sell Beauty comes "from the inside" and finally, see how lucrative that would be:
https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/another-pageant-contestant-calls-out-donald-trump-for-being-sexist-and-controlling-121350461.html
On one hand these ladies want to show case their sexual attractions and then belittle anyone that comments on it one way or the other as being sexist.
You can't have your bikini and your totalitariastic feminism too.
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On FOX last night they were talking that she had been a narco's squeeze and that she had driven the getaway car when her brother tried murdering someone. Apparently he threatened the judge in question and somehow nothing happened.
PS: In her own words she admitted packing on some pounds after winning the crown ("I was super anorexic in order to win, but then I got healthy again.")
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You Can’t Help a Man Who Can’t Help Himself
Between 3 and 5 a.m. this morning, the Republican nominee for president offered some thoughts on Twitter, urging those believing the tale of Miss Venezuela to “check out her sex tape and past.” He declared any stories about his staffers being dissatisfied with his debate performance must be false — “There are no sources, they are just made up lies!” He also misspelled “judgment.”
Hillary Clinton wanted to make this week about Alicia Machado; Donald Trump agreed. That’s on him.
Many good right-of-center friends are on the Trump bandwagon, and are working for his victory, and fervently hoping he can reach those 270 electoral votes. I think they are working harder, and smarter, and showing more judgment than the candidate himself.
From coverage of his preparation for the first debate:
He has paid only cursory attention to briefing materials. He has refused to use lecterns in mock debate sessions despite the urging of his advisers. He prefers spitballing ideas with his team rather than honing them into crisp, two-minute answers.
If you knew you were going to speak before 84 million Americans, wouldn’t you do everything humanly possible to maximize your chance of success?
Tuesday morning, he told Fox and Friends, “I really eased up because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.” Assuming that’s true, he didn’t maximize his chance of winning over voters . . . before an audience of 84 million people . . . because he didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
Now he gets sensitive?
This is the lamest excuse imaginable. “I could have done a lot better, but I chose not to do that.” Trump thinks he’s saying, “Look at what a nice guy I am.” What he’s really saying is, “look at what catastrophically egregious judgment I have.”
Why should anyone be emotionally invested in this man’s victory, if he refuses to learn, refuses to improve, and refuses to avoid making the same mistakes, over and over and over and over again? I’d love to see Hillary Clinton defeated. I just have no faith that Donald Trump is capable of doing that. Every now and then, he gains some traction, the polls get closer . . . and then he goes and does something stupid. And all of his supporters insist it doesn’t matter, and that we should all avert our eyes, and that we’re betraying something good and righteous by noticing what just happened right in front of us. And then they insist it’s not stupid, that there’s some brilliant nine-level chess going on that we can’t possibly understand from the outside, and if we just wait and see, Donald Trump will win in the end. Unless he doesn’t, because the election is rigged.
That’s not a campaign; that’s a cult.
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CD,
You just beat me to it:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-tweets-alicia-machado-134018710.html
All Hillary has to do in the next town hall is say : "there he goes again"
Yup. When the pressure is on he becomes childish.
It really is voting against Hillary then voting for him.
:cry:
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http://www.nationalreview.com/slideshows/cartoon-day#45
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"FWIW my sense of things is that Trump's proclivity for creating food fight snark fests is starting to wear rather thin with a lot of people; it may not have reached critical mass, but he may be setting himself up for a fall."
10/26/15
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Jonah Goldberg
Dear Reader (including the disgusting ones who made that G-File reader sex tape, check it out),
In my most selfish moments, I want Donald Trump to win the election.
But before I explain that, let me just say he could win. I talked to Hugh Hewitt this morning and he said he was stealing my line, so I figured I’d better get it down on “paper” fast.
Trump got to where he is for a lot of reasons, starting with a 17-candidate collective-action problem, myriad failures of both the GOP’s establishment and anti-establishment wings, and, of course, the cold, indifferent cruelty of this meaningless, empty universe where nothing matters and the living envy the dead. But giving Trump his due, he also got to where he is because he was great at punching-up. When he took on Jeb Bush, Reince Priebus, the media, Washington, etc., he was punching up. He wasn’t just the outsider coming into town to blow things up, he was Godzilla smashing all before him. In the standard Godzilla movie there’s always that scene where the hapless Japanese army tries to lure the beast toward some electric power lines. Godzilla takes the bait and bites the power lines. But the shock doesn’t kill him, it makes him stronger! That was Trump in the primaries. Mangling metaphors somewhat, people told him “You can’t chomp those power lines! Those are the third rails of American politics!” Trumpzilla cared not, bit them, and got stronger.
But here’s the problem: Everyone thinks Godzilla is cool when he’s fighting Monster Zero or swatting away fighter jets. But when they have that close up shot of Godzilla’s clawed foot coming down on a child or a screaming woman, all of a sudden, you can’t cheer the King of Monsters. So it is with Trump: He wins when he punches up. He loses when he punches down.
And that’s Trump’s Achilles’ heel: He can’t resist punching down. He can no more stop himself from “counter-punching” the little guy than my dog can agree not to chase rabbits. (“It’s just so hoppy! I must kill it!”)
Everyone knows this. Hillary Clinton knew it and she baited him. She almost literally could have said, “Donald, I’m going to bait you. You would be a fool to take the bait. But I know you will.” And he still would take the bait. In fact, I think he would be more likely to take the bait if she said she were baiting him, because he would want to prove that he could take the bait and win.
I thought Trump lost the debate, but not overwhelmingly. He was clearly the winner of the first 30 minutes or so, and if he’d stayed that guy for the full 90 it would have been a hugely consequential rout. But then, Hillary implemented “Bait Trump Protocol Alpha-1,” when she brought up how he got his start with a $14 million loan from his father. (She got the details wrong, but it doesn’t matter. When you’re baiting fish or Trumpzilla, the lure doesn’t have to be real, it just has to be shiny. In fact, getting the bait just slightly wrong makes it even more irresistible, because we all have a natural instinct to correct falsehoods aimed at us, and Trump more than most.)
So Trump bit the shiny thing, and for the rest of the night, plodding, dull Hillary Clinton led Trump around the stage like a matador with a red cape. And, four days later, Trump is still charging around like an enraged bull. At first I thought Clinton’s use of Alicia Machado was odd. There are so many Trump victims out there, why use one with such a weird past? But that’s what was so brilliant about it. If Machado were a nun, it’d be harder for Trump to attack. But Trump thinks he can win this one on the merits and so he won’t let go of it. He didn’t learn the lesson of his feud with the Khan family: The only way to win such fights is to not engage in them at all. The debate wasn’t a disaster but how he handled the post-debate spin was, and continues to be.
If Trump could stay on message, if he could be a disciplined candidate, I think he’d be ten points ahead by now. But realistically, this is no different from saying if he could control anything metal with his mind, he would be Magneto.
, , ,
Trump the Destroyer, First of His Name
I say “some” of his supporters for a reason. Because I think many of his supporters would continue to defend Trump no matter what he did or said as president. And that’s probably the main reason I’m so opposed to him: A Trump presidency would destroy conservatism in this country.
I’ve written a lot about the corrupting effect Trump’s candidacy has had on conservatism. But let me try to put it a different way. Trump is an unintentional master of the art of rectal ventriloquism. No, I don’t mean he’s a champion farter. I mean he talks out of his ass, and the words magically start coming out of other peoples’ mouths. He says eminent domain is wonderful and suddenly conservatives start saying, “Yeah, it’s wonderful!” He floats a new entitlement for child care and almost instantaneously people once opposed to it start bragging about how sensitive they are to the plight of working moms. He says Social Security needs to be more generous and days later once proud tea partiers are saying the same thing, and the rest of us are left to marvel how we didn’t even see Trump’s lips, or cheeks, move.
This is a perfect example of the corrupting effect of populism and personality cults. I keep mentioning my favorite line from William Jennings Bryan: “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.” For many Trump supporters, the rule of the day is, “Donald Trump is for X and I am for X. I will look up the arguments later (if ever).”
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Your Weapons Are Useless Against Him
I’ve spoken to countless leading conservatives, including prominent politicians, who tell me that once Trump is in the White House, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, and all of Trump’s wonderful appointees will be able to manage him. Trump’s talk-radio and TV supporters will keep him honest and make sure he keeps his promises.
I think this is in-frick’n-sane.
Candidate Trump can’t be managed. Everyone with any contacts in or around Trump world has heard the stories about how his staff tries to impose discipline on him. The jokes about Kellyanne Conway desperately trying to hide his phone from him to keep him off Twitter are funny because they’re true.
And yet, you’re telling me that when Trump wins despite rejecting all of this advice and actually takes possession of Air Force One, and when the Marine guards start saluting him as the band plays “Hail to the Chief,” I’m supposed to believe this staggering narcissist will suddenly become manageable? Seriously?
Moreover, throughout his entire career in business, he’s made a name for himself as a promise-breaker, welcher, and snake-oil salesman, willing to say whatever he needs to in order to close the deal. “Sure this car gets 200 miles to the gallon. Sign the check and you’ll see.” That is what the art of the deal really means for him. He’ll get the White House and he’ll say to the rest of us looking to cash in his political promises, “Try and collect.”
Trump is not a conservative. He has some instincts that overlap with conservatism — the importance of law and order, the value of military strength etc. — but these instincts are not derived from any serious attachment to ideas or arguments. They stem from his lizard-brain machismo and his authoritarian streak. He never talks about liberty or limited government unless someone shoves it into his TelePrompTer. His ideas about economics and public policy are shot-through with dirigisme. He’s learned to talk the talk about free-market solutions, but in his heart he’s still the guy who believes single-payer health care works “incredibly well.” The one adviser we know he listens to is his daughter, and she is certainly no conservative. Does anyone believe he will side with Mike Pence and against her in a fight over, say, Planned Parenthood?
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Donald Milhous Trump
Hadley Arkes, one of the many “Scholars for Trump” I respect a great deal, has an interesting argument for why he supports him. He writes:
In 1964 the Republicans, with Goldwater, were blown away, and yet four years later the Republicans came back strongly with Richard Nixon. But in those intervening four years the regime itself was changed: The Great Society extended and confirmed the reach of the federal authority until it covered hiring and firing in corporations and even small, private colleges. And it extended federal controls over local education. We are faced now with a comparable threat to change the regime yet again. Obama has already sought to govern wide sections of the economy with regulations that bear little connection to any statute that can give the standing of law to these executive orders. He has made a nullity of Congress and the separation of powers.
Note that Arkes says Republicans came back strongly with Richard Nixon. That’s true. But this was not a conservative comeback. The Goldwaterites were marginalized. Nixon didn’t roll back the Great Society; he made it bipartisan.
Save for his anti-Communism, Nixon wasn’t a conservative. He came from the progressive, Rockefeller, wing of the GOP. He told reporters that the “Buckleyites” were a “threat more menacing” to the GOP than was the John Birch Society. He believed Ronald Reagan was a “know-nothing.” He told his aide John C. Whitaker, “There is only one thing as bad as a far-left liberal and that’s a damn right-wing conservative.” Nixon created the EPA, implemented wage and price controls, launched the first affirmative-action programs, and proposed a health-care program that was downright Obamacare-esque.
From everything we know, Trump’s a Nixonian liberal without a fraction of Nixon’s policy chops. He’s surrounded himself with Nixon-retreads like Manafort and Stone, and ripped off Nixon’s entire rhetorical playbook from “the silent majority” on down.
In my heart, I truly believe he would trade Supreme Court appointments for a massive infrastructure program. The one thing we know about the guy is he likes to build stuff and put his name on it. If Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi — who already want a massive infrastructure program — told him, “Hey, meet us half way on the judges and we’ll deliver the votes you’ll need,” he’d do it in a heartbeat, throwing the conservatives under the bus while — here’s the important point — taking an enormous number of Republicans with him.
Just look at the issues of trade, entitlements, child care, and gun rights (in the form of his capitulation on the terror watch list). Look at all the formerly “true conservative” types who’ve gamely gone along with Trump so far. Do you honestly think they’ll break with a president Trump? Trump won’t crush the administrative state, he will be rolled by the bureaucrats. That’s what the heads of bureaucracies do in our system. They don’t run the agencies, they spin-up and co-opt politicians. That’s why you need a conservative president who knows things.
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The Perfidious Binary
I’m not one to over-indulge in self-pity, but I do sometimes feel like a therapist should be asking me, “Show me on the doll where 2016 touched you.” But among the most annoying and asinine “arguments” — accusations really — hurled at me 100 times a day is that if I’m against Trump, I’m for Hillary. This is nonsense on stilts atop a cloud. I can’t stand Hillary Clinton. Back when Trump was writing her checks and inviting her to his wedding, I was opposing her and her familial tong with everything I had. I wrote Liberal Fascism with her in mind. The hardcover’s subtitle reference to “the politics of meaning” was a direct shot at her New Age–y soft-totalitarian nanny-statism. I will give the first person who can find a single pro-Hillary column — or paragraph! — I’ve ever written a lifetime subscription to National Review.
I think she will make a terrible president and be bad for America. If any of the other 16 candidates had won the nomination, many of whom I cannot stand, I would be out there screaming expletives at any Republican who thought Hillary was a better choice.
And even with my adamantine opposition to Trump, I still cannot imagine endorsing Hillary Clinton (even though liberals are now insisting I must almost as much as conservatives claim I have), because I know she will be horrible and she stands for things I reject with every fiber of my political soul (“Do souls have fibers?” — The Couch).
But here’s the thing: Conservatives know how to oppose Clinton, who will come into office the most damaged and unpopular president in American history, having fulfilled her mandate to not be Trump on Day One.
But it’s already very clear they do not know how to oppose Trump. His hostile takeover of the Republican party demonstrates that. So do the otherworldly descriptions of Trump that his more intellectual supporters conjure from thin air. If he becomes president, the Republican party will no longer be even notionally conservative. America can survive four years of Hillary Clinton, though those four years will be bad. Very bad. But America cannot survive if both parties reject the principles of limited government and constitutionalism, which would be the result of a “successful” Trump presidency or even most scenarios in which he’s a failed president. The demise won’t be instantaneous, but gradual, as a new bipartisan consensus forms between a right-wing statist party and a left-wing statist party. The body-snatched Republicans will become ever more serviceable dummies for the master of rectal ventriloquism. Principled conservatives won’t vanish — though some trolls keep telling me we’ll all be hung, gassed, or killed by the coming mobs. Rather, we will become increasingly irrelevant, cast into the same peanut gallery as our libertarian cousins.
But, we will be able to say, “I told you so.” Which, in my selfish moments, is a great temptation.
Jonah Goldberg
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"FWIW my sense of things is that Trump's proclivity for creating food fight snark fests is starting to wear rather thin with a lot of people; it may not have reached critical mass, but he may be setting himself up for a fall."
Its obvious. When he sticks to issues he wins . When he asks like a baby he loses. He is down a bit in the polls supposedly from the debate.
He just refuses to learn. Tweeting at 3 AM?? sounds like he was pacing his bedroom unable to sleep because he was worried about what a 2 bit wanna be actress from Venezuela said about HIM instead of thinking how to run the greatest country on Earth. As said before on this board by many, God help us.
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God help us. We are so fcuked.
"FWIW my sense of things is that Trump's proclivity for creating food fight snark fests is starting to wear rather thin with a lot of people; it may not have reached critical mass, but he may be setting himself up for a fall."
Its obvious. When he sticks to issues he wins . When he asks like a baby he loses. He is down a bit in the polls supposedly from the debate.
He just refuses to learn. Tweeting at 3 AM?? sounds like he was pacing his bedroom unable to sleep because he was worried about what a 2 bit wanna be actress from Venezuela said about HIM instead of thinking how to run the greatest country on Earth. As said before on this board by many, God help us.
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Somebody made a lot of money stealing this information for the Clinton mob. Or perhaps the NYT paid the bribe. That said I don't see how this hurts Trump. So what he had big losses in the early 90's then took legal deductions for years off his personal income. Who wouldn't if they could. What annoys me about this is this is just another example of how wealthy people are allowed to game the system in ways that are not available to the rest of us. When I lost a lot in the tech crash in 2000 I could deduct only a tiny bit going forward for the following years. How come I cannot deduct more going forward and he can . That is clearly a system that is rigged for the wealthy. That is not Trump's fault. That is why we should lower taxes for the wealthy and close probably most if not all loop holes. Frankly I think 'maybe' we should close the charity deduction.
As for the argument that Trump may have made some bad business decisions, my response is so what. He fixed it all and came back stronger than before.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/report-trump-losses-may-mean-didnt-pay-taxes-034038880--election.html
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I read an Alert from Pravda On The Hudson.
Let me see if I have this right.
Trump had large losses in one year, but the tax code forced him into taking the losses over a long amount of time.
Is that it?
Of course there is also the matter of real estate having non-cash expenses (i.e. depreciation). In that cash flow matters more than nominal income, maybe Trump is right that his financials tell more than his tax records? Who knew! I'm shocked, absolutely shocked.
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Even despite all we have seen that even now Trump still has an outside shot at beating Hillary one must conclude that she is so loathed.
Asking if Trump deep down really 'wants to be' President is a valid question at this point:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440638/donald-trump-does-he-really-want-presidency
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A lot of serious bite to that piece , , , :cry: :cry: :cry:
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I have a stupid question... a "what if," if you will...
Suppose that Assange releases something truly damning to Clinton... something that absolutely prohibits her from seeking the presidency...
Suppose that also, Donald Trump doesn't really want to be president... and said so...after Clinton is found to be ineligible.
What would happen then? Would both major parties replace their candidates?
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I have a stupid question... a "what if," if you will...
Suppose that Assange releases something truly damning to Clinton... something that absolutely prohibits her from seeking the presidency...
Suppose that also, Donald Trump doesn't really want to be president... and said so...after Clinton is found to be ineligible.
What would happen then? Would both major parties replace their candidates?
The party isn't on the ballot, the candidate is. It's too late to put new names to be voted upon.
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I am not holding my breath:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440678/donald-trump-captain-queeg-admiral-bull-halsey
Plus we know for certain the LEFT and "Never Trump chumps" will set out to "get him" in a town hall . This time he better be prepared!
By the way. The (Admiral ) Halsey House was a restaurant for many years on West Jersey Ave in Elizabeth. My grandmother lived right next door for over 25 years. I don't think it exists anymore.
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http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/10/03/gw-law-prof-turley-people-in-dc-doing-claude-rains-act-on-trumps-taxes-this-isnt-a-shocking-event/
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-torches-trump-for-ptsd-comments-155918148.html
Gee what a shock. Some people handle stress better than others. So what . This happens in all walks of life.
Coming from the King of gaffes:
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1895156,00.html
"Plugs" as Mark Levin calls him
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Jess Jackson on Trump's not paying taxes:
http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/10/05/sean-hannity-jesse-jackson-first-vp-debate-kaine-pence-clinton-trump
Well JJ , at least his not paying taxes was legal:
http://dailysignal.com/2013/02/20/jesse-jackson-jr-and-wife-plead-guilty-to-tax-fraud/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE7MVsYi4po&feature=youtu.be&t=1450 :cry:
I just hope we can at least hold the Senate.............
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Did the *Republican* establishment people find and release the Billy Bush - Trump tape?
http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/5165512716001/falwell-jr-gop-elite-may-have-been-behind-trump-audio-leak/?#sp=show-clips
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Interesting idea , , ,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-special-prosecutor-1476143987
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/donald-trump-2016-biographers-214350
Yes, their political biases shine through, but nonetheless more than a few disconcerting tidbits in this interesting piece.
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Donald - Ivanka divorce within the next year?
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Ummm , , , isn't he married to Melania?
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"Ummm , , , isn't he married to Melania?" Yes you are right. :-o
Correction:
Donald - Melania divorce within the next year?
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A defense he can't use, but didn't all of Donald Trump's alleged bad talk and bad behavior happen back when he was a Democrat?
When they ask, have you changed, the answer should be yes. Democrats, everyone knows, are held to a lower standard. He should argue they hold him to the Bill Clinton standard for the 10 and 30 years ago stuff and only to the higher, Republican standard going forward.
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http://www.infowars.com/busted-trump-sex-allegations-full-of-holes/
Now if we didn't have a tape recording of Donald himself boasting that he does these things........
"A defense he can't use, but didn't all of Donald Trump's alleged bad talk and bad behavior happen back when he was a Democrat?"
Well it is 100 % definite that Allred would not be front and center with this if it were a Democrat.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441126/donald-trump-conservatives-should-vote-president
Read it all.
by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON October 17, 2016 4:00 AM Conservatives should vote for the Republican nominee.
Donald Trump needs a unified Republican party in the homestretch if he is to have any chance left of catching Hillary Clinton — along with winning higher percentages of the college-educated and women than currently support him. But even before the latest revelations from an eleven-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump crudely talked about women, he had long ago in the primaries gratuitously insulted his more moderate rivals and their supporters. He bragged about his lone-wolf candidacy and claimed that his polls were — and would be — always tremendous — contrary to his present deprecation of them. Is it all that surprising that some in his party and some independents, who felt offended, swear that they will not stoop to vote for him when in extremis he now needs them? Or that party stalwarts protest that they no longer wish to be associated with a malodorous albatross hung around their neck?
That question of payback gains importance if the race in the last weeks once again narrows. Trump had by mid September recaptured many of the constituencies that once put John McCain and Mitt Romney within striking distance of Barack Obama. And because Trump has apparently brought back to the Republican cause millions of the old Reagan Democrats, various tea-partiers, and the working classes, and since Hillary Clinton is a far weaker candidate than was Barack Obama, in theory he should have had a better shot to win the popular vote than has any Republican candidate since incumbent president George W. Bush in 2004.
What has always been missing to end the long public career of Hillary Clinton is a four- or five-percentage-point boost from a mélange of the so-called Never Trump Republicans, as well as women and suburban, college-educated independents. Winning back some of these critics could translate into a one- or two-point lead over Clinton in critical swing states.
Those who are soured on Trump certainly can cite lots of understandable reasons for their distaste — well beyond his sometimes grating reality-television personality. In over-dramatic fashion, some Against Trumpers invoke William F. Buckley Jr.’s ostracism of John Birchers from conservative circles as a model for dealing with perceived Trump vulgarity. He is damned as an opportunistic chameleon, not a true conservative. Trump’s personal and professional life has been lurid — as, again, we were reminded by the media-inspired release of a hot-mic tape of past Trump crude sexual braggadocio. The long campaigning has confirmed Trump as often uncouth — insensitive to women and minorities. He has never held office. His ignorance of politics often embarrasses those in foreign- and domestic-policy circles. Trump’s temperament is mercurial, especially in its ego-driven obsessions with slights to his business ethics and acumen. He wins back supporters by temporary bouts of steadiness as his polls surge, only to alienate them again with crazy nocturnal tweets and off-topic rants — as his popularity then again dips. He seems to battle as much with GOP stalwarts as Clintonites, often, to be fair, in retaliation rather than in preemptory fashion.
All these flaws earned Trump nemesis in his disastrous first debate, which was followed by marked dips in his polls. He seemed not to have prepared for the contest, convinced that he could wing it with his accustomed superlative adjectives and repetitive make-America-great generalities. He so obsessed over Clinton’s baited traps and contrived slights about his commercial reputation and his temperament that he allowed her to denigrate his character with impunity — even as he missed multiple opportunities to chronicle her spiraling scandals and contrast his mostly conservative agenda with her boilerplate, Obama 2.0, “you didn’t build that” neo-socialism. Trump’s second debate performance was far stronger, and stanched his hemorrhaging after the Access Hollywood revelations, but it was not the blow-out needed to recapture the lost momentum of mid September — nor will it yet win over Never Trump Republicans and independent women.
The counterarguments for voting Trump are by now also well known. The daily news — riot, terrorism, scandals, enemies on the move abroad, sluggish growth, and record debt — demands a candidate of change. The vote is not for purity of conservative thought, but for the candidate who is preferable to the alternative — and is also a somewhat rough form of adherence to the pragmatic Buckley dictate to prefer the most conservative candidate who can win. The issue, then, at this late date is not necessarily Trump per se, but the fact that he will bring into power far more conservatives than would Hillary Clinton. No one has made a successful argument to challenge that reality.
Nor is the election a choice even between four more years of liberalism and a return of conservatism; it’s an effort to halt the fundamental transformation of the country. A likely two-term Clinton presidency would complete a 16-year institutionalization of serial progressive abuse of the Constitution, outdoing even the twelve years of the imperial Roosevelt administration. The WikiLeaks revelations suggest an emboldened Hillary Clinton, who feels that a 2016 victory will reify her utopian dreams of a new intercontinental America of open borders and open markets, from Chile to Alaska, in the manner of the European Union expanse from the Aegean to the Baltic.
Conservatives who sit out the election de facto vote for Clinton, in the manner that Sanders’s liberal supporters, should they stay home, become votes for Trump. Oddly, renegade Democrats seem more eager to return to their fold than do their louder Republican counterparts. The idealist Bernie Sanders is not nearly as bothered by WikiLeaks and other hacked revelations of how Hillary Clinton sabotaged his campaign, cozied up to big banks, and admitted to talking progressively while in reality serving Wall Street, as are Republicans by Trump’s potty mouth. Yet in a veritable two-person race, the idea of expressing positive neutrality, to paraphrase the Indian statesman V. K. Krishna Menon, is to suppose that tigers can be vegetarians.
The tu quoque argument suggests that Trump’s rhetorical excesses — media obsessions aside — are unfortunately not all that different from those of Obama and Hillary about the “clingers” and the “deplorables.” Name a Trump cruelty or idiocy — unfamiliarity with the political discourse, ethnic insensitivity, cluelessness about the world abroad — and parallels abound, from Obama’s mispronunciation of “corpsman” as “corpse-man,” his mocking of the Special Olympics, and his remark about “punish[ing] our enemies” to Hillary’s statement that believing David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker required a “suspension of disbelief,” her “what difference does it make?” glibness about the Benghazi attack, and her past pandering to “white Americans.” And these Democrats’ frauds — from the Tony Rezko sweetheart lot deal with Obama to Hillary’s $100,000 profiteering in cattle futures — are even more banal grifting than Trump steaks and Trump vodka.
Had anyone else in government set up a private e-mail server, sent and received classified information on it, deleted over 30,000 e-mails, ordered subordinates to circumvent court and congressional orders to produce documents, and serially and publicly lied to the American people about the scandal, that person would surely be in jail. The Clinton Foundation is like no other president-sponsored nonprofit enterprise in recent memory — offering a clearing house for Clinton-family jet travel and sinecures for Clintonite operatives between Clinton elections. Hillary Clinton allotted chunks of her time as secretary of state to the largest Clinton Foundation donors. Almost every assistant whom she has suborned has taken the Fifth Amendment, in Lois Lerner fashion. The problems with Trump University are dwarfed by for-profit Laureate University, whose “Chancellor,” Bill Clinton, garnered $17.6 million in fees from the college and its affiliates over five years — often by cementing the often financially troubled international enterprise’s relationship with Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Collate what Hillary Clinton in the past has said about victims of Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual assaults, or reread some of the racier sections of Dreams From My Father, and it is hard to argue that Trump is beyond the pale in terms of contemporary culture.
Trump’s defeat would translate into continued political subversion of once disinterested federal agencies, from the FBI and Justice Department to the IRS and the EPA. It would ensure a liberal Supreme Court for the next 20 years — or more. Republicans would be lucky to hold the Senate. Obama’s unconstitutional executive overreach would be the model for Hillary’s second wave of pen-and-phone executive orders. If, in Obama fashion, the debt doubled again in eight years, we would be in hock $40 trillion after paying for Hillary’s even more grandiose entitlements of free college tuition, student-loan debt relief, and open borders. She has already talked of upping income and estate taxes on those far less wealthy than the Clintons and of putting coal miners out of work (“We are going to put a whole lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”) while promising more Solyndra-like ventures in failed crony capitalism.
We worry about what Citizen Trump did in the past in the private sector and fret more over what he might do as commander-in-chief. But these legitimate anxieties remain in the subjunctive mood; they are not facts in the indicative gleaned from Clinton’s long public record. As voters, we can only compare the respective Clinton and Trump published agendas on illegal immigration, taxes, regulation, defense spending, the Affordable Care Act, abortion, and other social issues to conclude that Trump’s platform is the far more conservative — and a rebuke of the last eight years. There is a reason the politicized media — from biased debate moderators to New York Times reporters who seek to pass muster in the Clinton team’s eyes before publishing their puff pieces — have gone haywire over Trump.
Contrary to popular anger against them, Never Trump conservative op-ed writers and wayward Republican insiders do not have much direct influence in keeping Trump’s party support down. Indeed, even after the latest gaffes, it creeps back up even as he is alienating women and the suburbs. The problem is more nuanced. Never Trump conservative grandees help flesh out the Clinton narrative of a toxic Trump that is then translated through ads, quotes, and sound bites to more numerous fence-sitting independents and women: Why should they vote for a purported extremist whom even the notables of the conservative movement and Republican party cannot stomach?
In an election with flawed candidates, balance is a legitimate question: Why didn’t The New Republic or the Huffington Post run an “Against Clinton” special issue? Certainly, she was dishonest enough to warrant such opprobrium from among a few of her own — given her prior treatment of Bill Clinton’s likely victims of sexual assault. Her endangerment of national security through use of her private server, the utter corruption of the Clinton Foundation and indeed the office of secretary of state, and her serial lies, from claiming to have braved sniper fire in Bosnia to misleading the families of the Benghazi fallen amid the caskets of their dead, make her unfit for the presidency.
In this low-bar presidential race, why do conservative establishmentarians and past foreign-policy officials feel a need to publish their support for the Democratic candidate, when their liberal counterparts feel no such urge to distance themselves from their own nominee? Is what Clinton actually did, in leaving Iraq abruptly, or lying about Benghazi, or violating federal security laws, so much less alarming than what Trump might do in shaking up NATO or “bombing the hell out of ISIS”? Trump’s platform is the far more conservative — and a rebuke of the last eight years.
Have such conservative self-auditing and Marquess of Queensberry restraint paid dividends in the past? Would it have been worth it for John McCain to go after Obama’s personal mentor and pastor, the racist, anti-American, and anti-Semitic Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in 2008, to preempt an agenda that led to the passage of the Affordable Care Act? Or, in the second presidential debate of 2012, should Romney have, in Reaganesque fashion, grabbed the hijacked mic back from the moderator and “fact-checker” Candy Crowley, if that dramatic act might have meant his election would have warded off the looming Iran deal? Was losing nobly in 2008 and 2012 preferable to winning ugly with Lee Atwater in 1988?
All the Republican primary candidates, in fear of a third-party Trump bid, swore an oath to support the nominee. When Jeb Bush or Carly Fiorina, even if for understandable reasons, broke that promise, they reinforced the unspoken admission that the Republican field — despite impressive résumés — operated on politics-as-usual principles. Trump won not only fair and square but also with a larger aggregate vote than any prior Republican nominee. Moreover, the Trump constituencies for the most part loyally voted in 2008 and 2012 for Republican moderates who they presciently feared were malleable on many conservative issues and who they rightly guessed would probably lose.
Trumpism was no fluke. During the primaries, a solid conservative governor, Scott Walker, at times seemed a deer in the headlights on illegal immigration. A charismatic Marco Rubio fell into robotic recitations of boilerplate. A decent Jeb Bush’s characterization of illegal immigration as “an act of love” was no gaffe but seemed a window into his own privilege. Multi-talented Ted Cruz convinced few that he was the elder Cato. Rand Paul reminded us why we would not vote for Ron Paul. Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry demonstrated how successful governors might not inspire the country. Chris Christie played the bully boy one too many times. The inspired outsiders, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, never quite got beyond being inspired outsiders. Campaigning is like war: It often involves a tragic correction to early mistaken appraisals of relative strength and weakness formed in calmer times. Casualties pile up to prove what should have been known but went unrecognized before blows fell: in this case, that in his energetic harnessing of popular anger, Trump, my own least favorite in the field, was the more effective candidate in gauging the mood of the times.
These are all valid rejoinders to those who say that recalcitrant conservatives, independents, and women should not hold their nose and vote for Trump. But they are not the chief considerations in his favor.
Something has gone terribly wrong with the Republican party, and it has nothing to do with the flaws of Donald Trump. Something like his tone and message would have to be invented if he did not exist. None of the other 16 primary candidates — the great majority of whom had far greater political expertise, more even temperaments, and more knowledge of issues than did Trump — shared Trump’s sense of outrage — or his ability to convey it — over what was wrong: The lives and concerns of the Republican establishment in the media and government no longer resembled those of half their supporters.
The Beltway establishment grew more concerned about their sinecures in government and the media than about showing urgency in stopping Obamaism. When the Voz de Aztlan and the Wall Street Journal often share the same position on illegal immigration, or when Republicans of the Gang of Eight are as likely as their left-wing associates to disparage those who want federal immigration law enforced, the proverbial conservative masses feel they have lost their representation. How, under a supposedly obstructive, conservative-controlled House and Senate, did we reach $20 trillion in debt, institutionalize sanctuary cities, and put ourselves on track to a Navy of World War I size? Compared with all that, “making Mexico pay” for the wall does not seem all that radical. Under a Trump presidency the owner of Univision would not be stealthily writing, as he did to Team Clinton, to press harder for open borders — and thus the continuance of a permanent and profitable viewership of non-English speakers. Trump’s outrageousness was not really new; it was more a 360-degree mirror of an already outrageous politics as usual.
One does not need lectures about conservatism from Edmund Burke when, at the neighborhood school, English becomes a second language, or when one is rammed by a hit-and-run driver illegally in the United States who flees the scene of the accident. Do our elites ever enter their offices to find their opinion-journalism jobs outsourced at half the cost to writers in India? Are congressional staffers told to move to Alabama, where it is cheaper to telecommunicate their business? Trump’s outrageousness was not really new; it was more a 360-degree mirror of an already outrageous politics as usual.
John Boehner and Mitch McConnell did make a good case that they had stopped some of the Obama agenda and could not have halted more, given that Republicans did not have the White House and Obama often exceeded his constitutional mandates. But they hardly provided emotional energy and vehement opposition — the thumos that galvanizes others to do things deemed improbable. Tea-party rallying cries to stop Obamacare, to stop piling up trillions in new debt, to stop slashing the military, and to stop disparaging working-class Americans mostly in favor of preferred racial, class, or gender groups were not inspired by the Republican elite. The WikiLeaks peek into the Clinton-Obama media Borg reveals an insidious corruption in which it is hard to distinguish between campaign officials, network-journalist grandees, and top-level bureaucrats. Colin Powell’s pathetic hacked e-mails might suggest that such insidiousness is not just confined to liberals and progressives.
“Creative destruction” and “job mobility” are favorite — and often correct — nostrums for the unfortunate downsides of otherwise wealth-creating, unfettered trade. The more foreign products undercut our own, in theory, the more we are forced to tone up, put the right workers into the right places for the right reasons, and become ever more productive and competitive.
The problem, however, is that a displaced real person, unemployed and living with his 80-year-old grandmother in a financially underwater and unsellable home, cannot easily move to the North Dakota fracking fields, any more than the destruction of an 80-acre small-farming operation owing to foreign agricultural subsidies is in any way “creative.” What we needed from our conservative elites and moderates was not necessarily less free-market economics, but fair in addition to free trade — and at least some compassion and sensitivity in recognizing that their bromides usually applied to others rather than to themselves and the political class of both parties.
When Trump shoots off his blunderbuss, is it always proof of laziness and ignorance, or is it sometimes generally aimed in the right direction to prompt anxiety and eventual necessary reconsideration? Questioning NATO’s pro forma way of doing business led to furor, but also to renewed promises from NATO allies to fight terror, pony up defense funds, and coordinate more effectively. Deploring unfair trade deals suddenly made Hillary Clinton renounce her prior zealous support of the “gold standard” Trans-Pacific Partnership deal.
Wondering whether some of our Asian allies might someday build nuclear weapons galvanized Japan and South Korea to step up and warn North Korea against further aggressive acts, in a new fashion. In Europe, Trump is said to be unpredictable and volatile. But since when are predictability and serenity always advantages in global poker?
A President Trump might shake up U.S. foreign policy in controversial and not always polite ways. In far calmer fashion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton already has revolutionized America’s role overseas — from the Iraq pullout to the foundations of the Iran deal to lead-from-behind Libyan bombing to tiptoeing around “violent extremism” and “workplace violence” to empowering Chinese expansionism to increasing distance from allies and proximity to enemies. Obama reminded us that approval from abroad is usually synonymous with thanks for weakening America and making us more like them than them us. Should we be more terrified that the socialist and largely pacifist European Union is afraid of Trump, or that it welcomes even more of Barack Obama’s type of leadership? Is not the present course of projecting weakness while insulting Vladimir Putin — the Russian reset of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — the inverse of speaking softly while carrying a big stick?
The ancient idea of tragic irony can sometimes be described as an outcome unfortunately contrary to what should have been expected. Many of us did not vote in the primaries for Trump, because we did not believe that he was sufficiently conservative or, given his polarizing demeanor, that he could win the presidency even if he were. The irony is now upon us that Trump may have been the most conservative Republican candidate who still could beat Hillary Clinton — and that if he were to win, he might usher in the most conservative Congress, presidency, and Supreme Court in nearly a century.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441126/donald-trump-conservatives-should-vote-president
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Case for Trump.
I agree with VDH and Doug. I just emailed this to some relatives who are voting their conscious and writing in candidates which I question as to the point.
It certainly is a vote for Hillary.
This election may well be the last one many of us will ever have any say in national politics and the direction of our country. The never Trumpers are deluding themselves or so divorced from main street they don't care. Like WSJ types who are for Hillary.
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Will makes the case that Trump "has a point". And we all know he is famous for being against Trump. Yet Paul Ryan, RNC lawyers, and the never Trumpers do nothing but undermine him. They sing the tune of the LEFT undermining the most of the members of the Republican party for the umpteenth time. Why couldn't Ryan have said something like this?:
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/10/18/george-will-trump-has-a-point-on-rigged-elections/
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Please post in SEIU/Electoral thread as well. TIA
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Case for Trump.
I agree with VDH and Doug. I just emailed this to some relatives who are voting their conscious and writing in candidates which I question as to the point.
It certainly is a vote for Hillary.
This election may well be the last one many of us will ever have any say in national politics and the direction of our country. The never Trumpers are deluding themselves or so divorced from main street they don't care. Like WSJ types who are for Hillary.
I also sent that VDH article to my closest of kin. Under Trump, there is only a chance of saving a part of what we love about this country. Under HRC, there isn't. We head further in the wrong direction to where we never come back.
Trump needs to pivot away from the personal defects of both candidates and POUNCE on to direction of the country - where wrong track leads by a two to one margin. One set of policies enhances economic growth, helping all. The other set of policies prevents growth, hurts all. One set of policies makes America strong on the world stage, deters enemies. The other approach, weak America, makes us less safe. One judicial philosophy honors the constitution and the limits on government. The other makes a mockery of the constitution.
Choose on direction of the country, not on the personalities and flaws in the candidates.
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Doug writes:
"Trump needs to pivot away from the personal defects of both candidates and POUNCE on to direction of the country - where wrong track leads by a two to one margin."
I agree with you 100% but as Larry Sabato said on MSNBC today Trump should do that *but he won't* . Further more his personality is such that he "can't" .
And NOW with this headline this is what he is going to waste time on with tweets, at the debate, and the rest:
http://www.drudgereport.com/
:cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:
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NSFW
https://scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t34.0-12/14055797_10155412313499129_600516789_n.jpg?oh=cdf1668493a85598d7022e6dfc1c0494&oe=580FABA4
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FIRST, propose a Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress;
SECOND, a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health);
THIRD, a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated;
FOURTH, a 5 year-ban on White House and Congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service;
FIFTH, a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government;
SIXTH, a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.
(Drain the swamp.)
On the same day, I will begin taking the following seven actions to protect American workers:
FIRST, I will announce my intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205
SECOND, I will announce our withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership
THIRD, I will direct my Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator
FOURTH, I will direct the Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately
FIFTH, I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.
SIXTH, lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward
SEVENTH, cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure
Additionally, on the first day, I will take the following five actions to restore security and the constitutional rule of law:
FIRST, cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama
SECOND, begin the process of selecting a replacement for Justice Scalia from one of the 20 judges on my list, who will uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States
THIRD, cancel all federal funding to Sanctuary Cities
FOURTH, begin removing the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back
FIFTH, suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered extreme vetting.
Next, I will work with Congress to introduce the following broader legislative measures and fight for their passage within the first 100 days of my Administration:
1. Middle Class Tax Relief And Simplification Act. An economic plan designed to grow the economy 4% per year and create at least 25 million new jobs through massive tax reduction and simplification, in combination with trade reform, regulatory relief, and lifting the restrictions on American energy. The largest tax reductions are for the middle class. A middle-class family with 2 children will get a 35% tax cut. The current number of brackets will be reduced from 7 to 3, and tax forms will likewise be greatly simplified. The business rate will be lowered from 35 to 15 percent, and the trillions of dollars of American corporate money overseas can now be brought back at a 10 percent rate.
2. End The Offshoring Act Establishes tariffs to discourage companies from laying off their workers in order to relocate in other countries and ship their products back to the U.S. tax-free.
3. American Energy & Infrastructure Act. Leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over 10 years. It is revenue neutral.
4. School Choice And Education Opportunity Act. Redirects education dollars to gives parents the right to send their kid to the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school of their choice. Ends common core, brings education supervision to local communities. It expands vocational and technical education, and make 2 and 4-year college more affordable.
5. Repeal and Replace Obamacare Act. Fully repeals Obamacare and replaces it with Health Savings Accounts, the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines, and lets states manage Medicaid funds. Reforms will also include cutting the red tape at the FDA: there are over 4,000 drugs awaiting approval, and we especially want to speed the approval of life-saving medications.
6. Affordable Childcare and Eldercare Act. Allows Americans to deduct childcare and elder care from their taxes, incentivizes employers to provide on-site childcare services, and creates tax-free Dependent Care Savings Accounts for both young and elderly dependents, with matching contributions for low-income families.
7. End Illegal Immigration Act Fully-funds the construction of a wall on our southern border with the full understanding that the country Mexico will be reimbursing the United States for the full cost of such wall; establishes a 2-year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence for illegally re-entering the U.S. after a previous deportation, and a 5-year mandatory minimum for illegally re-entering for those with felony convictions, multiple misdemeanor convictions or two or more prior deportations; also reforms visa rules to enhance penalties for overstaying and to ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first.
8. Restoring Community Safety Act. Reduces surging crime, drugs and violence by creating a Task Force On Violent Crime and increasing funding for programs that train and assist local police; increases resources for federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to dismantle criminal gangs and put violent offenders behind bars.
9. Restoring National Security Act. Rebuilds our military by eliminating the defense sequester and expanding military investment; provides Veterans with the ability to receive public VA treatment or attend the private doctor of their choice; protects our vital infrastructure from cyber-attack; establishes new screening procedures for immigration to ensure those who are admitted to our country support our people and our values
10. Clean up Corruption in Washington Act. Enacts new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics.
On November 8th, Americans will be voting for this 100-day plan to restore prosperity to our economy, security to our communities, and honesty to our government.
This is my pledge to you.
Video at link:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/22/trump_addresses_contract_with_the_american_voter_in_gettysburg_term_limits_energy_immigration_more.html
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Where I disagree with him on some issues, it isn't a close call that his agenda would reinvigorate America and Hillary's would destroy it. To sit out is to let others decide. How did that go for conservatives who couldn't stomach Romney?
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Doing my best to spread this around.
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I am glad Trump picked Pence over Christie. For one I like Pence more. Two I really think Christie is in trouble in NJ. The campaign certainly doesn't need that on top of everything else.
Jarad's father who, Christie put in jail knows a thing or two about the politics in NJ. I am sure he is drinking lots of Passover wine now:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-offered-chris-christie-vice-president-role-before-mike-pence/
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https://popehat.com/2016/10/31/the-facts-about-a-couple-of-pending-lawsuits-against-donald-trump/
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New thread?
Today the Trump administration begins, getting ready to start work. The Trump analogy to Reagan begins too. Trump starts with a huge advantage over Reagan by having the House and Senate in his own party. He also starts with a 5th vote Supreme Court vacancy to be filled. It is almost too good to be true. (Don't screw it up!) He does not have and never will have 60 votes in the Senate. The broken filibuster and reconciliation vote issues are the hurdles to enacting change; He also has to work well with congress - after he ran largely against them.
Hugh Hewitt says Trump should appoint and get confirmed 100 judges in 100 days, including a Supreme Court justice from his list.
He promised to cancel executive orders, get over-regulation repealed, overhaul the tax code, re-open TPP and other agreements. He needs great cabinet members. He needs to sweep the corruption and ethical issues out the door. He can't have scandal or make serious unforced errors. He needs to move first and strongest in the areas that have the widest agreement with the people and with congress. He needs to work quickly and boldly on healthcare. What an opportunity.
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I hope I am surprised at what a great job he does. Please don't fcuk this up!
New thread?
Today the Trump administration begins, getting ready to start work. The Trump analogy to Reagan begins too. Trump starts with a huge advantage over Reagan by having the House and Senate in his own party. He also starts with a 5th vote Supreme Court vacancy to be filled. It is almost too good to be true. (Don't screw it up!) He does not have and never will have 60 votes in the Senate. The broken filibuster and reconciliation vote issues are the hurdles to enacting change; He also has to work well with congress - after he ran largely against them.
Hugh Hewitt says Trump should appoint and get confirmed 100 judges in 100 days, including a Supreme Court justice from his list.
He promised to cancel executive orders, get over-regulation repealed, overhaul the tax code, re-open TPP and other agreements. He needs great cabinet members. He needs to sweep the corruption and ethical issues out the door. He can't have scandal or make serious unforced errors. He needs to move first and strongest in the areas that have the widest agreement with the people and with congress. He needs to work quickly and boldly on healthcare. What an opportunity.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKG7CZfC0JQ
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“Donald, your word is your bond but your memory is short."
Alleged quote of Trump's former stockbroker.
Source, second or third hand via facebook, must be true...
https://www.facebook.com/ted.greenberg.98/posts/10154459008621072
His words also are sometimes intended as starting points in negotiations.
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Doug,
I don't recall the bet we had. Do I owe you since Hillary won or are we even.
Either way we both won because she lost
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Summarizes the battle lines and strategies we now are seeing shape up and gel :
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442192/carpe-diem-mr-trump-forgive-unite-stand-strong
I don't know if VDH intended this but he convinces me that Steve Bannon is a correct choice to be top advisor. We need warriors to counter the oncoming backlash onslaught that is already coming from the Left and the Never Trumpers which includes Ryan and more subtly McConnell.
I would very much add the VDH would be an excellent person to be a Trump advisor as well!!!!
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Doug,
I don't recall the bet we had. Do I owe you since Hillary won or are we even.
Either way we both won because she lost
As I see it, I owe you two meals and you owe me one, all to be paid at the next forum gathering. )
I was partly right on the first two, she shouldn't have run and she shouldn't have won the nomination. And you were partly or nearly right on the final outcome. Under the worst of circumstances she still won the popular vote and almost became President.
The Clintons would not have taken in all the fees on the scale they did if not for the promise she would become President. I missed that fact in my prediction. Follow the money.
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Doug writes,
"The Clintons would not have taken in all the fees on the scale they did if not for the promise she would become President. I missed that fact in my prediction. Follow the money."
Absosutely. What a mob they are! They are still at it. I don't see how she could possibly run again. The non Clinton crats could not be that foolish to run someone with such high negatives again but her mob still will look for ways and she sure will explore it again in 2020. The twist will be something like, "I was the better choice".
The best counter of course is the country will be doing better by then.
On another topic this IS a problem:
Having his kids who are still running large business as part of the inner circle and ? getting topsecurity clearances if true. I do not like this:
https://www.yahoo.com/style/ivanka-trump-wore-a-10k-bracelet-from-her-own-label-on-60-minutes-and-social-media-is-erupting-174930008.html
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Regarding Security clearances for the Trump progeny:
I happened to surf by CNN this morning and caught a glorious moment:
Chris Cuomo had on some CIA/intel grey beard and started pushing in on this and the grey beard something pretty close to this (I do not exaggerate)
"Be quiet and I will educate you young man." :lol: :lol: :lol: CC had the grace to do just that. The gist of the answer was this-- and it makes sense to me:
Every president has people whom he trusts and it is natural for him to seek clearance for people upon whose advise he will rely. With apparently good reason, Trump respects and trusts his children, all of whom are full grown adults of genuine accomplishment.
Yes, there are conflict of interest questions to be addressed here, but Trump's desire to have his trusted people by his side is quite normal.
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As opposed to HRC, who had many people, including her maid handling classified material Without clearances.
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I still find at the very least the appearance of a conflict of interests if the children who close the inside are at the same time running multi million dollar businesses.
Ivanka wearing jewelry in an interview then promoting it for sale is tacky .
If Chelsea was doing that we would all be in an uproar.
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Agreed on all three points.
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Also, Cog Diss of the Left! With the outcome prediction wrong, how does that change the underlying logic? Trump is this bad and the alternative was that much worse! Smug liberals refuse to eat their own words. Let's get on with the recounts.
Knoxville News Sentinel
http://www.knoxnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/theotis-robinson/2016/10/23/trump-has-only-himself-blame-likely-loss/92457188/
Trump has only himself to blame for likely loss (WITH COMMENTS)
Fifteen days remain before Election Day, but it’s not too early to start the autopsy on Donald Trump’s candidacy and the wreckage of the Republican Party left in its wake.
There is no electoral path to the presidency left for The Donald. He knows there isn’t. So now he is trying to de-legitimize the election by claiming that it has been rigged by a shadowy global conspiracy to prevent him becoming president of the United States. (NOW WHO THINKS IT WAS RIGGED?) Trump is the one who has prevented himself becoming president by his foul mouth, repeated lies and incoherent policy statements.
Claiming that all Mexicans coming to America are criminals (DID HE SAY ALL?), drug dealers and rapists; repeatedly stoking the coals of “birtherism” in an effort to undermine the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president (BIRTH LOCATION IS RACE?); and Trump’s misogynistic view of women have proven caustic.
As a defense against the many women coming forward to accuse him of doing exactly what he told Billy Bush he did on the "Access Hollywood" bus, Trump has basically said that none were attractive enough to sexually assault. Was that a confession that if a woman was beautiful enough in his eyes, he would feel entitled to sexually assault her?
I have been black all my life, and for most of it I have been poor. But during none of it have I feared that walking out my front door would subject me to being shot(WRITER PROBABLY DOESN'T LIVE IN THE SOUTH SIDE OF CHICAGO). That’s ridiculous. So too is his invitation for Russian President Vladimir Putin to interfere in an American presidential election. How does an American presidential candidate justify asking Russia to get involved in our nation’s politics? Trump’s buddy, Putin (THEY'VE NEVER MET.), recently announced the completion of a rocket air defense system to fight the Islamic State in Syria. But ISIS does not have any airplanes. So where could Russia possibly aim its rockets in that area? Oh, U.S. aircraft operating in Syrian airspace. (IT WAS PRES OBAMA WHO TURNED SYRIA OVER TO PUTIN.)
In his death spiral of a campaign, Trump is inflicting heavy damage on the GOP. (OR IS THIS EXACTLY BACKWARDS?) His refusal during Wednesday night's debate to state that he would acknowledge Hillary Clinton's victory -- should that be the will of the American people -- undermines our democracy and is unprecedented in American history. (NOW SHE DOES THAT.) He is playing a serious role in Democrats making gains in both the House and the Senate and possibly in state legislative races. The reversals in the makeup of state lawmaking chambers (EXACTLY BACKWARDS AGAIN) could have a profound impact in the redrawing of congressional districts following the 2020 census and eliminate many of the gerrymandered Republican congressional seats. Think Texas.
Some Senate Republican candidates have endorsed Trump, then unendorsed him, only to re-endorse him out of fear of his supporters in their states. What a pickle they are in. And the fratricidal battle for the soul of the Republican Party is already underway. There have been chants of “Paul Ryan Sucks” -- in his own state of Wisconsin. That is a party coming apart. (GOP NOW HAS 34 GOVERNORSHIPS, 70% of STATE CHAMBERS, HOUSE, SENATE and PRESIDENCY.) How does the GOP put this Humpty Dumpty back together again?
This Republican debacle is all the making of the GOP by getting in bed with the hypocritical and so-called Christian conservatives. (WHY DON'T DEMS COMPETE FOR THOSE VOTES?) How do you square the call for character with Trump’s description of what he does to women? Perhaps the same way they voted for Ronald Reagan (WHO WON OVER 1000 ELECTORAL VOTES IN 93 STATES), whose wife checked with astrologers before allowing him to board an airplane, over Jimmy Carter, who got up every Sunday morning to teach Sunday school at his church (AND KNEW NOTHING ABOUT THE ECONOMY OR DEFENSE).
There was their embrace of the tea party. Let’s not forget that the Republican Party in the South was built on the resentment of Southern whites because nationally Democrats supported civil rights legislation (FALSE, DEMS VOTED AGAINST THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT), overturning decades of Jim Crowism. They have lied too many times to their base over things they knew were untrue for political expediency.
Last week, Obama called for Trump to “stop whining.” Many in my community knew the rest of that sentence. But to rile the president, Trump brought Obama's half-brother from Kenya to get back at him. Does he believe the president really cares? Or that Clinton could pick him out of a crowd?
The only conspiracy to deny Trump the presidency is that found in the mind of this self-loathing narcissist. My mom drilled it into me that if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. That is what the GOP has done -- only this time they are also getting up with ticks. (HILLARY'S SUPPORTERS ARE NOW UNCONTROLLABLY SCRATCHING.)
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this is not what we were voting for!
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-11-29/goldman-s-cohn-to-meet-with-trump-amid-transition-consultations
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Is this the guy who would like to see and end to the Fed someday? Didn't Steve Bannon come from GS?
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Bannon proved himself and is not running for Fed
I still don't know why we need a GS person again.
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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/flag-crusader-donald-trump-doesnt-know-what-the-13-stripes-represent/
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Is that true? He said he doesn't know what they represent? He went to a military academy. :-o
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Do you like going to doctors who make more by having you do MORE tests even if not necessary, or conversely make more money by restricting your care?
Personally I don't want my judgement clouded by either. Thus I would not want a President whose judgement is clouded by how well or poorly his business will do based on his decisions running the country.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-business_us_583ed744e4b04fcaa4d5d3a3
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Now linked in the US Russia thread. I don't buy the idea that his loyalties are other than to his new job, but at this point it is good to know all we can about where he comes from. American Interest as a reliable site. This piece, as it says, raises more questions than answers.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/12/19/the-curious-world-of-donald-trumps-private-russian-connections/
The American Interest
Published on: December 19, 2016
RUSSIA & THE WEST
The Curious World of Donald Trump’s Private Russian Connections
JAMES S. HENRY
Did the American people really know they were putting such a “well-connected” guy in the White House?
Throughout Donald Trump’s presidential campaign he expressed glowing admiration for Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Many of Trump’s adoring comments were utterly gratuitous. After his Electoral College victory, Trump continued praising the former head of the KGB while dismissing the findings of all 17 American national security agencies that Putin directed Russian government interference to help Trump in the 2016 American presidential election.
As veteran investigative economist and journalist Jim Henry shows below, a robust public record helps explain the fealty of Trump and his family to this murderous autocrat and the network of Russian oligarchs. Putin and his billionaire friends have plundered the wealth of their own people. They have also run numerous schemes to defraud governments and investors in the United States and Europe. From public records, using his renowned analytical skills, Henry shows what the mainstream news media in the United States have failed to report in any meaningful way: For three decades Donald Trump has profited from his connections to the Russian oligarchs, whose own fortunes depend on their continued fealty to Putin.
We don’t know the full relationship between Donald Trump, the Trump family and their enterprises with the network of world-class criminals known as the Russian oligarchs. Henry acknowledges that his article poses more questions than answers, establishes more connections than full explanations. But what Henry does show should prompt every American to rise up in defense of their country to demand a thorough, out-in-the-open congressional investigation with no holds barred. The national security of the United States of America and of peace around the world, especially in Europe, may well depend on how thoroughly we understand the rich network of relationships between the 45th President and the Russian oligarchy. When Donald Trump chooses to exercise, or not exercise, his power to restrain Putin’s drive to invade independent countries and seize their wealth, as well as loot countries beyond his control, Americans need to know in whose interest the President is acting or looking the other way.
—David Cay Johnston,
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of Donald Trump
“Tell me who you walk with and I’ll tell you who you are.”
—Cervantes
“I’ve always been blessed with a kind of intuition about people that allows me to sense who the sleazy guys are, and I stay far away.”
—Donald Trump, Surviving at the Top
Even before the November 8 election, many leading Democrats were vociferously demanding that the FBI disclose the fruits of its investigations into Putin-backed Russian hackers. Instead FBI Director Comey decided to temporarily revive his zombie-like investigation of Hillary’s emails. That decision may well have had an important impact on the election, but it did nothing to resolve the allegations about Putin. Even now, after the CIA has disclosed an abstract of its own still-secret investigation, it is fair to say that we still lack the cyberspace equivalent of a smoking gun.
Fortunately, however, for those of us who are curious about Trump’s Russian connections, there is another readily accessible body of material that has so far received surprisingly little attention. This suggests that whatever the nature of President-elect Donald Trump’s relationship with President Putin, he has certainly managed to accumulate direct and indirect connections with a far-flung private Russian/FSU network of outright mobsters, oligarchs, fraudsters, and kleptocrats.
Any one of these connections might have occurred at random. But the overall pattern is a veritable Star Wars bar scene of unsavory characters, with Donald Trump seated right in the middle. The analytical challenge is to map this network—a task that most journalists and law enforcement agencies, focused on individual cases, have failed to do.
Of course, to label this network “private” may be a stretch, given that in Putin’s Russia, even the toughest mobsters learn the hard way to maintain a respectful relationship with the “New Tsar.” But here the central question pertains to our new Tsar. Did the American people really know they were putting such a “well-connected” guy in the White House?
The Big Picture: Kleptocracy and Capital Flight
A few of Donald Trump’s connections to oligarchs and assorted thugs have already received sporadic press attention—for example, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s reported relationship with exiled Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. But no one has pulled the connections together, used them to identify still more relationships, and developed an image of the overall patterns.
Nor has anyone related these cases to one of the most central facts about modern Russia: its emergence since the 1990s as a world-class kleptocracy, second only to China as a source of illicit capital and criminal loot, with more than $1.3 trillion of net offshore “flight wealth” as of 2016.1
This tidal wave of illicit capital is hardly just Putin’s doing. It is in fact a symptom of one of the most epic failures in modern political economy—one for which the West bears a great deal of responsibility. This is the failure, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the late 1980s, to ensure that Russia acquires the kind of strong, middle-class-centric economic and political base that is required for democratic capitalism, the rule of law, and stable, peaceful relationships with its neighbors.
CapFlight-1Instead, from 1992 to the Russian debt crisis of August 1998, the West in general—and the U.S. Treasury, USAID, the State Department, the IMF/World Bank, the EBRD, and many leading economists in particular—actively promoted and, indeed, helped to finance one of the most massive transfers of public wealth into private hands that the world has ever seen.
For example, Russia’s 1992 “voucher privatization” program permitted a tiny elite of former state-owned company managers and party apparatchiks to acquire control over a vast number of public enterprises, often with the help of outright mobsters. A majority of Gazprom, the state energy company that controlled a third of the world’s gas reserves, was sold for $230 million; Russia’s entire national electric grid was privatized for $630 million; ZIL, Russia’s largest auto company, went for about $4 million; ports, ships, oil, iron and steel, aluminum, much of the high-tech arms and airlines industries, the world’s largest diamond mines, and most of Russia’s banking system also went for a song.
In 1994–96, under the infamous “loans-for-shares” program, Russia privatized 150 state-owned companies for just $12 billion, most of which was loaned to a handful of well-connected buyers by the state—and indirectly by the World Bank and the IMF. The principal beneficiaries of this “privatization”—actually, cartelization—were initially just 25 or so budding oligarchs with the insider connections to buy these properties and the muscle to hold them.2 The happy few who made personal fortunes from this feeding frenzy—in a sense, the very first of the new kleptocrats—not only included numerous Russian officials, but also leading gringo investors/advisers, Harvard professors, USAID advisers, and bankers at Credit Suisse First Boston and other Wall Street investment banks. As the renowned development economist Alex Gerschenkron, an authority on Russian development, once said, “If we were in Vienna, we would have said, ‘We wish we could play it on the piano!'”
For the vast majority of ordinary Russian citizens, this extreme re-concentration of wealth coincided with nothing less than a full-scale 1930s-type depression, a “shock therapy”-induced rise in domestic price levels that wiped out the private savings of millions, rampant lawlessness, a public health crisis, and a sharp decline in life expectancy and birth rates.
Sadly, this neoliberal “market reform” policy package that was introduced at a Stalin-like pace from 1992 to late 1998 was not only condoned but partly designed and financed by senior Clinton Administration officials, neoliberal economists, and innumerable USAID, World Bank, and IMF officials. The few dissenting voices included some of the West’s best economic brains—Nobel laureates like James Tobin, Kenneth Arrow, Lawrence Klein, and Joseph Stiglitz. They also included Moscow University’s Sergei Glaziev, who now serves as President Putin’s chief economic advisor.3 Unfortunately, they were no match for the folks with the cash.
There was also an important intervention in Russian politics. In January 1996 a secret team of professional U.S. political consultants arrived in Moscow to discover that, as CNN put it back then, “The only thing voters like less than Boris Yeltsin is the prospect of upheaval.” The experts’ solution was one of earliest “Our brand is crisis” campaign strategies, in which Yeltsin was “spun” as the only alternative to “chaos.” To support him, in March 1996 the IMF also pitched in with $10.1 billion of new loans, on top of $17.3 billion of IMF/World Bank loans that had already been made.
With all this outside help, plus ample contributions from Russia’s new elite, Yeltsin went from just 8 percent approval in the January 1996 polls to a 54-41 percent victory over the Communist Party candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, in the second round of the July 1996 election. At the time, mainstream media like Time and the New York Times were delighted. Very few outside Russia questioned the wisdom of this blatant intervention in post-Soviet Russia’s first democratic election, or the West’s right to do it in order to protect itself.
By the late 1990s the actual chaos that resulted from Yeltsin’s warped policies had laid the foundations for a strong counterrevolution, including the rise of ex-KGB officer Putin and a massive outpouring of oligarchic flight capital that has continued virtually up to the present. For ordinary Russians, as noted, this was disastrous. But for many banks, private bankers, hedge funds, law firms, and accounting firms, for leading oil companies like ExxonMobil and BP, as well as for needy borrowers like the Trump Organization, the opportunity to feed on post-Soviet spoils was a godsend. This was vulture capitalism at its worst.
The nine-lived Trump, in particular, had just suffered a string of six successive bankruptcies. So the massive illicit outflows from Russia and oil-rich FSU members like Kazahkstan and Azerbaijan from the mid-1990s provided precisely the kind of undiscriminating investors that he needed. These outflows arrived at just the right time to fund several of Trump’s post-2000 high-risk real estate and casino ventures—most of which failed. As Donald Trump, Jr., executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, told the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in Manhattan in September 2008 (on the basis, he said, of his own “half dozen trips to Russia in 18 months”):
In terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.
All this helps to explain one of the most intriguing puzzles about Donald Trump’s long, turbulent business career: how he managed to keep financing it, despite a dismal track record of failed projects.4
According to the “official story,” this was simply due to a combination of brilliant deal-making, Trump’s gold-plated brand, and raw animal spirits—with $916 million of creative tax dodging as a kicker. But this official story is hokum. The truth is that, since the late 1990s, Trump was also greatly assisted by these abundant new sources of global finance, especially from “submerging markets” like Russia
This suggests that neither Trump nor Putin is an “uncaused cause.” They are not evil twins, exactly, but they are both byproducts of the same neoliberal policy scams that were peddled to Russia’s struggling new democracy.
A Guided Tour of Trump’s Russian/FSU Connections
The following roundup of Trump’s Russo-Soviet business connections is based on published sources, interviews with former law enforcement staff and other experts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Iceland, searches of online corporate registries,5 and a detailed analysis of offshore company data from the Panama Papers.6 Given the sheer scope of Trump’s activities, there are undoubtedly other worthy cases, but our interest is in overall patterns.
Note that none of the activities and business connections related here necessarily involved criminal conduct. While several key players do have criminal records, few of their prolific business dealings have been thoroughly investigated, and of course they all deserve the presumption of innocence. Furthermore, several of these players reside in countries where activities like bribery, tax dodging, and other financial chicanery are either not illegal or are rarely prosecuted. As former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey once said, the difference between “legal” and “illegal” is often just “the width of a prison wall.”
So why spend time collecting and reviewing material that either doesn’t point to anything illegal or in some cases may even be impossible to verify? Because, we submit, the mere fact that such assertions are widely made is of legitimate public interest in its own right. In other words, when it comes to evaluating the probity of senior public officials, the public has the right to know about any material allegations—true, false, or, most commonly, unprovable—about their business partners and associates, so long as this information is clearly labeled as unverified.
Furthermore, the individual case-based approach to investigations employed by most investigative journalists and law enforcement often misses the big picture: the global networks of influence and finance, licit and illicit, that exist among business people, investors, kleptocrats, organized criminals, and politicians, as well as the “enablers”—banks, accounting firms, law firms, and havens. Any particular component of these networks might easily disappear without making any difference. But the networks live on. It is these shadowy transnational networks that really deserve scrutiny.
Bayrock Group LLC—Kazakhstan and Tevfik Arif
We’ll begin our tour of Trump’s Russian/FSU connections with several business relationships that evolved out of the curious case of Bayrock Group LLC, a spectacularly unsuccessful New York real estate development company that surfaced in the early 2000s and, by 2014, had all but disappeared except for a few lawsuits. As of 2007, Bayrock and its partners reportedly had more than $2 billion of Trump-branded deals in the works. But most of these either never materialized or were miserable failures, for reasons that will soon become obvious.
Bayrock’s “white elephants” included the 46-story Trump SoHo condo-hotel on Spring Street in New York City, for which the principle developer was a partnership formed by Bayrock and FL Group, an Icelandic investment company. Completed in 2010, the SoHo soon became the subject of prolonged civil litigation by disgruntled condo buyers. The building was foreclosed by creditors and resold in 2014 after more than $3 million of customer down payments had to be refunded. Similarly, Bayrock’s Trump International Hotel & Tower in Fort Lauderdale was foreclosed and resold in 2012, while at least three other Trump-branded properties in the United States, plus many other “project concepts” that Bayrock had contemplated, from Istanbul and Kiev to Moscow and Warsaw, also never happened.
Carelessness about due diligence with respect to potential partners and associates is one of Donald Trump’s more predictable qualities. Acting on the seat of the pants, he had hooked up with Bayrock rather quickly in 2005, becoming an 18 percent minority equity partner in the Trump SoHo, and agreeing to license his brand and manage the building.7
Exhibit A in the panoply of former Trump business partners is Bayrock’s former Chairman, Tevfik Arif (aka Arifov), an émigré from Kazakhstan who reportedly took up residence in Brooklyn in the 1990s. Trump also had extensive contacts with another key Bayrock Russian-American from Brooklyn, Felix Sater (aka Satter), discussed below.8 Trump has lately had some difficulty recalling very much about either Arif or Sater. But this is hardly surprising, given what we now know about them. Trump described his introduction to Bayrock in a 2013 deposition for a lawsuit that was brought by investors in the Fort Lauderdale project, one of Trump’s first with Bayrock: “Well, we had a tenant in … Trump Tower called Bayrock, and Bayrock was interested in getting us into deals.”9
According to several reports, Tevfik Arif was originally from Kazakhstan, a Soviet republic until 1992. Born in 1950, Arif worked for 17 years in the Soviet Ministry of Commerce and Trade, serving as Deputy Director of Hotel Management by the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse.10 In the early 1990s he relocated to Turkey, where he reportedly helped to develop properties for the Rixos Hotel chain. Not long thereafter he relocated to Brooklyn, founded Bayrock, opened an office in the Trump Tower, and started to pursue projects with Trump and other investors.11
Tevfik Arif was not Bayrock’s only connection to Kazakhstan. A 2007 Bayrock investor presentation refers to Alexander Mashevich’s “Eurasia Group” as a strategic partner for Bayrock’s equity finance. Together with two other prominent Kazakh billionaires, Patokh Chodiev (aka “Shodiyev”) and Alijan Ibragimov, Mashkevich reportedly ran the “Eurasian Natural Resources Cooperation.” In Kazakhstan these three are sometimes referred to as “the Trio.”12
The Trio has apparently worked together ever since Gorbachev’s late 1980s perestroika in metals and other natural resources. It was during this period that they first acquired a significant degree of control over Kazakhstan’s vast mineral and gas reserves. Naturally they found it useful to become friends with Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s long-time ruler. Indeed, State Department cables leaked by Wikileaks in November 2010 describe a close relationship between “the Trio” and the seemingly-perpetual Nazarbayev kleptocracy.
In any case, the Trio has recently attracted the attention of many other investigators and news outlets, including the September 11 Commission Report, the Guardian, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal. In addition to resource grabbing, the litany of the Trio’s alleged activities include money laundering, bribery, and racketeering.13 In 2005, according to U.S. State Department cables released by Wikileaks, Chodiev (referred to in a State Department cable as “Fatokh Shodiyev”) was recorded on video attending the birthday of reputed Uzbek mob boss Salim Abduvaliyeva and presenting him with a $10,000 “gift” or “tribute.”
According to the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, Chodiev and Mashkevich also became close associates of a curious Russian-Canadian businessman, Boris J. Birshtein. who happens to have been the father-in-law of another key Russian-Canadian business associate of Donald Trump in Toronto. We will return to Birshtein below.
The Trio also turn up in the April 2016 Panama Papers database as the apparent beneficial owners of a Cook Islands company, “International Financial Limited.”14 The Belgian newspapers Het Laatste Nieuws, Le Soir, and La Libre Belgique have reported that Chodiev paid €23 million to obtain a “Class B” banking license for this same company, permitting it to make international currency trades. In the words of a leading Belgian financial regulator, that would “make all money laundering undetectable.”
The Panama Papers also indicate that some of Arif’s connections at the Rixos Hotel Group may have ties to Kazakhstan. For example, one offshore company listed in the Panama Papers database, “Group Rixos Hotel,” reportedly acts as an intermediary for four BVI offshore companies.15 Rixos Hotel’s CEO, Fettah Tamince, is listed as having been a shareholder for two of these companies, while a shareholder in another—“Hazara Asset Management”—had the same name as the son of a recent Kazakhstan Minister for Sports and Tourism. As of 2012, this Kazakh official was described as the third-most influential deputy in the country’s Mazhilis (the lower house of Parliament), in a Forbes-Kazakhstan article.
According to a 2015 lawsuit against Bayrock by Jody Kriss, one of its former employees, Bayrock started to receive millions of dollars in equity contributions in 2004, supposedly by way of Arif’s brother in Russia, who allegedly “had access to cash accounts at a chromium refinery in Kazakhstan.”
This as-yet unproven allegation might well just be an attempt by the plaintiff to extract a more attractive settlement from Bayrock and its original principals. But it is also consistent with fact that chromium is indeed one of the Kazakh natural resources that is reportedly controlled by the Trio.
As for Arif, his most recent visible brush with the law came in 2010, when he and other members of Bayrock’s Eurasian Trio were arrested together in Turkey during a police raid on a suspected prostitution ring, according to the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot.
At the time, Turkish investigators reportedly asserted that Arif might be the head of a criminal organization that was trafficking in Russian and Ukrainian escorts, allegedly including some as young as 13.16 According to these assertions, big-ticket clients were making their selections by way of a modeling agency website, with Arif allegedly handling the logistics. Especially galling to Turkish authorities, the preferred venue was reportedly a yacht that had once belonged to the widely-revered Turkish leader Atatürk. It was also alleged that Arif may have also provided lodging for young women at Rixos Group hotels.17
According to Russian media, two senior Kazakh officials were also arrested during this incident, although the Turkish Foreign Ministry quickly dismissed this allegation as “groundless.” In the end, all the charges against Arif resulting from this incident were dismissed in 2012 by Turkish courts, and his spokespeople have subsequently denied all involvement.
Finally, despite Bayrock’s demise and these other legal entanglements, Arif has apparently remained active. For example, Bloomberg reports that, as of 2013, he, his son, and Rixos Hotels’ CEO Fettah Tamince had partnered to pursue the rather controversial business of advancing funds to cash-strapped high-profile soccer players in exchange for a share of their future marketing revenues and team transfer fees. In the case of Arif and his partners, this new-wave form of indentured servitude was reportedly implemented by way of a UK- and Malta-based hedge fund, Doyen Capital LLP. Because this practice is subject to innumerable potential abuses, including the possibility of subjecting athletes or clubs to undue pressure to sign over valuable rights and fees, UEFA, Europe’s governing soccer body, wants to ban it. But FIFA, the notorious global football regulator, has been customarily slow to act. To date, Doyen Capital LLP has reportedly taken financial gambles on several well-known players, including the Brazilian star Neymar.
The Case of Bayrock LLC—Felix Sater
Our second exhibit is Felix Sater, the senior Bayrock executive introduced earlier. This is the fellow who worked at Bayrock from 2002 to 2008 and negotiated several important deals with the Trump Organization and other investors. When Trump was asked who at Bayrock had brought him the Fort Lauderdale project in the 2013 deposition cited above, he replied: “It could have been Felix Sater, it could have been—I really don’t know who it might have been, but somebody from Bayrock.”18
SaterBizCardAlthough Sater left Bayrock in 2008, by 2010 he was reportedly back in Trump Tower as a “senior advisor” to the Trump Organization—at least on his business card—with his own office in the building.
Sater has also testified under oath that he had escorted Donald Trump, Jr. and Ivanka Trump around Moscow in 2006, had met frequently with Donald over several years, and had once flown with him to Colorado. And although this might easily have been staged, he is also reported to have visited Trump Tower in July 2016 and made a personal $5,400 contribution to Trump’s campaign.
Whatever Felix Sater has been up to recently, the key point is that by 2002, at the latest,19 Tevfik Arif decided to hire him as Bayrock’s COO and managing director. This was despite the fact that by then Felix had already compiled an astonishing track record as a professional criminal, with multiple felony pleas and convictions, extensive connections to organized crime, and—the ultimate prize—a virtual “get out of jail free card,” based on an informant relationship with the FBI and the CIA that is vaguely reminiscent of Whitey Bulger.20
Sater, a Brooklyn resident like Arif, was born in Russia in 1966. He reportedly emigrated with his family to the United States in the mid-1970s and settled in “Little Odessa.” It seems that his father, Mikhael Sheferovsky (aka Michael Sater), may have been engaged in Russian mob activity before he arrived in the United States. According to a certified U.S. Supreme Court petition, Felix Sater’s FBI handler stated that he “was well familiar with the crimes of Sater and his (Sater’s) father, a (Semion) Mogilevich crime syndicate boss.”21 A 1998 FBI report reportedly said Mogilevich’s organization had “approximately 250 members,” and was involved in trafficking nuclear materials, weapons, and more, as well as money laundering. (See below.)
But Michael Sater may have been less ambitious than his son. His only reported U.S. criminal conviction came in 2000, when he pled guilty to two felony counts for extorting Brooklyn restaurants, grocery stores, and clinics. He was released with three years’ probation. Interestingly, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York who handled that case at the time was Loretta Lynch, who succeeded Eric Holder as U.S. Attorney General in 2014. Back in 2000, she was also overseeing a budding informant relationship and a plea bargain with Michael’s son Felix, which may help to explain the father’s sentence.
By then young Felix Sater was already well on his way to a career as a prototypical Russian-American mobster. In 1991 he stabbed a commodity trader in the face with a margarita glass stem in a Manhattan bar, severing a nerve. He was convicted of a felony and sent to prison. As Trump tells it, Sater simply “got into a barroom fight, which a lot of people do.” The sentence for this felony conviction could not have been very long, because, by 1993, 27-year-old Felix was already a trader in a brand new Brooklyn-based commodity firm called “White Rock Partners,” an innovative joint venture among four New York crime families and the Russian mob aimed at bringing state-of-the art financial fraud to Wall Street.
Five years later, in 1998, Felix Sater pled guilty to stock racketeering, as one of 19 U.S.-and Russian mob-connected traders who participated in a $40 million “pump and dump” securities fraud scheme. Facing twenty years in Federal prison, Sater and Gennady Klotsman, a fellow Russian-American who’d been with him on the night of the Manhattan bar fight, turned “snitch” and helped the Department of Justice prosecute their co-conspirators.22 Reportedly, so did Salvatore Lauria, another “trader” involved in the scheme. According to the Jody Kriss lawsuit, Lauria later joined Bayrock as an off-the-books paid “consultant.” Initially their cooperation, which lasted from 1998 until at least late 2001, was kept secret, until it was inadvertently revealed in a March 2000 press release by U.S. Attorney Lynch.
Unfortunately for Sater, about the same time the NYPD also reportedly discovered that he had been running a money-laundering scheme and illicit gun sales out of a Manhattan storage locker. He and Klotsman fled to Russia. However, according to the New York Times, which cited Klotsman and Lauria, soon after the events of September 11, 2001, the ever-creative Sater succeeded in brokering information about the black market for Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the CIA and the FBI. According to Klotsman, this strategy “bought Felix his freedom,” allowing him to return to Brooklyn. It is still not clear precisely what information Sater actually provided, but in 2015 U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch publicly commended him for sharing information that she described as “crucial to national security.”
Meanwhile, Sater’s sentence for his financial crimes continued to be deferred even after his official cooperation in that case ceased in late 2001. His files remained sealed, and he managed to avoid any sentencing for those crimes at all until October 23, 2009. When he finally appeared before the Eastern District’s Judge I. Leo Glasser, Felix received a $25,000 fine, no jail time, and no probation in a quiet proceeding that attracted no press attention. Some compared this sentence to Judge Glasser’s earlier sentence of Mafia hit man “Sammy the Bull” Gravano to 4.5 years for 19 murders, in exchange for “cooperating against John Gotti.”
In any case, between 2002 and 2008, when Felix Sater finally left Bayrock LLC, and well beyond, his ability to avoid jail and conceal his criminal roots enabled him to enjoy a lucrative new career as Bayrock’s chief operating officer. In that position, he was in charge of negotiating aggressive property deals all over the planet, even while—according to lawsuits by former Bayrock investors—engaging in still more financial fraud. The only apparent difference was that he changed his name from “Sater” to “Satter.”23
In the 2013 deposition cited earlier, Trump went on to say “I don’t see Felix as being a member of the Mafia.” Asked if he had any evidence for this claim, Trump conceded “I have none.”24
As for Sater’s pal Klotsman, the past few years have not been kind. As of December 2016 he is in a Russian penal colony, working off a ten-year sentence for a failed $2.8 million Moscow diamond heist in August 2010. In 2016 Klotsman was reportedly placed on a “top-ten list” of Americans that the Russians were willing to exchange for high-value Russian prisoners in U.S. custody, like the infamous arms dealer Viktor Bout. So far there have been no takers. But with Donald Trump as President, who knows?
The Case of Iceland’s FL Group
One of the most serious frauds alleged in the recent Bayrock lawsuit involves FL Group, an Icelandic private investment fund that is really a saga all its own.
Iceland is not usually thought of as a major offshore financial center. It is a small snowy island in the North Atlantic, closer to Greenland than to the UK or Europe, with only 330,000 citizens and a total GDP of just $17 billion. Twenty years ago, its main exports were cod and aluminum—with the imported bauxite smelted there to take advantage of the island’s low electricity costs.
But in the 1990s Iceland’s tiny neoliberal political elite had what they all told themselves was a brilliant idea: “Let’s privatize our state-owned banks, deregulate capital markets, and turn them loose on the world!” By the time all three of the resulting privatized banks, as well as FL Group, failed in 2008, the combined bank loan portfolio amounted to more than 12.5 times Iceland’s GDP—the highest country debt ratio in the entire world.
For purposes of our story, the most interesting thing about Iceland is that, long before this crisis hit and utterly bankrupted FL Group, our two key Russian/FSU/Brooklyn mobster-mavens, Arif and Sater, had somehow stumbled on this obscure Iceland fund. Indeed, in early 2007 they persuaded FL Group to invest $50 million in a project to build the Trump SoHo in mid-town Manhattan.
According to the Kriss lawsuit, at the same time, FL Group and Bayrock’s Felix Sater also agreed in principle to pursue up to an additional $2 billion in other Trump-related deals. The Kriss lawsuit further alleges that FL Group (FLG) also agreed to work with Bayrock to facilitate outright tax fraud on more than $250 million of potential earnings. In particular, it alleges that FLG agreed to provide the $50 million in exchange for a 62 percent stake in the four Bayrock Trump projects, but Bayrock would structure the contract as a “loan.” This meant that Bayrock would not have to pay taxes on the initial proceeds, while FLG’s anticipated $250 million of dividends would be channeled through a Delaware company and characterized as “interest payments,” allowing Bayrock to avoid up to $100 million in taxes. For tax purposes, Bayrock would pretend that their actual partner was a Delaware partnership that it had formed with FLG, “FLG Property I LLC,” rather than FLG itself.
The Trump Organization has denied any involvement with FLG. However, as an equity partner in the Trump SoHo, with a significant 18 percent equity stake in this one deal alone, Donald Trump himself had to sign off on the Bayrock-FLG deal.
This raises many questions. Most of these will have to await the outcome of the Kriss litigation, which might well take years, especially now that Trump is President. But several of these questions just leap off the page.
First, how much did President-elect Trump know about the partners and the inner workings of this deal? After all, he had a significant equity stake in it, unlike many of his “brand-name only” deals, and it was also supposed to finance several of his most important East Coast properties.
Second, how did the FL Group and Bayrock come together to do this dodgy deal in the first place? One former FL Group manager alleges that the deal arrived by accident, a “relatively small deal” was nothing special on either side.25 The Kriss lawsuit, on the other hand, alleges that FLG was a well-known source of easy money from dodgy sources like Kazakhstan and Russia, and that other Bayrock players with criminal histories—like Salvatore Lauria, for example—were involved in making the introductions.
At this stage the evidence with respect to this second question is incomplete. But there are already some interesting indications that FL Group’s willingness to generously finance Bayrock’s peculiar Russian/FSU/Brooklyn team, its rather poorly-conceived Trump projects, and its purported tax dodging were not simply due to Icelandic backwardness. There is much more for us to know about Iceland’s “special” relationship with Russian finance. In this regard, there are several puzzles to be resolved.
First, it turns out that FL Group, Iceland’s largest private investment fund until it crashed in 2008, had several owners/investors with deep Russian business connections, including several key investors in all three top Iceland banks.
Second, it turns out that FL Group had constructed an incredible maze of cross-shareholding, lending, and cross-derivatives relationships with all these major banks, as illustrated by the following snapshot of cross-shareholding among Iceland’s financial institutions and companies as of 2008.26
Cross-shareholding Relationships, FLG and Other Leading Icelandic Financial Institutions, 2008
Cross-shareholding Relationships, FLG and Other Leading Icelandic Financial Institutions, 2008
This thicket of cross-dealing made it almost impossible to regulate “control fraud,” where insiders at leading financial institutions went on a self-serving binge, borrowing and lending to finance risky investments of all kinds. It became difficult to determine which institutions were net borrowers or investors, as the concentration of ownership and self-dealing in the financial system just soared.
Third, FL Group make a variety of peculiar loans to Russian-connected oligarchs as well as to Bayrock. For example, as discussed below, Alex Shnaider, the Russian-Canadian billionaire who later became Donald Trump’s Toronto business partner, secured a €45.8 million loan to buy a yacht from Kaupthing Bank during the same period, while a company belonging to another Russian billionaire who reportedly owns an important vodka franchise got an even larger loan.27
Fourth, Iceland’s largest banks also made a series of extraordinary loans to Russian interests during the run-up to the 2008 crisis. For example, one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs, a close friend of President Putin, nearly managed to secure at least €400 million (or, some say, up to four times that much) from Kaupthing, Iceland’s largest bank, in late September 2008, just as the financial crisis was breaking wide open. This bank also had important direct and indirect investments in FL Group. Indeed, until December 2006, it is reported to have employed the FL Group private equity manager who allegedly negotiated Felix Sater’s $50 million deal in early 2007.28
Fifth, there are unconfirmed accounts of a secret U.S. Federal Reserve report that unnamed Iceland banks were being used for Russian money laundering.29 Furthermore, Kaupthing Bank’s repeated requests to open a New York branch in 2007-08 were rejected by the Fed. Similar unconfirmed rumors repeatedly appeared in Danish and German publications, as did allegations about the supposed Kazakh origins of FLG’s cash to be “laundered” in the Kriss lawsuit.
Sixth, there is the peculiar fact that, when Iceland’s banks went belly-up in October 2008, their private banking subsidiaries in Luxembourg, which were managing at least €8 billion of private assets, were suddenly seized by Luxembourg banking authorities and transferred to a new bank, Banque Havilland. This happened so fast that Iceland’s Central Bank was prevented from learning anything about the identities or portfolio sizes of the Iceland banks’ private offshore clients. But again, there were rumors of some important Russian names.
Finally, there is the rather odd phone call that Russia’s Ambassador to Iceland made to Iceland’s Prime Minister at 6:45 a.m. on October 7, 2008, the day after the financial crisis hit Iceland. According to the PM’s own account, the Russian Ambassador informed him that then-Prime Minister Putin was willing to consider offering Iceland a €4 billion Russian bailout.
Of course this alleged Putin offer was modified not long thereafter into a willingness to entertain an Icelandic negotiating team in Moscow. By the time the Iceland team got to Moscow later that year, Russia’s desire to lend had cooled, and Iceland ended up accepting a $2.1 billion IMF “stabilization package” instead. But according to a member of the negotiating team, the reasons for the reversal are still a mystery. Perhaps Putin had reconsidered because he simply decided that Russia had to worry about its own considerable financial problems. Or perhaps he had discovered that Iceland’s banks had indeed been very generous to Russian interests on the lending side, while—given Luxembourg’s actions—any Russian private wealth invested in Icelandic banks was already safe.
On the other hand, there may be a simpler explanation for Iceland’s peculiar generosity to sketchy partners like Bayrock. After all, right up to the last minute before the October 2008 meltdown, the whole world had awarded Iceland AAA ratings: Depositors queued up in London to open high-yield Iceland bank accounts, its bank stocks were booming, and the compensation paid to its financiers was off the charts. So why would anyone worry about making a few more dubious deals?
Overall, therefore, with respect to these odd “Russia-Iceland” connections, the proverbial jury is still out. But all these Icelandic puzzles are intriguing and bear further investigation.
The Case of the Trump Toronto Tower and Hotel—Alex Shnaider
Our fourth case study of Trump’s business associates concerns the 48-year-old Russian-Canadian billionaire Alex Shnaider, who co-financed the seventy-story Trump Tower and Hotel, Canada’s tallest building. It opened in Toronto in 2012. Unfortunately, like so many of Trump’s other Russia/FSU-financed projects, this massive Toronto condo-hotel project went belly-up this November and has now entered foreclosure.
According to an online profile of Shnaider by a Ukrainian news agency, Alex Shnaider was born in Leningrad in 1968, the son of “Евсей Шнайдер,” or “Evsei Shnaider” in Russian.30 A recent Forbes article says that he and his family emigrated to Israel from Russia when he was four and then relocated to Toronto when he was 13-14. The Ukrainian news agency says that Alex’s familly soon established “one of the most successful stories in Toronto’s Russian quarter, “ and that young Alex, with “an entrepreneurial streak,” “helped his father Evsei Shnaider in the business, placing goods on the shelves and wiping floors.”
Eventually that proved to be a great decision—Shnaider prospered in the New World. Much of this was no doubt due to raw talent. But it also appears that for a time he got significant helping hand from his (now reportedly ex-) father-in-law, another colorful Russian-Canadian, Boris J. Birshtein.
Originally from Lithuania, Birshtein, now about 69, has been a Canadian citizen since at least 1982.31 He resided in Zurich for a time in the early 1990s, but then returned to Toronto and New York.32 One of his key companies was called Seabeco SA, a “trading” company that was registered in Zurich in December 1982.33 By the early 1990s Birshtein and his partners had started many other Seabeco-related companies in a wide variety of locations, inclding Antwerp,34 Toronto,35 Winnipeg,36 Moscow, Delaware,37 Panama,38 and Zurich.39 Several of these are still active.40 He often staffed them with directors and officers from a far-flung network of Russians, emissaries from other FSU countries like Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, and recent Russia/FSU emigres to Canada.41
According to the Financial Times and the FBI, in addition to running Seabeco, Birshtein was a close business associate of Sergei Mikhaylov, the reputed head of Solntsevskaya Bratva, the Russian mob’s largest branch, and the world’s highest-grossing organized crime group as of 2014, according to Fortune.42 A 1996 FBI intelligence report cited by the FT claims that Birshtein hosted a meeting in his Tel Aviv office for Mikhaylov, the Ukrainian-born Semion Mogilevich, and several other leaders of the Russo/FSU mafia, in order to discuss “sharing interests in Ukraine.”43 A subsequent 1998 FBI Intelligence report on the “Semion Mogilevich Organization” repeated the same charge,44 and described Mogilevich’s successful attempts at gaining control over Ukraine privatization assets. The FT article also described how Birshtein and his associates had acquired extraordinary influence with key Ukraine officials, including President Leonid Kuchma, with the help of up to $5 million of payoffs.45 Citing Swiss and Belgian investigators, the FT also claimed that Birshtein and Mikhaylov jointly controlled a Belgian company called MAB International in the early 1990s.46 During that period, those same investigators reportedly observed transfers worth millions of dollars between accounts held by Mikhaylov, Birshtein, and Alexander Volkov, Seabeco’s representative in Ukraine.
In 1993, the Yeltsin government reportedly accused Birshtein of illegally exporting seven million tons of Russian oil and laundering the proceeds.47 Dmytro Iakoubovski, a former associate of Birshtein’s who had also moved to Toronto, was said to be cooperating with the Russian investigation. One night a gunman fired three shots into Iakoubovski’s home, leaving a note warning him to cease his cooperation, according to a New York Times article published that year. As noted above, according to the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, two members of Bayrock’s Eurasian Trio were also involved in Seabeco during this period as well—Patokh Chodiev and Alexander Mashkevich. Chodiev reportedly first met Birshtein through the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and then went on to run Seabeco’s Moscow office before joining its Belgium office in 1991. Le Soir further claims that Mashkevich worked for Seabeco too, and that this was actually how he and Chodiev had first met.
All this is fascinating, but what about the connections between Birshtein and Trump’s Toronto business associate, Alex Shnaider? Again, the leads we have are tantalizing.The Toronto Globe and Mail reported that in 1991, while enrolled in law school, young Alex Shnaider started working for Birshtein at Seabeco’s Zurich headquarters, where he was reportedly introduced to steel trading. Evidently this was much more than just a job; the Zurich company registry lists “Alex Shnaider” as a director of “Seabeco Metals AG” from March 1993 to January 1994.48
In 1994, according to this account, he reportedly left Seabeco in January 1994 to start his own trading company in Antwerp, in partnership with a Belgian trader-partner. Curiously, Le Soir also says that Mikhaylov and Birshtein co-founded MAB International in Antwerp in January 1994. Is it far-fetched to suspect that Alex Shnaider and mob boss Mikhaylov might have crossed paths, since they were both in the same city and they were both close to Shnaider’s father-in-law?
According to Forbes, soon after Shnaider moved to Antwerp, he started visiting the factories of his steel trading partners in Ukraine.49 His favorite client was the Zaporizhstal steel mill, Ukraine’s fourth largest. At the Zaporizhstal mill he reportedly met Eduard Shifrin (aka Shyfrin), a metals trader with a doctorate in metallurgical engineering. Together they founded Midland Resource Holdings Ltd. in 1994.50
As the Forbes piece argues, with privatization sweeping Eastern Europe, private investors were jockeying to buy up the government’s shares in Zaprozhstal. But most traders lacked the financial backing and political connectons to accumulate large risky positions. Shnaider and Shifrin, in contrast, started buying up shares without limit, as if their pockets and connections were very deep. By 2001 they had purchased 93 percent of the plant for about $70 million, a stake that would be worth much more just five years later, when Shnaider reportedly turned down a $1.2 billion offer.
Today, Midland Resources Holdings Ltd. reportedly generates more than $4 billion a year of revenue and has numerous subsidiaries all across Eastern Europe.51 Shnaider also reportedly owns Talon International Development, the firm that oversaw construction of the Trump hotel-tower in Toronto. All this wealth apparently helped Iceland’s FL Group decide that it could afford to extend a €45.8 million loan to Alex Shnaider in 2008 to buy a yacht.52
As of December 2016, a search of the Panama Papers database found no fewer than 28 offshore companies that have been associated with “Midland Resources Holding Limited.”53 According to the database, “Midland Resources Holding Limited” was a shareholder in at least two of these companies, alongside an individual named “Oleg Sheykhametov.”54 The two companies, Olave Equities Limited and Colley International Marketing SA, were both registered and active in the British Virgin Islands from 2007–10.55 A Russian restaurateur by that same name reportedly runs a business owned by two other alleged Solntsevskaya mob associates, Lev Kvetnoy and Andrei Skoch, both of whom appear with Sergei Mikhaylov. Of course mere inclusion in such a group photo is not evidence of wrongdoing. (See the photo here.) According to Forbes, Kvetnoy is the 55th richest person in Russia and Skoch, now a deputy in the Russian Duma, is the 18th.56
Finally, it is also intriguing to note that Boris Birshtein is also listed as the President of “ME Moldova Enterprises AG,” a Zurich-based company” that was founded in November 1992, transferred to the canton of Schwyz in September 1994, and liquidated and cancelled in January 1999.57 Birshstein was a member of the company’s board of directors from November 1992 to January 1994, when he became its President. At that point he was succeeded as President in June 1994 by one “Evsei Shnaider, Canadian citizen, resident in Zurich,” who was also listed as director of the company in September 1994.58 “Evsei Schnaider” is also listed in the Panama registry as a Treasurer and Director of “The Seabeco Group Inc.,” formed on December 6, 1991,59 and as treasurer and director of Seabeco Security International Inc.,” formed on December 10, 1991. As of December 2016, both companies are still in existence.60 Boris Birshtein is listed as president and director of both companies.61
The Case of Paul Manafort’s Ukrainian Oligarchs
Our fifth Trump associate profile concerns the Russo/Ukrainian connections of Paul Manafort, the former Washington lobbyist who served as Donald Trump’s national campaign director from April 2016 to August 2016. Manafort’s partner, Rick Davis, also served as national campaign manager for Senator John McCain in 2008, so this may not just be a Trump association.
One of Manafort’s biggest clients was the dubious pro-Russian Ukrainian billionaire Dmytro Firtash. By his own admission, Firtash maintains strong ties with a recurrent figure on this scene, the reputed Ukrainian/Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich. His most important other links are almost certainly to Putin. Otherwise it is difficult to explain how this former used-car salesman could gain a lock on trading goods for gas in Turkmenistan and also become a lynchpin investor in the Swiss company RosUrEnergo, which controls Gazprom’s gas sales to Europe.62
In 2008, Manafort teamed up with a former manager of the Trump Organization to purchase the Drake Hotel in New York for up to $850 million, with Firtash agreeing to invest $112 million. According to a lawsuit brought against Manafort and Firtash, the key point of the deal was not to make a carefully-planned investment in real estate, but to simply launder part of the huge profits that Firtash had skimmed while brokering dodgy natural gas deals between Russia and Ukraine, with Mogilevich acting as a “silent partner.”
Ultimately Firtash pulled out of this Drake Hotel deal. The reasons are unclear—it has been suggested that he needed to focus on the 2015 collapse and nationalization of his Group DF’s Bank Nadra back home in Ukraine.63 But it certainly doesn’t appear to have changed his behavior. Since 2014 there has been a spate of other Firtash-related prosecutions, with the United States trying to extradict from Austria in order to stand trial on allegations that his vast spidernet “Group DF” had bribed Indian officials to secure mining licenses. The Austrian court has required him to put up a record-busting €125 million bail while he awaits a decision.64 And just last month, Spain has also tried to extradite Firtash on a separate money laundering case, involving the laundering of €10 million through Spanish property investments.
After Firtash pulled out of the deal, Manafort reportedly turned to Trump, but he declined to engage. Manafort stepped down as Trump’s campaign manager in August of 2016 in response to press investigations into his ties not only to Firtash, but to Ukraine’s previous pro-Russian Yanukovych government, which had been deposed by a uprising in 2014. However, following the November 8 election, Manafort reportedly returned to advise Trump on staffing his new administration. He got an assist from Putin—on November 30 a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Ukraine of leaking stories about Manafort in an effort to hurt Trump.
The Case of “Well-Connected” Russia/FSU Mobsters
Finally, several other interesting Russian/FSU connections have a more residential flavor, but they are a source of very important leads about the Trump network.
Indeed, partly because it has no prying co-op board, Trump Tower in New York has received press attention for including among its many honest residents tax-dodgers, bribers, arms dealers, convicted cocaine traffickers, and corrupt former FIFA officials.65
One typical example involves the alleged Russian mobster Anatoly Golubchik, who went to prison in 2014 for running an illegal gambling ring out of Trump Tower—not only the headquarters of the Trump Organization but also the former headquarters of Bayrock Group LLC. This operation reportedly took up the entire 51st floor. Also reportedly involved in it was the alleged mobster Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov,66 who has the distinction of making the Forbes 2008 list of the World’s Ten Most Wanted Criminals, and whose organization the FBI believes to be tied to Mogilevich’s. Even as this gambling ring was still operating in Trump Tower, Tokhtakhounov reportedly travelled to Moscow to attend Donald Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe contest as a special VIP.
In the Panama Papers database we do find the name “Anatoly Golubchik.” Interestingly, his particular offshore company, “Lytton Ventures Inc.,”67 shares a corporate director, Stanley Williams, with a company that may well be connected to our old friend Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mafia’s alleged “Boss of Bosses” who appeared so frequently in the story above. Thus Lytton Ventures Inc. shares this particular director with another company that is held under the name of “Galina Telesh.”68 According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, multiple offshore companies belonging to Semion Mogilevich have been registered under this same name—which just happens to be that of Mogilevich’s first wife.
A 2003 indictment of Mogilevich also mentions two offshore companies that he is said to have owned, with names that include the terms “Arbat” and “Arigon.” The same corporate director shared by Golubchik and Telesh also happens to be a director of a company called Westix Ltd.,69 which shares its Moscow address with “Arigon Overseas” and “Arbat Capital.”70 And another company with that same director appears to belong to Dariga Nazarbayeva, the eldest daughter of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the long-lived President of Kazakhstan. Dariga is expected to take his place if he ever decides to leave office or proves to be mortal.
Lastly, Dmytro Firtash—the Mogilevich pal and Manafort client that we met earlier—also turns up in the Panama Papers database as part of Galina Telesh’s network neighborhood. A director of Telesh’s “Barlow Investing,” Vasliki Andreou, was also a nominee director of a Cyprus company called “Toromont Ltd.,” while another Toromont Ltd. nominee director, Annex Holdings Ltd., a St. Kitts company, is also listed as a shareholder in Firtash’s Group DF Ltd., along with Firtash himself.71 And Group DF’s CEO, who allegedly worked with Manafort to channel Firtash’s funding into the Drake Hotel venture, is also listed in the Panama Papers database as a Group DF shareholder. Moreover, a 2006 Financial Times investigation identified three other offshore companies that are linked to both Firtash and Telesh.72
Anatoly Golubchik’s Panama Papers Network Neighborhood
Anatoly Golubchik’s Panama Papers Network Neighborhood
Of course, all of these curious relationships may just be meaningless coincidences. After all, the director shared by Telesh and Golubchik is also listed in the same role for more than 200 other companies, and more than a thousand companies besides Arbat Capital and Arigon Overseas share Westix’s corporate address. In the burgeoning land of offshore havens and shell-game corporate citizenship, there is no such thing as overcrowding. The appropriate way to view all this evidence is to regard it as “Socratic:” raising important unanswered questions, not providing definite answers.
In any case, returning to Trump’s relationships through Trump Tower, another odd one involves the 1990s-vintage fraudulent company YBM Magnex International. YBM, ostensibly a world-class manufacturer of industrial magnets, was founded indirectly in Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1995 by the “boss of bosses,” Semion Mogilevich, Moscow’s “brainy Don.”
This is a fellow with an incredible history, even if only half of what has been written about him is true.73 Unfortunately, we have to focus here only on the bits that are most relevant. Born in Kiev, and now a citizen of Israel as well as Ukraine and Russia, Semion, now seventy, is a lifelong criminal. But he boasts an undergraduate economics degree from Lviv University, and is reported to take special pride in designing sophisticated, virtually undetectable financial frauds that take years to put in place. To pull them off, he often relies on the human frailties of top bankers, stock brokers, accountants, business magnates, and key politicians.74
In YBM’s case, for a mere $2.4 million in bribes, Semion and his henchmen spent years in the 1990s launching a product-free, fictitious company on the still-badly under-regulated Toronto Stock Exchange. Along the way they succeeded in securing the support of several leading Toronto business people and a former Ontario Province Premier to win a seat on YBM’s board. They also paid the “Big Four” accounting firm Deloitte Touche very handsomely in exchange for glowing audits. By mid-1998, YBM’s stock price had gone from less than $0.10 to $20, and Semion cashed out at least $18 million—a relatively big fraud for its day—before the FBI raid its YBM’s corporate headquarters. When it did so, it found piles of bogus invoices for magnets, but no magnets.75
In 2003, Mogilevich was indicted in Philadelphia on 45 felony counts for this $150 million stock fraud. But there is no extradition treaty between the United States and Russia, and no chance that Russia will ever extradite Semion voluntarily; he is arguably a national treasure, especially now. Acknowledging these realities, or perhaps for other reasons, the FBI quietly removed Mogilevich from its Top Ten Most Wanted list in 2015, where he had resided for the previous six years.76
For our purposes, one of the most interesting things to note about this YBM Magnex case is that its CEO was a Russian-American named Jacob Bogatin, who was also indicted in the Philadelphia case. His brother David had served in the Soviet Army in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft unit, helping to shoot down American pilots like Senator John McCain. Since the early 1990s, David Bogatin was considered by the FBI to be one of the key members of Semion Mogilevich’s Russian organized crime family in the United States, with a long string of convictions for big-ticket Mogilevich-type offenses like financial fraud and tax dodging.
At one point, David Bogatin owned five separate condos in Trump Tower that Donald Trump had reportedly sold to him personally.77 And Vyacheslav Ivankov, another key Mogilevich lieutenant in the United States during the 1990s, also resided for a time at Trump Tower, and reportedly had in his personal phone book the private telephone and fax numbers for the Trump Organization’s office in that building.78
So what have we learned from this deep dive into the network of Donald Trump’s Russian/FSU connections?
First, the President-elect really is very “well-connected,” with an extensive network of unsavory global underground connections that may well be unprecedented in White House history. In choosing his associates, evidently Donald Trump only pays cursory attention to questions of background, character, and integrity.
Second, Donald Trump has also literally spent decades cultivating senior relationships of all kinds with Russia and the FSU. And public and private senior Russian figures of all kinds have likewise spent decades cultivating him, not only as a business partner, but as a “useful idiot.”
After all, on September 1, 1987 (!), Trump was already willing to spend a $94,801 on full-page ads in the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the New York Times calling for the United States to stop spending money to defend Japan, Europe, and the Persian Gulf, “an area of only marginal significance to the U.S. for its oil supplies, but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent.”79
This is one key reason why just this week, Robert Gates—a registered Republican who served as Secretary of Defense under Presidents Bush and Obama, as well as former Director and Deputy Director of the CIA—criticized the response of Congress and the White House to the alleged Putin-backed hacking as far too “laid back.”80
Third, even beyond questions of illegality, the public clearly has a right to know much more than it already does about the nature of such global connections. As the opening quote from Cervantes suggests, these relationships are probably a pretty good leading indicator of how Presidents will behave once in office.
Unfortunately, for many reasons, this year American voters never really got the chance to decide whether such low connections and entanglements belong at the world’s high peak of official power. In the waning days of the Obama Administration, with the Electoral College about to ratify Trump’s election and Congress in recess, it is too late to establish the kind of bipartisan, 9/11-type commission that would be needed to explore these connections in detail.
Finally, the long-run consequence of careless interventions in other countries is that they often come back to haunt us. In Russia’s case, it just has.
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We search for Truth around here, no matter where it may lead.
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We search for Truth around here, no matter where it may lead.
He dealt with shady characters. I don't know what that means. Just posting it in the spirit so well expressed above.
A professor who predicted before the election Trump would win also predicted he would be impeached.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNhz6a1PKWY&feature=youtu.be
American University professor Allan Lichtman has a system of predicting U.S. presidential election winners that accurately foresaw Donald Trump's victory. He joins CBSN to explain his prediction, and why he now thinks it's likely Trump will be impeached.
The argument was that he had shady and corrupt business practices before and a tiger never changes his stripes.
I doubted that when I heard it earlier; don't know of overt wrongdoing in his past and I think people underestimate his determination and discipline. It's easy to do that when you see him speak or tweet undisciplined messages.
This piece posted earlier today does not allege illegal activities on the part of Trump or even known wrongdoings. It just gives us a heads up and context if or when allegations come up from past dealings or future events.
If he commits impeachable offenses, I believe the R's (and Dems obviously) will turn on him quickly. I predict he won't, but keeping the promise for the Trump business to do no new deals is a big part of that.
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If you deal with rich people from outside the western world, it's pretty much a given they are "shady" in some way. Sometimes slight, sometimes neck deep in bad things.
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I did not know this:
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2016-08-31.html
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I did not know this:
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2016-08-31.html
politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/03/20/obama-makes-late-night-gaffe/
8 years of a special olympics president.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-intelligence.html?emc=edit_na_20170110&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
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Rsh was excitedly calling Trump's handling of CNN brilliant. That a Republican is finally standing up to them instead of the decades old cowtowing with tail between legs.
One could argue that Trump will never win the MSM over with this strategy however one could also argue there is no way he can ever win them over. CNN's MO is not to report on Trump but to "take him down". To destroy him and to get him impeached. So why should Trump grant them carte blanche questions? No matter what he says and no matter how he says it, CNN is going out of their way to make him look as bad as they can.
This fits the concept there is no compromise with the LEFT. Maybe just short term compromise because they don't hold the cards ,but we know that is only till the following day when the mob is back out again shoving all their shit in our faces:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/11/trump-trolls-fake-news-organizations-at-great-news-conference-on-twitter/
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The MSM is a dinosaur stupidly thrashing in a tar pit, too stupid to yet realize how it caused it's own demise.
Rsh was excitedly calling Trump's handling of CNN brilliant. That a Republican is finally standing up to them instead of the decades old cowtowing with tail between legs.
One could argue that Trump will never win the MSM over with this strategy however one could also argue there is no way he can ever win them over. CNN's MO is not to report on Trump but to "take him down". To destroy him and to get him impeached. So why should Trump grant them carte blanche questions? No matter what he says and no matter how he says it, CNN is going out of their way to make him look as bad as they can.
This fits the concept there is no compromise with the LEFT. Maybe just short term compromise because they don't hold the cards ,but we know that is only till the following day when the mob is back out again shoving all their shit in our faces:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/11/trump-trolls-fake-news-organizations-at-great-news-conference-on-twitter/
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-business.html?emc=edit_ta_20170116&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
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anything in there about uranium?
"In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. praised the opportunities in Russia, but also called it a “scary place” to do business because of corruption and legal complications."
this article to me actually makes it sound like he never did much at all with Russia despite NYT desperately trying to find dirt.
In a way NYT has closer tie to Russia then Trump hence the name "Pravda on hudson" ( Good Communists think a like :wink:)
I know people who, because they read the NYT think they are the world's experts in everything. They are always liberals.
Perhaps they fill in their vast vast knowledge of the human condition with the Bezos Post too.
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I've modified the name of this thread 8-)
http://bluelivesmatter.blue/president-donald-trump-lt-debra-clayton/
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http://www.dickmorris.com/trumps-new-whig-party-history-video/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
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Trump is going to win again in 2016.
Just wanted to let everyone know.
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Perhaps you mean 2020?
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I do. Funny...no one ever responds to anything I write unless there's a mistake in it. Actually came back here specifically to fix it; yet, there you were. Imagine that. In any event, he'll be president again. Calling it now.
Calling Trump from the outset last time was nice. See how I do this time. Anyone want to bet?
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I do. Funny...no one ever responds to anything I write unless there's a mistake in it. Actually came back here specifically to fix it; yet, there you were. Imagine that. In any event, he'll be president again. Calling it now.
Calling Trump from the outset last time was nice. See how I do this time. Anyone want to bet?
I'm hoping he does such a great job it's an easy re-election. I still keep waiting for him to fcuk us over, sell us out. Thus far, I'm pretty happy with what he's done.
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My wife and I were watching the news together recently and we had a moment where we could really imagine 8 years of Trump and then 8 of Pence (is he young enough for this?). Imagining 16 good years for our country was a very nice feeling.
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"My wife and I were watching the news together recently and we had a moment where we could really imagine 8 years of Trump and then 8 of Pence (is he young enough for this?). Imagining 16 good years for our country was a very nice feeling."
The Repubs better keep control of the chambers because the Dems are HELL BENT on damaging him every single second. It will not cease and it will only get worse.
We can only hope he succeeds *despite* them and the lose more power.
I think his odds are very low of success. I hope I am wrong
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That was not a prediction!
IMHO it can go either way. He certainly is doing a number of things very right AND he keeps stepping all over his message or failing to make points that should be made (e.g. on the Swamp thing IMHO he should be pounding the table on his rule about people not being allowed to go straight into lobbying, etc).
I think it would have been far wiser to go for tax reform first and get the economy roaring while allowing Obamacare to collapse of its own weight further. I fear that going with Obamacare first is going to turn into a giant fart where as far as the American people will be concerned nobody is right and everybody is wrong.
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I do. Funny...no one ever responds to anything I write unless there's a mistake in it. Actually came back here specifically to fix it; yet, there you were. Imagine that. In any event, he'll be president again. Calling it now.
Calling Trump from the outset last time was nice. See how I do this time. Anyone want to bet?
I'm hoping he does such a great job it's an easy re-election. I still keep waiting for him to fcuk us over, sell us out. Thus far, I'm pretty happy with what he's done.
I hope so too.
Sure enough, as to the post in voter fraud, Trump just an hour ago called for an investigation into voter fraud. I think Trump will usher in the change many are looking for.
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My wife and I were watching the news together recently and we had a moment where we could really imagine 8 years of Trump and then 8 of Pence (is he young enough for this?). Imagining 16 good years for our country was a very nice feeling.
I think so. If you keep people's wallets fat, they really don't care about much else for the most párt. Listening to Trump's announcement of when he will divulge who is to be his pick for the Supreme Court, and the manner in which he did it, smacks of business leadership and lingo. I know that govenment and business are two different things entirely, but having someone that is capable of generating capital, there is much to be said for that.
Even the safe space people, as soon as they are out of their universities, and cut off from the tit, will be worried about whether there will be jobs to buy all of the comfortable things they want (since none of them actually have the courage of their conviction, to go live in one of the countries where they'd actually be "equal," "lose their privileged status" or that actually practices all of their socialist, social programs, such as North Korea). Whoever gives that to the people, wins.
Edit: I wanted to add, that in Russia, most people don't really fall in love. There's a reason for it. Hard to fall in love, when you have nothing to eat. As much as Americans hate other Americans (and we do), nothing solves racism and other things, like a full belly and all kinds of material toys and money to travel.
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When I lived just across the bridge from Mar a Lago in the early 1990's I think the fee was $50,000:
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/exclusive-mar-lago-membership-fee-174129819.html
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This is straight forward based on what is in the news.
She needs to be dismissed. Yes "times have changed" for her too:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/01/28/secret-service-agent-who-said-she-wouldnt-take-a-bullet-for-trump-put-on-paid-leave/
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This is straight forward based on what is in the news.
She needs to be dismissed. Yes "times have changed" for her too:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/01/28/secret-service-agent-who-said-she-wouldnt-take-a-bullet-for-trump-put-on-paid-leave/
I can't even fathom why she's still there, or why her superiors or coworkers would even tolerate her presence after something like that. She's now a liability.
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http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Trump-Sent-10000-Check-to-Illinois-FedEx-Courier-Report-412296163.html
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By David Satter
Updated Feb. 7, 2017 4:22 p.m. ET
423 COMMENTS
President Trump’s expression of “respect” for Vladimir Putin in an interview that aired over the weekend, and his comparison of extrajudicial killings by the Putin regime to American actions, has ushered in a new era in U.S.-Russian relations. Never before has an American president implied that political murder is acceptable or that the U.S. is guilty of similar crimes.
The goal of improved relations with the Russian president, as Mr. Trump explained, is to create the conditions for a U.S.-Russian alliance to fight Islamic State. But the result will be to cripple the Russian opposition, contribute to the propagandizing of the population, and diminish the ability of the U.S. to prevent internal and foreign Russian atrocities.
In the present atmosphere, Russian activists know they could be killed at any time. Last week Vladimir Kara-Murza, a political activist and journalist, was hospitalized with symptoms of poisoning. The motive for the poisoning may lie in statements Mr. Kara-Murza made to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee last June. In his testimony, he called for the extension of sanctions under the Magnitsky Act, which imposed visa bans and asset freezes on Russian officials involved in the 2009 torture and murder of Sergei Magnitsky, an anticorruption lawyer.
Mr. Kara-Murza said sanctions should be imposed on Russian human-rights abusers including Gen. Alexander Bastrykin, at the time Russia’s chief security officer and head of the Investigative Committee. Gen. Bastrykin resigned in September, and on Jan. 9 he was added to the list of those targeted by the Magnitsky sanctions.
Now Mr. Kara-Murza is in a coma, suffering from organ failure, and fighting for his life. The symptoms are identical to those he showed after being poisoned two years ago, when he was given a 5% chance of survival.
On Feb. 27, 2015, Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the Russian opposition, was shot dead as he crossed the Moskvoretsky Bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin. He was compiling a report on Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine whose presence was denied by the government. Earlier, he advised representatives of the U.S. government on targets for sanctions after the Russian annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine.
For both Mr. Kara-Murza and Nemtsov, the violence was demonstrative. Mr. Kara-Murza was poisoned twice in the same way, and Nemtsov was shot next to the Kremlin on the most heavily guarded bridge in Moscow. These are signs that the regime is not hesitant to indicate authorship of its crimes.
The oppositionists also face social isolation. Alexei Navalny, a prominent blogger, and Mikhail Kasyanov, the former prime minister, have been physically attacked. A secretly filmed video of Mr. Kasyanov with his lover was shown on national television. Before he was killed, Nemtsov received death threats on social media. After his murder, images of his body were circulated on websites and social media, and posts denouncing him received hundreds of thousands of “likes.”
In such a hostile environment, U.S. backing is an important source of moral reinforcement for Russia’s political and human-rights activists. Mr. Trump’s remarks instead provide reinforcement for the Putin regime’s propaganda, which tries to convince Russians that the abuses they experience in their daily lives are typical of all countries.
An example was an Oct. 30 Russian news report that U.S. citizens, angered by vote fraud in the lead up to the Nov. 8 election, were ready to launch a massive demonstration in Washington, similar to the 2013-14 protests in Kiev’s Maidan Square. While the story about the U.S. demonstration was fabricated, in December 2011 Russians did take to the streets to protest widespread vote fraud. The “news” item was intended to persuade them that vote fraud was also typical of the U.S.
Mr. Trump’s statements suggesting that Russia and America are similar in abusing human rights and the U.S. also has “killers” will be quoted by the government, state-run media and other anti-opposition forces for years.
Mr. Trump also undermines America’s moral authority, making it more difficult for the U.S. to prevent Russian atrocities. In Syria, Russian forces have deliberately targeted markets, hospitals and homes. The London-based monitoring group Airwars estimates that there were at least 3,786 civilian deaths caused by Russian bombing between Sept. 30, 2015, and Dec. 20, 2016, with the actual numbers likely far higher. Death on this scale can generate new resistance. But Mr. Trump’s “respect” for Mr. Putin leaves little room for criticism. If the U.S. president is not concerned about political murders, what basis does he have for objecting to the indiscriminate meting out of death from the air?
The attempt to mollify Russia is not new. In 1999 the U.S. failed to question Russia’s official explanations for the apartment bombings that brought Mr. Putin to power despite the arrest of state security agents found planting a bomb in an apartment building in Ryazan. In 2009 the Obama administration launched its “reset” policy despite the murders of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent, and Anna Politkovskaya, a leading investigative reporter, and the invasion of Georgia.
Mr. Trump’s readiness to condone murder in the pursuit of an ill-advised U.S.-Russia partnership suggests that he doesn’t see the distinction between defensive war and the murder of one’s own people to hold on to power. Cooperation with Russia on these terms could involve the U.S. in crimes that neither the American people nor the world will accept. Mr. Trump needs to give more thought to his words—while there is still time.
Mr. Satter is affiliated with the Hudson Institute and Johns Hopkins University. He is author of “The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin” (Yale, 2016).
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Can't say I disagree:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444724/donald-trump-conservative-defenders-behavior-indefensible
It doesn't help that Republicans in general seem all over the map on some issues
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let's see how soon it all comes true
https://tranio.com/world/news/what-trumps-victory-means-for-the-us-property-market_5219/
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Andy:
Welcome aboard.
a) Please post a self-intro in the Rules of the Road/Fire Hydrant thread.
b) Please note that I am a "Thread Nazi" :-D Our idea here is to have threads serve as useful repositories on a given subject. To that end we look to be as specific as possible. Thus, your post here would be best in the Real Estate thread-- otherwise this thread becomes a meaningless blob. Please post it there.
TAC!
Marc
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Hi Marc! and thanks for your guidance! all covered now
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:-)
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http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-north-korea-mar-a-lago-meeting-photos-2017-2
http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/13/14597700/donald-trump-phone-flashlight-north-korea-hacking-security
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/02/13/trump-ran-a-campaign-based-on-intelligence-security-thats-not-how-hes-governing/?utm_term=.b20e187e56be
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/02/03/513256171/is-trump-tweeting-from-a-secure-smartphone-the-white-house-wont-say
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communications-trump.html?emc=edit_na_20170214&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
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http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/donald-trump-security-cyberattacks-leaks-234973
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This is entirely unprecedented - but then - so is Barack Obama and his efforts as U.S. President to dismantle the nation as founded:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265808/obamas-shadow-presidency-matthew-vadum
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This article is about something very important well worth following, but this is the wrong thread for it-- please post in Armed and Unarmed Resistance and/or Politics. TY
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http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/319800-gop-senators-unnerved-by-trump-russia-relationship
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gop-senators-unnerved-by-trump-russia-relationship
All the usual cast of GOP useful to the Left Senators that are the GOP go to pols for Leftist who do interviews:
Graham McCain sell out Corker and to some extent McConnell.
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https://www.jiujitsutimes.com/defend-donald-trumps-arm-drag-handshake/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xecEV4dSAXE&sns=fb
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By Daniel Henninger
Feb. 22, 2017 7:19 p.m. ET
345 COMMENTS
Donald Trump is right that the media is making a mountain out of every Trump molehill. Despite the “resistance,” it also remains true that most Americans want the Trump presidency to succeed.
These Trump Hopefuls, whose number includes people who didn’t vote for him, want the presidency to succeed because they understand that if it fails, the social and economic condition of their country will be in a bad place.
Despite this reservoir of goodwill for the Trump presidency, the degree of anxiety about it is palpable. You have to be living in Netflixed isolation not to have had conversations with people wondering what the hell is going on at this White House.
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
Beyond the Beltway bubble, I think most people look upon the pitched battle between Mr. Trump and the news media as they would a playground fight between sixth-graders.
“He hit me first.”
“You hit first.”
“You’re a liar.”
“No, you’re the liar.”
Millions of Americans simply gape.
We could spend the next several years arguing whether Mr. Trump or the dishonest mainstream media started this, but a more productive question is, why is the mayhem happening?
It is happening mainly because the presidential campaign didn’t end last November. The political culture of the 2017 campaign endures inside the White House and among the press and the Trump opposition.
Presidential campaigns are an essential feature of the American political system—long, raucous, fiercely contested. But that glorious tumult is supposed to give way to the more substantial, harder politics of the presidency.
The permanent campaign has been with us a long time, and Barack Obama was the first president who didn’t disband his campaign operation after winning. But we’re in a different dimension today.
Propelled by new media, campaign politics has become a national addiction. It’s similar to the way people drive cars into trees because they can’t stop texting. No one will let go—not the tweeting president, not the surly press and not the hooked, agog public.
Still, there’s a political casualty waiting to happen inside the great American thrill ride—the presidency. Trump the president is looking like he’s trapped inside Trump the campaigner.
To be sure, the Trump presidential machine is executing the president’s orders and making fine appointments. The president’s downward ratchet on the vast Obama regulatory state is the main reason for the upward-bound stock market.
But Mr. Trump himself can revert in an instant to campaign mode—Hillary’s failures, voter fraud and past media transgressions. Or a Florida presidential rally that looks just like a Florida campaign rally. Bill Clinton once said that to win an election you do what you’ve gotta do. But are the tactics of a campaign transferrable to the daily life of a presidency?
Some will say the political world underestimated Donald Trump from day one. That’s true—but as a candidate. The presidency, by contrast, is one part of a large and complicated political system, complicated because the Founders wanted the process to be difficult and to require getting buy-in from unavoidably divided factions.
Mr. Trump and his White House are justified in wondering how it is their politics get hammered, while the factions of the alt-left are generally misrepresented as a benevolent children’s crusade.
A further Trump argument would be that they owe their distraught opposition nothing. That’s mostly true. It isn’t Mr. Trump’s responsibility to provide kumbaya solace to a political left whose street bullies turned Chuck Schumer into a progressive factotum.
The argument here isn’t that Donald Trump as president has to step up to “heal” a divided nation, not least because our age of limitless sentimentality has turned the phrase “heal the nation” into soap bubbles. But it’s obvious that the hyper-hot emotions in the country’s political life now are unsettling many normal people who don’t wish Mr. Trump ill.
There are risks, to the Trump presidency, its goals and the system itself, if the volatile personality-driven politics of the Trump campaign remain the norm for the 45th presidency.
Yes, we know it’s a populist movement. Populism, though, is what gets you elected. The president who tries to govern with populism inside the U.S.’s system of distributed, three-branch authority will fail.
There are going to be tough votes soon in Congress on the president’s tax bill, ObamaCare reform, a Dodd-Frank revision, the budget, infrastructure and the rest. That agenda, intended to raise the U.S. from its doldrums, is the reason so many different kinds of people want this presidency to succeed.
The Trump margin for delivering victory to these hopeful Americans is narrower than it should be. The president’s goals could falter or fail if enough Republicans running for election in 2020 decide their own needs require putting distance between themselves and the permanent volcano of the Trump White House. There will be no moral victories for a presidency that cannot produce 50 votes in the Senate.
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/02/breaking-report-white-house-deputy-chief-staff-nevertrumper-kate-walsh-source-leaks/
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This is unprecedented in my memory having people in the same part trying to bring down the President.
What would Joe Stalin do?
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Note the subject line "Caveat lector" i.e. "Let the reader beware"!
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445185/trump-less-authoritarian-obama
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http://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/02/24/trump-isnt-sounding-like-a-russian-mole/
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Chris Wallace and Van Jones both (!) said "Last night he became The President".
The opposition party counterattacks:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/02/28/fact-checking-president-trumps-address-to-congress/?utm_term=.91d93d4680af&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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Bigly embarrassing if true!!!!
http://theseattletribune.com/trumps-unsecured-android-device-believed-to-be-source-of-recent-white-house-leaks/
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House Committee has asked him to put up or shut up on the wiretapping accusation.
We live in interesting times.
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House Committee has asked him to put up or shut up on the wiretapping accusation.
We live in interesting times.
He needs to.
We do.
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http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/324598-trump-brings-the-boardroom-to-washington
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March 21, 2017 7:28 p.m. ET
2126 COMMENTS
If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.
The latest example is Mr. Trump’s refusal to back off his Saturday morning tweet of three weeks ago that he had “found out that [Barack] Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory” on Election Day. He has offered no evidence for his claim, and a parade of intelligence officials, senior Republicans and Democrats have since said they have seen no such evidence.
Yet the President clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle, rolling out his press spokesman to make more dubious claims. Sean Spicer—who doesn’t deserve this treatment—was dispatched last week to repeat an assertion by a Fox News commentator that perhaps the Obama Administration had subcontracted the wiretap to British intelligence.
That bungle led to a public denial from the British Government Communications Headquarters, and British news reports said the U.S. apologized. But then the White House claimed there was no apology. For the sake of grasping for any evidence to back up his original tweet, and the sin of pride in not admitting error, Mr. Trump had his spokesman repeat an unchecked TV claim that insulted an ally.
The wiretap tweet is also costing Mr. Trump politically as he hands his opponents a sword. Mr. Trump has a legitimate question about why the U.S. was listening to his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and who leaked news of his meeting with the Russian ambassador. But that question never gets a hearing because the near-daily repudiation of his false tweet is a bigger media story.
FBI director James Comey also took revenge on Monday by joining the queue of those saying the bureau has no evidence to back up the wiretap tweet. Mr. Comey even took the unusual step of confirming that the FBI is investigating ties between the Trump election campaign and Russia.
Mr. Comey said he could make such a public admission only in “unusual circumstances,” but why now? Could the wiretap tweet have made Mr. Comey angry because it implied the FBI was involved in illegal surveillance? Mr. Trump blundered in keeping Mr. Comey in the job after the election, but now the President can’t fire the man leading an investigation into his campaign even if he wants to.
All of this continues the pattern from the campaign that Mr. Trump is his own worst political enemy. He survived his many false claims as a candidate because his core supporters treated it as mere hyperbole and his opponent was untrustworthy Hillary Clinton. But now he’s President, and he needs support beyond the Breitbart cheering section that will excuse anything. As he is learning with the health-care bill, Mr. Trump needs partners in his own party to pass his agenda. He also needs friends abroad who are willing to trust him when he asks for support, not least in a crisis.
This week should be dominated by the smooth political sailing for Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee and the progress of health-care reform on Capitol Hill. These are historic events, and success will show he can deliver on his promises. But instead the week has been dominated by the news that he was repudiated by his own FBI director.
Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 39%. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.
Appeared in the Mar. 22, 2017, print edition.
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Too late now but Trump should have fired Comey:
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsmax-Tv/FBI-James-Comey-investigation-White-House/2017/03/21/id/780018/
Comey's not referring Clinton to the DOJ was grounds enough to be fired but it is all just for the history books now.
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March 21, 2017 7:28 p.m. ET
2126 COMMENTS
If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.
The latest example is Mr. Trump’s refusal to back off his Saturday morning tweet of three weeks ago that he had “found out that [Barack] Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory” on Election Day. He has offered no evidence for his claim, and a parade of intelligence officials, senior Republicans and Democrats have since said they have seen no such evidence.
Yet the President clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle, rolling out his press spokesman to make more dubious claims. Sean Spicer—who doesn’t deserve this treatment—was dispatched last week to repeat an assertion by a Fox News commentator that perhaps the Obama Administration had subcontracted the wiretap to British intelligence.
That bungle led to a public denial from the British Government Communications Headquarters, and British news reports said the U.S. apologized. But then the White House claimed there was no apology. For the sake of grasping for any evidence to back up his original tweet, and the sin of pride in not admitting error, Mr. Trump had his spokesman repeat an unchecked TV claim that insulted an ally.
The wiretap tweet is also costing Mr. Trump politically as he hands his opponents a sword. Mr. Trump has a legitimate question about why the U.S. was listening to his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and who leaked news of his meeting with the Russian ambassador. But that question never gets a hearing because the near-daily repudiation of his false tweet is a bigger media story.
FBI director James Comey also took revenge on Monday by joining the queue of those saying the bureau has no evidence to back up the wiretap tweet. Mr. Comey even took the unusual step of confirming that the FBI is investigating ties between the Trump election campaign and Russia.
Mr. Comey said he could make such a public admission only in “unusual circumstances,” but why now? Could the wiretap tweet have made Mr. Comey angry because it implied the FBI was involved in illegal surveillance? Mr. Trump blundered in keeping Mr. Comey in the job after the election, but now the President can’t fire the man leading an investigation into his campaign even if he wants to.
All of this continues the pattern from the campaign that Mr. Trump is his own worst political enemy. He survived his many false claims as a candidate because his core supporters treated it as mere hyperbole and his opponent was untrustworthy Hillary Clinton. But now he’s President, and he needs support beyond the Breitbart cheering section that will excuse anything. As he is learning with the health-care bill, Mr. Trump needs partners in his own party to pass his agenda. He also needs friends abroad who are willing to trust him when he asks for support, not least in a crisis.
This week should be dominated by the smooth political sailing for Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee and the progress of health-care reform on Capitol Hill. These are historic events, and success will show he can deliver on his promises. But instead the week has been dominated by the news that he was repudiated by his own FBI director.
Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 39%. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.
Appeared in the Mar. 22, 2017, print edition.
The WSJ morphed so slowly into the Huffington Post, I almost didn't notice.
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The Outsider Enters Boldly and Trips Over His Own Shoelaces
“There’s a new sheriff in town” is a pretty popular power fantasy. We find ourselves stuck in a circumstance where everyone seems to be running amok, pursuing their own selfish or petty agenda, acting in complete disregard of the needs of others or the community as a whole. Our patience is exhausted, we’re fed up with it, and we make a bold, impossible to ignore, vaguely threatening gesture that demonstrates our supreme power. ENOUGH! Everyone freezes. We declare that order has returned. We begin dictating orders to others, to put everyone in their place. Cowed and intimidated, everyone dutifully returns to their proper place as part of a well-organized machine.
Saturday, Mike Allen shared a rather revealing anecdote about the way the Trump administration is approaching the task of getting legislation passed:
When the balky hardliners of the House Freedom Caucus visited the White House earlier this week, this was Steve Bannon's opening line, according to people in the conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building:
“Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill.”
Bannon's point was: This is the Republican platform. You're the conservative wing of the Republican Party. But people in the room were put off by the dictatorial mindset.
One of the members replied: ”You know, the last time someone ordered me to something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn't listen to him, either.”
“You have no choice…” Except, the members did. Perhaps at Breitbart.com, Bannon got used to negotiating with people he could fire. The president and his team can’t make a member vote for a bill, particularly one the member thinks is terrible or severely disappointing.
I wrote Friday that one glaring, unavoidable problem for the White House is that the president was trying persuade reluctant members of the House without really understanding why they were objecting. Our old friend Tim Alberta offered a vivid anecdote:
Thursday afternoon, members of the House Freedom Caucus were peppering the president with wonkish concerns about the American Health Care Act—the language that would leave Obamacare’s “essential health benefits” in place, the community rating provision that limited what insurers could charge certain patients, and whether the next two steps of Speaker Paul Ryan’s master plan were even feasible—when Trump decided to cut them off.
“Forget about the little s***,” Trump said, according to multiple sources in the room. “Let's focus on the big picture here.”
The group of roughly 30 House conservatives, gathered around a mammoth, oval-shaped conference table in the Cabinet Room of the White House, exchanged disapproving looks. Trump wanted to emphasize the political ramifications of the bill's defeat; specifically, he said, it would derail his first-term agenda and imperil his prospects for reelection in 2020. The lawmakers nodded and said they understood. And yet they were disturbed by his dismissiveness. For many of the members, the “little s***” meant the policy details that could make or break their support for the bill—and have far-reaching implications for their constituents and the country.
Maybe to Trump these details about the bill were “the little s***.” But to the members in front of him, this was the make-or-break criteria of what makes a good reform bill. You would think the author of The Art of the Deal would have understood the importance of knowing the other side’s priorities. I seem to recall impassioned, insistent assurances during the 2016 Republican presidential primary that Trump was the ultimate dealmaker. Now we’re assured by Trump fan Bill Mitchell, “Trump is prescient and a brilliant strategist; therefore, the death of today's bill was part of his long term strategy.”
We’ve seen the growing enthusiasm for “outsiders” in American politics in recent years. A pratfall like this isn’t the only potential outcome with an outsider, but it’s a strong possibility. They either think they can completely rewrite how the system works, haven’t bothered to study how the system works, or don’t care how the system works. But they don’t actually change how the system works.
Like most of my colleagues, I found AHCA pretty “meh” at best. (With all the bashing going on right now, it’s worth remembering that the bill did offer flexibility to the states on Medicaid, did reduce the deficit, would reduce premiums in the long term if not the short term, and constituted the biggest effort at entitlement reform in a generation.) But because of the impossibility of getting 60 votes in the Senate, it didn’t include tort reform, insurance companies selling across state lines, and a couple of other big elements of the conservative health care reform agenda. It’s quite possible that had this bill been enacted, most Americans would feel like nothing had changed or improved by November 2018.
This was always a thorny, multifaceted problem. But the president and congressional Republicans were quite clear in their promises in 2016. They told us they could handle this, and they made fixing it sound easy. At what point is it fair to conclude their self-assurance was evidence they had no idea what they were talking about?
Could You Guys Stop Finger-Pointing for a Minute?
Historians and students of the presidency love Abraham Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals” in his cabinet. They describe it as messy and complicated but effective and a way to guarantee a diverse range of viewpoints and options are considered. But I’ve always wondered whether the “team of rivals” approach worked because it’s a good system… or whether it worked because Abraham Lincoln was using it.
Because if you have a “team of rivals” in your White House, everybody spends a lot of time jockeying for position and addressing “palace intrigue” instead of, you know, their jobs.
What would be the worst possible way to respond to a defeat? Oh, probably recriminations and finger-pointing, instead of refocusing on common goals and getting everyone on the same page, rowing in the same direction.
With President Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda hitting the rocks as he edges toward the 100-day mark, top aides, political allies and donors are embroiled in a furious round of finger-pointing over who is at fault.
The recriminations extend far beyond the implosion of the GOP’s Obamacare repeal on Friday. Senior aides are lashing each other over their inability to stem a never-ending tide of negative stories about the president. There is second-guessing of the Republican National Committee’s efforts to mobilize Trump’s electoral coalition on behalf of his legislative priorities. At the Environmental Protection Agency, a top official quit recently amid accusations the department is failing to advance the president’s campaign promises. And one of Trump's most generous benefactors, Rebekah Mercer, has expressed frustration over the direction of the administration.
It’s not even April yet.
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second post
Amid Spending Questions, White House Defends Trump’s Golf-Resort Trips
WSJ
By Rebecca Ballhaus
Mar 20, 2017 3:31 pm ET
383 COMMENTS
President Donald Trump on Thursday released a budget blueprint calling for sharp cuts to spending on foreign aid, the arts, environmental protection and other areas to pay for a bigger military and more secure border. The next day, he left Washington for his fifth weekend at Mar-a-Lago, his luxurious private golf resort in Palm Beach, Fla.—a trip estimated to cost around $3 million.
The juxtaposition prompted a slew of calculations as to which agencies the president proposed to cut could be saved by reducing the number of weekend trips to Florida for Mr. Trump and his staff. The Washington Post, for example, pointed out that two trips to Mar-a-Lago would pay for a year of funding for the Interagency Council on Homelessness, which Mr. Trump’s budget proposed to eliminate.
Asked at Monday’s White House briefing whether the president would consider reducing his weekend trips “given his feelings about the priorities for Americans’ tax dollars,” press secretary Sean Spicer replied, “That is a vast reach to suggest.” “Presidents always travel,” Mr. Spicer continued. “The president will continue to go and travel around the country and have meetings to solve the nation’s problems.”
Former President Barack Obama also drew criticism for going on golf trips during his presidency — including from Mr. Trump himself. But Mr. Obama didn’t make his first trip to the golf course until four months into his administration. Mr. Trump first traveled to Mar-a-Lago on his second weekend as president.
Pressed on the fact that no previous president had traveled as frequently and as early in his administration—and to a private club—as Mr. Trump, Mr. Spicer pointed out that former President George W. Bush had traveled to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, but did not respond to the rest of the question. “The president’s very clear that he works seven days a week,” Mr. Spicer said. “This is where he goes to see his family. This is part of being president.”
Mr. Trump’s trips to Florida have raised eyebrows not just for their hefty price tag — which, according to a Government Accountability Office report on an Obama trip to West Palm Beach from 2013, is somewhere around $3 million — but for the spotlight they place on a resort he owns. His frequent trips there – sometimes accompanied by foreign leaders – and meetings with the club’s exclusive roster of members have driven up business for the resort, which recently doubled its initiation fees to $200,000.
Last weekend, Mr. Trump held what the White House called “part of a cabinet meeting” in the dining room of his Virginia-based golf resort. And in April, the president is tentatively set to meet at Mar-a-Lago with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who would become the second foreign leader to travel to the club. Meanwhile, White House officials have sought to play down the amount of golf Mr. Trump plays at the resort each weekend.
The White House on Sunday said Mr. Trump might hit a few golf balls, but declined to confirm whether he actually did so. Chris Ruddy, a longtime friend of the president who is also a member of Mar-a-Lago, subsequently tweeted a photo of Mr. Trump wearing a golf glove.
On Monday, Mr. Spicer defended the president’s trips to the golf course. “How you use the game of golf is something that he’s talked about,” he said. Mr. Spicer also challenged the notion that Mr. Trump’s frequenting of golf courses means he’s actually playing golf.
“Just because he heads there doesn’t mean that that’s what’s happening,” he said.
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Tom Delay on Trump "working with Dems":
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsmax-Tv/Democrats-left-agenda-Tom-DeLay/2017/03/27/id/781027/
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Just over two months into President Trump's presidency, the Leftist media bashing President Trump constantly, Paul Ryan and his failings, Russia, golf, Britain and spying; and I still have absolutely no "buyer's remorse," when I consider what either of the socialist alternatives would have been.
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AMEN!!!
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By Peggy Noonan
March 30, 2017 7:21 p.m. ET
791 COMMENTS
Near the end of the campaign I wrote a column called “Imagine a Sane Donald Trump,” lamenting that I believed he was crazy, and too bad. Too bad because his broad policy assertions, or impulses, suggested he understood that 2008 and the years just after (the crash and the weak recovery) had changed everything in America, and that the country was going to choose, in coming decades, one of two paths—a moderate populism or socialism—and that the former was vastly to be preferred, for reasons of the nation’s health. A gifted politician could make his party the leader toward that path, which includes being supportive and encouraging of business but willing to harness government to alleviate the distress of the abandoned working class and the anxious middle class; strong on defense but neither aggressive nor dreamy in world affairs; realistic and nonradical on social issues while unmistakably committed to protecting the freedoms of the greatest cohering force in America, its churches; and aware that our nation’s immigration reality was a scandal created by both parties, and must be redressed.
You could discern, listening to his interviews and speeches, that this was more or less where Donald Trump stood. If a politician governed along those lines, he could help bring forward a politics more pertinent to the times, end brain-dead fixations, force both parties to question their ways of operating, and possibly push our national politics in a more productive direction. All this in my view would be good.
Undergirding my thinking is the sense that a big bad day is coming—that we have too many enemies, and some of them have the talent to hurt us, and one or more inevitably will. Whatever helps hold us together now will help hold us together then, when we’re under severe pressure.
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Behind that thought is the observation that our country is stressed to the point of fracture culturally, economically, politically, spiritually. We find it hard to hold together on a peaceful day, never mind a violent one. And so right now we must institute as much good feeling and cooperation in Washington as we can. The nation longs for examples of constructiveness and capability. We’ve got to keep the long view in mind.
High Anxiety Over Health-Care Reform
ObamaCare proved to be a catastrophic victory. The Republican plan had the makings of another one.
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Reach Across the Aisle, Mr. President
For health-care reform to succeed, it requires buy-in and compromise from both parties.
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House Republicans Repeat an Obama Error
Like the Democrats in 2009, the majority party’s priorities aren’t responsive to the moment.
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A Surprising Show of Confidence
Trump’s speech was clear, plain, even warm at times. Could we be seeing a capacity to grow? Declarations columnist Peggy Noonan writes.
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Washington Still Reels From the Quake of 2016
Declarations columnist Peggy Noonan writes that from the White House’s empty offices to overly giddy CPAC, everyone seems a little lost.
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The priority is stabilizing and strengthening what we have, and encouraging wherever possible an atmosphere of peacefulness and respect.
That’s where I am, or rather what I think is politically desirable.
Looking at the administration 70 days in, things do not, in these areas, look promising. There’s too much gravitational pull to the president’s accumulated mistakes.
His stupid tweets have now resulted in the Russia probe. That will help opioid addicts in Ohio. This Thursday he may have launched a Republican civil war: The Freedom Caucus had better “get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & the Dems, in 2018!” That will help promote harmony. His staff has failed to absorb the obvious fact that Mr. Trump was so outsized, colorful, and freakish a character that their primary job, and an easy one it was, was to be the opposite—sober, low-key, reassuring. Instead they seemed to compete with him for outlandishness.
Whatever your feelings and views, whatever was said behind closed doors, in the photo-op the president of the United States must shake the German chancellor’s hand. Not only because you are a gentleman, not only because it is your job to represent America with grace, but because a baseline requirement of your office is to show public respect for a great nation with which we have a history, part of that history constituting a jewel in the crown of 20th-century world diplomacy.
It amazes me that in his dealings with the health-care bill Mr. Trump revealed that he has no deep knowledge of who his base is, who his people are. I’ve never seen that in politics. But Mr. Trump’s supporters didn’t like the bill. If they had wanted a Republican president who deals only with the right, to produce a rightist bill, they would have chosen Ted Cruz. Instead they chose someone outside conservatism who backed big-ticket spending on infrastructure and opposed cutting entitlements, which suggested he’d be working with Democrats, too.
A president dealing with a national issue that arouses anxieties has to take time and speak repeatedly on the plan and the goal, with the kind of specificity that encourages confidence. “You win the argument, then you win legislatively,” Newt Gingrich said in an interview this week, paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher.
And a president must always appear to be leading, not meekly tagging leaders within the Congress.
Seventy days is only 70 days. Mr. Trump’s supporters will give him time. During the campaign I spoke often to a friend in north Georgia, a Trump supporter who was a Democrat and voted for Barack Obama. She is unshaken. Mr. Trump is “making the kind of mistakes a new president makes,” she says now. “He’s having growing pains. Because he’s not a politician.”
He’s not. But he is the holder of the highest political office in the land, which requires some political discipline.
Whenever I used to have disagreements with passionate pro-Trump people, I’d hear their arguments, weigh their logic and grievances. I realized after a while that in every conversation we always brought different experiences to the table. I had worked in a White House. I had personally observed its deeper realities and requirements. Their sense of how a White House works came from news shows and reading, and also from TV shows such as “House of Cards” and “Scandal.” Those are dark, cynical shows that more or less suggest anyone can be president. I don’t mean that in the nice way. Those programs don’t convey how a White House is an organism demanding of true depth, of serious people, real professionals. A president has to be a serious person too, and not only an amusing or stimulating talker, or the object of a dream.
Robert Sherwood, the playwright who was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speechwriter throughout the war, saw him as subtle, high-minded, and one of the great “showmen” of presidential history. Sherwood’s biographer, Harriet Hyman Alonso, quotes Sherwood on how sometimes FDR spoke to him “as if he were an actor who had been reading my lines.” After a speech in Philadelphia, the president asked Sherwood if he thought the timing in a section of the speech was good. Sherwood called it perfect. Roosevelt then gave him “one of his sly looks and asked, ‘Do you think [Alfred] Lunt could have done it any better?’ ” Lunt was the great stage actor of the day.
That is the public part of the presidency, which we see so much now that we think it’s all there is. But there is a private presidency. It is in private that Mr. Trump does his tweeting. It is in private, in the office, that a crisis comes over the transom, and is announced by the national security adviser. Maybe the mad boy-king of North Korea will decide it’s a good day to see if his missiles can hit Los Angeles. Maybe a sleeper cell of terrorists will decide it’s a good day to show it’s woke.
Crisis reveals the character, the essential nature of a White House. Seventy days in, that is my worry.
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By Louise Radnofsky and
Rebecca Ballhaus
March 31, 2017 6:00 p.m. ET
105 COMMENTS
WASHINGTON—Ten weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump hasn’t had an easy week yet.
Mr. Trump has hit regular high points—the nomination of a Supreme Court justice, a smooth speech to a joint session of Congress, an active deal-making role in health-care negotiations.
But they have each been punctured, within hours or days, by low points—courts blocking his travel restrictions, an early-morning tweet about wiretapping, and the collapse of those talks to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
The result, as captured in Gallup polling, is a constant cycle of slips and rebounds for Mr. Trump. The collapse of the health-care bill last week helped pushed down his approval rating to 35% between Sunday and Tuesday, the all-time worst ratings for any president in his first year, Gallup found.
“Unusually low, unusually early,” the organization concluded in its assessment of the data. “Already a trendsetter by earning the lowest initial job approval rating of any president and falling below 40% approval in record time, Trump’s recent 35% and 36% approval ratings are the lowest of any president in his first year.”
On Thursday, the White House began making adjustments aimed at improving its performance as it turns toward a measure in Congress to keep the government from shutting down and an effort to overhaul the tax code.
The president is likely to bank a win next week with the Senate moving toward approval of his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, though Democrats are threatening a vigorous debate and perhaps a filibuster.
Mr. Trump is in need of a clean victory to shore up his nascent presidency, political strategists said.
“Momentum matters right now, particularly when you have as aggressive an agenda as this White House has,” said Kevin Madden, a longtime Republican strategist who advised 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. “The core reason that the president got elected was his ability to speak to the frustrations that people have about Washington not getting things done. A lot of those controversies distract attention from that.”
The White House “hasn’t made the gains that they’ve promised, and Congress is motivated by gains,” Mr. Madden said. “Without those, it’s increasingly difficult to create incentives for Congress to provide the support they need to get things done.”
Mr. Trump, for his part, sets little store in polls or unfavorable headlines, as he has made clear in tweet after tweet.
“If the people of our great country could only see how viciously and inaccurately my administration is covered by certain media!” Mr. Trump wrote this week.
Instead, he and spokesman Sean Spicer talk up positive economic indicators, as Mr. Spicer did again Friday. He cited a survey by the National Association of Manufacturers, whose members visited the White House on Friday, in which 93% of respondents said they now had a positive outlook.
“The president was glad to see this report add to the list of measurements reflecting the incredible optimism and positivity that his pro-growth policies have created,” he said.
Other presidents have seen approval ratings significantly worse, but they have all come at later points in their presidencies, Gallup found.
President Bill Clinton hit a low in his first summer in office of 37%, but it marked a bottoming out from which he climbed back to win re-election. Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush each reached the 20s in the latter years in their first, and only, terms of office, and didn’t recover.
Judge Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court comes to a Senate vote next week as two Democratic senators have stepped forward as the first to throw support behind the nominee. WSJ's Byron Tau and Tanya Rivero discuss whether more Democrats are likely to follow suit. Photo: AP
The selection of Judge Gorsuch, who now serves on the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, is a rare case in which the president has managed to clearly fulfill a campaign pledge, as was his promise to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and expedite approval of long-stalled pipeline projects.
More often, though, the White House has either seen its initiatives blocked or scaled back from the fiery rhetoric of the presidential campaign.
Mr. Trump is expected to seek minor changes in the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, rather than a broad rewrite. He has yet to find a winning strategy for constructing a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border—paid for by Mexico. His travel restrictions on six majority-Muslim nations, intended to diminish terrorism threats, are mired in the courts. His description of the revised ban as a “watered-down version of the first one” already has complicated the government’s arguments in support of it.
On Thursday, a frustrated Mr. Trump lashed out at lawmakers in the House Freedom Caucus who withheld support for the White House-backed health-care bill after deeming it insufficiently conservative. He said he would “fight them” in the 2018 elections, if he had to. The rift, some conservatives have said, is mutual.
“I think the man who came to drain the swamp might have become the creature from the black lagoon,” said Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and a strong backer of Mr. Trump. “He’s got the wrong target. The grass roots thank God for the Freedom Caucus. Trump is separating himself from his own base.”
Since entering the White House, Mr. Trump has not finished a single week without controversy, and all of it has unfolded against a backdrop of probes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and on Capitol Hill into his team’s contacts with Russia.
This week, the White House announced the departure of Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh to join America First Policies, an outside group that aims to bolster Mr. Trump’s agenda, and which could take a more muscular approach to fighting the president’s former conservative allies.
Trump advisers are interviewing Rick Dearborn, currently a deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs, to succeed Ms. Walsh, according to two people familiar with the conversations. A senior administration official said the White House hopes to decide on her successor by this weekend.
Mr. Dearborn and Ms. Walsh have feuded from the first day of Mr. Trump’s administration, according to a person familiar with their conversations.
Ms. Walsh, in charge of assigning West Wing office space, gave Mr. Dearborn an office he found inferior to the space allotted to his assistant. Mr. Dearborn and the assistant switched offices, which angered Ms. Walsh. Aides loyal to Mr. Dearborn cheered Ms. Walsh’s White House departure, while other insiders—including top Trump adviser Steve Bannon—heaped praise on her.
She is the second high-level Trump adviser to resign. The first was National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, who was forced out after it became apparent that he misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.
Mr. Flynn’s contacts with Russian officials are now a major part of a much broader, criminal investigation of some of Mr. Trump’s top campaign advisers that has begun to hang over his new presidency.
“Having the Russia [inquiries] taking up time and energy, and add in the congressional oversight role—and it all presents a very real challenge,” Mr. Madden said.
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second post
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/31/sources-white-house-leaks-center-discussions-katie-walsh-replacement/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20170331
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"Trump is a man who is constitutionally incapable of taking responsibility for his own defects and errors, and as such requires an enemy. The one he has chosen isn’t Schumer — it is congressional conservatives, the Republican true-believers who make up the grandiosely named “Freedom Caucus.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446333/trump-democrats-working-together
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:-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
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The Trump Presidency Begins
A presidency that was almost too much fun has taken a clear turn to the serious.
President Trump and Chinese President Xi in Palm Beach, Fla., April 7.
President Trump and Chinese President Xi in Palm Beach, Fla., April 7. Photo: Associated Press
By Daniel Henninger
Updated April 13, 2017 7:19 a.m. ET
320 COMMENTS
Instead of “The Trump Presidency Begins,” an alternative headline for this column might have been “Trump’s Presidency Begins.” Each describes a different reality.
Until recently, “Trump’s presidency” has been about one thing—Donald Trump. It’s been Trump 24/7. Mr. Trump owned the presidency the way Mr. Trump owns a tower on Fifth Avenue. For better and for worse, Trump’s presidency was all about him.
In the past few weeks—the Gorsuch appointment, the Syrian strike, the meeting with China’s Xi Jinping —we are finally seeing the beginning of the real Trump presidency.
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Like all the others dating back to George Washington, the presidency is not an object captured by one person; it is an office held in trust for the people of the United States.
The Trump-centric phenomenon of these early days is the product of our celebrity-centric times, not least the presidency. He drove it with social media, and the media torrents washed back over him.
There are some realities, though, that the media torrents haven’t washed away yet. America’s institutions, its politics and the distant world are still too large for anyone to hold and command alone. That is the lesson of recent days.
Neil Gorsuch was nominated by Mr. Trump to fill the ninth seat on the Supreme Court. What followed was a mighty political struggle. The opposition to Judge Gorsuch, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, revealed that the legal philosophies of progressives and conservatives have arrived at incompatibility.
Confirming Judge Gorsuch required the Trump presidency to recede so its political allies could rise and execute. The legislative branch eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, thereby preserving the president’s prerogatives.
While the Gorsuch drama played out on the Senate floor, Mr. Trump met at Mar-a-Lago with China’s Xi Jinping, who traveled nearly 8,000 miles to meet the American president. Possibly, the Chinese thought that Muhammad going to the mountain would flatter the flatterable Mr. Trump. Instead, the strikingly low-key meeting acknowledged the high stakes for the two nations and the world.
On Wednesday, Mr. Xi called the president to discuss North Korea again. That no doubt had something to do with Mr. Trump’s soufflé surprise over dinner with Mr. Xi—a missile strike against an Assad airfield and chemical-weapons depot in Syria.
Unlike the assassination of Osama bin Laden, when the mission details leaked out overnight, there was no self-congratulatory media dump out of the White House of this presumably ultra-media-conscious president. Just a blow to the Middle East status quo.
For our purposes, the important thing isn’t the strike but what came before. It requires little imagination to guess the import of the conversations about operational and political details between the president and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis —former head of the U.S.’s Middle Eastern Central Command—and his national security adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster. As Dorothy said to Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.
Days before the Syrian strike, Mr. Trump with little fanfare met two Middle Eastern leaders crucial to U.S. strategy for the region—President Sisi of Egypt and Jordan’s King Abdullah. In March, he hosted a working lunch for Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince Salman, creator of the 41-state Arab coalition to fight Islamic State. A successful presidential foreign policy needs allies. Watch this space.
There has been the difficult matter of the Trump-Putin mutual admiration society. Over the past week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said Russia may have been “complicit” in the Syrian gas attack. Mr. Tillerson flew to Moscow for a tough chat Wednesday with Mr. Putin. Any Putin investment in the U.S. election is deep in the red right now.
One reads that the Trump White House’s communication shop is up late imagining bullet points for the president’s “first 100 days.” One reads that Mr. Trump is arbitrating disputes between his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his Cromwellian counselor Steve Bannon over the presidency’s proper direction.
This isn’t complicated. There was only one Trump promise—Make America Great Again. If you type that phrase into Google Translate, this is what should appear: Get the American economic engine retuned or pack it in. Every other pet peeve or project is secondary.
There are two levers for achieving this goal: tax policy and deregulation. To get there, the Trump presidency just inserted two key players.
Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, an expert on what makes a tax code productive, becomes chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Neomi Rao, director of George Mason University’s gloriously named Center for the Study of the Administrative State, became the Trump White House’s czarina of regulation. A Chicago Law grad.
We have arrived in the foothills of the Trump presidency, and warnings no doubt abound. Not least is the Republican obsession with the sport of cliff-diving over dry land. What’s important is that a presidency that was almost too much fun has taken a turn for the serious.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
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https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/04/15/president-trump-realigning-geo-political-alliances-and-few-paying-attention/
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As U.S. President Donald Trump approaches his 100-day benchmark on Saturday, a media deluge has already begun bemoaning the demise of the liberal order, celebrating waves of deregulation or simply blaming the president's rocky start on the "disaster" he inherited on taking office. Rather than wade into that predictable morass, we prefer to focus instead on what the next 100 days hold in store.
A Slippery Slope in Trade
Trump is often described as a "transactional" president who sees the world as one big negotiating table where he can leverage his business experience to exact better terms and conditions for American workers and corporations. Trump will therefore try to keep his core agenda focused on what he regards as his sweet spot: U.S. economy and trade. But even though the domestic economy may be the thing closest to the president's comfort zone, it's also where he comes up against a wall of institutional barriers. As a result, his much-touted tax overhaul attempting a steep reduction in the corporate tax rate will remain gridlocked in congressional battles over health care and the budget.
The new U.S. administration will have a bit more room to maneuver on trade issues. Its simplistic fixation on countries with which the United States has a large deficit will become more nuanced with time. The United States cannot simply force other countries to buy more of its goods in volumes that would make an appreciable difference in the trade deficit. And in some cases, America's existing factory capacity is neither ready nor able to meet a sizable increase in demand from abroad. Instead, for select industries, Washington will try to boost U.S. purchases of American goods and the enforcement of trade measures to restrict certain imports from abroad.
The steel sector is a logical place for the White House to focus its attention. After all, it's an industry that appeals to Trump's support base in the Rust Belt (though price hikes risk alienating big U.S. steel consumers); the United States has the domestic capacity to meet most of its steel demand (save for specific, often military-related applications); and there are several World Trade Organization (WTO) provisions that the United States can use to tighten restrictions on imports (well before Trump's election, Washington had placed more than 150 countervailing and anti-dumping duties on steel imports).
A number of these measures will inevitably invite challenges in the WTO, but a much bigger and more consequential question will still hang over U.S. trade partners. The Trump administration has outlined a trade policy to Congress that "will aggressively defend American sovereignty over matters of trade policy." Specifically, the White House has said the United States would not subject itself to WTO provisions that are "inconsistent" with U.S. law. This raises the question of just how far a protectionist White House will try to stretch trade loopholes — and what it will risk in the process. Trump has ordered the Department of Commerce to open an investigation into whether importing steel harms the national security interests of the United States by sidelining domestic producers. Based on precedent and the current definition of national security in the context of trade, it will be difficult for the United States to argue that it does. But the national security clause is an extremely powerful tool in the hands of the executive. If the Trump administration expands that definition to include issues such as employment and domestic stability, the White House would have a much broader set of tools with which to target other industries under duress from foreign competition.
Trump is thus at the top of a slippery slope. If the United States aggressively plays the national security card in trade, its trade partners will be compelled to do the same. The tit-for-tat would severely undermine the foundation of the international trade order that the United States has underpinned as part of its global hegemonic responsibilities for the past 70 years.
Trump is thus at the top of a slippery slope. If the United States aggressively plays the national security card in trade, its trade partners will be compelled to do the same. The tit-for-tat would severely undermine the foundation of the international trade order that the United States has underpinned as part of its global hegemonic responsibilities for the past 70 years.
Still, this isn't cause for alarmist predictions of the end of free trade as we know it. Decades of interwoven supply chains wrapped around the globe will not be undone by a single president. Moreover, there's no guarantee that the White House will follow this course to its extreme end. The Trump administration is not prepared to absorb the political cost of greatly compromising its trade links abroad, and the White House still needs a credible WTO to enforce many of the trade measures it is already trying to invoke. In fact, the mere threat of upending international trade governance may simply be a useful negotiating tactic as the White House tries to improve its bilateral trade terms with countries such as Mexico and China.
A Familiar Conundrum in North Korea
Trump has broadcast to the world that the trade pressure he has applied on China will achieve things "never seen before" in managing the North Korean crisis. But intertwining trade with foreign policy gets messy very quickly. The president has framed his recent reversal on labeling China a currency manipulator as a negotiating tactic intended to push China to do more in pressuring North Korea. But there was little weight behind the threat of using that label in the first place. China has been defending, not devaluing, its currency for the past three years; in fact, it hopes to avoid a steep fall in the value of the yuan, which would exacerbate capital flight and hamper Beijing's efforts to boost domestic consumption and reduce its heavy reliance on exports. China is concerned, of course, about the more selective trade measures the White House is pursuing to target Chinese imports, and it will float promises of granting U.S. investors greater market access in certain sectors to keep those frictions manageable.
Does this U.S.-China trade dynamic amount to substantive change in how North Korea is handled? Not exactly. While consolidating power at home ahead of this year's Communist Party Congress and fending off trade attacks from Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has been using a careful blend of economic incentives and military moves with its neighbors to carve out and seal a sphere of influence in its near abroad, squeezing out the United States. North Korea has interfered with those plans. As Pyongyang inches closer to fielding a long-range weaponized nuclear device, the United States is drawn deeper into the Asia-Pacific, encroaching on what China regards as its regional turf.
So, even as "strategic impatience" begins to dominate Washington's rhetoric about North Korea, Trump will likely meet the fate of his predecessors.
China is far more concerned about having an unstable North Korea on its doorstep than a nuclear one. And though China does have substantial economic leverage over North Korea, there are clear limits to how far Beijing will go in applying sanctions. The Chinese do not want to face a refugee crisis on their border and are not interested in triggering the government's collapse in Pyongyang if it also means accelerating a scenario in which China must contend with a reunified Korea tucked under a U.S. security umbrella. Military planners in the region and the United States know that there are simply no good military options for managing North Korea's actions when Seoul is in range of a massive artillery barrage and both Japan and China are in range of North Korea's missile arsenal. Real potential exists for a military crisis on the Korean Peninsula to escalate into a regional conflict. Kim Jong Un's reclusive government, meanwhile, has done an exceptional job of keeping China (and the rest of the world) at arm's length to muddle intelligence estimates and leave adversaries with little choice but to factor the worst-case scenario — regional war — into the cost calculations of their military plans.
So, even as "strategic impatience" begins to dominate Washington's rhetoric about North Korea, Trump will likely meet the fate of his predecessors. After reaching the limits of exerting economic pressure through China, his administration will reserve the high-risk military option of conducting a pre-emptive attack against North Korea for the event that Washington detects Pyongyang's preparations for a suicidal strike against the United States, Japan or South Korea. Pyongyang, for its part, will proceed apace with the development of its nuclear deterrent. The United States will try to mitigate this threat in other ways by focusing on covert means of disrupting the program, stepping up missile defense in the region, and reinforcing the defenses of Japan and South Korea. A heavier U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific will worsen tension between China, on one hand, and the United States and its security partners on the other. And with the reality of a nuclear North Korea setting in, Washington's security commitments in the region will be tested. If Japan and South Korea have reason to seriously question their protection under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, they could well take steps to develop their own nuclear weapons programs, just as Trump himself bluntly advocated during his presidential campaign.
An Enduring Standoff in Eurasia
The United States' relationship with Russia will remain rocky in the months ahead. An unrelenting congressional probe into Russian meddling in the U.S. election is a political fire the White House will be unable to completely stamp out. As a result, the issue of easing sanctions will likely continue to be too thorny to touch for the time being.
Neither the United States nor Russia will let its military guard down in Europe as the standoff endures. If Moscow and Washington hold a substantive negotiation of any kind over the next 100 days, it will be on the matter of arms control. But they will encounter major obstacles there as well. With U.S. ballistic missile defense expanding and a race for hypersonic weapons underway, Russia has no intention of hamstringing itself under foundational agreements such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which is rapidly becoming defunct. And as China sits out of the arms control discussion, both Russia and the United States will have motivation beyond their competition with each other to operate outside the obsolete bounds of their 20th-century pacts. All the while, however, they will be trying to suss out where new deals can be made.
An unrelenting congressional probe into Russian meddling in the U.S. election is a political fire the White House will be unable to completely stamp out. As a result, the issue of easing sanctions will likely continue to be too thorny to touch for the time being.
As he copes with rising discontent at home, Russian President Vladimir Putin will stick by his long-standing strategy of cracking the core of the European Union and NATO. The first round of France's presidential election pit the politically hollow and moderate Europeanist Emmanuel Macron against far-right National Front Euroskeptic Marine Le Pen. Though the second round will likely favor Macron, thus buying Europe time to hold itself together, the Continent is still on shaky ground. A polarized French electorate and the potential for gridlock to emerge from National Assembly elections in June — not to mention the deeper issues driving economic stagnation and social tensions — will keep the country's Euroskeptic current alive and hinder structural reforms. At the same time, Italy, still highly fragile, will inch toward its own elections, and the north-south chasm in Europe will widen — just as German voters prepare to head to the polls in the fall. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, is gearing up for the long and arduous negotiation ahead as it divorces itself from the European Union. (In the process, it will be creating a template for other members of the bloc to potentially do the same.) The White House has openly endorsed the Euroskeptics' vision for Europe, in line with its own view that national self-interest is not just preferable but also plain sensible. Nonetheless, this is a precarious and all-consuming path for Europe that will leave little room for the United States to impose its preferences on the bloc — and plenty of loose threads for Russia to pull in trying to unravel the Western alliance.
Risky Readjustments in the Middle East
As tremors spread across Europe and Asia, the United States will be occupied by trying to dodge pockets of political quicksand throughout the Middle East. The Syrian battlefield offers opportunities for decisive shows of military action, as demonstrated recently when Trump ordered a limited strike on a Syrian air base in response to a chemical weapons attack. But Syria is also a siren song for mission creep that the United States will struggle to resist while staying focused on the fight against the Islamic State. Within that fight, Russia will alternate between playing spoiler and mediator, trying to poke and prod the United States into a more productive dialogue. Turkey, fresh off its win in a recent constitutional referendum, can also be expected to butt heads with the Americans, Russians and Iranians while staking out its own sphere of influence across northern Syria and Iraq in the name of containing the Kurds and protecting the Sunnis against Iranian encroachment.
The leading Sunni powers of the region, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, will find this U.S. president much more willing to help keep Iran at bay than the last. While former U.S. President Barack Obama undertook the task of neutralizing the Iranian nuclear threat so that the United States could avoid being pulled into another Middle Eastern war, Trump will now work to further tilt the regional balance of power toward the Sunni camp. This doesn't mean the Trump administration is prepared to walk away from its nuclear deal with Iran and reopen yet another potential theater for conflict. Instead, the White House will take a tougher stance on Iran by reinforcing its Sunni allies in proxy battles in Syria, Yemen and Iraq. Sanctions that directly interfere with the Iranian nuclear deal will likely be averted, and sanctions waivers tied to the nuclear deal will likely be extended, but additional sanctions related to human rights abuses and Iran's sponsorship of terrorism can be expected. And with Iran's presidential election set for May 19, a hard-nosed U.S. administration's efforts to keep Iran in check will have the unintended effect of bolstering Iranian hard-liners, injecting more uncertainty into the tenuous working relationship between Washington and Tehran.
Deepening Crisis in the Caribbean
The United States will also have a tough time ignoring the alarms sounding in the Caribbean in the months ahead. Deteriorating economic conditions in Venezuela have finally given way to large demonstrations in the country's urban core, including the poorest neighborhoods of Caracas where the once-powerful ideology of Chavismo has faded. The risk of state-run oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) defaulting on its debt will rise substantially in the second half of the year, adding yet another source of instability. As that specter looms, the Venezuelan government — led by embattled President Nicolas Maduro and riddled with corrupt officials trying to evade extradition — will take steps to consolidate power into a one-party state and hunker down for the impending struggle in the streets. But deep rifts among the security and military forces charged with quashing unrest threaten to tear the government apart. The United States has the option of accelerating the administration's collapse by leveling weightier sanctions against PDVSA, but with a number of other crises and priorities to consider, it could opt to keep its distance as the country crumbles from within.
100 Days in Perspective
Despite the prestige the U.S. presidency traditionally carries, it is an office designed by America's founding fathers to be hemmed in from many sides. And though the executive branch has a little more room to shape foreign policy than domestic law, it must often contend with jagged geopolitical realities that cut into, rather than bend with, the president's worldview. "America First" also means "China First," "Russia First," "Germany First" and so on. Each state will pursue its national interests and, in doing so, often find its imperatives collide with others'. The irreversible technological, demographic and economic forces shaping global trade, the menace of a Northeast Asian war started by North Korea, the historical distrust between Russia and the West and within Europe itself, and the deeply rooted ideological and sectarian battles being waged within the Islamic world are a daunting collection of crises for any president to grapple with. And whether we look 100 days behind us or 100 days ahead, there is no question that the bounds of U.S. presidential power are being put to the test.
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At certain times Donald Trump has seemed like a budding authoritarian, a corrupt Nixon, a rabble-rousing populist or a big business corporatist.
But as Trump has settled into his White House role, he has given a series of long interviews, and when you study the transcripts it becomes clear that fundamentally he is none of these things.
At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif.
First, most adults have learned to sit still. But mentally, Trump is still a 7-year-old boy who is bouncing around the classroom. Trump’s answers in these interviews are not very long — 200 words at the high end — but he will typically flit through four or five topics before ending up with how unfair the press is to him.
His inability to focus his attention makes it hard for him to learn and master facts. He is ill informed about his own policies and tramples his own talking points. It makes it hard to control his mouth. On an impulse, he will promise a tax reform when his staff has done little of the actual work.
Second, most people of drinking age have achieved some accurate sense of themselves, some internal criteria to measure their own merits and demerits. But Trump seems to need perpetual outside approval to stabilize his sense of self, so he is perpetually desperate for approval, telling heroic fabulist tales about himself.
“In a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care,” he told Time. “A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber,” he told The Associated Press, referring to his joint session speech.
By Trump’s own account, he knows more about aircraft carrier technology than the Navy. According to his interview with The Economist, he invented the phrase “priming the pump” (even though it was famous by 1933). Trump is not only trying to deceive others. His falsehoods are attempts to build a world in which he can feel good for an instant and comfortably deceive himself.
He is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence. Trump thought he’d be celebrated for firing James Comey. He thought his press coverage would grow wildly positive once he won the nomination. He is perpetually surprised because reality does not comport with his fantasies.
Third, by adulthood most people can perceive how others are thinking. For example, they learn subtle arts such as false modesty so they won’t be perceived as obnoxious.
But Trump seems to have not yet developed a theory of mind. Other people are black boxes that supply either affirmation or disapproval. As a result, he is weirdly transparent. He wants people to love him, so he is constantly telling interviewers that he is widely loved. In Trump’s telling, every meeting was scheduled for 15 minutes but his guests stayed two hours because they liked him so much.
Which brings us to the reports that Trump betrayed an intelligence source and leaked secrets to his Russian visitors. From all we know so far, Trump didn’t do it because he is a Russian agent, or for any malevolent intent. He did it because he is sloppy, because he lacks all impulse control, and above all because he is a 7-year-old boy desperate for the approval of those he admires.
The Russian leak story reveals one other thing, the dangerousness of a hollow man.
Our institutions depend on people who have enough engraved character traits to fulfill their assigned duties. But there is perpetually less to Trump than it appears. When we analyze a president’s utterances we tend to assume that there is some substantive process behind the words, that it’s part of some strategic intent.
But Trump’s statements don’t necessarily come from anywhere, lead anywhere or have a permanent reality beyond his wish to be liked at any given instant.
We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.
“We badly want to understand Trump, to grasp him,” David Roberts writes in Vox. “It might give us some sense of control, or at least an ability to predict what he will do next. But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there is no there there?”
And out of that void comes a carelessness that quite possibly betrayed an intelligence source, and endangered a country.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8304654/WikiLeaks-cables-US-agrees-to-tell-Russia-Britains-nuclear-secrets.html
Good thing we haven't had a malignant narcissistic incompetent buffoon who discloses sensitive information to the Russians as president before.
:roll:
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thanks GM
This whole thing sounds like it is the LEFT trying to make a scandal out of possibly nothing.
The pres as commander in chief has the right to share informotion if he wants to. Whehter or not he should have is another matter.
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http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/333529-frustration-abounds-in-trump-white-house
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/loose-lips-sink-presidencies-1494977056
Loose Lips Sink Presidencies
The Russian intel story shows the price of Trump’s lost credibility.
President Donald Trump speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, May 16, 2017. PHOTO: EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 16, 2017 7:24 p.m. ET
The state of the Trump Presidency has been perpetual turbulence, which seems to be how the principal likes it. The latest vortex is over Mr. Trump’s disclosure of sensitive intel to the Russians—and whatever the particulars of the incident, the danger is that Presidencies can withstand only so much turbulence before they come apart.
The Washington Post reported Monday night that in an Oval Office meeting last week Mr. Trump relayed high-level “code word” classified material obtained from an ally to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Cue another Washington meltdown. The President took to Twitter on Tuesday morning to defend himself, claiming an “absolute right” to disclose “facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety.”
National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster put a finer point on it at a Tuesday press conference, though without denying key details. He said Mr. Trump’s disclosure was “wholly appropriate” and didn’t expose intelligence sources and methods.
Presidents sometimes share secrets with overseas leaders—even to adversaries such as the Soviets during the Cold War—if they conclude the benefits of showing what the U.S. knows will aid diplomacy or strategic interests. From media accounts and his tweets, Mr. Trump said something about Islamic State’s laptop bomb threat to airlines. He may well have been trying to convince the envoys of the menace ISIS poses to Russian lives and foreign-policy goals, like the Russian airliner that exploded over Sinai in 2015.
Then again, the Post story has Mr. Trump boasting about how great U.S. intelligence is and divulging the info on impulse to prove it. National security officials also asked the reporters to withhold specifics about the item in question, presumably because further disclosure could undermine efforts to counter the threat or endanger the lives of human assets.
Reports emerged on Tuesday that the ally that gathered the material is Israel, and the revelation could endanger this and other intelligence-sharing relationships. The Israelis may hold back if they think their dossiers will be laundered through the U.S. to the Russians and then get passed to their Iranian and Syrian clients, and other foreign services may lose confidence in the U.S.
Lt. Gen. McMaster said he disputed “the premise” of the Post story, which was that Mr. Trump had done something wrong or unbecoming. He confirmed that Mr. Trump made the decision ad hoc “in the context of the conversation,” not before the meeting. The problem is that even if the President’s conduct was “wholly appropriate,” the story’s premise is wholly plausible.
The portrait of an inexperienced, impulsive chief who might spill secrets to an overseas foe is one to which Mr. Trump has too often contributed. It was political mismanagement even to hold the Russian meeting, especially the day after he fired FBI Director James Comey amid the investigation of the Trump campaign’s alleged Russian connection.
This eruption shows why a President’s credibility is so important. If people don’t believe Mr. Trump’s words or trust his judgment, they won’t give him the benefit of the doubt or be responsive if he asks for support. Last week the White House spent two days attributing Mr. Comey’s firing to a Justice Department recommendation, only for Mr. Trump to insist in a TV interview that the pink slip came “regardless of recommendation.”
News broke late Tuesday of Mr. Comey’s contemporaneous notes that Mr. Trump asked him in February to “let this go,” referring to the FBI probe of axed National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. The White House denied that account of the conversation, but that would be more credible if its previous statements were more reliable.
Mr. Trump’s strife and insults with the intelligence community were also bound to invite blowback. The Post report is sourced to “current and former U.S. officials,” which raises the question of how former officials are privy to “code word” information, defined as anything that could be expected to cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security if disclosed. In that case the public leaks about Mr. Trump’s actions, if true, will do more damage than whatever he said in private.
Mr. Trump is considering a White House shakeup, including cleaning out many of his top aides, but the White House always reflects the President’s governing style. If Mr. Trump can’t discipline himself, then no Jim Baker ex machina will make much difference.
Mr. Trump needs to appreciate how close he is to losing the Republicans he needs to pass the agenda that will determine if he is successful. Weeks of pointless melodrama and undisciplined comments have depleted public and Capitol Hill attention from health care and tax reform, and exhaustion is setting in. America holds elections every two years, and Mr. Trump’s policy allies in Congress will drift away if he looks like a liability.
Millions of Americans recognized Mr. Trump’s flaws but decided he was a risk worth taking. They assumed, or at least hoped, that he’d rise to the occasion and the demands of the job. If he cannot, he’ll betray their hopes as his Presidency sinks before his eyes.
Appeared in the May. 17, 2017, print edition.
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"Mr. Trump is considering a White House shakeup, including cleaning out many of his top aides, but the White House always reflects the President’s governing style. If Mr. Trump can’t discipline himself, then no Jim Baker ex machina will make much difference."
Right. It matters not who is working for him as long as he continues to be who he has been for 70 yrs. The liberals are certainly succeeding at using his own big mouth against him.
If the MSM were right, not left wing then we would not even be having this conversation though.
I meant if the MSM were right *wing*.
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"Donald, you stupid fk!"
Can we safely assume that today will not be a day that the Trump administration will significantly move the ball forward on tax reform, Obamacare repeal or adding 75 more active ships to the Navy?
The comparisons of Trump to Ronald Reagan on focus and discipline are fading fast.
If you need to score touchdowns, how about switching from defense to offense!
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Peggy Noonan is someone I have respected for a long time. She has been at the highest levels of the game and always maintained class and love for America.
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By Peggy Noonan
May 18, 2017 7:11 p.m. ET
41 COMMENTS
This will be unpleasantly earnest, but having witnessed the atmospherics the past 10 days it’s what I think needs saying:
ADVERTISING
Everyone, get serious.
Democracy is not your plaything.
This is not a game.
The president of the United States has produced a building crisis that is unprecedented in our history. The question, at bottom, is whether Donald Trump has demonstrated, in his first four months, that he is unfit for the presidency—wholly unsuited in terms of judgment, knowledge, mental capacity, personal stability. That epic question is then broken down into discrete and specific questions: Did he improperly attempt to interfere with an FBI criminal investigation, did his presidential campaign collude with a foreign government, etc.
But the epic question underlies all. It couldn’t be more consequential and will take time to resolve. The sheer gravity of the drama will demand the best from all of us. Are we up to it?
Mr. Trump’s longtime foes, especially Democrats and progressives, are in the throes of a kind of obsessive delight. Every new blunder, every suggestion of an illegality, gives them pleasure. “He’ll be gone by autumn.”
But he was duly and legally elected by tens of millions of Americans who had legitimate reasons to support him, who knew they were throwing the long ball, and who, polls suggest, continue to support him. They believe the press is trying to kill him. “He’s new, not a politician, give him a chance.” What would it do to them, what would it say to them, to have him brusquely removed by his enemies after so little time? Would it tell them democracy is a con, the swamp always wins, you nobodies can make your little choices but we’re in control? What will that do to their faith in our institutions, in democracy itself?
These are wrenching questions.
But if Mr. Trump is truly unfit—if he has demonstrated already, so quickly, that he cannot competently perform the role, and that his drama will only get more dangerous and chaotic, how much time should pass to let him prove it? And how dangerous will the proving get?
Again, wrenching questions. So this is no time for blood lust and delight. Because democracy is not your plaything.
The president’s staffers seem to spend most of their time on the phone, leaking and seeking advantage, trying not to be named in the next White House Shake-Up story. A reliable anonymous source who gives good quote will be protected—for a while. The president spends his time tweeting his inane, bizarre messages—he’s the victim of a “witch hunt”—from his bed, with his iPad. And giving speeches, as he did this week at the Coast Guard Academy: “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” Actually Lincoln got secession, civil war and a daily pounding from an abolitionist press that thought he didn’t go far enough and moderates who slammed his brutalist pursuit of victory. Then someone shot him in the head. So he had his challenges.
Journalists on fire with the great story of their lives—the most bizarre presidency in U.S. history and the breaking news of its daily missteps—cheer when their scoop that could bring down a president gets more hits then the previous record holder, the scoop that could bring down the candidate.
Stop leaking, tweeting, cheering. Democracy is not your plaything.
There’s a sense nobody’s in charge, that there’s no power center that’s holding, that in Washington they’re all randomly slamming into each other.
Which is not good in a crisis.
For Capitol Hill Democrats the crisis appears to be primarily a chance to showboat. Republicans are evolving, some starting to use the word “unfit” and some, as a congressman told me, “talking like they’re in a shelter for abused women. ‘He didn’t mean to throw me down the stairs.’ ‘He promised not to punch me again.’ ”
We’re chasing so many rabbits, we can’t keep track—Comey, FBI, memoranda; Russia, Flynn, the Trump campaign; Lavrov, indiscretions with intelligence. It’s become a blur.
But there’s an emerging sense of tragedy, isn’t there? Crucially needed reforms in taxing, regulation and infrastructure—changes the country needs!—are thwarted, all momentum killed. Markets are nervous.
The world sees the U.S. political system once again as a circus. Once the circus comes to town, it consumes everything, absorbs all energy.
I asked the ambassador to the U.S. from one of our greatest allies: “What does Europe say now when America leaves the room?” You’re still great, he said, but “we think you’re having a nervous breakdown.”
It is absurd to think the president can solve his problems by firing his staff. They are not the problem. He is the problem. They’re not the A-Team, they’re not the counselors you’d want, experienced and wise. They’re the island of misfit toys. But they could function adequately if he could lead adequately. For months he’s told friends he’s about to make big changes, and doesn’t. Why? Maybe because talented people on the outside don’t want to enter a poisonous staff environment just for the joy of committing career suicide. So he’s stuck, surrounded by people who increasingly resent him, who fear his unpredictably and pique and will surely one day begin to speak on the record.
A mystery: Why is the president never careful? He doesn’t act as if he’s picking his way through a minefield every day, which he is. He acts like he’s gamboling through safe terrain. Thus he indulges himself with strange claims, statements, tweets. He comports himself as if he has a buffer of deep support. He doesn’t. Nationally his approval numbers are in the mid to high 30s.
His position is not secure. And yet he gambols on, both paranoid and oblivious.
History is going to judge us by how we comported ourselves in this murky time. It will see who cared first for the country and who didn’t, who kept his head and did not, who remained true and calm and played it straight.
Now there will be a special prosecutor. In the short term this buys the White House time.
Here’s an idea.
It would be good if top Hill Republicans went en masse to the president and said: “Stop it. Clean up your act. Shut your mouth. Do your job. Stop tweeting. Stop seething. Stop wasting time. You lost the thread and don’t even know what you were elected to do anymore. Get a grip. Grow up and look at the terrain, see it for what it is. We have limited time. Every day you undercut yourself, you undercut us. More important, you keep from happening the good policy things we could have done together. If you don’t grow up fast, you’ll wind up abandoned and alone. Act like a president or leave the presidency.”
Could it help? For a minute. But it would be constructive—not just carping, leaking, posing, cheering and tweeting but actually trying to lead.
The president needs to be told: Democracy is not your plaything.
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I also like Peggy Noonan a lot and this is the most sane criticism and helpful advice for him I have seen, and beautifully written. Lincoln had his challenges too!
OTOH... I think there is an unprecedented level of fake news going on against Trump. Keeping your head on straight through that would be hard for anyone. Fighting back is what got him where he is, for better or worse. Of course he should keep his focus on issues and solutions. It's not that he tweets; it's the content of the tweets.
"It would be good if top Hill Republicans went en masse to the president and said: “Stop it. Clean up your act..."
No. This President won an election over building a wall and they haven't funded it. This President released Obamacare repeal and replace, phase one that only needs 50 votes in the Senate, and they haven't got a bill through both chambers for him to sign yet. The President released comprehensive tax reform - nothing passed in either chamber yet. In the spirit of separation of powers, "top Hill Republicans" need to get their own act together. They will be judged by the electorate before he is.
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"No. This President won an election over building a wall and they haven't funded it. This President released Obamacare repeal and replace, phase one that only needs 50 votes in the Senate, and they haven't got a bill through both chambers for him to sign yet. The President released comprehensive tax reform - nothing passed in either chamber yet. In the spirit of separation of powers, "top Hill Republicans" need to get their own act together. They will be judged by the electorate before he is."
I fully agree with identifying CONGRESS as failing to meet its responsibilities.
To your list I would add getting the budget back to "regular order" i.e. instead of one big mess of Continuing Resolution returning to passing bills department by department.
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/comic/herding-cats/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DayByDayCartoon+%28Day+by+Day+Cartoon+by+Chris+Muir%29
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By Daniel Henninger
May 17, 2017 6:50 p.m. ET
609 COMMENTS
After the past two weeks, one must ask: How many parallel universes can the U.S. political system endure?
Let us enumerate the celestial bodies traveling along independent orbits just now: Donald Trump, Sean Spicer, the Beltway press chorus, the White House’s Borgia factions, 2018’s at-risk congressional Republicans, the Schumer Democrats, the mosquito clouds of social media, and the various people working in what little exists so far of the Trump government.
One more parallel universe deserves mention: the Trump vote, which decided the 2016 election. Oh, them.
The Trump vote sits out in the country watching the Washington spectacle of all things Comey, all things Russian, rumors of White House firings, and the president’s tweetstorms.
Polls suggest most Trump voters aren’t much moved by these events. After surviving the 2016 election, the Trump voter remains fixed on achieving the Trump agenda—the economy, health care, taxes, education, America’s global standing, financial reform, immigration, infrastructure, trade. They are willing to put up with a lot, because they know that President Donald J. Trump is the only vessel they’ve got.
Trump voters, however, should not underestimate the dangers of the current Washington circus. It isn’t a sideshow. It could pull down him and them.
If Republicans running in 23 House districts carried by Hillary Clinton, or districts barely carried by Mr. Trump, distance themselves from the White-House mayhem, vote margins for the Trump legislative agenda will be at risk. Wednesday’s down stock market was a canary in that mineshaft.
If Democrats win back the House in 2018, they will commence impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump and his presidency will lose its ability to function for half its term.
Something’s gotta give in Washington. It’s not going to be Donald Trump.
The rumors of a White House shake-up include the suggestion that Mr. Trump may fire Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, communications director Mike Dubke, counsel Don McGahn and consigliere Steve Bannon. What difference would that make?
No conceivable chief of staff would sign on now without a commitment from the president of full control over White House operations and messaging. Donald Trump won’t cede that. He believes what he is doing is fine, as he’s said in multiple interviews. So let’s consider something completely different.
There is a reality at the center of this matter that has to be faced: Donald Trump doesn’t like intermediaries. He abhors anything that gets between him and the public. The problem is not Sean Spicer’s performance as press secretary. The problem is positioning anything between Donald Trump’s mind and the outside world.
When Mr. Trump says he is moving too fast and doing too much for any of his staff to keep up, we should take him at his word. He wants direct access. So, create a system that gives him exactly that.
The answer is to cut out the middlemen. Let Trump be Trump.
Donald Trump should serve as his own press secretary and maybe his own chief of staff. I would even propose that the Trump presidency go live to the world, with a camera crew recording the president and his moment-to-moment thoughts in real time every day. President Trump as messenger in chief.
A month ago, this proposal would have been read as satire. But it is now close to the manifest reality of the Trump White House.
If Mr. Trump says or tweets something that causes a stir, such as pulling out of Nafta, let him talk to reporters on his terms to explain what he meant. If he changes his mind in minutes, hours or days, he can turn to the real-time camera and do it. But he takes responsibility for the Trump message.
Mr. Trump managing the message flow himself won’t eliminate all the static, but it would remove the press spending days pounding intermediaries like Sean Spicer to produce answers the president hasn’t shared with his people or isn’t ready to share. If the Trump presidency is going to produce static on a scale of 1 to 100, why not live with his 50 rather than the current 90?
Think of the Trump presidency as a Wikipedia entry, a project of constant updating, correction and revision. Once people get used to Donald Trump as a wiki, with him as the main editor, things might calm down. For Congress and the legislative agenda, midcourse corrections would become the daily routine, rather than media melodramas. The goal is relative stability.
There are all sorts of objections to a real-time Trump. It won’t solve White House disorganization, but nothing is workable in this unique context. The old normal isn’t happening and never will.
Discontinuity defines the Trump personality, and this won’t change. But if it’s all passing through him in real time, then corrections of facts, policy or intent can come earlier and reduce the current period of radioactive fallout.
Let Trump be Trump, for as long as it lasts.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
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Third post of the day:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-employees-of-donald-trump-say-they-saw-him-tape-conversations-1494715712?mod=fbads
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http://dailysignal.com/2017/05/12/333351/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Top5&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTURKbU1UQTJaVFpoWVRobSIsInQiOiIxc1k5Y2dkTm9PQmNkbk90YlFWZzM0RmJFc29FRTRuZzEzMXBoa2J3Z2V4a05UZ1lmTVIyc1dWU1VLdWs1NkJrOHNtK2JEbmZpektUUTlMUzdDTGpWOGhMb2NTdzUrSEVpVmtqbUZYMDlBMXpGSm9JcTFVd0RKVzRKQW9oT2NUNSJ9
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http://theweek.com/speedreads/701368/watch-trump-casually-push-fellow-nato-leader-way-preen-front
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http://theweek.com/speedreads/701368/watch-trump-casually-push-fellow-nato-leader-way-preen-front
Montenegro is very low energy, very much not paying it's way. America is leading from the front. Bigly!
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https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/18698109_1096752687125434_196528852929548610_n.jpg?oh=d2cdae5be4658fdc8537b5d4fb0936a2&oe=59BAA401
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The News You Didn’t Hear
Reporters only want to talk about Russia, instead of what Team Trump is getting done.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
June 1, 2017 7:03 p.m. ET
Here is what Americans this week were told counted as “news”: Jared Kushner’s past meetings. Russians. James Comey’s upcoming testimony. Russians. Hillary Clinton’s latest conspiracy theories. Russians. Bob Mueller’s as-yet-nonexistent investigation (into Russians). Kathy Griffin, Mr. Met and, of course, “covfefe.” Total words printed on these subjects? At least a duodecillion.
Here’s what actually happened this week, the “news” that holds real consequences for real Americans:
• Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed an order to begin reopening Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve to oil and gas exploration, reversing the Obama administration’s ideologically driven 2013 shutdown. The order even aims at opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to production—a move that is decades overdue. This could not only buck up the listless Alaskan economy but cement the U.S. as an oil and gas powerhouse.
• In related news, the Dakota Access Pipeline finally went live.
Why James Comey Had to Go
The FBI head’s sense of perfect virtue led him to ignore his own enormous conflicts.
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The House’s Job Now? Keep Calm
The Senate is going to alter the health-care bill. Be open to ideas that can improve it.
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Trump’s Finest Moment (So Far)
His tax-reform plan is smart policy, but even better politics: It’s a challenge to Congress.
Click to Read Story
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Democrats Get Smart in Georgia
Jon Ossoff is a return to the old strategy of drafting a candidate who can win.
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The Conflicts of J. Edgar Comey
The FBI chief refuses to tell Congress who requested to ‘unmask’ Mike Flynn’s name.
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What Devin Nunes Knows
Team Obama was spying broadly on the incoming administration.
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More By Kimberley Strassel
• The Fish and Wildlife Service took steps that may stop the Obama administration’s last-minute endangered-species listing for the Texas Hornshell, a freshwater mussel. That listing, based on outdated science, threatens significant harm to the Texas economy and was done over the protest of state officials and local industry.
• Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross surprisingly said that he was open to completing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, a far-reaching trade agreement being negotiated with the European Union.
• Sen. John Thune, the upper chamber’s third-ranking Republican, said his caucus had moved beyond meetings and on to “drafting” the base language of an ObamaCare replacement. The No. 2 Republican, John Cornyn, vowed the Senate would “absolutely” have a bill by “the end of July at the latest.”
And on and on. The Environmental Protection Agency stayed crushing regulations. The U.S. tested the first ground-based system for intercepting ballistic missiles. New numbers showed the private economy adding a rip-roaring 253,000 jobs in May.
Who is to blame for this real-news blackout? The press, obviously. But the co-culprit: Donald Trump.
Americans know that much of the mainstream media is biased in how it presents stories. The dirty little secret is that journalists’ far greater power rests in what they choose to—or not to—report. The country is no better informed about exactly how Russia interfered in the election than it was in October, when intelligence agencies issued a statement expressing their belief that Moscow had helped hack emails. Not a single useful fact has since been added, nor a single investigation completed, nor a single official report produced. Until those inquiries are completed, we will have no new real facts. Yet every day, a new Russia story.
Few expect better from today’s ratings-obsessed media. Especially given its new mission of working with Democrats and Never Trumpers to take down a presidency. That means spewing strategic leaks and suppositions, which create new controversies, which are spun into yet more distant scandals. We are these days reading exposes about former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s work for a Turkish businessman, which is utterly removed from the original question of Russian “collusion.”
The result is a surreal situation in which the near-hysterical press coverage of Trump the man (and potential Russian operative) is utterly divorced from the substantive actions his administration takes or the progress it makes. Mr. Trump’s cabinet, which includes some of the best reformers in the conservative world, is methodically implementing a far-reaching deregulatory agenda. Congress is moving ahead on key promises.
Thus Mr. Trump’s culpability. The president knows better than most the ills of the media; he rails about them constantly. Yet he continues to be the indulger in chief. He daily provides new, explosive tweets that give reporters every excuse to keep up their obsessions about Russia, Mr. Comey, Hillary, Carter Page.
Mr. Trump’s Twitter handle may be the most powerful communications tool on the planet. He has the awesome ability, unlike any president in history, to force the press to focus on his agenda by putting it out into the world every morning (or late night, as it may be). He could use that tool to set the daily discussion. Instead, he’s using it to undermine his own administration.
Mr. Trump also has at his disposal an array of famous surrogates who could spread his message. He has all the free media he could ever hope for, if only he used it in a strategic fashion. He has activist groups to help push for his reforms, but they can’t compete amid the crazy headlines.
Team Trump owes it to voters to get the real news out about its agenda and successes. But that will require doing more than complaining about the press. This White House needs to set and define the daily debate. It’s that, or Russia headlines through 2018.
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http://www.dailywire.com/news/17275/obama-era-slush-fund-funneling-cash-leftist-groups-amanda-prestigiacomo?utm_campaign=foramerica&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1496877314
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http://www.dailywire.com/news/17275/obama-era-slush-fund-funneling-cash-leftist-groups-amanda-prestigiacomo?utm_campaign=foramerica&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1496877314
That alone was a reason to vote for Trump.
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Amen!
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Trump as a Democracy Promoter
His responses to abuse in Syria and Venezuela suggest he cares about freedom and human rights.
By Judy Shelton
June 7, 2017 7:24 p.m. ET
16 COMMENTS
Much has been made of President Trump’s supposed lack of interest in human rights and the promotion of American ideals. Stepping back from his rhetoric and looking at his actions suggests an alternative conclusion.
If it were an easy task to set up a flourishing democracy, the entire world would be experiencing peace and prosperity. But it has never been simple. Many people around the world understand that liberty, opportunity and fairness flow from democratic institutions. But establishing such systems takes time, and progress is uneven. The growing pains of warring internal factions and harsh retributions meted out by ruthless authoritarians slow the march toward democracy.
President Reagan sought to address the issue in a speech before the British Parliament on June 8, 1982. He affirmed it was a mistake to ignore the rise of tyrants: Britain had paid a terrible price in World War II after allowing dictators to underestimate its resolve. He further maintained that democratic nations needed to resist as a matter of self-expression. Reagan said we must think of ourselves as “free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.”
The 40th president proposed countering totalitarianism and its terrible inhumanity by actively promoting freedom and democratic ideals throughout the world. He envisioned the creation of a bipartisan U.S. political foundation that would assist democratic development by openly providing support to those seeking equality and liberty for their countrymen. Building the infrastructure of democracy—free elections, free markets, free speech and rule of law—would empower people to choose their own way to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means. “Democracy is not a fragile flower,” Reagan observed. “Still, it needs cultivating.”
The National Endowment for Democracy, launched as a result of that speech, remains faithful to its founding mission: to help others achieve a system that protects the inalienable rights of individuals and guarantees the people’s freedom to determine their own destiny. The endowment provides modest grants to democracy activists around the world, but its greater gift is the imprimatur of moral support from the American people. Brave individuals on the front lines of the struggle for democracy in their own countries draw strength from that connection.
The efforts of five endowment grantees battling government corruption were applauded during a Capitol Hill ceremony on Wednesday, with remarks delivered by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Yet some argue that endorsing the spread of the American idea beyond the U.S. no longer aligns with the preferences of American voters. The most cynical voices claim Mr. Trump neither accepts nor comprehends the profound influence of America’s moral authority in the world.
That simplistic narrative is wrong. Consider Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s remarks to his department’s employees last month. He adjured them to “remember that guiding all of our foreign-policy actions are our fundamental values,” which include “freedom, human dignity, the way people are treated.” As Mr. Tillerson explained, the objectives of the administration’s America First approach—encouraging economic prosperity and maintaining military readiness—are crucial if the U.S. is to promote its values abroad.
Mr. Trump’s decisions ultimately make the difference. “I see in the president somebody who said a lot of things in the campaign,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice noted in a recent Journal interview. “But when he was sitting in that chair and watched Syrian babies choking on chemical gas said, ‘I can’t let that stand.’ ”
What Mr. Trump apparently felt at a gut level is entirely in keeping with that uniquely American quality of being unable to ignore injustice—that inability to stand idly by while the rights of others are cruelly violated by despots. Does he appreciate that America’s own hard-fought path to democracy and equal rights means we never retreat from leadership or abstain from righteousness in a world prone to malevolence?
One notable event may provide a telling indication. In February, Mr. Trump met in the Oval Office with Lilian Tintori, wife of jailed Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. Afterward the president tweeted a thumbs-up photo of himself, together with Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, standing beside Ms. Tintori. “Venezuela should allow Leopoldo Lopez, a political prisoner & husband of @liliantintori (just met w/@marcorubio) out of prison immediately,” read his accompanying message.
“Here in Venezuela, jaws dropped,” wrote Emiliana Duarte, managing editor of the English-language blog Caracas Chronicles, in the Atlantic. “For Venezuelans accustomed to living in fear of their dictatorial government, the sight of the president of the United States siding publicly with the most fearless champion of Venezuelan democracy was powerful.”
As someone who has thought deeply about democracy promotion, I take this as evidence that America’s leader—an admirer of Reagan—has the head and the heart to act with fundamental decency. American decency is born of gratitude for what this nation’s founders had the courage and vision to establish. It is what compels Americans to stand for the rights and liberties of those who can’t stand for those rights and liberties themselves. It is what drives the aspiration to share the American values that have made the U.S. not only successful but honorable.
Ms. Shelton is chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy. She served on the Trump transition team.
Appeared in the June 8, 2017, print edition.
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I feel that Trump did not win election because of his name calling and other childish behavior. He won in spite of it. He won because of as Coulter says his policies
It is the policies stupid!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/you-cant-govern-by-id/2017/06/08/fad7a168-4c7a-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html?utm_term=.011c46d05cfa
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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-russia-probe-talk-lindsey-graham-article-1.3238742
I might add I would not feel sorry for Trump either. But I would feel sorry for us.
There is no one who can carry the torch.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443188/donald-trumps-cunning-animal-instinct
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http://www.conservativenews.com/article/3311/president-trump-breaks-tradition?utm_source=dwemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=062617-news&utm_campaign=position4
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The G-File By Jonah Goldberg Put Down the Phone, Mr. President
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/449152/donald-trump-tweets-agenda-damaged-character-revealed
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Trump will not change. Just forget it. :cry:
From Fox off Drudge:
Few voters approve of President Trump’s tweeting, and most agree it’s making his job harder.
Seventy-one percent say the president’s tweets are hurting his agenda, according to the latest Fox News Poll. Just 17 percent see the tweets as helpful.
The poll was conducted Sunday through Tuesday evenings -- before a tweet by President Trump about MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski received significant media coverage Thursday morning.
Related Image
Fox News Poll 1Expand / Collapse
READ THE RESULTS OF THE LATEST FOX NEWS POLL
Do voters consider the president’s online posts official statements? Close call: 51 percent say yes vs. 45 percent no.
Overall, only 13 percent approve of Trump’s tweeting. It was 16 percent in March. Forty-six percent disapprove, while 39 percent take the middle ground and “wish he’d be more cautious.”
Among Republicans, 21 percent approve, while 59 percent would like Trump to be more careful with his tweets and 18 percent disapprove.
Related Image
Fox News Poll 2Expand / Collapse
Majorities across the board say Trump’s tweets are hurting his agenda, although Democrats (87 percent) and independents (75 percent) are far more likely than Republicans (53 percent) to see it that way.
Over half of Democrats (59 percent) say the tweets are official presidential statements, while over half of Republicans say they aren’t (52 percent).
Related Image
Fox News Poll 3Expand / Collapse
The Fox News poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 1,017 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from June 25-27, 2017. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points for all registered voters.
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"President Trump’s tweeting, and most agree it’s making his job harder"
It's making his job harder.
The fact that he has a way to communicate directly to the people without going through the media is great. How he uses it is not.
At least he does fight back, but too often he just digs new holes for himself and his agenda to fall into.
The Mika thing... a supporter could say they struck him first and deserved it but he is the President. He needs to spell out his grievance and do it in a classier way. Or ignore them and move forward, control the message, let them look petty.
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"Or ignore them and move forward, control the message, let them look petty."
ignoring would have been the clever response .
why give them the time of the day?
why give them the media exposure?
why promote their show?
they are fleas - he is the most powerful man in the world
Yet he is responds like a spurned school girl.
I have given up hoping he will change, in this regard.
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https://spectator.org/trump-and-morning-joke/
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"Or ignore them and move forward, control the message, let them look petty."
ignoring would have been the clever response .
why give them the time of the day?
why give them the media exposure?
why promote their show?
they are fleas - he is the most powerful man in the world
Yet he is responds like a spurned school girl.
I have given up hoping he will change, in this regard.
W tried to ignore the critics/MSM. How did that work out for him?
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OTOH, fake"Time" covers?!? Seriously?!? :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:
http://thepoliticalinsider.com/morning-joe-trump-tweets/
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"W tried to ignore the critics/MSM. How did that work out for him?"
I don't know about Bush but Trump is hurting himself with his tweets.
I have no problem with his spokespeople pointing out how partisan the media is and that they are simply an attack mob,
but calling people names, trying to humiliate them, insulting language.
Sorry , but he is not helping himself.
Look at all the polls coming out. A large majority say his tweets are hurting his agenda .
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I'm guessing Mika's super soprano snicker about him hiding his hands in the fake Time cover is what drove him over the edge.
Rubio's opposition research discovered his extreme sensitivity to comments on his hand size and used it to unbalance Donald when Donald was ragging him as "Little Marco". What did Donald do? In a national debate he reassured the nation that his dick size is just fine. Now Mika snickers, and again he lunges and lashes out.
This is weakness.
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I'm guessing Mika's super soprano snicker about him hiding his hands in the fake Time cover is what drove him over the edge.
Rubio's opposition research discovered his extreme sensitivity to comments on his hand size and used it to unbalance Donald when Donald was ragging him as "Little Marco". What did Donald do? In a national debate he reassured the nation that his dick size is just fine. Now Mika snickers, and again he lunges and lashes out.
This is weakness.
Trump is gonna Trump. Meanwhile, lots of good things are happening. I doubt anyone here expected him to walk on water. He's done better than I anticipated so far.
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GM,
I want Trump to succeed too.
But he shoots us *all* in the feet every time he tweets childish memos.
In additions, he drives his far less courageous Repubs under cover.
And he gives ammo not only to Dems, but ammo to vengeful anti-Trumpsters - like McCain, whom I might add, I have lost a large amount of respect for.
IMHO
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GM,
I want Trump to succeed too.
But he shoots us *all* in the feet every time he tweets childish memos.
In additions, he drives his far less courageous Repubs under cover.
And he gives ammo not only to Dems, but ammo to vengeful anti-Trumpsters - like McCain, whom I might add, I have lost a large amount of respect for.
IMHO
The dems and the republican wings of the dems, like McLame will never fight the left's deep state. They are content to live in DC and get their share of the loot while acting as the token resistance. Do you see the left worried about it's hateful messages or real violence from it's followers? Gee, Trump tweets mean things while a Bernie-bot tries to murder congressmen.
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"He's done better than I anticipated so far."
I remember just how vigorously I opposed him during the primaries, yet somehow I have become quite a fan. This makes his unforced errors all the more infuriating. Fake Time covers?!? Seriously?!?
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National Enquirer Shielded Donald Trump From Playboy Model’s Affair Allegation
Tabloid owner American Media agreed to pay $150,000 for story from 1998 Playmate of the Year, but hasn’t published her account
Donald Trump and former Playboy model Karen McDougal
Donald Trump and former Playboy model Karen McDougal Photo: Associated Press; Getty Images
By Joe Palazzolo,
Michael Rothfeld and
Lukas I. Alpert
November 4, 2016
1847 COMMENTS
The company that owns the National Enquirer, a backer of Donald Trump, agreed to pay $150,000 to a former Playboy centerfold model for her story of an affair a decade ago with the Republican presidential nominee, but then didn’t publish it, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the matter.
The tabloid-newspaper publisher reached an agreement in early August with Karen McDougal, the 1998 Playmate of the Year. American Media Inc., which owns the Enquirer, hasn’t published anything about what she has told friends was a consensual romantic relationship she had with Mr. Trump in 2006. At the time, Mr. Trump was married to his current wife, Melania.
Quashing stories that way is known in the tabloid world as “catch and kill.”
In a written statement, the company said it wasn’t buying Ms. McDougal’s story for $150,000, but rather two years’ worth of her fitness columns and magazine covers as well as exclusive life rights to any relationship she has had with a then-married man. “AMI has not paid people to kill damaging stories about Mr. Trump,” the statement said.
Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, said of the agreement with Ms. McDougal: “We have no knowledge of any of this.” She said that Ms. McDougal’s claim of an affair with Mr. Trump was “totally untrue.”
Ms. McDougal expected her story about Mr. Trump to be published, people familiar with the matter said. American Media didn’t intend to run it, said another person familiar with the matter. Ms. McDougal didn’t return calls for comment.
Mr. Trump and American Media Chairman and Chief Executive Officer David J. Pecker are longtime friends. Since last year, the Enquirer has supported Mr. Trump’s presidential bid, endorsing him and publishing negative articles about some of his opponents.
In a written statement, Mr. Pecker said that it is no secret that he and Mr. Trump are friends and that he greatly admires him. However, he said, the Enquirer under his management “set the agenda” on Mr. Trump’s affair with Marla Maples when he was married to his first wife. “That in itself speaks volumes about our commitment to investigative reporting,” he said.
AMI covered some of Mr. Trump’s relationship with Ms. Maples after Mr. Pecker arrived there in 1998. However, Mr. Pecker had not joined the company when their extramarital affair was first exposed in the early 90s.
A contract reviewed by the Journal gave American Media exclusive rights to Ms. McDougal’s story forever, but didn’t obligate the company to publish it and allowed the company to transfer those rights. It barred her from telling her story elsewhere. The company said it also would give her monthly columns to write and would put her on magazine covers.
AMI said in a written statement the company was pleased to hire Ms. McDougal as a columnist.
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The tabloid publisher didn’t publish Ms. McDougal’s story of the alleged extramarital affair even after Mr. Trump’s alleged relationships with and comments about women became a campaign issue. In October, the Washington Post published a videotape made by “Access Hollywood” of Mr. Trump, in which he spoke of groping women. Several women subsequently said publicly that he had made unwanted sexual advances.
Mr. Trump has denied their accounts and apologized for his remarks on the tape, calling them locker-room banter.
Ms. McDougal, who continued modeling after appearing in Playboy, told several of her friends she had a relationship for about 10 months with Mr. Trump, beginning in 2006 and lasting into 2007, according to people familiar with her account. Another friend told the Journal that Ms. McDougal’s relationship with Mr. Trump lasted about a year.
A friend of Ms. McDougal’s recalled attending the Miss Universe pageant at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles as a guest of Mr. Trump in 2006. Mr. Trump’s limousine picked up Ms. McDougal and her at Ms. McDougal’s Beverly Hills home, and the two women sat in the front row with Mr. Trump and music producers Quincy Jones and David Foster. Mr. Trump escorted them home, the friend said.
Messages left with representatives for Messrs. Jones and Foster weren’t immediately returned.
In July, Ms. McDougal was in talks with producers at ABC News to tell her story, but she ultimately agreed to the deal with AMI, guided by her lawyer Keith Davidson, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
“I did indeed represent Ms. McDougal and currently represent Ms. McDougal in her negotiations with American Media Inc. to provide services to them,” Mr. Davidson said.
Mr. Davidson also represented Stephanie Clifford, a former adult-film star whose professional name is Stormy Daniels and who was in discussions with ABC’s “Good Morning America” in recent months to publicly disclose what she said was a past relationship with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the talks. Ms. Clifford cut off contact with the network without telling her story. She didn’t respond to requests for comment.
An ABC spokesperson declined to comment on Ms. McDougal or Ms. Clifford.
The Trump spokeswoman, Ms. Hicks, said it was “absolutely, unequivocally” untrue that Ms. Clifford had a relationship with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Davidson’s work for Ms. McDougal was in connection with “claims against Donald Trump and or assisting client in negotiating a confidentiality agreement and/or life rights related to interactions with Donald Trump and/or negotiating assignment of exclusive press opportunities regarding same,” according to a copy of Mr. Davidson’s agreement to represent her, which was reviewed by the Journal.
The agreement between Ms. McDougal and AMI doesn’t mention Mr. Trump by name, but gives the publisher the rights to “any romantic, personal and/or physical relationship McDougal has ever had with any then-married man.” The document says AMI is entitled to damages of at least $150,000 if she discloses her story elsewhere on social media or gives interviews about it.
Ms. McDougal hasn't appeared in or written for any AMI publications since signing the agreement, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mr. Pecker, the chairman of American Media, is well-documented. In the 1990s, when Mr. Pecker was president and chief executive of Hachette Filipacchi Magazines, the publisher put out “Trump Style,” a custom quarterly magazine distributed to guests at Trump properties.
As the presidential race ramped up last year, the Enquirer published a series of columns by Mr. Trump. One began, “I am the only one who can make America great again!” Another was headlined, “Donald Trump: The Man Behind the Legend!”
Amplifications:
David Pecker cited the Enquirer’s coverage of Donald Trump’s extramarital affair with Marla Maples as evidence of his commitment to investigative journalism. This story has been updated to make clear that the affair occurred and was first revealed in the early 1990s, predating Mr. Pecker’s arrival at the company. The Enquirer did publish articles about Mr. Trump and Ms. Maples before his arrival in 1998 and continued to do so afterward. (Nov. 6, 2016)
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/donald-trump-eats-first/534927/
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from CD post above:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/donald-trump-eats-first/534927/
I agree with author's sentiment 100%.
Rush , who I admire, I also disagree with. Trumps tweets. daily rants , are not brilliant handling of the press with some sort of genius hidden plan. His
berating Sessions for example is not some sort of scheme to make people more sympathetic to the AG and thus make him more effective or to instill incentive to Sessions eetc
These rants are stupid impulsive vindictive attacks by a guy who has some personality flaws and never takes responsibility for his own screw ups and has always his whole life blamed others.
Most likely he has personality disorder. My guess would be the most obvious like narcissistic . Will be interested to see what the shrinks have to say now the polictical APA removed there ban on psychiatrists from pubicaly commenting on President's personality. I notice though the left org they did not do this with the pervious nariccistic megalomaniac President or with Clinton who are both with their flaws.
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https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/politics/those-calls-to-trump-white-house-admits-they-didnt-happen.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%2F
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https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/29/killing-gods-city/
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Pretty potent stuff
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/450835/trump-and-chaos-yuval-levin
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http://www.dickmorris.com/trumps-big-surge-polls-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/melania-trump-slowly-finds-her-first-lady-persona-more-bess-truman-than-jackie-kennedy/2017/09/15/7dfbea54-9a23-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html?undefined=&utm_term=.d1b70bef21c1&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/why-mike-pence-and-jeff-sessions-should-resign
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Hyper-ventilation in my opinion.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-Hk_po6KGI
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https://bluelivesmatter.blue/officer-robert-turner-president-trump/
http://ijr.com/the-declaration/2017/09/986196-officer-escorting-trump-crashes-trump-refuses-let-air-force-one-take-off-talks/
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https://bluelivesmatter.blue/officer-robert-turner-president-trump/
Compare and contrast:
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/5492/coincidence-barack-police-acted-stupidly-obama-put-campaign-latrines-on-top-of-police-memorial-supported-by-f-the-police-producer/
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http://www.dickmorris.com/trump-learned-president-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
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to the left of him:
https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/gop-browbeats-trumps-epa-into-expanding-obamacare-of-energy
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reflecting on Trump. Short attention span? ADD?
from the author of Doug's favorite book:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ashamed-writer-art-deal-says-trump-man-70-7/
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reflecting on Trump. Short attention span? ADD?
from the author of Doug's favorite book:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ashamed-writer-art-deal-says-trump-man-70-7/
ccp, You remembered how much I hated that book. ) Maybe it's good that this worthless p.o.s. was ghost-written.
Trump calls it a 'business book', best selling business book of all time... Good grief.
Somehow you suspected that lyrics books aren't always written by the celeb that takes credit...
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"Somehow you suspected that lyrics books aren't always written by the celeb that takes credit..."
Celebrity writers
restauranteers / chefs
fashion designers
perfume and makeup chemists
autobiographers
What can I say?
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Give me a break Donald. Waiting for twin assassins family of Bloom/Allred to parade some women who will make claims against Trump:
https://nypost.com/2017/11/16/trump-blasts-al-frankenstien-on-twitter-over-alleged-groping/
I cannot think of a better example of the pot calling the kettle black.
I wonder if DJT does this just to infuriate libs even more................. :|
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https://townhall.com/columnists/evansayet/2017/07/13/he-fights-n2354580
He Fights
Evan Sayet |Posted: Jul 13, 2017 1:57 PM
My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.” Here’s my answer:
We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency. We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain? We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney? And the results were always the same.
This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.
I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”
The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale. It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the universities – till today.
The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.
With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.
During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming. Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”
General George Patton was a vulgar-talking, son-of-a-bitch. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum, then Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.
Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!” That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics.
That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis. It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.
Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do.
First, instead of going after “the fake media” – and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri – Trump isolated CNN. He made it personal. Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.”
Everyone gets that it’s not just CNN – in fact, in a world where Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof are people of influence and whose “reporting” is in no way significantly different than CNN’s – CNN is just a piker.
Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. With Trump’s ability to go around them, they cannot simply stand pat. They need to respond. This leaves them with only two choices.
They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery.
The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve. It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.
Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s, church.
Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up.
This makes “going high” a non-starter for CNN. This leaves them no other option but to ratchet up the fake news, conjuring up the next “nothing burger” and devoting 24 hours a day to hysterical rants about how it’s “worse than Nixon.”
This, obviously, is what CNN has chosen to do. The problem is that, as they become more and more hysterical, they become more and more obvious. Each new effort at even faker news than before and faker “outrage” only makes that much more clear to any objective observer that Trump is and always has been right about the fake news media.
And, by causing their hysteria, Trump has forced them into numerous, highly embarrassing and discrediting mistakes. Thus, in their desperation, they have lowered their standards even further and run with articles so clearly fake that, even with the liberal (lower case “l”) libel laws protecting the media, they’ve had to wholly retract and erase their stories repeatedly.
Their flailing at Trump has even seen them cross the line into criminality, with CNN using their vast corporate fortune to hunt down a private citizen for having made fun of them in an Internet meme. This threat to “dox” – release of personal information to encourage co-ideologists to visit violence upon him and his family -- a political satirist was chilling in that it clearly wasn’t meant just for him. If it were, there would have been no reason for CNN to have made their “deal” with him public.
Instead, CNN – playing by “Chicago Rules” – was sending a message to any and all: dissent will not be tolerated.
This heavy-handed and hysterical response to a joke on the Internet has backfired on CNN, giving rise to only more righteous ridicule.
So, to my friends on the Left – and the #NeverTrumpers as well -- do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”? Of course I do. These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years.
So, say anything you want about this president – I get it, he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights.
Evan Sayet is the author of The KinderGarden of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Thinks. His lecture to the Heritage Foundation on this same topic remains, some ten years later, by far the single most viewed lecture in their history. Evan can be reached at contactevansayet@gmail.com.
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Where are the Britain First clips that the President posted?
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second post?
I'm reading that the Britain First vids he posted were, like many from BF, bullshit. IF true-- WTF?!? C'mon Donald, have someone vet this stuff before retweeting!!!
Wuzzup with his saying the pussy grabbing tapes are doctored/not his voice or something like that?
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By Michael C. Bender
Dec. 3, 2017 7:00 a.m. ET
501 COMMENTS
WASHINGTON—Chief of Staff John Kelly over the past five months has imposed discipline and rigorous protocols on a freewheeling White House. But President Donald Trump has found the loopholes.
The president on occasion has called White House aides to the private residence in the evening, where he makes assignments and asks them not tell Mr. Kelly about the plans, according to several people familiar with the matter. At least once, aides have declined to carry out the requested task so as not to run afoul of Mr. Kelly, one of these people said.
The president, who values counsel from an informal group of confidants outside the White House, also sometimes bypasses the normal scheduling for phone calls that give other White House staff, including Mr. Kelly, some control and influence over who the president talks to and when.
Instead, some of his friends have taken to calling Melania Trump and asking her to pass messages to her husband, according to two people familiar with the matter. They say that since she arrived in the White House from New York in the summer, the first lady has taken on a more central role as a political adviser to the president.
“If I don’t want to wait 24 hours for a call from the president, getting to Melania is much easier,” one person said.
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A spokeswoman for Mrs. Trump said: “This is more fake news and these are more anonymous sources peddling things that just aren’t true. The First Lady is focused on her own work in the East Wing.” The White House declined to provide comment.
Mr. Kelly has frequently said that it is his job to control the White House below the president, rather than the president himself. The president’s penchant for what one confidant dubbed “workarounds” to the new White House protocols shows the limits of Mr. Kelly’s approach.
“John has been successful at putting in place a stronger chain of command in the White House, requiring people to go through him to get to the Oval Office,” said Leon Panetta, a White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton who worked with Mr. Kelly, a four-star Marine general, in the Department of Defense. “The problem has always been whether or not the president is going to accept better discipline in the way he operates. He’s been less successful at that.”
From the Archives
Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly Faces a Tall Task
Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly faces the tall task of reforming the White House. Former chiefs of staff weigh in on how they handled one of the toughest jobs in Washington and how Kelly's military experience may shape the coming months of the administration. The WSJ's Shelby Holliday reports. Photo: AP (Originally published Aug. 4, 2017)
Still, White House staffers say that Mr. Trump’s working relationship with Mr. Kelly remains strong and that the two men appear to have found an equilibrium that suggests Mr. Kelly could be in place for a long time, with the chief of staff focusing on running White House operations while the president takes a freer hand with his own agenda and communications, even if that at times leaves the chief of staff out of the loop.
“This is all just inevitable,” said one person close to Mr. Trump. “It’s not that Mr. Kelly is wrong—we all know he’s terribly competent.”
Presidents have long made a point of staying in contact with friends and outside advisers; former President Barack Obama successfully argued with handlers to keep his BlackBerry to remain in touch with the world beyond the White House. What’s striking about Mr. Trump’s actions is that he is circumventing protocols that advisers say are intended to help him.
Since arriving in July, Mr. Kelly has clamped down on a number of practices that aides say made the White House’s internal operations chaotic in the first several months of the Trump presidency. He has told staff there will be no more patching through calls from Trump friends outside the White House who wanted to weigh in on the news; instead they would need appointments. And he stopped aides from wandering into the Oval Office to try to get time with the president.
Mr. Kelly has never aspired to control the president’s Twitter feed, however, which continues to create news, promote the president’s agenda and draw criticism. Just last week, Mr. Trump’s tweets prompted top congressional Democrats to cancel a meeting to discuss the looming deadline for a deal to avoid a government shutdown. He also drew a rebuke from British Prime Minister Theresa May for retweeting videos posted by a far-right British nationalist group that purported to show violence committed by Muslims.
On Nov. 12, with many of Mr. Trump’s senior military and diplomatic advisers arguing for diplomacy with North Korea, the president tweeted that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, was “short and fat.” Asked about the tweet, posted during the president’s trip to Asia, Mr. Kelly shrugged.
“Believe it or not—I don’t follow the tweets,” he said, adding that he urges White House policy staff not to be influenced by the missives and does not himself use Twitter. “We develop policy in the normal traditional staff way.”
Those who have watched the two men interact said their personalities are too different to ever be very close. “Kelly is too much of a general, and Trump is too much Trump,” one White House official said. But Mr. Trump continues to hold Mr. Kelly in high regard, these people say. He frequently calls out Mr. Kelly during his public appearances.
At a briefing on Hurricane Maria relief efforts in Puerto Rico earlier in the fall, Mr. Trump noted Mr. Kelly’s presence in the back of the room.
“He likes to keep a low profile; Look at him sitting in the back,” Mr. Trump continued. “But, boy, is he watching—you have no idea.”
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Fun speech tonight in Pensacola
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454668/donald-trump-president-losing-fox-news-viewers-approval-rating
It is not that he tweets
it is the nature of his tweets
I believe he will never get additional support
yeah the rah rahs love it - just no body else.
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BREAKING NEWS
President Trump is not in violation of the Emoluments Clause, a judge ruled, dismissing a suit accusing him of profiting through his office
Thursday, December 21, 2017 6:14 PM EST
In a legal victory for the Trump administration, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit on Thursday that accused President Trump of violating the Constitution by continuing to own and profit from his business empire.
The complaint, filed this year in the Southern District of New York, said that Mr. Trump had harmed plaintiffs in the restaurant and hotel business, including an organization representing more than 200 restaurants and thousands of employees.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443188/donald-trumps-cunning-animal-instinct
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I keep thinking why o why do we have to have the only one who will fight for "America first" be such an impulsive big mouth .
Just what the GOP needs a big mouth who will turn every immigrant and non white against us forever ! :x
If I was Haitian or African I would certainly not forgive this easily if at all.
It is not about what country they come from at all . It is about their character and their willingness to come to this country to contribute and honest living and be American.
For Gods sake I can't take him anymore.................and I am not even a never Trumpster.
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I keep thinking why o why do we have to have the only one who will fight for "America first" be such an impulsive big mouth .
Just what the GOP needs a big mouth who will turn every immigrant and non white against us forever ! :x
If I was Haitian or African I would certainly not forgive this easily if at all.
It is not about what country they come from at all . It is about their character and their willingness to come to this country to contribute and honest living and be American.
For Gods sake I can't take him anymore.................and I am not even a never Trumpster.
Another step backward. Our leaders helping our opponents. He got tired of winning. I can support him on policy but how do you tell others he deserves your support.
There are a number of takes on it. First is Presidential vulgarity. Not new, but new that we have such immediate reports of it.
Second, is this a fair characterization of these countries? Honest people from these countries find truth in the description. Literally, they can't separate sewage from drinking water in many of these places.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/07/29/537945957/you-probably-dont-want-to-know-about-haitis-sewage-problems.
Somalia was home of Blackhawk down and still in a decades long civil war with dire humanitarian conditions. Is it a shithole? Yes.
Third, was he disparaging the PEOPLE from these shitholes?
Here's what he reportedly said: "Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" - according to The Washington Post.
It seems to me like a valid question in an immigration debate. Mixed with the good people are dozens of "dreamers" in Minnesota convicted in US federal court for joining al Qaida. No native Norwegians in that mix. There are gangs from el Salvador committing crimes here, MS-13. Very few of the foreigners infiltrating MIT, our medical schools and silicon valley come from Haiti of Republic of the Congo. There are humanitarian refugee problems in the world and there are legitimate questions about which immigrants benefit the USA most.
Rand Paul said today, '700 million people want to come here. We can't take all of them.' The refugee problem and our immigration strategy need to be examined independently, IMHO.
Whatever the point was that he was trying to make, he failed miserably.
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https://spectator.org/importing-the-s-hole/
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Doug points out that may of these countries are poor and miserable to live in for the majority that are not the few families who run the show there or connected through mafia style government gangs or in the case of Somalia total criminal mobs.
We all know this but our big mouth billionaire in the WH is damn clumsy and I am tired of trying to rationalize and explain away what he says as trivial .
I hope there is a viable Republican alternative to him in '20. I'll take Mike Pence, Ted Cruz or even Nikki Haley though I know nothing about the latter's overall stances on policy.
Trump (and family ) is not the guy period.
Though we may be stuck with him only because I can't stomach an even worse outcome -> A Democrat - not one Democrat could I possibly vote. nada a one
and sorry Rush, this is NOT "faux outrage" (whatever that is supposed to mean). I am on your side and Trump's side and even when I saw this I was legitimately outraged:
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2018/01/12/limbaugh-reaction-trump-shithole-remarks-faux-rage-made-cameras-microphones/
Explaining this away would be like the LEFT explaining away Oprah's comment that all white people who grew up in the Crow South all need to die. (My first thought well if that's true then all Black people who grew up in the same environment wh have to see everything as racist also all need to die off ).
All these kinds of shoot off the mouth statements need not be tolerated from people who are elected or otherwise looked to as role models or spokespeople and Opray has certainly jumped into the ring .
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https://spectator.org/importing-the-s-hole/
Exactly.
I call on all shithole nations to start an immediate boycott of the US. Not one more refugee/illegal alien sent here until Trump apologizes!
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-genius-of-trump-what-the-president-means-when-he-touts-his-smarts/2018/01/13/d70b419c-f55b-11e7-a9e3-ab18ce41436a_story.html?undefined=&utm_term=.fa3f4a370907&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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THIS is what Durbin and the Dems and the Pravdas are looking to disrupt:
From Jan 10
By Daniel Henninger
Jan 10, 2018 6:46 p.m. ET
By putting it out there that the U.S. president is an “idiot,” a “dope,” “dumb as sh—” and basically insane, Michael Wolff may have ensured the success and continuation of Donald J. Trump’s improbable presidency. That’s right, Michael Wolff, who admitted on “Meet the Press” that “this is 25th Amendment kind of stuff,” did President Trump a favor.
It’s impossible to know which half of Mr. Wolff’s book is more-or-less true and which half is second-level hearsay (similar to many of the Russian collusion stories). So it follows that among those uncertain about what’s fake is Donald Trump. After all, someone did allow Mr. Wolff, a well-known stab-in-the-back specialist, to hang around the White House for six months. A lot of White House courtiers, including the exiled Steve Bannon, seem to have spent most of their working hours the first six months speed-dialing dirt to White House reporters. We all watched the muck leak into the Oval Office.
So if you are Donald Trump, and like any normal person don’t want the world to think you’re cuckoo, what do you do? You prove they are wrong. Which is what Mr. Trump did twice this week with conscious intent in public forums. Both events not only showed the president acting, in his word, “stable,” both also offered a successful model for a post-Bannon, post-Wolff presidency.
People who have a job that requires them to make a living by doing something other than watch Donald Trump in real time most likely didn’t see either of these events. The first was Mr. Trump’s speech Monday to the American Farm Bureau in Nashville, Tenn. The other, which is worth a look if you didn’t see it, was a nearly hour-long session on immigration legislation Mr. Trump held at the White House with about 24 members of Congress, TV cameras rolling and the press taking notes.
.
What struck me most about the farm speech was how relaxed Mr. Trump was. Most Trump speeches to large audiences are generally delivered in a simmering anger, the president gripping both sides of the podium and launching words like grenades at a still-doubting world. Not this one. He was at ease throughout.
That would have been about as noteworthy as a passing cloud if not for the next day’s immigration meeting on the Dreamers and DACA legislation. Mr. Trump presided over this meeting like some previously undiscovered Buddha. He talked but didn’t dominate. He methodically elicited views from Republicans (among them Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, David Perdue and Carlos Curbelo ) and Democrats (Dick Durbin, Steny Hoyer, Dianne Feinstein ).
Once you realized it wasn’t a brief photo-op before the doors closed, the meeting was sort of weird, with reporters and their notebooks looming over the legislators’ backs, but it was also weirdly impressive. They looked like politicians doing real work, and afterward the White House announced the framework of a deal on the Dreamers.
Contrast this with how Barack Obama invited congressional Republicans and Democrats to a public, televised forum on health-care reform at Blair House in early 2010, listened to a series of GOP policy proposals from serious people such as Lamar Alexander and Tom Coburn, and then smirked it all away as nothing new. It was a setup that poisoned the well.
Or how in 2011 Mr. Obama blew up the deficit-reduction deal Joe Biden had worked out in meetings and dinners with a bipartisan supercommittee. Mr. Obama then descended on the group to lecture it on his demand that they raise taxes on “the wealthy” and corporations. “I will not support any plan that puts all of the burden for closing our deficit on ordinary Americans,” Mr. Obama magisterially intoned. The bipartisan deal collapsed.
The Trump-Republican-Democratic DACA deal, if it succeeds, will be a major bipartisan accomplishment.
But back to the Trump-is-Dr. Strangelove thesis. Mr. Trump himself contributed to the mania with a tweet, days before the Wolff book’s release, about his nuclear button being bigger than Kim Jong Un’s . That tweet put the president’s mental capacity in play, even among supporters, which is not where he should want it to be.
Instead, the Trump immigration negotiation session with Congress is the sort of public presidential face the world should see more of. In fact, that meeting’s productive content is a template for broadening the president’s Twitter account, an underutilized asset.
The morning after the immigration summit, a grudging consensus formed that Mr. Trump had confounded critics of his basic competence. A parallel consensus snorted that this positive moment won’t last.
And maybe it won’t. If this week’s impressive Trump performance gets buried beneath petty feuds, Mr. Wolff’s dumpster diving inside the Bannon-era White House will be seen as prescient and accurate enough.
But if the president running that meeting is the one seen by voters going forward, Mr. Trump should invite Mr. Wolff to the second inauguration.
================================================================================================
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/368954-gop-sen-trump-did-not-make-shithole-comment?rnd=1515941970
http://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/368963-cotton-attacks-durbin-for-claims-of-trumps-shithole-countries?rnd=1515947330
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http://observer.com/2018/01/donald-trump-supporters-voice-support-for-shithole-countries-comment/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5lcART6TTE
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This is in an article reporting his declining support.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-voters-abandoning-donald-trump/550247/?platform=hootsuite
In other news, Trump would win MN today.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/01/minnesota-kinda-likes-donald-trump.php
Closing the poll gap since losing MN by only 1.5%.
Even though he is getting shithole media coverage.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455449/donald-trump-democrats-not-friends?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-01-16&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-risk-heart-attack-dangerous-220447054.html
As a doctor I can tell you this is true but so what!
2 out of 3 Americans have BMI over 25!
I don't recall Newsweek which I used to subscribe to in the 80s having a big propaganda hit about the ONE smoking cigarettes !
Why does Newsweek keep getting on yahoo news every day with its anti Trump tirades?
Queen Hillary looks pretty darn pudgy to me. What is her BMI ? I guarantee it is over 25.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455453/president-trump-undoes-obama-legacy-commonsense-nobama?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-01-16&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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"Dr. Jackson, did you take a waist measurement for the President? His weight — I think you said 239, right? That seems — I think that’s just shy of obesity, right? So you’re confident of that number, and did you do any measurements?"
- This from a press who thinks Oprah should be President.
Can you imagine asking this of a woman? Of Oprah?
Did you take her measurements? Is she obese? What exercises did you recommend?
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/01/17/the-80-questions-white-house-reporters-asked-dr-ronny-jackson-about-donald-trumps-health/
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Talking to Trump: A How-To Guide
Insights from more than 50 people the president met with in his first year in office
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press
By Peter Nicholas and
Rebecca Ballhaus
Updated Jan. 18, 2018 7:57 p.m. ET
37 COMMENTS
Link copied…
President Donald Trump has received huge public exposure in his first year through blanket TV coverage, speeches and tweets. But what is he like in person?
While some of the president’s most provocative private comments have made headlines—his demands for loyalty from top officials and his vulgar reference to African nations, for instance—The Wall Street Journal gathered others shared by more than 50 people who met with the president to discuss a range of issues in the Oval Office, on Air Force One and at Mar-a-Lago in the past year. Here are their insights:
Be prepared for a change of topic...
In an early session on his infrastructure plan, Mr. Trump detoured into a riff about part of the road network that has long bugged him: guardrails. “It’s put together with these screws, right?” he told cabinet members and business executives, who nodded solemnly. “I always think if I ever went into that sucker I’d be afraid that it opens and you get speared.” He continued: “I want to hire whoever their salesman is. He’s the greatest salesman in the world. That is the worst crap.”
...especially if it involves old enemies and old friends...
In an April meeting focused on bolstering business, Mr. Trump repeatedly interrupted his speech to jab at the news media or to call out executives in the audience, many of whom are his longtime buddies. “Trump reads his audience and responds to that,” said Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, an association of executives that organized the White House event.
Trump Has Broken All the Rules
In the year since he took office, President Donald Trump has shown that he isn’t bound by what had been seen as the previous conventions of the role, Gerald F. Seib writes.
Click to Read Story
Trump Pledged 28 Actions: Has He Delivered?
The president entered office a year ago with sweeping promises, ranging from protecting workers to cleaning up corruption and ending illegal immigration and Obamacare. Here’s a scorecard.
Click to Read Story
For Businesses, a Net Success
Trump's initiatives on taxes and regulation have been broadly welcomed by business, even though his relationship with CEOs has sometimes stumbled.
Click to Read Story
37 Ways Business Rules Have Changed
Trump has pushed for deregulation across industries. Here is a sampling of the major changes.
Click to Read Story
A Look Back at Approval Ratings
President Trump is the first in polling history to spend his entire first year with more disapproving than approving of his performance
Click to Read Story
Stock Market Roared, Boosted by Earnings and Tax Cut
Stocks benefited from a mix of pro-business policies, steady corporate earnings and a rebound in global growth.
Click to Read Story
Key Moments from Trump’s First Year
The president has reversed his predecessor’s policies—and sometimes stoked a backlash with his unconventional approach to leading the nation.
Click to View Timeline
How Trump Upended Foreign Policy
As president, Trump has reshuffled the deck of U.S. relationships
Click to Read Story
President Trump's First Year in Office
Click to Watch Video
Trump's First Year
...and expect him to be blunt...
Meeting last spring with representatives of veterans’ groups and Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, Mr. Trump criticized the slow pace of terminating federal employees, particularly at the VA. “You just need to start firing people,” he told Mr. Shulkin. “Let them sue us. I don’t care if they sue us.”
...to the point of abruptness.
Mr. Trump abruptly stood up before a March meeting had finished with five chairmen of congressional committees and Vice President Mike Pence. “I have to go do some work in the Oval Office,” he told them, according to one of the chairmen. “But if you need me, I’ll be in there.”
He can be persuaded to change his mind...
Mr. Trump was annoyed with Congress last summer for passing legislation imposing new Russian sanctions. He told aides he was inclined to veto the bill because he wanted better relations with Russia. Aides told him Congress would override the veto, making him look weak. Mr. Trump yielded, signing the bill in August. A White House official said the president never gave serious consideration to not signing the bill, but was frustrated at Congress for inserting itself into a foreign-policy matter.
...especially if it is tactfully done…
Around the same time, Mr. Trump had an idea about how to counter the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, which he got after speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin : If the U.S. stopped joint military exercises with the South Koreans, it could help moderate Kim Jong Un’s behavior. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis used an approach that aides say can work: “He says, ‘Your instincts are absolutely correct,’ and then gets him [the president] to do the exact opposite of what his instincts say,” said one person close to the White House. Mr. Trump dropped the idea, although he has ordered aides to give the exercises a low profile, eliminating press releases and briefings about them.
...and he can take frankness.
Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings from Baltimore took Mr. Trump to task for his depiction of African-American neighborhoods as destitute and crime-ridden. “Most black people are doing pretty good. We have people struggling to make ends meet, but that’s insulting,” Mr. Cummings told him. “Probably nobody has ever told you that.” “You’re right,” Mr. Trump responded, “nobody has ever told me that.” Mr. Cummings later, however, wound up disillusioned, saying, “I don’t think it made any difference.”
Sometimes delaying works best...
To convince Mr. Trump to change course, White House aides sometimes stall, hoping he’ll forget what he wanted done and move on to something else. Trying to dissuade him from taking tough trade actions against other countries, aides caution that such moves could reverse the stock-market gains he touts. Or they might tell him that an action he wants to take on steel or aluminum must wait a month or so until the Commerce Department weighs in.
... but he can also get exasperated...
People who overheard a phone conversation between the president and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recall Mr. Trump saying, “Rex, Rex, Rex, how many times do I have to tell you…”
...and arguments are rarely final.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump talked about how the U.S. should have seized Iraqi oil as recompense for the 2003 invasion. In office, Mr. Trump returned to the idea and advisers told him it wasn’t feasible. They thought the matter was put to rest. Mr. Trump has since asked about it again. One White House official characterized his question as: “Why do we go into these wars if we don’t get anything for it?” Said another U.S. official: “No case is ever settled.”
He is happy to play tour guide...
In the middle of meetings with executives and lawmakers, the president sometimes invites them to walk over and take pictures in the Oval Office if they haven’t visited before. “I mean, who does that?” said Scott Heitkamp, the CEO of ValueBank, who attended one such meeting in March.
...even if the seating arrangement is tricky.
Unlike past presidents, who often sat on couches with Oval Office visitors, Mr. Trump sits behind his desk, raising the question for guests: Can they put their papers on the Resolute Desk? “At one point, I set my papers on the table, and then I thought, maybe that’s not the best form,” said former Rep. Jason Chaffetz. “So I picked them back up again and set them back on my lap.”
He can be courteous with Republicans...
When Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) visited the Oval Office after his return in September from a near-fatal shooting, Mr. Trump made sure he sat in the chair normally reserved for visiting heads of state. “That’s an honor,” Mr. Scalise said.
...and Democrats...
Mr. Trump spent months courting Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va), at one point introducing the senator to an assistant and instructing her: “When Joe calls, you make sure to give me the message.”
...and isn’t beyond using chocolate to win someone over.
Mr. Trump invited Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) to fly with him after a rally in Louisville as he sought support for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. On board, the president asked him whether he had any children. Three, Mr. Comer said. Mr. Trump handed him three Air Force One-branded boxes of M&Ms: “Give them to your kids and tell them they’re from me.”
But he has a short fuse...
Backstage at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, when Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.) told Mr. Trump several religious organizations in his state opposed the White House’s travel ban, the president snapped: “Nobody told me you were going to be a nasty man.”
...and sorry can be the hardest word.
Weeks after Mr. Trump’s election victory, the incoming president and his advisers were considering how to handle China being upset by a phone call he held with Taiwan’s leader. The question of an apology was broached. “Never, ever apologize,” Mr. Trump said.
And finally...
Mick Mulvaney, the president’s budget director and frequent golf companion at the Trump course in northern Virginia, said Mr. Trump will point out arcane features during the rounds, noting “which trees have died and which trees to cut down and what greens are struggling with what fungus.”
—Gordon Lubold and Michael C. Bender contributed to this article.
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https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/286506/#respond
(https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Screen-Shot-2018-01-20-at-3.28.09-PM.png)
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http://thehill.com/policy/international/370435-ugandan-president-i-love-trump-because-he-tells-africans-frankly
Ugandan president praises Trump for his frankness: 'Africans need to solve their problems'
Imagine the advancement of humankind if African nations suddenly got their act together. For a how-to guide, just read the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom:
Rule of Law
Property Rights:
Freedom from Corruption
Limited Government
Fiscal Freedom
Government Size/Spending
Regulatory Efficiency
Business Freedom
Labor Freedom
Open Markets
Trade Freedom
Investment Freedom
Financial Freedom
It's 2018 and we know how to eradicate poverty. We just don't seem to know how to set a better example.
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I see that Melania didn't go to Davos with President Trump. Coincidentally this comes on the heels of the revelations of him buying the silence of a porn star he fuct sans condom shortly after the birth of his son Baron. Various sordid details being leaked about it, and assertions they have separate bedrooms in the White House.
Can't be easy being Mrs. Trump.
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He treated his first wife the exact same way
BTW how do you know he didn't use a condom?
:-o
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It is what the porn star says.
Imagine how Melania feels, reading that realizing that it was while she was post-partum with their son. She knew he was a dog when she married him, but still , , , hard to imagine she would want his dick in her now , , ,
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Trump Hits Alps, but Melania Is Frosty in Florida
Maureen Dowd JAN. 27, 2018
President and Melania Trump in Brussels in May. Credit Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
WASHINGTON — Melania has learned a few things from the master.
The first lady will never be as brilliant at trolling as her husband. He is an idiot-savant who plays in the roiling ocean of Twitter as naturally as a blubbery-necked sea lion.
Only Donald Trump, a Rat Pack relic who spurred the reckoning with his transgressions toward women, could send out a tweet taking credit for the women’s march.
But the Slovenian Sphinx has her moments.
It started when she seemed to sartorially upbraid Trump for his Billy Bush vulgarities by wearing a pussy-bow blouse to the St. Louis debate. Then, in a master stroke, she chose a first-lady project that could only be interpreted as a wicked rip on her husband: fighting vicious cyberbullies. Last spring, Melania’s personal Twitter account favorited a GIF of her own downcast face at the Inaugural Address with an accompanying crack: “Seems the only #Wall @realDonaldTrump’s built is the one between him and @FLOTUS.”
And who can forget the crisp hand swat in Israel or her wish to spend Christmas on “a deserted island”?
session - Clinton bashing. What else is new?
Last weekend, on the anniversary of the inauguration, Melania Instagrammed a throwback picture of herself in her powder-blue Jackie suit, not with her husband but with a hunky Marine escort. She wore a delighted ear-to-ear smile, the kind she never seems to flash around the Donald. (It would have been even funnier, of course, if she had posted a photo of herself in front of some empty stands and a sparse crowd, but we’re talking more grounds for divorce there.)
After the Stormy Daniels story broke — about Trump cavorting and watching Shark Week with the porn star and telling her not to worry about Melania, at home with a new baby, and then having his lawyer allegedly pay Stormy $130,000 during the campaign to hush her up — a wintry Melania canceled her plan to accompany her husband to Davos.
Instead, while the kid from Queens was abroad trying to impress the soul-sucking global elites he got elected railing against, pathetically bragging that he had “a crowd like they’ve never had before in Davos,” Melania made a solo visit to the Holocaust Museum here for Holocaust Remembrance Day. This looked like a subtle reproach to Trump for his unspeakable defense of the “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., and an allusion to the president’s statement last year on remembrance day, which somehow neglected to remember Jews or anti-Semitism. What a Stephen Miller special that was.
Afterward, the always elusive first lady became even more elusive, slipping out of Washington, much to the surprise of the press. Suddenly, as Stormy Daniels began her media tour on “Inside Edition” and booked an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel,” Melania was making a stealthy landing in Florida on an Air Force plane.
Trump could humiliate his wife by being a big, horny pig, but he is the one who comes off as the embarrassment. He’s an embarrassing husband and an embarrassing president and an embarrassing leader of the free world. Barack Obama was always calling to our better angels. Donald Trump is paying off porn stars and denigrating struggling countries that send minorities to the U.S. as “shitholes.” How did we drop so far and so fast from class to crass?
Partly, it was the Democrats’ preference for lecturing and entitlement over winning and wooing. They passed over people who had better messages and more authentic personae who might have beaten Trump, like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, and gave the nomination to Hillary Clinton, a flawed feminist icon who was stunted in her ability to criticize her rival for his retrogressive treatment of women since she had enabled her husband in his retrogressive treatment of women.
The Times reported Friday that Hillary protected a senior adviser on faith in her 2008 campaign who was accused of repeatedly sexually harassing a young female aide. Hillary ignored the advice of her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, to fire the man, Burns Strider, and simply docked him several weeks of pay and made him undergo counseling. The subordinate who complained was given a new job.
As The Times’s Susan Chira wrote, the episode was “a poignant reminder that placing women in positions of leadership does not ensure they will always act to protect other women.”
Everyone wondered if Melania’s rebellious vanishing act — combined with the simultaneous Times scoop that Trump had already tried to fire Robert Mueller but was blocked by the White House lawyer, Don McGahn — was the beginning of the “unraveling,” as one top Democrat put it. (Surely, the Trump unraveling began with his birth, like Damien in “The Omen.”)
“There’s an endgame in sight, though it may take longer,” Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, told me. “It’s like ancient Rome where they’re all turning on each other. McGahn is taking out the long knives to stick Trump in the back. At some point, General Kelly may do the same. Bannon is exiled to the outer walls of the city, where he is collecting wayward Roman soldiers to go back and attack Trump. There are orgies and payoffs and mud wrestling, so beyond anything we’ve experienced anywhere.”
The White House is either ancient Rome falling or the Moscow cat circus, as Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio calls it, or a blender with the top off, as one of my colleagues dubs it.
It’s a shattering moment for the country, when many of the institutions that gave America its identity as a smart, brave, generous, fair country — the presidency, Congress, sports, faith, Hollywood, big business — seem corroded and immoral.
When we look in the mirror and try to figure out who we are now, elevating a corporate tax cut over our fundamental values is not going to cut it.
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When did it become okay to go after the family, I missed that rule change.
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When did it become okay to go after the family, I missed that rule change.
The rule is: Whatever benefits the left at the moment.
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/26561/poor-jimmy-porn-star-stormy-daniels-releases-new-ryan-saavedra?utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=013118-news&utm_campaign=position1
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/26561/poor-jimmy-porn-star-stormy-daniels-releases-new-ryan-saavedra?utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=013118-news&utm_campaign=position1
Will he cry on camera again?
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Oy vey , , ,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2018/01/31/stormy-daniels-to-jimmy-kimmel-it-doesnt-look-like-my-signature-on-trump-statement/?undefined=&utm_term=.44a9a34de4f8&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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[I didn't watch the speech, had my own activities to attend to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt-1F8SKVfQ]
I've now heard parts of it and parts of the Davos speech. I think we can almost all agree that delivering this kind of message is something Trump is very good at. Polling shows people like the speech.
One theme is that Obama said I and Trump said we, calling on people to come together. Dems made fools of selves in mostly minor ways.
John Hinderaker of Powerline blog and Center for the American Experiment summed it up this way" "American Freedom is in better condition at the end of Trump year one than at the end of Obama year eight."
Trump has passed enough of his agenda now that he should stay focused from now until midterms on selling America and selling the wisdom, merit and success of his policies. As his approval jumps over 40% so does his chance of holding the House and Senate.
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[I didn't watch the speech, had my own activities to attend to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt-1F8SKVfQ]
I've now heard parts of it and parts of the Davos speech. I think we can almost all agree that delivering this kind of message is something Trump is very good at. Polling shows people like the speech.
One theme is that Obama said I and Trump said we, calling on people to come together. Dems made fools of selves in mostly minor ways.
John Hinderaker of Powerline blog and Center for the American Experiment summed it up this way" "American Freedom is in better condition at the end of Trump year one than at the end of Obama year eight."
Trump has passed enough of his agenda now that he should stay focused from now until midterms on selling America and selling the wisdom, merit and success of his policies. As his approval jumps over 40% so does his chance of holding the House and Senate.
I listened to about half of it. It was very well done. Trump continues to surprise.
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"I listened to about half of it. It was very well done. Trump continues to surprise."
As did I. I take back what I said 2 weeks ago after his "shithole" comment. I will be voting for him '20 if he keeps this up.
He is the only one with the guts to stand up to the Left. (well, maybe Cruz and a few others ) Yes WE have dreams too !!!
However he did cave to a degree on immigration which I am not thrilled about .
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"I listened to about half of it. It was very well done. Trump continues to surprise."
As did I. I take back what I said 2 weeks ago after his "shithole" comment. I will be voting for him '20 if he keeps this up.
He is the only one with the guts to stand up to the Left. (well, maybe Cruz and a few others ) Yes WE have dreams too !!!
However he did cave to a degree on immigration which I am not thrilled about .
I take that to be a negotiation ploy as far as immigration goes.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5345079/Trump-vaults-49-cent-approval-rating-voters.html
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Trump Drops the T-Word
Democrats who fail to applaud him aren’t betraying the country.
By
The Editorial Board
Updated Feb. 5, 2018 7:47 p.m. ET
274 COMMENTS
Treason by any other name is not defined by refusing to applaud Donald Trump during his State of the Union speech last week. Still, at a discursive speech Monday in Cincinnati that was nominally about the strong economy, President Trump decided to drop the T-word on the Democratic hand-sitters. “They were like death, and un-American,” Mr. Trump said to the Ohio factory workers. “Somebody said treasonous. Can we call that treason? Why not? They certainly don’t seem to love our country very much.”
When politicians start accusing opponents of treason, our former Journal colleague Seth Lipsky has made it a practice to recall that “treason” is defined narrowly in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution.
President Donald Trump delivers a speech on tax reform after touring Sheffer Corporation in Blue Ash outside Cincinnati, OH, Feb. 5.
President Donald Trump delivers a speech on tax reform after touring Sheffer Corporation in Blue Ash outside Cincinnati, OH, Feb. 5. Photo: jonathan ernst/Reuters
.
Perhaps we should be grateful to Mr. Trump for giving us the opportunity to quote the Founding Fathers: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”
Watching Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer scowl through the State of the Union speech, several words occurred to us: churlish, grumpy, resentful. But treasonous didn’t spring to mind. Mr. Trump’s mind no doubt is filled with smoldering anger because opponents have called him authoritarian, totalitarian, Hitler and insane.
Voters may be getting turned off by the hyperbolic rhetoric of politics, but they’d better expect more of the same. Mr. Trump tweeted Monday that Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee “must be stopped,” whatever that means for a duly elected Member of Congress, while Mr. Schiff accuses Mr. Trump of colluding with Russia based on little evidence. The real treason here, in the non-constitutional meaning, is against normal political debate and reason.
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Yawn. Slow clap for the virtue signalling rinos at the WSJ.
:roll:
Trump Drops the T-Word
Democrats who fail to applaud him aren’t betraying the country.
By
The Editorial Board
Updated Feb. 5, 2018 7:47 p.m. ET
274 COMMENTS
Treason by any other name is not defined by refusing to applaud Donald Trump during his State of the Union speech last week. Still, at a discursive speech Monday in Cincinnati that was nominally about the strong economy, President Trump decided to drop the T-word on the Democratic hand-sitters. “They were like death, and un-American,” Mr. Trump said to the Ohio factory workers. “Somebody said treasonous. Can we call that treason? Why not? They certainly don’t seem to love our country very much.”
When politicians start accusing opponents of treason, our former Journal colleague Seth Lipsky has made it a practice to recall that “treason” is defined narrowly in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution.
President Donald Trump delivers a speech on tax reform after touring Sheffer Corporation in Blue Ash outside Cincinnati, OH, Feb. 5.
President Donald Trump delivers a speech on tax reform after touring Sheffer Corporation in Blue Ash outside Cincinnati, OH, Feb. 5. Photo: jonathan ernst/Reuters
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Perhaps we should be grateful to Mr. Trump for giving us the opportunity to quote the Founding Fathers: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”
Watching Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer scowl through the State of the Union speech, several words occurred to us: churlish, grumpy, resentful. But treasonous didn’t spring to mind. Mr. Trump’s mind no doubt is filled with smoldering anger because opponents have called him authoritarian, totalitarian, Hitler and insane.
Voters may be getting turned off by the hyperbolic rhetoric of politics, but they’d better expect more of the same. Mr. Trump tweeted Monday that Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee “must be stopped,” whatever that means for a duly elected Member of Congress, while Mr. Schiff accuses Mr. Trump of colluding with Russia based on little evidence. The real treason here, in the non-constitutional meaning, is against normal political debate and reason.
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Stupid? Yes and I don't approve, but strategic? Maybe.
1) He called them out for disapproving of America and its accomplishments, not just his policies.
2) Maybe he is desensitizing people to extreme language that is so easily bandied about - like "impeachment". 60 elected Democrat representatives already voted to begin impeachment hearings before a high crime has been identified. And it's reported like news.
3) The whole Russian investigation is a treason accusation against him without a shred of evidence to support it that we know about and everyone of stature including every identifiable Democrat says the investigation should go on until completion. How do THEY like the game they started? When did YOU stop beating your wife?
4) Fighting back with William F Buckley level dignity doesn't work in 2018. It didn't work then either.
5) Which side is off their rocker?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=79&v=kyRuEzlpTXg
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/8/trump-approval-rating-tops-obamas-same-point-presi/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWWpRNE5tWTRaR0V5WkRFeSIsInQiOiJwd1dtQnQwWCtDNjNaMEVsZnIxRHhLT2JxRzJ4V3diSm55NTVvR1RWMTN6aG9aYUw4cnExYlh0WFdXRTJtZHoydHU4UlAyMllrVFZ6T1kyam5DMEdnK0h6WUdocElIXC9HVHRlT3R0cWlCVTQ5T3lleU1rbk9kZWJpQjRTb0tQMXcifQ%3D%3D's
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/which-is-scarier--that-trump-doesnt-read-his-daily-intel-briefing-or-that-jared-kushner-does/2018/02/11/faad67e4-0f30-11e8-9065-e55346f6de81_story.html?undefined=&utm_term=.8fad8ca18ee4&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/theres-a-good-chance-president-trump-is-being-blackmailed.html
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Seems like a well researched story. He was married 2 years to Melania, Barron was one, it sets up a pattern of how people were paid for silence. Consensual but opens the door for others who did not appreciate similar advances. I have no idea if any of it is true. All long before he was President. He has never claimed a lifetime of marital fidelity. Could be damaging or is it all defects we already knew about him. Certainly a distraction and likely stuff that Melania didn't fully know.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-a-playboy-model-and-a-system-for-concealing-infidelity-national-enquirer-karen-mcdougal
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Linked at Crafty's story posted while typing...
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Seems like a well researched story. He was married 2 years to Melania, Barron was one, it sets up a pattern of how people were paid for silence. Consensual but opens the door for others who did not appreciate similar advances. I have no idea if any of it is true. All long before he was President. He has never claimed a lifetime of marital fidelity. Could be damaging or is it all defects we already knew about him. Certainly a distraction and likely stuff that Melania didn't fully know.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-a-playboy-model-and-a-system-for-concealing-infidelity-national-enquirer-karen-mcdougal
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Linked at Crafty's story posted while typing...
Yawn.
I'm sure this will shake everyone who saw Trump as a paragon of personal morality.
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quote author=G M
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-a-playboy-model-and-a-system-for-concealing-infidelity-national-enquirer-karen-mcdougal
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Yawn.
I'm sure this will shake everyone who saw Trump as a paragon of personal morality.
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I know, nothing new, but one more time we get one more reason that some people around us, wife, girlfriend, daughter, person of principle, cannot be told in a close election where we need every vote that this man or person should be their choice for President.
I succeeded in persuaded my liberal leaning girlfriend last time, who could not stand Trump and demanded a president be virtuous, to vote for neither. My daughter who I'm sure did not vote for Trump has not said and I have not asked how she voted.
I sadly wish we had a candidate that I could say without apologies is the best person for the job. Maybe Mike Pence someday but he would not have won if he had run with all the others in 2016.
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quote author=G M
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-a-playboy-model-and-a-system-for-concealing-infidelity-national-enquirer-karen-mcdougal
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Yawn.
I'm sure this will shake everyone who saw Trump as a paragon of personal morality.
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I know, nothing new, but one more time we get one more reason that some people around us, wife, girlfriend, daughter, person of principle, cannot be told in a close election where we need every vote that this man or person should be their choice for President.
I succeeded in persuaded my liberal leaning girlfriend last time, who could not stand Trump and demanded a president be virtuous, to vote for neither. My daughter who I'm sure did not vote for Trump has not said and I have not asked how she voted.
I sadly wish we had a candidate that I could say without apologies is the best person for the job. Maybe Mike Pence someday but he would not have won if he had run with all the others in 2016.
Really decent people avoid political office. We have to decide among those who run. I didn't like Trump at all. He has turned out to be far better than I thought possible.
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AGREED.
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"Really decent people avoid political office. We have to decide among those who run. I didn't like Trump at all. He has turned out to be far better than I thought possible."
I agree, all true, same for me. He is performing his duties as President in excellent fashion so far. He is not a person you can point your children to and say I would like you to grow up and aspire to be like him. If you are Melania's father and had all the information, you would tell her he is scum. We are supporting a President that we wouldn't want as a spouse, friend or relative. It sucks to have to settle and not just for moral reasons of principle but as a practical, political matter as well. His defects lose him votes and gain him nothing.
Democrats have more skill and experience at looking the other way and more help at covering it up.
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Not to mention grifting operations like Trump University, bullying that little old lady in Atlantic City with eminent domain, and a reputation for stiffing contractors.
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" Not to mention grifting operations like Trump University, bullying that little old lady in Atlantic City with eminent domain, and a reputation for stiffing contractors."
Katherine and I did not at all appreciate it some yrs back when watching one of his celebrity apprentices he had no problem with ideas being stolen from one being used by others. In fact he though that was just part of the game.
He can be a very ruthless guy.
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He is a bastard, but thus far he has been our bastard.
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Bonus points-- Who said that and about whom?
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Bonus points-- Who said that and about whom?
FDR about Patton. (?)
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Yes, bullying the lady for his parking lot using eminent domain was disgusting, but what I hated him for in the primaries was that he supported that Supreme Court ruling, Kelo.
That he supports ends justify means may be why he was able to play ball against the Democrats.
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If Dems win House OR Senate, this is going to happen , , ,
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/374323-calls-mount-from-dems-to-give-platform-to-trump-accusers?userid=188403
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If Dems win House OR Senate, this is going to happen , , ,
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/374323-calls-mount-from-dems-to-give-platform-to-trump-accusers?userid=188403
That's right. It will be ugly, so ugly that maybe it will backfire on them. A replay of Clinton Whitewater, economy grows while opposition talks about past wrongdoings... Why are R's conceding the loss of the House instead of fighting for it? In the end they won't impeach over anything we know now. True leftist ideologues fear Pence more than Trump. As we asked of Gore in the 90s, why elevate your next opponent?
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https://theintercept.com/2018/02/16/trump-russia-election-hacking-investigation/
:roll: :roll: :roll:
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Mr James Risen =>
he is so obviously an agent of Putin, sowing discord , chaos and doubt among as many Americans as he can against a duly elected President.
Why else would he write such a long article about a subject he hates............
:lol:
I didn't thoroughly read thru it as I don't want to waste my time but I still see nothing to explain to me how any of this changed the results of the election, how it changes the FACT that Hillary was one of the worst candidate , she is extremely corrupt , and everything abut her that was released is true .
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I am tempted by the analysis here by long time Trump hater Karl Rove, but I also find myself remembering a line from a Brandon Lee movie where one bad guy says to another "Don't ask for what you can't take." Along that line, exactly what leverage do we have with Russia to back up the threats that Rove would have President Trump make?
I could have posted this in the Cyberwar thread, but posted here because of the comments on President Trump-- but please let's use the Cyberwar thread for discussion of the larger issue-- which is a very important one.
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Trump Wastes Another Weekend
The indictment was a perfect time to pivot. Instead he amplified the media noise.
By Karl Rove
Feb. 21, 2018 6:21 p.m. ET
103 COMMENTS
President Trump has shown he has a finger on the nation’s pulse. But he often fails to read it correctly, missing obvious opportunities to advance his cause.
Take Friday’s decision by the Justice Department to indict 13 Russians and three Russian companies for interfering in American politics between 2014 and 2016. The indictment is compelling reading, its evidence damning, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s televised explanation riveting.
The next day the president tweeted that the indictment didn’t show a conspiracy between his campaign and the Russians, that the Russians spent more money after the election than before, and that they began intervening long before he entered the race. All are true and useful points, but Mr. Trump offered them with an unnecessarily defensive tone.
In doing so he missed his opportunity for a permanent pivot on the Russian mess. Mr. Trump should have talked about firm actions he is taking to stop foreign meddling in American elections. He could have vowed that any foreign nation that intervenes in our elections will be discovered, have its methods exposed, and face forceful retaliation.
Though the Russians named in the recent indictment are unlikely to be extradited and face trial, Mr. Trump could have warned them never to leave Russia. If they do, he might have said, America will guarantee they receive justice.
Mr. Trump could have pledged that his administration will do whatever is necessary to stop meddling in 2018 and beyond. He will ensure state and local governments have the cyber tools to protect elections. He will make certain America has the cyber weapons and defenses to respond if foreign adversaries attempt to subvert our democracy.
This could have given his administration a firmer footing on the Russia issue. The question of Mr. Putin’s election interference would have become much less about Mr. Trump and much more about defending the country against serious threats.
But instead the president amplified the media noise. His weekend tweets claimed “they are laughing their asses off in Moscow” because of “all the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred.” (Moscow may well be laughing, but not for the reasons Mr. Trump claims.) He falsely blamed the Parkland, Fla., mass shooting on the Federal Bureau of Investigation “spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion.” And he asserted that he had never claimed Russia didn’t meddle in the election, only that China or “a 400-pound genius sitting in bed” might also be the culprits. It’s time for Mr. Trump to put the rotund computer nerd to sleep and say without qualification that Russia attempted to undermine American democracy.
Furthermore, Mr. Trump raised the bar for himself by tweeting that President Barack Obama “did nothing” to prevent Russian meddling before the election. Mr. Obama’s sharp words for Mr. Putin and ousting of 35 Russian spies were indeed an inadequate response, but now Mr. Trump must show he is doing everything possible to stop Russia’s continuing efforts. He could start by condemning Russia’s reported use of cyberbots to inflame tensions after the Florida shooting.
The mishandling of the Russia indictments wasn’t Mr. Trump’s only missed opportunity last weekend. Time is one of any president’s most precious resources, and Mr. Trump wasted some on Sunday by pinging Oprah Winfrey after she appeared on “60 Minutes.” At 11:28 p.m., he called Ms. Winfrey “very insecure” and taunted her, saying “ Hope Oprah runs so she can be exposed and defeated just like all of the others!”
The next presidential election is nearly three years away, and a Jan. 12 NPR/PBS/Marist poll after Ms. Winfrey’s Golden Globes appearance showed 35% of Americans want her to run while 54% don’t. Mr. Trump’s tweet guaranteed breathless coverage the next day of Oprah vs. The Donald. He could have instead drawn attention to Monday’s New York Times/Survey Monkey poll. It showed approval for the recent tax reform rose from 37% in December to 51% in February, while disapproval dropped from 57% to 46%. Better numbers for his signature domestic achievement are more important for Mr. Trump than tweaking Oprah.
In his White House memoir, Henry Kissinger wrote, “The old adage that men grow into office has not proved true in my experience.” Like many others, I anticipated Mr. Trump would become more “presidential” over time. Yet tweet by tweet, he appears determined to crush that expectation. Maybe he will yet be helped by people who wrestle the White House’s messaging onto more constructive paths. We can wish.
Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads and is the author of “The Triumph of William McKinley ” (Simon & Schuster, 2015).
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I agree with most of Rove's points
actually
except the use of the word "Guarantee" the US will be able to get any of the indicted Russians to US soil if "they leave Russian soil"
As for this week his listening to the children (soros CNN et all funded ) march on DC was a good political move.
but i agree with Karl about the opray wnifrey tweets . Why is he wasting time with her?
and raising the bar on himself by criticizing Brock could back fire.
And i absolutely agree what he says about the line "they are laughing their asses off in Moscow" That was frankly dumb to say .
And this : "In his White House memoir, Henry Kissinger wrote, “The old adage that men grow into office has not proved true in my experience.” Like many others, I anticipated Mr. Trump would become more “presidential” over time. Yet tweet by tweet, he appears determined to crush that expectation. Maybe he will yet be helped by people who wrestle the White House’s messaging onto more constructive paths. We can wish"
I could not agree more on this point.
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https://www.newsmax.com/politics/trump-florida-deputy-coward/2018/02/23/id/845056/
Anyone recall Eisenhower forcing Patten to apologize in front of the troops and be demoted for calling a soldier who mentally collapsed under the stress a coward?
I don't like this. And don't bother to tell me its true . Not the point
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The Only Good Thing About Donald Trump Is All His Policies
A U.S. president who is a boor presents a problem. The presidency, after all, has a symbolic aspect.
By Joseph Epstein
Feb. 26, 2018 6:58 p.m. ET
My son Mark, whose mind is more capacious, objective and generous than mine, nicely formulated the Donald Trump problem for thoughtful conservatives. “I approve of almost everything he has done,” my son remarked, “and I disapprove of almost everything he has said.”
Second the motion. I approve of the Neil Gorsuch appointment, the moving of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the removal of often-strangling regulations from much commerce, the opening of the Keystone pipeline, the tax-reform law, and more.
I disapprove of the bragging tweets, the touchiness, the crude put-downs of anyone who disagrees with him (“Little Marco, ” “insecure Oprah, ” “Sloppy Steve, ” and the rest), the unrestrained vulgarity. America has had ignorant, corrupt, vain, lazy presidents before, but in Donald Trump we have the first president who is a genuine boor.
In many realms of life, a boor’s rude, unmannerly nature can be forgivable. A wise stockbroker, who makes his clients lots of money, might get away with being a boor. A boorish winning football coach— Mike Ditka, take a bow—is livable if not likable. Showbiz has never been without its boors, from George Jessel to Whoopi Goldberg. Even a boorish friend is possible, if he is also loyal, generous and honorable. But a boorish president of the United States presents a problem.
The presidency, like the monarchy in England, has a symbolic along with a practical aspect. The president is meant to represent the nation at its best. What precisely that means can vary greatly in a country as wide and differentiated as ours. Dwight David Eisenhower was a different model of our best than was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harry S. Truman was different again, and yet in his own way he represented the country, in its Middle Western, small-business, common-sensical strain.
No one expects the president to be perfect. Nonetheless, it is disappointing when his imperfections are glaringly on display. Hence Bill Cinton’s fraternity-boy high jinks in the Oval Office with Monica Lewinsky was not a mere misdemeanor, a contretemps, but a disgrace, which left a permanent blot on what was in many ways a successful presidency.
The obverse of Donald Trump’s presidency for me was that of Barack Obama. To flip my son’s formulation, I approved of almost everything Mr. Obama said, and I disapproved of almost everything he did. He made a wretched nuclear deal with Iran, initiated a hopelessly cumbersome health-care law, deserted Israel at the United Nations, and did more to exacerbate than to alleviate race relations. Yet no hint of corruption, no sexual scandal of any sort, clings to Mr. Obama, a man who seems a loving husband and a good father.
I can easily imagine myself at lunch with Barack Obama, talking baseball, basketball, the University of Chicago, the intricacies of Chicago-style machine politics, whereas I cannot think of a single topic I might take up at a similar meal with Donald Trump.
The presidency, I can hear critics claiming, is not a charm contest. If President Trump is a boor, that may be regrettable, but better a boor with sound policies than a gentleman with unsound ones. True enough, yet this does not, as the philosophers say, exhaust all cases. A man likes to think that one day we may again have a president with both sound policies and dignified behavior.
Such a combination is of course possible, but at present more than merely unlikely. Boors in their 70s do not change. Donald Trump is incorrigible. Not even John Kelly, a tough retired Marine Corps general, has been able to whip him into anything resembling presidential shape. With Mr. Trump, what we see is what we get, and what we get distinctly isn’t Cary Grant. And we have three more years, possibly seven, to live it.
What is to be done? I wonder if we might start with journalism. What if American reporters began by ignoring Mr. Trump’s tweets, treating them as no more than the belches and embarrassing flatulence of an incurably dyspeptic man? Heavy media coverage of his tweets only encourages the old boy. What if journalists also ceased searching out the rest homes for aging hookers, porn queens, Mmes. America and Universe who, many moons ago, may or may not have lain with the current leader of the free world? With these two steps alone, the nature of current-day political life would be radically improved.
As things stand, with television punditi awaiting each morning’s fresh batch of presidential tweets, and with journalists sniffing out possible sex scandals like so many truffle dogs, the coverage of our politics seems rarely to rise above the intellectual level of the New York Post’s gossip-filled Page Six. Gossip is amusing in its place, but when that place is the White House it tends to lose its allure. In fact, it makes politics in the United States dreary beyond reckoning.
Mr. Epstein is author of the forthcoming “The Ideal of Culture and Other Essays” (Axios Press) and “Charm: The Elusive Enchantment” ( Taylor Trade), both to be published in 2018.
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" The obverse of Donald Trump’s presidency for me was that of Barack Obama. To flip my son’s formulation, I approved of almost everything Mr. Obama said, and I disapproved of almost everything he did."
" Yet no hint of corruption, no sexual scandal of any sort, clings to Mr. Obama,"
I certainly do not agree with these assertions in the least.
" What is to be done? I wonder if we might start with journalism. What if American reporters began by ignoring Mr. Trump’s tweets, treating them as no more than the belches and embarrassing flatulence of an incurably dyspeptic man? Heavy media coverage of his tweets only encourages the old boy. "
This statement is intriguing though. What if the media just ignore the man? Who wants to hear him on a daily basis anyway? Even I who supports most of his policies do not like listening to him unless he is totally scripted like a SOTU address.
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he is wrong.
Trump won not because of himself but despite himself.
He won on his policies . He would have won bigger if he did not have his personal flaws and certainly not because of them.
His fighting spirt true was paramount. But not his obnoxious words. And to hear other including Mike Savage tell us now that Trump was the only one who could beat Hillary if frankly nonsense.
I distinctly remember real clear politics had every Repub candidate AHEAD of Hillary EXCET Trump.
That said Trump was the only one with the policies. Imagine there would not have been so many never Trumpers if Trump was more of a role model personally.
https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/trumpian-rorschach-test-never-ends/
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/27655/flashback-donald-trump-rushed-stop-assailant-1991-michael-j-knowles?utm_medium=email&utm_content=022818-news&utm_campaign=position1
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Quite of few things in her story indicate lack of credibility. It is only credible because, yes, people can imagine that Donald Trump would have been unfaithful to his wife and family even at that point in his life.
She denied this, denied it, denied it in sworn documents, then alleges it.
She says she is not a victim, this was all consensual, but what came out of the 60 minutes story was the threat made to her in a garage. That was the criminal part, but the story, like the sex, has no details to verify. Police were not called. And she forgot about that when she started calling herself not a victim?? Hard to walk those words back as you expand the allegation.
An affair with a porn actress? Even as alleged, it was one time, lousy, consensual sex. Cheating, yes, but not much of a relationship. She indicated he wanted sex again but didn't get it.
The payment, if made on his behalf, was a campaign contribution? But the motive for a married man to keep it secret also relates to his marriage, even now as President.
How about the other side of it? She has consensual sex allegedly and wants money for silence or for her story? That has legal danger as well. Extortion?
If this is a real claim in real life, she has a real name, Stephanie Clifford, but CBS, 60 Minutes and Anderson Cooper keep calling her "Stormy Daniels", even in the transcript I read. That is not how journalists normally handle this, must have been a condition for the interview - not disclosed to the audience. Surprisingly, she has a DVD for sale coming out in that nationally promoted name.
The lawyer seemed to hang a warning out there, like she still has videos, photos or more likely texts, but he has denied it so we will see.
The lawyer is a Democrat activist, but this is not political.
The motive whether true of false seems to be not that Leftists are offended by cheating but that Trump supporters like evangelicals should be offended. Add to that, they would love to see this connect somehow to Meuller's investigation even if it turns out there is nothing there.
Again, the only thing credible is that yes, people can imagine that he would have sex with this woman if given the chance and this woman would have sex once with this man if given the chance. A BFD maybe if this was Pence and the facts proved true. But Trump already failed the test of role model and sexual purity.
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I’m more upset with Trump cheating on us, hooking up with the DC uniparty for some consensual overspending. He says never again, but I don’t believe him.
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What was the President to do? Look Sec Def Mattis in the eye and tell him that he was going to throw away all the spending increases for our military until after Congress and the American people got over their spending addictions?
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What was the President to do? Look Sec Def Mattis in the eye and tell him that he was going to throw away all the spending increases for our military until after Congress and the American people got over their spending addictions?
I expect that the alleged author of the "Art of the deal" not get rolled by the likes of Chuck Schumer. If I understand correctly, China gets 15 million in foreign aid out of this bill.
That's the fcuking best he could do?
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Sorry, but spending originates in the Congress. The Congressional Reps are the ones who lack the testicular fortitude.
As stupid and outrageous as the $15 MILLION to the Chinese is, losing $700 BILLION (or whatever the number is) for our badly overworked military and overextended military to a fit of pique would be self-destructive beyond calculation.
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https://www.newsmax.com/politics/anti-trump-new-york-times-columnist-david-brooks/2018/04/10/id/853677/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=idealmedia&utm_campaign=newsmax.com&utm_term=68938&utm_content=2218209
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I resent the usage by David Brock and others this description of differences of people as "tribal"
it is condescending denigrating and belittling .
This term always seems to come from the Left as a way to describe people on the Right as ancient , medieval , or ignorant , uneducated and basically dumb.
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He struggles to deal with the reality of how things are going. :-D
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I resent the usage by David [Brooks] and others this description of differences of people as "tribal"
it is condescending denigrating and belittling .
This term always seems to come from the Left as a way to describe people on the Right as ancient , medieval , or ignorant , uneducated and basically dumb.
I resent it too. It has a divide-America motive to it for political gain and it is disgusting.
I also hate terms of class in America, as if you're stuck in a class, upper, middle or lower. I remember as a boy wondering what class we were in. It could have been any of the three; we didn't neatly fit into a label. There are places in the world where they really do have classes that you are born into and stuck there for life. In America, we have mobility; you can move up down or sideways, and same for your so-called subculture. Unless all the people around you succeed in stopping you, you can choose any class or 'tribe' that you want. You can even choose your gender!
We call them terms like 'liberal elites' and their outlets 'mainstream media', but they embrace those labels. Like the proponents of "smart growth" and central health care planners like Jonathon Gruber, they really do believe they are smarter than everyone else. HRC: "I won the areas that have 2/3rds of GDP".
But as Crafty alludes, we know they aren't smarter because their policies don't work. A market full of honest, hard working people is smarter than a roomful of geniuses, even if each one of them really was smarter than us. The economy is picking up and our enemies are taking notice of the new Commander in Chief.
When the politicians and commentators go negative on the deplorables for example, it tends to backfire. The attacks on Trump and his supporters are backfiring.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/doctor-says-trump-dictated-letter-health-000553950.html
I am not defending the doctor here.
He is a bit questionable himself.
But this is exactly why Trump's heavy handed revenge tactics back fire in his face. He has never learned to control his temper.
The doctor should not have said anything bout propecia without Trump's prior approval
but just sending his palace guard there to raid the place was a bit much
OTOH I guess he didn't want the guy to copy his records
In NJ I used to copy the records to give to patients and keep the original which I think is necessary for legal purposes.
We are supposed to keep them for 7 yrs even if patient see another doctor.
I don't know about NY though
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Not much to say
if dems win Congress he will be impeached.
even if dems win Senate he may not be convicted as 67 votes needed (unless some rebs also vote to convict - and I can certainly see that happening)
the future of his presidency looks very miserable from here
*unless* Repubs can keep House and Senate.
It may be up to Repub turnout in November
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FWIW I see the legal tide shifting the President's way of late , , ,
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FWIW I see the legal tide shifting the President's way of late , , ,
He's rich, he bangs supermodels and porn stars, he wants to create a space army. He is an Iron Man suit away from being a superhero. He may be our greatest president ever!
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GM wrote :
"He's rich, he bangs supermodels and porn stars, he wants to create a space army. He is an Iron Man suit away from being a superhero. He may be our greatest president ever!"
A modern Republican version of DEM icon JKF
(except for the third sentence)
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https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/trumps-email-scandal/
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Yesterday I wrote about G7:
"Nice that the group now excludes Russia, not close to top 10 but part of the former G8 or 7+1."
The ink wasn't dry when Trump announced Russia should be in the group. What?? Mentioned earlier, Russia has an economy smaller than China, India and Brazil, all not in the talks. Their significance is what? Nuclear arms? China has those, India too. Rogue interventionism gives them a seat in the group of advanced economies? What is advanced about the Russian economy, crony industries and oil?
A minute or two before that he was bragging how no one is tougher on Russia than him.
It makes me think of the ZTE question. Why would we save a Chinese company who makes its fortune stealing US technology? He needs China's help on NK and with trade barriers.
Trump tried to isolate China on trade, but declaring a national security emergency on Canada and Europe as well.
Is this guy nuts?
I have grudgingly become a Trump supporter because he has been far better than expected, and better than the candidate I supported on policy and appointments would have been.
It's difficult being a Trump supporter when he keeps pulling stuff like this. Written previously, there is no way to tell while it's happening when he is being stupid and when he is a step or two ahead of us with an eye on the big picture.
Is this guy nuts, is exactly the question he wants his negotiating opponents, Europe on trade and Kim Jung Un on his continued existence, to be thinking as negotiations begin. He doesn't want Russia in the group. He wants his rivals in the trade game of chicken to think he is nuts. And he needs Putin's help to isolate NK. Now Un can wonder if Putin and Trump have something all worked out much larger than Russia protecting his puny regime.
Painful to watch but very good results could come out of this.
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IIRC, Russia is making quasi-cooperative noises about leaving Syria.
Putin is doing mating dances with Xi.
If at all possible we want to not have Russia working at cross purposes to us geopolitically. China and the Norks are all we can handle right now. If we succeed with the Norks, and Russia distances from the Iranians, our success with the Norks will lay the foundation for pressuring with Iran.
The Euros oppose us on the JCPOA in great part because of Swamp reasons. See https://www.facebook.com/FoxNewsVoices/videos/1047138215434733/?hc_ref=ARSrSohQBj3VrCPAUa3c8jbiiKNo7cJvf2D6Fev-dxAb42WhjzMQw5xHWOCPBhOAlJA Sorry for citing via FB, anyone have this on youtube?
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https://patriotpost.us/alexander/56540-trump-plays-chess-while-msm-plays-checkers?mailing_id=3544&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3544&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=header
Still looking for non-FB clip of this:
https://www.facebook.com/FoxNewsVoices/videos/1047138215434733/?hc_ref=ARSrSohQBj3VrCPAUa3c8jbiiKNo7cJvf2D6Fev-dxAb42WhjzMQw5xHWOCPBhOAlJA
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This I believe was the origin of Donald Trump's comments about rapists that were part of his announcing his candidacy:
""80% of women and girls from Central America who enter the U.S. illegally suffer rape."
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/12/central-america-migrants-rape_n_5806972.html "
I would also note that no one seems to have asked whether he said is his typically fragmented syntax
(working from memory here)
a) "the people they are sending , , , they are rapists" or
b) "they are sending us their rapists"
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This I believe was the origin of Donald Trump's comments about rapists that were part of his announcing his candidacy:
""80% of women and girls from Central America who enter the U.S. illegally suffer rape."
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/12/central-america-migrants-rape_n_5806972.html "
I would also note that no one seems to have asked whether he said is his typically fragmented syntax
(working from memory here)
a) "the people they are sending , , , they are rapists" or
b) "they are sending us their rapists"
He also based his campaign start on Ann Coulter's book 'Adios America' which I believe was a highly researched academic study of these problems. Most law enforcement and media crime reports don't distinguish legal from illegal with perps of crimes so a lot of research was required to try to measure the crimes of the illegals.
On the second part, good point. He did not say they were all rapists etc. but it was easy for opponents to say he was disparaging all of them with his not very careful arrangement of words. A little like the Muslims, if (only?)10% are jihadists and 30% are ISIS sympathizers, or if the ratios are one half or tenth of that, why take any of them if we can't sort it out? If we reject the whole group with plenty of good people in it because of the crimes of the many, so be it. With legal immigration we can at least try to sort out good from bad.
If you are an illegal who came across the border by paying thousand of US$ to a criminal border gang and an 80% chance your wife and daughters were raped, you have seen the bad elements of which he refers.
Interesting that Huffington Post is the source reporting that despicable border statistic, "according to directors of migrant shelters". Don't believe for a second that the leaders of the Left don't know how bad this is.
It is inhumane to keep luring them into this trap.
One more point on the "children". A 17 1/2 year old who has not been under the direction of a parent for 6 or 7 years and has already committed multiple felonies, rapes and murders, could be a gang leader, and would be tried as an adult if caught - is a "child". Not just the cute, innocent little ones.
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https://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/08/magazine/the-expanding-empire-of-donald-trump.html
...somehow, everyone at this sports function was drawn to Donald Trump, the 37-year-old owner of the New Jersey Generals, a franchise in the upstart United States Football League.
...
Donald J. Trump is the man of the hour. Turn on the television or open a newspaper almost any day of the week and there he is, snatching some star form the National Football League, announcing some preposterously lavish project he wants to build. Public-relations firms call him, offering to handle his account for nothing, so that they might take credit for the torrential hoopla. . .
SPENDING A DAY WITH Donald Trump is like driving a Ferrari without the windshield. It’s exhilarating; he gets a few bugs in his teeth. . .
Just as the name Donald Trump is well-known to most New Yorkers, the name is now becoming recognized throughout the country. He is fast becoming one of the nation’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, able to buy practically anthing he wants. . .
While critics charge that Mr. Trump is a raving egomaniac, bent on putting his name on every inanimate object in the city, he claims that putting on the Trump name is value added.
‘These units are selling,’ says Blanche Sprague, who is in charge of sales at Trump Plaza, ‘because of the Trump name.’ A man holding a trowel says he is proud to be working on a Trump building and always tells his friends.
‘I don’t think you understand,’ Mrs. Sprague adds. ‘When I walk down the street with Donald, people come up and just touch him, hoping that his good fortune will rub off.’
The Trump touch. It has set some people in New York to outright Trump worship; they call him ‘a real-estate genius’ who has helped lead the city out of the darkness of the mid-1970’s into a new era of glamour and excitement. Mr. Trump does not take exception to that.
To others, the notion that Mr. Trump seems to be able to do just about anything he sets his mind to is terrifying. They see him as a rogue billionaire, loose in the city like some sort of movie monster, unrestrained by the bounds of good taste or by city officials to whom he makes campaign contributions . . .
‘Trump is mad and wonderful,’ says [famed architect Philip] Johnson. . .
‘He has the uncanny ability to smell blood in the water,’ a competitor says. . . ‘He is an almost unbelievable negotiator,’ says Irving Fischer of HRH Construction. ‘I don’t worship at the shrine of Donald Trump,’ he says, ‘but our company has given up trying to negotiate costs with him. We just say: ‘Tell us what you want, you’re going to get it anyway.” . . .
Preston Robert Tisch, a developer and chief operating officer of the Loews Corporation, who lost out to Mr. Trump in the battle over whose site would be chosen for the city’s convention center, concludes: ‘He captured the imagination of people to a greater degree than I could.’
Mr. Trump does not place patience on his list of virtues. . . It is often pointed out that Mr. Trump is prone to exaggeration in describing his projects. Oh, he lies a great deal, says Philip Johnson with a laugh. But it’s sheer exuberance, exaggeration. It’s never about anything important. He’s straight as an arrow in his business dealings. . .
Mr. Trump has abandoned the flashy haberdashery he favored some years ago – a wardrobe that included a burgundy suit and matching shoes – and he now dresses conservatively if casually, often wearing dark suits, white shirts, subdued ties and loafers. He speaks slowly and softly and in the same casual manner to eminent architects an business moguls as to the coffee and sandwich vendor outside his casino-hotel. He is said, by acquaintances, to be generally even tempered and rarely seems ruffled. He is not given to unkind remarks and is nearly always in a positive frame of mind. I never think of the negative, he says. All obstacles can be overcome. . .
Asked to explain, he adds: What does it all mean when some wacko over in Syria can end the world with nuclear weapons? He says that his concern for nuclear holocaust is not one that popped into his mind during any recent made-of-television movie. He says that it has been troubling him since his uncle, a nuclear physicist, began talking to him about it 15 years ago.
His greatest dream is to personally do something about the problem and, characteristially, Donald Trump thinks he has an answer to nuclear armament: Let him negotiate arms agreements —he who can talk people into selling $100 million properties to him for $13 million. Negotiation is an art, he says, and I have a gift for it.
The idea that he would ever be allowed to get into a room alone and negotiate for the United States, let alone be successful in disarming the world, seems the naive musing of an optimistic, deluded young man who has never lost at anything he has tried. But he believes that through years of making his views known and through supporting candidates who share his views, it could someday happen.
He is constantly asked about his interest in running for elective office. Absolutely not, he answers. All of the false smiles and the red tape. It is too difficult to really do anything.
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Hat tip Steve Hayward
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Far out.
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Klayman:
not illegal to pay hush money(though the left will make it about some twisted election law thing)
it is not illegal to tape in one party NY state but unethical for Cohen to have done so with a law client
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Even Roosevelt seemed to like Stalin.
I though Trump was better then this though but I guess not :
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/helsinki-summit-trump-bites-on-putins-incredible-offer/
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a week or two ago we had one poll with him at 49 % and that was the highest approval yet.
now we have him at 44 % and he is at the highest yet. Every week I read his approval is mid 40s for a year and he is at the highest yet with each one.
What a bunch of BS :
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/donald-trump-republicans-approval-rating-economy/2018/07/22/id/873124/
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a week or two ago we had one poll with him at 49 % and that was the highest approval yet.
now we have him at 44 % and he is at the highest yet. Every week I read his approval is mid 40s for a year and he is at the highest yet with each one.
What a bunch of BS :
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/donald-trump-republicans-approval-rating-economy/2018/07/22/id/873124/
The 49% poll was probably Rasmussen, different methodology, generally more accurate. For the others, look at it this way,. He won the election at their measure of 38% approval so he is way up from where he was when he won 300 electoral votes.
Isn't Trump more popular in the US than Merkel is in Germany, May in Britain, Macron in France or Trudeau in Canada? Only in the 95% negative media are his detractors noteworthy.
On the disapproval side, Dems are united in hating Trump but divided beyond that. All the energy on the left is with the far left but the country is not clamoring for a revolution against capitalism. If a sensible moderate prevails with the Democrat nomination, the far left will revolt.
Of the Democrat candidates they could put up against Trump, there is a small pool of moderate or western state governors that aren't part of the socialists and jackasses in Washington, such as Hickenlooper in Colorado, and they have virtually no chance of being nominated or winning.
In the aftermath of Obama, all that's left of experienced leadership are the octogenarians. Put Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Schumer or Durbin on a national ballot. These are their leaders. What a joke. Or Ocasio or Ellison... Approvals are relative to the alternatives.
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Exactly.
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I don't know yet if House will be lost etc. But if it does this could well be what turns off the "independents" from voting Republican:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/midterm-elections-democratic-wave-trump-unpresidential-manner-will-cost-republicans/
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I like Jay Cost but he is half wrong which means wrong on this IMHO. Good for him for hanging around with wise people like George Will but George Will is wrong too. Electing Democrats doesn't solve this and voters know that.
Jay cost, from the article: "Trump’s entire Twitter feed is a case study in how not to act as president."
Because this is an overstatement, half false, this statement is false. Trump goes over the top and has inaccuracies in his Twitter feed but it is exactly that feed that gives him the voice that got him elected and got his long list of accomplishments achieved. To those who don't get that, you are missing something. Where is President Jeb Bush with his nice manners now? Where was the MSM support of John McCain after he won the nomination? When did the media reward Romney for his stately manner and deep resume?
It didn't matter. If you aren't a leftist, they hate you. If you can't fight back, you lose, they win. Trump's overstatements and chest pounding on his Twitter feed draw attention to it and that is where he is able to make his points to the public without the MSM filter. Haven't we all known this for about a year and a half or more?
If people don't like the unpresidential manner of this president, do they think it will be better with the House run by the nuts of the opposing party and as he defense against a groundless impeachment?
Trump will be removed from office only when a majority of Republicans turn against him. The midterm election is irrelevant to that. On the ballot this year will be the repeal of the economic recovery and the reinstatement of the Obama Ocasio Chavez economic plan. Democrats need about a plus 9 or 10 in the polls to win. Maybe we can look back later and say that they almost had that in late July.
Jay Cost is a good analyst but he is citing the last poll numbers published before the Republican economic success was cast into concrete for the midterm campaigns. The media won't toute it but the House Republican campaigns will and they have not begun to air.
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I agree with the piece's point about President Trump's all too frequent farts of personal immaturity and personal insecurity genuinely causing concern and that they are a key variable for many people in determining whether to support him and the Reps or not.
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" I agree with the piece's point about President Trump's all too frequent farts of personal immaturity and personal insecurity genuinely causing concern and that they are a key variable for many people in determining whether to support him and the Reps or not. '
Indeed
I am not nostradamus but I find it hard to believe this guy's approval would not be above 50% mark if he did not have the personality flaws that go with his tenacity.
We CANNOT lose the House this November.
We all agree here no doubt.
I can't believe the Senate race in Missouri is a toss up at this point.
How is it the slime ball crooked Dems so often can buy there way through elections?
I gave $100 to Hawley and will probably donate some more.
(of course I have a personal interest)
I was thinking of donating some to David Nunes.
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I wholly agree on manner and gaffes but don't think he would be president if Trump were not Trump. The good without the bad is not one of our options. His erratic behavior also causes confusion for Juncker, Un and Xi in addition to Schumer, Durbin, and even Ryan, McConnell. That is not all bad.
The issue I found him most wrong on was trade. He still makes wrong sounds on trade, yet his policy is leading toward breaking down the barriers against American products overseas and toward free trade more so than any other president or any other candidate would have achieved.
It seems to me his trendline is up; he is acting more and more presidential over time. The Helsinki freeze-up was bizarre but there was something more going on there that we don't know. Bigger things were at stake, the Syrian war and cooperation against Un and Xi for examples. Time will sort that out.
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couldn't agree with Bannon more :
https://www.yahoo.com/news/steve-bannon-charles-koch-apos-103627144.html
of course the big business guy is screaming about trade and immigration
blah blah blah.
he is not conservative then . you can't tell me you may be willing to work with crats and give the US of A as we know away for good and tell me you are a real Republican or conservative
over some temporary tariff issues and opening up flood gates to the world who will predominately vote for a party that is against everything we stand for
now is not the time to squabble .
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quote author=ccp
couldn't agree with Bannon more :
Yes but not real practical to tell donors to shut up.
To Koch and to George Wil typesl, it's pretty hard to advance libertarian causes by supporting the party of Obama, Sanders, Pelosi!
Pick the right side and help out. Give money to Cramer in North Dakota and to key house candidates. They can still criticize Trump when he's wrong or has bad form.
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"Yes but not real practical to tell donors to shut up."
I agree ,
but then what to do with them? do we change policy that affects the whole nation because they insist?
they are threatening to stop donations and support Dems if they don't get what THEY want.
they can do what they want with their money but does the Repubs need to be threatened by their own donors
their points are well taken with divisiveness and trade and immigration .
But that said
they either support the GOP ( with some disagreements in policy understood) or they don't.
why are they giving to the GOP anyway ? is it all about what helps their businesses and everything else be damed?
I am not saying that but just don't get it otherwise . that is what it appears to be.
How can anyone seriously insist on immigration (open at least ) and after watching what has happened to California and other previously red states like Colorado NM and others and say you are for the GOP?
the two are incompatible. The Bush theory of winning them over is too little and too late and cannot compete with the Dems tax and bribe policies
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/the_chinese_think_trump_is_a_genius.html
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/the_chinese_think_trump_is_a_genius.html
From a link in the article:
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
"The Supreme Art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." -- Sun Tzu
17 Jul 2012
Trump was known as a negotiator before he had the full faith and credit (and military) of the United States of America behind him for his position of strength. It seemed like a joke or cliche, but it really will get more and more fun for him if he keeps winning.
How do the Canadians, the EU, or the Chinese justify their own position, having a complex set of rules and tariffs against our products while we accept theirs freely? We don't have cheap labor and their consumers can't afford that much of our products, what are they afraid of? It doesn't make any sense. A level playing field with no tariffs is the only logical stopping point in the trade fight. Meanwhile Trump has confronted China with a number of even bigger issues, NK, Taiwan, So China Sea, technology theft, WTO, nuclear proliferation in their region, plus underlying all that they know he might just be nuts. Brush him off at your own risk but if I were them I would cut a deal and let Trump declare victory.
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271088/trumps-character-and-trumps-presidency-david-horowitz
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https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2018/08/24/jim-brown-backs-trump-2020-claims-support-will-make-me-very-unpopular-black-community/
I remember around 10 yrs old reading a biography from some NY Giant who discussed a lot of his games . I think he was a defensive lineman but cannot remember his name.
Whenever they would play Cleveland the coaches would tell them to watch out for Jimmy Brown. Watch out for him over and over again.
They would play against the Browns and Jimmy would run all over them anyway and kick their rear ends.
May have been a better actor than OJ too.
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I saw Jim Brown play against the Philadelphia Eagles.
He was truly extraordinary.
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An truth came out of the McCain funeral where presidents Bush and Obama spoke, Hillary and Biden sat next to the Cheneys and Trump was shunned, mocked and denigrated:
The Resistance is The Establishment.
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http://thehill.com/homenews/house/405463-dems-vow-to-grab-trump-tax-returns-upon-taking-majority
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/donald-trump-political-opponents/
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-apprentice-book-excerpt-at-cias-russia-house-growing-alarm-about-2016-election-interference/2018/09/18/51eb1732-b5c5-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html?utm_term=.fe6aba2cdcd9&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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Trump Family Finance
Being Fred Trump’s son was good for business. Being President, not so much.
315 Comments
By James Freeman
Oct. 3, 2018 3:21 p.m. ET
Donald Trump with his father, Fred Trump, in 1992.
Donald Trump with his father, Fred Trump, in 1992. Photo: Judie Burstein/Zuma Press
Last year MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow revealed tax data suggesting that Donald Trump is not nearly as good as Warren Buffett when it comes to avoiding federal income taxes. But what about Mr. Trump’s late father Fred? The New York Times is out with a story claiming that the Trump family patriarch went way too far to avoid taxes as he transferred significant wealth to his children, especially Donald.
Meanwhile, according to a new analysis in Forbes magazine, the frequently aired media speculation that the Trump family business is benefiting from the Trump presidency has it exactly backwards. Politics appears to be a commercial killer.
No surprise, the New York Times story is the one getting most of the attention today. According to the Times:
Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.
But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.
Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.
Tax lawyers and accountants can now debate the particulars. Regardless, the Times story makes a forceful argument that estate taxes encourage wealthy entrepreneurs to pursue complicated schemes to shield their fortunes. Since the Times piece claims that Fred Trump’s building projects were often supported by government programs, the story also makes a strong case that housing subsidies sold by politicians in the name of keeping housing “affordable” often end up enriching property owners who are hardly in need of assistance. Unfortunately, you won’t find these lessons in a list of Times “Takeaways” from the paper’s inquiry into Trump family finances.
Was the President’s father a crook? The Times notes:
In a statement on behalf of the Trump family, the president’s brother, Robert Trump, said, “All appropriate gift and estate tax returns were filed, and the required taxes were paid.”
The Times maintains that the Trumps often undervalued assets to reduce taxes owed on them and adds:
These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.
The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.
This column should clarify that while it’s definitely a scandal that the founders of any business would be expected to hand over more than half of what they built to the feds, Timesfolk are upset because they believe the Trumps should have been required to surrender more than $52 million.
As the Times acknowledges, much of the story detailing Fred Trump’s success and support of his son’s business career is not news. The Times notes an episode in which Fred Trump found an unusual way of financing his son’s struggling casino operations. The story is recalled in a new book on Donald Trump’s lender Citibank co-authored by your humble correspondent, but this column did not break the story. All the way back in January of 1991, Neil Barsky reported in The Wall Street Journal :
Donald Trump can add another individual to his long list of creditors: his father, the quiet real estate mogul Fred Trump.
At least that’s what New Jersey casino regulators are saying. The regulators, who scrutinize what comes in and out of Atlantic City casinos, say it appears that the elder Mr. Trump helped his son make the $18.4 million interest payment on Trump Castle bonds in a rather unconventional manner by buying chips in his casino.
The regulators confirmed that on Dec. 17, an attorney they identified as Howard Snyder, acting on Fred Trump’s behalf, purchased more than $3 million in chips from the Trump Castle casino. Mr. Snyder did not gamble with the chips and promptly left the casino under police escort, according to regulators...
One person close to the transaction said it was likely that Fred Trump purchased the chips rather than loan the funds directly to Mr. Trump because he wanted to avoid having to compete with other creditors in the event he wanted the money returned. Now, this individual said, all the elder Mr. Trump has to do is redeem the chips in the casino.
“It is the ultimate first mortgage,” the individual said.
And Fred Trump was the ultimate dad when it came to helping his son succeed in real estate. As for whether the elder Trump’s tax avoidance crossed the line into evasion, we can’t get his side of the story because he died in June of 1999. This also means that a libel suit can no longer be filed on his behalf.
In any case, the real estate empire created by Fred Trump and now owned by his son does not appear to be mixing well with politics. Forbes magazine reports on leaner times at Trump Tower:
Nike abandoned its attached flagship store earlier this year, and Ivanka Trump’s accessories business closed up shop as well. What’s left is basically nothing but Gucci, Starbucks and The Donald, wall-to-wall. Trump Bar sits atop Trump Grille, next to Trump Café, the Trump Store and Trump’s Ice Cream. It is unlikely Trump pays himself rent for any of them. “Things are all different now,” [Trump Organization executive Barbara Res] says.
That difference includes profits. Net operating income dropped 27% between 2014, the year before Trump announced his run for president, and 2017, his first year in the White House. When the real estate mogul descended the escalator to launch his campaign, in this very building, no one could have predicted the chain of events that would lead to this point...
While the experiment continues to unfold, in real time, the early results are in. Much as he’s trying—and he’s definitely trying—Donald Trump is not getting richer off the presidency. Just the opposite. His net worth, by our calculation, has dropped from $4.5 billion in 2015 to $3.1 billion the last two years, knocking the president 138 spots lower on the Forbes 400.
***
Kavanaugh Vote on Tap
Opponents of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to serve on the Supreme Court have largely moved on from accusations of gang rape to accusations of gang rental of beachfront property.
This follows Judge Kavanaugh’s admission last week that he “fully embraces” beer. While it might seem that professional academics have only unkind words to say about the judge, Columbia business school professor Charles Calomiris thinks that the Kavanaugh beer declaration “puts him in good company.” Writes the professor in an email:
Jesus’s first miracle was to convert water into wine. Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1779 to André Morellet: “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”
So, on one side we have the new hypocrisy of Democrat Senators pretending to dislike drinking. On the other side we have Kavanaugh, Franklin, and God. Choosing sides on this one is not very hard.
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second post
New York Tax Department Reviewing Allegations of Trump Family Transactions
New York Times reported Fred Trump passed assets to his son Donald via complex deals in the 1990s
Framed photographs of President Donald Trump's parents, Fred and Mary Trump, are displayed on a table in the Oval Office.
Framed photographs of President Donald Trump's parents, Fred and Mary Trump, are displayed on a table in the Oval Office. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
391 Comments
By Jimmy Vielkind
Updated Oct. 3, 2018 10:26 a.m. ET
The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance said Tuesday that it is reviewing allegations made in a New York Times report that President Trump’s father transferred money to him and his siblings through complex tax arrangements.
The Times reported on Tuesday that during the 1990s, Fred Trump and Donald Trump engaged in a series of transactions to pass income and real-estate assets from father to son while limiting tax liability. Citing confidential tax records it reviewed, the Times reported that over his lifetime, Mr. Trump received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father, a New York City landlord who built a real- estate empire from scratch.
James Gazzale, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Taxation and Finance, said the allegations in the Times article are under review and his agency is “vigorously pursuing all appropriate avenues of investigation.”
Charles Harder, an attorney for Mr. Trump, didn’t immediately return a call and email seeking comment on the tax department’s review. In a statement to the Times, Mr. Harder said there was “no fraud or tax evasion” involving Fred Trump.
“Fred Trump has been gone for nearly twenty years and it’s sad to witness this misleading attack against the Trump family,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement Tuesday evening. “Many decades ago the IRS reviewed and signed off on these transactions.”
The Department of Taxation and Finance is a state-level version of the Internal Revenue Service. It is responsible for collecting and processing sales, business and personal income tax returns in New York. While the department is a state agency, the audit and investigative functions aren’t directed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration, a spokesman for the governor said.
Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, previously confirmed that the department had opened an inquiry into whether Mr. Trump’s now-defunct charity, The Donald J. Trump Foundation, committed tax fraud. That inquiry is ongoing; Mr. Gazzale has declined to comment on its progress.
Attorney General Barbara Underwoodhas sued Mr. Trump over the foundation, accusing it of self-dealing and illegal political coordination between the foundation and Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. Lawyers for Mr. Trump have moved to dismiss the suit, and say it is politically motivated.
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Old and busted: RAAAAAaaaaaaAAAAAAApe!
New, exciting and extra shiny" TAAAAAaaaaaaAAAAaaaaxes!
second post
New York Tax Department Reviewing Allegations of Trump Family Transactions
New York Times reported Fred Trump passed assets to his son Donald via complex deals in the 1990s
Framed photographs of President Donald Trump's parents, Fred and Mary Trump, are displayed on a table in the Oval Office.
Framed photographs of President Donald Trump's parents, Fred and Mary Trump, are displayed on a table in the Oval Office. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
391 Comments
By Jimmy Vielkind
Updated Oct. 3, 2018 10:26 a.m. ET
The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance said Tuesday that it is reviewing allegations made in a New York Times report that President Trump’s father transferred money to him and his siblings through complex tax arrangements.
The Times reported on Tuesday that during the 1990s, Fred Trump and Donald Trump engaged in a series of transactions to pass income and real-estate assets from father to son while limiting tax liability. Citing confidential tax records it reviewed, the Times reported that over his lifetime, Mr. Trump received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father, a New York City landlord who built a real- estate empire from scratch.
James Gazzale, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Taxation and Finance, said the allegations in the Times article are under review and his agency is “vigorously pursuing all appropriate avenues of investigation.”
Charles Harder, an attorney for Mr. Trump, didn’t immediately return a call and email seeking comment on the tax department’s review. In a statement to the Times, Mr. Harder said there was “no fraud or tax evasion” involving Fred Trump.
“Fred Trump has been gone for nearly twenty years and it’s sad to witness this misleading attack against the Trump family,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement Tuesday evening. “Many decades ago the IRS reviewed and signed off on these transactions.”
The Department of Taxation and Finance is a state-level version of the Internal Revenue Service. It is responsible for collecting and processing sales, business and personal income tax returns in New York. While the department is a state agency, the audit and investigative functions aren’t directed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration, a spokesman for the governor said.
Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, previously confirmed that the department had opened an inquiry into whether Mr. Trump’s now-defunct charity, The Donald J. Trump Foundation, committed tax fraud. That inquiry is ongoing; Mr. Gazzale has declined to comment on its progress.
Attorney General Barbara Underwoodhas sued Mr. Trump over the foundation, accusing it of self-dealing and illegal political coordination between the foundation and Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. Lawyers for Mr. Trump have moved to dismiss the suit, and say it is politically motivated.
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Trump, right side up. Didn't he win the election at 38% approval?
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/trump_administration/prez_track_oct04
New, Free Trade Agreement, great Supreme Court picks, roaring economy. You don't have to like him to approve any more.
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Getrude Stein who wrote the famous line " a rose is a rose is a rose"
the same cannot always be said of a poll is a poll is a poll
In other words a poll may or may not be the truth and is nothing but a poll
OTOH this sure makes me feel good:
https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/kanyes-not-alone-blacks-are-deserting-the-dems/
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/trump_goes_full_alinsky_in_the_midterm_race.html#ixzz5TMviqa4W&f
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/trump_goes_full_alinsky_in_the_midterm_race.html#ixzz5TMviqa4W&f
Great news and great strategy, he needs to call this out.
Secondly, he needs to challenge the other side to be better, to stand up for American ideals even if they disagree with him on details of policy. Ideals such as that the constitution is a set of principles and doesn't favor one side or the other.
Trump is good at mixing messages. He needs to both call out what is wrong in his opponents and also speak to the country as a whole. For example, we need to pull together right now as a nation on the China trade issue. The president of the United States is the only person who can do that.
He should watch a few Reagan videos. Reagan called out his opponents but didn't generally try to explain what he or what Republicans were trying to do, he was explaining the challenges that America faces and what America is trying to do.
Starting with this, Reagan's first inaugural.
https://youtu.be/hpPt7xGx4Xo
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https://clarionproject.org/how-isis-plot-to-assassinate-trump-was-foiled/
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51-47
http://m.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/political_updates/prez_track_nov02
If there is some big Republican surprise on Tuesday, this was an indicator.
By the way, Trump gave a great speech yesterday on immigration and the Caravan. He sounded very presidential, a pretty big breakthrough for him.
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51% Rasmussen today
Rasmussen for some reason seems to find him polling higher then the other polls
That said this is quite an achievement being up the Dem propaganda machine .
Can anyone imagine what it would be if he got evern 50 /50 good /bad reviews as opposed to 95/5 bad / good?
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" 51% Rasmussen today
Rasmussen for some reason seems to find him polling higher then the other polls"
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One reason is they poll likely voters instead of registered voters. Each firm has their own view of how to balance poll samples and predict who votes. Rasmussen was accurate poll in 2016. Others are more accurate in Democratic wave years. Which kind of year is this, I guess nobody knows two days away.
Other polls tighten up close to elections because that is where they measure accuracy, errors and fake news. ABC and NBC just raised Trump approval to 44, 46%. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/
George Bush had 30% approval when he lost the House and Senate.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx
Zogby has Trump at 46-51 and very strong on issues. (Is Trump on the ballot?)
A majority of voters think the economy will be good for the next four years.
[Nobody is talking about the great economy because the people we hear talking are the 93% negative MSM.]
Hispanic support for Trump surged from 31% to 42%. THAT is a BFD.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-approval-rebounds-to-45-surges-among-hispanics-union-homes-men
Black American Approval - 40% Rasnmuissen. https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1056946262690299904/photo/1
In suburbs [where Republicans are supposed to lose the House] likely voters agree with Trump sending troops to the border: 56/44. That could be the game changer. Crazy like a fox, he won the argument over the economy and quickly shifted back to a more emotional, security issue. They hear the media rip his border security while thinking wait, I support that. Immigration and border security is a concern for suburban women, who knew?
Will there be surprises Tuesday? Yes. So many important races House and Senate are still considered tossup or within the margin of error. Which way will they go? Nobody knows. I like the way the facts are lining up for the Republicans. I hate the messaging. Someday maybe we can have a leader on our side who can make a coherent economic argument. Trump at least does that at the gut level.
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1. Most obvious coming accomplishments will be judicial appointments. District and Appeals Courts plus potentially this:
https://www.smobserved.com/story/2018/09/27/politics/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-will-retire-from-the-us-supreme-court-in-january-2019/3658.html
Update, Now this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/11/08/ruth-bader-ginsburg-hospitalized-after-fall-supreme-court-office/1928409002/
2. China. Both sides need an agreement that settles the disputes. Look for a big breakthrough soon.
3. North Korea. If nothing further happens, Trump won, no more threats or nuclear or missile tests. If NK wants sanctions relief, Trump wins denuclearization. If NK goes rogue, Trump likely wins handly an international crisis.
4. The economy: Trump likely continues to win. The cuts made were growth oriented and mostly lasting.
5. Taxes: Pelosi and co. need blue state S.A.L.T. tax relief, that means a minor deal could be cut.
6. Regulations: Trump continues to win because his predecessor governed through executive orders that are easily undone.
7. Budget / Spending: Trump is a better negotiator than Republican predecessors. Knows how to use the podium stage and go around the media. He needs to pin deficits on spending and Democrats, if people care about that.
8. Healthcare: This is the big unknown. Dems are committed to single payer which is unachievable without control of all branches and chambers. Republicans need to keep moving forward with expanded private sector choices even if they are blocked in the new Dem House.
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Good analysis.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-completes-a-shameful-trip-to-paris-just-as-he-needs-the-global-stage?mbid=nl_Daily%20111218&CNDID=50142053&utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20111218&utm_content=&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=Daily%20111218&hasha=52f016547a40edbdd6de69b8a7728bbf&hashb=e02b3c0e6e0f3888e0288d6e52a57eccde1bfd75&spMailingID=14604191&spUserID=MjAxODUyNTc2OTUwS0&spJobID=1520934440&spReportId=MTUyMDkzNDQ0MAS2
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Libs are suddenly such worshipers of out military
You mean the same 1960' s crew that used to spit on our soldiers?
Trump who is always talking up our military and talking about staying away from war is now a disgrace on Veterans Day . What crop.
He did go to a cemetery to commemorate the 100 th anniversary of armistice 1918.
Just not the one the globalists went to .
Just another round of lib bashing trying to manipulate the propaganda story to pretend they own the veteran high ground
The journalister nonsense about Trump's brand of nationalism had anything to do with the carnage of th 20th century is false. The New Yorker is same as NYT .
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Macron struggles with defining words like “teacher” and “abuser” and “wife”, so I won’t be looking for him to define other concepts.
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I thought it pretty fg spectacular forn:
a) Marcron to call "nationalism the opposite of patriotism", particularly with Trump right there on the 100th Anniversary of a day enabled by American force of arms;
b) Marcron to call for a Euro Army (fine by me) for the purpose of defending Europe from the Chinese, Russians, , , or Americans
c) the Euros to undercut and back stab our re-imposition of sanctions..
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I thought it pretty fg spectacular forn:
a) Marcron to call "nationalism the opposite of patriotism", particularly with Trump right there on the 100th Anniversary of a day enabled by American force of arms;
b) Marcron to call for a Euro Army (fine by me) for the purpose of defending Europe from the Chinese, Russians, , , or Americans
c) the Euros to undercut and back stab our re-imposition of sanctions..
Long past time to get out of europe.
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I thought it pretty fg spectacular forn:
a) Marcron to call "nationalism the opposite of patriotism", particularly with Trump right there on the 100th Anniversary of a day enabled by American force of arms;
b) Marcron to call for a Euro Army (fine by me) for the purpose of defending Europe from the Chinese, Russians, , , or Americans
c) the Euros to undercut and back stab our re-imposition of sanctions..
Walter Russell Mead on this topic
https://www.wsj.com/articles/macrons-faux-pas-on-nationalism-1542066344
Trump Fights Back.
“The problem is that Emmanuel suffers from a very low Approval Rating in France, 26%, and an unemployment rate of almost 10%. He was just trying to get onto another subject."
" make France great again"
The meaning of Trump's nationalism is intentionally Lost in Macron's Translation. He is actually reversing his predecessors authoritarian rule. Hitler analogies fail 4 people who didn't murder 6 million Jews. Americans bailed out France over and over, in our own nationalist interest, and left them to be free.
A simple thank you might have been more fitting even if it wasn't Trump who saved them.
If I were Macron and hated Trump I think I would ignore him instead of picking a meaningless, unwinnable fight.
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Headlines the left imagines: French criticism of Trump ends 2020 re-election prospects!
I thought it pretty fg spectacular forn:
a) Marcron to call "nationalism the opposite of patriotism", particularly with Trump right there on the 100th Anniversary of a day enabled by American force of arms;
b) Marcron to call for a Euro Army (fine by me) for the purpose of defending Europe from the Chinese, Russians, , , or Americans
c) the Euros to undercut and back stab our re-imposition of sanctions..
Walter Russell Mead on this topic
https://www.wsj.com/articles/macrons-faux-pas-on-nationalism-1542066344
Trump Fights Back.
“The problem is that Emmanuel suffers from a very low Approval Rating in France, 26%, and an unemployment rate of almost 10%. He was just trying to get onto another subject."
" make France great again"
The meaning of Trump's nationalism is intentionally Lost in Macron's Translation. He is actually reversing his predecessors authoritarian rule. Hitler analogies fail 4 people who didn't murder 6 million Jews. Americans bailed out France over and over, in our own nationalist interest, and left them to be free.
A simple thank you might have been more fitting even if it wasn't Trump who saved them.
If I were Macron and hated Trump I think I would ignore him instead of picking a meaningless, unwinnable fight.
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I don't know whether to be for or against the crime bill as I read so many opposing contradictory views on it , but this does clearly seem to be the opposite of what he campaigned on:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/15/after-suggesting-2018-election-about-law-and-order-trump-touts-weaker-penalties-for-drug-traffickers/
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I don't know whether to be for or against the crime bill as I read so many opposing contradictory views on it , but this does clearly seem to be the opposite of what he campaigned on:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/15/after-suggesting-2018-election-about-law-and-order-trump-touts-weaker-penalties-for-drug-traffickers/
Like poverty programs, criminal law and penalties for crimes should be open for re-examination, but being weak on crime is generally a bad thing.
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FWIW, make take on it at the moment:
1) Bretibart, apart from Caroline Glick, remains a dubious source and I ask that it be cited with care around here; the article here speaks only of drug dealers-- what else is in the bill? And what kind of drug dealers are they?
2) IMHO US mandatory sentencing laws often create grave injustice. Just this morning there was a piece on the news about sexual assaults on air planes on the rise that mentioned that the sentence could be as much as ten years. In that an assault on a plane is usually a matter of an offensive groping, what sense does it make to have ten years on the table? This is deranged. This enables bullying in negotiations where the accused genuinely feels wrongly accused, but is looking at ten years if he does not take the deal and loses.
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believes Trump played into the hands of the LEFt on crime bill.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/first-step-act-trump-embraces-left-wing-racism-rhetoric/
Only Time will tell if crime goes back up.
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How wrong! How utterly stupid! How utterly immature!
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" How wrong! How utterly stupid! How utterly immature!"
yup
and this why he will likely lose in '20.
he just can't and won't even try as far as i can tell to control himself
this HAS to cause damage to the morale of those who serve!
The older brother of Katherine's cousin that died who is a colonel in the air force now regrets he ever served because he told her no one really "appreciates" his sacrifice (and of course he feels guilty for inspiring his now deceased brother to join)
Trump is playing right into this.
Just NO excuse
he is going to lose in '20 if the Dems come up with an honorable qualified candidate.
However I don't see any at this time.
Certainly ain't Kamala or Hillary or Joe or Cory etc.....
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/nov/19/james-mattis-pressed-pentagon-budget-cuts/
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How wrong! How utterly stupid! How utterly immature!
Video: https://video.foxnews.com/v/5968742441001
He could have easily argued against the substance of the point McRaven made instead of against the person.
McRaven: "Trump's attacks on the media were 'greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime." Oh Good God. Want me to name a few, how about the Soviet threat the first 34 years of your life?
It's okay to me to expose a retired military officer, Navy Seal, as the political player he is now, but you do that by also honoring at least acknowledging all the good he did first.
We should have gotten bin Laden sooner? True, but not a really point against McRaven.
The points he made against Pakistan were largely true, but weird in the way he blended them in. Also his opposition to the Iraq war, irrelevant to that argument.
Trump's weakness (and maybe his strength?) is in these against-the-person attacks. Then his opponents respond attacking against the person Trump instead of intelligently debating his policies one by one. It is a very low level of politics being played on all sides. At least in some ways, he is just the person to do it.
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I conclude calling people names like one might have done in grammar school is not a "strength" of the POTUS.
He belittles himself and the rest of us.
His poll numbers have never crossed 50 % and I believe this is exactly why.
" He could have easily argued against the substance of the point McRaven made instead of against the person. "
I agree totally and would add that
McRaven might well NOT have made the disparaging remarks of Trump to begin with if , indeed , the "Donald" was not such a foul mouth got to get the last work in kind of guy.
Trump is simply NOT winning anyone over beyond whatever wants to call his base. I for support him 100 % but am disgusted and beyond fatigued about his pissing away in the wind any good things he does by shooting off his mouth and alienating people who WILL come back to bring him down. Just foolish and not smart political gamesmanship.
Just my one opinion out of 7 billion on the planet .
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OTOH I do agree with Trump that we certainly have "Obama" judges . :|
we've been following this for years on this board
If he can just keep it "civil" though and not get in it too much with the Chief Justice who seems to not note the politically obvious though in his position can he really do that?
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Worth remembering is that as best as we can tell Roberts changed his vote to save Obamacare for political reasons, yes?
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" Worth remembering is that as best as we can tell Roberts changed his vote to save Obamacare for political reasons, yes?"
I think the theory is he decided to support Obamacare to keep the Court from *appearing* political.
Yet one could argue as I think you are suggesting that that decision to support Obamacare by itself is in was by itself a political and thus not a legal interpretation of the Constitution.
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Exactly so.
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40 minutes. Recommended
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlNacmT5MSw
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Trump in '20 depends on who crats nominate .
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/i-can-tell-you-right-now-what-will-happen-in-2020/
So there is al least one person of the 7 billion on the planet who sees it the same as me for '20.
Trump just screws himself every time he insults high placed people.
from my post on Nov 21 :
"Trump is simply NOT winning anyone over beyond whatever wants to call his base. I for support him 100 % but am disgusted and beyond fatigued about his pissing away in the wind any good things he does by shooting off his mouth and alienating people who WILL come back to bring him down. Just foolish and not smart political gamesmanship.
Just my one opinion out of 7 billion on the planet "
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http://michellemalkin.com/2018/11/21/first-step-pro-cop-pro-borders-pro-criminal-justice-reform/
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Damn, the man thinks so clearly-- what a pleasure to read!
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/trump-media-criticism-enemy-of-the-people-charge/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202018-11-24&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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Yes Andrew's article is good. I am glad he disagrees with Chris Wallace who seems to ignore the truth by claiming we (news people ) are all one !
(But at the same time then states Wallace is objective!! Well if that not a contradictory conclusion against the OBVIOUS. )
(Wallace's claims are akn to Justice Roberts' coming out and stating there are no 'politically' biased OBAMA Clinton Trump judges. )
Nice to see some at least at NR FINALLY speaking truth about what we are up against . Seems to me that the Kavanaugh circus FINALLY opened their eyes - seems to have opened some legislators - to a good extent Lindsey Graham too for example.
With respect for the NR they try to be objective reasonable and open to all sides of the argument. They finally seem to get they and us are against the LEFT which is not objective , reasonable or objective or interested anything then gaining total power over the world with their progressive views
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/trump-policy-success-political-success/
How many times have so many of us prayed he would heed this kind of advice only to be disappointed over and over again.
Zero evidence he will change - none.
No one else on horizon to replace him though.
I feel like we are the defenders of the Alamo just before the walls are breached for good............
This may well be the real Montezuma's revenge................
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The Trump Volatility Risks
The President indulges his worst impulses and loses a defense chief.
608 Comments
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 20, 2018 7:58 p.m. ET
It is well known that President Trump invests fervent belief in the stock market as a performance measure. When it’s rising, as it often has during his Presidency, he says that his policies are responsible. But what about a week like this with markets in decline, including a steep two-day drop in the Dow Jones average? No logic exists that will allow Mr. Trump to take responsibility only for sunny days.
The President is right to believe in market signals. More than any individual can do, markets absorb material events occurring in the world and make financial bets on the future. This week they have had to absorb three major events: The Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates after public pressure from the President not to do so; Mr. Trump’s abrupt and unilateral decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria; and Mr. Trump’s 11th-hour threat Thursday not to sign a budget bill that would prevent a Friday night government shutdown.
Mr. Trump entered the Presidency as a disrupter of the status quo, for which he has many fans. We include ourselves among those who believe the political status quo—here and abroad—was overdue for challenge. He has provided that with a sharp cut in the U.S. corporate tax rate, economy-wide deregulation and U.S. withdrawal from the Obama Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord.
The execution of those decisions, however, is a far cry from what is happening now. Mr. Trump crossed over this week from considered disruption into a degree of political volatility that has the potential to raise the political risks for himself and U.S. interests.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell was at pains during his press conference to make the economic case for raising rates now, but the overhang from Mr. Trump’s threats against Mr. Powell and the Fed were impossible to dismiss. And then as if markets and the world didn’t have enough to absorb from the Fed’s decision, Mr. Trump made his Syria pullout call the same day.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump tweeted that “Getting out of Syria was no surprise” because he campaigned on it. But the abruptness of the announcement did catch his own advisers and the world by surprise. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, is widely reported to have not been consulted.
Withdrawing those 2,000 American troops from the Middle East is a significant act for which allies in the region and elsewhere needed a decent interval to prepare. Mr. Trump gave them none. The decision, which emerged after Mr. Trump’s phone call with Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, did earn public praise from one big beneficiary—Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Then on Thursday Mr. Trump tweeted that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, one of his strongest appointees, “will be retiring” in February. This landed shortly after the Journal reported that Mr. Trump may withdraw most U.S. troops from Afghanistan within weeks. Mr. Mattis’s resignation letter makes clear he is leaving because he disagrees with Mr. Trump’s treatment of allies and his impulsive decision making.
Meanwhile, the Thursday threat to shut down the government over funding for the wall comes amid no strategy for prevailing in this fight. Most Senators have left town after voting to fund the government until February. Any new spending patch needs 60 Senate votes, meaning Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer’s blessing for what surely would be a bottom-dollar fig leaf of wall funding.
Mr. Trump should take this week’s big market selloff seriously as a useful warning. The successful disruptions of the President’s first year emerged from planned strategies executed by allies in the government and Congress. His erratic actions this week are different. Heading into 2019 and divided government, Mr. Trump is acting less like a confident disturber of the status quo and more like a raging bull.
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Hard to comment on news that is still so fluid.
Syria: To Trump, this is a promise kept. To us, it is reason why no one here except pp supported him until no one but Hillary was running. Trump's view is NOT the same as the people who support this decision like Rand Paul. Trump still believes in Peace through Strength and a military buildup. It is VERY possible he will revisit and revise this flawed decision. I think we had 2000 troops and 4 deaths. Hard to say aloud that is a very small number in war. Perhaps it was done to gain favor with Turkey on a particular cause that could get resolved. Doubtful it was done to (intentionally) appease Russia or Iran, or ISIS, the other main beneficiaries.
In Trump's world, the main controversial decision might have been withdrawal from Afghanistan. Maybe the controversy over withdrawal from Syria was made or timed to slide that announcement through.
In the cases of both Syria and Afghan, he better damn well have a plan. Maybe Mattis was unkeepable and certainly he will find another great Defense Secretary, but we were stronger with Mattis than without.
Abandon the Kurds... Are you kidding? Now they may need to ally with Assad... Why don't we set up a military base in Kurdistan. How about an embassy too if he is so bold.
On the good side of Trump's unpredictable behavior is the confusion it causes for his rival adversaries like Kim Jung Un, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Nancy Pelosi. The man is not afraid to go against his advisers - or his nation's best interest. Don't get overconfident negotiating with him, Un, Xi, Vlad or Nan.
Wall / Steel slats / Shutdown? Trump on a video he made sure everyone saw: "I have the votes in the House."
Nancy Pelosi: "No you don't." Chuck Schumer: "No you don't." Nancy and Chuck tgether: "No you don't."
The vote was called and the wall funding won, receiving 217 votes.
Suddenly the Trump shutdown that was so easily named is now the Schumer shutdown and no one else. If Trump and the wall can now get 50-51 votes in the Senate and they do not invoke the nuclear option which McConnell has said they will not, then the President, House and Senate have all agreed to the terms but will shut down anyway due to the Schumer cloture vote filibuster. All over a piddly to them US$5 billion and the admitted obsession with continued borders open to drugs, arms, terrorists, gangs, dehydrated children and a new supply of welfare recipients Democratic voters.
Is Heidi Heitkamp going to vote against it, shut down the government? Joe Donelly, Joe Manchin, Claire McCaskill, Doug Jones, Testor, Bill Nelson? All Dems are going to put party loyalty above secure borders and a functioning government? Why? Committee assignments for outgoing Senators?? How about the ones who tell us they reach across the aisle, Klobuchar, Koons, Bennet, Coons, Angus King, independent?? How about New Hampshire and New Mexico with their opioid epidemics, still nobody care about free flow at the southern border?
If Trump has learned anything from the Democrats on immigration it is don't win, keep the issue alive.
That is a very bad start for Schumer-Pelosi and the gang as the new session and the new campaign season starts up. Elect us for dysfunctional government. Check out the market since Dems were projected to take the House and completed their self declared wave. Somebody got it right.
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"Is Heidi Heitkamp going to vote against it, shut down the government? Joe Donelly, Joe Manchin, Claire McCaskill, Doug Jones, Testor, Bill Nelson?"
what about Flake and
Collins Murkowski and a few others?
Listened to Rush on way to and back from bringing my 18 yo J Russell to the vet
He has it right . IF the Republicans can just stick together on this and support Trump we can achieve something.
Some on National Review may disagree but some don't get it in mho. VDH sure does .
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https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/daughters-late-podiatrist-claim-diagnosed-donald-trump-bone-spurs-vietnam-war-favor-134618527.html
DAughters Jewish New Yorkers mostly likely Democrats
As for me this makes their father look a sell out lying doctor
I remember most people were trying to finds ways to avoid the draft. I don't know of doctors who would lie and make up medical reasons for someone to get favors in his apartment .
No different the a doctor who prescribes opoids for cash
while making up visits etc.
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Jonah has been a consistent anti-Trumper; his comments here are not without bite:
Trump's character will be his downfall.
For a very long time now, I have been predicting that the Trump presidency will end poorly because character is destiny. I’ve said it so often, I occasionally need to be reminded that I didn’t coin the phrase. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus did when he observed “ethos anthropoi daimon,” most often translated as “man’s character is his fate.”
Character is one of those topics, like culture or morality, that everyone strongly supports yet also argues about. When James Q. Wilson, one of the greatest social scientists of the last half-century, turned his scholarly attention to character, many of his colleagues in academia were repulsed. Even though every one of them surely believed in some notion of good character, it was assumed that to talk of it, let alone seek a definition of it or a plan for how to cultivate it, would be an exercise in lending aid and comfort to the moralizers of the Right.
But Wilson, a man of both good and conservative character, had a more humble and universal definition than his colleagues might have expected: decency, politeness, self-restraint, commitment, honesty, cooperativeness, and the ability to think of others’ well-being.
Weirdly, it’s gotten to the point that when I say President Trump is not a man of good character, I feel like I should preface it with a trigger warning for many of my fellow conservatives.
Most of the angry responses are clearly rooted in the fact that they do not wish to be reminded of this obvious truth. But others seem to have convinced themselves that Trump is a man of good character, and they take personal offense at the insult, even though I usually offer it as little more than an observation. They rush to rebut the claim, citing banal or debatable propositions: He loves his children! He’s loyal to a fault! He’s authentic! Never mind that many bad men love their children, that loyalty to people or causes unworthy of loyalty is not admirable, and that authentic caddishness is not admirable. Moreover, he is not remotely loyal to his wives or the people who work for him.
NOW WATCH: 'Government Shutdown Reaches Day 5'
What’s most worrisome is that these defenders are redefining good character in Trump’s image, and they end up modeling it.
Others assume that I am referencing the president’s style, specifically his insults and Twitter addiction. What his defenders overlook is that his insults are not simply an act; they are the product of astonishing levels of narcissism, insecurity, and intellectual incuriosity. Trump’s Twitter account is simply a window into his id.
The president who became a celebrity by telling reality-show contestants “you’re fired” has not fired any of his cabinet officials face to face or even on the phone. He relies on others, or on Twitter, to deliver the news. He loves controversy because it keeps him in the center ring, but he hates confrontation.
Nearly all of the controversies that have bedeviled Trump’s administration are the direct result of his character, not his ideology. To be sure, ideology plays a role, amplifying both the intensity of anger from his left-wing critics and the intensity of his transactional defenders. Many of the liberal critics shrieking about the betrayal of the Kurds implicit in Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria would be applauding if a President Clinton had made the same decision. And many of the conservatives celebrating the move would be condemning it.
But Trump’s refusal to listen to advisers, his inability to bite his tongue, his demonization and belittling of senators who vote for his agenda but refuse to keep quiet when he does or says things they disagree with, his rants against the First Amendment, his praise for dictators and insults for allies, his need to create new controversies to eclipse old ones, and his inexhaustible capacity to lie and fabricate history: All of this springs from his character.
Last weekend, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie offered an odd defense of the president. He’s like a “72-year-old relative,” Christie said on ABC’s This Week. “When people get older, they become more and more convinced of the fact that what they’re doing is the right thing.”
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Christie has a point. But the reason Trump won’t change has little to do with age and everything to do with character.
© 2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
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"his rants against the First Amendment"
When and where was this said by Trump?
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I confess I don't remember the specifics, but there have been some things that were seriously stupid and over the line.
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I confess I don't remember the specifics, but there have been some things that were seriously stupid and over the line.
Yes but he has clarified many times that his derogatory comments are aimed only against fake news, not against free press. Exercising his speech and tweet back rights against his attackers is powerful, de facto, 1st amendment advocacy, missed by his critics.
Google steers and shuts off pathways to news. Facebook screws with the receiving of news. Twitter shuts off the expression of dissenting voices. Trump has proposed and done none of that. Words aimed at him on that score are off the mark, IMHO.
His predecessor literally shut off the delivery of dissenting political speech with the IRS attack on opposition. And we fret over a few careless words uttered by Trump.
To point out the obvious, he has every right to call out false and misleading coverage for what it is or what he thinks it is. [It was different when Obama continually ripped Fox News?] Their reaction to being called the equivalent of partisan hacks should be to make certain they are neutral instead of doubling down on opposition warfare as they do.
Trump has said specific things that are wrong or in bad taste. Trump's critics commit the same sin they see in him, ad hominem attacks.
He has bad character, great. Now what? You're better than him Jonah, or John Kasich is? So what? You can't get elected, he did.
The last two presidents of the other party gave us 16 years of character know better than Trump's, just better press coverage. Narcissistic? Yes, that's who wins elections for Leader of the Free World generally.
He didn't cuddle any dictators, that's BS. He didn't spit in Putin's face for the cameras, that was a strategy, not affirmation.
He kept perhaps 200 campaign promises. Not mentioned in an article concluding lack of character.
Would it be great for conservatives to get all of the good from Trump and none of the bad? Yes, but not exactly an original idea for a column. This one will get more mileage building up the narcissism of the author: conservative boldly declares Trump has no character. Good for you Jonah. Divide the movement so the left can win. Maybe like George Will, you can call on everyone to vote for Nancy Pelosi as the only way forward. Just tell me one thing, how does your column advance conservatism?
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McChrystal: Former Commander famous for dishonesty, and fired by Obama as a direct result of incompetency, calls Trump dishonest and immoral
Remember Pat Tillman. A true hero whose name is now fused with scandal created under Stanley McChrystal.
McChrystal who publicly sucked up to Obama then was fired by Obama. McChrystal who sucked up to Clinton and returned to American to tell millions about the evils of the .223.
The same McChrystal who tried to control and censor press in Afghanistan during his tour of incompetency. Taliban loved McChrystal.
Happy New Year, Stan -- it's almost 2019. Been almost 9 years since you and Sholtis and Mike Flynn and the gang had your Paris party.
How is that press control going now?
You'll always have Paris.
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How utterly graceless , , ,
He sours a lot of people on him with crap like this.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/2/trump-said-he-essentially-fired-mattis/?bt_ee=PjMgqpZepgg048CrgttcLvxaPP%2FfzGmBYdQ6T0IT6AT2eCjtGF8rGm2y5AWkxFIJ&bt_ts=1546457683617
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How utterly graceless , , ,
He sours a lot of people on him with crap like this.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/2/trump-said-he-essentially-fired-mattis/?bt_ee=PjMgqpZepgg048CrgttcLvxaPP%2FfzGmBYdQ6T0IT6AT2eCjtGF8rGm2y5AWkxFIJ&bt_ts=1546457683617
Yes.
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Yes I agree Crafty and GM
And sadly I am convinced he will lose in '20. He just refuses to change and has not and will not win anyone over past the 45 % of us who will vote for him despite this stuff.
When he is out of power he will have NO friends . nada
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https://www.westernjournal.com/infamous-drug-lords-brother-attempts-raise-50-million-impeach-trump/
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Can Trump Handle a Foreign Crisis?
He’ll face one eventually, and there’s good reason to worry the administration will be unprepared.
149 Comments
By Peggy Noonan
Feb. 7, 2019 6:57 p.m. ET
Someday this White House will face a sudden, immediate and severe foreign-policy crisis. It’s almost a miracle it hasn’t happened already. George W. Bush had 9/11 less than eight months into his tenure; John F. Kennedy had the Bay of Pigs three months into his presidency and the Cuban missile crisis the following year. In two years Donald Trump has faced some turbulence, but not a full-fledged crisis.
Such good fortune won’t continue forever. I sometimes ask past and present officials of this administration their thoughts on a crisis, and how the White House would handle one. They are concerned.
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What might such a crisis look like? History resides in both the unexpected and the long-predicted. Russia moves against a U.S. ally, testing Washington’s commitment to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty; a coordinated cyber action by our adversaries takes down the American grid; China, experiencing political unrest within a background of a slowing economy, decides this is a good time to move on Taiwan; someone bombs Iran’s missile sites; Venezuela explodes in violence during a military crackdown; there’s an accidental launch somewhere.
Maybe it will be a wild and deliberate act that brings trouble, maybe not. The historian Margaret MacMillan said a few years ago in a radio interview: “I think we should never underestimate the sheer role of accident.”
What does it take to handle a grave crisis successfully, beyond luck?
Everything depends on personnel, process and planning. The president and his top advisers have to work closely, with trust and confidence, quickly apprehending the shape of the challenge and its implications. There must be people around him with wisdom, judgment, experience. They must know their jobs and be able to execute them under pressure. Clear lines of communication are key between both individuals and agencies. The president and his advisers have to maintain high focus yet pace themselves—you never know how long a crisis will last. They would have to keep their eyes on the million moving pieces, military and diplomatic, that comprise a strategy. As Navy veteran JFK said during the missile crisis, “There’s always some poor son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word.”
How would this White House handle a grave crisis? It is right to feel particular concern. We know from every first-person account, from the histories, memoirs and journalism, that it’s a White House frequently at war. They don’t get along, they leak, they don’t trust each other. There is unusually high turnover, a constantly changing cast of characters, a lack of deep experience. During the Berlin airlift, thought at the time to be the height of the Cold War, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who’d been Army chief of staff during World War II, was asked how worried he was. “I’ve seen worse,” he replied. He had. No one around this president has seen worse. When Jim Mattis, John Kelly and H.R. McMaster left the administration, a cumulative 123 years of military and diplomatic experience left with them.
The president is famously impulsive, uninterested in deep study, not systematic in his thinking. His recently leaked schedules give no sign he spends a lot of time forging deeper relationships with advisers and agency heads on whom one day a great deal may depend. There is a marked lack of trust between the intelligence community and the White House—and intelligence is front and center during a crisis. The National Security Council is not fully staffed.
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What would happen if they suddenly faced heavy history? “No administration is ready for its first crisis,” says Richard Haass, who was a member of George H.W. Bush’s NSC and is author of “A World in Disarray.” “What you learn is that the machinery isn’t adequate, or people aren’t ready.” First crises trigger reforms of procedures so that second ones are better handled. “This administration is not populated by people who’ve been through a crisis of the first order.” Mr. Haass notes that the national security adviser must see himself not only as counselor to the president but a coordinator of the interagency process. He’s got to make sure it works.
There is no way, really, to simulate a crisis, because you don’t know what’s coming, and key people are busy doing their regular jobs. And all administrations, up until the point they’re tested, tend to be overconfident.
What can they do to be readier? Think, study, talk and plan.
For a modern example of good process, personnel and management, there is the Cuban missile crisis. Because of its nature—two nuclear powers poised eye to eye—the stakes couldn’t have been higher. The threat of miscalculation was ever present in JFK’s mind. He feared a so-called spasm response—a knee-jerk reaction from Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev if he felt cornered or provoked. Presidential historian Michael Beschloss says “a big part of Kennedy’s job was to keep an eye on every aspect, big and small—where planes are flying, where troops are moving”—so that Krushchev “could get no false impression.” Kennedy had learned during the Bay of Pigs disaster that a president can’t do it alone. He created an executive committee of a dozen trusted advisers to help him achieve consensus and devise strategy. “He needed expert help to ride herd on the bureaucracy, including the military bureaucracy.” He often absented himself so members weren’t tempted to tailor their advice to his perceived preferences. In time he brought in Congress. House Majority Whip Hale Boggs was famously summoned by a note in a bottle dropped from an military helicopter as he fished on the Gulf of Mexico. Personal emissaries were sent to Paris, Bonn and London. When former Secretary of State Dean Acheson met with Charles de Gaulle, the latter famously waved away photographic proof of the Soviet missile sites. A great nation like America would not act without proof, he said.
“It was,” says Mr. Beschloss, “a triumph of management.”
He notes that President Trump doesn’t seem to think homing in on details is a big part of his job: “For one who touts himself as a spectacular manager, he hasn’t gotten beyond the idea ‘I alone can fix it.’ ”
It would be good to know people in the administration are regularly thinking about all this.
They need to repair the breach with the intelligence community. They need to see to it that a serious NSC process is produced, and all positions filled, preferably with experienced professionals for whom the next crisis is not their first one.
It might be good to have regular situation-room meetings on what-ifs, and how to handle what-ifs, and to have deep contingency planning with intelligence, military and civilian leaders discussing scenarios. “Put yourself in a position,” says Mr. Haass, “where you’re less unread when a crisis does occur.”
All the senior people in an administration always know whether and how they’ll get to the bunker. But by the time we’re talking bunkers, the story is almost over. It’s not a plan. Think about the plan.
Margaret MacMillan again: People not only get used to peace and think it’s “the normal state of affairs,” they get used to the idea that any crisis can be weathered, because they have been in the past. But that’s no guarantee of anything, is it?
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From Rasmussen which seems to be an outlier but still this is great news:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/trump_administration/prez_track_feb11
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http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/hispanics-70-of-registered-attendees-for-trumps-el-paso-rally/
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Ran across this today. Given the Big Lie success to the meme about Trump's Charlotteville statement as proof of his racism, we need to:
a) realize that many good Americans have been taken in by the false meme, and as good Americans think very poorly of President Trump for it, and
b) be able to clarify the point in simple, direct, and concise language.
https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/346878-the-media-couldnt-be-more-blatant-in-distorting-trumps-words-on?fbclid=IwAR2UFTBypU1qqVjp1l3TN1zzanHOEoFlxZR2oqmBn0e4G_nLYfT6xzxsbaM
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2qIXXafxCQ&feature=youtu.be
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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-case-for-trump-order-the-new-vdh-book-today/
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https://townhall.com/columnists/larryelder/2019/04/04/the-trumpcharlottesville-moral-equivalency-lie-the-left-keeps-telling-n2544241
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The Mueller report depicts a White House where orders are optional.
One of the outstanding features of the Mueller report was its portrait of Donald Trump’s presidency, in which the orders and directives he gives are routinely ignored by his own White House staff and cabinet members. In some instances, his lack of follow-up or his later acceptance of a contrary suggestion may indicate that his previous orders were more like a Nixonian outburst. In many of the cited cases, especially those involving White House counsel Don McGahn, administration officials drag their feet until the president changes his mind, or simply ignore his orders.
But reading the report I couldn’t help but wonder if we were already involved in a constitutional crisis of authority, a dormant one, that is waiting for one unfortunate incident in Syria to explode. The 1983 bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon caused Ronald Reagan to withdraw our troops from that country, partly because it was a conflict he could not explain to the satisfaction of the American people. In 1993, after a period of mission creep in Somalia, an exfiltration operation turned into the Battle of Mogadishu, leaving 18 Americans dead and over 70 others injured. It rocked the Clinton presidency.
What would happen if some enormity befell our troops in Syria? And remember that, unlike Reagan or Clinton, Trump has already announced that U.S. troops will be leaving Syria expeditiously — but advisers, military commanders, and others who prefer a plan that keeps the U.S. in Syria have prevailed in ignoring and reversing this presidential announcement.
A refresher, if you haven’t followed the blow-by-blow. Are we withdrawing all troops in Syria, as President Trump announced in December? Or are we keeping just 200 troops in Syria, as “the White House” announced in February? Or are we leaving as many as 1,000 troops or more, as the Wall Street Journal reported in March? The last attempt to answer these questions was made by General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. More or less, his response to the above three questions was to say “Yes. All of the above.”
“There has been no change to the plan announced in February and we continue to implement the president’s direction to draw down U.S. forces to a residual presence,” Dunford said. The plan was to create with regional allies a combined force of 1,500 troops overall, with the U.S. drawing down its number as others kick in.
NOW WATCH: 'Trump Doesn't Think White House Should Have Testified In Mueller Report'
Reports emphasize that there is a continued low-grade conflict between Trump and his advisers on this matter. “U.S. military commanders were aware that while Trump has allowed some troops to stay in Syria, he has not given up on the idea of eventually pulling them all out,” CNN reported. Trump has adverted to the conflict as well. In December, when visiting an airbase in Iraq, Trump said that military commanders had repeatedly asked for 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria.
Some will claim that it is Trump who is undermining the process. White House officials had been working on a new Syria policy, and Trump’s announcement of another contrary policy of withdrawal took them by surprise. But should it? If White House officials are routinely steering Trump’s administration in a way that contravenes his wishes, it is safe to imagine that their advice and counsel to him is aimed at denying him options that comport with his instincts and impulses, especially when those run counter to the judgments made by military commanders and other senior advisers. In fact this is a major theme of the reporting about foreign policy in Trump Era: The Deep State is in the White House, and Trump appointed them. But managing a boss this way is dangerous. And the confusion over Syria shows it.
If Trump senses that he is being manipulated, then he is apt to go rogue when he gets new information from an outside source, if only to reassert his authority over his presidency. This may explain why, when talking to President Erdogan, Trump suddenly asked if Turkey (a NATO ally) could handle mopping up ISIS on its own. When Erdogan said yes, Trump immediately dictated to national-security adviser John Bolton over the line: “Start work for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria.” In that exchange, it’s hard not to sense the president looking for options beyond those his advisers had given to him. In Erodogan’s commitment, Trump found a basis for making his own policy. His advisers rejected it.
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What makes this a true constitutional crisis is that both sides of the argument are correct. Those who are inclined to defer to the president’s wishes are absolutely right when they say a foreign policy and military establishment that stubbornly resists and undermines the president’s ability to act as commander-in-chief is essentially thwarting democracy, undermining the people’s ability to influence foreign policy through their choice of presidents.
However, those who are partial to the permanent foreign-policy staff, which is acting under extreme duress, are also correct: Advisers and subordinates owe the president their best counsel, and the United States cannot run a foreign policy as inconstant and unpredictable as the untutored impulses of man who won’t even stand behind his own orders to conclude U.S. operations in a war that has no congressional or popular support. In the normal course of things, presidents ought to show constancy. And in the normal course of things, subordinates to the president ought to do their best to translate his preferences into workable policy. In this case, neither is happening, and the apportionment of blame for this dormant crisis cannot be determined by reference to the Constitution and American governing norms; it is merely a judgment of the risks of leaning one way or the other.
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The potential political crisis is heightened precisely because Trump is the sort of person to disclaim responsibility and blame subordinates in a pinch. And also because Trump was elected while promising to resist and defy the conventional thinking in foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.
So again, what happens if there is a tragedy that gets Americans asking what our men in uniform are doing in Syria? If Trump decides, like Reagan, that the political costs of continued U.S. involvement are unacceptable, how can he credibly announce a withdrawal, when his previous announcement was ignored and undermined? And if neither the public nor the Pentagon can take the word of the commander-in-chief seriously, exactly who will be accountable for our foreign policy? And what kind of mischief are we inviting America’s enemies to make in the interim?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=91&v=jx9cMuMb2pk
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmaZR8E12bs&fbclid=IwAR0DsJlVclZ1eo4d2BOyf51ORmobijuYzi_5vHvy_7mKIOZzFWkfQj_-SJE
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clearly appear sleazy :
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/pat-nolan-trump-pardon-035008637.html
want a pardon
just kiss up to DJT and praise him or write a book telling us he is great.
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https://www.breitbart.com/africa/2019/06/20/expert-u-s-invests-more-in-africa-under-trump-than-any-other-president/#
contrast this to slutbergers NYslimes article from 1/19:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/opinion/inequality-poverty-global-aid.html .
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one of these days he is going to have to put his money where his mouth is.
His pattern now obvious:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/trump-administration-caution-center-right-government/
backs off removing criminal aliens - why?
because pelosi gave him a call or vice versa?
like she is going to do anything?
Crats just approved another $5 billion to welcome the illegals with more food shelter legal aid ...........
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I'd say he's been plenty fg serious on defending the border; I'm perfectly willing to see this as simply a matter of setting the table for when he actually pulls the trigger on this.
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" .I'd say he's been plenty fg serious on defending the border"
more than any Repub or rat-o-crat
that said, the results are pitiful
he would have fired himself - if it weren't himself.
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The Open Border Prog judges have ruled against him contra-constitutionally.
Change of the law(s) are what is required, but Deranged Demogogues control of House blocks that.
I'd say he's putting up a helluva fight-- and that is what I was hearing during a visit to CBP HQ in DC.
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"I'd say he's putting up a helluva fight-- and that is what I was hearing during to CBP HQ in DC."
You were in DC for a hearing ?
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Whoops-- left out "during a visit to"-- I've made correction.
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He attacked them for their hatred and shame of our country, not race. The 'go back to where you came from' comment is playground level banter. Should he say stuff like that? No, but he knows how to get attention and no one else on our side does.
Only one of them came from another country in their lifetime, Ilhan Omar, and she was 13 when she left. She still sides with the terrorists over the United States on BlackHawk Down in her home Mogadishu, as one example of how Trump is right about this.Tlaib refers to the Palestinians as 'my people' so it is her choice if the comment applies to her. She was born here. The tweet doesn't fit Ocasio Cortez although her native New York is crime-ridden and corrupt and so is her proud ancestry of Puerto Rico which is not a separate country.
Her policies aim to make us more like the failure of these places. She was not named by Trump so it is her choice to apply his comments to her. He said hatred of country so she assumed and we all assumed he was talking about her.
It is the Liberals, other liberals anyway, who so often say they will leave the country if so-and-so is elected, Trump in this case. Turning that around, people like this with loyalties or allegiances elsewhere could use a little of their charm and wisdom to help those places. He said leave and come back as a suggestion and that it is their choice, obviously. Again it is political or playground banter, to take it more seriously than that is to miss the point.
American sports hero Arthur Ashe retired from competition by his mid-thirties and spent the rest of his life giving back and trying to advance the lives of other black Americans. It cost him his life. These people tell us how bad our country is and how we have to change everything before they have experienced or accomplished anything. It is indelicate to say but maybe they could go to a place that needs their help and try their ideas there before making our country more like those failed places.
As badly as this has come across in the liberal and conservative media, people seem to get what he is saying. They hate our country and all elected Democrats and candidates should be called out as to whether they support or reject these people's ideas.
Free People, free markets and rule of law is a system that works better than what these people are proposing. They ought to look around the world and through history before they throw out what is great about the greatest country in history. That they weren't born there or didn't experience adulthood there is even more reason why they don't know how bad it is there or how good it is here.
Trump's strategy is larger than criticism of some unnamed people. He is trying to tie Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House and all the Democratic candidates to the spewed hatred of the people they are now calling the squad. The Democrats bought his taunt hook, line and sinker.
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The media screams while most Americans silently agree.
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Does anyone here disagree with Alexrod?:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/david-axelrod-trumps-ugly-divisive-bombast-will-only-get-worse-and-will-be-his-2020-kryptonite
I don't.
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Does anyone here disagree with Alexrod?:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/david-axelrod-trumps-ugly-divisive-bombast-will-only-get-worse-and-will-be-his-2020-kryptonite
I don't.
I do.
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I've been wrong before, but I am reminded of my claim for my street material-- "die less often". On any given shiny object twitterfest, he somehow comes out ahead, but net overall there is a price that will be paid.
Edited to add:
There he comes out ahead again , , , somehow :-D
https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/movies/bs-fe-rat-film-20180226-story.html?fbclid=IwAR0Hty0k9RQsMD3dYg4jWwacV_pZr8GnRiZSo2wWehfy-6ybj2i9NPq0qR4
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Anybody objective can see he attacks those who attack him. He isn't attacking Candace Owens for example. The problem with Omar, Sharpton, Cumming is not race and no one said it is. Well they happen to be black. Ok, how about Jim Acosta? I don't watch CNN but he looks like a middle aged, white divorced guy according to his bio on wikipedia.
If they hadn't already called Mitt Romney, George Bush, Reagan and Nancy Pelosi a racist, maybe people would take alarm at hearing them call Donald Trump one.
My rebuttal to the Left is this, why are afraid of debating the issues and the merits of your policies head-on?
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I've been wrong before, but I am reminded of my claim for my street material-- "die less often". On any given shiny object twitterfest, he somehow comes out ahead, but net overall there is a price that will be paid.
Edited to add:
There he comes out ahead again , , , somehow :-D
https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/movies/bs-fe-rat-film-20180226-story.html?fbclid=IwAR0Hty0k9RQsMD3dYg4jWwacV_pZr8GnRiZSo2wWehfy-6ybj2i9NPq0qR4
Who knew PBS was a white supremacist media outlet?
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https://dailycaller.com/2019/07/29/trump-full-pardons-clemency/?utm_medium=email
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I guess I am in minority here but I say he is squandering his favor with all but the core of us who will support him no matter what.
And I say it is the darn impulsive tweets:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/trump_favorableunfavorable-5493.html
That said the question is can the Dems come up with anyone else ?
I hope and pray NOT.
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I confess I haven't a clue-- I do think he could do MUCH better at unifying and calling to the positive as well as brawling.
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When called a racist by some elderly dem kleptocrat, one should immediately grovel and apologize. Certainly never fight back!
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" .When called a racist by some elderly dem kleptocrat, one should immediately grovel and apologize. Certainly never fight back!"
I want him to fight back ; just not the WAY he is doing it.
I could be wrong but I think he would win more people over with ideas rather then the personal attacks.
You can see the poll numbers. Why do you think his unfavorability numbers are so high?"
It ain't because the economy is good.
And I don't forget that we will sooner and hopefully later have a Democrat President. The next one might be worse than Brock (if possible).
Do we want her to be calling us all racist etc etc all day long?
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I want him to fight back ; just not the WAY he is doing it.
I could be wrong but I think he would win more people over with ideas rather then the personal attacks.
You can see the poll numbers. Why do you think his unfavorability numbers are so high?"
It ain't because the economy is good.
And I don't forget that we will sooner and hopefully later have a Democrat President. The next one might be worse than Brock (if possible).
Do we want her to be calling us all racist etc etc all day long?
I'm afraid we have to let Trump be Trump, for better and worse. There is no switch for him to be a more conventional politician. Tweets are how he overcomes 100% MSM liberal bias. George Bush just sat there and took it. McCain, Romney, ditto. Add Ryan, McConnell, and all the rest to the list. The outrageous sounding things he says are how he draw attention and it mostly works. Time after time he is a step ahead of them. His tweets are the laser pointer and the Left are the cats.
Best we can hope for is some filter on it. Don't call war heroes scum. Don't brag about grabbing pussy, but that was a hidden microphone, not a tweet, and was from back when he was a registered Democrat. He has improved. It turns out his 'why don't you go back and make it better and then return' spurt did not say send her back and did not say race. He did not say Baltimore was infested with blacks; he said it was infested with rats. He actually had the nerve to hit back at Al Sharpton. I'll bet some of that boldness helps him with black voters.
We don't like that he personalizes his attacks but these are counterpunches to people who call him racist and worse.
Civility into fair coverage would be nicer but it isn't going to happen in our lifetimes. Civility and honesty and moderation are what swing district suburban voters supposedly want and then they vote for far Leftists who have none of it. Keep your plan, keep your doctor, those people are bitter clingers, deplorables, the dregs of society, they want to put you back in chains, we will not even hear arguments because this is settled science, blah, blah. Yeah, that's honesty, civility - not!
The way they define it, we are racists. They overused and misused the term and now it means nothing. Lower tax rates for everyone means we are rigging the system for ourselves, and protecting the unborn, mostly girls, means stomping on women's rights. Right. Buying a couple of ads and showing up for debates every four years does not counteract all that bullshit messaging that has permeated k-12, all college and media. Trump is using Leftists tactics against them - and they can't stand it.
Democrats don't care more about those in need. We can prove that a hundred different ways but we never seem to get the chance. It turns out it takes the communications skills of this reality show star, not a Harvard lecturer type, to actually get the chance to make the point.
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Exactly!
I want him to fight back ; just not the WAY he is doing it.
I could be wrong but I think he would win more people over with ideas rather then the personal attacks.
You can see the poll numbers. Why do you think his unfavorability numbers are so high?"
It ain't because the economy is good.
And I don't forget that we will sooner and hopefully later have a Democrat President. The next one might be worse than Brock (if possible).
Do we want her to be calling us all racist etc etc all day long?
I'm afraid we have to let Trump be Trump, for better and worse. There is no switch to being a more conventional politician. Tweets are how overcomes 100% msm liberal bias. George Bush just sat there and took it. McCain, Romney, ditto. The outrageous sounding things he says draw attention to it. Time after time he is a step ahead of them. His tweets are the laser pointer and they are the cats.
Best we can hope for is some filter on it. Don't call war heroes scum. Don't brag about grabbing pussy, but that was a hidden microphone, not a tweet and was from back when he was a registered Democrat. He has improved. It turns out his why don't you go back and make it better and return spurt did not say send her back and did not say race. He did not say Baltimore was infested with blacks; he said it was infested with rats. He actually had the nerve to hit back at Al Sharpton. I'll bet some of his boldness helps him with black voters.
We don't like that he personalizes his attacks but these are counterpunches to people who call him a racist and worse.
Civility into fair coverage would be nicer but it isn't going to happen in our lifetimes. Civility and honesty are what swing district suburban voters supposedly want and then they vote for Leftists who really have none of it. Keep your plan, keep your doctor, those people are bitter clingers, deplorables, the dregs of society, want to put you back in chains, we will not even hear arguments of settled science, blah, blah. Yeah, that's honesty, civility - not!
The way they define it, we are racists. They overused and misused the term and now it means nothing. Lower tax rates for everyone means we are rigging the system for ourselves, and protecting the unborn, mostly girls, means taking stomping on women's rights. Buying a couple of ads and showing up for debates every four years does not counteract all that bullshit messaging. Trump is using Leftists tactics against them - and they can't stand it.
Democrats don't care more about those in need. We can prove that a hundred different ways - but it turns out it takes the communications skills of this reality show star, not a Harvard lecturer type, to actually get the chance to make the point.
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WWWOOOFFF!!!
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" .I'm afraid we have to let Trump be Trump, for better and worse."
Like Rush said couple days back
The total never Trumpers are few in the Republican party
The mega maga types are probably the majority but we have a sizable portion who hold their nose with his tweets while know the alternative is a Dem who will "f" up this country good and plenty.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/news/sen-scott-hits-back-at-democrats-calling-trump-racist/vi-AAFIZuA
Please watch and spread this.
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I thought I was being original with the idea that our real estate developer President should buy Siberia:
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1677.msg111811#msg111811
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1103.msg113704#msg113704
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2666.msg114971#msg114971
It turns out Walter Russell Mead made that suggestion in the LAT in 1992:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-07-19-op-4526-story.html
Now the rumor is that Trump wants to buy Greenland. Greenland has responded to the rumor by saying it is not for sale. Let the negotiations begin!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/not-for-sale-danish-officials-unanimously-reject-trumps-interest-in-buying-greenland/
How about the residents vote on their allegiance. Same for Siberia.
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China is quietly taking over Siberia through a policy of facilitating illegal immigration. Good thing that can't happen here!
I thought I was being original with the idea that our real estate developer President should buy Siberia:
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1677.msg111811#msg111811
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1103.msg113704#msg113704
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2666.msg114971#msg114971
It turns out Walter Russell Mead made that suggestion in the LAT in 1992:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-07-19-op-4526-story.html
Now the rumor is that Trump wants to buy Greenland. Greenland has responded to the rumor by saying it is not for sale. Let the negotiations begin!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/not-for-sale-danish-officials-unanimously-reject-trumps-interest-in-buying-greenland/
How about the residents vote on their allegiance. Same for Siberia.
-
https://israelunwired.com/what-trump-really-said-about-jews-and-the-democratic-party/
-
https://israelunwired.com/what-trump-really-said-about-jews-and-the-democratic-party/
These new congressional members openly advocate condemnation and destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. American Jews need to sort out whether this is just a couple of wackos or whether it is the new voices and direction of the Democratic party. This is not the equivalent of falsely associating a few skinhead white supremacists with the conservative movement which is all about rights and opportunities for all. These congresswomen are sponsored by terror organizations and have a seat at the table INSIDE the Democrat caucus setting votes and policies. They are using an megaphone amplified by the party and the media to shout out their anti-Israel hatred while Trump is
building the closest ties with Israel perhaps ever.
The Dem party is not tolerating a variety of views on any issue. Democrats already silenced and chased out all pro-life members and has zero tolerance for a pragmatic view on climate or a law enforcement approach to immigration. Does being part of the American Left means hating Israel and calling for its destruction? There isn't tolerance in that movement for two views on this. Defeat these people from inside your party or you are joining them. Trump is calling out the choice faced by everyone on Israel and it hits Jewish Americans most personally.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/comparison-trump-record-former-presidents-current-critics/?fbclid=IwAR3QXIxSr5vmgSeHEOSxqEttFJMRPfZDaebsZdJSq0sPZYZutdeUqJzYu4A
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/comparison-trump-record-former-presidents-current-critics/?fbclid=IwAR3QXIxSr5vmgSeHEOSxqEttFJMRPfZDaebsZdJSq0sPZYZutdeUqJzYu4A
VDH is going to be a great resource in the campaign.
"To counter every signature Trump issue, there is almost no rational alternative advanced." ...
"they’re offering the heat of hatred rather than the light of a viable political alternative."
...
"What are the advantages of returning to the Paris climate accord? Or reentering the missile deal with Vladimir Putin? Who was subverting NATO: the reckless, tough-talking Trump, or the German-led membership that never had much intention of meeting their prior “2 percent” promises? How exactly did Barack Obama’s whines about “free riders” persuade some NATO nations to reconsider their broken promises on defense expenditures?"
- It is silly season that we are seeing general election polls before anyone debates any of these questions.
"Trump’s crime is that, without sanitized surgical gloves, he completely ripped the scab off what we call “journalism” and exposed a festering wound of narcissistic, mostly incompetent, and utterly partisan reportage."
- Yes he did! Do the people really get it even now that the prestigious NY Times and prestigious Washington Post won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize based on 5 articles each that were all based on fake news, making this accuracy-challenged President right and all of them wrong!
"does the Left tell us how many barrels of oil per day and cubic feet of natural gas they would wish to curtail, or whether the resulting higher costs for fuel, heating, and power are worth the cutbacks, or whether we wish to return to strategic dependence on Persian Gulf psychodramas? Do they have a plan to deal with Indian and Chinese coal-burning if we were to radically cut the use of clean-burning natural gas? Do they know why the signees of the Paris climate accord for the most part have not and will not meet their promises while the U.S. has?
...
What exactly are the Never Trump and progressive alternative agendas? In the latter case, are we to expect that top income-tax rate of 70 percent, a wealth tax, the Green New Deal, reparations, free health care for illegal aliens, Medicare for all, cancellation of $1.5 trillion in college debt, and free college tuition will avoid the now looked-for recession?
...
Did he whip racial animosity in the manner of Elizabeth Warren by falsely alleging that the Ferguson shooting, thoroughly investigated by the Obama Justice Department, was murder?"
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for God's sakes
and you better not tweet something obnoxious to this guy now:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/man-trump-once-called-my-african-american-leaves-republican-party
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=TzufjsnCa7Y
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=TzufjsnCa7Y
PHENOMENAL speech! In a very calm tone that everyone has said they want to hear him use and right to their faces he called out all the major players and all the major issues in the world, China, Iran, North Korea, Taliban, Venezuela, organized crime involved with migration. He called out socialism and he called out totalitarianism.
Full transcript at this link, just scroll below the video:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/09/24/full_replay_president_trump_rails_against_globalists_china_iran_in_speech_to_un_general_assembly.html
In the same calm tone he just finished a live press conference to wrap up the UN appearance. He looks and sounds, um, ... presidential.
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Doug wrote :
"In the same calm tone he just finished a live press conference to wrap up the UN appearance. He looks and sounds, um, ... presidential."
From the anti Trump liberal young lad David A Graham who writes for the Leftist 'the Atlantic' :
" When Donald Trump stepped to the dais at the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, he had a speech full of sharp lines: swipes at socialism, assertions of nationalism versus globalism, harsh words for Iran. Though Trump doesn’t enjoy delivering scripted remarks, he sounded listless, tired, and bored even by his own standards, struggling through the speech."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/trump-panicking/598807/
If Trump had been giving a bellicose speech they would be criticizing him for being a loud mouth lune.
So he is subdued and they criticize him as appearing like a weak injured deer in the headlight. Injured by the Dems injured by the whistleblower, injured by Nancy P.
:roll:
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I would like . to know who the blower is and we will find out but
sorry Donald this is over the top
you can't threaten execution sorry
please stop this talk . for goodness sakes:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-attacks-whistle-blowers-sources-and-alludes-to-punishment-for-spies/ar-AAHTvMV
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to help HIM politically
and frankly I agree:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/after-trump-solicits-biden-investigations-from-china-and-ukraine-fec-chair-post-reminder-that-doing-so-is-illegal-193941937.html
I wish he would stop doing this . It IS really bad . To think he is asking communist china to help him politically IS beyond the pale.
China for sure is already dreaming of ways to use this to its' advantage
If a Democrat pres was doing this we would be going nuts
My confession:
Sorry but Trump is going crazy.
If he would only shut the hell up .
I am sick of hearing his drama daily.
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to help HIM politically
and frankly I agree:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/after-trump-solicits-biden-investigations-from-china-and-ukraine-fec-chair-post-reminder-that-doing-so-is-illegal-193941937.html
I wish he would stop doing this . It IS really bad...
My two cents: The corruption being investigated is not solely or mostly about campaign finance laws and those laws do not supersede constitutional authority vested in the President.
Millions to the VP family with no visible work done is okay? Where was the FEC investigation on this? [No jurisdiction.] Where were they on the Steele Dossier?? [No interest.] Where were they when the Democrat operatives in the Obama administration FISA team went after opposition candidate Trump? Where were they when Obama IRS went after all political opposition groups? Where were they when Loretta Lynch met with HRC family during an ongoing investigation? When Comey cleared Hillary without investigating? Or when FBI allowed refusal of a DNC server under search warrant? Biden and little Biden weren't running for anything in 2015. What jurisdiction does "Federal Elections Commission" have over general corruption?
FEC isn't the main agency much less the gold standard on corruption.
The "crowdstrike" question isn't about Biden or jr. Biden and he wasn't running for office when he got the prosecutor fired.
Ukraine is a center for cyber hacking. This administration's investigations might benefit all of us if we wait and get through the derangement.
---------------------
From Wikipedia,
"The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an independent regulatory agency whose purpose is to enforce campaign finance law in United States federal elections. Created in 1974 through amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act, the commission describes its duties as "to disclose campaign finance information, to enforce the provisions of the law such as the limits and prohibitions on contributions, and to oversee the public funding of presidential elections."
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I have 1 (or 2) extra tickets if anyone wants to go.
Thurs Oct 10 7pm at Target Center.
Don't be surprised if this gets moved to US Bank stadium if oversold.
Just so it stays in Rep. Omar's district.
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If I were a wealthy man I would fly in for this!
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Many people don't understand the game being played by Trump. Do you think China is actually going to help disclose the Slow Joe bribes it laundered through Snorty Biden?
to help HIM politically
and frankly I agree:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/after-trump-solicits-biden-investigations-from-china-and-ukraine-fec-chair-post-reminder-that-doing-so-is-illegal-193941937.html
I wish he would stop doing this . It IS really bad . To think he is asking communist china to help him politically IS beyond the pale.
China for sure is already dreaming of ways to use this to its' advantage
If a Democrat pres was doing this we would be going nuts
My confession:
Sorry but Trump is going crazy.
If he would only shut the hell up .
I am sick of hearing his drama daily.
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My initial reaction is that this was quite poorly played by the President.
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My initial reaction is that this was quite poorly played by the President.
Trump is hacking and hijacking the left's propaganda machine. Remember, most of the public doesn't read news articles beyond the headlines. By connecting Ukraine and China, Trump is pushing the pay for play corruption into the public's awareness.
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I get that, but asking the "Chinese Commies" for help unnecessarily sits poorly with many people. Got to be a better way to make the point!!!
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I get that, but asking the "Chinese Commies" for help unnecessarily sits poorly with many people. Got to be a better way to make the point!!!
How would you have phrased it?
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"Could the $1.5 Billion have had something to do with Obama's flacidity as the Chinese blew off the international court and undertook conquest of the South China Sea?"
Something like that , , ,
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"Could the $1.5 Billion have had something to do with Obama's flacidity as the Chinese blew off the international court and undertook conquest of the South China Sea?"
Something like that , , ,
That would have been ignored.
Unless it prompts hair on fire screaming, they suppress it.
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Calling Obama flacid would have been ignored?
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Calling Obama flacid would have been ignored?
Many of the people you are trying to reach don't know that word.
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OK, how about "limp"? :-D
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OK, how about "limp"? :-D
Must generate irrational outrage in the DNC-MSM to have a chance of getting eyeballs.
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Asking a purported ally for help (Ukraine) is different from asking our number one geopolitical foe for help.
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Flaccid has two not one "c"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flaccid
I am expert on this since I treat ED.
:-D
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Asking a purported ally for help (Ukraine) is different from asking our number one geopolitical foe for help.
Why? It's a common practice. The US and China have worked together on criminal cases that involved both countries.
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it DOES look bad when he asks China to do this in the middle of trade war.
and as far as Ukraine Trump would not be impeached if he had asked for help without the at least appearance of using 400 million approved funds to be held up just shortly before
now he will be impeached for effectively doing what he just got out of with the Mueller report
as for Biden , he was done even before all this IMHO.
To me this is not indicative of calculation . it is more of impulsiveness.
Is someone going to say he had these conversations knowing people are listening , hoping CIA would in a historic first puplicize them so he could get the MSM conversation to focus on Biden.
NO way
This was just stupid impulsive childish I am going to "f" the Left behavior and the Intelligence people found a way through the whistle blower laws to make this public since they have been out to get Trump for 4 yrs now.
Any way he will be impeached and hopefully the Repubs will stand strong and vote against it in the Senate and Trump can still win.
Will it backfire on the Dems?
I am nost so sure . Clinton continued to carry on the "business" of the American people
he did not go around daily throwing bombs.
OTOH Trump is on the right side of the policy debates.
So I don't know anymore than anyone else.
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Asking a purported ally for help (Ukraine) is different from asking our number one geopolitical foe for help.
Why? It's a common practice. The US and China have worked together on criminal cases that involved both countries.
Good points. I would just add that China is both a friend/pretend-friend and a foe/enemy. They can cooperate on things that win them favor with us and cost them nothing right while they oppose us on something else for no good reason and steal form us, arm and prepare for war against us. The relationship is way more complicated than seeing them as either a friend or a foe.
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"Flaccid has two not one "c"'
So noted! :oops:
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Asking a purported ally for help (Ukraine) is different from asking our number one geopolitical foe for help.
Why? It's a common practice. The US and China have worked together on criminal cases that involved both countries.
Good points. I would just add that China is both a friend/pretend-friend and a foe/enemy. They can cooperate on things that win them favor with us and cost them nothing right while they oppose us on something else for no good reason and steal form us, arm and prepare for war against us. The relationship is way more complicated than seeing them as either a friend or a foe.
https://nypost.com/2019/10/04/sorry-dems-its-ok-to-ask-for-foreign-help-in-a-criminal-justice-investigation/
Sorry, Dems: It’s OK to ask for foreign help in a criminal justice investigation
By Marc Thiessen October 4, 2019 | 7:58pm | Updated
Enlarge Image
President Donald Trump
President Donald Trump Getty Images
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President Trump’s critics are now complaining that he asked the Australian prime minister to cooperate with the Justice Department’s investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe and that Attorney General William Barr has traveled overseas to ask foreign intelligence officials to cooperate with that investigation. The New York Times called it another example of “the president using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political interests.”
No, it’s not. The president’s critics are conflating two different things: the investigation by Trump’s private lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, and the inquiry by US Attorney John Durham into the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. The former is opposition research activity; the latter is a criminal justice matter.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking foreign heads of state or intelligence officials to cooperate with an official Justice Department investigation.
As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley explains, “It is not uncommon for an attorney general, or even a president, to ask foreign leaders to assist with ongoing investigations. Such calls can shortcut bureaucratic red tape, particularly if the evidence is held, as in this case, by national security or justice officials.”
Americans support the Durham probe. For two years, they were told by Trump’s opponents that the president was “working on behalf of the Russians” and had committed “treasonous” acts that were of “a size and scope probably beyond Watergate.” Those were serious accusations, and Americans took them seriously. They waited for special counsel Robert Mueller to tell them whether the president had indeed betrayed the country.
Then Mueller issued his report, and they found out that none of it was true. They understandably wanted answers. How did it come to pass that our government was paralyzed for two years and spent tens of millions of their tax dollars, chasing a Trump-Russia collusion-conspiracy theory?
A Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll following the Mueller report’s release found that 53% of Americans said that “bias against President Trump in the FBI played a role in launching investigations against him,” and 62% supported appointing a special counsel to investigate the investigation of Trump.
SEE ALSO
Dems, media aim to squash Barr’s probe of Russia collusion hoax
Instead of a special counsel, Barr appointed Durham, a career prosecutor, to lead the investigation. Durham is a man of unimpeachable character who was appointed by Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the CIA’s terrorist-interrogation program. At the conclusion of that probe, Holder praised Durham for working “tirelessly.”
Now Barr has asked Durham to bring the same tireless professionalism to his investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe. But suddenly, all those who were so eager to find out what happened in 2016 when they thought Mueller would reveal that Trump conspired with the Russians have lost interest.
The same people who were outraged at Trump’s efforts to discredit the Mueller probe are now doing the exact same thing to the Durham probe.
Back then, Democrats insisted Trump stop criticizing the investigation and “let Mueller follow the facts wherever they lead.” Now they need to heed their own advice: Stop criticizing the investigation. Let Durham follow the facts wherever they lead. If there was no wrongdoing, then there is nothing to worry about.
To be sure, Trump bears some responsibility for helping Democrats lump together Durham’s official investigation with Giuliani’s partisan activities by mentioning them both on the call with Ukraine’s president. There should be a firewall between the two inquiries.
But keep in mind, it was the Democrats who told us there is nothing wrong or illegal with a presidential candidate hiring a private lawyer to conduct opposition research in a foreign country on their political opponents. After it emerged that the Clinton campaign and the DNC had paid Christopher Steele to dig up dirt in Russia on Trump, the Democrats’ defense was: That’s just opposition research. Everyone does it.
Durham is no partisan actor. Despite political pressure, he cleared the CIA of wrongdoing during the Obama administration. Like Mueller, he will follow the facts wherever they lead. Maybe that is why so many Democrats are up in arms.
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Doug,
How was the event last night?
did not see it on cable unless I missed it.
It is tonight. Not sure yet if I will go. Roads are closing and buses diverted. I would feel more comfortable parking and walking through Antifa 'demonstrators' downtown Minneapolis if was between Crafty and Bigdog, with G M in the group and a little bit of concealed carry (AR15?)going on. And maybe ccp to stitch me up if anything goes wrong, like the last time I walked where I wasn't welcome. I should have gotten more tickets.
I wonder if local Represent Ilhan Omar's name will come up.
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If only Minneapolis had some sort of government agency empowered to protect the citizens and public order and a mandate to enforce the law...
Doug,
How was the event last night?
did not see it on cable unless I missed it.
It is tonight. Not sure yet if I will go. Roads are closing and buses diverted. I would feel more comfortable parking and walking through Antifa 'demonstrators' downtown Minneapolis if was between Crafty and Bigdog, with G M in the group and a little bit of concealed carry (AR15?)going on. And maybe ccp to stitch me up if anything goes wrong, like the last time I walked where I wasn't welcome. I should have gotten more tickets.
I wonder if local Represent Ilhan Omar's name will come up.
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quote author=G M
If only Minneapolis had some sort of government agency empowered to protect the citizens and public order and a mandate to enforce the law...
--------------------------------
Ha! Unfortunately they feel more secure in their squad cars where they can shoot if you approach than walking the beat. We'll see. If they want a half million for one event of security, they better provide some.
It would help if we didn't have a state attorney general, Keith Ellison, make his rise to power by calling for more street violence in Minneapolis.
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heard part of Trump last night on Fox
he was great
enormous presentation and talent for all to behold.
spoke about making and keeping America great
Then I switch over to CNNs "townhall" and see whiny gays trans etc
bitching about gay adoption, endlessly about their perceived persecution and calling for laws against "conversion therapy"
rights and the usual leftist identity politics bull shit
and am thinking is this what most Americans give a freakin shit about now?
Why cannot gays trans etc be Americans instead for gays trans etc.
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Yes Great speech.
Full Video: (it's long)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT3O5WFYUxo
[I didn't go.]
He is like no other politician in our time. Just talks to the people and says what he wants to say.
The theme at the start is perfect. "We're going to win Minnesota".
He's serious and that's big deal. MN has the longest run of any state of not going for a Republican, the only state Reagan never carried. Trump flipped Wisc, Mich, Iowa and almost MN. He's way more qualified and capable now than he was entering office the first time. If he carries MN, it means he's got the rest of the region and probably the election.
At about 42:30 he goes after 'Minnesota's own representative 'Illian' Omar'. He went after her up, down and sideways, very specific on facts. He went down the list and nailed her record perfectly. Most of all, he framed the race as running against her, then tied her to AOC and tied all of them to the party and he says we will beat them. Next he will tie the eventual nominee to them.
Trump singles out Scott Johnson from Powerline in the Twin Cites as a person who has done the work of bringing our the story on Omar. Many of his posts are here on the forum.
He wrapped himself around law enforcement and the police, in stark contrast to his opponents, a great issue for him. He benefited from the latest controversy about cops not being able to attend in uniform.
Very inspiring, Very substantive. He closes with explicit optimism, "the best is yet to come". [You never hear the doom and gloom side say that.]
Here is the other side: Protesters screaming in the dark in front of a fire burning Trump stuff.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/10/10/anti-trump_protesters_burn_red_trump_hats_outside_rally_in_minnesota_yell_fck_you_at_police.html
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Though he wandered a bit in the middle, overall I watched with a big smile on my face.
PS: He needs to work on his explanation of the Syrian Kurds-Turkey decision.
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https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/465249-trump-attacks-sessions-a-total-disaster-and-an-embarrassment-to-the
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https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/465249-trump-attacks-sessions-a-total-disaster-and-an-embarrassment-to-the
Most open administration ever - he just puts it all out there whether you like it or not. It's hard to see a reason to dwell on it now but it did cost him 2 1/2 years out of his first 4 and it cost him / us the House. Session's recusal, from the Trump administration's point of view, was a self inflicted wound. This was Trump's biggest regret. Everyone says they want him to admit his mistakes. There it is. Does anyone else admit theirs?
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how plainly obnoxious:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-has-awarded-next-years-g-7-summit-of-world-leaders-to-his-miami-area-resort-the-white-house-said/2019/10/17/221b32d6-ef52-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html :x
could he just stop making everything worse!
:x
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The claim is that it is cheaper, and a more suitable facility, e.g. with separate building for each country.
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how plainly obnoxious:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-has-awarded-next-years-g-7-summit-of-world-leaders-to-his-miami-area-resort-the-white-house-said/2019/10/17/221b32d6-ef52-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html :x
could he just stop making everything worse!
I thought Mulvaney was spoofing the reporters when I heard it. Is this the latest, shiny, in your face, object to taunt the press and the opponents (I repeat)? Then I thought he will back off of this, just using it to throw everyone off balance. But people make plans on announcements like this.
A team looked at 12 venues in 10 states for security and all the other factors. They won't say what the other sites were. I'm not sure they will say who the team was. More to come, no doubt. Last time they used Camp David and it was judged by all to be inadequate. Other sites were twice the price or unavailable.
He did not fear the emoluments argument before this decision because, he says,he is losing money for being President, the opposite of profiting from it. The resort will do this "at cost", whatever that means. If true, by narrow definition, that negates the gift/payment argument. Doing this 'at cost' makes this an accounting and billing issue, not an impeachment article. Like Mulvaney said, the brand issue is a little silly, especially made by people who say his family company name in every sentence.
I have a feeling his is right; this will save the taxpayers and the visitors a boatload of money over alternatives. Which opponent or House committee is going to do the work of finding where they could have hosted it better for less and the difference is what Trump cost the taxpayers?
This all happened on the day of the Turkey-Syria cease fire, the Mulvaney Ukraine aid money quid pro quo (non-)admission, the big Trump Dallas rally, and the day Elijah Cummings died. Slow news day? Like ccp, my first reaction was obnoxious, unnecessary, Brazen. Now I'm starting to find it humorous. While they are arguing about venue and room costs, he will negotiating the top issues of our time with the top leaders in the world.
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"Which opponent or House committee is going to do the work of finding where they could have hosted it better for less and the difference is what Trump cost the taxpayers?"
The Southern (NYState Democratic Party )District of NY
stinking schyster lawyers....
-
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-his-florida-doral-resort-will-no-longer-host-n1069081
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reaching the breaking point:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/trump-says-his-doral-resort-will-no-longer-host-g-7-summit/
I think Trump did cross the Rubicon.
The only hope is the voters won't turn to Warren
The media has not yet embraced her.
The declared winner goes is back to Booti as they go from one candidate to the other trying to figure out who is best to beat Trump.
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reaching the breaking point:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/trump-says-his-doral-resort-will-no-longer-host-g-7-summit/
I think Trump did cross the Rubicon.
The only hope is the voters won't turn to Warren
The media has not yet embraced her.
The declared winner goes is back to Booti as they go from one candidate to the other trying to figure out who is best to beat Trump.
Maybe he was talked out of this by opponents, critics, media, lawyers and advisers and maybe the whole thing was a shiny object, chase this, head fake.
It sounded so outrageous it was humorous. None of the opponents could quite say it was impeachable, but maybe they wanted him to go ahead with it so they could accuse that. Now maybe the joke is on them. If it was true, he can just say he could have saved the taxpayers millions for better facilities, Provided at cost because of the emoluments clause, but who needs the distraction with new European borders to draw up and NATO treaties to rewrite.
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https://www.amgreatness.com/2019/10/20/why-do-they-hate-him-so/?fbclid=IwAR3_vLwvamJ5cScjcip5RoOaEuzifJEjDnyFBIlhh9z2gg3cZgkac4oXJ48
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...
Frankly he can't be defended anymore
from my point of view
But I will support him against any Democrat but reluctantly.....
I am tired of this daily stupid tit for stupid tat.
"Being decorous is not the president’s strong suit at the best of times"
- Conrad Black
https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/22/impeachment-will-fail/
AlanTuring, The imitation Game - "Indecorous"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVmffsRTc3o
Trump is indecorous. "But I will support him against any Democrat..."
-
Conrad Black reminds me of VDH with their talents for description , observation , summary , and insight
His use of the word "indecorus" is an exquisitely "decorus" description of Donald Trump.
I would have called Trump an abomination.
but that perhaps has somewhat of a religious inference to it which would not be precise.
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Yes, it's a nice way of saying the same thing. Trump says it and everyone squirms. Couple of days go by and we mostly move on. Meanwhile he remains the twitter and news magnet - champion of the world, while Paul Ryan, George Bush, Kasich, Sasse, Weld and the rest can't draw a crowd or get a message out, relying on the MSM or their own boring position papers that no one reads.
Someone compared to the Dem debates to nascar, people secretly watch to see a crackup. Same with Trump. What he says and how he says it draws attention, like it or not. But much of the time, he is holding the laser pointer and the media are chasing it like cats.
-----
"What Biden may lack in crowd size is made up for in ..." What??
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/warren-s-big-rallies-biden-s-smaller-events-what-crowd-n1057371
Biden would book the Superdome if he could fill it. Trump probably will.
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I knew if we waited patiently this would come out:
10 Politicians Who Used 'Lynching' the Way Trump Did, and the Left Didn't Care
https://pjmedia.com/trending/10-politicians-who-used-lynching-the-way-trump-did-and-the-left-didnt-care/
Joe Biden in 1998:
"Even if the President should be impeached, history is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching..."
"We shouldn’t participate in a lynch mob against the president," Jerry Nadler Sept. 13, 1998.
“It’s a verbal political lynching on the floor of the Senate.”
- Sen John Kerry, 1998
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk5ScZoSA_k
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It's totally different because ORANGE MAN BAD!
I knew if we waited patiently this would come out:
10 Politicians Who Used 'Lynching' the Way Trump Did, and the Left Didn't Care
https://pjmedia.com/trending/10-politicians-who-used-lynching-the-way-trump-did-and-the-left-didnt-care/
Joe Biden in 1998:
"Even if the President should be impeached, history is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching..."
"We shouldn’t participate in a lynch mob against the president," Jerry Nadler Sept. 13, 1998.
“It’s a verbal political lynching on the floor of the Senate.”
- Sen John Kerry, 1998
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk5ScZoSA_k
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https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-honored-bipartisan-justice-award-black-leaders-criminal-justice-reform/?utm_source=push&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_content=2019-10-25&utm_campaign=pushtraffic
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America agrees with ccp, and all of us.
"A majority of the public like what Donald Trump is doing and a majority of the public don’t like what he’s saying"
Frank Luntz
Well, if those are the choices — nice words but bad policies, or the other way around — which do you prefer?
Stephen Green at Instapundit
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I thought he was in rockin' good form last night in Kentucky, even eloquent here and there. A lot can happen in a year, but I would not rule out a landslide victory.
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-KMS0QAMcA&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR3KSHCgxcqzVBRMLRCBHidfdR702wkAXurr9yVrw5eq7QRr5d8m6RkfntA
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Parallel Lives of Donald Trump
If Plutarch studied American presidents, to which would he compare and contrast the 45th?
By Lance Morrow
Nov. 6, 2019 6:57 pm ET
Plutarch and Donald Trump. PHOTO: ADOC-PHOTOS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Harry S. Truman kept a set of Plutarch’s writings at hand in the White House. He said that in Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives,” he could find everything worth knowing about leaders—how they behave, what makes them tick.
In the “Lives,” Plutarch (A.D. 47-120) would compare a famous Greek to a famous Roman—setting Alexander the Great, for example, next to Julius Caesar, or Demosthenes beside Cicero. It was moral portraiture; Plutarch had a genius for details. He believed that a trivial detail can reveal a man more profoundly than a great event. Cicero, for example, became alert to an unexpected subtlety of Julius Caesar’s character after noticing, one day in the Senate, the way he adjusted his forelock with one finger.
Suppose Plutarch undertook to write one of his “Parallel Lives” on the subject of Donald Trump. If Plutarch were to study the biographies of the previous American presidents, to which of them would he compare the 45th?
Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mr. Trump is an illusionist. Like FDR, Mr. Trump has boundless confidence in himself. Like FDR, Mr. Trump has been known to lie. Unlike Roosevelt, Mr. Trump is a businessman. (FDR failed in his minor efforts at business investment during the 1920s.) Roosevelt undertook to make America great again by mobilizing the federal government against the “economic royalists” in a great depression; Mr. Trump wants to accomplish the same goal by demobilizing the regulators and resisting the cultural autocracy of the left.
Mr. Trump is best understood as a businessman and a performer. If you analyze him at the intersection of those two identities, you begin to understand him. As an actor on the world stage, his favorite role is a version of Stanley Kowalski.
Like Calvin Coolidge, Mr. Trump believes that the primary business of America is business. Like Truman, Mr. Trump has presided over businesses that failed. Unlike Coolidge, who was famously laconic, Mr. Trump is noisy.
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Unlike Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Mr. Trump does not read books. In that he resembles Lyndon B. Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom preferred to gather information in conversation, face-to-face or on the telephone. Dwight D. Eisenhower read Zane Gray westerns to help him fall asleep.
LBJ liked to have three television sets going so that he could monitor the major networks simultaneously; Mr. Trump watches Fox News.
Plutarch, in a pairing of opposites, might have explored the contrast between Mr. Trump and Jimmy Carter —Mr. Carter hammering away for Habitat for Humanity, Mr. Trump putting up Trump Towers.
Mr. Trump’s enemies consider him a monster of racism. He claims to be “the least racist man who ever lived.” Twelve American presidents, starting with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves. Wilson was assuredly a racist. In early 1933, President-elect Roosevelt visited the state capitol in Montgomery, Ala., where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath of office as president of the Confederacy; FDR referred to it as “this sacred spot.” Truman and LBJ routinely used the N-word before they got to the White House. Yet Truman racially integrated the armed forces and Johnson told Congress “we shall overcome” as he pushed through the greatest civil rights acts in American history.
Like Julius Caesar, Mr. Trump is fussy about his hair. Unlike any other president, Mr. Trump has been married three times. ( Ronald Reagan was divorced once, and five other presidents remarried after their first wives died.) Like John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, Mr. Trump has a history of womanizing and marital infidelity.
In a famous remark, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described FDR as a man with “a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament.” (The story was told secondhand, and some thought that the aged Justice Holmes was referring to the earlier Roosevelt, Teddy, whom he had also known). In fact, FDR had a first-class intellect. So, notably, did Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Wilson and (as a manager if not as a philosopher) Eisenhower. Mr. Trump has described himself as a “very stable genius.” On that, the jury is deadlocked. Intellectuals tend to despise Mr. Trump. They also dismissed Eisenhower and Reagan as dunces.
Edward Gibbon, author of “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” summarized a half-dozen early emperors as follows: “the dark, unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the stupid Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius, and the timid inhuman Domitian. ”
Think of how one might compile a similar list of modern presidents: “the glamorous, amoral Kennedy; the Machiavellian, self-destructive Johnson; the saturnine Nixon; the touchingly decent Ford; the fussy weakling Carter.”
Plutarch or Gibbon would likely have loved to write about Donald Trump and his headlong, unfiltered singularity. Would they have entertained (before rejecting it) the theory that Mr. Trump’s apparently fantastic ego is mere performance, mere misdirection? That all of the Trumpian ego is an act that has served to get and keep the world’s attention, that has gotten him elected president, and allowed him to disarm his enemies, in part by reducing them to incoherent rage and hatred?
Whether he has deployed it consciously or simply cannot help himself, his personality has taken him far in an unhappy, disrupted land. It is also about to get him impeached.
Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
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Very interesting comparisons
"In a famous remark, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described FDR as a man with “a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament.” (The story was told secondhand, and some thought that the aged Justice Holmes was referring to the earlier Roosevelt, Teddy, whom he had also known). "
After reading a condensed bio on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr I would think also he was referring to Teddy not Franklin.
Teddy tried to influence at least some of his Court decisions and was pissed when his smooching did not work.
I notice there are no mentions of Barack the Great or any comparisons to DJT......
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https://emersonpolling.reportablenews.com/pr/november-national-poll-support-for-impeachment-declines-biden-and-sanders-lead-democratic-primary
A new Emerson poll finds President Trump’s approval has increased in the last month with 48% approval and 47% disapproval, a bounce from 43% approval in the last Emerson National poll in October.
This changes everything.
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This is what President Trump faced upon assuming office:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/burden-donald-trump
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Did anyone just get a text to buy Trump Christmas socks for $20?
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+socks&source=univ&tbm=shop&tbo=u&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiMitbarIHmAhWRMd8KHX1xAiwQsxh6BAgOECg&biw=1440&bih=789
For the woman in your life:
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+panties&source=univ&tbm=shop&tbo=u&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiw8ZmFrYHmAhWwiOAKHU8hCtkQsxh6BAgKECg&biw=1440&bih=789
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=17&v=yosAVMB47-Y&feature=emb_logo
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"My father has hired women for major roles for as long as Joe Biden has been rubbing their shoulders, smelling their hair, and breathing on their necks."
Eric Trump
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"My father has hired women for major roles for as long as Joe Biden has been rubbing their shoulders, smelling their hair, and breathing on their necks."
Eric Trump
Awesome!
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I am looking for President Trump to announce some new rules on New Year's Day for taxes that make for an election year economic stimulus. See previous posts for what I hope they include. He can't announce them in advance because people would postpone their transaction until the new year.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=jjrU_WzTUYU&feature=emb_logo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=mDIB521q4tk&feature=emb_logo
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I am looking for President Trump to announce some new rules on New Year's Day for taxes that make for an election year economic stimulus. See previous posts for what I hope they include. He can't announce them in advance because people would postpone their transaction until the new year.
Were the New Year's economic announcements delayed by the Iran action taking up the news cycle or was I just wrong?
Watcing https://www.whitehouse.gov/
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From the Iran thread: 'cultural targets', 'Trump being an ass.'
Besides his bad habits and good policies, I would award him a most improved ribbon:
4 years ago candidate Trump did not know Quds from Kurds:
https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/252752-trump-blasts-hugh-hewitt-as-a-third-rate-radio-announcer
And he wasn't familiar with the nuclear triad:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2015/12/17/what-is-nuclear-triad-debate-sot.cnn
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:-D
-
Expect a GREAT State of the Union speech tonight.
-
https://thefederalist.com/2017/01/23/donald-trump-first-president-turn-postmodernism/
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https://www.foxnews.com/media/rush-limbaugh-state-of-the-union-presidential-medal-of-freedom
I want to see the faces of the Dems for this ! :-D
-
For me that speech was from a titan
(when he behaves himself . :-D)
God bless Rush . A Patriot all the way!
I did not watch the Dem response
why bother
-
I did not watch the Dem response
why bother
[/quote]
I turned it off at the end too, missed the Pelosi tear up and the rebuttal. Watched this morning.
Dem response here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=277&v=xc5MJpEkO8g&feature=emb_logo
Her points are worthy of discussion too. She really had to do extensive research to find positive things Democratic Governors are doing across the country. Fixing pot holes, bridges, etc. Taking care of the have-nots in their states. Good presentation, good speech. The answer to many of her points is that those things SHOULD be done by states, cities, counties. It was not a rebuttal to what the President said: Lowest black and Hispanic unemployment ever, best wage growth in however many years, 7 million new jobs when only 1.9 million were forecasted, millions and millions off of food stamps. That growth brings revenues to the STATES - who did NOT lower their tax rates. Why shouldn't they use the money to fix what is broken and deteriorating in their states? [After they pay off the teachers unions and special interests that got them elected.] But she throws in the right to slaughter their young. Mentions impeachment, speaking of time wasted on talk, not action. Fails to mention the Dem's strange emphasis on transgender bathrooms, girls and women's sports destroyed by social engineering, while the President works on wage growth. Nothing said on their bought-opposition to school choice in Detroit's failed schools. Nothing on foreign policy, the Democratic President's giveaway of lands won with sacrifice of Michiganders blood and treasure, right back to ISIS, or how her party and the establishment of the other party let China walk all over us for so many years, but not anymore.
Manufacturing came back to Michigan and she can't even give it a mention - because she opposed the policies that led to that. Her state is on a comeback, not thanks to her.
Thank you President Trump and the Republicans in Washington who re-energized the country without any help from the other side of the aisle.
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"For me that speech was from a titan
(when he behaves himself . :-D)
God bless announcing Rush . A Patriot all the way!"
/quote]
That took enormous guts from both of them. One day after announcing terminal illness, the President gets him to Washington, seats him next to the First Lady and awards him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with the biggest possible audience worldwide.
Part of it is that they are friends. Part is that he deserves it and part is that Trump knows this cements his bond with his base.
Half the audience had no idea Rush was an "inspirational" leader. They know him only through the hate sites quoting him out of context. If only we could read the thought bubble over Nancy Pelosi's cartoon head during that honor.
-------------
Trump also hit hard with a ban on late term abortion and the right to prayer in public schools. What say his general election opponent Buttigieg(?) to that? People can't understand why 'evangelicals' support Trump. Maybe because the other side despises them so.
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Doug,
Linked to your post on Dem response to SOTU
only 11 minutes (Thank you know who)
reaching out to the suburban moms .
white lady but very motherly soft spoken
nod to paying off teachers
mentions about the increasing wealth gap - I do agree this is not healthy but I don't agree with confiscation of the wealth to bribe their freee stuff crowd as the answer
college education of course mentioned - nod to continue paying off leftist academics while getting to the free college money crowd
health care ( which I see others agreeing with us :-D will likely be the prominent issue ) . - more health care for those who do have trouble paying for it by making others pay for it.
Trump did some good work addressing this up front.
the typical Dem condescending phony - truth matters etc........
( I never heard Pelosi lie........ :wink:; or Schiffster or love handles Nads)
and of course climate change . not much I can say about this . Maybe Trump could push for fusion but the rest of the Left's prescription is bad for us IMO
The Dem response was actually not as obnoxious as the MSM libs .
The main stream media never ever discuss what Trump says or does /did soley on its merits - only that it is partisan , divisive , racial
anti black anti latino anti babes and the rest......
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/donald-trump-unorthodoxy-becoming-orthodox/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-02-06&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yey5MtACi3g&feature=share
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/
-
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/
Oh no, our esteemed military leadership that hasn't won a war since 1945 is very upset that the Commander in Chief won't defer to their expertise.
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"Oh no, our esteemed military leadership that hasn't won a war since 1945 is very upset that the Commander in Chief won't defer to their expertise."
Hold it right there GM
we kicked the Cubans off Grenada!
:evil: :-D
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Witty snark no doubt, but for the record I'd say we won the Gulf War pretty decisively and overthrew Saddam pretty decisively.
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Witty snark no doubt, but for the record I'd say we won the Gulf War pretty decisively and overthrew Saddam pretty decisively.
I keep looking for pictures and articles of Saddam signing an unconditional surrender document at the end of the Gulf War. I haven't found anything yet.
Google must be broken!
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Witty snark no doubt, but for the record I'd say we won the Gulf War pretty decisively and overthrew Saddam pretty decisively.
I keep looking for pictures and articles of Saddam signing an unconditional surrender document at the end of the Gulf War. I haven't found anything yet.
Google must be broken!
I believe there is such an agreement. I read it at the time. And had a printed copy of it. I believe Google is broken, can't find it.
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=946.msg48276#msg48276
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yes I thought of H Bush win
though we got rid of saddam once and for all but not sure I would call it.a win or what
the second time around with W Bush
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I would say our military won the war with Saddam but our political leadership lost the peace until our military via the Surge won it again only to have Obama-Biden lose it again.
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Witty snark no doubt, but for the record I'd say we won the Gulf War pretty decisively and overthrew Saddam pretty decisively.
I keep looking for pictures and articles of Saddam signing an unconditional surrender document at the end of the Gulf War. I haven't found anything yet.
Google must be broken!
I believe there is such an agreement. I read it at the time. And had a printed copy of it. I believe Google is broken, can't find it.
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=946.msg48276#msg48276
unconditional-surrender
Noun
A surrender without conditions, except for those provided by international law.
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https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trump-pardon-san-francisco-49ers-owner-eddie-de-bartolo-jr-wexner-223144333.html
he just has to be so much in "your face"
it does look bad when he is pardoning donors
though I recall clinton did it and likely bamster
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Yes, Clinton's pardons were far, far worse AND "it does look bad when he is pardoning donors".
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https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trump-pardon-san-francisco-49ers-owner-eddie-de-bartolo-jr-wexner-223144333.html
he just has to be so much in "your face"
it does look bad when he is pardoning donors
though I recall clinton did it and likely bamster
https://www.justice.gov/pardon/file/993666/download
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https://www.newsmax.com/politics/alan-dershowitz-trial-penalty-pardon-criminal-justice/2020/02/19/id/954842/
at this rate we will be hearing calls to do away with the entire prison system
MOST crimes go unpunished
this is not helpful! :-(
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The Michael Milken Pardon
Trump’s act of clemency recalls an era rife with the politics of envy.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 18, 2020 7:28 pm ET
Michael Milken speaks during the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore, Sept. 19, 2019.
PHOTO: PAUL MILLER/BLOOMBERG NEWS
President Trump issued several controversial pardons and grants of clemency on Tuesday, but the most welcome was the pardon to legendary financier Michael Milken. The presidential action recognizes that the Milken prosecution of the late 1980s-early 1990s was an example of prosecutorial excess in an era like our own when political gales were raging about “the greed decade.”
Mr. Milken was one of the great financial innovators of the 20th century. In the 1980s he invented the high-yield bond market that is now a financial staple but in the 1980s made capital available to entrepreneurs and young companies that otherwise couldn’t get it. In the process Mr. Milken and his employer, Drexel Burnham, challenged established Wall Street firms and corporate elites. The innovation helped to usher in two decades of rapid American growth and prosperity.
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It also made them political targets as prosecutors riding an anti-Wall Street populist wave investigated insider trading. The prosecutions, using the RICO statute usually reserved for the mob, turned up some genuine crooks but also prominent Wall Street figures who were largely innocent. Ivan Boesky, a genuine crook, produced information in return for leniency that led prosecutors to Mr. Milken, a bigger prize.
Drexel Burnham eventually went bust under the pressure. Mr. Milken fought the charges for some time but eventually pleaded guilty to six felonies after prosecutors targeted his brother Lowell. He was never charged with insider trading but was given a 10-year sentence out of proportion to his offenses that the judge later reduced to two years.
Most of the original securities prosecutions of that era were overturned by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, though only after Mr. Milken had served 21 months in prison. “The charges filed against Mr. Milken were truly novel,” said Tuesday’s White House statement on the pardon. “In fact, one of the lead prosecutors later admitted that Mr. Milken had been charged with numerous technical offenses and regulatory violations that had never before been charged as crimes.”
In an irony for the ages, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan at the time whose office led the prosecutions was Rudy Giuliani, who had his sights set on a campaign for New York mayor. Tuesday’s White House statement said Mr. Giuliani is among those who urged Mr. Trump to pardon Mr. Milken.
The White House statement also lists our proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, as a pardon advocate, among many others. For the record, these columns endorsed a pardon for Mr. Milken as long ago as Dec. 13, 2000, when news reports said Bill Clinton was considering it at the urging of financier Ron Burkle, whom the White House also mentioned on Tuesday.
The pardon erases Mr. Milken’s conviction, but the 73-year-old says he has no plans to return to the securities industry. It’s a shame the world was denied his expertise on that score for so long. Instead he has devoted his post-prison life to philanthropy through his family foundation with wife Lori and the Milken Institute.
His charitable priorities have included education, medical research, and spreading capital to the poor in the U.S. and around the world. His FasterCures project has saved countless lives by pushing the medical and regulatory communities to speed therapies for such afflictions as prostate cancer and melanoma.
Most of the media won’t share our view of this pardon, which is instructive about our politics then and now. Numerous journalists made their careers from prosecutors’ leaks against Mr. Milken and others on Wall Street, and they have a reputational stake in denying him any vindication.
Then as now the political air was also thick with a desire to punish the wealthy. Such vapors are easy to ride, but they don’t equate with justice. In the long run of history, Mike Milken has done more good for more people with his financial innovations and philanthropy than all the scribes of envy politics ever will.
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". The Michael Milken Pardon
Trump’s act of clemency recalls an era rife with the politics of envy.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 18, 2020 7:28 pm ET"
This has got to be the Wall Street Journal.
"Most of the media won’t share our view of this pardon"
Neither do I. Milken with his prostate cancer has done just fine since.
I doubt even 1% if the corruption on WAll STreet is ever revealed
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/us/politics/trump-pardons.html
sounds like a swamp to me.
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You're not the only person to whom that has occurred.
BTW, a rather powerful summary of some facts in the Roger Stone saga:
https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/483620-free-roger-stone
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-its-safe-to-hold-large-events-amid-coronavirus-outbreak_3257608.html?ref=brief_BreakingNews&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=c8cc02c906-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_03_02_09_40&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-c8cc02c906-239065853
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/cpac-chair-had-brief-contact-with-coronavirus-patient-at-conference_3264239.html?utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=5965010666-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_03_08_10_55&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-5965010666-239065853
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Brazilian official who met Trump on Saturday at Mar-a-Lago tests positive for coronavirus
Fabio Wajngarten, communications secretary to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, stood with Trump and Pence for a photograph taken at Mar-a-Lago.
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Along with Prof. VDH, Prof. WRM is my other favorite Democrat.
"If conventional U.S. political leaders had been properly doing their jobs, Donald Trump would still be hosting a television show."
He explains the Trump connection to the people in a way the political establishment, foreign policy establishment and the media establishment cannot see. This article has excellent analysis all the way through.
----------------------------
The Coronavirus May Make Trump Stronger
Gallup finds 60% of voters approve of his handling of the crisis. As usual, the establishment is clueless.
By Walter Russell Mead, WSJ Opinion / American Interest
March 25, 2020
This is not what his critics expected. At 49% overall job approval in the latest Gallup poll, and with 60% approval of the way he is handling the coronavirus epidemic, President Trump’s standing with voters has improved even as the country closed down and the stock market underwent a historic meltdown. That may change as this unpredictable crisis develops, but bitter and often justified criticism of Mr. Trump’s decision making in the early months of the pandemic has so far failed to break the bond between the 45th president and his political base.
One reason Mr. Trump’s opponents have had such a hard time damaging his connection with voters is that they still don’t understand why so many Americans want a wrecking-ball presidency. Beyond attributing Mr. Trump’s support to a mix of racism, religious fundamentalism and profound ignorance, the president’s establishment opponents in both parties have yet to grasp the depth and intensity of the populist energy that animates his base and the Bernie Sanders movement.
The sheer number of voters in open political rebellion against centrist politics is remarkable. Adding the Sanders base (36% of the Democratic vote in the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, or roughly 13% of the national vote considering that about 45% of voters lean Democratic) to the core Trump base of roughly 42%, and around 55% of U.S. voters now support politicians who openly despise the central assumptions of the political establishment.
That a majority of the electorate is this deeply alienated from the establishment can’t be dismissed as bigotry and ignorance. There are solid and serious grounds for doubting the competence and wisdom of America’s self-proclaimed expert class. What is so intelligent and enlightened, populists ask, about a foreign-policy establishment that failed to perceive that U.S. trade policies were promoting the rise of a hostile Communist superpower with the ability to disrupt supplies of essential goods in a national emergency? What competence have the military and political establishments shown in almost two decades of tactical success and strategic impotence in Afghanistan? What came of that intervention in Libya? What was the net result of all the fine talk in the Bush and Obama administrations about building democracy in the Middle East?
On domestic policy, the criticism is equally trenchant and deeply felt. Many voters believe that the U.S. establishment has produced a health-care system that is neither affordable nor universal. Higher education saddles students with increasing debt while leaving many graduates woefully unprepared for good jobs in the real world. The centrist establishment has amassed unprecedented deficits without keeping roads, bridges and pipes in good repair. It has weighed down cities and states with unmanageable levels of pension debt.
The culture of social promotion and participation trophies is not, populists feel, confined to U.S. kindergartens and elementary schools. Judging by performance, they conclude that people rise in the American establishment by relentless virtue-signaling; by going along with conventional wisdom, however foolish; and by forgiving the failures of others and having their own overlooked in return.
The blame game playing out over how the president has handled the coronavirus epidemic reflects the dynamics of this struggle. Mr. Trump’s establishment critics want a narrow fight over the dismal trail of bluster, evasions, missed opportunities and failed predictions that marked the president’s approach to the virus earlier in the year. Like many criticisms of Mr. Trump, these arguments against him are by and large correct and significant and it is part of the proper job of a free press to make them.
However, Mr. Trump’s supporters are not comparing him with an omniscient leader who always does the right thing, but with the establishment—including the bulk of the mainstream media—that largely backed a policy of engagement with China long after its pitfalls became clear. For Americans who lost their jobs to Chinese competition or who fear the possibility of a new cold war against an economically potent and technologically advanced power, Mr. Trump’s errors pale before those of the bipartisan American foreign-policy consensus.
The establishment’s massive, decadeslong failure to think through the consequences of empowering Communist China and creating a trading relationship that, among other things, left the U.S. dependent on Beijing for pharmaceuticals is a much less excusable and more consequential error than anything Donald Trump has done in 2020—and it has a direct bearing on the mess we are in.
Attacks on the establishment aren’t always rational or fair. They can be one-sided and fail to do justice to the accomplishments the U.S. has made in the recent past. Populism on both the left and the right always attracts its share of snake-oil salesmen, and America’s current antiestablishment surge is no exception. But the U.S. establishment won’t prosper again until it comes to grip with a central political fact: Populism rises when establishment leadership fails. If conventional U.S. political leaders had been properly doing their jobs, Donald Trump would still be hosting a television show.
Unless the president’s opponents take the full measure of this public discontent, they will be continually surprised by his resilience against media attacks. And until the establishment undertakes a searching and honest inventory of the tangled legacy of American foreign and domestic policy since the end of the Cold War, expect populism to remain a potent part of the political scene.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=anayDLau0zM&feature=emb_logo
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3Ou5uFFn8Q&feature=youtu.be
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=anayDLau0zM&feature=emb_logo
Love it!
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long time supporter, like all of us worried his poll numbers keep tanking - and they do for good reason.
The idea of simply moving to the Rose Garden where he can real journalist, who are not Democratic machine operatives could help:
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/04/28/nolte-donald-trump-must-stop-wrestling-with-the-media-pigs/
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The world retains its ability to surprise:
https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/politics/trump-quote-facebook-trnd/index.html
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"The world retains its ability to surprise:
'If I were to run, I'd run as a Republican. They're the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they'd still eat it up"
yes surprised CNN would call it this wrong
maybe since they themselves call Republicans the dumbest bunch of voters in the world ("his base") everyday they don't can pretend objectivism here.
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A Presidential Smear
Trump imitates the Steele dossier in attacks on Joe Scarborough.
By The WSJ Editorial Board
May 26, 2020 7:23 pm ET
Donald Trump sometimes traffics in conspiracy theories—recall his innuendo in 2016 about Ted Cruz’s father and the JFK assassination—but his latest accusation against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is ugly even for him. Mr. Trump has been tweeting the suggestion that Mr. Scarborough might have had something to do with the death in 2001 of a young woman who worked in his Florida office when Mr. Scarborough was a GOP Congressman.
“A lot of interest in this story about Psycho Joe Scarborough. So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair? What about the so-called investigator? Read story!” Mr. Trump tweeted Saturday while retweeting a dubious account of the case.
He kept it going Tuesday with new tweets: “The opening of a Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough was not a Donald Trump original thought, this has been going on for years, long before I joined the chorus. . . . So many unanswered & obvious questions, but I won’t bring them up now! Law enforcement eventually will?” Nasty stuff, and from the Oval Office to more than 80 million Twitter followers.
There’s no evidence of foul play, or an affair with the woman, and the local coroner ruled that the woman fainted from an undiagnosed heart condition and died of head trauma. Some on the web are positing a conspiracy because the coroner had left a previous job under a cloud, but the parents and husband of the young woman accepted the coroner’s findings and want the case to stay closed.
Mr. Trump always hits back at critics, and Mr. Scarborough has called the President mentally ill, among other things. But suggesting that the talk-show host is implicated in the woman’s death isn’t political hardball. It’s a smear. Mr. Trump rightly denounces the lies spread about him in the Steele dossier, yet here he is trafficking in the same sort of trash.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, had it right when he tweeted on the weekend: “Completely unfounded conspiracy. Just stop. Stop spreading it, stop creating paranoia. It will destroy us.”
We don’t write this with any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop. Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so.
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".We don’t write this with any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop. Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so."
Yup
if he was a Democrat I would have TDS too. Indeed I would love to send him. home packing knowing he LOST and let him stew over it
like he likes to do to so many people many of whom do not deserve it.
he is just so utterly repulsive
and like someone with a personality disorder he can't see it and has to blame others, so no , he won't stop . It has always amazed me how people with these disorders just cannot take responsibility for anything.
sadly I will not be surprised if enough people have felt enough of this sick childish BS that he will lose
I think his chance of a win maybe ~ 1/3. Like I posted before we can only hope Biden is worse. So far his handlers and baby sitters have been able to minimize him from getting out of his basement.
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for the powerful President of the US
to tweet about a single unknown person
without due process
I don't care about police looking for person of interest
but for the President to be doing this ?
://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-tweets-ohio-man-protest-014037091.html
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The Confessions of John Bolton
It’s quaint, we know, but whatever happened to honor in public service?
By The Editorial Board
June 18, 2020 7:14 pm ET
On the matter of John Bolton’s book, it’s hard to tell who looks worse: the former national security adviser for writing it while President Trump is still in office, his lifelong political opponents who now hail Mr. Bolton as a truth teller, or the President of the United States as depicted in the book.
Mr. Bolton has been a frequent Journal contributor across his long public life, and he’s a defender of American interests. We have gone to the barricades on his behalf more than a few times. His account of Mr. Trump’s private words and actions sounds right because the President often says similar things in public. As far as we know, Mr. Bolton has never lied to us.
Yet we also have to wonder what happened to honor in public service. Presidents should have some expectation that their advisers will wait until they kiss and tell, especially about their private conversations with foreign leaders. It used to be that advisers wouldn’t write about the Presidents they served until they had left office.
These days too many advisers bid for fame the minute they leave the White House, and Mr. Bolton has managed to do so in the middle of a re-election campaign. Mr. Trump didn’t treat him well, but the President treats few people well beyond his immediate family. Mr. Bolton certainly knew what to expect when he accepted the job.
Even if his motivation in publishing his book now is to block Mr. Trump’s re-election, there’s no reason for Mr. Bolton to disclose private comments by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. All he’s doing is undermining Mr. Pompeo’s ability to influence Mr. Trump away from bad policy mistakes. Mr. Bolton’s book is a blot on his distinguished career, and the contents will not help his country no matter who wins the November election.
Even worse are the Democrats and media who now hail Mr. Bolton’s book as holy writ after spending decades fighting everything he stands for. Joe Biden was among the Senate Democrats who filibustered Mr. Bolton’s nomination to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 2005 for no reason but partisan spite. Yet on Wednesday Mr. Biden issued a statement endorsing Mr. Bolton’s version of events without caveat.
As for Mr. Trump, the book’s excerpts carry no real surprises. The details are depressing against the standards one expects from a President. But voters know Mr. Trump has little tact, is untutored in foreign affairs, operates on personal instincts more than any guiding principles, and looks at nearly everything almost entirely through the prism of what is good for him.
Mr. Trump is hardly unique in gearing policy to his re-election. Recall Barack Obama’s “the tide of war is receding” in 2012 even as Islamic State mobilized. But it is still cringe-worthy to learn that Mr. Trump wrote his defense of U.S.-Saudi ties after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder to deflect from his daughter Ivanka’s troubles. And it’s revolting if Mr. Bolton is right that Mr. Trump gave Xi Jinping a moral blank check to hold a million Uighurs in concentration camps.
Voters can add all this to everything else they’ve learned in three and a half years as they decide whether to give Mr. Trump four more in the Oval Office. His character flaws and their considerable risks for a second term will be measured against Mr. Biden’s ebbing vigor and his increasing deference to the Democratic Party’s Jacobin left. As Winston Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.
==============
What is the reference to Ivanka's troubles?
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second post
MAGA—for All
Trump needs to give voters a reason to support him. He’s working on it.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
June 18, 2020 6:48 pm ET
Potomac Watch: Trump needs to give voters a reason to support him. He’s working on it.
President Trump convened a roundtable last week in Dallas, which the media described as a talk on police and race relations. It was much more. Some Republicans are beginning to hope it was the basis of a compelling second-term agenda.
As national unrest continues, Democrats are intent on limiting this debate to law-enforcement brutality and “racism.” Mr. Trump’s Dallas event was an effort to broaden the discussion into one about “advancing the cause of justice and freedom.” Part of that, Mr. Trump said, was working together to “confront bigotry and prejudice.” As important, he added, is providing “opportunity” to every American.
The president handed it over to Attorney General William Barr, who called education the “civil-rights issue of our time” and argued for school choice. Housing Secretary Ben Carson discussed efforts to use telemedicine to remedy health-care disparities. Scott Turner, executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, touted the success of “opportunity zones,” created in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which have funneled tens of billions of dollars into distressed communities.
Mr. Trump campaigned in 2016 to work on behalf of “forgotten” Americans—whether they be in struggling blue-collar areas, inner-city minority communities, or rural towns. As fate would have it, both the coronavirus and George Floyd’s death have shined a spotlight on glaring disparities in the country. The white-collar elite work safely from home in shut-down cities, while hands-on workers and small-business owners become economic statistics. The focus on rare cases of police abuse has resurfaced the all-too-common reality of so many African-American communities—crime, high unemployment, poor health care, failing schools.
In those bleak headlines is an opening for Mr. Trump to embrace a second-term “opportunity” agenda, a promise that free-market policies won’t only revive the struggling economy but throw it open to those forgotten Americans. So far, Mr. Trump has seemed content to let the race with Joe Biden boil down to a debate over the past four years and whether the Democrat is too radical or too incompetent to be trusted. Those points will certainly energize the Republican base. But making inroads with independents, minority voters and suburban housewives will require something more concrete and aspirational. Why not an “American Dream” theme?
That’s the case many Republicans are making to the White House, even as they think about how to refine it. One benefit of such an agenda is that it doesn’t require the administration to try to package a theme around disparate or expensive proposals like infrastructure or tax credits. It gives the president something more to pitch than a return to lost prosperity. And it provides the Trump campaign with an opportunity to make inroads with minority voters—crucial in a close race.
The greatest merit of an opportunity agenda is that it rests on core conservative policies and principles. It’s about tailoring them—and ramping them up—to serve struggling communities. That’s the brilliance of opportunity zones, which South Carolina’s Sen. Tim Scott got included in the 2017 tax reform. He harnessed the power of smart tax relief and directed it at underserved, struggling communities. School choice is, likewise, about providing minority parents the opportunity to rescue their kids from crummy schools. Health-care choice is about giving poor Americans the opportunity to escape Medicaid. Deregulation is about providing more Americans the opportunity to engage in entrepreneurship.
Even better, the Trump administration already has the record, people and infrastructure to build on this theme. The common and absurd claim that Mr. Trump is “racist” has always been belied by the diversity of his administration and the programs it has pursued. Sentencing reform. An unprecedented focus on vocational education. Funding for historically black colleges. Tackling the opioid epidemic. Mr. Trump in 2018 set up the Opportunity and Revitalization Council, which Messrs. Turner and Carson oversee. In May the council put out a report brimming with case studies and best practices for spurring investment in economically distressed areas.
Promoters also note that an American Dream theme is optimistic and inclusive—a needed contrast to perpetual Democratic anger, partisan and racial animus, the fear and gloom of the virus. The administration aside, that kind of positive agenda could prove a lifeline for Senate Republicans who have been provided little that is forward-looking to campaign on, and who aren’t running against Mr. Biden.
But perhaps the best argument for this agenda is that Mr. Trump already believes in it. Advisers note that there’s a reason he talks so frequently about the historically low black and Hispanic unemployment rates; he’s genuinely proud of them. The 2016 slogan was “Make America Great Again.” It would be no lift for Mr. Trump to add a couple of words and sell what he has done, and what he could with four more years. “Make America Great Again—for All.”
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third post
Well, there goes one of Bolton and the WSJ's criticisms:
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/china-warns-us-of-consequences-after-donald-trump-signs-uighur-human-rights-act-2248064
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There goes another:
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/06/pompeo-calls-bolton-a-traitor-who-damaged-america-over-book-claims/?utm_campaign=DailyEmails&utm_source=AM_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Master+List&utm_campaign=9a18a498af-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_06_19_08_59&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9c4ef113e0-9a18a498af-61658629&mc_cid=9a18a498af
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There goes another:
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/06/pompeo-calls-bolton-a-traitor-who-damaged-america-over-book-claims/?utm_campaign=DailyEmails&utm_source=AM_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Master+List&utm_campaign=9a18a498af-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_06_19_08_59&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9c4ef113e0-9a18a498af-61658629&mc_cid=9a18a498af
Good that it's Pompeo more than Trump speaking out on this.
I used to like Bolton also. He is more of a hawk than Trump. It is easier to be a total hawk as a think tank critic than as a policy maker. They were bound to have disagreements. Having hawks at his side, Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis, gave Trump credibility in his bluffs or negotiations with Kim Jung Un, Xi Jinping, Assad, Erdogan, Ayatollah etc. Trump's foreign policy has been described as Boisterous Isolationism. Over time, that is not compatible with the likes of Bolton or Mattis. I don't know how he makes it work with Pompeo, just that Pompeo is putting his country first, and that neither he, nor Bolton could or did get elected.
Bolton was a big backer of the Iraq war. Trump calls it America's biggest mistake in however many years. That is insulting. I side more with Bolton, but again, Trump got elected and the rest of us didn't.
I wrote earlier, if the effect of this book and book tour is to weaken us with our allies and adversaries and it didn't need to be said, then he is a traitor. I mean that in terms of definition, not criminal charges.
"Traitor definition: one who betrays another's trust or is false to an obligation or duty."Merriam-Webster
Who is Bolton going to vote for now, Joe Biden? Biden will be tougher on China, NK, Syria, Iran? More principled? More honest? Are you kidding??
To my friends on the Left and same to never-Trumpers on the right, if the guy is so bad and he has plenty of faults, why do you have to lie about him or take ANYTHING out of context to criticize him? Isn't the truth bad enough?
Trump is a racist? Good, then ell me a true story about that. Trump is a fool. Good. Tell me a true story about that. What is Bolton's overall point? Sell a book? At all costs?? That he never should have gone to work for a President he didn't support? That his ego got bruised? Who could have seen that coming?
Trump tweet, from the article:
“When Wacko John Bolton went on Deface the Nation and so stupidly said that he looked at the ‘Libyan Model’ for North Korea, all hell broke out. Kim Jong Un, who we were getting along with very well, went ‘ballistic,’ just like his missiles — and rightfully so. He didn’t want Bolton anywhere near him,” Trump tweeted. “Bolton’s dumbest of all statements set us back very badly with North Korea, even now. I asked him, ‘what the hell were you thinking?’ He had no answer and just apologized. That was early on, I should have fired him right then & there!”
- Did Bolton deny this. He said it on national television.
Headline: "Bolton says US considering Libya model for North Korean denuclearization"
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/30/asia/north-korea-bolton-libya-intl/index.html
[Host:] "is it a requirement that Kim Jong-un agree to give away those weapons before you give any kind of concession?
BOLTON: I think that's right. I think we're looking at the Libya model of 2003-2004."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/full-transcript-face-the-nation-on-april-29-2018/
Libyans cheered the fate of ousted dictator Moammar Gadhafi into the early hours of Friday after his death in what Libya's transitional prime minister described as a crossfire that followed his arrest by revolutionary forces. ... troops found Gadhafi in a large drainage pipe. ...the pipe is about 3 feet wide and filled with trash and sand.
https://www.cnn.com/2011/10/20/world/africa/libya-war/index.html..
Does anyone not know how that ended for Kadhafy? Was that supposed to sound appealing to Kim Jung Un?
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https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Trump-elicits-backlash-over-racist-language-15364474.php
He just has to keep making everything worse and keep driving anyone who would even be inclined to vote for Republicans away.
Looks like we are all going down with him.
I can only hope for something to come up out of thin air and save the conservatives
at least the Senate
normal people get tired of wise guy hard asses.
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I don't get that Kung Flu is racist. To me it is one of many name to blow off the Chi Com puppet masters controlling our language.
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CD
it can be deemed as racist if one is Chinese
it is clearly
meant to be an insult
if he says flu from China ok
This is just stupid shit. and I believe is reason why so many are sick of him and why he is going to lose
(so am I frankly). yes , I know the LEFt has been giving him the total 100% resistance from day one
but there are people who might come over to our side if he was not so off the charts impulsive , insulting and the rest we all know ad nauseum
only the Dems are worse - far worse.
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https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/trump-follows-threat-slow-testing-163220493.html
who the hell cares how HE looks
wear a mask
every time I read this stuff
it brings us one step closer to losing
venting
would someone please shove his tweeter where the sun don't shine?
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Peggy has been squishy a very long time, but she can write , , ,
The Week It Went South for Trump
He hasn’t been equal to the crises. He never makes anything better. And everyone kind of knows.
By Peggy Noonan
June 25, 2020 7:28 pm ET
Something shifted this month. Donald Trump’s hold on history loosened, and may be breaking. In some new way his limitations are being seen and acknowledged, and at a moment when people are worried about the continuance of their country and their own ability to continue within it. He hasn’t been equal to the multiple crises. Good news or bad, he rarely makes any situation better. And everyone kind of knows.
On Wednesday a Siena College/New York Times poll found Joe Biden ahead 50% to 36%. It’s a poll four months out, but it’s a respectable one and in line with others. (A week before, a Fox News poll had Mr. Biden leading 50% to 38%. The president denounced it as a fantasy.) This week’s poll had Mr. Biden leading among women by 22 points—a bigger lead than Hillary Clinton enjoyed in 2016. He has moderates by 33 points, independents by 21. On Thursday a separate Times/Siena poll had Mr. Trump losing support in the battleground states that put him over the top in 2016. His “once-commanding advantage among white voters has nearly vanished,” the Times wrote.
The latest White House memoir paints the president as ignorant, selfish and unworthy of high office. Two GOP House primary candidates the president supported lost their primaries resoundingly. Internet betting sites that long saw Mr. Trump as the front-runner now favor Mr. Biden. The president’s vaunted Tulsa, Okla., rally was a dud with low turnout. Senior officials continue to depart the administration—another economic adviser this week, the director of legislative affairs and the head of the domestic policy council before him. Why are they fleeing the ship in a crisis, in an election year?
Judgments on the president’s pandemic leadership have settled in. It was inadequate and did harm. He experienced Covid-19 not as a once-in-a-lifetime medical threat but merely a threat to his re-election argument, a gangbusters economy. He denied the scope and scale of the crisis, sent economic adviser Larry Kudlow out to say we have it “contained” and don’t forget to buy the dip. Mr. Trump essentially admitted he didn’t want more testing because it would result in more positives.
And the virus rages on, having hit blue states first and now tearing through red states in the South and West—Arizona, Florida, the Carolinas, Texas.
The protests and riots of June were poorly, embarrassingly handled. They weren’t the worst Washington had ever seen, they were no 1968, but still he wound up in the White House bunker. Then out of the bunker for an epically pointless and manipulative photo-op in front of a boarded-up church whose basement had been burned. Through it all the angry, blustering tweets issued from the White House like panicked bats fleeing flames in the smokestack.
It was all weak, unserious and avoidant of the big issues. He wasn’t equal to that moment either.
His long-term political malpractice has been his failure—with a rising economy, no unemployment and no hot wars—to build his support beyond roughly 40% of the country. He failed because he obsesses on his base and thinks it has to be fed and greased with the entertainments that alienate everyone else. But his base, which always understood he was a showman, wanted steadiness and seriousness in these crises, because they have a sense of the implications of things.
He doesn’t understand his own base. I’ve never seen that in national politics.
Some of them, maybe half, are amused by his nonsense decisions and statements—let’s ban all Muslims; let’s end this deadbeat alliance; we have the biggest, best tests. But they are half of 40%, and they would stick with him no matter what. He doesn’t have to entertain them! He had to impress and create a bond with others.
The other half of his base is mortified by his antics and shallowness. I hear from them often. They used to say yes, he’s rough and uncouth and unpolished, but only a rough man can defeat the swamp. Now they say I hate him and what he represents but I’ll vote for him because of the courts, etc. How a lot of Trump supporters feel about the president has changed. The real picture at the Tulsa rally was not the empty seats so much as the empty faces—the bored looks, the yawning and phone checking, as if everyone was re-enacting something, hearing some old song and trying to remember how it felt a few years ago, when you heard it the first time.
In the end, if the president loses, he’ll turn on them too. They weren’t there for him, they didn’t work hard enough, they’re no good at politics. “After all I did.”
That will be something, when that happens.
Nobody knows what’s coming. On New Year’s Eve we couldn’t imagine the pandemic, economic contraction and protests. We don’t know what will happen in the next four months, either. I believe in the phenomenon of silent Trump voters, people who don’t tell anyone, including pollsters, that they’re for him because they don’t want to be hassled. But eight, 10 or 14 points worth? No.
It’s generally thought that if the summer’s protests and demonstrations become riots again, if they’re marked by more violence and statues crashing to the ground, then Mr. Trump will benefit. This may be true. There will be powerful pushback if things are grim. But I’m not sure he will benefit. A sense that things have gone out of control under your watch does not help incumbents. A sense that he cannot calibrate his actions but will do any crazy thing to bolster his position will not help him. He is a strange man in a strange time, the old rules don’t necessarily apply.
It’s possible, but not likely, that a general calming will occur as progressive activists make progress in party primaries and corporate boardrooms, and as their ideological assumptions ascend in public life. They’ve already won and are winning a lot.
And it’s always possible Joe Biden will awaken to the moment we’re in, see that a leader isn’t someone who sits back in a sunny, well-appointed suburban room and watches, passively, as dramatic events unfold. He could emerge as a real leader with a series of statements putting forth guiding principles to weather our crises. We have problems with race, problems with the police. What rearrangements should be made? How do we make them nonviolently, democratically? What is the meaning of history? What is a statue? What is socialism? What is the path?
He is bowing to the ancient political wisdom that you should never interrupt a man while he’s destroying himself. And he’s afraid of being on the wrong side of rising progressive forces. But thoughtfulness and seriousness would put him squarely with wavering Trump supporters and the honestly undecided, and reassure them that a vote for him is not also a vote for unchecked extremism and mayhem.
Silence is short-term shrewd. Rising to the occasion, taking a chance, making a gamble when everything is going your way but the country needs more—that is long-term wise. And wise always beats shrewd in the end.
We had wondered if Mr. Trump can lead in a crisis. He cannot. Can Mr. Biden?
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I agree the her main point of Trump
that he has not been capable to win over any new voters
and other parts of what she says, but not all -
she has clearly been a never Trumper (all along) so she totally ignores all entire lefts and never trumpers onslaught against him much if it unfair
but this part really. annoys me :
" And it’s always possible Joe Biden will awaken to the moment we’re in, see that a leader isn’t someone who sits back in a sunny, well-appointed suburban room and watches, passively, as dramatic events unfold. He could emerge as a real leader with a series of statements putting forth guiding principles to weather our crises"
yeah sure , he is not going senile or had some sort of ministrokes with brain damage.
that is why he was in the basement - hiding and being hid by handlers.
as for him emerging as a true "leader " . of course he will pretend to be for all americans, paint himself as a moderate (gleefully cheered on as true by the propaganda wing)
and a uniter , blah blah blah, like Obama.
and he will proceed to be the same dem party hack liberal lying sleazy low life he has always been
and of course govern that way - with people around him who will do the same - like obama.
something about never trumpers (Noonan) who still cling to the idea , they are safe, and the dems are not really what they say they are .
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Yup.
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I remember when she was fantastic, inspirational. Now she sounds run of the mill msm. She introduces no new facts except a lopsided NYT poll which she calls respectable. Really? Did they get the last presidential election right? Does anyone think this election will be decided by a national poll of registered voters? Joe will win by 14%? I'll take that bet with any odds. Obama last won by less than 4. Joe has none of his skill or savvy and Trump has incumbency and a record.
What the poll means is that Biden cannot be replaced on the ticket. What the poll means is that in this bizarre time of unprecedented lockdown and frustration, he is still 3 times more popular than the only incumbent, national leader of the other party: https://bustatroll.org/2020/03/30/nancy-pelosis-approval-rating-is-now-the-lowest-in-congress-at-14/
Trump couldn't lead in a crisis? Lead us where, to Kumbaya with the arsonists? Trump shut down flights from China. NO ONE else would have done that. In hindsight, he should have done it 3 months earlier and should have shut down flights from Europe too if they didn't shut down their flights from China. Who would have done that? No one. In this crisis we needed someone bolder than Trump with greater foresight. That's a very short list that doesn't include Joe Biden.
Trump led us to peace and prosperity. Promising to do that again is a pretty solid campaign message. He is a phenomenal cheerleader for the American economy and his instincts for growing it have turned out to be right, over and over. He is bringing troops home instead of being drawn into new conflicts. People like that.
We are in the middle of a mess that no one is happy with, but the storm willll pass. Covid deaths are down 90% since the peak of April 21. Instead of covering that progress up, NYT should try pushpolling with that fact and see where the needle turns.
She asks, can Joe Biden lead, as if it's a serious question. More realistic: can he still dress himself? Quoting someone recently, he is more than a couple of tacos short of a combo plate. His elevator doesn't stop on all the floors anymore. His only winning argument is, anyone but Trump, and that only works when he is in hiding.
He gaffes whenever his lips move. Joe Biden yesterday: 120 million have died in this country from COVID. https://hotair.com/archives/karen-townsend/2020/06/26/oops-bidens-outlandish-gaffe-pennsylvania-delights-gop/
This guy is not a math guy. What is his strength, oratory? Linguistics? He had nothing going for him BEFORE this sad, very public deterioration.
Peggy Noonan does not like Trump. It's some kind of a New York thing. I didn't like him either but got over it when faced with all the alternatives, mainly the US going the way of Venezuela and Mogadishu. If she can't get over her dislike, she should write about something else - but that choice is hers.
-----------------------
ccp: "something about never trumpers (Noonan) who still cling to the idea, they are safe, and the dems are not really what they say they are.
Right! Moderates in the House did not stand up to AOC and Omar and Joe Biden will not stand up to the far Left. Biden's argument against Bernie was that Bernie would lose, not that his policies are wrong. This is not JFK, a rising tide lifts all boats. This is not Clinton, shrewd enough to "triangulate". This is the VP who voted yes on planeloads of cash to the mullahs and voted no on the Osama bin Laden raid.
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".This is the VP who voted yes on planeloads of cash to the mullahs and voted no on the Osama bin Laden raid."
and is the corrupt career politician who recommended using the Logan Act to go after Gen Flynn (even after their own FBI cleared him of any wrong doing). and along with Obama
oversaw a coupe d tat attempt
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/25/joe-kent-foreign-policy-military-generalsprefer-status-quo/
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https://lawliberty.org/podcast/ronin-without-masters-a-never-trump-assessment/
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I assume Trump will bash his niece soon
call her a liar
make fun of her.
but this is so damaging
I love how everyone who writes these tell books ALWAYS claim it ain't about the money.....
no new revelations as trump's personalty flaws obvious for all to see long before this book
though some insights where this came from maybe -
OTOH not sure how much of a personality disorder is nurture vs genetic vs other so to blame the father etc may well be right but studies I think are unclear on this. As for a clinical psychologist diagnosing her family members in a book , would that not be unethical ? :wink:
The Left is having fun with this.
The left just cannot fathom why we would not abandon Trump and thus vote Biden - as though he is truly a role model
as leftist Tom Friedman claims. - what a joke.
Like I should want to go back to Obama era rule but on steroids ......
Pray we hold the Senate
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Something to remember:
The entire Trump family was NYC Dem. IIRC Ivanka and Jared couldn't even vote for Donald in the NY primary because they were registered Dems at the time.
Think of all the TV series about the viciousness of big, rich family power dynamics.
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".Think of all the TV series about the viciousness of big, rich family power dynamics."
yes but this is not 'Dallas' .
this is the present president of the US
he is a dichotomy
champion for 63 million ignored people (including me). and a total nut job.
with the emotional maturity of someone 6 y old.
that said I will/can never vote for a Democrat
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html
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I give Trump kudos
for being able to write off taxes. :-D. Anyway this is no surprise.
Amazon pays no taxes .....
That said how does NYT get this a month before election?
someone is being paid
or a true believer
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I give Trump kudos
for being able to write off taxes. :-D. Anyway this is no surprise.
Amazon pays no taxes .....
That said how does NYT get this a month before election?
someone is being paid
or a true believer
https://monsterhunternation.com/2020/09/28/no-you-idiots-thats-not-how-taxes-work-an-accountants-guide-to-why-you-are-a-gullible-moron/
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https://americanmind.org/essays/how-america-first-broke-the-establishment-curse/
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Covid survival rate for someone like the President: 96%. Prayers for the President [and ALL afflicted with this nasty pandemic].
Political impact: TBD.
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As a matter of logic, doesn't St. Fauci and other experts say that masks are from protecting others from you, not you from others?
Doesn't being President involve interacting with a lot of people?
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Not sure I can take much more of 2020. Can we just fast forward?
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Isn't there an Aesop fable about how that is a bad idea?
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quote author=Crafty_Dog
As a matter of logic, doesn't St. Fauci and other experts say that masks are from protecting others from you, not you from others?
I think that is true with the cloth masks, but I believe wearing a well fitted and sealed N95 gives you good breathing protection. And wear gloves.
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N-95 protects down to 3 microns. Covid is 2 microns.
My brain is 1/2 of 1 micron.
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Lets see ,
Sanjay
how many times do your sources tell you he coughed today?
Well Jake,.......
If any of this information is coming from any health care people it is HIPPA violations that could land that person(s) in jail and fines up the ass.
CNN has to be paying someone or someones for this stuff
or they simply make up "sources"
or they have listening devices that can pick of conversations
Has to be .....
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N95 protects to 0.3 microns. "COVID-19 particle is around 0.1 microns in size, but it is always bonded to something larger."
“There is never a naked virus floating in the air or released by people,” said Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech who specializes in airborne transmission of viruses.
https://www.sphosp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Letter-in-response-to-N-95-use-RA-Final.pdf
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/11/fact-check-n-95-filters-not-too-large-stop-covid-19-particles/5343537002/
Leakage around the mask is another matter.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Virus through cloth mask is like shooting a nail through a chain link fence.
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https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/10/08/trump-suggests-he-may-have-contracted-coronavirus-from-gold-star-families/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Army%20DNR%2010.8.20&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Army%20-%20Daily%20News%20Roundup
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trump-does-what-he-says-muslims-abandon-biden-back-president
Very interesting, if true. I know that Mpls Somali Americans do not reflexively support Reo Ilhan Omar's divisive approach.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q6UWa3Uj_Q
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https://dailycaller.com/2020/11/12/victor-davis-hanson-will-trump-ride-off-into-the-sunset/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=recaps&pnespid=hvNxuehFGwqNgDJ1gGe8pEVzew1N.2P8aYsUntsR
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Help! Can someone please help me. I can't find the part where Trump incites the crowd to commit violence on the nation's capitol.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?507744-1/rally-electoral-college-vote-certification
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I can't find the part where Trump incites the crowd to commit violence on the nation's capitol."
he doesn't ; just says walk to capital to give Congressmen who vote on electors etc
more or less moral support
Off the top of my head this was really the first violent Maga gathering . And most had nothing to do with the violence
they were just there.
Everyone caught off guard I think
though we read reports about law enforcement intelligence of people making plans to get violent.
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"Everyone caught off guard I think."
Except for the Antifa among them.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/09/trump-twitter-protests/
Can't read this because of paywall. but if capitol siege was planned online, that is more evidence it was not a direct result of the President's speech that day, that did not call for violence.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/09/trump-twitter-protests/
Can't read this because of paywall. but if capitol siege was planned online, that is more evidence it was not a direct result of the President's speech that day, that did not call for violence.
Sorry Doug, ORANGE MAN BAD!
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/trumps-tragic-fall/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202021-01-21&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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"The Hubris and Tragedy of President Trump"
generally agree with author but not about we who don't believe the integrity of the manipulated election as being
cry babies
but the character flaw is exactly the reason we cannot have him continue to be a favorite to run again
in the end we all got screwed
by it
yes for us a tragedy
yes Shakespearian
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I guess NYT had some time on their hands with the Biden scandals they aren't planning to cover.
I thought history was erased when twitter deleted his account.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/19/upshot/trump-complete-insult-list.html
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Awesome.
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2021/01/23/key-advisor-reveals-trumps-postpresidency-plans-n2583598
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/23/trump-will-return/
Helluva smile from Melania.
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Will return? Already back.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-meets-with-mccarthy-in-florida-to-plan-gop-house-takeover-in-2022
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I am not. huge fan of hers
but I do agree with some of this:
https://anncoulter.com/2021/01/13/most-disloyal-man-in-history-finally-finds-a-cause-worth-fighting-forxx/
Bottom line,
Please God, will someone with the fight spirit of Trump but without the over the top narcissistic personality disorder set of defects , please emerge before 2022?
Please
Trump is like a pitcher who can win 20 games a season - but then loses 20 or 21.....
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Forgotten about the massive electoral/vote fraud already?
I am not. huge fan of hers
but I do agree with some of this:
https://anncoulter.com/2021/01/13/most-disloyal-man-in-history-finally-finds-a-cause-worth-fighting-forxx/
Bottom line,
Please God, will someone with the fight spirit of Trump but without the over the top narcissistic personality disorder set of defects , please emerge before 2022?
Please
Trump is like a pitcher who can win 20 games a season - but then loses 20 or 21.....
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https://patriotpost.us/alexander/77325-the-trump-presidency-a-one-term-postmortem-2021-01-27?mailing_id=5603&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5603&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=header.default&fbclid=IwAR2xCae2k8JyCshJuyQZwSl_RK2KKGeHD_pSq16ADXEwbLY-VLgR4yXPeUY
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"Forgotten about the massive electoral/vote fraud already?"
no of course not
yet he still lost to a demented idiot
probably more due to his personality then policies
I am not sure if he made any difference in Georgia races or not
But intra party fighting just before an election does not seem like a good strategy
it is hard to fathom that he would not have won easily if not for endless impulsive often egotistical tweets
day after day
making it much easier for his political enemies to attack him
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He didn't lose, it was stolen. Big difference.
"Forgotten about the massive electoral/vote fraud already?"
no of course not
yet he still lost to a demented idiot
probably more due to his personality then policies
I am not sure if he made any difference in Georgia races or not
But intra party fighting just before an election does not seem like a good doctor
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He lost for several reasons any of which, had they been different would have given him victory. We know the evil that was done him AND we know what an ass he was at the first debate. We know the stupid China Virus press conferences. We know all the stupid punching down food fights. etc etc.
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He lost for several reasons any of which, had they been different would have given him victory. We know the evil that was done him AND we know what an ass he was at the first debate. We know the stupid China Virus press conferences. We know all the stupid punching down food fights. etc etc.
A stolen election ISN'T a loss.
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He ain't in the White House, is he?
Sure sounds like a loss to me.
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He ain't in the White House, is he?
Sure sounds like a loss to me.
Did the guy that came in second to Lance Armstrong really lose to him?
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He ain't in the White House, is he?
Sure sounds like a loss to me.
Did the guy that came in second to Lance Armstrong really lose to him?
Did Barry Bonds really break Hank Aaron's home run record?
https://www.mlb.com/cut4/bonds-breaks-aaron-s-record-on-august-7-c289134264
Did Mark McGuire really hit more home runs than Hamon Killebrew?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_career_home_run_leaders
Neither Bonds nor McGuire are in the Hall of Fame. Both are on the all time leaderboard. The world knows they cheated.
G M, I think you are thrown off by the word 'really'. Biden didn't really win, but as pointed out, he sits in the office and holds all the powers. Winning by cheating isn't really a stain if you're a psychopath. (
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He ain't in the White House, is he?
Sure sounds like a loss to me.
Did the guy that came in second to Lance Armstrong really lose to him?
Did Barry Bonds really break Hank Aaron's home run record?
https://www.mlb.com/cut4/bonds-breaks-aaron-s-record-on-august-7-c289134264
Did Mark McGuire really hit more home runs than Hamon Killebrew?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_career_home_run_leaders
Neither Bonds nor McGuire are in the Hall of Fame. Both are on the all time leaderboard. The world knows they cheated.
G M, I think you are thrown off by the word 'really'. Biden didn't really win, but as pointed out, he sits in the office and holds all the powers. Winning by cheating isn't really a stain if you're a psychopath. (
I reject the "If only Trump were nicer" theory. Since I was a kid, every republican is a nazi. It never ends. The cheating won't either, as there are no consequences.
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Unlike the power struggle at hand, baseball is a sport, a ritual with rules.
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https://news.yahoo.com/trump-raked-cash-denying-loss-125839286.html
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https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2021/02/02/autopsy-report-coronavirus-cost-donald-trump-reelection/
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https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2021/02/02/autopsy-report-coronavirus-cost-donald-trump-reelection/
The lack of empathy I saw was what voters didn't have for him for having to go through the phony Mueller probe and endless media bullsh*t.
The economy before Covid was the winning ticket.
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rump tried to get China to pay for virus damages
Navarro explains reelection maneuver
BY BILL GERTZ THE WASHINGTON TIMES
President Trump, before the 2020 election, considered setting up a blueribbon panel of experts to study the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic along with seeking as much as $10 trillion in reparations from Beijing for the damage, according to a book by former White House aide Peter Navarro.
The effort, which included a draft executive order, was scuttled by Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin and White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow. They persuaded Mr. Trump to reject the commission over fears that the inquiry would cause stock markets to crash or trigger a war with China, Mr. Navarro contends in his book, “In Trump Time,” being published Tuesday.
Mr. Navarro explained how he lined up key players inside the White House to support setting up a commission to publish a report on the virus’ origin before the presidential election, holding China accountable for the global outbreak. The commission’s interim report would be
released two months before the November election in a bid to sway voters to back Mr. Trump’s reelection, he stated.
The draft presidential order called for investigating the origin of the coronavirus, determining whether it really developed from a natural animal host as Beijing claimed, assessing the economic and human costs, and looking at whether China’s ruling Communist Party exploited the pandemic to advance its political, economic and military agendas.
A preliminary estimate of damage to the U.S. population and economy was the value of an entire lost year of the U.S. gross domestic product, or more than $20 trillion. The federal government also spent more than $10 trillion in fiscal and monetary relief efforts to keep the economy from collapsing during the pandemic.
“By sticking China with a bill for the havoc it has wreaked on the U.S. economy and American people, we could effectively cancel our debt to China and still lay claim to trillions of dollars more in damages for the havoc inflicted by the CCP,” Mr. Navarro wrote, using the acronym for Chinese Communist Party. China holds about $1 trillion in U.S. government debt, second only to Japan among international creditors.
In addition to producing a clear statement on the pandemic, an interim report produced by the commission would help counter mainstream media reporting that sought to ignore China’s role in the pandemic and blame Mr. Trump, who was campaigning for reelection.
“In the end, Mnuchin and Kudlow got it wrong on just about everything. And nowhere were they more wrong than on the issue of Communist China,” Mr. Navarro writes in “In Trump Time.”
Mr. Navarro wrote that he hoped the commission could be led by Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, and include prominent virologists and biological weapons experts such as those at the Army’s Fort Detrick research base. The State Department would host and fund the commission.
However, the proposed “National Commission on the Origins and Costs of COVID-19” was blocked by what Mr. Navarro calls three unfounded “fears” that pro-China aides, Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Kudlow raised with the president.
The first fear was that China would cancel Mr. Trump’s January 2020 “phase one” trade deal requiring significant purchases of American agricultural and manufactured exports by Beijing. There was also concern that a full-scale clash with China would cause the stock markets to dive just months before Election Day.
The last fear was that antagonizing Beijing might lead to a shooting war.
Mr. Navarro said he felt such a notion was curious because “we were already in a hot war with China, both economically and in cyberspace.”
The author recalls that the debate over the commission involved “sparks” and “insults” during a meeting in which Mr. Trump shook his head in exasperation with his feuding advisers.
Mr. Kudlow did not return an email seeking comment.
A person close to Mr. Mnuchin said: “The secretary does not recall any conversations with Peter or others regarding this matter.”
Like many other China skeptics, Mr. Navarro believes the coronavirus behind the pandemic was biologically engineered. He also contends that the presidential election was stolen through Democrats’ “lawfare,” or legal warfare in altering voting rules in the months before the vote.
Mr. Navarro, who served as assistant to the president for trade and manufacturing policy, said he, Mr. Trump and former White House strategist Steve Bannon planned a Green Bay Packers-style political “sweep” to challenge Democrat Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. The goal was to send the contested presidential election results from Congress to state legislatures to be decided.
As part of the strategy, Vice President Mike Pence was to use his authority as Senate president to put off congressional certification of the election for several weeks so state legislatures could investigate voting irregularities, mainly in how key states handled absentee and mail-in ballots.
The effort failed as a result of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, which prompted the evacuation of Mr. Pence and other Trump loyalists in Congress. When lawmakers and Mr. Pence reassembled late in the day, they quickly certified a victory for Mr. Biden.
“The January 6, 2021, violence on Capitol Hill was not instigated by President Trump,” said Mr. Navarro, who provides one of the first insider accounts of the White House in the last days of the Trump administration. The adviser says the violence in the halls of Congress was against Mr. Trump’s interests.
Mr. Trump “was the very last person to want such violence, precisely because it derailed his best chance to get a full and fair accounting of the flood of illegal ballots cast in the Nov. 3 election,” he stated. “In this inglorious way, the Green Bay Sweep will end with either a fumble, a sack or an interception — choose your own football metaphor,” Mr. Navarro wrote. He added that the former vice president is to blame for betraying Mr. Trump and ending election integrity.
Mr. Navarro also blames White House aide Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-inlaw, for failing to anticipate the legal disputes after the election. Days afterward, “war officially breaks out between the Kushner-led campaign and a team led by the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani,” he stated.
In one White House dining room encounter, Mr. Navarro said, several aides urged Mr. Trump to announce a run for president in 2024. Mr. Navarro told him it was a “dumb idea” because it would signal Mr. Trump was conceding that the 2020 election was over.
“What you damn well need to do right now is fight,” Mr. Navarro told the president.
Instead, the Trump presidential campaign was “doing its best impression of Gen. George Custer at the Little Big Horn,” he said, noting that $70 million in campaign funds could have been used for legal challenges to Mr. Biden’s victory.
Mr. Navarro wrote that he urged Attorney General William Barr to order the Justice Department to investigate election fraud. He was told that privatesector lawyers representing the campaigns carried out challenges during the disputed 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
The title of Mr. Navarro’s book, “In Trump Time,” is based on Mr. Trump’s desire to accomplish things rapidly. Mr. Navarro said a second meaning reflects his four years in the administration.
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" President Trump, before the 2020 election, considered setting up a blueribbon panel of experts to study the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic along with seeking as much as $10 trillion in reparations from Beijing for the damage, according to a book by former White House aide Peter Navarro.
The effort, which included a draft executive order, was scuttled by Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin and White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow. They persuaded Mr. Trump to reject the commission over fears that the inquiry would cause stock markets to crash or trigger a war with China, Mr. Navarro contends in his book, “In Trump Time,” being published Tuesday"
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/should-u-s-refuse-pay-back-its-1-trillion-debt-n1227351
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-fox-news-pundit-says-105215532.html
I am certainly no great fan of JonahG anymore
but I agree on his point here, and I am also tired of cleaning up Trump's messes
lets NOT go thru this all over again
Lets go Desantis!
------ I would also add that Trump did not ask them to invade capital and did state "peacefully"
However I do agree he took a prolonged to say a peep after the Capital trespassing.
He clearly was in his heart quite happy with it no matter what he says now.
As the Fox news people were begging him to get on a mike and state it must cease immediately
and I recall members on this board stating they were ashamed
and yet our fearless tough guy remained silent.
We will go through this crap again if he gets elected.....
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/amid-middle-east-chaos-billionaire-democrat-admits-trump-enacted-incredible-foreign-policies-5512116?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2023-10-19&src_cmp=gv-2023-10-19&utm_medium=email&cta_utm_source=Goodevening&est=wZ00zLihD2P95TDycCxkbMzERSACWJWtEWl2hH61G9ep5wH9ScfvHS5I6FgEX%2FUrxXHb
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSJxyVJjAfk
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thank you for posting
that scene of President Trump announcing that Black unemployment is lowest in history then the take of the response of the Black caucus looking mad, disgusted, and put off was a classic. I got a real belly laugh from that. Belly laughs are the best therapy for me.
And Prof Sowell laughs too and says the statistic Trump stated was TRUE!
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https://resistthemainstream.com/billionaire-drops-major-allegation-about-secret-talks-with-trump/?utm_source=newsletter2
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https://www.mediaite.com/trump/trump-asked-melania-to-parade-around-mar-a-lago-in-a-bikini-so-all-the-other-guys-could-get-a-look-aussie-billionaire-says-in-leaked-audio/
I have to admit.
If anyone ever accused any other President of doing this I would write off as not true.
Except for Clinton as I would know not true. He would never have wanted Hillary to walk around in bikini and have everyone laugh
But with Trump it is easy to believe it.
Why oh why?!!?!!
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Because Melania is super hot?
BTW, worth remembering is that back in the day the press covered for JFK's philandering, including with a mob moll and IIRC an East German spy.
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if true , you don't think it pretty sick for him to ask his wife to walk around in a bikini while President of the US?
She is not my type. I have never been into tall lanky models
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My gut impression is that I like her. She did not sign up to be a political wife, let alone First Lady. She did sign up to be a trophy wife.
As his wife she has received vicious calumny and the shame of her husband's philandering on the front pages.
My sense is that she has handled herself with dignity and class.
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I have a favorable opinion of her.
not her husband who disrespects her at times
though of course I would vote for him in a hearbeat if he is the nominee.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/trump-cleared-of-any-wrongdoing-in-fbi-headquarters-spat-5516106?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-10-25-1&src_cmp=breaking-2023-10-25-1&utm_medium=email&cta_utm_source=News&est=kbPqPl234THg3vxrpmcwSGZulcBd%2FoiC2tjeZV1riicuRhpHbT2ImfKIUFaksJ%2BlZiPN
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Trump’s Drastic Plan to Slash the Government Could Succeed
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/why-trumps-drastic-plan-to-slash-the-government-could-succeed-6828ccbe
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(Doug). If he set his mind to it he could be the biggest government cutter of all time.
One of many reasons (also 3 great Supreme Court picks) I will vote for him in the general election even though I prefer someone else in the primary.