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U.S. Politics: Are You Threadening Me Master Jedi?


Jace, Extat

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1 minute ago, Shryke said:

When did he say that? I must have missed it while retching.

The bit about how he fired a bunch of VA providers who weren't no good before seguaying into demanding the power to fire insufficiently measured government employees.

The clear subtext was firing improperly 'patriotic' government workers.

Or FBI agents who aren't loyal. He mentioned that too, how loyal his government was going to be.

Add a dash of Paul Ryan suggesting a 'cleanse' of the DOJ minutes before walking into the room and the picture is painting itself.

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1 minute ago, Triskele said:

Per the Ryan "cleanse" comment and the rest of the evidence that the GOP is really working overtime to attack the FBI's investigation....

An element of this that i find really unsettling is that it's fairly...cavalier.  It doesn't jive with a party that is very likely to take a huge hit in November's elections.  It doesn't seem consistent with "let's get what we can now because we're likely fucked in the Fall."  It fits better with "if we an pull this off we'll never face repercussions for anything ever again."  Does anyone else feel the same way?

Yeah

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17 minutes ago, Triskele said:

It fits better with "if we an pull this off we'll never face repercussions for anything ever again."  Does anyone else feel the same way?

That's absolutely what they're doing. Let's face it, it is working. It is 100% working. They must be asking themselves why they ever held to conventions before, when this is so much more effective.

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2 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

So i didn't watch the clown show, did Trump declare all Jedis enemies of the Republic?

Nah. This was mostly a Miller speech.

Lots of blah blah blah, lots of pointless clapping every 5 seconds per the standard SOTU tradition, praised himself for the tax bill, went on about american carnage and white genocide for awhile, went on about destroying american soft power for awhile, closed it out. I think that was about it.

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On 1/30/2018 at 1:51 PM, Fragile Bird said:

Ormond, there has not been a market correction, a drop of 10% or more, since 2015, and that was just over 10%. There are usually at least 1 a year, as there have been 123 since 1900. This bull market is getting long in the tooth. One individual event like a letter of intention, with no details and no plans, has knocked tens of millions (don't know if it's hundreds of millions) off of a sector. That's a good indicator of nervousness. 

If Trump had any brains, which he doesn’t, he’d be worried about the current bubble. The main reason being that the Fed doesn’t have much room to cut, likely putting us back at the ZLB. In such a situation, I assume additional fiscal spending won’t be forthcoming, so it may be up to the FED to do all the heavy lifting. Except, with the crew Trump as appointed to the FED, I don’t know if they are up to the task, because they’d have to something “unconventional” like buying more long term securities or engaging in price level targeting.

Maybe the deficits created by the Republican Party’s corporate tax cuts might push up the FED rate sufficiently. But, that really doesn’t seem likely, in my opinion, in the next two years.

If the bubble does burst, putting us back into another liquidity trap, which will prove disastrous for many people, particularly for those people just starting to “recover” from  the Great Recession, Trump and the Republican Party will rightly deserve the ridicule and blame for it. For one Trump will look stupid for crowing about the stock market that is overvalued. And of course the stock market doesn't matter that much to the people Trump was allegedly supposed to be helping as most equities are owned by the affluent.Secondly, had more safe assets been issued when they were needed and the market was clearly thirsty for them, then perhaps the stock market wouldn’t be so bubbly today.

On 1/30/2018 at 1:51 PM, Fragile Bird said:

When I was in the finance sector, we always warned new clients that there would be a bear every four years, something they needed to take into account with regard to how much risk they could tolerate. Opening a statement that says 1/3 of the value of your investments has disappeared can be pretty frightening.

As I have said several times already in US Politics threads, I believe 'reversion to the mean' will be a phrase you will hear often in the next year.

Probably, a good time to start thinking about getting into foreign equities and safe bonds, at this juncture.

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Hey guys, remember that time when we cut taxes and in 1984...........

And that, it seems,  is the story the Republican Party has been clinging to for over thirty years.

Trump is a trash talker. But, it would seem, he fits right in with a party of trash talkers. Remember "Bullish on Bush"?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/18/16902390/trump-black-unemployment-rate-record-decline

Quote

During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, President Donald Trump once again heralded the black unemployment rate, which, at 6.8 percent nationally, is at its lowest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics first began breaking unemployment numbers down by race in the 1970s.

“Unemployment claims have hit a 45-year low,” Trump said. “And, something I’m very proud of, African-American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded,” he added to applause.

This isn’t the first time that Trump has highlighted the drop in black unemployment. In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly touted the unemployment numbers, which were released earlier in January by the Bureau of Labor Statistics

 

......................................................................................

Evidently, the concept of adverse selection is just too difficult for bidness guy, Trump, and "The Party of Business" to grasp.

https://www.vox.com/2018/1/30/16953506/trump-state-of-the-union-2018-individual-mandate

Quote

President Donald Trump barely mentioned Obamacare in his first State of the Union speech, though the issue dominated much of his first term in office.

But he did take a few seconds to highlight the GOP’s success in repealing the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate as part of their tax overhaul.

“We eliminated an especially cruel tax that fell mostly on Americans making less than $50,000 a year, forcing them to pay tremendous penalties simply because they could not afford government-ordered health plans,” Trump said in the House chamber. “We repealed the core of disastrous Obamacare. The individual mandate is now gone.”

Trump is right on the surface, of course: The mandate is gone, and it was originally considered core to the ACA. But these days, most experts largely believe that the tax penalty for not having insurance was actually too low to have the desired effect, even as Trump cites its “tremendous” nature” and that the law’s markets will survive — if imperfectly — without it.

But on the margins, the mandate’s elimination will likely lead to some bump in premiums and fewer Americans having health coverage over the long term. That is what Trump chose to brag about before the nation Tuesday night.

 

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6 hours ago, GrimTuesday said:

I really wish that we would stop with this myth that the Pilgrims were fleeing oppression. They left because they were mad they weren't allowed to discriminate and harm Catholics anymore in England.

This does not accord with any educational cartoon I have ever seen on the subject, hence is wrong. Why do you hate Freedom?

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1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

Hey guys, remember that time when we cut taxes and in 1984...........

And that, it seems,  is the story the Republican Party has been clinging to for over thirty years.

Trump is a trash talker. But, it would seem, he fits right in with a party of trash talkers. Remember "Bullish on Bush"?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/18/16902390/trump-black-unemployment-rate-record-decline

 

......................................................................................

Evidently, the concept of adverse selection is just too difficult for bidness guy, Trump, and "The Party of Business" to grasp.

https://www.vox.com/2018/1/30/16953506/trump-state-of-the-union-2018-individual-mandate

 

The Democrats in the audience looked rather glum last night. 

 

 

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7 hours ago, GrimTuesday said:

I really wish that we would stop with this myth that the Pilgrims were fleeing oppression. They left because they were mad they weren't allowed to discriminate and harm Catholics anymore in England.

This is exactly what Republicans think oppression is.

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12 minutes ago, GAROVORKIN said:

The Democrats in the audience looked rather glum last night. 

 

 

I kinda feel that an article which takes a head-on approach to addressing whether Trump is responsible for racial egalitarian numbers in the workplace in just a missed satire opportunity of staggering proportion.

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32 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

I kinda feel that an article which takes a head-on approach to addressing whether Trump is responsible for racial egalitarian numbers in the workplace in just a missed satire opportunity of staggering proportion.

On the PR front does Trump appears to be winning on the economy.  If this  economy Keeps steaming the way to November and beyond, The Democrats won't make any gains both houses , In fact it's not out of the realm of possibility that they could end up losing additional seats to the Republicans.

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1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

Hey guys, remember that time when we cut taxes and in 1984...........

And that, it seems,  is the story the Republican Party has been clinging to for over thirty years.

Trump is a trash talker. But, it would seem, he fits right in with a party of trash talkers. Remember "Bullish on Bush"?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/18/16902390/trump-black-unemployment-rate-record-decline

 

 

In politics it doesn't matter who was largely responsible for a milestone being achieved (for good or ill) it only matters who is in power when the milestone is achieved. It has ever been thus.

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23 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

In politics it doesn't matter who was largely responsible for a milestone being achieved (for good or ill) it only matters who is in power when the milestone is achieved. It has ever been thus.

Well maybe. It's more likely to occur if you simply let the other side spew bullshit, and you don't challenge it. If you don't challenge it and repeatedly drive the point home, then surely the dynamic you describe will happen.

I don't like giving up that easily.

ETA:

Remember the old joke that a liberal is somebody that won't take his own side in an argument? Probably not a good time to do that.

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23 hours ago, GAROVORKIN said:

On the PR front does Trump appears to be winning on the economy.  If this  economy Kees steaming the way to November and beyond, The Democrats won't make any gains both houses , In fact it's not out of the realm of possibility that they could end up losing additional seats to the Republicans.

Perhaps. But, the Democrats need to drive the point home that Trump and the Republicans are trying to take credit for stuff they have no business taking credit  for. In fact, for reasons, I've described we're kind of in a precarious situation right now and that, in my opinion, needs to be emphasized, largely because of Republican Party idiocy. And then plus voters need to be reminded Trump has reneged or hasn't really followed through with many of his promises.

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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/31/trump-state-of-the-union-reality-380145

“You can say yes, but for the tweets and calling Haiti a shithole and being insensitive after Charlottesville and after attacking civil servants on a Twitter account and after completely conflating his private financial interests with policy making in the White House, if all those things were off the table, yes maybe he could have had a successful presidency,” said Tim O’Brien, (...)

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2018/sotu-commentary/

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union agenda has two things working against it: Congress and time.

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2018/trump-state-of-the-union-2018-transcript-analysis/?lo=ap_a1 full transcript and fact checks

 

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Speaking about illegal immigration, Trump said, “My duty, and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber, is to defend Americans,” the president said during the section of his speech about illegal immigration, “because Americans are dreamers, too.” With that phrase, Trump drew a sharp line between the DREAMers, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as childrenand those born in this country. Both alt-right leader Richard Spencer and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke highlighted that line to their followers.

White Nationalists Celebrate Trump’s ‘Americans Are Dreamers, Too’ SOTU Line

https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-nationalists-celebrate-trumps-americans-are-dreamers-too-sotu-line?ref=home

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23 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

White Nationalists Celebrate Trump’s ‘Americans Are Dreamers, Too’ SOTU Line

https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-nationalists-celebrate-trumps-americans-are-dreamers-too-sotu-line?ref=home

Amazing how Republicans and Trump try to side step issues. This definitely is the old texas two step around the issue of the dreamers.

And then of course, the Trumpsters and Republicans just eat that shit up, like it's the best thing ever.

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Which bring us to the 2018 State of the Union. Last night’s big speech lacked Bannon’s grand vision of a partisan re-alignment, or Kushner’s attempt to make Trumpism safe for Harvard class reunions. Instead, it was a combination of raw resentment and entitlement, a mix of David Koch and David Duke. Sure, Donald Trump did the talking. But that was President Stephen Miller’s first State of the Union Address.

President Stephen Miller’s SOTU Was a White-Nationalist Wish List
President Trump does not have coherent policy positions, that puts huge power in the hands of the advisers writing his speeches.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/president-stephen-millers-sotu-was-a-white-nationalist-wish-list?ref=home

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10 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Amazing how Republicans and Trump try to side step issues. This definitely is the old texas two step around the issue of the dreamers.

And then of course, the Trumpsters and Republicans just eat that shit up, like it's the best thing ever.

Yeah, the Trump Presidency after year can basically be summed up as the racists get their payoff, the plutocrats get their payoff, and everybody else gets constantly pissed on. And that was before the insane stepped up assault on rule of law.

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