BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

So your contention is that support for President Trump's policies...lower taxes, border security, better trade deals, etc...is directly proportional to how much light is reflected from his supporters' skin? I'm trying really hard to get the correlation. But so far it has escaped me. Please elaborate.

Christopher Titus
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A friend of mine sat next to John Brennan on a plane and asked him if the Russia thing was as bad as they say. John Brennan said, “Can’t tell you what, but it’s much worse than you think.”
Mueller hasn’t found too little, he found too much.
#DemocracyShaken

11:21 AM - 14 Feb 2019

True? Lie? Hyperbole? What?

Trump Dennison Individual-1 Comrade-1 announces national emergency at border

Replying to a tweet that claimed “the goal of a national emergency is to end illegal immigration and cartel smuggling,” Coulter wrote that “no, the goal of a national emergency is for Trump to scam the stupidest people in his base for 2 more years.” In a subsequent tweet, she added that “The goal is to get Trump’s stupidest voters to say ‘HE’S FIGHTING!’ No he’s not. If he signs this bill, it’s over.”

Sure

The central guiding principal that unifies Trump's base is hatred of the the "other". The other being just about anything other than ignorant white Christian trash.

"Border security"? Trump's entire platform is nothing more than a thinly disguised version of the "Daily Hate"?
Better Trade deals? Those don't actually exist... Trump has made a bunch of ridiculous claims which credulous shitheads like yourself lap up, but he hasn't actually achieved any kind of net positive...
Lower taxes? Maybe if you're in the top 1%. However, most folks in the middle class who are filing this year are getting a really ugly wake up call.

Thirty minutes into his speech, Trump admitted, “I didn’t need to” declare a national emergency to build the wall, remarks that are sure to find their way into the lawsuits that are coming.

“The primary fight was on the wall,” Trump said, referring to his federal government shutdown.

“I have so much money on everything else, I don’t know what to do with it,” he claimed. “I could do the wall over a longer period of time – I didn’t need to do this – but I wanted to do it faster.”

What a thoughtful eloquent post! "ignorant white Christian trash." Really?
1. I am an atheist.
2. My IQ is 146
3. I don't resort to name-calling ("credulous shitheads like yourself"). I consider it the last refuge of scoundrels.

I will leave you boys alone for awhile now. Please carry on your frivolity with great vigor.

I will leave you boys alone for awhile now. Please carry on your frivolity with great vigor.

What a thoughtful eloquent post! "ignorant white Christian trash." Really?
1. I am an atheist.
2. My IQ is 146
3. I don't resort to name-calling ("credulous shitheads like yourself"). I consider it the last refuge of scoundrels.

I don't really like Trump, but let's face it. He's the Pres for about two more years (maybe 6).

andrei, on 2019-February-08, 10:51, said:

You almost got something correct. The last battle is over. The next battle, if any, is over the next spending bill. And there will be many more battles in the next 2 years, assuming Dennison hasn't been impeached and removed from office before then.

"You have a very big mark on our back, Mr. President, regarding who pays for the wall," Pena Nieto said. "My position has been and will continue to be very firm saying that Mexico cannot pay for that wall."

Trump responded, "But you cannot say that to the press. The press is going to go with that, and I cannot live with that. You cannot say that to the press, because I cannot negotiate under those circumstances."

"When during the campaign, I would say Mexico is going to pay for it, obviously I never said this. I never meant they're going to write out a check," Trump told reporters at the White House Thursday

Dennison needs to hire an assistant to make a large spreadsheet of all of his lies so he can try to keep track of them and avoid looking even more stupid by publicly contradicting himself.

A friend sat next to JB on a plane. LOFL

This thread is priceless.

“The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of ‘Trump Incorporated’ attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets,” Brennan wrote.

Russian denials of interference in the election, Brennan added, also were “hogwash.”

President Donald Trump will head to his Mar-a-Lago resort and golf club Friday afternoon, hours after declaring a national emergency in order to build a wall on the southern border, according to his public schedule.

I don't really like Trump, but let's face it. He's the Pres for about two more years (maybe 6).

Doesn't sound like you're actually a member of Trump's base
[You're just a random troll who think's that claiming an IQ test score of 146 would actually impress people]

3. I don't resort to name-calling ("credulous shitheads like yourself"). I consider it the last refuge of scoundrels.

...
2. My IQ is 146
...

Today’s national emergency declaration from Donald Trump is an obvious fraud, detectable if nothing else by the reality that various White House and congressional officials have been teasing it as a possibility for months. In a real emergency, you act fast.

In a fake emergency, you act when you’ve decided the political timing is right as part of a larger ass-covering move because you need to back down from an ill-advised congressional fight that, itself, followed from an ill-advised campaign promise.

Security at the US-Mexico border is, of course, not perfect. But the world is full of problems, none of which are an “emergency” in the sense of requiring some kind of urgent extralegal repurposing of funds. Indeed, by robbing the nation’s drug interdiction and military construction budgets for his slat-building adventure, Trump is much more likely to make national problems worse rather than better: The process of fencing the southern border — ongoing for decades already — is subject to diminishing returns, with the valuable sections having been fenced years ago.

The crisis on display over the past couple of months is the total incompetence of Donald Trump. He has no understanding of how to set a policy agenda or get anything done.

Consequently, without Paul Ryan around to drive a legislative agenda that he can rubber-stamp, he’s flailing. First, shutting down the government and throwing millions of people’s lives into chaos. Now, reopening the government having obtained nothing he couldn’t have had in December while adopting a Hail Mary “emergency” scheme that is only going to make things worse. It’s a much better outcome than a new shutdown, but it should all make us worry about the president’s shaky ability to handle a real crisis.

The world’s stupidest political standoff

This all began, obviously, when Trump promised to build a solid concrete wall across the entire span of the US-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it.

That was an incredibly stupid idea, wasteful and unworkable in every way, and his critics said so. But Trump transmogrified his opponents’ mockery into a test of will. The political establishment didn’t want to secure the border, but Trump did — and the wall was proof.

In office, Trump has been confronting the reality that his critics were correct in every way. Mexico is not going to pay for the wall, so congressional appropriations are needed, and the cost-benefit question is valid. He also long ago conceded that precisely because of cost-benefit considerations, there is not going to be a wall stretching across the entire border — there are places where it’s infeasible and useless, and that’s that. He also conceded, by the way, that there’s not going to be a wall at all, that the previous steel bollard anti-pedestrian fencing that he mocked as a candidate is a useful barrier and that Border Patrol personnel prefer its see-through quality.

The whole dispute, on a practical level, is simply about the level of spending and pace of construction of a type of border hardening that has been underway for years.

Democrats find this border hardening to be mostly wasteful; Republicans say it’s important. To any halfway competent president, this is the most banal kind of political controversy imaginable. If you have a pet project that you want to get money for, you have to offer your opponents something in exchange.

The wall itself is stupid

Trump’s problem here is that the wall is a bad idea and his own allies and staff know it’s a bad idea. The sort of illicit border crossings that pedestrian fences are supposed to prevent have already fallen to very low levels (perhaps because of the already-build barriers, perhaps for other reasons), and the immigration conversation has moved on to other things — most notably, the treatment of asylum-seeking families from Central America.

Because the wall is bad, immigration hawks don’t want to make any meaningful concessions in order to get it.

Anytime talks seem to be getting off the ground about some kind of swap of help for DREAMers in exchange for wall money, the hawks swoop in with a bunch of other demands that have nothing to do with the wall.

It’s reasonable that conservatives don’t want to make concessions for the wall because the wall is bad. But by the same token, if your political allies don’t want to make concessions to get something because the thing in question is bad, the smart approach is to just let it slide, not throw a tantrum.

But instead, we have Donald Trump.

A crisis of leadership

First the shutdown and now the “emergency” both stem from the basic fact that Trump will neither admit his whole wall spiel was BS nor decide to act like someone who genuinely wants a wall and make a deal to get it.

Instead, a lot of people’s time and money is now going to be wasted on litigation while money is taken away from duly authorized programs and sent instead to a construction project nobody really wants. This is not the worst thing anyone has ever done in American politics — it’s not even close to being the worst thing Trump has ever done — but it’s arguably the most absurd.

And it raises, once again, the fundamental question about Trump. When you have a president who can’t handle relatively banal problems like a disagreement over a $5 billion appropriation for a pet project, what’s going to happen to us when a real crisis hits?

It's always amusing to see people resort to "argument by IQ score." Keep in mind:

A friend sat next to JB on a plane. LOFL

This thread is priceless.

Did you pay your own tuition to clown school or did you get a scholarship? Don't answer, that was a rhetorical question
Since Fox Propaganda viewers usually don't bother to find out what's happening in the real world, John Brennan has been saying there are more bad things about Dennison and Russia that haven't been revealed since the start of the Mueller investigation in all types of national news shows.

And there was this:

John Brennan Says Trump’s ‘No Collusion’ Claims Are ‘Hogwash’

Did you pay your own tuition to clown school or did you get a scholarship? Don't answer, that was a rhetorical question
Since Fox Propaganda viewers usually don't bother to find out what's happening in the real world, John Brennan has been saying there are more bad things about Dennison and Russia that haven't been revealed since the start of the Mueller investigation in all types of national news shows.

And there was this:

John Brennan Says Trump’s ‘No Collusion’ Claims Are ‘Hogwash’

Well, if the collusion claims are such a slam dunk, then maybe someone should put real evidence of it out there.

Sadly, Brennan sounds like he's parroting his buddy shifty Rep. Adam Schiff who claimed there was plenty of evidence of collusion a year or two ago but that he couldn't share it with us. Now that he's Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, he's said that they must move past the Russian investigation and investigate Trump's finances.

Like the famous campaign quip from either the '84 or '88 election parodying an Arby's ad, Cora's asking "Where's the beef?" It seems like all we've been getting for a couple is a lot of smoke and little barbecue.

On Tuesday, when news broke that Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort had shared internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian business associate with ties to Russian intelligence, the through line between the campaign and the Kremlin began to look incontrovertible. The revelation came in an inadvertently unredacted court document, which was filed by Manafort’s lawyers in response to charges made by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, that Manafort had lied to investigators. According to the Times, some—but not all—of the data was already in the public domain. The rest came from the campaign’s own polling operation.

(b) The Special Counsel is authorized to conduct the investigation confirmed by then-FBI Director James 8. Comey in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 20, 2017, including:

(i) any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and

(ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; and

(iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).