I know that I seem obsessed with Donald Trump and I probably am, but I keep seeing him do things that are bad for the country and I don’t see any reason for this except that his ego is bruised or he made some rash, stupid promise when he was running for office and now he believes that he has to fulfill it to hold his base no matter how it will harm our country and its citizens.
Right now he’s after Obamacare, simply because its called Obamacare. If it were known as Jonescare he probably wouldn’t think about it for a second. The move last week, lessened coverage for pre-existing conditions, provided fewer guarantied benefits and stopped insurance subsidies. This will cause premiums to jump 20% in 2018 and 25% in 2019. It also means that the Federal deficit will rise and many people will lose their coverage. Right now about 7 million Americans, mostly poor, benefit from the coverage in question. Brian Sandoval the Republican Governor of Utah understands this and has attacked Trump’s moves in total.
So how does this move by Trump help the American people? Very simply, it doesn’t. So why did he make it? Well, if he were rational we would look for a logical answer, but he isn’t rational and hasn’t been rational at any point in his Presidency. So maybe he’s just crazy. More probably he’s just a nasty, bitter sociopath who is using the office of the president to carry out a vendetta against Barak Obama who once mocked him at a Washington dinner. He’ll show that black SOB! But while he’s doing that, while he’s carrying out his petty vendetta, he’s damaging the nation, he’s destroying healthcare for many people who voted for him. It’s a very depressing conclusion but the only logical reason fro his attack on healthcare is that he is an egomaniac bent on revenge.
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So with a President who knows nothing, says everything and doesn’t accomplish anything constructive, and a former advisor, Steve Bannon, who is trying his best to rip the Republican Party apart, coupled with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, Republican leadership that seems frozen in jello when it comes to getting anything done, where are the Democrats? True, they don’t have enough numbers to get their own agenda passed but they aren’t doing anything to let the voters know that they do, in fact, have an agenda. With healthcare, the Iran Treaty, the Dreamers, The Wall, the environment, immigration, military spending, government waste, the Russian investigation infrastructure plus the failures in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, the Democrats have a plethora of issues on which to present a plan of attack but like the Republicans for the last seven years on healthcare, they are sitting back and bitching instead of producing functional legislation.
The job of our houses of congress is to legislate. None of the fools occupying those seats seem to realize this. The Democrats have a golden opportunity and they are blowing it. Now is the time for the Democrats to produce reams of legislation; legislation that deals with the obvious problems not solved by a Republican government that holds all the cards. Now is the time for Democrats to write legislation that explains to the public how they will run the country if they are given the opportunity. Right now the Democrats are sitting quietly and watching he Republicans and the President implode. That’s exactly what the Republicans did during eight years of Obama, and look what a mess we’re in now.
Serious gearing up for the mid-term elections will happen in June of 2018. By that time the Democrats should have published legislation on every subject already mentioned plus a dozen more, legislation that will tell he public exactly what they want to do, given the opportunity. That way all the Democratic candidates will be able to stand before an audience of voters and say; this is what we will do if you put enough of us in office. They will be able to say that because if they can take both houses, Trump will not veto most Democratic legislation. After all, he is more Democrat than Republican He just glommed onto the GOP after the Dems threw him out.
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Javad Zarif the Iranian Foreign Minister spoke very clearly this week, about what it is currently like to deal with the United States. He is quite clear that this administration is breaking down other nations ability to deal with us, simply because we are proving that America’s word is no good, that America’s word only lasts for the length of a President’s term in office because one American President, in this case Donald Trump doesn’t have the integrity to honor another President’s accomplishments in international dealings. It seems that only Trump doesn’t understand how devastating to international cooperation his actions are.
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The pundits are all quoting polls this week especially those dealing in what Americans are worried about in terms of violence and danger. Right now North Korea is at the top of all polls with ISIS, Russia, China and Iran following at a distance. In polls that include it, terrorism is in second place but none of the polls include homegrown gun violence. It’s hard t believe that anything could supersede homegrown gun violence if it were contained in any of these polls, but of course the gun lobby spends big bucks to keep questions like that out of the polls.
So let’s stop kidding ourselves. If we want to worry about our kids getting killed, we should eliminate the Koreans, the Russians, the Iranians and the Chinese who are all an ocean away and don’t want to start a war any more than we do. What we have to worry about to a lesser extent is foreign terrorism, which in the sixteen years since 911 has actually killed fewer than 100 Americans on our soil. If we really want to make a difference we can talk about gun violence, which kills 30,000 Americans each year. This math is so simple that even Donald Trump can do it. Can you?
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Never in my rather long life have I seen two former Presidents, one from each party give almost simultaneous speeches on the same subject. In this case the inability of the current President to govern. But that’s what happened when both George Bush and Barak Obama gave speeches in which neither mentioned the name of Donald Trump but in which each made it crystal clear that they disapproved of the way Trump is running the country.
To tell you the truth, I don’t understand why Bush hates this guy. Sure he beat his brother’s brains out in the primary but he is also lifting Bush’s mantle as the worst President in U.S. history.
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The Republicans have decided that if they don’t pass something they can sell as a Middle Class tax cut before the summer of 2018 they better forget about having a majority in either house of congress in the fall of 2018. The basic thinking goes if you can’t pass anything when you have a majority of the whole government why should you have a majority of the whole government?
The GOP problem is that they know they must pass a bill that encourages the working poor and the middle class to vote for them but everything they have put forth so far, corporate tax cuts, the end of the estate tax and getting rid of the alternate minimum tax are all benefits for the rich. The basic GOP problem is that they just don’t think in terms of helping anyone but the rich. This leaves them with a real conundrum.
So how does the GOP pull itself out of this hole? This is after all, a GOP tax policy and the GOP is supposed to be very frugal. (That’s only if you haven’t checked on their record lately.) Well, the answer to the problem of swelling the deficit to over thirty trillion has been found by the GOP and they are extremely busy trying to figure out how they are going to sell it to all the people it is going to screw.
Basically the new middle class tax cut will look like this. Taxpayers will no longer be able to deduct the current $18,000 per year they are allowed to put into their IRAs. That number will be reduced to $2400. The new formula works out this way. After 15 years of paying into an IRA the taxpayer will, on the basis of a 7% return, have $50,000 a year less to live on than they did before the change. Wait! That was supposed to help the middle class? How? How the hell do the Republicans expect to be able to sell this rip-off to anyone? We all know they think their constituents are dumber than dirt but even those morons who voted Republican in the last election aren’t all that dumb. Or are they?
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When Donald Trump reached out to Mathis, McMaster and Kelly to be the core of an otherwise completely dysfunctional administration many of us worried about the predominance of military minds in our government. It has always been the mind-set of the American people that civilians should be in charge of what this nation does. Over the years this concept has worked. But those three military minds seemed to be just what we needed to make even a small inroad into the chaos that was created by Trump and his cronies in the White House.
We even began to think of the military three as saviors, islands of light in the murky darkness that was the present administration. Now, however one of them, John Kelly has been revealed as what he actually is.
When Kelly was appointed to his new job as White House Chief of Staff we all thought that here was a man of discipline and organization that would keep Trump in line and maybe make some sense of the madhouse he was walking into. Well, he may have inaugurated a sense of organization at some level but the chaos still exists and where we had hoped he might add a modicum of balance to Trump’s nonpresidential behavior he is now endorsing it.
Last week Kelly became just another of Trump’s enablers when he attacked congresswoman Frederica Wilson over Trump’s poor performance during his call to the widow of KIA Sgt. La David Johnson. Unfortunately, expressing his ire wasn’t enough and Kelly went on to lie about things the congresswoman was supposed to have said at an earlier rally on another matter. This was indeed surprising for a man who had been openly acknowledged by most as exactly the kind of man America needs in its government. Then he turns out to be just another Sara (Ilsa Koch) Sanders clone.
But as always, the biggest problem, the most despicable act is left to our degenerate President who stood behind a microphone and lied again as he has so many times we have all lost count. Trump, the small, despicable liar announced that he didn’t say what everyone else heard him say. It wasn’t that it was the wrong thing to say, it was just that it was the wrong thing to say when he said it and then this fat coward couldn’t man up to it. Liar, coward and sociopath, Trump is a disgrace.
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Fake, or maybe not. There was this dossier of possibly fake news that laid out Trump’s compliance with the Russians and possibly what the Russians could help him with. That may or may not be true. Are you confused yet?
Well, the Republicans aren’t, or so they say. They say that the Democrats led by Hillary Clinton’s lawyer paid a Brit, Chris Steele to create this dossier. But there also seems to be some evidence that Steele was first hired by a GOP organization during the primaries to create this dossier and that the Democrats didn’t get involved until after Trump won the GOP primary. Still got it together?
Okay So now the Republicans, primarily Trump’s camp want to start a congressional investigation into that and also into their allegation that the Obama campaign through Hillary Clinton arranged for the Russians to buy tons of our uranium and send it back to Russia. Okay, now you still may not be confused but by the time I got to this part, I was.
So let’s look at tbe reality of both accusations and also at the Trump desire for congress to instigate investigations into them. First are they real? Well, yes, there is a dossier of some sort but whether anything in it is true or accurate is a whole other question. Steele in making this document for an outfit named eFusion had no supervision or editing so right now, no one knows if anything in the dossier is true. On top of that the information contained in the dossier is pretty much standard political fact finding, the kind of thing that every candidate does on every candidate they are facing, so, so what?
As for the uranium; well, whether there is a contract to sell it to the Russians or whether there isn’t, seems pretty blurry, but in any case whatever the reality of the contract, the bigger reality is that it had nothing to do with Hillary. She just wasn’t involved. On top of that there is an American law that prohibits the exportation of uranium anywhere in the world.
But there is one more point that has to be looked at in terms of this problem. It seems that the White House contacted the Justice Department to “suggest” that they get involved in this question. That is not only unethical but a violation of justice department rules. If the justice department is willing to be complicit in such a political ploy then it is in complete violation of the constitution it is in place to protect. This is the problem with the whole government as led by the Trump administration. They, like the President, just don’t believe in the rule of law. They see only what they want and jump at it.
So neither attempt by the Trump administration to take attention away from its own incompetence and inability to function is reality, at least anywhere except Trump’s twisted mind. But then there are the congressional investigations that he wants to happen. Obviously Trump is not in a strong enough possession of his faculties to realize that congress is already ass deep in too many of these and we really should leave them alone to do what they were elected to do, that which they have done little enough already… legislate.
The Senate’s congressional investigation is already proving what a waste of time such procedures often are. The committee chairman, Richard Burr, ® SC, is so busy protecting the White House that nothing of substance can possibly emerge from all this time wasting and noise.