The TRUMP POTUS "Tribute" & "Tribulations" of the Politically Incorrect....!

jyoung8607 said:

The Mooch abides!

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Jack@European_Parts said:

Nah the mooch was fired....... /\

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Democrats try to co-opt populist rage. Hilarity ensues.

Matt Bai
Yahoo News
August 10, 2017

Washington was abuzz this week with talk about the new Democratic agenda, “A Better Deal,” which is suddenly dominating news coverage and captivating voters with a plan to remake the American economy, sending Republicans scrambling for a viable platform of their own in advance of the midterm elections.

No, not really. I just wanted to see if you were paying attention on the beach.

In reality, with Congress and the president out of town right now, Washington is deader than a Chick-fil-A on Sunday. Bored TV commentators would rather analyze every nuance of President Trump’s latest tweetstorm than spend a second debating trade policy.

And the agenda I mentioned, which Democrats began rolling out a few weeks ago in a series of choreographed events, has impressed pretty much no one.

The slogan, which apparently took months of focus-grouping to perfect, rather than the five seconds of idle thought while doing the laundry that you would think it required, evokes — yet again — memories of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, which remain powerful in exactly two places in America: nursing homes and Democratic leadership meetings.

Critics of the plan were quick to point out that it wasn’t really a plan at all — more like a collection of greatest hits like public infrastructure spending (1984), job retraining (1992) and monopoly busting (1896).

But the more profound and more overlooked problem with this “Better Deal” proclamation isn’t actually about its language or its gauziness. It’s more about the underlying philosophy, which misreads in some fundamental way the core appeal of Trump’s campaign.

Democrats are trying to do a couple of things with this new marketing push. One is to answer this question of what they actually want to achieve, aside from impeaching the president. In announcing the new slogan, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, lamented that “too many Americans don’t know what we stand for” before boldly declaring: “Not after today.”

Because nothing redefines a party in the public mind like a slogan unveiled by congressional leaders at a podium. That’s always worked before.

The other and perhaps more urgent objective is to co-opt some of the populist fury that’s simmering right now in the Democratic base, before it overwhelms the party establishment in the same way that Trump toppled leading Republicans. Schumer and his compatriots are trying to convincingly adopt the ethos of the anti-corporate politicians who appeal most to their activists — namely Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

It’s worth taking a moment here to consider what being a populist party actually means in 2017.

Broadly speaking, populism is the practice of galvanizing the majority of the people against powerful and oppressive interests in the society. In the late 19th century and well into the 20th, populism necessarily translated into an assault on industrial-age business.

This made sense. The most powerful institutions in American life were ascendant corporations, which concentrated their collective energy on exploiting both workers and consumers for profit.

There was no central government to speak of back then, no balancing force on behalf of Americans who weren’t part of the industrial or financial elite. It took a series of populist leaders — most notably the two Roosevelts in the White House — to shatter the grip of corporate trusts and establish an essential counterbalance in the public sector.

Almost a century later, however, the meaning of populism is a little more complicated. Yes, a lot of Americans remain deeply suspicious of banks and multinational corporations, especially those that move manufacturing overseas. That’s a reliably strong current in our politics.

But we also depend on companies like Walmart and Target for affordable drugs, groceries and toys for our kids. The fastest-growing and most ubiquitous companies in America now aren’t in oil or steel; they’re Apple and Amazon and Google. You don’t sense a lot of populist outrage over next-day shipping.

Meanwhile, government bureaucracies have grown exponentially in both size and power. If you went out on the street anywhere in America and asked people what the most powerful institutions in American life are today, I’m betting almost everyone would name Washington in their top three.

And not just powerful but, to a lot of Americans, oppressive, too. It’s not so much the taxes people pay, which really aren’t all that onerous in most cases; yelling about taxes is really just a way of voicing general disdain.

It’s the TSA guy barking at you in the airport, or the woman at the DMV who rejected your paperwork, or the county inspector who threatened to shut down your shop over some obscure code. It’s the VA hospital that won’t give you an appointment, or the detox facility with no beds.

More than any of that, though, it’s the promises that never seem to be kept, year after year — of jobs, of affordable college, of renewal in abandoned towns. For decades now, since the onset of globalization and technological upheaval, politicians have been telling people they’ve got this or that plan to reverse the decline. They don’t.

According to the latest data from the indispensable Pew Research Center, about 55 percent of Americans are frustrated with the federal government, and only 20 percent say they trust the government to do what’s right most or all of the time. The partisan divides here shift from year to year, but the pervasive sentiment is remarkably constant.

This, at least among a lot of independent and less ideological voters, is what Trump tapped into last year with his silly red hat. Sure, he mouthed a lot of platitudes about setting Wall Street straight (and then hired the top echelon of Goldman Sachs to work in his White House). But it was his indictment of government generally — and the establishments of both parties — that ultimately washed away the Clintonian argument for faith in the governing class.

What this means is that populism as a purely economic proposition — the people versus their corporate overlords — is too limiting a construct in modern politics. Any winning populist critique probably has to extend to the failures of the federal bureaucracy, too.

Democrats don’t like to hear this. They represent the party of government, and they fear that if they acknowledge its flaws or anachronisms, they will essentially be validating the conservative argument.

But that’s not right, and it’s self-defeating. You can be pro-government and still make the case for fundamental reform and modernization, as Gary Hart and Bill Clinton once did. That’s just admitting reality.

What does the “Better Deal” have to say about this?

Among the precious few new policy ideas Democrats now propose is the creation of yet more government agencies to rein in corporate excess and unfair trade. Praising this proposal in The Nation, the liberal writer David Dayen noted that “building new agencies with targeted missions was a hallmark of the New Deal.”

Right. Except this isn’t 1933. We have all the agencies we can handle now, and we don’t trust them a whole lot to begin with.

A party that believes more government will solve everything can’t really call itself populist in any modern sense of the word. It’s more just anti-business and anti-Trump.

I’d be surprised if most Americans — or at least the ones you need to win back majorities — consider that much of a deal at all.

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CNN severed ties with commentator Jeffery Lord on Thursday after he tweeted "Sieg Heil!" at a liberal activist on Twitter, CNN reports.Lord, a columnist for conservative magazine The American Spectator, tweeted the Nazi victory salute at Angela Carusone, president of the liberal group Media Matters for America.
"Nazi salutes are indefensible," a CNN spokesperson said, according to the network. "Jeffrey Lord is no longer with the network."
The columnist has previously clashed with Media Matters, which has previously called for his firing from CNN.

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Jack@European_Parts said:

A better deal............!

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is warning of military action, saying the U.S. is "locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely."
Trump tweeted: "Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely."
North Korea has announced a detailed plan to launch a salvo of ballistic missiles toward the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, a major military hub and home to U.S. bombers. If carried out, it would be its most provocative missile launch to date.

Trump said this week the U.S. would unleash "fire and fury" on North Korea if it continued to threaten the United States.
The tweet was one of several Trump sent on Friday. He also retweeted links to Fox News stories on Trump's frustration with Senate Republicans and drone strikes in Somalia.

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Employees at Trump Organization properties have been told they must give up their right to sue their employer or else they will lose their jobs. This arrangement is called a mutual arbitration agreement, and the document was obtained by CBS News. Arbitration means that instead of going to court, employees must take any complaints to a third party arbitrator paid for by the Trump Organization to resolve disputes. Matters before an arbitrator are secret.

A Trump Organization spokesperson provided this statement via email to CBS News: "Because it is faster, more cost effective and tends to level the playing field, it is commonplace for large companies like The Trump Organization to use arbitration as the preferred method for resolving disputes."
The document was presented to all employees, including gardeners, housekeepers and manicurists. The document was paired with a mandatory gag order obtained by CBS News that required all Trump employees to keep any information, pictures or opinions of the Trump family confidential. Employees were also told that if they didn't sign the confidentiality agreement, they would lose their jobs.
The arbitration agreement states that "Arbitration is intended to provide a less time- consuming, less expensive, and less complicated means of settling disputes." Because arbitration takes place behind closed doors, the number and nature of employee complaints against the president's company will never become public. The agreement also requires Trump employees to give up their rights to join a class action lawsuit.
"It is part of a major trend to privatize justice," said Deborah Soltis, a partner at the litigation firm Kiyonaga & Soltis who has been practicing for 25 years, "What employers have been doing for about the last 20 years is slowly taking away their employees' rights to level the playing field and go to court," Soltis told CBS News.
Complaints that would now be secret include matters related to "unpaid compensation, missed meal or rest breaks, wrongful termination, unfair competition, discrimination, harassment, retaliation" according to the agreement.
The Trump Organization is using the arbitrator JAMS, which has arbitration centers around the country and, according to Lewis Maltby of the National Workrights Institute, JAMS is known as "reasonably fair".
It's estimated that up to 20 percent of all businesses nationwide require employees to give up the right to sue. It's favored by some, as the Trump Organization indicated, because arbitration is cheaper for both parties, and it tends to be faster than the courts. In recent years, decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court have supported the rights of corporations to force employees to sign arbitration agreements.

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Jack@European_Parts said:

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China’s government says it would remain neutral if North Korea attacks the United States, but warned it would defend its Asian neighbor if the U.S. strikes first and tries to overthrow Kim Jong Un’s regime, Chinese state media said Friday.
If the U.S. and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime, and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so,” reported the Global Times, a daily Chinese newspaper controlled by the Communist Party.Meanwhile, other Asia-Pacific countries have come out in support of the United States in the event of a North Korean nuclear attack.
Japan’s defense minister, Itsunori Onodera, said this week that his nation’s military was ready to shoot down North Korean nuclear missiles, if necessary.

In Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull described his country and the U.S. as being “joined at the hip,” the South China Morning Post reported.
“If there is an attack on the U.S., the Anzus Treaty would be invoked,” and Australia would aid the U.S., Turnbull told Australia’s 3AW radio Friday morning. Turnbull was referring to a collective security agreement between the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
The Chinese response to the heightened tensions between the U.S. and North Korea followed a number of hot-headed proclamations.
North Korea has threatened the U.S. with a nuclear attack on Guam, a U.S. territory south of Japan, after President Donald Trump said additional threats against the country or its allies would be met with “fire and fury.”
On Thursday, the president doubled-down on the remarks, saying his original comment possibly “wasn’t tough enough.”
In a separate appearance, Trump added: “Let’s see what [Kim Jong Un] does with Guam. He does something in Guam, it will be an event the likes of which nobody has seen before – what will happen in North Korea.”
One North Korean government official, meanwhile, accused Trump of “going senile,” Fox News reported.

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President Trump's approval rating has rebounded after a week of rising tensions with North Korea, according to a Rasmussen poll released Friday afternoon.Trump's approval rating in the right-leaning poll now stands at 45 percent, a six-point jump from a 39 percent approval rating in the same poll last week. The new rating marks Trump's highest approval the poll has recorded since July 12.
Trump has spent the week escalating tensions with North Korea after the nation announced it was moving forward with developing plans to attack the island territory of Guam. On Friday morning, Trump tweeted that U.S. forces in the region were "locked and loaded."
"Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely," Trump wrote on Twitter Friday. "Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!"
Rasmussen reported that 45 percent of Americans supported a military solution to North Korea's nuclear missiles in a poll last month.
According to the poll, he still faces high disapproval ratings. More than half of likely voters surveyed, 53 percent, said they disapprove of the job Trump has done during his first 200 days in office.
Rasmussen's poll surveyed 1,500 likely voters with a margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points.

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Hillary Clinton Benghazi email review ordered nine months after she lost the presidential race to Donald Trump

Clark Mindock
The Independent
August 10, 2017

A federal judge has ordered a new search of Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi emails, nine months after the Democrat lost the 2016 election.

US District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the State Department hasn’t done enough to track down emails Ms Clinton may have sent out related to the 2012 Benghazi attack that left four Americans dead. The new directive asks for a review of emails received or sent to Ms Clinton's by aides using State Department servers.

The US ambassador to Libya at the time, Chris Stevens, was one of those killed.

Before the recent ruling, the State Department had searched tens of thousands of emails handed over to the agency by Ms Clinton and three of her top aides. The State Department also searched a trove of emails the FBI had assembled when it investigated Ms Clinton’s use of a private email server who serving as secretary of State.

But conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch argued that those efforts weren’t enough. They urged the federal judiciary to force the State Department to search its own stems for relevant emails that may have been sent to state.gov email addresses.

The first search found 348 Benghazi-related emails sent in the five months following the attack.

“To date, State has searched only data compilations originating from outside sources — Secretary Clinton, her former aides, and the FBI. ... It has not, however, searched 8 the one records system over which it has always had control and that is almost certain to contain some responsive records: the state.gov e-mail server,” Mr Mehta wrote in his 10-page ruling.

“If Secretary Clinton sent an e-mail about Benghazi to Abedin, Mills, or Sullivan at his or her state.gov e-mail address, or if one of them sent an e-mail to Secretary Clinton using his or her state.gov account, then State’s server presumably would have captured and stored such an e-mail. Therefore, State has an obligation to search its own server for responsive records,” he continued.

It is not clear if the State Department archived emails sent from Ms Clinton’s top aides regularly or reliably.

The issue of Ms Clinton’s use of a private email server, and her handling of the Benghazi attack, dogged her throughout her 2016 presidential campaign. Although investigators never concluded that Ms Clinton had done anything illegal, Republicans repeatedly attacked her for her emails, raising suspicions of foul play and conspiracy.

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Jack@European_Parts said:

I thought Virginia was for loSers...........?

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