Trump to win?

[GRG55]

Re: Trump to win?

If Sanders and Warren can pull it off, more power to them although it might be that Bernie's time has passed. Besides, the smart move would be to run someone (way) under 70 and firmly planted in the 21st Century as a way of demonstrating a clear break from the past. First the let's see if the party can purge the Clintons and then we'll be in a better position to talk about what might come next.

I'm not sure where your bravado and optimism comes from seeing how similar assurances were made on Monday morning only to be dashed so thoroughly and unexpectedly Wednesday morning. The Democrats are still walking through the stages of grief, I get it, and we will see if and when they can free themselves of denial as to the reasons they were routed and what they need to do to win back these voters.

As of now, I see them stuck in the propaganda bubble they made for themselves and doubling down on the ridiculous assertions made during the campaign. The anti-Trump riots, small as they are, should give people some idea as to the mindset of the most extreme and unhinged on the Clinton cohort. If the shoe were on the other foot at it was anti-Hillary riots, you can be sure it would be the lead story every cycle. On every talking head and pundit's mouth you'd hear "why isn't Trump making his supporters stop rioting" but no such demand is made on Hillary. Par for the course, but makes me think the institutional and individual failures among the Democratic Party and it's MSM adjuncts that brought us a Trump landslide aren't about to change.

If the Dems get pushed to the far left by Warren et al the vacuum in the center of the spectrum will give rising Republican talent like Rubio all the room they need to institutionalize the results of this election for a generation. That's the real danger facing the Dems...years in the wilderness.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

I think it's the Sanders / Warren party. Warren was asked today who her running mate would be in 2020. This time she did not say no, she gave the usual political answer, there's a lot to accomplish, etc. etc. As I said in the post you responded to, the Dems are mourning. We will come out of this quickly and move forward. Your candidate and his party will likely do a lot of damage to the US over the next four years. Hopefully that can be repaired. When anarchists take control, life can be very unpredictable. We'll know more by this coming summer.

If Sanders and Warren can pull it off, more power to them although it might be that Bernie's time has passed. Besides, the smart move would be to run someone (way) under 70 and firmly planted in the 21st Century as a way of demonstrating a clear break from the past. First the let's see if the party can purge the Clintons and then we'll be in a better position to talk about what might come next.

I'm not sure where your bravado and optimism comes from seeing how similar assurances were made on Monday morning only to be dashed so thoroughly and unexpectedly Wednesday morning. The Democrats are still walking through the stages of grief, I get it, and we will see if and when they can free themselves of denial as to the reasons they were routed and what they need to do to win back these voters.

As of now, I see them stuck in the propaganda bubble they made for themselves and doubling down on the ridiculous assertions made during the campaign. The anti-Trump riots, small as they are, should give people some idea as to the mindset of the most extreme and unhinged on the Clinton cohort. If the shoe were on the other foot at it was anti-Hillary riots, you can be sure it would be the lead story every cycle. On every talking head and pundit's mouth you'd hear "why isn't Trump making his supporters stop rioting" but no such demand is made on Hillary. Par for the course, but makes me think the institutional and individual failures among the Democratic Party and it's MSM adjuncts that brought us a Trump landslide aren't about to change.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Trump to win?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...OP-sweeps.html

They all took the figures for US unemployment as truth; when many out here honestly believe that the unemployment figures are a blatant lie; not 4.5% but nearer 23%. In which case, if they believed the figures given to them, then why would they feel they had any further responsibility towards the poor working people of their nation?

If the unemployment figures are in fact nearer 23%, then that simple fact may become the trigger for the complete collapse of many erstwhile leading careers.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Trump to win?

While you are certainly correct, I see no hope that we will ever see civil servants standing up to call out misbehavior by their superiors.
Certain cohorts self-select. Whip-smart people with courage and vision who are bold in their actions don't seek jobs as clerks issuing building permits.
I know quite a few career civil servants very well, and they tend to be meek, careful people proud of their ability to understand and follow the office rules, fearful of losing their jobs and pensions.
In the US civil servants who blow the whistle on misbehavior get punished badly.
Edward Snowden springs to mind.

I doubt we will ever be able to count on civil servants to notice misbehavior and rush to accuse elected offials.
It just isn't in them, as a cohort.

I am reminded of the occasional western movie where the very same people suddenly realise that they too have to step up to the plate to act; in the interests of a free society, where the good people matter more than forever standing silent, watching the criminals continuing to strut around the town without fear of any consequences.

Over the years, I have met many whip smart people in very low paid and seeming inconsequential jobs; yes, agreed, some because they had previously spoken out and paid the price. But, sooner or later, we all have to step forward and take responsibility, or face a future without any regard for truth; law and order.

If we talk about this openly, one day, they will understand that they have responsibilities too.

[vt]

Re: Trump to win?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...OP-sweeps.html

[vt]

Re: Trump to win?

[santafe2]

Re: Trump to win?

The Democratic Party as currently organized is a zombie, a dead man walking.

I think it's the Sanders / Warren party. Warren was asked today who her running mate would be in 2020. This time she did not say no, she gave the usual political answer, there's a lot to accomplish, etc. etc. As I said in the post you responded to, the Dems are mourning. We will come out of this quickly and move forward. Your candidate and his party will likely do a lot of damage to the US over the next four years. Hopefully that can be repaired. When anarchists take control, life can be very unpredictable. We'll know more by this coming summer.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

Woody, I'm not playing 4-D chess here...

No sweat, D.C. Didn't mean to imply any gamesmanship on your part. That's never once been your style and you're always a straight shooter.

If it's okay with you I'd much rather table this particular issue and simply reaffirm my view that it's a settled matter and that I have nothing further to add to the discussion.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Trump to win?

You make a good point too, regarding the word corruption.

What I am trying to do is bring the matter of the, (agreed; civil service), responsibility to the people into view. What we have seen develop over the last few decades is the rise of the national interest over and above the needs of the people; wherein the "Nation" has become the interests of the civil services. That is a dichotomy that needs recognition. Again, returning to the word corruption we need to remember that in any court of the law, if any of us step back and knowingly let another; whomever; break the law; we too become equally responsible. It is all very well saying that "I have been given orders" when the orders involve not telling a true picture to the people to hide unhelpful facts.

Again, if the civil service set out to silence a critic, simply because such criticism opens an honest, reasonable debate, regarding the actions of the civil servants, at what point does the word ethics come into view? Everyone has their eye on the Clinton's of the world; From my viewpoint, we all need to take a very close look at the underlying mechanisms that allowed the political to create such a dysfunctional system and then take no responsibility for the dysfunction. It takes two to tango!

While you are certainly correct, I see no hope that we will ever see civil servants standing up to call out misbehavior by their superiors.
Certain cohorts self-select. Whip-smart people with courage and vision who are bold in their actions don't seek jobs as clerks issuing building permits.
I know quite a few career civil servants very well, and they tend to be meek, careful people proud of their ability to understand and follow the office rules, fearful of losing their jobs and pensions.
In the US civil servants who blow the whistle on misbehavior get punished badly.
Edward Snowden springs to mind.

I doubt we will ever be able to count on civil servants to notice misbehavior and rush to accuse elected offials.
It just isn't in them, as a cohort.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Trump to win?

I see your point, Chris. Here in the U.S. we also call that part of our government the Civil Service - employees who report to a desk every day to collect taxes and fees, and spend that money buying goods and services.

One thing that confounds these conversations is our specific meaning of the word "corruption"
Because it is such a powerfully negative word filled with awful connotation, people have starting using it to describe almost any behavior they don't like, legal or not.

You make a good point too, regarding the word corruption.

What I am trying to do is bring the matter of the, (agreed; civil service), responsibility to the people into view. What we have seen develop over the last few decades is the rise of the national interest over and above the needs of the people; wherein the "Nation" has become the interests of the civil services. That is a dichotomy that needs recognition. Again, returning to the word corruption we need to remember that in any court of the law, if any of us step back and knowingly let another; whomever; break the law; we too become equally responsible. It is all very well saying that "I have been given orders" when the orders involve not telling a true picture to the people to hide unhelpful facts.

Again, if the civil service set out to silence a critic, simply because such criticism opens an honest, reasonable debate, regarding the actions of the civil servants, at what point does the word ethics come into view? Everyone has their eye on the Clinton's of the world; From my viewpoint, we all need to take a very close look at the underlying mechanisms that allowed the political to create such a dysfunctional system and then take no responsibility for the dysfunction. It takes two to tango!

[dcarrigg]

Re: Trump Appointments

I'm starting to get a bad deja-vu. According to Zerocred, Trump is considering his financial advisor, Mnuchin, a 17-year-veteran of Goldman Sachs for Treasury Secretary: "[Mnuchin] ... according to this article, Trump has appointed neocon James Woolsey as his National Security Advisor. If true it doesn't bode well:


While I'm very disappointed about this, it should be good news to those who supported Hillary as for now it looks like there's no difference where Goldman and the neocons are concerned.

This is kinder how I had it figured for a while now...

Just click and hit play.

http://embed.genfb.com/1162376937139173

Now that the theater for us plebeians is over, Ivanka and Chelsea are sipping $200 afternoon cocktails together at some swanky penthouse lounge in Manhattan that would never let you or I through door.

http://www.eonline.com/videos/embed/254297

No matter what happened in the election, the upper class was winning.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Trump to win?

No, I don't think it's quite as grim as that. There are hundreds of Democrats in the House and Senate, thousands more in the state houses, tens and hundreds of thousands working the various agencies, and they dominate K street and the NGOs. Not dead yet.

We need to give this time to shake out and see what Trump will do. See what the Democrats will do in counter. Both parties need to go after and keep/win the voters who put Trump in the White House by promoting policies that help them directly and with immediacy. There are powerful and massively capitalized centrifugal forces that will move Heaven and Earth to keep Trump and the Democrats from doing precisely that, because it's their ass if they don't.

Well, truth be told, come 2017, Democrats are out everywhere by 13 states. They have no federal power at all. Not in the House. Not in the Senate. Not in the White House. Not in the Supreme Court.

Everything that happens from then on, for at least two years, and probably longer, will fall on the Republicans.

Republicans actually have to govern this time.

And it's not Trump personally I'm so worried about here. Actually, if he could get some movement on trade deals, I think that'd be good. His revolving door / lobby plan isn't bad. The defense spend is at least anti-austerity. It's not all garbage.

But what is the legislature going to do? They're not just protesting any more. They need ideas. And they have to be better than vouchers (Discounts are meaningless if you can't afford the thing anyways!) and tax-preferred savings accounts (Hahaha! What savings?) and slashing regulations (Wall Street give-away every time!) and slashing public employment (Not a good idea if you keep talking about jobs!) and tax cuts for millionaires and estates and corporations (It never has once trickled down!).

I mean, ideas aren't hard to come by. Instead of billionaire tax cuts, you could always put an equivalent amount of money into highways, housing, defense, energy, whatever. I don't know that with debt as high as it is right now we can do both. Maybe. But probably it will have to be one or the other. I just don't trust Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to pick the right one when it comes time to chose between national investment vs. taxpayer give-away to donor-class.

And you and I both know that HSAs are a joke--a spectacularly failed policy that has never worked and will never work. Even worse than 401(k)s, which are also a terrible joke.

I'm willing to hold judgement on Trump only because it seems like he's not a pure market-anarchist zealot. But I know that many of his fellow party members in the legislature are...and his Heritage Foundation policy people on the EOP side will be too. I don't trust them to come up with any productive ideas.

But we shall see.

[jk]

Re: Trump Appointments

attorney general giuliani? secty of the interior palin? secty of transportation- christie? [that last is a joke]

[dcarrigg]

Re: Trump to win?

It's more of the same scare tactics Democrats and liberal activists have come to rely on by default. There's nothing to concern ourselves and we can go back to our lives with no fear that should we want an abortion, morning-after pill, IUD, Depo-Provera, the pill, damns, condoms, sponges or even those funny eyeglasses they issued me in the army, that all those services will be there for us just as they have before ('73 and some time prior).

Look it; we had 8 years of Reagan, 4 years of Bush I and 8 years of Bush 2. These were pro-life presidents and each had at some point in their administrations enough legislative mojo to pass some rather sizable bills with far reaching effects. Yet in all those years where these stridently pro-life presidents served, no serious or successful attempt has been made to overturn RvW and women have maintained consistent access to the full range of reproductive health options available. In and between those administrations, abortions have remained legal, widely available and at little or no charge to the persons receiving the services.

There is ZERO support for an "instant ban" and anyone who attempts to run such legislation now or in the next administration will be pissing into the wind. You folks do know that the "struggle" for reproductive rights is yet another of these false controversies used to gin up donations and attention to left/liberal activist groups? You do know it's a false controversy to keep us distracted and at each others throats, don't you?

Woody, I'm not playing 4-D chess here. I didn't have any secret agenda with that comment. It was not meant to scare anyone nor advocate one party over another in any way.

I hope you'll take a second to go back and read my words rather than read into them. I can't prove to you I'm not operating on some secret agenda here, I'm just telling you so, and hoping whatever reputation I've earned after 10 years or whatever it has been is enough to convince you and everyone else.

In fact, I'm pretty sure over the last 10 years, I have never let my personal position on the matter of abortion be known here, just because it is so divisive a wedge issue.

That being said, I was responding to jk's hypothetical, and I'm too much a Catholic and too familiar with the pro-life argument not to point out what I saw as a glaring error in his hypothetical logic.

The pro-life movement's goal is not now, and never has been, to overturn Roe v. Wade the way jk (and probably lots of other people unfamiliar with the pro-life movement) believe it to be.

The pro-life movement generally has little interest in undoing privacy protections as civil liberties and following the Roe v. Wade logic back to Griswald v. CT, etc.

The pro-life movement makes both the legal and moral argument that the fetus is alive, and that's the wellspring from which it should have rights and abortion should be illegal. Very few, if any, in the pro-life movement think that Roe ought to be overturned on the grounds upon which it was decided, and that states ought to gain greater power to violate individual privacy rights.

The phrase "overturn Roe v. Wade" when used in national politics does not mean the same thing to a pro-life activist as it does to jk here. Few, if any, pro-life advocates are thinking "the decision will just go back to the states, and that's fine." The grounds on which Roe was decided are totally tangential to the central matter at hand for the pro-life movement, and overturning Roe in the minds of most pro-life activists is not actually simply overturning Roe, it's getting judicial recognition for fetal personhood and working to get equal protection and due process that way. That is what "overturn Roe v. Wade" means to the rank and file voter in the pro-life movement, not some devolution of authority to the states.

And that was all I was trying to say.

No more, no less.

Fire away.

[shiny!]

Trump Appointments

I'm starting to get a bad deja-vu. According to Zerocred, Trump is considering his financial advisor, Mnuchin, a 17-year-veteran of Goldman Sachs for Treasury Secretary: "[Mnuchin] ... who now works as the chairman and chief executive of the private investment firm Dune Capital Management. Mnuchin has also worked for OneWest Bank, which was later sold to CIT Group in 2015."

This, IMO is akin to Obama naming Geithner to Treasury.

I'm not familiar with The Intercept so can't attest to their veracity, but according to this article, Trump has appointed neocon James Woolsey as his National Security Advisor. If true it doesn't bode well:

Donald Trump named former CIA director and extremist neoconservative James Woolsey his senior adviser on national security issues on Monday. Woolsey, who left the CIA in 1995, went on to become one of Washington’s most outspoken promoters of U.S. war in Iraq and the Middle East.

As such, Woolsey’s selection either clashes with Trump’s noninterventionist rhetoric — or represents a pivot towards a more muscular, neoconservative approach to resolving international conflicts.
Trump has called the Iraq War “a disaster.”
Woolsey, by contrast, was a key member of the Project for the New American Century — a neoconservative think tank largely founded to encourage a second war with Iraq. Woolsey signed a letter in 1998 calling on Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein and only hours after the 9/11 attacks appeared on CNN and blamed the attacks on Iraq. Woolsey has continued to insist on such a connection despite the complete lack of evidence to support his argument. He also blames Iran.
Weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Woolsey called for broader war in the Middle East, saying “World War IV” was already underway.
Woolsey has also put himself in a position to profit from the wars he has promoted. He has served as vice president of Pentagon contracting giant Booz Allen, and as chairman of Paladin Capital Group, a private equity fund that invests in national security and cybersecurity.
He chairs the leadership council at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a hawkish national security nonprofit, and is a venture partner with Lux Capital Management, which invests in emerging technologies like drones, satellite imaging, and artificial intelligence.
Woolsey went on CNN on Monday and said that he was principally motivated to support Trump because of his plans to expand U.S. military spending.
Trump gave a speech last week in which he proposed dramatic expansions of the Army and Marines, and hundred-billion-dollar weapons systems for the Navy and Air Force. He offered no justification — aside from citing a few officials who claimed they wanted more firepower.
Woolsey stood by Trump’s proposal on Monday.
“I think the problem is her budget,” Woolsey said of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. “She is spending so much money on domestic programs — including ones that we don’t even have now, and the ones we have now are underfunded — I think there can be very little room for the improvements in defense and intelligence that have to be made.”
Woolsey has previously called for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be “hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted.”
In the past, Woolsey has publicly disagreed with Trump on a number of national security issues — including Trump’s plan to ban Muslim immigration. On Monday, Woolsey told CNN that such a plan would raise First Amendment issues, but that he supported a temporary immigration block from certain Muslim countries.
Thus far, at least, most prominent war hawks have found they had more in common with Clinton than Trump. “I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” leading neoconservative Robert Kagan told a group in July.

While I'm very disappointed about this, it should be good news to those who supported Hillary as for now it looks like there's no difference where Goldman and the neocons are concerned.