Trump Presidency and the Consequences

[dbphoenix]

So an enlightened democracy is possible after all:

Justin Trudeau Pledged $650 Million To Counter Trump’s Anti-Abortion Rule

 

[petetrades]

https://twitter.com/mike_pence/status/579018955005775872?lang=en

"Mike Pence‏Verified account @Mike_pence

So proud to see our son 2nd Lt Michael J Pence earn his @usmc comm & join the fine men & women of US military today."

 

[Atilla]

I was pondering not that I understand it too well, if it is blinding obvious why Obamacare is so bad that we have this piece of news pop-up?

House Republicans didn’t expect party to rebel against their health care plan


Do the Republicans know what they want and do they buy in.

Being a business analyst, one would hope at least the problem is looked at, considered, weighed and the rest of it, consulting the republicans with a view to trying to forge some consensus before proceeding.

It's always about devising a decent solution and getting some buy-in.


Looks like couple of steps were missed. Not the way to conduct government or any business policy or strategy that has high visibility and strategic importance to a great nation. I'd say it's one big eFup so soon drawn in haste.

If you are the top of your own business, what you say may go. This, however is running a government, considerably different to running a dictatorial what I say goes regime.


Ofcourse it could be that this is fake news and a republican majority for this move already exists, in which case sure go for it. :whistling

 

[dbphoenix]

Republicans aren't what they used to be. Several decades ago, they were all about smaller government, fiscal responsibility, states' rights. However, for many reasons, they've become the party of tax cuts for the rich, deregulation (which is what the rich want, and corporate capitalism. But the only way they can enact any of this is (a) to get elected and (b) to stay elected. The elective part is accomplished by focusing on the kinds of hot-button issues that move people to get out and vote and to vote as a bloc. Hence the emphasis on abortion (as if that's the only thing we have to worry about) and gun rights. Plus of course racism, bigotry, and xenophobia, which are always good to rouse certain segments of the population.

Therefore, they're pushing this particular piece of legislation because of the tax relief for the rich. If it harms the poor or the struggling working class white, that's fine. Republicans couldn't care less about the poor, or the disabled, or the elderly, or veterans (and if you're a disabled veteran, good luck).

Ryan's idol is Ayn Rand, which may help explain his behavior. One can hope that enough Republican members of Congress will develop a conscience and defeat this thing. Or, if that fails, the anger among the Republican base with regard to this bill may rattle them enough to take a "moral stand". Their greatest fear after all is to be voted out of office. And when your own constituents start giving you a hard time, it's time to pay attention.

 

[wackypete2]

Democrats aren't what they used to be either. They were once for the blue collar working family, but those voters largely told them where to go last November... tired of being sold out by politicians who promise all but deliver nothing or deliver the (un)afforadable care act that benefits insurance companies and big phama much more than the american citizens.

Peter

 

[wackypete2]

Looks like couple of steps were missed. Not the way to conduct government or any business policy or strategy that has high visibility and strategic importance to a great nation. I'd say it's one big eFup so soon drawn in haste.

Sounds exactly like the current (un)affordable care act. It was designed to blow up like it's doing now. Democrats just didn't think it would happen so fast. Poor planning there. Democrat house minority leader, Nancy Peolsi, once famously said "we have to pass the bill before you can find out what's in it".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...0/gJQAqch6qV_blog.html?utm_term=.e7572fe89f9a

Bunch of BS here...

Peter

 

[dbphoenix]

So much for that immigration crackdown fantasy:

Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Would Burn Billions Of Dollars DHS Doesn’t Have

 

[dbphoenix]

Make Jobs Numbers Real Again

• The US added 235,000 "nonfarm" jobs in February — much better than expected, and great news for the economy. [Business Insider / Akin Oyedele]
  
  
• Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration was also eager to claim it as great news for Donald Trump. Press secretary Sean Spicer was in fact so eager to claim it as such that he violated a federal rule by tweeting about it less than an hour after the jobs report was released. [NYT / Patricia Cohen]
  
  
• Spicer's haste was unusual, but his exuberance was not. Presidents always take good credit for good jobs reports, even though, really, the president doesn't control the economy... [The Atlantic / Derek Thompson]
  
  
• ...and even if he did, the president in question would have been Barack Obama, because the strong job market now is the result of factors that have been present in the economy for a while. [Vox / Jim Tankersley]
  
  
• The bigger problem with Trump claiming credit for these jobs numbers, of course, is that Trump spent his entire campaign arguing that jobs reports were fake — manipulated by the Obama White House to obscure the truth of a terrible economy.
  
  
• There is an actual policy argument here — in fact, after taking office, Trump reportedly mulled changing the calculation of the unemployment rate in a way that would result in it rising by a full percentage point. But it was also a convenient dog whistle for the idea that the Obama administration was simply making up numbers. [Bloomberg / Patricia Laya]
  
  
• This is one of those claims that is hard to get around when one becomes president oneself. Spicer tried to wave it away last month, after the first jobs report came out since Trump's inauguration, by saying the president wasn't interested in statistics. [NPR / Scott Horsley]
  
  
• This time around, though, Spicer gleefully trumpeted the statistic, and — asked about Trump's earlier skepticism — joked that the numbers "might have been phony in the past, but they're real now." It was either a snide joke about the president's (and his administration's) tendency to lie or a casual dismissal of the legitimacy of jobs numbers themselves — or both. And it was, to be honest, not okay. [Vox / Matt Yglesias]
  

 

[dbphoenix]

The upside of capitalism (even, in this case, corporate capitalism):

BOSTON (AP) — The Latest on the decision by the organizers of Boston St. Patrick's Day parade to bar a group of gay veterans from participating (all times local):

11:30 p.m. [Friday]

A lawyer for a group of gay veterans initially barred from participating in Boston's St. Patrick's Day parade says they look forward to "marching proudly" and representing LGBTQ vets.

Organizers of this year's parade reversed course Friday and said they will allow the group of gay veterans to march. Parade organizers tweeted an "acceptance letter" had been signed by the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council that would allow OutVets to take part in the March 19 parade.

Lawyer Dee Dee Edmondson says OutVets will be marching in the parade and that it is "honored and humbled" by the support received by LGBTQ veterans, "one of the most unrepresented" demographics among veterans. (more)

 

[dbphoenix]

(Boston Globe) US Representative Joe Kennedy III ripped into the House GOP’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act Wednesday in a surprisingly pointed jibe at Speaker Paul Ryan.

Ryan said Tuesday that Republicans are “doing an act of mercy” by repealing the law known as Obamacare and replacing it with something else.

Kennedy, shall we say, does not share that assessment.

“I was struck last night by a comment that I heard made by Speaker Ryan, where he called this repeal bill ‘an act of mercy.’ With all due respect to our speaker, he and I must have read different Scripture,” Kennedy said as the House Energy and Commerce Committee dove into the details of the GOP effort.

“The one I read calls on us to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, and to comfort the sick.

“It reminds us that we are judged not by how we treat the powerful, but by how we care for the least among us,” said the Brookline Democrat and scion of the most famous Massachusetts political dynasty.

“There is no mercy in a system that makes health care a luxury. There is no mercy in a country that turns their back on those most in need of protection: the elderly, the poor, the sick, and the suffering. There is no mercy in a cold shoulder to the mentally ill,” he said, appearing to read from notes.

“This is not an act of mercy. It is an act of malice,” he said.

 

[petetrades]

https://www.infowars.com/general-mattis-steamrolls-dem-senator-on-lgbt-in-military-questions/

"While Democrats may be obsessed with the subject of homosexuals serving in the military, they rarely discuss the apparent epidemic of sexual assaults perpetrated against men, by other men, in the armed forces.
According to an anonymous sexual assault survey released by the Department of Defense in 2013, scientific sampling indicates there were 26,000 victims in fiscal 2012 – 14,000 of whom were men. Of those 14,000 incidents, only 2% were perpetrated by women.
“It appears that the DOD has serious problems with male-on-male sexual assaults that men are not reporting and the Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about,” asserted Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness.
The DOD released a report in 2015 estimating that 10,800 men are sexually assaulted every year, as opposed to 8,000 women, but that only 13% of victims report their attacks.
Additionally, the Daily Mail revealed that a report released by the American Psychological Association in 2015 indicates the Pentagon may be under-reporting male-on-male sexual assault rates by as much as 15 times, and that the “true figure could be as high as 180,000 sexual assaults, including 60,000 rapes.”

 

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[dbphoenix]

This is, in fact, the Rosetta Stone by which Ryan’s worldview is explained: Those who have achieved affluence have done so through proper moral choices and deserve rewards. Those who are struggling have made poor moral choices and require punishments to induce them back into prosperity. That’s the whole of it. And you can see how this is wholly incompatible with what “health care reform” seeks to achieve. In Ryan’s view, if you have come to the point in your life where you are incapable of simply financing your own health care, this is down to your personal failings, and you don’t deserve much beyond the barest of minimums.

So in the end, it’s not that Paul Ryan doesn’t understand health insurance. And it’s not that he doesn’t understand math well enough to know that the numbers don’t add up to a sufficient “replacement” for Obamacare. That’s because what Ryan is “repealing” and “replacing” isn’t a health care bill ― he’s swapping out the moral universe that gave birth to the Affordable Care Act with the one that he prefers. One in which the state rewards affluence and punishes those who fail to achieve it. One in which the very notion of redistributing money from the well-off to the poor for the purpose of health care provision is a mortal sin. Properly reconfiguring the universe along these moral guidelines is, to Ryan’s mind, an “act of mercy.”

--Jason Linkins

 

[petetrades]

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/06/suc...-million-book-deal-is-the-last-thing-we-need/

"Sucks for us: Why Barack and Michelle Obama’s $65 million book deal is the last thing we need

The publishing world was rocked last week by the news that Penguin Random House had reportedly paid $65 million to Barack and Michelle Obama for a pair of his and her memoirs. I love the Obamas as much as the next traumatized white liberal and good things happening to good people is usually a cause for a celebration but, in this case, not so much.

Historically, presidential memoirs have paid even more. Bill Clinton reportedly received $15 million for “My Life,” a book so long Jon Stewart once joked he hadn’t finished by page 12,000. But $65 million is so unprecedented, it should set off a round of soul-searching among publishers (though, of course, it will not). You might think a rising tide floats all boats for all writers but no, it doesn’t work that way. When a publisher overspends on books written by already rich celebrities, it means that much less money for real writers, the schmucks who spend years researching a topic and then another year laboring over the craft of telling an engaging story — in other words, the people who write the books you and I actually want to read.

For writers, the glaring inability to make a decent living was painfully brought home last year by award-winning author Neal Gabler’s cri de coeur in The Atlantic about being dead broke after a lifetime of writing. As Gabler noted, the advances were never enough to cover his expenses in the years it took to write a book, and the magazines he wrote for continued to pay him the exact same amount they had paid him 20 years ago for an article of the same length. Hey, Neal, I can top that: This website is paying me one-twentieth of what I used to make writing magazine articles 20 years ago. But, oh, the fame!

When Hillary Clinton was asked why she took all that money from Goldman Sachs, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “It’s what they offered.” It didn’t mean she had to take it."

 

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