So I'm trying to convince you that silly put downs are pointless.

BTW, prior to this post, you had more "whizzes" in this 'tree' than I did!

You're ignoring the "most" part of my quote. I would never think of including Mr. Hypersensitivity in that group of "shallow understanders"!

Kick would like to encourage you to say "better than 'they', instead of "them".

P.S. As a last resort, you could ignore my posts, and save yourself all that misery I'm inflicting on you.

Of course, he's not alone in that kind of shallow understanding, most of his fellow countrymen are also that dumb.

Why do you think of yourself as a member of a cognitive and educated elite, also why do you need to keep telling everybody you think you are better than them?

You sort of remind me of my dog who has to whizz on every bush and tree.

He might have gone on a bit of a bender and is in need of sleep.

Earlier Monday, majority owner Orestes Fintiklis — a Cypriot businessman now based in Miami — said that a Panamanian legal official had allowed him to take over the hotel’s administration.

They've removed the Trump-letters from the exterior and Fintiklis sat down in the lobby, at the piano:

“And now, as you guessed it, I will play the piano,” Fintiklis told a crowd of reporters. He then began to play a tune on the piano in the hotel lobby, repeating a ritual that he had used to mark previous victories in the case. This time, he played what he said was a traditional Greek song, “Accordeon,” an anti-fascist anthem, and he sang along in Greek.

!

Of course, he's not alone in that kind of shallow understanding, most of his fellow countrymen are also that dumb.

If the White House really wants to target China and do it in a way that they can't retaliate and strengthens their regional opponents, the TPP is really the best solution.

We can't keep trying to protect industries where we have no competitive advantage, even if it is because another country has over invested and is running their economy at a loss for political reasons. This is the case in China where steel is an economic disaster that they are trapped in.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-04/would-trump-rejoin-the-tpp-let-s-hope-so

Past administrations have policed usage vigilantly. In 2005 the Bush administration ordered the satirical news website The Onion to remove a replica of the seal. Grant M. Dixton, associate White House counsel, wrote in a letter to The Onion that the seal “is not to be used in connection with commercial ventures or products in any way that suggests presidential support or endorsement.”

Just another day under the criminal administration.

Why I regret being in the pocket of the NRA: Marc Dann (Opinion)

I first encountered those voters as an Ohio state senator who represented a largely rural district. From the moment I took office, my staff and I were inundated with calls and letters from gun owners and advocates. No matter where I went in my district or what issue I was discussing, my constituents never failed to remind me they had a zero-tolerance policy for gun safety laws. Anyone who thinks Social Security is the third rail of American politics has clearly never talked about firearms with an NRA member.

While I didn't enter politics to be an advocate for the NRA, I quickly learned that unless I became one, I wouldn't be around to advocate for the issues I did care about. So I made a devil's bargain with myself: To stay in office, I adopted pro-gun positions that made me uncomfortable.

The bargain paid off. I was re-elected to the state senate and won an upset victory to become Ohio's attorney general in large part because the NRA and Buckeye Firearms had "educated" pro-gun voters about my unwavering commitment to the Second Amendment.

I soon learned however, that in making a deal with the devil to advance my political career, I had abandoned my principles and sold my soul.

Yep.

I like your analogy about the red hat in the wash - he certainly does seem to stain everyone who associates with him.

Up til now Blotus has paid his way out of his crimes. People who hook up with him don't seem to have understood this - and find out, to their cost, they don't have that privilege.

Hopefully that option won't be available to Blotus this time. Although I'd be fine with him avoiding jail if he'd just leave AND some of the top Republicans go to jail instead.

As I recall, the House of Representatives, where spending bills originate, was under Dem control throughout all 8 yrs of Reagan's admin. Don't recall about the Senate, and too lazy to research it.

Also, Reagan used some tricks, that the Republicans are still using, such as building 5% growth rates into his first budget - even David Stockman now admits that the proposed budget was "rosy" - and later budgets were also "rosy".

Yeah, we've been thru this executive vs. legislative before. Reagan suggested the Dem congress bump the defense budget and cut the welfare budget, so the Dem congress bumped both of them, but still we call the resulting deficit the "Reagan deficit", right?

"There’s a lot of things wrong with this country, but one of the few things still right with it is that a man can steer clear of the organized bullshit if he really wants to. It’s a goddamned luxury, and if I were you, I’d take advantage of it while you can."

Remember.

Good peo­ple drink good beer. Just look around any pub­lic bar­room and you will see: Bad peo­ple drink bad beer. Think about it.

Thank you HST .... you should have bought the ticket and taken the ride.

Too true.

This sentiment is so common these days that it ought to have its own emoji, something like: -><-??

"He's now president for life. President for life. And he's great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll give that a shot some day. ~ Donald Trump speaking about Xi Jinping

"President for life"!? Not on our watch."

I can't believe as an American President he got away with saying this about a foreign Communist dictator and there was NO Republican outcry!

Can you imagine the screams of "He hates America!" from the right wing and FOX News if Obama had said this? Or Hillary?

smh

LL&P

Faulty Towers

Trump Inc provides management to the enterprise, but it's a typical Trump product...overpriced and shoddy.. At best it just a cardboard cutout At worst, It's like putting one of his red hats in your washing machine - it wiil stain everything else in the load.

Trump's greatest skill is recognizing there is a sucker born every minute. Some of the suckers have money, some just vote. Mix and match.

"with some people reality is a challenge". AKA reality challenged people. Less politely known as psychotic, or delusional people Not to be confused with one note cranks or political/social propagandists with easy acess to an unmoterated comments section. It' s a rich tapestry (taxonomy?) and getting richer by the day.

"President for life"!? Not on our watch.

"Life for president" is more like it. I hope Benedict Donald likes orange. Oh, wait. :)

We have in our system (if I may continue my analogy), two competing teams of software programmers (as many Silicon Valley firms do), the GOP and the Dems.

But keeping these teams on an equal footing - and not allowing one team to 'game the system' to override the programming that's meant to be responsive to end users (citizens), in order to install their own software, is right now an urgent task for management (voters), because I think it's evident that it creates vulnerability for the whole system.

In fact, we're seeing a similar situation occurring with large platforms like facebook, or google, which was founded with a slogan much like the motto that the US adopted at it's founding: "Don't be Evil". But over time they've grown, and often been accused lately of having favored stockholders over customers, and of allowing malicious content to infect their systems, to the detriment of their ability to fulfill their missions faithfully (or as originally intended) and more importantly, to give their users the quality of service that they have been promised.

Inattention and slow response won't be a good idea for either those internet platforms, or for the US. It could be an existential problem, since our credibility, including the cred we give to our money by dint of our perceived responsibility, is at risk. The fact that as you say, the inability of some commenters to understand that the way the government is meant to work on paper is very different from reality, is a bug in the system - how can we be sure that those commenters even reflect the reality of the voters at ground level if the process by which we identify those voters wishes is rigged to achieve a pre-ordained result?

I'm mixing metaphors wildly, but you get my gist:
It's up to us to fix this.

The innovation that distinguished our software from all others at the time was the concept of enhanced user interactivity as opposed to simply leaving the system design to a single programmer, who was an autocrat in a room with a throne.

Sort of like the guy who used to fix my office computer. He and I at least shared a fondness for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

Since then a myriad of competing systems have arisen, some awful, some not so much.

But right now, one of our competitors have attacked our system with malware that exploits our own programming, but which is essentially just a hack that left too much of a trail to be truly viral.

But we haven't addressed it. And we haven't even discussed the fact that this virus has apparently invaded other systems from Hungary to Germany to France. We don't even have anyone tasked with designing counter-software, or some sort of firewall to keep them our of our system, at least.

That's what worries me, long run.

I agree. I've not met any Reps/Cons yet with a basic grasp of economics. Fortunately, there are plenty of left wing economists, some with Nobel prizes in economics, that do understand economics.

This might explain why we need a Democratic administration to put America back on track again after we've had a disastrous spell with Republicans in charge.

When are Republicans going to learn fiscal discipline, as opposed to mouthing off about it then destroying our economy? Look at Reagan's deficit busting term. "W''s unfunded mandates and off-the-books wars, and the current clown-in-chief.

What is amazingly sad is the complete inability of the right wing at the moment to comprehend basic economics when they are in power.

as of yesterday, WaPo fact checker had it at 2,436 "false or misleading claims" - hard to tell based on that label what's actually an according to hoyle "lie," as opposed to a casually repeated myth, honest mistake, delusional fantasy, braggadocio exaggeration, ad infinitum.

JL

Great cartoon! From one Rusty to another, welcome to the group!

-R

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty6XAN_kzm4

It's easy to rabble rouse, offer to pay legal bills (and not,) and whip up a herd of potential snakeoil consumers..but running into anything, other than a flawed ACME boobytrap, just isn't Captain Collusion's modus operandi.

Trump should stick to fiddling, Nero found that to be a relaxing distraction. One gets a sense that the denouement is close at hand in this saga, being a student of history, I have visions of Trump sloping the halls of the White House shaking hands, handing out phials of cyanide, bidding farewell to party comrades and marrying his mistress, all the while, the final act of Gotterdammerung echoing in the gloom. The Russians really know how to crash a party.

LL&P

So, what else is new? A helluva lot of people much smarter than Trump (which group includes all Reps/Cons, and even a few Dems/Libs) possess only the slightest trace of economic literacy.

Next time, maybe a real war, or a nuclear strike?

If Trump is this disorganized when announcing a trade war -- one that had no external deadline to meet -- then what is going to happen if a real war ever happens on Trump's watch? It staggers the mind to even think about, really.

Exactly. Trouble is, Trump's approval rating among Republicans remains remarkably high - I don't think any other president could have been caught openly paying off a porn star (and a Playboy playmate) or openly musing about confiscating guns and remained as popular with the GOP as Trump has.

Part of the problem is that moderate Republicans refuse to face the tsumani of immoderate behavior that's come over their party, and continue to lecture Democrats not to be to hard on their brethren: David Brooks, hardly a radical, today described the current move by companies to distance themselves from the noxious policies of the NRA 'elite cultural intimidation', and warns, "If you exile 40 percent of the country from respectable society they will mount a political backlash that will make Donald Trump look like Adlai Stevenson."

Well I think the exact opposite is true. It's clearly moderates in both parties that have been subjected to intimidation for far too long - by pro-gun advocates, and by political nihilists of the type who support Trump and refused to allow Merrick Garland a vote in the Senate. And like the #MeToo crowd, Democrats have finally had enough. If the GOP keeps pressing this outrageous and dangerous agenda, the candidate Democrats elect in the backlash will make Hillary Clinton look like Anne Coulter.

As I read this, I was reminded of a cartoon I saw in Politico:
https://www.politico.com/gallery/2018/03/02/the-nations-cartoonists-on-the-week-in-politics-002818?slide=10

It's about time 'take your kids to work day' came to an end. What Kushner and Ivanka know about affairs of state could be written on the head of a pin, their complete ignorance of government is dwarfed only by Trump's own neolithic understanding of leadership. As they say in Yorkshire, the three of them are as useful as a chocolate fireguard.

Ben Carson brought a smile to my face this week, other than the one I reach back for when feeling maudlin, that the Pyramids weren't funerary in nature, but were in fact granaries. 30k for a dinner set, nice one... I'm still convinced Trump put him charge of housing as a bird-flip to his conviction in the seventies for throwing poverty stricken families of colour out of his buildings, prior to gentrification.

Now that hope has abandoned all, and a couple of Generals are about to be beheaded in the Rose Garden, I noticed 'The Mooch' doing the talk show circuit gushing all things Trump, maybe his star will ascend again...the White House needs a new Trump whisperer, one willing to follow his boss down whatever rabbit hole he goes...Of the motley crew that slithered into the White Outhouse, the Mooch was far in a way the most colourful.

Well, back to subverting the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership race, not a tough task to be sure...One candidate wants to introduce the lord into schools, after we just had him removed. One wants toned down sex-ed classes because, and I quote...''I have only ever had one position on sex education,'' a statement no one feels the need to refute. Brian Mulroney's daughter, she wants to represent the working man, regardless of the fact that she's never done a turn of hard graft in her entire life...and the cherry on the top, Doug Ford, brother former Toronto mayor Rob...I got one of the last live texts in during the debate, I said...''When Dougie Ford is considered the towering intellect in the room, the room is considered empty.''

And so it goes...

LL&P

Maybe Trump should read a book. You could've stopped right there.

I checked. Over at Fox News dot com one searches in vain for news of White House firings, Mueller indictments or Jared's shady business dealings.
Over in the clips column I finally see something: "Unions Praising Trump's Steel and Aluminum Tariff Plan", but that turns out to be an interview by Neil Cavuto with a conservative who wrote a book about unions once, and says - without evidence - that they're lined up behind Trump.

Another clip in that column is from Tucker Carlson's show, in which he cites a USA Today/Suffolk University Poll to prove that "Americans don't care about Russia". The part of the poll cited by Carlson asks what issues respondents think will be important in the 2018 election. Opinion was widely divided, as one would imagine this far from the actual event. Only 1% said "Russia", and Carlson seized on that. What Carlson didn't tell his audience was that "by close to 2-1, 58%-32%, those surveyed say they want to elect a Congress that mostly stands up to the president, not one that mostly cooperates with him."
I found that on the USA Today website, where they also note: "those surveyed say they are more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate for Congress than the Republican one by 47%-32% — a yawning 15 percentage-point advantage."

So Republicans, and their Fake News Network have done the equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and singing, "la-la-la" until the bad news goes away.

Which means that if the Mueller investigation indicts Trump, or the stock market tanks as a result of Tariffs, the basis for these events will come as a complete surprise to Fox viewers. That's worrisome on many levels.

We've seen news sources with partisan agendas before - early America was rife with them, and 'yellow journalism' was once a thing, but we've never before seen a major News outlet deliberately mislead its followers with such systematic deliberateness.

https://thinkprogress.org/trump-panama-hotel-investigation-5a49443c387f/

Another legal complaint adds that Trump’s security team physically shoved Fintiklis himself when he attempted to terminate the Trump employees. Likewise, when the hotel owners’ association tried to fire Trump Hotels staff last week, witnesses saw Trump’s managers begin “carrying files to an area where the sounds of a shredding machine could be heard,” the AP reported.

But the issues haven’t been limited to scuffles and handcuffs. Earlier this week, Panama’s government entered the fray, announcing that it would be formally investigating the matter. As such, wrote the Post’s Joshua Partlow and David Farenthold, the standoff has suddenly “turned a theoretical concern about the Trump administration — that, someday, the president’s private business might be investigated by a foreign government — into a reality."

The building was used for laundering Colombian Drug Cartel money - Trump may or may not have known. That is to say, there's no public record at this time that he knew, though all the signs were there. Mueller has apparently just started looking into some of Ivanka's business activities - this hotel was "Ivanka's Baby" - and Trump profited big-time.

This is unprecedented in our history - a POTUS entangled in these kinds of sordid crimes.

Although I simply can't believe Blotus actually prays.

Week after week the question arises: "when will Republicans do their jobs?" and week after week they don't. Will a trade war be their tipping point?

We have a crazy criminal in the WH who is losing staff on an ongoing basis, with no one competent/principled stepping up to fill those positions. Even those who remain apparently want the hell out. Well, except maybe Miller, who just got his coffin moved into a basement crypt and doesn't want to have to go back to Transylvania.

There's a photo making the rounds on Twitter of Kellyanne Conway sitting next to Sarah Huckabee-Sanders and they both look grim and exhausted. I despise them both but still felt a twinge of pity for them. Both have been absolutely willing to lie their heads off for this administration day after day and for months it worked. I don't think it's working any more; it's no "fun", it's just a painful, unrewarding slog.

It's certainly no fun for the rest of us.