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U.S. Politics 2017: He's Good Enough, He's Smart Enough, and GODDAMMIT AL, WTF WERE YOU THINKING?


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Just now, Nasty LongRider said:

Don't think so.  So, did you lose your house or your job in the '08 crash and aftermath?  I lost one of those, so guess what, I cannot agree with you, at all.

Yep. I lost one of those too, and we emptied our retirement accounts and got a huge amount of money from the F-I-L or we would have lost both.

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4 minutes ago, Nasty LongRider said:

Don't think so?  So, did you lose your house or your job in the '08 crash and aftermath?  I lost one of those, so guess what, I cannot agree with you, at all.

Was that due to any particular administration? Or was it due to large scale economic forces almost outside of government control.

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Lotsa links!

Why 2020 Will Be the Year of the Woman

Quote

The last time America experienced such a jarring moment regarding sexual misconduct was the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, which ended with the televised spectacle of his former assistant Anita Hill charging him with sexual harassment. Simmering anger over Hill’s treatment by the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee spilled into the next election. When four new women were elected to the Senate, increasing their ranks to six, 1992 was decreed to be “The Year of the Woman.”

Should be noted, 24 new women were elected to the House as well in 1992.

How Dem Insiders Rank 2020 Contenders

Quote

The Hill interviewed nearly a dozen prominent Democrats to find out who has captured the party’s attention in recent months and who has fallen out of favor. 

In short, the ranking goes Sanders, Biden, Warren, Harris, Sherrod Brown, Deval Patrick, in order.  Really not a fan of the top three (at least in terms of running).

Senate Vote on Tax Cute Next Week?

McConnell still wants to schedule a vote as early as Thursday.  We'll see about that.

Quote

Several Republican senators — like Sens. Bob Corker (Tenn.), Jeff Flake(Ariz.), James Lankford (Okla.) and John McCain (Ariz.) — have raised concerns about the $1.4 trillion that the Joint Committee on Taxation says the bill will add to the federal deficit, contrary to supporters’ claims that the tax cuts will generate enough economic growth to pay for themselves.

Democratic Wave Begins to Form

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It is certainly true that Democrats lack both a single leader and a message, but midterm elections are never about a party out of power. Those are problems that Democrats must face in 2019 and 2020. The more immediate problem next year is whether this hyper-motivated Democratic base nominates too many “exotic” candidates who might not fare well in general elections. It will be interesting to see if any Republicans try their version of what Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri did in 2012, effectively steering the GOP nomination to Rep. Todd Akin, who ended up being unelectable.

The prevailing winds could significantly change over the next year, but with the current dynamics in place, it would require a big event to cause a change in the political weather.

While Cook is less cautious than, say, Sabato, he has never been nearly this resolute so early in the 14 years I've followed his election analysis - including in 2006 and 2010.

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1 minute ago, Lany Freelove Cassandra said:

Yep. I lost one of those too, and we emptied our retirement accounts and got a huge amount of money from the F-I-L or we would have lost both.

Yup.  I would say that seeing one's savings and retirements account empty is one experience in my life I could have done without.   World changing, it is.

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3 minutes ago, Eggegg said:

Was that due to any particular administration? Or was it due to large scale economic forces almost outside of government control.

Ask GW Bush.  It was due to lack of proper banking regs, banks run by criminals and other issues, right here in USA USA!

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3 minutes ago, Nasty LongRider said:

Ask GW Bush.  It was do to lack of proper banking regs, banks run by criminals and other issues, right here in USA USA!

Or blame a host of factors, including the Clintons and Bushes.

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/10/who-caused-the-economic-crisis/
 

Quote
  • The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
  • Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
  • Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
  • Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
  • The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
  • Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
  • Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
  • Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
  • The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
  • An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
  • Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

 

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/us/politics/dana-rohrabacher-putin-trump-kremlin-under-fire.html?

The Russians, they just keep a'comin' ... what a long play indeed this has been, decades in the strategizing and deployment, perfect timed revelations, one just after another.  John Le Carré even, as well as our own NSA etc., see classic KGB groom and release in all of it, from targeted Rethug politicians, to the trump family, to Assange, and now this massive sex scandal that like the Russians just keeps a'comin' that keeps everyone in an uproar -- with the end result they get to do whatever they want, and the USA goes down the tubes, and with it the European Union.

Of course, some it may be just too convenient conspiracy theory, but this sex biz is starting to look damned suspicious since the worst offenders of all, the guys in high finance, are the only industry, from politics to religion, not to be targeted with revelations of sexual abuse, harassment and rape.

Still, damn!  Assange played us all for suckers, including myself.

 

 

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3 minutes ago, Eggegg said:

Or blame a host of factors, including the Clintons and Bushes.

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/10/who-caused-the-economic-crisis/
 

 

Do you see anything there that goes against what I was saying?  Read your own f'ing links fer cryin' out loud.  

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2 hours ago, Lany Freelove Cassandra said:

I'm bored at work, so here are a  few rankings the US compared to other countries (most are in comparison to other OECD countries). I'll bold all the areas where we are #1.

 

 

But, but, but....I thought this was a 4 day holiday for most people in the US (ie not in retail)?

Bloody hell, sorry you need to work! <3

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1 minute ago, Nasty LongRider said:

Do you see anything there that goes against what I was saying?  Read your own f'ing links fer cryin' out loud.  

It backs up what I'm saying. That the financial crash was caused by a lot of factors coming together at once. Worrying about who the president is really is small beans when you look at the big picture.

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22 minutes ago, zelticgar said:

Trump is no different, yes he will change some policies, he will take a different approach to foreign policy and he will send out some embarrassing tweets but ultimately, nothing significant will change who we are as a country of the 4 years of his presidency.

On the idealistic side, electing someone who wants to build a wall on the Mexican border and who rejects Muslim immigrants already represents a significant change in a country that used to pride itself for welcoming immigrants. Remember this?

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

On the international scene, Trump is widely seen as a joke. But that's nothing new after all. W was a joke when president as well. Reagan was a joke. For some reason, Republican presidents have been evolving in the wrong direction. The last respectable Republican president seems to have been Ike (because Nixon "I'm not a crook" can be ruled out, methinks, and Ford barely registers in the history books), and he was so far to the left of the right that he would certainly not be considered a Republican today.
https://wrongologist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/COW-DeEvolution.jpg

Lastly, on the US side of things... Well, why does @OldGimletEye rant so much? Because the economic consequences of Trump's presidency won't be felt and understood before a decade or two. Nothing much will change right now. But once you understand that a lot of today's economic woes are the consequences of Reagan's and W's economic policies you can see where this is going.

But generally speaking, with some notable exceptions, politics seldom has an immediate impact. That's why so many politicians get away with so much. Most of the time, a president is already out of office when most of the consequences of his decisions become evident. So yeah, it's always possible to blind yourself to what a given administration is doing.

22 minutes ago, zelticgar said:

As to facts, I see a lot of facts, upthread someone just dredged up the same old set of statistics that are cooked up to show how horrible the country is doing. When you dig into the details it becomes the same old set of comparisons between a few Scandinavian countries with tiny, homogenous populations.

If you'd bothered to check, you'd know this isn't true.

Overall, the US doesn't do so poorly, especially considering the size of its population. But it performs poorly in areas that can prove important for its future like inequality, education or healthcare.
Inequality is especially high with a GINI coefficient of 0,39. At this point, it's not just Scandinavian countries that are doing better than the US, it's basically *all* developed nations (save Chile, Turkey and Mexico). Let that sink in for a moment. Let that really sink in, because what it means is that the "American dream" is dead and burried by now.


 

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2 minutes ago, Eggegg said:

It backs up what I'm saying. That the financial crash was caused by a lot of factors coming together at once. Worrying about who the president is really is small beans when you look at the big picture.

No.  Elections matter, see this one?  It matters.   The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.

That fucking does matter, so guess what, who is president does matter.  Did Clinton pass stuff that worked into the crash as well?  Yup, presidents and their policies matter.  Did too many presidents think Greenspan was a god because the stock market liked him.  Yup, but the stock market really doesn't do much for the working people, except when it breaks.

Elections and presidents matter.  45 matters because is he terrible person and a terrible president.  It matters.  He's trying to break the ACA, so far no but if he could he would.  Does he give a shit if real people lose health care or that health insurance markets are destabilized  No he does not.  Sure matters to me though. 

Does he care about the little hidden terrors in the upcoming tax 'reform'.  No, he does not care if your taxes and mine go up, he'll get a tax break worth millions, maybe billions!  Which will really hurt this country on down the line. 

Does he care about net neutrality?  Of fuck no, he'll always have twitter.   And on and on it goes.

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On 11/24/2017 at 11:35 AM, zelticgar said:

Lany, I'd say the same fundamental areas that mattered when GWB and Obama were in office matter now - stock market health, consumer confidence, standing in the world, employment growth, education, economic opportunity, gas prices, freedom of movement, safety, equality and a sense of pride for your country.

I remember some family members who are conservative feeling that the world was at a breaking point when Obama was elected and was able to pass Obamacare. Their fear and anxiety was palpable. I recall telling them that fundamentally, nothing would really change for them during the time he was in office and that view proved true. Really the only thing that happened was a small change in their health coverage to a high deductible plan which was offset by an HSA anyway. This big boogie man that they created in Obama was a mountain of sand. Trump is no different, yes he will change some policies, he will take a different approach to foreign policy and he will send out some embarrassing tweets but ultimately, nothing significant will change who we are as a country of the 4 years of his presidency. 

As to facts, I see a lot of facts, upthread someone just dredged up the same old set of statistics that are cooked up to show how horrible the country is doing. When you dig into the details it becomes the same old set of comparisons between a few Scandinavian countries with tiny, homogenous populations. I could spend hours on here picking through those stats and proving them wrong but it is not worth the time. This board has been wiped clean of any semblance of diverse viewpoint. The moderators have seen to that a long time ago. 

Like you, I know lots of conservative sorts of people that had “fears”. But, the question is whether their fears had much basis in reality or made much of sense.

Now most of these conservative sorts of people that had “fears” during the Obama presidency, were just big old former Dubya supporters. They were shouting from roof tops about about that “Bush Boom” and they thought Dubya was just the best old wartime president ever cause well he struted around an aircraft carrier and somebody wrote a sad old country song and that, evidently, convinced a lot of conservatives that Dubya knew what in the hell he was doing.

Of course, on foreign policy Dubya was a disaster, and the Bush Boom wasn’t so boomyish, and the economy imploded throwing lots of people out of work.

Now you’d think some of these conservative sorts of people just might have revised some of the worldview. But, many of them didn’t. They just got crazier. And there so called “fears” were complete garbage.

Now, I’ve written a lot on these threads about the utter insanity and stupidity of conservatives during the financial crises, so I won’t say much about it here, other than it is one of the most sorry ass episodes in economic history.

Now while Obama may have not got as much change done as one might have hoped for, he did get some important things done on healthcare, financial regulation, and some other matters, and generally giving people hope,who hold minority status in this country, whether that minority status is gender,  race, gender identification, or whatever, that there is going to be place for them in this country.

Of course a big reason Obama didn’t get as many things done as one could hope for is largely because of conservative oppositions whose reasons were largely based on a big old pile of bullshit.

But, he did get some progress made and all of it is being threatened, like say Trumps antics with the ACA.

To the extent, that Trump and the Republicans have not been able to make big legislative changes it is largely because its a combination of them being outright bullshit artist and being incompetent. Take healthcare reform. For about seven years, the Republican Party lied it’s ass off about the ACA and represented that it had an awesome replacement just waitin’ in the wings, based on “conservative principles” or whatever when it had nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s simply bullshitted about it. And Trump bullshitted about it with his effiing stupid “cross state lines” thing, which is the biggest load of baloney, just a bunch of crap that conservatives just lap right up as the best thing ever.

And then of course, the Republican Party has having a hard time passing it’s signature issue tax cuts, which just shows how incompetent it is. But besides the fact it has hard time even passing what’s supposed to be it’s biggest “reform” is the fact that it’s premised on a bunch of garbage. You’d think the Republican Party, at this juncture, would move on from the it’s supply side religion, but it still just wants to cling to it, even though real world experience that it has ever been successful is very thin, and yes that includes the 1980s under Reagan.

But, I don’t agree nothing has changed under Trump or won’t. Because the fact of the matter is that Trump will make a whole bunch of appointments to various government post that can have a profound impact. Just take Pai and this net neutrality thing. Or some conservative idiot like Randall Quarles being appointed to the Fed. God knows what he’ll do the banking regulations that the Fed is responsible for.

And aside from this stuff, we’ve seen this alt right nonsense spinoff from more mainstream conservatism, and having often the support of Trump with his statements or actions. And this alt right stuff is truly scary and shouldn’t have the approval of any leader. The fact of however that that the alt right did spin off from mainstream conservatism, however, shouldn’t be too surprising, as conservatism has always been willing to play along with white resentment, and with conservatism just getting nuttier and nuttier, it’s not surprising it would spinoff something that is just completely nutty.

I think that it is completely nonsense for you to sit there and say don’t worry nothing will change. And in fact, that nothing will change is part of the problem, as there is just a whole bunch of issues this country needs to be fixed and conservatives literally have no solutions to fix them, largely because they don’t take anything serious, apparently, than tax cuts for their wealthy donors.

I think it’s completely wrong for you to sit there and say or imply that when it comes to the policy fights between liberals and conservatives, they are both equally the same or that they both equally rational. I'd submit they are not.

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20 minutes ago, Eggegg said:

Well I'm not sure very much has changed for the average american over the past few presidents, thats not such a controversial point.

I’m one of the millions of Americans with a preexisting condition. I have SLE, commonly called lupus. Since I aged out of my parents’ insurance when I turned 21 in 2004, I was ineligible for coverage because of it. This meant all of my healthcare was emergency room care, because that’s the only place available to me. It meant I could not see a specialist for my condition, couldn’t get any sort of long term or preventative care. The ACA changed that. The kind of specialist and preventative care I can get now drastically changes my life expectancy. My life isn’t just very different, it’s going to be longer. 

Things are very different for the lgbt community. Things are very different for those who lost houses and jobs in the recession. Things are very different for people sent to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Things are very different for DACA recipients. 

To not have it make much difference who is president is a privilege reserved for the rich, white, healthy, and straight.

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27 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

because Nixon "I'm not a crook" can be ruled out, methinks,

Disagree pretty strongly there.  Sure, he had his issues with Vietnam (and Cambodia...and Laos...and assassinating Allende), but on the big stuff - China, instituting detente, initiating SALT I, Nixon has a pretty damn good record and was certainly well respected around the world.

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4 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

Disagree pretty strongly there.  Sure, he had his issues with Vietnam (and Cambodia...and Laos...and assassinating Allende), but on the big stuff - China, instituting detente, initiating SALT I, Nixon has a pretty damn good record and was certainly well respected around the world.

Right. I shouldn't be mixing up "respected" with "respectable." If we're only talking about respect abroad, both Nixon and Ford fared well.
The end of Nixon's presidency showed that he wasn't exactly respectable though. But it is indeed a separate issue.

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44 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Like you, I know lots of conservative sorts of people that had “fears”. But, the question is whether their fears had much basis in reality or made much of sense.

Now most of these conservative sorts of people that had “fears” during the Obama presidency, were just big old former Dubya supporters. They were shouting from roof tops about about that “Bush Boom” and they thought Dubya was just the best old wartime president ever cause well he struted around an aircraft carrier and somebody wrote a sad old country song and that, evidently, convinced a lot of conservatives that Dubya knew what in the hell he was doing.

Of course, on foreign policy Dubya was a disaster, and the Bush Boom wasn’t so boomyish, and the economy imploded throwing lots of people out of work.

Now you’d think some of these conservative sorts of people just might have revised some of the worldview. But, many of them didn’t. They just got crazier. And there so called “fears” were complete garbage.

Now, I’ve written a lot on these threads about the utter insanity and stupidity of conservatives during the financial crises, so I won’t say much about it here, other than it is one of the most sorry ass episodes in economic history.

Now while Obama may have not got as much change done as one might have hoped for, he did get some important things done on healthcare, financial regulation, and some other matters, and generally giving people who hold minority status in this country, whether that minority status is gender,  race, gender identification, or whatever, that there is going to be place for them in this country.

Of course a big reason Obama didn’t get as many things done as one could hope for is largely because of conservative oppositions whose reasons were largely based on a big old pile of bullshit.

But, he did get some progress made and all of it is being threatened, like say Trumps antics with the ACA.

To the extent, that Trump and the Republicans have not been able to make big legislative changes it is largely because its a combination of them being outright bullshit artist and being incompetent. Take healthcare reform. For about seven years, the Republican Party lied it’s ass off about the ACA and represented that it had an awesome replacement just waitin’ in the wings, based on “conservative principles” or whatever when it had nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s simply bullshitted about it. And Trump bullshitted about it with his effiing stupid “cross state lines” thing, which is the biggest load of baloney, just a bunch of crap that conservatives just lap right up as the best thing ever.

And then of course, the Republican Party has having a hard time passing it’s signature issue tax cuts, which just shows how incompetent it is. But besides the fact it has hard time even passing what’s supposed to be it’s biggest “reform” is the fact that it’s premised on a bunch of garbage. You’d think the Republican Party, at this juncture, would move on from the it’s supply side religion, but it still just wants to cling to it, even though real world experience that it has ever been successful is very thin, and yes that includes the 1980s under Reagan.

But, I don’t agree nothing has changed under Trump or won’t. Because the fact of the matter is that Trump will make a whole bunch of appointments to various government post that can have a profound impact. Just take Pai and this net neutrality thing. Or some conservative idiot like Randall Quarles being appointed to the Fed. God knows what he’ll do the banking regulations that the Fed is responsible for.

And aside from this stuff, we’ve seen this alt right nonsense spinoff from more mainstream conservatism, and having often the support of Trump with his statements or actions. And this alt right stuff is truly scary and shouldn’t have the approval of any leader. The fact of however that that the alt right did spin off from mainstream conservatism, however, shouldn’t be too surprising, as conservatism has always been willing to play along with white resentment, and with conservatism just getting nuttier and nuttier, it’s not surprising it would spinoff something that is just completely nutty.

I think that it is completely nonsense for you to sit there and say don’t worry nothing will change. And in fact, that nothing will change is part of the problem, as there is just a whole bunch of issues this country needs to be fixed and conservatives literally have no solutions to fix them, largely because they don’t take anything serious, apparently, than tax cuts for their wealthy donors.

I think it’s completely wrong for you to sit there and say or imply that when it comes to the policy fights between liberals and conservatives, they are both equally the same or that they both equally rational. I'd submit they are not.

Yah, those terrors that Obama was coming to take their guns and force their daughters to marry black, and deliver the nation to shia law because he was an African muslim, blahblahblah.  Yah, no wonder nothing changed for them despite their totally insane manufactured idiotic terrors.  And really, people in the fact-based universe are supposed to give respect and consideration to these people's entirely fantasy fears?

What he's already done has affected a huge number of people we know and love, and those we don't know, hugely negatively, particularly Mexican-Americans, Latin Americans of all nationality heritage, Haitians, Puerto Ricans and Cubans.  Which means it has impacted me, personally, very largely, both emotionally and economically.

Obama opened things enormously, particularly with Cuba.  The orange gasbag is sitting his bloated ass right down on that opening to close it all again.  And using stupid manufactured (probably by the russians) excuse such as a sonic weapon, that not a single Cuban or anyone in Cuba has ever been affected by or know a single person that was effected by. 

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4 hours ago, Eggegg said:

Well I'm not sure very much has changed for the average american over the past few presidents, thats not such a controversial point.

Depends on what you mean by 'average' here.

If you're a woman - half of the US population - you've seen your life expectancy decline, you've seen reduced access to medical options, you've seen abortion rights denied, you've seen a rise in domestic violence and abuse. 

If you're a minority, you're much more likely to be part of that 'average' - so you've seen a major incidence in discrimination at work, in society at large, and the biggest uptick in hate crimes since we've started tracking it. You've also seen the likelihood that 1 out of 7 of the people you know are in jail. 

If you're young, you've seen a massive drop in available good jobs, though you've fortunately also seen one of the single most important things in health insurance- being able to stay on your parent's coverage until 26.

 

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3 hours ago, Eggegg said:

It backs up what I'm saying. That the financial crash was caused by a lot of factors coming together at once. Worrying about who the president is really is small beans when you look at the big picture.

It was a lot of factors, but the ultimate one was 3 consecutive anti-regulation presidents that encouraged unstable economic growth and lack of oversight. You don't have to blame a specific one - though GWB was worse than CLinton here, both were bad - but saying that it was beyond control was obviously wrong, as we had controls in place specifically to deal with it and then rescinded these controls, and the POTUS did that.

It was foreseeable (and in fact many people did foresee it), it was preventable, and we chose not to do it so that we could make banks more money. 

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I don't disagree with that Factcheck list, but virtually everything on it is controlled by or heavily affected by the administration in power. The president largely sets their party's agenda in Congress. The president appoints a Fed chair. What Wall Street investment banks can do is affected by federal regulations. And so on. It seems to me like Eggegg sees that that list contains bullet points besides "president" and doesn't realize how much the sitting president affects those other things.

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