[ilduclo]

 

[h8kurdt]

Haha!

The image of three wise men giving baby Jesus an assortment of guns as gifts is perfect.

[_tunic_]

Happy New 2020 Year

&

Welcome To WWIII

[_tunic_]

I didn't see there was another thread, let's keep the discussion over there to avoid cross-posting etc ...

[Antagon]

Originally Posted by Robert Schunk

Trump's response on this point is no more than saying that even a broken clock is correct twice a day. Bad people can say wise things, as a half-truth is often more effective than an outright lie.

So fuck the sociopolitical context and the connotations of said quote, right? We all live in a vacuum where nothing means anything anyway. Might as well appropriate a saying of a true-blue fascist to suit your needs because meaning, what is meaning?

Originally Posted by Robert Schunk

Here, you're buying into the Charlottesville Hoax. Here's the CNN report of the famous Trump Tower press conference of 15 August 2017 as reported the following day:

https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/15/polit...lay/index.html

Included are the following:

"On Saturday, as violence in Charlottesville played out on national television, Trump blamed "many sides" for the conflict. Though that answer was quickly panned by Democrats and Republicans alike, Trump remained silent on Sunday, leaving it to his aides to try to clean up his vague answer. Trump, after mounting pressure that was palpable inside the White House, spoke Monday and condemned the white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the heart of the violence.On Tuesday, though, Trump defended his 48-hour delay in denouncing white supremacists, arguing that he took his time because he didn't know the facts.
"I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct, not make a quick statement," Trump said, calling his initial comment a "fine statement."
He added: "I don't want to go quickly and just make a statement for the sake of making a political statement."
The President subsequently called the driver of the car that drove through a crowd, killing one woman, a "murderer" then once again blamed both sides for the violence.
Trump said there were some "very bad people" on both sides, but that there was [sic] some who came out to protest the removal of Robert E. Lee's statue who were "fine people."
"You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, to them, of a very, very important statue and a renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name," Trump said.

***

In other words, he was distinguishing between peaceful protestors on both sides and those on both sides using violence to get their points across while denying others their say.

Accuses someone of buying into press hoax, provides link that in no way invalidates, hell, even doubles down on what had been said before. I am aware of Trump's little damage control act he hastily applied about two days too late, but his track record on condemning rightwing extremists continued to be poor as all can be. And his little dogwhistles as well as his constant verbal diarrhea would continue onward.

Originally Posted by Robert Schunk

And concerning Professor Neueborne's op-ed, I find it facile and unconvincing. That's quite difficult for me to say, since he once substitute-taught my Constitutional Law class while my regular professor was sidelined for medical reasons and he's a brilliant and humorous guy, but I jump off his train when he relates Hitler's use of unilateral executive power to the President's use of executive orders.

In the preamble, Neuborne clearly states the following:
" I hate to put Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler in the same sentence. It trivializes Hitler’s obscene crimes to compare them with Trump’s often pathetic foibles. And it understates our nation’s historic commitment to constitutional democracy to suggest a serious parallel between the twenty first century United States and 1930’s Weimar Germany."

He compiled similarities and parallels in conduct/behavior, but he never stated those actions are exactly one and the same. You don't exactly have to have the full executive power of a dictator to fancy yourself a big guy with lotsa lotsa power. And that, Trump does to a tee.



And as for Trump "never violating a court order", maybe you should think about the sheer amount of court orders his admin made necessary. Let alone the many counts of him violating the constitution.


Anyway, Trump might've just set in motion a new devastating war with his stupid actions. This is really fucking bad. And it will take center stage in this thread now.

[h8kurdt]

 

[ilduclo]

Donald Trump claims that his unexpected strike on Iran that killed top military official Qasem Soleimani came on the heels of an imminent threat against the United States – but less than 24 hours after the president officially announced the assassination, his entire rationale for the military action has collapsed.

As NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel said on Saturday, there is “no direct evidence” that there was a specific threat against the United States that would justify the strike.

“There has been no direct evidence presented by the administration and nothing that we’ve seen,” Engel said on MSNBC’s AM Joy. “When you listen to officials at the U.S. State Department, and they described yesterday in a call to reporters what this imminent attack was all about, it was quite vague in their explanation. ”

The NBC News correspondent said the administration is presenting “a very, very broad picture that doesn’t necessarily explain the kind of pinpoint specific attack that would necessarily justify this kind of imminent threat logic.”



— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) January 4, 2020

Engel reported:

There has been no direct evidence presented by the administration and nothing that we’ve seen. But frankly speaking, the — that is what Qasem Soleimani did. We don’t know if he was organizing what kind of attack, we don’t know if he was organizing something imminent in the future, where, when or how but the fact that Qasem Soleimani would have been meeting with Shiite militia leaders – and he was meeting with Shiite militia leaders – because they were in the same convoy that was killed for him, that’s not that unusual and the things that they would meet to do would be to carry out attacks against the U.S. That is something they’ve done in the past. That is something that is in their strategic interest. They generally both want the United States out of this country. That is what they have been set up to do. But, no, we don’t have any specific information but you can draw a logical conclusion that that’s the kind of thing they would be talking about. And frankly when you listen to officials at the U.S. State Department, and they described yesterday in a call to reporters what this imminent attack was all about, it was quite vague in their explanation. They said that it was going to be attack on U.S. personnel or U.S. bases in Iraq or Syria or the region or Lebanon, a very, very broad picture that doesn’t necessarily explain the kind of pinpoint specific attack that would necessarily justify this kind of imminent threat logic.

This is about Trump boosting his reelection bid – full stop

[ilduclo]

Arundhati Roy:

“..a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is becoming more and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even to ourselves. An accurate description runs the risk if sounding like hyperbole. And so, for the sake of credibility and good manners, we groom the creature that has sunk its teeth into us; we comb out its hair and wipe its dripping jaw to make it more personable in polite company.”

[ilduclo]

https://www.salon.com/2020/01/02/edd...lent-nihilism/

[ilduclo]

pull out...don't pull out.....make up yer fucking republan minds. what little ya have....

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/unite...b0843d3616faac

[ilduclo]

Noel Casler, a celebrity and comedian who used to work on the Apprentice:

"The guy is unmanageable...He's not a functioning human being. He barely works....Imagine the dysfunction and the insanity these people are witnessing at the White House. The GOP leaders that, as you said, are enabling him. He doesn't even leave the residency anymore. You know, when he took office, he wouldn't come down to the Oval Office until noon. And they started calling it executive time. Right. And I'm like, I know what that's about. He's a 73 year old drug addict. It takes him three hours to get going in the morning....and now he has degenerated to the point where he doesn't leave the residence. He's taking most of those meetings when he's at the White House in his private quarters."

And now...Ivanka. The plastic, fake-throaty voice, daughter wife.

"If you are scared of Trump, you should be terrified of Ivanka. I think she's the brains behind the operation. I've seen her manipulate him. It's all an act. Down to that phony voice she uses. That's a put on. That's how he likes her to sound. Her real voice is a lot lower and she curses like a sailor...she's engineering herself to take over. Ivanka wants to rule us all someday and I'm not being...it's not just hyperbole....she wants her face on money....so people should be very worried about her."

[Bytor Peltor]

Today is like Trumps Election Day all over again......for the stock market tells us so!

[!@#$%!]

the fear and greed index

[!@#$%!]

paul krugman’s newsletter from this morning, which i just posted on the iran thread cuz it applies here too.

—

When liars go to war

I wrote my first column for The New York Times 20 years ago. I was hired to focus on business and economics — I remember Howell Raines, the editorial page editor at the time, saying “We have five columnists writing about the Middle East, which is too many, and nobody writing about the economy.” And I fully expected to spend my time mainly on the tech bubble, China’s entry into the world economy, and so on.

But events intervened, in ways that seem highly relevant to our current situation.

First, I found myself horrified by the 2000 election campaign and its immediate aftermath — both by the campaign’s content and by most of the media coverage. For it was obvious to me that George W. Bush was being deeply dishonest about his policy proposals on things like tax cuts and Social Security privatization — dishonest in a way we’d never seen in previous elections.

Yet the conventions of “balanced” coverage prevented the news media from making Bush’s dishonesty clear. As I wrote in November 2000, “If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ‘Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.’”

Then came Sept. 11, and the partisan exploitation of the atrocity. Within days, Republicans tried to use the terrorist attack as an excuse to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy. But nobody wanted to hear about that; the media narrative was of a nation unified in its determination to stand tall, and the corrupt reality was largely covered over.

Which brings us to this current moment. The media and the public are far less gullible now than they were then, but even now there’s a tendency to take administration claims at face value, or at least semi-seriously.

Don’t do this. Lies don’t stop at the water’s edge. Administrations that are dishonest about domestic policy tend to be dishonest about foreign policy too. And while the Bush administration lied a lot, Trump and company lie about everything

[ilduclo]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

the fear and greed index

yup, I sold EVERYTHING off. Gonna settle for 162%

[!@#$%!]

 

[ilduclo]

" She is going to go down as one of the worst Speakers in the history of our country,” Trump said."

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis..._prose cution

[ilduclo]

put the blame for the plane downing mostly on Trump. He didn't launch the missiles, but he got the ball rolling.

[!@#$%!]

drunkle bob delirious again

[!@#$%!]

Paul Krugman - How progressives won the health care argument

On Monday Donald Trump came out with another big lie, claiming to be “the person who saved pre-existing conditions.” And progressives should celebrate.

I mean, it’s not a good thing that we have a president who lies about everything, all the time. And as I wrote in today’s column, he and his party are still trying to destroy Obamacare, and will probably succeed if he’s re-elected.

But notice the nature of this lie. Although Trump is actually the enemy of Americans with pre-existing conditions, he feels the need to pretend that he’s their friend. What that means is that progressives, who insisted that nobody should be denied affordable coverage because of their medical history, have won the argument.

Now, you can win an argument and still be defeated by a combination of dishonesty and brute force, and that’s a real possibility for health care. But things have definitely changed.

Back when the A.C.A. was being debated, the right denounced the entire idea of getting the government involved in regulating and subsidizing private insurance. They did so even though the principal form of private insurance we have, employer-based coverage, is heavily subsidized through the tax code — employer-paid premiums aren’t taxable income — and heavily regulated, because to get that tax-free status employers have to obey rules, including not discriminating against employees with pre-existing conditions.

And these subsidies and rules are why employer-based coverage works, to the extent it does. But conservatives claimed that terrible things would happen if you tried to extend comparable subsidies and regulation to Americans with less generous employers.

As it turned out, however, none of those terrible things happened. Remember how Obamacare was supposed to be a huge job destroyer? In 2011 the Republican House passed a bill titled “Repealing the job-killing health care law act.” Well, here we are with the A.C.A. still in place and 3.5 percent unemployment.

And remember how it was going to explode the deficit? Actually, the parts of federal spending affected by the A.C.A. rose only around 0.7 percent of G.D.P., around 40 percent of the revenue loss from the 2017 tax cut.

And, of course, around 20 million people gained health coverage. For many with pre-existing conditions, health reform was literally a lifesaver.

Now, Obamacare didn’t take us all the way to universal coverage. And some progressives trash the act. Cenk Uygur, a media personality now running for Congress (briefly endorsed by Bernie Sanders), recently declared that “Nancy Pelosi took bribes from insurance companies and 45,000 people died” — because, he apparently believes, she could have passed Medicare for All in 2010 if she wanted to.

The reality, as anyone who followed the events in real time knows, was that Obamacare was the most that could have been achieved in that political environment. In fact, it barely made it through. The point, however, is that the law’s success — and it has been a success, even if both the right and some on the left refuse to admit it — has itself changed the political environment, to the point where even Donald Trump feels the need to lie and pretend that he supports the Affordable Care Act’s key provisions.

I still don’t think Democrats can get to Medicare for All in the next few years, but if they win they’re in a good position to improve substantially on Obamacare — because, as I said, they have decisively won the argument.