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Post by revirdsuba99 on Aug 9, 2019 3:24:29 GMT
trump.. ”Rod Blagojevich, the former Governor of Illinois, was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He has served 7 years. Many people have asked that I study the possibility of commuting his sentence in that it was a very severe one. White House staff is continuing the review of this matter.” Not that it totally matters, but the DOJ is supposed to look into those dt might pardon, commute, whatever......
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Aug 9, 2019 3:27:47 GMT
Jim Acosta... ”A hospital official tells CNN Trump showed “an absence of empathy” during his visit to El Paso. Also, Trump and FLOTUS both met baby who was shielded by parents who died in the shooting. The baby was brought back to the hospital to see the president. More on @cnnsitroom tonight.” Andrew Lawrence.. ” CNN's @acosta reports that the 2-month old baby orphaned in the El Paso shooting was discharged from the hospital and then brought back yesterday only for Trump's photo op”Didn't know about the baby but it was covered that some who had been released came back to meet with dt. Somewhere I read or heard that none of the patients still hospitalized saw him, they said no!
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 9, 2019 3:30:37 GMT
Paul Waldman..
No matter how cruel his policies, Trump's immigration policy is and will continue to be a failure. We still have 40 million immigrants and America keeps evolving. That's what he and his supporters wanted to undo, and they can't. I discuss here:
The Washington Times...
“Trump’s ultimate immigration failure”
“There is no policy issue about which President Trump cares more than immigration. Indeed, other than trade, it’s pretty much the only policy issue he cares about at all. For all the controversy that has attended the president’s racist statements and cruel policy changes, one fundamental truth has gone nearly unnoticed: By any measure you could think of, on immigration, Trump has been a complete and utter failure.
That’s true of both the specific actions he has taken and of the broad, long-term goals he is trying to achieve — goals that were never possible in the first place.
Let’s start with the particular. A month ago, the administration announced it would soon begin a nationwide sweep of undocumented immigrants, and Trump said “millions” of people would be rounded up. The actual number of arrests in this high-profile operation turned out to be 35. On Wednesday, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement launched raids on seven agricultural processing plants in Mississippi, arresting 680 people.
Despite the attention the administration has called to raids like that one, and the policy of family separation that was intended in its cruelty to create a deterrent to immigration, people keep coming. U.S. Customs and Border Protection says it apprehended more than 780,000 people along the southern border in the first nine months of the fiscal year beginning last October. That’s compared to 521,000 in all of fiscal 2018, and 415,000 in fiscal 2017. So despite all of Trump’s efforts, more people are coming to the United States — particularly from Central America. He has failed. And he has also failed to build the “big, beautiful wall” that, during the 2016 campaign, he promised would stretch from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
The parts of his immigration agenda that Trump has implemented with any degree of success are in practical terms the least important to his overall vision. For instance, he has all but shut America’s doors to refugees, but refugees make up only a tiny portion of the immigrant population. The highest number of refugees admitted in recent years was in fiscal 2016, when 85,000 came to the United States, essentially a rounding error when placed alongside the 40 million foreign-born people living here today.
That latter number is what Trump supporters and Trump himself really have a problem with. What they have always been after isn’t just a reorientation of immigration policy away from being welcoming and toward being restrictive. They want a transformation of American society itself. The grievances to which Trump appealed in 2016 — and which he thinks will win him reelection — are about certain people’s feeling of disorientation in the face of a changing society, where native-born white people are seeing immigrants in places they didn’t before, or fearing that immigrants will come to their communities even if they haven’t yet.
Trump has now been president for nearly three years, and his supporters should ask themselves: How’s it working out? Trump spun out a fantasy when he ran in 2016 and has continued to do so as president. It’s one in which his wall would end all unauthorized immigration, he’d round up all the undocumented people and send them away, and the doors of America would largely be shut, at least to nonwhite immigrants (“Why do we want these people from all these shithole countries here? We should have more people from places like Norway.”)
The result — and this is the part that was unspoken but still clear — would then be a society that was “Great Again,” a society where you wouldn’t have to hear people speaking Spanish and where there was no doubt who was in charge.
The fact that he cannot bring that vision to reality is Trump’s ultimate failure to his supporters. Even if he could somehow succeed in stopping every last immigrant from coming to the United States for the remainder of his term — which, of course, he won’t — it wouldn’t change the reality he wants to reverse. America is and will continue to be a diverse society. White people will continue to decline as a proportion of the population. The future will see new waves of immigrants, bringing with them their language and food and music and culture, all of which will become part of America. Our society will continue to change, because that’s what it has always done. And there’s nothing President Trump or his voters can do about it.
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Post by crazy4scraps on Aug 9, 2019 3:31:30 GMT
this really is true... listening to DT read off a teleprompter is like listening to a 1-800 customer service number robotic menu of options to choose. You can totally tell that he's not even comprehending at ALL what he's saying AS he's saying it. Well then, I guess he can read. Well, maybe, if the words are printed phonetically. I also wouldn’t put it past him to have an earpiece with someone telling him exactly what to say and how to pronounce all the best words.
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Post by Skellinton on Aug 9, 2019 3:36:25 GMT
trump.. ”Rod Blagojevich, the former Governor of Illinois, was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He has served 7 years. Many people have asked that I study the possibility of commuting his sentence in that it was a very severe one. White House staff is continuing the review of this matter.” Those many people that hang out only in trump’s. According to NPR today Rod’s wife has been on Fox News saying how unfair her husband’s sentence was. They implied that is why he brought it up. www.npr.org/local/309/2019/08/08/749375414/trump-s-idea-of-freeing-blagojevich-draws-bipartisan-fire-in-illinois
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 9, 2019 3:52:37 GMT
Paul Waldman...
“On guns, America is ‘exceptional’
“As it often does after a mass shooting, the Onion posted on Sunday a new version of one of its most enduring stories, “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Then Monday morning, President Trump came before the cameras and read a speech saturated with precisely what the Onion was satirizing: the ignoramus’ version of American exceptionalism. It treats the United States as not just the greatest country on Earth but in many ways the only country on Earth, such that nothing that happens anywhere else could possibly tell us anything about ourselves or what kind of choices we might make in the future.
Because he was reading a speech others had written for him, Trump managed to say a few reasonable things about the two massacres that occurred over the weekend in El Paso and Dayton, even if many of them sounded like backhanded denunciations of himself (“In one voice our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy”). But when Trump endeavored to explain how such a thing could happen, he offered reasons that anyone from any other country could only laugh at. Here’s where he put the blame: on people with mental health problems, on video games and on the Internet.
If those were the things that produced mass shootings, then every country in the world would see mass shootings with the regularity we see them in the United States. Because every country in the world has people with mental health problems, and video games, and the Internet.
So what is it that makes the United States different from places where mass shootings are rare or nonexistent? Perhaps we should put together a blue-ribbon panel to figure out the answer. Trump knows what it isn’t, however. “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun,” he said with characteristic eloquence: How is a gun supposed to pull a trigger?
Unless you believe Americans are an inherently murderous people, the reason these mass shootings occur here and almost nowhere else is obvious: It’s the hundreds of millions of guns our country is drowning in.
That isn’t to say that people aren’t radicalized on the Internet, or that things like social isolation can’t contribute to a particular individual’s descent toward mass murder. But we’re the country that makes it so easy to acquire the means to act on those impulses.
This is hardly the only policy question on which Republicans seem to think we can’t possibly learn anything from the rest of the world. They act as though providing affordable health insurance to all our citizens is simply beyond the reach of human ingenuity, when in fact every country in Europe does it, as do wealthy Asian nations such as Japan and South Korea. But heaven forbid we actually look at the experience of those countries to see what has succeeded and failed. They couldn’t possibly have anything to teach us.
To be clear, we actually aren’t the country with the highest rate of violent gun deaths in the world. That title belongs to El Salvador, followed by Venezuela, followed by Guatemala and Honduras. But we have a gun homicide rate 25 times as high as similarly developed countries. It varies by country depending on their gun laws, but no wealthy democratic country even comes close to the United States in our quantity of bloodshed from guns.
While I’m not sure about Trump in particular, I can say with confidence that most Republican officeholders who serve up their “thoughts and prayers” after every mass shooting and then pretend to care about mental health and video games for a day or two know exactly how inane and dishonest they’re being. But they don’t see any alternative, because telling the truth would require them to admit that regular mass shootings, not to mention a broader death toll from guns that approaches 40,000 a year, is simply the price they’re willing to pay in order to maintain a status quo in which regulation of guns is so limited as to be little more than a temporary inconvenience to most anyone who wants to arm themselves to the teeth.
They want anybody to be able to get as many guns as they want and carry them wherever they want, and if that means tens of thousands of homicides and suicides with firearms every year, then it’s a price they’re willing to pay. They want anybody to be able to buy weapons of war because they’re fun to shoot and accessorize, and if that means that every month or every week somebody can walk into a mall and mow down 20 people, it’s a price they’re willing to pay.
The laws we have are the laws Republicans and the gun lobby want, and that’s why we have the number of firearm homicides and mass shootings that we do. It isn’t some kind of unfathomable mystery. It’s a choice we’ve made, and continue to make.”
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Aug 9, 2019 4:19:06 GMT
(CNN)A foreign service officer resigned from the State Department effective Thursday, writing in a blistering op-ed in The Washington Post that he could no longer serve in "The Complacent State," particularly in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting. Chuck Park wrote in the op-ed that during his almost 10 years in the foreign service he "worked to spread what (he) believed were American values: freedom, fairness and tolerance." "But more and more I found myself in a defensive stance, struggling to explain to foreign peoples the blatant contradictions at home," he wrote. Park said that after the election of President Donald Trump, he had remained "complacent" and had "let career perks silence (his) conscience." "I let free housing, the countdown to a pension and the prestige of representing a powerful nation overseas distract me from ideals that once seemed so clear to me. I can't do that anymore," Park wrote. "My son, born in El Paso on the American side of that same Rio Grande where the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter were discovered, in the same city where 22 people were just killed by a gunman whose purported 'manifesto' echoed the inflammatory language of our President, turned 7 this month. I can no longer justify to him, or to myself, my complicity in the actions of this administration. That's why I choose to resign," he said. In an email to CNN, Park clarified that he made the decision to resign before the El Paso shooting, "though it certainly reaffirmed it." Writing in the Post, Park noted that he has not seen an "organized resistance from within" to the Trump presidency, but rather "The Complacent State." "Among my colleagues at the State Department, I have met neither the unsung hero nor the cunning villain of Deep State lore," he wrote. "One thing I agree with the conspiracy theorists about: The Deep State, if it did exist, would be wrong," he said, noting that foreign service officers pledge to serve at the pleasure of the President -- or else they should quit. ** www.cnn.com/2019/08/08/politics/fso-resigns-washington-post-op-ed/index.htmlWe are losing too many qualified people.. They are allowing dt to do what he chooses without consequences... Will we and our country last until Jan 2021?
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Post by birdgate on Aug 9, 2019 5:30:37 GMT
From CNN "We had an amazing day, as you know," Trump said in the corridor of an emergency coordination center in El Paso, Texas, his final stop in a city where an anti-immigrant gunman had shot 22 people dead. "The love, the respect for the office of the presidency. It was, I wish you could have been in there to see it." The man makes me feel sick. Within minutes of his visit a campaign ad with the hospital footage came out playing upbeat Olympic style music. Vile!
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Post by lucyg on Aug 9, 2019 6:42:05 GMT
trump.. ”Rod Blagojevich, the former Governor of Illinois, was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He has served 7 years. Many people have asked that I study the possibility of commuting his sentence in that it was a very severe one. White House staff is continuing the review of this matter.” Those many people that hang out only in trump’s. “All the best people.” Gag me.
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Post by jess on Aug 9, 2019 6:49:08 GMT
I've never posted a video. Hopefully this works. Sammy J is an Australian comedian, but it's largely about the thoughts and prayers sent after all the shootings. Funny, but not funny. Thoughts and Prayers Department
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Post by ajsweetpea on Aug 9, 2019 14:45:50 GMT
Just bizarre...
President Trump’s compliment — “You could be a movie star, the way you look” — to an Army soldier who saved children during the El Paso shooting, wasn’t universally flattering.
On Wednesday, the president and first lady Melania Trump flew to Dayton, Ohio where 9 people were shot and killed Sunday, and El Paso, Texas where 22 died after a gunman’s spree at Walmart, to congratulate first responders.
Fort Bliss U.S. Army specialist Glendon Oakley, who scooped up as many children as he could carry during the gunfire, met Trump.
"We run towards Dillard's, and it's like a play pen over there. I see a whole bunch of kids like, without their parents running around screaming and crying, so I grab as many as possible," Oakley previously told WMAZ-TV. He also told CBS4, "...I just did what I would want another person to do for my children.”
While thanking first responders at the Emergency Operations Center in El Paso, Trump turned to Oakley. “And, by the way, here is a great hero,” he said. “This man — the job he did. You all know who it is. Everybody — the whole world knows who you are now, right?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” answered Oakley, prompting this from Trump: “So you’ll be a movie star, the way you look. That’ll be — hey, that’ll be next. Who knows, right?”
“Yes, sir,” said Oakley.
Twitter said the out-of-place praise was “weird” and asked why Trump did not address Oakley by name.
Trump’s morning was controversial as well— after landing in Dayton, Ohio, the first couple visited recovering victims at the Miami Valley Hospital, where the president took selfies and grinned while giving the thumbs-up sign in photos.
The moment mimicked a Hollywood signing, people tweeted.
Afterward, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, who were at the hospital, gave a press conference and Brown stated that he wanted the president and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to support background checks for gun purchases.
Brown also disagreed that poor mental health was singularly responsible for gun violence, which Trump has argued. “...If he cares about mental health, the important thing is not to repeal the Affordable Care Act and not to cut Medicaid..” said Brown, then slammed Republicans for lying “in bed with the gun lobby.”
A president who “divides” and has “racist” rhetoric is troublesome, said Brown. However, according to CNN, Brown also said that Trump was "received well by the patients” and "did the right things” at the hospital.
After Trump left Dayton, he tweeted about the “fraud” press conference, accusing Brown and Whaley of “totally misrepresenting” his hospital visit.
However, when Whaley read Trump’s tweets on camera, she said, “I’m really confused — we said he was treated very well. Oh well, he lives in his world of Twitter.”
A president who “divides” and has “racist” rhetoric is troublesome, said Brown. However, according to CNN, Brown also said that Trump was "received well by the patients” and "did the right things” at the hospital.
After Trump left Dayton, he tweeted about the “fraud” press conference, accusing Brown and Whaley of “totally misrepresenting” his hospital visit.
However, when Whaley read Trump’s tweets on camera, she said, “I’m really confused — we said he was treated very well. Oh well, he lives in his world of Twitter.”
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Post by crimsoncat05 on Aug 9, 2019 15:37:19 GMT
trump.. ”Rod Blagojevich, the former Governor of Illinois, was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He has served 7 years. Many people have asked that I study the possibility of commuting his sentence in that it was a very severe one. White House staff is continuing the review of this matter.” Those many people that hang out only in trump’s. According to NPR today Rod’s wife has been on Fox News saying how unfair her husband’s sentence was. They implied that is why he brought it up. www.npr.org/local/309/2019/08/08/749375414/trump-s-idea-of-freeing-blagojevich-draws-bipartisan-fire-in-illinoisI'm sure DT couldn't even pronounce Blagojevich, let alone spell it, so the fact that she was on Fox News, and THEN he brings it up? that makes total sense. (as much sense as anything in this bizarro world we're living in right now, anyway.)
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 9, 2019 20:12:46 GMT
trump...
”Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate! They like to call themselves “Elite,” but they are not Elite. In fact, it is often the people that they so strongly oppose that are actually the Elite. The movie coming out is made in order....”
”to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence, and then try to blame others. They are the true Racists, and are very bad for our Country!”
Two things.. Notice how he takes criticism against him and desperately tries to deflect it by pinning it on someone else? He does this a lot. He also desperately wants to be seen as an elitist.
Second, I guess he doesn’t like the new movie The Hunt...
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amom23
Drama Llama
Posts: 5,393
Jun 27, 2014 12:39:18 GMT
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Post by amom23 on Aug 9, 2019 20:19:00 GMT
According to the Fargo Forum support for Trump is down 18pts. in North Dakota. But I swear I'll have neighbors wearing their MAGA hats at their own farm auctions while blaming Hillary before they will turn on Trump.
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Post by Skellinton on Aug 9, 2019 20:21:30 GMT
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Just T
Drama Llama
Posts: 5,776
Jun 26, 2014 1:20:09 GMT
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Post by Just T on Aug 9, 2019 20:27:26 GMT
That is disgusting.
I will ask this for the millionth time--can you even imagine if Obama had done such a thing??
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Post by iamkristinl16 on Aug 9, 2019 20:51:06 GMT
He is really lacking in the social skills department. Do we know anything about his parents or siblings and their mental health?
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2019 14:51:20 GMT
🎶 #MAGA 🎶From CNBC.. “Trump is ruining our markets': Struggling farmers are losing a huge customer to the trade war — China”*. “U.S. farmers lost their fourth largest customer this week after China officially cancelled all purchases of U.S. agricultural products, a retaliatory move following President Donald Trump’s pledge to slap 10% tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese imports. * China's exit piles on to a devastating year for farmers, who've struggled through record flooding and droughts that destroyed crop yields, and trade war escalations that have lowered prices and profits this year. * “It’s really, really getting bad out here,” Bob Kuylen, a farmer of 35 years in North Dakota, told CNBC. * "There's no incentive to keep farming, except that I've invested everything I have in farming, and it's hard to walk” link
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2019 15:04:05 GMT
From Elizabeth I have a plan Warren
Reuters.
“Democratic presidential contender Warren rolls out gun limit plan”
“Reuters) - Democratic presidential hopeful U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren pledged on Saturday to use executive powers to curb gun violence if she wins the White House as fellow Democratic candidates prepared to demand gun safety reforms at an Iowa forum.
After back-to-back mass shootings last weekend roiled the nation, Warren said she would impose background check requirements, more reporting on multiple gun purchases and expand age restrictions to limit teenage access to guns. That’s it? That is the best she can do?
"In 2017, almost 40,000 people died from guns in the United States," the Massachusetts politician said. "My goal as president, and our goal as a society, will be to reduce that number by 80 percent."
Warren's proposals built on rising calls for gun control across the party's crowded field of candidates. Seventeen Democratic candidates were expected to address the issue at a Saturday forum hosted by the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety in Des Moines, Iowa.
Iowa is a key focus of campaigning because in February the state will hold the first nominating contest in the Democratic presidential primaries ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Many have called for measures such as an assault weapon bans, universal background checks and other gun control reforms long stymied by partisan fighting in Washington.
The issue has seen renewed debate, including attention from the White House and some Republicans in Congress, after 31 people were killed last weekend in shootings in Texas and Ohio.
Democrats have criticized Republican President Donald Trump's mixed messaging this week on possible support for some gun control measures.
Trump on Friday suggested that he could sway the nation's powerful gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, to drop its opposition to gun restrictions.
Warren's proposals built on rising calls for gun control across the party's crowded field of candidates. Seventeen Democratic candidates were expected to address the issue at a Saturday forum hosted by the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety in Des Moines, Iowa.
Iowa is a key focus of campaigning because in February the state will hold the first nominating contest in the Democratic presidential primaries ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Many have called for measures such as an assault weapon bans, universal background checks and other gun control reforms long stymied by partisan fighting in Washington.
The issue has seen renewed debate, including attention from the White House and some Republicans in Congress, after 31 people were killed last weekend in shootings in Texas and Ohio.
Democrats have criticized Republican President Donald Trump's mixed messaging this week on possible support for some gun control measures.
Trump on Friday suggested that he could sway the nation's powerful gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, to drop its opposition to gun restrictions.”
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2019 15:12:24 GMT
The Hill...
“Trump threatens to 'reciprocate' countries that issue travel warnings to US”
“President Trump on Friday threatened to "reciprocate" travel warnings issued against the U.S. following a pair of mass shootings.
Asked about his reactions to the travel advisories, Trump replied, "Well, I can't imagine that. But if they did that, we'd just reciprocate."
"We are a very reciprocal nation, with me as the head. When somebody does something negative to us in terms of a country, we do it to them," he added. So very Presidential...
"Look, our country has been taken advantage of by foreign countries, even allies - including allies, and in many cases, more than anybody else," Trump said. "We've been taken advantage of for many, many years, and it stops. It stopped." So what does this have to do with countries issuing travel advisories?
Uruguay, Venezuela and Japan issued warnings this week after the U.S. experienced a pair of mass shootings last weekend that killed 31 people. Japan warned of "the potential for gunfire incidents everywhere in the United States," and described the country as a "gun society."
Uruguay told its citizens to be aware of "growing indiscriminate violence, mostly for hate crimes."
Venezuela similarly warned of "the recent proliferation of violent acts and hate crimes."
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2019 15:17:22 GMT
trump..
”In a letter to me sent by Kim Jong Un, he stated, very nicely, that he would like to meet and start negotiations as soon as the joint U.S./South Korea joint exercise are over. It was a long letter, much of it complaining about the ridiculous and expensive exercises. It was.....”
”also a small apology for testing the short range missiles, and that this testing would stop when the exercises end. I look forward to seeing Kim Jong Un in the not too distant future! A nuclear free North Korea will lead to one of the most successful countries in the world!”
😀
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2019 15:18:56 GMT
trump...
”Never has the press been more inaccurate, unfair or corrupt! We are not fighting the Democrats, they are easy, we are fighting the seriously dishonest and unhinged Lamestream Media. They have gone totally CRAZY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Aug 10, 2019 15:56:45 GMT
" Look, our country has been taken advantage of by foreign countries, even allies - including allies, and in many cases, more than anybody else," Trump said. "We've been taken advantage of for many, many years, and it stops. It stopped." So what does this have to do with countries issuing travel advisories?
Uruguay, Venezuela and Japan issued warnings this week after the U.S. experienced a pair of mass shootings last weekend that killed 31 people. Japan warned of "the potential for gunfire incidents everywhere in the United States," and described the country as a "gun society." Uruguay told its citizens to be aware of "growing indiscriminate violence, mostly for hate crimes." Venezuela similarly warned of "the recent proliferation of violent acts and hate crimes." But... but... but... Putin says he did NOT interfere with our elections.... Fake news from 17 of OUR intelligence agencies say Putin did!! Mueller gave sworn testimony that Putin did....
ETA: Japan is far too close the No Korea to NOT worry about all of the dangers even here! Venezuela has no room to talk.
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2019 18:44:04 GMT
🎶 #MAGA 🎶
CNN...
”The EPA told staff scientists that it was no longer opposing a controversial Alaska mining project that could devastate one of the world's most valuable wild salmon fisheries, just one day after President Trump met with Alaska's governor, CNN has learned cnn.it/2KBLQSZ”
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2019 18:47:49 GMT
linkCNN... ”The top cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security said backup paper ballots would be a necessary part of 2020 election security, speaking at the DEFCON cyber conference” I wonder how much longer this guy will be with DHS before he’s pushed out?
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2019 18:59:21 GMT
NBC News.. “Democrats now outnumber Republicans in Orange County, onetime GOP stronghold”Now if we can just get rid of Kevin McCarthy and Devin Nunes our takeover of CA will be complete! Just joking. I do sort of feel bad for the Republicans in this state but I’m not joking about getting rid of McCarthy and Nunes. I do think the country would be better if the word “compromise “ was reintroduced to our vocabulary and embraced by all. With the understanding none of us are going to get everything we want.
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2019 19:36:55 GMT
🎶 #MAGA 🎶
NY Times... opinion piece by Nicholas Krishof
“Trump Finds a Brawler for His War on Workers”
“America’s working class is in desperate shape, and its longtime protectors — unions — have lost much of their power.
President Trump talks a good game about helping American workers but has pursued arguably the most anti-labor agenda of any modern president. Now he has doubled down by choosing for secretary of labor a corporate lawyer who has spent his career battling workers.
This is a bit like nominating Typhoid Mary to be health secretary.
The official mission of the Labor Department emphasizes the promotion of “the welfare of the wage earners,” but Trump’s mission has been to promote the exploitation of wage earners.
So Eugene Scalia is a perfect fit. Scalia, a son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who has fought unions on behalf of Walmart and other companies, is a talented and experienced litigator who upon assuming office will be in a position to disembowel labor.
There’s a larger issue: The relentless assault on labor has gained ground partly because, over the last half-century, many Americans — me included — became too disdainful of unions. It was common to scorn union leaders as corrupt Luddites who used ridiculous work rules to block modernization and undermine America’s economic competitiveness.
There’s something to those critiques. Yet it’s now clear that the collapse of unions — the share of employees belonging to unions has plunged to 10 percent in 2018 from 35 percent in the mid-1950s — has been accompanied by a rise of unchecked corporate power, a surge in income inequality and a decline in the well-being of working Americans.
For all their shortcomings, unions midwifed the birth of the middle class in the United States. The period of greatest union strength from the late 1940s through the 1950s was the time when economic growth was particularly robust and broadly shared. Most studies find that at least one-fifth of the rise in income inequality in the United States is attributable to the decline of labor unions.
Unlock more free articles. Create an account or log in Unions were also a formidable political force, and it’s perhaps not a surprise that their enfeebling has been accompanied by a rise in far-right policies that subsidize the wealthy, punish the working poor and exacerbate the income gap.
“Labor unions, and their ability to create a powerful collective voice for workers, played a huge role in building the world’s largest, richest middle class,” notes Steven Greenhouse in his superb, important and eminently readable new book about the labor movement, “Beaten Down, Worked Up.”
“Unions also played a crucial role,” Greenhouse adds, “in achieving many things that most Americans now take for granted: the eight-hour workday, employer-backed health coverage, paid vacations, paid sick days, safe workplaces. Indeed, unions were the major force in ending sweatshops, making coal mines safer, and eliminating many of the worst, most dangerous working conditions in the United States.”
Greenhouse, who covered labor for 19 years for The Times, acknowledges all the ways in which labor unions were maddening and retrograde. But he notes that corporations run amok when no one is minding them.
Union featherbedding and rigid work rules have been real problems. Yet without unions to check them, C.E.O.s engage in their own greedy featherbedding and underinvest in worker training, thus undermining America’s economic competitiveness.
Sure, it’s frustrating that teachers’ unions use political capital to defend incompetent teachers. In New York City, the union hailed its defense of a teacher who passed out in class, her breath reeking of alcohol, with even the principal unable to rouse her.
It’s also true that states with strong teachers’ unions, like Pennsylvania and Vermont, have far better student outcomes than states with feeble unions, like South Carolina and Mississippi. Teachers’ unions have also been heroic advocates for early childhood education, and Red for Ed strikers forced states like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona to improve their school systems.
Remember, too, that manufacturing workers in Germany are unionized and earn $10 more an hour than their American counterparts. Mercedes-Benz autoworkers earn $67 an hour in wages and benefits, and German workers are guaranteed a presence on corporate boards. Unions don’t detract from Germany’s economic system and competitiveness but are a pillar of it.
The bigger picture is that America’s working class is in desperate shape. Average hourly wages are actually lower today, after inflation, than they were in 1973, and the bottom 90 percent of Americans have seen incomes grow more slowly than the overall economy over the last four decades. The reasons are complex, but one is the decline of unions — for unions benefit not only their own members but also raise wage levels for workers generally.
So I’ve come to believe that we need stronger private-sector unions — yet the Trump administration continues to fight them. Greenhouse notes that nearly 20 percent of rank-and-file union activists are fired during organizing drives, because the penalties for doing so are so weak: A corporation may eventually be fined $5,000 or $10,000 for such a wrongful dismissal, but that is a negligible cost of doing business if it averts unionization.
That’s why we need a secretary of labor who cares about laborers. Trump campaigned in 2016 as a voice for forgotten workers, but he consistently sides with large corporations against workers, and his nomination of Scalia would amplify the sad and damaging war on unions.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2019 19:46:05 GMT
The Atlantic...
“What Joe Biden’s Latest Gaffe Reveals”
“He equated being poor with being a person of color. But many people share that sociological assumption.”
Another Joe Biden gaffe: “We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it. Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” That was yesterday, before the Asian and Latino Commission in Des Moines, Iowa. And Biden knew it was one—he immediately tried to clarify with, “Wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids. No, I really mean it. But think how we think about it. We think how we’re going to dumb it down. They can do anything anybody else can do, given a shot.”
But still—“white” kids versus “poor” ones. The reason even Biden’s fans are cringing at this remark is that it implies an equation between being poor and being a person of color, and perhaps also that all high-achieving students are white.
And it isn’t the first time Biden has let slip sociological assumptions of this kind. Who can forget Biden sunnily crowing that Barack Obama, when first running for president, was a godsend in being a “mainstream” African American who combined the traits of being “articulate and bright and clean.”
Besides the memory-friendly ABC sequence of the words, that remark was almost uncannily complete in summing up age-old stereotypes about what it is to be black. Few educated black people are unfamiliar with being called “articulate” for simply speaking about as confidently as their white equivalents; the veiled notion is that the black norm is to be somewhat ungifted with words. Then “bright” harbors a quiet yet pitiless condescension. (After the acclaimed theater director Harold Prince’s passing last week, I think of when the playboy Bobby in Company says to a flight attendant he just slept with but is ambivalent about seeing again, “Look, you’re a very special girl,” and “not just because you’re bright.”) As to noting that Obama is “clean,” little needs to even be said.
Biden’s underlying schema was the one minted in the era of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, where being accomplished, poised, and well-spoken was seen as remarkable in a black man; in white men, by contrast, those traits were seen as signs of basic middle-class maturity. That movie was a good while ago now, as was Biden’s birth, and few would tar him as a bigot for harboring these quiet assumptions, which were once common. Indeed, they are still common. If America were completely past the notion that articulateness (in standard English) has a ticklish relationship to black authenticity, then it would be hard to explain why debates about the issue still crop up endlessly.
The “articulate, bright, and clean” moment wasn’t pretty, but if anything, the unprettiness it revealed was our own, not just Biden’s.
The same case can be made for this latest flub. In equating poverty with not being white, Biden would seem to be displaying what many would consider high wokeness catechism.
On race and socioeconomics, the enlightened American these days is asked to wangle a peculiar sort of equipoise. For example, we are never to discount the black community’s achievement by “racializing” poverty. We are revolted when President Donald Trump implies that struggling black communities are uniquely degraded, almost perverted landscapes. These days, the concept of underclass is perhaps more race-neutral than ever before, in view of countless mostly white areas ravaged by deindustrialization and the opioid epidemic.
But then we are also to maintain a sense of black Americans as a singularly burdened people, suffering from a persistent wage gap with whites, overrepresented in low-quality schools, and mired in a web of circumstances founded in and ever propelled by a deathless kind of white supremacy. No one denies that other groups suffer as well, such as Latinos and Native Americans. However, the tacit idea is that black Americans are a special case, caught “between hell and high water” by Hurricane Katrina, to use the deft title of Michael Eric Dyson’s book; ever the “faces at the bottom of the well,” to quote Derrick Bell; and owed reparations for the slavery and legal segregation their ancestors endured.
As such, how many among us can claim not to operate upon a certain conception of privileged whites on top and people of color on the bottom? We all know it’s an oversimplification, what with some of those articulate, bright, and clean black people up top—or East and South Asian kids overrepresented at elite public high schools in New York, such as Stuyvesant—and poor whites like the ones depicted in J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy at the bottom. But overall, white people are always ahead, “maintaining” their “privilege” upon the necks of the various-hued subalterns down below.
With all the heat Biden has been taking for views on race minted in another time, we might see it as an advance that he made a remark that, in all of its clumsiness, would appear to take a page from progressive scripture. If it’s really so wrong of him to operate upon a thumbnail sketch of white kids as rich and kids of color as poor, then many might consider assessing the essentialism in their own mental schema of how America operates.”
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2019 19:49:19 GMT
The Hill.. “Poll: McConnell's approval in Kentucky at 18 percent”
link
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Deleted
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Sept 18, 2024 23:07:23 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 11, 2019 4:13:13 GMT
This from
Anthony Scaramucci..
”For the last 3 years I have fully supported this President. Recently he has said things that divide the country in a way that is unacceptable. So I didn’t make the 100% litmus test. Eventually he turns on on everyone and soon it will be you and then the entire country.”
Was in response to this...
trump
”Anthony Scaramucci, who was quickly terminated (11 days) from a position that he was totally incapable of handling, now seems to do nothing but television as the all time expert on “President Trump.” Like many other so-called television experts, he knows very little about me.....”
”.....other than the fact that this Administration has probably done more than any other Administration in its first 2 1/2 years of existence. Anthony, who would do anything to come back in, should remember the only reason he is on TV, and it’s not for being the Mooch!”
I believe Anthony is spot on with the bolded comment.
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