US Politics: March Madness

[OldGimletEye]

I always knew Mitt Romney was one sorry ass individual.

Here is another data point to file away.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/17168360/mitt-romney-daca-utah-immigration

Quote

Mitt Romney is making the case that he’s more conservative than President Donald Trump on immigration.

“I’m also more of a hawk on immigration than even the president,” Romney, who announced his bid for Senate in Utah in February, said at a Republican event Monday when asked to defend his conservative credentials. “My view was these DACA kids shouldn’t all be allowed to stay in the country legally.”

 

[Ice Queen]

1 hour ago, Martell Spy said:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-prosecutors-link-trump-aide-rick-gates-to-russian-intelligence

Mueller Prosecutors Link Trump Aide Rick Gates to Russian Intel Network

 

"During his first interview with the Special Counsel’s Office, van der Zwaan admitted that he knew of that connection, stating that Gates told him Person A was a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the GRU." 

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4424919/3-27-18-US-Sentencing-Memo-Van-Der-Zwaan.pdf

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

15 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Eh. The idea that Trump is declining is projection and wishful thinking, I think.

Possibly, but it seems unlikely to me that he left merely over a difference in legal strategy, especially one that seems to be more for public consumption rather than what’s really happening behind the scenes.  

15 hours ago, Ormond said:

To be nitpicky: Wishful thinking is a good possibility. But if you accuse Tywin of "projection" you are saying you believe that Tywin thinks, consciously or unconsciously, that he is "declining" himself, because projection is attributing your own characteristics to someone else:

https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/psychpedia/projection

 

Well to be fair I think we as a species are declining because of Trump, so that would include me, which I am quite consciously aware of.

Also, it’s funny that you’re getting technical here, because of all the psychological defense mechanisms, projection is the one Trump is clearly most guilty of. Pretty much all of his personal attacks on others are things that can be easily seen about him. He attacks others for their looks when he is obviously very self-conscious of his own. He attacks other people’s intelligence because there is some self-awareness that he’s deeply lacking in that regard. And on and on it goes. At this point I always take his attacks as some form of self-reflection, consciously or not.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

11 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Ah, thank you for that link! I see that 23,500 is considered weak support with a stronger support level at 22,500. In which case I’d say there’s a good chance that’s a level we will see for the Dow.

No worries, it’s the least I could do after you wrote several in-depth responses to my questions and all I gave you back was railing against the irrational behavior of the stock market and the brokers who run it. I honestly think the world would be a better place if it simply didn’t exist.  

[Fez]

7 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Possibly, but it seems unlikely to me that he left merely over a difference in legal strategy, especially one that seems to be more for public consumption rather than what’s really happening behind the scenes.  

It's certainly something Michael Wolff claimed in his column introducing his book; he said that at a New Year's Eve/Day party this year Trump was having trouble recognizing old friends.

As with everything Wolff writes though, extremely large amounts of salt are necessary.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

I always knew Mitt Romney was one sorry ass individual.

Here is another data point to file away.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/17168360/mitt-romney-daca-utah-immigration

 

Welcome to the bizarre political paradox in America, where conservatives race to the right to embrace wildly unpopular positions and get rewarded for it. If you eliminated this single anomaly, our politics would go back to being relatively sane.

I think….

[Shryke]

16 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Eh. The idea that Trump is declining is projection and wishful thinking, I think.

Do you mean mentally or politically?

Cause mentally he's totally in decline. Just watching old interviews from like 10 years ago and the contrast is stark. He's an addled old racist cook.

Politically he's also in deep shit. A big reason for the panic setting in around Trump's lawyer issues and the Mueller probe is that it's becoming increasingly clear that Mueller is pulling at strings attached to real crimes and getting more and more evidence by the day. Trump's position is worsening on this issue basically every day.

[Shryke]

12 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Quibbling about minutia is a fairly essential aspect of internet message boards, especially when the topic is politics and 90% of the board is left-leaning.

I suspect the incumbency advantage will look as it has for the past half century - insanely high.  The main causal factor there isn't gerrymandering, which can either benefit or hamper specific incumbents dependent upon the aims of any state party's leadership.  Rather, the primary mechanism there is money in campaigns, which is actually a much tougher systemic problem to remedy.

Broadly, like most things, the only constant in US politics is that there are no constants.  This is particularly the case in respect to the inherently and perpetually shifting coalitions of cartel parties in a two-party system.  Gerrymandering is a potent weapon for such parties to employ to exploit systemic weaknesses for their own ends, but it is a very old weapon that is not fundamentally altered by new statistical analytics or algorithms, and it's a weapon that is sharp on both ends.

It's altered fairly fundamentally by computational power actually since gerrymandering is now a lot easier to make a lot stronger.

[Martell Spy]

So it appear's Trump's "trade war" is a Carrier stunt. Nothing will change and Trump will say he was tough and made deals.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

It's certainly something Michael Wolff claimed in his column introducing his book; he said that at a New Year's Eve/Day party this year Trump was having trouble recognizing old friends.

As with everything Wolff writes though, extremely large amounts of salt are necessary.

I think you can honestly explain that as just being overwhelmed by everything that was going on around him. What troubles me is the clear devolution of his thought process and speech patterns.  Trump was never a great thinker or orator, but if you look back to interviews from the 80’s, 90’s and even 00’s, you can see that he was at least competent. You can’t say that anymore. He talks worse than my 9 year old god daughter and it’s clear that his mind has degenerated. Our racists, idiotic uncle who is now showing signs of deterioration is at the helm of our ship. God help us all…..

[Martell Spy]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/american-immigration-service-slavery/555824/

America Cannot Bear to Bring Back Indentured Servitude

Quote

It’s a lesson as old as European settlement of the present-day United States: Treating migrant workers as property for the benefit of others leads to terrible consequences. But judging from a recent immigration-reform proposal, the country hasn’t entirely learned that lesson. In a Politico pieceoriginally titled, “What If You Could Get Your Own Immigrant?”—a headline that provoked such anger it was quickly changed—Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Law School, and Glen Weyl, an economist at Microsoft Research New England, described a plan that amounts to reintroducing a form of bonded immigrant labor to the United States. Their idea, in essence, is to give every American citizen the right to “sponsor” an immigrant, put that person to work, and then take a portion of his or her wages

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

5 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

So it appear's Trump's "trade war" is a Carrier stunt. Nothing will change and Trump will say he was tough and made deals.

What happened? did he cancel all the tariffs?

[Martell Spy]

2 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

What happened? did he cancel all the tariffs?

He made a big show of negotiating with various allies. Then he granted them all exemptions. Exemptions they should have had in the first place. Now. He is doing similar with China.

So, it was all bluster. The only real news is that we signed a trade agreement with South Korea.

The retaliation from China was purposely limited. It was part of the dance.

[Fragile Bird]

2 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

What happened? did he cancel all the tariffs?

The thing is, the big problem is China, and Obama put tariffs on Chinese steel, so only 3% of imports come from China. In the meantime, the EU, Canada, Mexico and South Korea and I don’t know who else, have been exempted from the tariffs. But that’s ‘temporary’, while treaties like NAFTA are renegotiated.

[Martell Spy]

4 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

The thing is, the big problem is China, and Obama put tariffs on Chinese steel, so only 3% of imports come from China. In the meantime, the EU, Canada, Mexico and South Korea and I don’t know who else has been exempted from the tariffs. But that’s ‘temporary’, while treaties like NAFTA are renegotiated.

Australia is another that I heard.

[Martell Spy]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/trump-obsessed-with-amazon-wants-to-crush-washington-post.html

Trump Is ‘Obsessed’ With Amazon Because He Wants to Crush the Washington Post

Quote

In theory, Trump might have developed an economic theory that Amazon is inappropriately benefitting from public policy, and have drawn critical conclusions about the journalism at the Post, and it is merely a coincidence that the same person, Jeff Bezos, owns both businesses. In practice, Trump makes no pretense of obscuring any connection between the two. When he lashes out at the Post’s coverage, he segues seamlessly to Amazon. Trump has done this over and over.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

21 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

He made a big show of negotiating with various allies. Then he granted them all exemptions. Exemptions they should have had in the first place. Now. He is doing similar with China.

So, it was all bluster. The only real news is that we signed a trade agreement with South Korea.

The retaliation from China was purposely limited. It was part of the dance.

I’ve said it here before, Trump is often times playing the role of a professional wrestling heel. The only thing I’m curious about is if the other elected officials, both at home and abroad, are in on the game.

[Martell Spy]

4 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I’ve said it here before, Trump is often times playing the role of a professional wrestling heel. The only thing I’m curious about is if the other elected officials, both at home and abroad, are in on the game.

I am very curious if he will pull back on the NK meeting. So far he seems to do whatever establishment Republicans want, sometimes after making a big show of otherwise.

[Martell Spy]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/us-north-korea-prepare-for-talks.html

How the U.S. and North Korea Are Preparing for the Trump-Kim Summit

Quote

The summit is tentatively scheduled for May, though recent actions by the U.S. and North Korea have stirred doubts about the potential for a solution, and it’s unclear if the summit will actually take place. Here’s what the two sides have been up to since the announcement.

.

[Kalbear]

3 hours ago, Shryke said:

Do you mean mentally or politically?

Cause mentally he's totally in decline. Just watching old interviews from like 10 years ago and the contrast is stark. He's an addled old racist cook.

Politically he's also in deep shit. A big reason for the panic setting in around Trump's lawyer issues and the Mueller probe is that it's becoming increasingly clear that Mueller is pulling at strings attached to real crimes and getting more and more evidence by the day. Trump's position is worsening on this issue basically every day.

I think that the idea that Trump is clearly in some kind of alzheimer dementia is wishful thinking. I agree he's not as sharp as he was 20 years ago, but it's not clear at all that he's impaired, and the idea that his legal team left him (as @Tywin et al. mentioned) because of it seems like wishful thinking. The obvious answer is that he's really difficult to work with, and lawyers don't like to lose, especially when their clients won't listen to their advice. 

As to politically, I am entirely skeptical simply because the only threat to Trump is if the Republican congresspeople turn against him, and there has been zero sign of this so far. They won't even vote to pass a law stating that Mueller can't be fired.