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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 9:14 am 
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It appears that about 35% of the country will support Trump no matter what he does. They judge the believability of information based on how right wing it is, so anything bad about Trump is a lie or unimportant; anything bad that happens is by definition the fault of the Democrats. A Republican can only betray them by failing to be conservative enough. Call it circular reasoning, call it group think, call it tribal epistemology. Call them the anti-vaxxers of politics. Bannon probably thinks he can keep this base riled enough to spook the Republican Congresscritters into obedience. Classic populist Latin American strongman move. You don't need the majority necessarily. You just need the fence-sitters to stay quiet. But, Bannon thinks he's living in a movie. Reality will clock him upside the head sooner or later.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:08 pm 
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Trump wants to mix infrastructure with tax reform (read massive top heavy cuts) in order to attract Democratic fellow travelers to vote for it. Perhaps enough hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal spending for public owned projects will get some Democrats interested in voting for tax cuts weighted largely towards the working and middle classes; but since both of those are anathema to the current majority I think we can safely rule out anything like this happening.

I suspect someone is about to find out that tax policy and Federal budgets are complicated.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:16 pm 
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Taxes and budgets. Who could have known they were so complicated?

sighs

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 10:20 pm 
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Not only that, he's spent 2 months being so cartoonishly evil (ignoring Jews on holocaust remembrance day??) that no Democrat would want to be seen dead cooperating with him now. Trump has boxed himself in.

Oh well. He's still gutting environmental regulations and Congress is still passing legislation to let ISPs sell your personal data to advertisers without your permission, so it's all good right? Next stop, net neutrality.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Mar 31, 2017 4:58 am 
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Weremensch wrote:
There's talk that General Flynn is cooperating with the FBI against Trump. It's certainly plausible (especially to those of us who remember Watergate), and it could make things interesting if true.

You were kinda right. Flynn now wants to testify before Congress in return for immunity, but it looks like nobody there gives a crap. Either they don't think he's got anything useful, were planning on nailing him and don't feel like throwing him a rope, or don't want him to talk because they intend to let Trump off scot free. One of the three.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Mar 31, 2017 4:27 pm 
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There's talk that Trump is blowing off the seriousness of a government shutdown next month because the Democrats would get the blame. I'm starting to wonder if we should be testing him for drug use (piss in this jar, Mr. President).

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 6:05 pm 
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There is a court case currently in progress against Trump for inciting violence during one of his rallies, brought by the folks his followers attacked after he allegedly incited them to do so. The judge just declined to throw it out; ruling that the charge is plausible, and if true it's not protected speech. Yes, Trump's mouthpiece was claiming that incitement to violence is protected under the 1st Amendment as free speech. Next up, shouting 'movie' in a crowded firehouse.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2017 10:16 pm 
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How predictable, the Republicans furiously spinning a load of nothingburger scandals to distract from Trump's Russia problem. Nooooo, it's all Obama's fault for spying on Trump in the first place! Trump is the real victim here! It'll keep Fox watchers occupied for a while. Maybe until after the midterms.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2017 11:14 pm 
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Lessee. Court packing yes, health care stripping no, bringing back jobs no, border wall no, convincingly lying that Obama is to blame no, betraying internet users yes, escaping the Russia scandal no, recovering poll ratings no, competent White House staff no, apparently ordering a missile strike on Russian and Syrian troops in a Syrian airbase...well, the missiles were launched. An interesting week. Oh, and the adults apparently took over the National Security Council just before we attacked Syria, so it probably wasn't all Bannon's idea. In the wings, China.

Suddenly the idea of a drink seems a bit more attractive.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 12:32 am 
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1. It's probably futile to try to make sense of Trump's foreign policy. It's probably a function of (current dominant White House faction) x (most macho narrative) + (whatever Trump saw on Fox this morning).

2. I guess all the "President Bannon" jabs finally got to Trump and he dumped Bannon off the NSC. Just think of what trouble we'll be in if Bannon learns subtlety. His blatant Darth Vader fanboy schtick isn't getting him anywhere.

3. Something like 75% of Republicans believe that Obama wiretapped Trump. Wall of nonsense propaganda only convinces the base, but its purpose is to get everybody talking about nonsense (even to refute it) instead of real problems. Such as...

4. How is the blatant nepotism of having Jared Kusher and Ivanka Trump practically running the country not breaking a truckload of laws right now?

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Apr 09, 2017 12:07 pm 
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So long as they don't have posts requiring Senate confirmation it's not illegal (though they are breaking a lot of laws regarding conflicts of interest). Not that there are any Republicans or fellow traveler 'moderates' in the press capable of caring unless they're punished for not doing so.

In other news...unless the US launches rather a lot more military strikes against Syrian government forces then the missile attack was only a small and ineffective sop to Trump's base. It's much like moving a single carrier into Korean waters (as he is). Unless they use nukes, one carrier group really can't do much more then irritate North Korea (and presumably China).

Meanwhile China won the meeting with Trump; he got nothing, which is exactly what they wanted to offer. It's uncertain if he even really tried to advance American interests during those meetings. Lets see how many fellow traveler media sources will discuss that where the flyover fools can hear it.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Apr 10, 2017 11:25 pm 
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China likes the status quo just fine. The collapse of the TPP just sets China up to fill the trade vacuum, and nobody's got time to stop them taking over the South China Sea. I bet Xi just wanted to see for himself what an idiot Trump is.

As for the Syria strike, it's a flop with a good chunk of Trump's base. The alt-right is screeching about betrayal because they were totally on board with buddying up with Putin to prop up Assad. As far as they're concerned, bombing Assad for humanitarian reasons is aping Hillary Clinton on steroids. Those most pleased are the old-school Republican hawks like McCain.

Watching the media chatter, I am disappointed (but not surprised) that they've fallen for the "Trump is Acting Presidential Now!" routine again. Hopefully it'll wear off in about three days when Trump says something stupid. Then come all the foreign policy wonks trying to parse the implications of Trump's supposed 180 degree turn on Syria and regime change and intervention in the Middle East.

Guys, you don't get it. You can't have a 180 degree turn if there was no direction to begin with. Trump doesn't have a policy. He's not an anything-ist. He just says random crap because he thinks it sounds tough. Yesterday he thought it sounded tough to prop up a brutal dictator against ISIS (and Bannon was whispering in his ear). Today he thinks it sounds tough to lob missiles. Stop looking for coherence when there isn't any. Even Trump officials admit that there is no Trump doctrine.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2017 7:45 pm 
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We're doing health care. No, we're doing tax policy. No, health care; and in order to get the Republican Congresscritters who won't kill the ACA in broad daylight to do so, we'll kill it and own it ourselves if they don't.

Fresh from our bigly success in Syria, we're going to threaten North Korea. Moreover, we'll do so without mobilizing anything like enough non-nuclear force to make it work. And we'll do it from a golf course in Florida with food safety violations (make the steak very well done). That can't go wrong.

Meanwhile he's adopting more of the policies of the Obama Administration that the fools in the cheap seats wanted him to undo, and getting rid of the staffers they like, and as a consequence he's alienating a lot of them. And if, as it seems, his only accomplishment with China is to get permission for our financial sector to invest more heavily in their economy then the cheap seats are going to be even less pleased. Pity they're his only political resource.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2017 11:57 pm 
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The big-ticket Republican policy items are all floundering, but no matter, the Trump administration is screwing people in a thousand small ways.

- They just deported a DACA kid twice in the space of a few days (i.e. the same kid was deported twice), the first time for no apparent reason. Note to non-Americans: these are the kids that Obama allowed to stay in the US by executive order because they were brought over illegally as children, and the Democrats felt it was cruel to deport people who'd been in the US since they were five through no fault of their own. Trump has not formally rescinded the policy, his agents just appear to be disregarding it.
- Betsy DeVos says that "past quality of service" is no longer a consideration in the contracting of student loan debt collectors. In other words, the government wants to hire an incompetent company to save money.
- Mining companies can now pollute streams. Take that, environment!
- Jeff Sessions has given the Justice Department instructions to stop caring about police brutality.

Have I missed any?

The Democrats seem hilariously inept at this point, narrowly losing two special congressional elections after three months of uninterrupted Trump idiocy. Well, technically the second one has gone to a run-off, but there's no way Ossoff's gonna win now that the Republican vote has been whittled down to one candidate.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2017 12:19 pm 
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If i understand it correctly, the one election they lost was in a district so red, that the republican candidate usually wins by a 30% margin and this time he won by a 7% margin, so while they lost, they still had a good performance.

The one with a runoff also usually has a comfortable republican majority, but Trump only got a slim majority here, so the democratic results where roughly the same as in the presidental election. If that is an especially anti-Trump red district, the big question would be, how Trumpish the republican candidates are, and especially how Trumpish the remaining republican candiate is.

Anti-Trump republicans might still have vote preferences like "anti-Trump republican","democrat","Trump-republican". So i guess the more Trumpish the remaining republican candidate is, the better for the democrat. And if my quick calculation in the head is correct, if 4% of the voters are republicans, who were mainly interested in pushing the republican party in one direction, and now that their candidate is eliminated stay at home in the runoffs, and everyone else votes for the same party, the democrat will win. So i guess while it is still an uphill struggle, the race is not yet lost for the democrats.

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