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and this by the same blogger,
Now, on to the illegal alien problem, of which this caravan is merely the latest manifestation.
It is the second-largest reason why the southern border is kept open - cheap labor that, if allowed, would have to be content with a few fish heads and a bowl of rice for a daily wage, rather than money. Trust me, if the national COC and major employers in this country could get away with it, that's what they'd pay these people. And native-born or naturalized Americans would be not far above them, I guarantee you, once the wages start falling - and we just got over a prolonged period of that, eight long, terrible years of people working two or even three jobs - all part time - to make ends meet.
The "caravan" - which I prefer to call an invasion force - is running the length of Mexico without any truly serious attempt on the part of the Mexican govt to stop it, and hopefully reverse its course and send it back to its point of origin. It's serving one useful purpose - to illustrate the half-assed measures the Mexican govt - if you can call it that - is taking to try to help maintain peace in this hemisphere.
But suppose those people are headed up here for a better life. I don't blame them for wanting in their heart to have a better life. Anyone who has had children (which, BTW, are truly lacking in the numbers of this invasion force) will experience that. To have a better life, your surroundings need to improve. And for that to happen, your government needs to be examined.
Why o why does everyone who is involved in this debacle support the desire of these people to flee their own countries and head to the USA as a means to address the problems? Does not the issue lie with the governments of Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador, etc etc etc - run by two-bit tin-horn banana-republic dictators under a system the people just allow to keep running as it is?
These governments allow internal problems to continue to fester (for the good of the occupants of the presidential palace) and merely ship the possible insurgents out of the country via illegal immigration to the US. Not only that - those same governments cynically allow these illegal expats from their country to send back a LOT of money to their kin back home, which is intercepted upon arrival and a portion of which is absconded with by the govt to keep its criminal enterprise running. If we can see that - surely the US govt has seen it but has done NOTHING about it for decades. That's criminal. It's also inhuman.
But, again, back to the invasion force. Yes, indeed, illegal aliens have arrived in their hundreds of thousands over the years at the border just as these people are aiming to do. The difference here is they have NEVER arrived in a 14,000-strong mass, with two other invasion forces mobilizing behind them or already enroute. That sends a very definite, undeniable signal to those north of the border. It says, in effect, "We're here to take your land, your jobs, and change the very nature of the nation in which you live. We have an inherent right to the place where you live, and we will exercise that right. We're here to bankrupt you, turn your domestic affairs into the same mess we left behind in Guatemala, or wherever. And last, but certainly not least - we're here to bring with us diseases you in North America have, through diligent study and labor, managed to eradicate to protect yourselves and your children. Or, in some cases, diseases you've never seen before in this hemisphere - or anywhere."
And THAT's one HUGE reason we must have controlled immigration into this country. Health screening. It was one enormous reason Ellis Island on the East Coast - and Terminal Island on the West Coast - were built. No more epidemics in this country. And we're seeing it start to happen all over again.
Now, why would George Soros want to fund something like this? He doesn't want to destroy the United States - only its governmental system. He wants to keep the manufacturing or financial base, that which generates the money he wants to run his hands through over and over again. Under Obama we were in the middle of losing our manufacturing base - which, BTW, was the thing that gave the middle class in this country its wherewithal and means of livelihood. Move it overseas where employees will work for practically nothing - thus further maximizing Soros' profits and it only serves to his benfit. Under Hillary that manufacturing base would practically disappear, and the middle class along with it. History has shown whenever, in a given society, you have only two classes - the huge have-nots, and the very, very small have-it-alls, you put a permanent state of social crisis into effect. Social disorder is always just under the surface. A state of permanent impending or actual crisis makes it easy for Soros and his buddies to get the puppet government to crack down on the working minions in that society through the puppet government; if you keep people in a permanent state of upheaval you cause them to be concerned for their own day to day welfare; they don't have the time or energy for serious abstract thought, like that required to plot a successful revolt. It's all about control. And control, for the VERY wealthy like Soros, just means more money in their pocket and further advantage for their children and grandchildren - but certainly not for yours.
But most importantly, you have the means of tightening your control over the whole operation on a permanent basis, thus further enriching yourself.
It's a safe bet Soros and his like have connections, using money via crooked politicians and bureaucrats, with practically every nation and major corporation on this planet. Funding is the weak link, there is just so much money in this world controlled through a very few centers of influence and power; have a "hook" in each of those centers (which he does) and you've got control. A rogue like Trump upsets that balance and incurs the ire of the very wealthy - hence, he's got to go, along with the politics that put him in place.
Let me catch my breath and rest my fingers and we can explore this at greater length if you so desire.
Consider this,The Deplorable SSI01 Guest • 17 hours ago
There is ample documentation available, if you have the clearances, in the files of the USBP and local and state narcotics enforcement agencies on the southern border to support the proposition illegal aliens are a huge part of the narcotics-trafficking problem in this country. For decades illegals have had to each carry a small parcel of MJ or another drug across the border as part of the fee they pay the coyote who is guiding them and who himself has connections to the drug cartels. He's running the "mule train" of which these illegals have always been a part. If they refuse to carry their portion of the whole they are killed on the spot. It's called internal discipline. Lots of coyotes move drugs if they're not moving illegals. It's a disgusting situation all around that's been ignored for years like a lot of things involved in the "war on drugs" - that should have been over long ago.
That's one reason - one BIG reason - Trump is having so much trouble getting this wall built in a coordinated manner. There are too many people in positions of authority in the US govt - and its agencies - who are making a fortune in payoffs from the drug lords in SA and up here to keep looking the other way on this "wall" matter.
This payoff money is an excellent reason the construction should be handed over to the US Army Corps of Engineers to run, using Army labor. Keep civilians out of the process as much as possible. Materials will flow as needed. No engineered labor "shortages," no union problems, no problems with not enough equipment.
Erect the wall and run it the way it should be run, and drug imports to this country drop SUBSTANTIALLY, and overnight. It would be the beginning of the end for the drug makers and marketers in this country. The only means of production after that would be domestic labs that would be easy to track. Smuggled dope would have to come in by air (pretty easily tracked), or by sea (again, easily tracked - the USCG has displayed particular talent in finding and arresting - or sinking - these threats). Air shipments would necessarily have to be small and therefore easily controlled. Same with by boat.
We would FINALLY, after decades of effort in this country, have the upper hand against drugs.
But there is far, far too much money dangling in front of everyone here. A lot of people in the US, state, and local govts are getting rich or are maintaining their lifestyle, with that payoff money. Either to oppose the wall altogether - or engineer a slow-down in the works, like endless legal challenges.
And THAT is what is ultimately causing the wall not to be built. We need to dig deep - DEEP - up here to find the crooks in the govt who let this go on and on and on.
cont'd...
OpEdNews Op Eds -- 10/22/2018 -- From Common Dreams
"Stop GOP Voter Suppression -- Or Else!
Most American voters generally don't like billionaires and corporations running politics, so the GOP is simply not letting them vote."
By Thom Hartmann:
He added that if only the rights of property were written into the Constitution, the rich would ravage the few assets of the poor. "Give all power to property," he said, "and the indigent will be oppressed."
In fact, Madison noted, all the former republics that they had studied in his five years of preparation for writing our Constitution had ended up corrupted by exactly that: the political power of concentrated money.
"In all the governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots and lawgivers," he said, "the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich."
Thus, wanting to establish a country where the rich didn't end up running it as their own private kingdom or oligarchy, he proposed that only the House of Representatives -- the only branch elected directly by the people, and every two years at that -- should have the power to raise taxes or spend federal funds.
"The time to guard against this danger is at the first forming of the Constitution," he said in his speech. "Liberty, not less than justice, pleads for the policy here recommended.
"If all power be suffered to slide into hands [of the rich]" he warned, the American citizenry will "become the dupes and instruments of ambition, or their poverty and dependence will render them the mercenary instruments of wealth. In either case liberty will be subverted: in the first, by a despotism growing out of anarchy; in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption."
And, indeed, the delegates assembled agreed. Only the House of Representatives, to this day, can raise taxes or spend money.
In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Jefferson noted, "It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor."
Fighting those instincts of human nature, he argued, was at the core of the American experiment. (Like George Washington and many of his peers, Jefferson died broke. America's first millionaire came along in 1791 -- a shipping magnate -- and none of the founders or framers were wealthy enough to leave an estate that lasted even to a second generation.)
In an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson explained, "I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependance (sic) for continued freedom."
He added that if we ended up with an oligarchic government that is run, directly or indirectly, by the rich, America's working people "must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four;" and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they [poor Europeans] now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers."
One wonders how the employees of the giant corporations that throw so much money at the Republican Party would compare that metaphor with their own current existence, since the GOP has successfully fought any meaningful reform of union rights, universal health care, or the minimum wage since Reagan.
And they're using voting suppression to maintain a situation that's so hostile to workers that wages have actually fallen for the bottom half of American workers in the 38 years since Reagan's election in 1980.
Thomas Paine, in his 1795 Dissertation on First Principles of Government, noted that, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case."
If we fail to do something large, substantial and dramatic about the scourge of voter suppression, we must all begin learning how to rivet chains.
Those are our options.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/3/Stop-GOP-Voter-Suppression-by-Thom-Hartmann-Billionaires_Election_Politics_Voter-Fraud-181022-905.html
cont'd...
OpEdNews Op Eds -- 10/22/2018 -- From Common Dreams
"Stop GOP Voter Suppression -- Or Else!
Most American voters generally don't like billionaires and corporations running politics, so the GOP is simply not letting them vote."
By Thom Hartmann:
In 2000, though, the GOP changed tactics. After Reagan almost got busted for Iran/Contra (he testified that he "forgot" about details of the program over 80 times; he was saved by his growing Alzheimer's from an indictment), they realized that getting busted for treason wasn't worth the risk.) They needed a "Plan B."
And it was deliciously simple. If the majority of voters don't like what you're selling, then just don't let them vote.
Paul Weyrich had promoted this idea back in 1980 when he was campaigning for Reagan (after co-founding the Heritage Foundation), and, indeed, many Republican luminaries (like William Rehnquist, who went from poll-intimidator in the 1960s to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) rose up through the ranks by participating in Republican-run voter intimidation schemes.
While they used smear and innuendo to attack Al Gore (ridiculing him for helping write the legislation that created the modern internet, for example), the main thing that got George W. Bush into the White House was voter suppression crimes committed by his brother, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and Bush's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris. Throwing somewhere between 50,000 and 90,000 African American voters off the rolls, they were able to get the vote close enough that five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court functionally awarded Bush the presidency. (The BBC covered this in 2001 in two major investigative reports here and here that were literally seen all over the world except on any American media.)But it became the foundational go-to tactic for the GOP in 2000.
By 2016, the Republican Party had fine-tuned their voter suppression and intimidation systems to the point that they ran in nearly 30 states like well-oiled machines. Between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, for example, Ohio had purged more than 2 million voters from its rolls, the vast majority (more than 2:1) in heavily African American and Hispanic counties. (And the Supreme Court ruled last year that they can keep it up; other states have since adopted their new tactic of caging voters.)
The New York Times noted that in Wisconsin, around 300,000 registered voters were turned away at the polls because they didn't have the particular types of ID necessitated by Scott Walker's ALEC-recommended new voter ID law (in Texas, the Times reported, the number was 900,000).
It's symbiotic: billionaires and corporations spend hundreds of millions to fund Republicans, who pass laws and tax breaks that give billions to the corporations and billionaires, who then recycle a fraction of that, mere millions, back to the legislators they own. To keep the cycle going, both must prevent people who object to this system from voting.
ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), funded by the Koch network and other billionaires and big corporations, has been at the forefront of these efforts, with the majority of voter suppressive state laws passed having been introduced by ALEC-affiliated Republican legislators. ALEC itself facilitated the production of voter suppressive "model legislation."
Average American voters generally don't like billionaires and corporations running politics, so the billionaires and their corporations have organized major efforts to keep those people from voting. Numbers are sketchy, because Republican Secretaries of State are unwilling to release purge numbers and details without being sued to do so.
Fortunately for America, investigative reporter Greg Palast is executing such lawsuits right now, and the purge lists he's acquired in the past two weeks include over 90,000 people in largely Democratic parts of Nevada, 769,436 voters purged in Colorado, 340,134 in Georgia, 550,000 in Illinois, a large but as-yet-uncounted list from Nebraska, and 469,000 just purged in Indiana. More are coming in virtually daily, as Palast continues his lawsuits, along with the NAACP and Rainbow Push.
True the Vote, the latest Astroturf group pushing for voter purges, is partly funded by the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), the group that spent millions to run nationwide TV ads for Judge Brett Kavanaugh disparaging Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony as a "sham."
JCN, in turn, is funded by the Wellspring Committee that, according to investigative reporter Ken Vogel, was started by billionaires Charles and David Koch. (Their father, Fred Koch, was a founder and major funder of the John Birch Society, which ran "Impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice] Earl Warren" billboards and ads across America in the 1950s and 1960s decrying the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation order in Brown v. Board, and funded publications and efforts characterizing the voter drives of Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist plot.)
Republicans, instead of helping working people, love to lecture Americans that only their elected officials and Federal and Supreme Court justices are actually channeling the "original intent" of the founders and framers of the Constitution. ("Originalism" is a scam run uniquely by Republican justices, for example.)
Like their rigged elections and their ads saying that they want to defend Social Security and protect us against insurance companies viz preexisting conditions, it's a lie.
Although about half of the founders were slaveholders, practicing their own form of voter suppression, they nonetheless held egalitarian values for the future of this country and worried obsessively about a takeover by the very rich. It's hard to imagine that they'd ever sanction interpreting the First Amendment as a license for billionaires and corporations to buy our political system (as the Supreme Court first did in 1976 in the Buckley case, and then supercharged in 2010 with Citizens United).
In the summer of 1785, James Madison was essentially running the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he gave a speech (you can read in his Notes on the Convention) about the importance of not allowing the new country they were forming to become an oligarchy, run of, by, and for the rich. He noted that there are "two cardinal objects of government, the rights of persons and the rights of property."
https://www.opednews.com/articles/2/Stop-GOP-Voter-Suppression-by-Thom-Hartmann-Billionaires_Election_Politics_Voter-Fraud-181022-905.html
cont'd...
OpEdNews Op Eds -- 10/22/2018 -- From Common Dreams
"Stop GOP Voter Suppression -- Or Else!
Most American voters generally don't like billionaires and corporations running politics, so the GOP is simply not letting them vote."
By Thom Hartmann:
The Republican Party is currently hoping to win nationwide using two simple elements: explicit and overt racism, and voter suppression.
No "ideas"; no pitch for tax cuts; no discussion of their "replacement" for the Affordable Care Act; no push for better schools, hospitals, airports, roads or bridges; no promise for more and better jobs -- none of these staples of the 2016 presidential campaign can be found in pretty much any Republican advertising today.
Instead, the public Republican message is all about race or the subset of race, religion ("Muslim" stands in for "brown Arab" in GOP-speak) and "immigration" (aka brown people from south of our border). Republicans across the country are even recruiting white supremacist and neo-Nazi gangs to threaten or assault Democrats and their supporters, while Trump praises the criminal assault of reporters in the wake of Khashoggi's murder.
Meanwhile, Republican secretaries of state across the nation are vigorously purging voters from the rolls (over 14 million, more than 10 percent of America's active voters, in the past two years, according to investigative reporter Greg Palast).
Immediately after the five Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 14 GOP-controlled states moved, within a year (some within days), to restrict access to the vote, particularly for communities of color, students, and retired people.
In North Carolina, for example, 158 polling places were permanently closedin the 40 counties with the most African American voters just before the 2016 election, leading to a 16 percent decline in African American early voting in that state. An MIT study found that, nationwide, Hispanic voters wait 150 percent longer in line than white voters, and Black voters can expect to wait 200 percent longer in line to vote.
In Indiana, then-Governor Pence's new rigorous voter ID law caused an 11.5 percent drop in African American voting. Students are suing for their right to vote, and retired people who no longer drive but care passionately about their Social Security and Medicare are being turned away at the polls by the tens of thousands.
How did it come to this?
The problem for the GOP has deep roots. In the 1870s, when the Party abandoned its Lincolnesque position in favor of granting full citizenship rights to freed slaves, it rapidly slid into the role of being the party of the barons of rail, oil, coal, steel, and construction.
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, largely threw its efforts -- culminating in the New Deal in 1933 and the Great Society in 1967 -- in with working people, legislatively protecting unionization efforts, passing Social Security and Medicare, putting the minimum wage and unemployment insurance into law, and creating federal and state agencies to protect workers' safety, children, and the environment.
This has led to a major problem for the GOP, since the very wealthy and CEOs only constitute a small part of the American voting public. In order to pass tax cuts and cut protective regulations for their rich owners, they needed political power, and -- particularly since the disastrous "roaring 20s" leading straight to the Republican Great Depression (yes, they called it that until after WWII) -- Republicans needed voters to put them into office.
And this was generally pretty tough for the GOP. In 1974, for example, the GOP only had outright control of seven states. The message of, "elect us and we'll help the rich people out" just didn't generally resonate with American voters. It's the reason why, outside of the fluke elections of 1946 and 1952, Democrats outright controlled the House of Representatives for three generations, from 1933 to 1996, and controlled the Senate for most of that time.
Desperate to win the presidency in 1968, Richard Nixon even went so far as to commit treason by torpedoing a peace deal that LBJ had worked out with the Vietnamese. According to the then-president of Iran, Reagan did the same thing by cutting a deal with Iran to hold the U.S. embassy hostages until after the election, destroying Jimmy Carter's chances of re-election.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Stop-GOP-Voter-Suppression-by-Thom-Hartmann-Billionaires_Election_Politics_Voter-Fraud-181022-905.html
cont'd...
Today in the first hour of Thom's program, he discusses serious and widespread efforts for many years by Republican Secretaries of State throughout the country, especially in swing states, to disenfranchise as many potential Democratic voters as possible, primarily by purging them from voting rolls without good cause -- over 14 million just this year! And Democrats in general, who fit certain profiles, have been finding it increasingly more difficult to vote. This is by design, of course.
Thom's guest is Greg Palast.
Since voter suppression -- striking at the very "beating heart of democracy" -- is such a critical topic right now before these extremely important midterms, Thom's timely and poignant article, "Stop GOP Voter Suppression -- Or Else!," should be revisited.
From the podium of pontification on high, the demagogue of nonstop campaign rhetoric inspires his fever-eyed fans ("...very fine people on both sides...") to put aside differences (riiight) and come together as one nation under, goddammit, his Highness...
...that is, after blowing up, killing , and maiming innocent people simply because they work in the media or call themselves Democrats or are undocumented or have brown skin or are Muslim ...or, or, or...
And from whom, do you suppose, did this latest Trump-winger -- a registered Republican whackjob -- get his hateful, angry, violent politics?
Gee, could it possibly be from the fake president, perhaps -- this sad, past-his-prime, fake playboy (sexual predator), who arrogantly tilts his haughty head back in a ridiculous Mussolini-esque frown, his cartoonish vision of the respectable pose a strong leader should strike (which, for vanity's sake, also has the added benefit of stretching out those saggy jowls and neck waddle for the cameras)?
This twittering twit is an efing joke, the butt of the whole world! As are the fools who follow Dear Leader like little lost puppies, who evidently like their crotches grabbed by dirty old men ...politically speaking.
Vote the bums out!
And have fun doin' it!
The Thom Hartmann Program - 1 hour edition - 10/26/2018
DianeR
Just nice to have on hand....I'm off to make chili dogs for the Warrior game. Love their great teamwork. And not to much politics.
back later!
HotCoffee, Interesting website. I will play with it a bit later. It will be interesting come 2018 income tax time. The high tax states that received a gift from the feds by allowing those taxpayers to deduct their State taxes from their Federal taxes is now gone, so the free ride for high tax states is over. I predice lots of sticker shock for many in high tax states come mid April.
cont'd...
OpEdNews, July 25, 2018
"Trump Doesn't Have the Skill to Pull Off His Most Nefarious Plots"
By Thom Hartmann:
Trump believes that if the "leaders" of a nation can get along, everything will work out. While there's actually a long history of personal chemistry between leaders leading to good results, dating back to the first years of our Republic and Jefferson's relationship with Lafayette, this all has to happen within a much larger and more institutional framework, and Trump can't do that.
Instead, Trump is handling U.S./Russian relations the way a small-time (non-public company, like Trump's) CEO would negotiate a deal between their companies. Except that a competent CEO would have had his underlings work out most of the details before the first meeting took place -- or at least immediately thereafter.
As if to flaunt his incompetence, Trump hasn't even yet told his national security team what he agreed to in his private meeting with Putin.
It's becoming pretty clear that he can't work out a deal with Russia, and meanwhile North Korea is openly flaunting their defiance of him (despite the superficial changes that have recently occurred). Even Trump's right-wing allies around the world are laughing at him: Bibi considers him a useful idiot, and the Saudis walked all over him (leading to millions of refugees in Yemen). Erdoğan is ignoring Trump's pleas to release an imprisoned American pastor, and Xi, other than swapping financing for the Indonesian Trump property for ZTE's future, is mostly ignoring him.
A few conservatives have tried to spin Trump's blundering in North Korea and Russia as being on the level of Reagan first "going off script" with Gorbachev, something that did actually happen and eventually turned out well (at least until Milton Friedman's libertarian "Chicago School boys" began advising the privatization of the former USSR's assets, but that's another article).
But the simple reality is that Reagan knew that government doesn't work like a corporation (unless it's an autocratic government), and therefore he let competent statesmen and stateswomen around him work out the thousands of small but critical details. Reagan at least had the experience of running California, with the world's sixth largest economy and layer upon layer of fractious politics; his policies were terrible, but he knew how to get things done. Trump doesn't.
Trump, in apparent thrall to the idea that he's America's "CEO President" or, worse, our soon-to-be Erdoğan or Mussolini, thinks he can have a "secret" conversation with Putin and he'll just magically charm Russia's far-more-sophisticated president into supine compliance with U.S. concerns.
Predictably, it doesn't seem to be working out. He just can't do it.
Trump should have learned from President Obama's successful negotiations, leading to world-turning agreements with Iran and Cuba, that there is a way to work things out with former adversaries. Step one, in fact, is to bring in all concerned parties, as Obama did when he successfully worked out the Iran deal with Russia, China, the UK, France, Germany and the UN.
But Trump just can't learn, and instead, like a spoiled child, he's now trying to destroy two of the most important bipartisan and multilateral accomplishments of his own country's early 21st century.
So, yes, we should all hope for better relations between the world's two great nuclear powers. And if Donald Trump had shown any competence at anything other than demagoguery and race-baiting, it should be included on a list of reasons why he's working so hard at his relationship with President Putin.
But the last two years tell us that Trump's Russia outreach is almost certainly more about the money he owes Russian oligarchs than any desire for our two nations to "get along."
It's a good thing for world peace and stability to have an American president competent in international relations (and domestic governance, for that matter), and it would be a good thing for the U.S. and the Russian Federation to have a good -- or even a great -- relationship; most Americans would be grateful and supportive of such a president's best efforts.
Proof of that is found in the early outreach to Trump from a number of Democrats, from Bernie to Chuck Schumer to Nancy Pelosi, right after the election. They each said, in various ways, "Where he's wrong, we'll fight him -- but when he's right, like on trade, infrastructure, or strengthening Social Security, we're prepared to work with him." I even said similar things on my radio/TV program, and meant them.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump turned out to be so incompetent that he couldn't even turn Democrats' "yes" into anything real, and his promises to do things for average working Americans -- or for world peace -- were simply lies.
He just can't do it.
Trump will go down as the most dangerously corrupt and tragically incompetent president in America's history, and the most it seems we can hope for is that he won't start World War III or flip America into fascism with his next tweet.
Those are the things, history tells us, an incompetent leader actually can do.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Trump-Doesn-t-Have-the-Ski-by-Thom-Hartmann-Incompetence_Trump-And-Putin_Trump-Broken-Promises_Trump-Ego-180725-323.html
-- from the Independent Media Institute
cont'd...
OpEdNews, July 25, 2018
"Trump Doesn't Have the Skill to Pull Off His Most Nefarious Plots"
By Thom Hartmann:
He can't do it through politics.
Trump can't get his pitiful wall out of his own Republican-controlled Congress, and his brutal child-separation/detention-camp policies have horrified Americans across the political spectrum.
He can't do it on immigration.
He has utterly failed at health care, to the point that massive increases in insurance prices (and declines in the quality of coverage) are predicted for this winter when rates are reset, further hammering working families who are seeing their wages drop as the natural result of the ongoing Republican War on Unions.
Meanwhile, working-class Americans are further getting hammered with rising gasoline prices as Trump's newfound Saudi "friends" are laughing all the way to the bank.
He can't do anything successful for working-class people.
His tax-cut scam will, in the first weeks of October, collide with the Fed's program of unwinding quantitative easing (QE). The Fed will be looking for purchasers of $800 billion or so of Treasurys on their balance sheet, while the Treasury Department must find buyers for around $1.2 trillion in new debt to continue handing U.S. tax dollars to multinational corporations and billionaires. This, David Stockman told me, will probably push us into the next great depression.
He can't do it for the economy.
The drug companies are laughing at him (and pretending to go along by holding prices down" for a few months), his infrastructure investment ideas have been killed by McConnell and Ryan, and the GOP won't even discuss his (Ivanka's) campaign promises of more governmental help for low-income women and children.
He can't do it to keep us well.
Which brings us back to why I didn't include "Trump wanting better U.S. relations with Russia" in my list of reasons he's so utterly obsequious when it comes to President Putin and Russian oligarchs.
We all would like a win-win of good relations with the world's second largest nuclear power, but is Donald Trump moving us in that direction? The evidence shouts, "No, he can't do it." He's simply too incompetent.
If Donald Trump -- or any president, for that matter -- wanted to accomplish a rapprochement with Russia (or any other nation), it must be done systemically.
From the State Department to Congress to our military/intelligence agencies, a president committed to working things out with Russia would be realigning the levers of American power to consistently offer both carrots and sticks, holding a clear-eyed vision of the goals and needs of both nations.
He'd be working with NATO to resolve issues that are troubling to the Russians while, at the same time, informing the American people about the history of this relationship and how it got to this point. (Ironically, that last would give him something to bash Bill Clinton with, as it was on his watch that America broke Bush's promise to Gorbachev. Trump apparently can't even competently abuse a political foe.)
Trump grew up in his daddy's business, which he eventually inherited. As a CEO, he was an absolute autocrat, and never seems to have mastered the necessary arts of compromise and cooperation. His legendary business failures, frauds (yes, with convictions), and bankruptcies attest to his inability to accomplish things -- and also to his childlike belief that the way to "get things done" is simply by ordering it so.
That's not even how competently run companies work, much less entire nations. He's just a third-level grifter, and just can't do it.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Trump-Doesn-t-Have-the-Ski-by-Thom-Hartmann-Incompetence_Trump-And-Putin_Trump-Broken-Promises_Trump-Ego-180725-323.html
cont'd...
The Thom Hartmann Program - 10/25/2018 -1 hour edition
DianeR,
You might like this site...menu is at top left hand corner ...the three lines.
https://howmuch.net/
Cheers!
cont'd...
OpEdNews, July 25, 2018
"Trump Doesn't Have the Skill to Pull Off His Most Nefarious Plots"
By Thom Hartmann:
While tariffs should lead to increases in domestic manufacturing and, thus, more jobs, they aren't in this case because no company can take that large a risk on such an unstable president with an eccentric policy that has no laws behind it.
He just can't do it on trade.
On international relations, Trump repeatedly called for better relations withother nations, a goal that (outside of a few hardliners) is widely embraced, at least in the abstract, by both parties and the people of the world (particularly in Europe). Sadly, he's managed to damage or destroy our relations with all but a handful of autocratic nations, disrespecting and angering American allies who've been with us for centuries.
He can't do it on international relations.
On infrastructure, Trump parroted Bernie in calling for a $1.5 trillion national investment in America's crumbling infrastructure, repeatedly pointing out that since U.S. infrastructure investments collapsed following Reagan's huge tax cuts in the 1980s, we've let our roads, rails, and airports deteriorate to Third World status. But action since the election? He seems to have forgotten.
He can't do it on infrastructure.
On issues affecting women and children, Trump called for increased federal spending for child care, child tax credits, and paid maternity leave. The GOP in Congress and the billionaires who fund their campaigns and their voter suppression efforts simply laughed at him.
He can't do it on family issues.
On health care, Trump continued to insist, even after he was elected, that he would follow the Democrats' plan to change the law so that Medicare could directly negotiate prescription drug prices (ending a $600 billion windfall for the drug companies inserted by the GOP in 2005), and would provide "insurance for everybody" that was "much less expensive and much better than" Obamacare. Instead, he's changing the law so your insurance company can once again refuse to pay your bills if they can dig into your records and find any remote evidence of a pre-existing condition. Or simply dump you when you get sick.
He can't do it on health care.
On taxes, while President Obama signed into law the largest middle-class tax cut in the history of the nation, Trump promised an even bigger tax cut for working people. Instead, he and the GOP handed over $5 trillion in U.S. tax dollars to the billionaire and corporate class, while further depressing wages on working people.
He can't do it on taxes.
He promised to help out low-income blacks, saying, "What have you got to lose?" Turns out that, along with other low-income minorities and low-income whites, they're losing a lot, from the right to vote, to essential government help with housing, food, and health care. His white supremacist base seems happy with his "rapist"/"shithole" rhetoric, but they're being screwed economically by his policies, too.
He can't do it for low-income folks, people of color, or even the racists among his base.
Trump is breathtakingly incompetent. His businesses have failed repeatedly, foreign oligarchs are bailing him out, and he and Michael Cohen apparently broke numerous U.S. election laws just getting him elected. He couldn't even run a competent campaign for president, and without "a little (illegal) help from his friends" he wouldn't be in the White House.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Trump-Doesn-t-Have-the-Ski-by-Thom-Hartmann-Incompetence_Trump-And-Putin_Trump-Broken-Promises_Trump-Ego-180725-323.html
cont'd...
OpEdNews, July 25, 2018 -- from the Independent Media Institute
"Trump Doesn't Have the Skill to Pull Off His Most Nefarious Plots"
By Thom Hartmann:
Trump just can't get things done, and we need to stop having conversations predicated on the assumption that maybe he can. His dangerous incompetence is currently risking war in the Middle East and Asia, while pitting American against American in ways we haven't seen in this country since the days of George Wallace.
For example, while citizens and leaders of the western world try to figure out what happened in Helsinki, Trump supporters are in plaintive wail mode: "He just wants better relations with Russia," they say. "What's wrong with that?"
In a previous op-ed, I posited three possible reasons for Donald Trump's behavior relative to Russia: that he's a witting or unwitting stooge, a wannabe dictator, or desperately broke. Several people noted, in comments to the article, that I'd missed a fourth option: "He's trying for world peace. Wouldn't better U.S./Russia relations be a good thing for the U.S. and world peace?"
Of course, it would be a good thing if the U.S. and Russia could get along better. It would be a very good thing.
Relations have been badly strained with Russia ever since we first started pushing NATO onto her borders (in ways that Reagan/Bush had promised Gorbachevwould never happen if he'd let the USSR dissolve), and Russia (in part, citing those broken promises) intervened in Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine.
But Donald Trump is never going to untangle that mess: He simply lacks the skills, and isn't willing to turn details over to underlings who are competent. Instead, in Bolton and Pompeo, he has selected "hawks" historically hostile to Russia, which may be why he went out of his way to exclude them from his talks in Helsinki. It says a lot when a president is so incompetent he can't even appoint advisers who agree with his worldview.
He just can't do things competently.
This pattern has repeated almost daily since the election: consider how his other promises and actions reveal his distressing lack of competence and his failure to understand even the most basic elements of statesmanship and governance.
Donald Trump was elected on an "outsider" platform that, in significant ways, mirrored that of Bernie Sanders and progressive Democrats, earning him large swaths of former Obama voters. But his incompetence has betrayed them, and every world leader, looking on, now knows exactly what they're dealing with and won't be suckered the way working-class Americans were in November of 2016.
On entitlements, for example, Trump famously stood on the stage on April 18, 2015 (and multiple other occasions), and said, "Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid, and we can't do that and it's not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now, all of a sudden, they wanna be cutting it." (Bernie, of course, didn't believe him for a second and called him out.)
He can't do it on entitlements.
On trade, Trump took the position of the Congressional Progressive Caucus -- and every U.S. administration from George Washington to Jimmy Carter -- when he said he would protect U.S. jobs (and bring home manufacturing jobs) with the use of targeted tariffs. The last time we had a substantive national discussion of the issue was when Ross Perot challenged Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush for the presidency in 1992, and won over 20 percent of the national vote (correctly) warning of that "giant sucking sound from the south" that would happen if the U.S. signed NAFTA and joined the GATT/WTO.
Most Americans then, and most now, supported targeted tariffs. But Trump's all over the map, doling out exceptions to tariffs and trade rules when it suits his business interests or when he gets hassled by his wealthy Republican constituency.
Even worse, companies must operate over decades-long periods when planning to invest millions or billions into new manufacturing facilities -- but because Trump is doing what he is by executive actions (with a "national security" excuse that will probably be struck down in the courts) instead of moving comprehensive trade legislation through Congress, no company has the assurance that his protective tariffs won't simply evaporate the day he leaves office.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Trump-Doesn-t-Have-the-Ski-by-Thom-Hartmann-Incompetence_Trump-And-Putin_Trump-Broken-Promises_Trump-Ego-180725-323.html
cont'd...
HotCoffee, I would think the mountain lions would love to have pigs for dinner. I wonder how many a lion would take in a week. I have heard there are thoughts of testing lions for "hog control" in some controled situations. In most states there is no season on wild pigs and landowners appreciate any hunters that ask for permission to remove as many as they wish as these varmints can tear up a couple of acres of land per night. Lots of thermal imaging rifle scopes sold. AR10's are very effective at diminishing the population.
More information on the bomber is coming out but the first thing I noticed, this nutjob listed himself as Native American. Possibly channeling Elizabeth Warren? Thank god he is caught. Now hack to the horde of immigrants.
See ya!
The Thom Hartmann Program 10/25/2018 1 hour edition
cont'd...
OpEdNews, July 30, 2018
"Trump Is in Major Legal and Political Trouble — His Desperate Attempts to Escape Could Lead America to Catastrophe.
We should prepare for any drastic measures from war to martial law that Trump may undertake to escape his crises."
By Thom Hartmann:
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (that country's version of NPR/PBS) is reporting right now that Donald Trump is studying plans to bomb Iran as soon as a month from now. To quote the article that is rocking Australia right now: "Senior figures in the Turnbull Government have told the ABC they believe the United States is prepared to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, perhaps as early as next month, and that Australia is poised to help identify possible targets."
If Trump believes that Bush was right that war is good for politics and lifts war-making presidents and parties, perhaps this is his midterm strategy in the face of terrible poll numbers. Tragically, such a bombing could well bring Iran's allies, including Russia and China, into a larger war, triggering World War III in a manner similar to how World War I spiraled out of control.
Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, and early in the Trump presidency, it was nearly impossible to imagine the things that he would later do and get away with.
That failure of imagination has cost us dearly.
While the time for freak-out is hopefully far in the future, imagining and gaming out our response to some of the worst-case and most extreme possibilities is not at all a hysterical reaction. If anything, it's the essence of prudence.
What do you think he could do? And how should we best react?
An entire generation of Germans, Italians, and Spaniards are aging into their twilight years right now wishing they'd had such imagination in the early 1930s.
It's time for a conversation.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/2/Trump-Is-in-Major-Legal-an-by-Thom-Hartmann-America-Freedom-To-Fascism_Iran_Korea_Military-180730-178.html
cont'd...
OpEdNews, July 30, 2018
"Trump Is in Major Legal and Political Trouble — His Desperate Attempts to Escape Could Lead America to Catastrophe.
We should prepare for any drastic measures from war to martial law that Trump may undertake to escape his crises."
By Thom Hartmann:
If Mueller used federal courts to indict Trump and his merry band, and Trump directed the police agencies of the U.S. to ignore the order (as Jackson directed the U.S. Army to ignore the Supreme Court and relocate the Cherokee, and they complied), then Mueller may find that he has precisely as much power over Trump and his family and friends as Chief Justice John Marshall had over Andrew Jackson.
This wouldn't just provoke a constitutional crisis; it's the very definition of one.
As Alexander Hamilton noted in #78 of the Federalist Papers, "The judiciary... has no influence over either the sword [President] or the purse [Congress]; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments." (Capitals Hamilton's.)
But Trump doesn't need a fight with Mueller in the courts to provoke a crisis: war works just as well.
FDR declared martial law in Hawaii (which wasn't even a state then) after Pearl Harbor, and [then-General] Andrew Jackson declared martial law in New Orleans during the War of 1812. (There's that name again...)
Provoking Iran or North Korea into a limited war may give Trump all the power he needs.
And, as George W. Bush noted to his biographer Mickey Herskowitz in 1999, war gives a president political capital. Bush even thought he'd get enough political capital from invading Iraq (this was before he was elected, keep in mind) that he could use it to privatize Social Security.
"One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief," Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker that Bush told him.
"My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it," Bush said, adding, "If I have a chance to invade... if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."
(Much like Schwartz writing Trump's autobiography, Herskowitz wrote the first draft of George W. Bush's autobiography A Charge to Keep. We should attend to the warnings of presidential biographers.)
Privatizing Social Security was very, very important to George W. Bush (maybe as important as staying out of jail is to Trump). Bush ran an unsuccessful campaign for the House of Representatives in 1978 in Texas on that singular platform.
And, after winning reelection and being sworn back into office in 2005, Bush began a campaign, traveling all across the country, trying to convince people privatization was a good idea.
As the San Francisco Chronicle's Washington Bureau Chief Marc Sandalow wrote the day after Bush won reelection, "President Bush proclaimed his election as evidence that Americans embrace his plans to reform Social Security... Bush staked his claim to a broad mandate and announced his top priorities at a post-election news conference, saying his 3.5 million vote victory had won him political capital that he would spend enacting his conservative agenda."
"I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it," Bush told reporters. "It is my style."
The more Bush traveled pitching the idea, though, the more people hated it. He ultimately gave it up, as Brookings reported.
But if Bush was willing to start a war with Iraq to get himself reelected and privatize Social Security, imagine how much more motivated Trump may be to start a war -- with anybody, anywhere -- if he saw his financial empire slipping away, his presidency imperiled, and his children facing jail time.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/2/Trump-Is-in-Major-Legal-an-by-Thom-Hartmann-America-Freedom-To-Fascism_Iran_Korea_Military-180730-178.html
cont'd...
cont'd...
OpEdNews, July 30, 2018
"Trump Is in Major Legal and Political Trouble — His Desperate Attempts to Escape Could Lead America to Catastrophe.
We should prepare for any drastic measures from war to martial law that Trump may undertake to escape his crises."
By Thom Hartmann:
Trump thrives on creating crises, and then "solving" the crisis he, himself created. He did it with DACA, with Obamacare, and with North Korea. It seems he's trying the same playbook with Iran and immigration/asylum.
But what if the crisis he creates in this case involved what looked like widespread violence?
The Constitution gives Congress (controlled by the GOP) the power to "suppress insurrections," while numerous laws including the Patriot Act and its successors give the president the power to declare various levels of emergency or even martial law. (It's been done before; Lincoln did it and even suspended habeas corpus, which was clearly unconstitutional.)
In 2004, the Congressional Research Service (a federal agency that researches legal questions for members of Congress) looked into whether a president could suspend elections in a time of crisis. They concluded: "While the Executive Branch does not currently have this power, it appears that Congress may be able to delegate this power to the Executive Branch by enacting a statute."
Is it inconceivable that our current Congress might do such a thing? Wouldn't it depend on how many people were in the streets protesting (after the election it was a million-plus) and how many right-wing open-carry armed thugs show up?
If Heather Heyer was only the first anti-Trump protester murdered by white supremacists, and dozens or hundreds more were to fall to the guns or bombs of Trump's Very Fine People, Congress may well consider it a state of emergency.
This was, after all, the exact scenario that Timothy McVeigh thought he would bring about. Following the Turner Diaries script, known to every white supremacist, McVeigh believed that President Bill Clinton would react to the Oklahoma City bombing with widespread gun control, which would cause all the good well-armed white people to start a killing frenzy against people of color and bring about the Aryan forces' "triumph."
And McVeigh's thinking on the subject is widely shared in the hard-right-wing underground today.
We Americans tend to think of ourselves as totally unique, but numerous democratic republics have gone down this or similar roads in past generations. As Trump biographer Tony Schwartz noted, "Just look at any country that has been taken over by the military. He'd say there is a threat to the republic and the military needs to crack down and he would start with curfews, and the stop and frisk of anyone who is not white, male and rich."
But what about the power of the Article III courts to restrain Trump, you might ask?
So far, with his Muslim ban and his brutal confinement of refugee children, Trump has gone along with the courts. But consider his presidential hero, Andrew Jackson, the man whose picture Trump hung by his desk in the Oval Office.
Not just the lower courts, but the Supreme Court itself told Jackson that he couldn't do things -- twice -- and both times he simply defied them. One was ending the second National Bank, and the other was the genocidal Trail of Tears.
John Marshall was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the time. President Jackson simply ignored the earlier SCOTUS ruling in the constitutionality of the bank (McCulloch v Maryland), and ignored legislation supporting the Court and the bank that passed through both the House and the Senate.
Ignoring the law and legal precedent, Jackson proceeded to shut the bank down, an action that, in part (along with paying off the national debt), produced the deepest and longest depression in the history of the United States.
And when Marshall ordered him not to forcibly relocate the Cherokee Indians from Georgia to Oklahoma (indirectly; the case had to do with a Vermont man held in Georgia who was going to be relocated along with the Cherokee), Jackson was said to have bragged to his friends, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
So, what if Trump were to simply follow the example of his hero, Jackson?
https://www.opednews.com/articles/2/Trump-Is-in-Major-Legal-an-by-Thom-Hartmann-America-Freedom-To-Fascism_Iran_Korea_Military-180730-178.html
cont'd...
Good day DianeR,
You & coalage3 are right on!
Well news is off to an interesting start again today. He has a terror threat from 2002? I wonder who was threatened then? Promoter for Chippendales, that has a tinge of Avanatti.
Bears around here all the time...I get a good close up look when they are on the porch.
This is mountian lion, and wild pig territory too, Banging pots & pans doesn't work but a bullet into the sand pile scares them away. The pigs are as bad as the bears. Actually the spiders bug me more than the bears...:).
More later .... another great day!
HotCoffee, Black Bears in your Pear trees? Be careful out there. I just saw a video of a Grizzly charging a man who was trying to retrieve his dog from the yard. The bear was 10 feet and hit in the face with a 12 ga. full of birdshot and brushed it off like he was swatting a mosquito. Fortunately everyone survived but best not swat the bears, even cute little black bears.
It's the weekend and a Bloody Mary before dinner is in order.
Glad they caught this bomber nutjob. Interesting to find out his past terroristic threats and why he was released.
So the alleged mail bomber, Cesar Sayoc, has been caught in FL. He supposedly has decals of Trump and the republican party all over his van. Reports also say that law enforcement knew of this person from previous threats he had made. So why was he still on the street?
Even though none of the bombs went off, and there are stories that they couldn't be detonated, anyone want to bet that the CNN coverage will be "over the top"? Do you think a panel will be seated with Don Lemon tonight to discuss who was crazier, James Hodgkinson or Cesar Sayoc? Do you think CNN will accept at least part of the blame for ratcheting up the political violence in the country due to their hyper partisan 24 hr. anti-Trump rhetoric, and issue a call for civility as the President has done? Do you think that Lemon will tearfully implore democrats to do their part and tone down their rabid speech?
If Trump is somehow responsible for this bomber, then obviously Bernie Sanders and CNN are responsible for Hodgkinson and his carnage.
Coalage3, Yor are are correct, with few exceptions most media, with the exclusion of CNN, have all prospered during Trumps tenure in office. I am not so sure about the late night shows who have really put off half their audience. In fact many of them draw a smaller following that major morning rock and roll/chatter radio shows.
Regardless of one's political preferences, the fact the smaller two-three hour radio talking bobbleheads are still surviving in the market but only because they have shored up their programs by adding a lot of one minute spots to each hour of babble, so much so that I really only tune in Limbaugh as he charges so much for spots he does not have to start each and every segment with a buy gold, buy a chair, or some blind company promo. His are very limited and he gets a lot of entertainment into each hour he is on the air. His success is clearly the fact he calls himself an entertainer not to be taken seriously.
So, in fact Trump even makes his detractors wealthier and they should be thanking him for that on a daily basis.