Interesting discussion on Bill Maher’s show about the difference between Republicans and Democrats. I would think by this time, the difference is obvious. The GOP decides what it wants and goes after it. The Democrats decide what they want and then debate the merits of their own choice. Democrats have to learn that once they know what they want, they have to go after it with blood in their eyes. That killer instinct is the difference between winning and losing and if you care to look, the GOP controls the entire government right now and that includes most of the state legislatures. That constitutes a lot of winning.
No one has attacked Trump about his fetish with winning more than this blog. Trump wants the win because it makes him feel like a big man. I don’t think he even has an agenda that goes back more than thirty seconds or the last lie. But you do need the win if you want to get stuff done. Most in the Left revere Barak Obama for any number of reasons, but having a little blood in his eye was never one of them. Merrick Garland is not on the Supreme Court right now because Obama didn’t have the stones to make a recess appointment when congress went on vacation. If Obama had done that, the court wouldn’t be facing the disaster it is now. Instead Mitch McConnell just stood his ground and said he was not going to allow Garland’s name to come up for nomination. He didn’t have a reason; he just wasn’t going to let it happen. So he won!
The Democrats, still thinking that politics have something to do with morals, cannot allow themselves to make this kind of decision. That’s the big difference between the parties. Barak Obama as much as you want to admire him, wasn’t up to making the tough move that would save the court and Mitch McConnell, the scumbag, was.
Everything that Trump does, all the racism and the disgusting social behavior is accepted by his followers because in the end they think he will deliver and they know in their twisted hearts that the delivery will be worth what they have given up.
Occasionally, Trump goes too far even for his monstrous hordes. Torturing babies to get a wall may have been one of those times but it was close. If you look at the polls you can see that many of his followers were turned off by that move. Not all of them, just a significant number. There are always those that can rationalize any action if the result falls in line with their aberrant desires.
I am not advocating this as a position for Democrats but there are too many instances where they just must jump into the fight that they have been ignoring. The naming of Judge Kennedy’s replacement is just such a situation. So is the horror our President has perpetrated on the border. He border fight has a natural liberal appeal, but it’s the fight over SCOTUS that has to engage the Democrats. I have heard too many of them buckle under the numbers in congress, saying that they just can’t do anything about it. Bullshit! Right now the GOP has 51 votes for any candidate for SCOTUS. But it is anything but a hard 51 votes. Collins and Murkowski are always on the fence about any controversial subject. Just the two of them would flip any result but there have to be others that would step forward, legislators who are already dissenters like Flake, Corker and Sanford.
Of course the Democrats must hold their solid wall. There are Democrats like Manchin in danger in Red states. They all, every single one of them, have to have the courage of their convictions. If they do, all we will need is a couple of Republicans to have the courage of theirs.
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And, of course, if all else fails, those Progressives who are wailing about losing the court for 40 years can look to Tom Rogers, former CEO of TIVo and founder of CNBC who has brought to light a factor that others seem to have either forgotten or ignored.
The Constitution provides for SCOTUS but it never states its size. Because of that the court has been changed any number of times over its life. The Judiciary Act of 1789 set the number at 6 members and in 1807 that was changed to 7. In 1837 it was changed to 9, in 1863 to 10, in 1867 to 7 again and finally in 1869 to 9 where it has stayed despite an attempt by FDR to change it to 10. So it’s already been done a number of times. There is precedent; there is an established process. There is everythingthe Democrats need to do it except balls. They have to find those on their own. Of course like anything else there is always a catch. The party that wants to do this has to have exactly what the Republicans have now, the Presidency and both houses of congress, so before the Dems give up on this round of the fight for Trump’s appointment they should think twice. Yeah, there’s a possibility, down the road to neutralize it but that will entail a situation they haven’t been able to pull off since Obama’s first two years and even if they get there someone will have to have the stones to pull the trigger.
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The latest news concerning Paul Manafort and the expansion of our justice department’s interest in his activities involving the promotion of Putin’s interests in the expansion of Russia’s world footprint seems to be peaking after a weekend of new moves by Robert Mueller and his team.
It’s no secret that after the collapse of the USSR, Putin has made it his life’s work to restore Russia to a prominent position in the world. This hasn’t been easy. Russia has a powerful military compared to most of the world but not the U.S. Their problem is that they have a failing economy and that severely limits what Putin can do economically causing him to push as far as he can militarily.
Standing in Putin’s way is NATO, currently under attack by our lame brained President. Trump keeps blabbing that NATO members must pay their bills and that they are all deadbeats. Now if there is anyone in the world who knows about being a deadbeat it is the fat orange one himself. His record as a contractor and developer is overflowing with instances of him stiffing subs just because they couldn’t afford to take him to court.
Of course a little reality like that never bothered Trump. He threatens to dump NATO despite the fact that right now, NATO is the principle obstacle to Russian expansion.
The American military budget is currently $600 billion. China’s is $250 billion. Russia’s is $80 billion but NATO’s is $300 billion, cumulatively, second only to that of the US so as usual Trump is full of shit and his big mouth is hurting not only NATO but also us.
Trump may be too stupid to understand the above quoted numbers but Putin isn’t. That’s why he has established non-military networks all over the world to subvert governments in nations he wishes to influence. We have already seen that in Russia’s Internet influence on our elections and those of other countries in Europe.
That’s where Manafort comes in. He seems to have had one of the premier lists of connections of everyone imaginable and he appears to have been using those connections to advance the plans not principally of Trump but of Putin. Sure he was helping Trump too because in doing so, he was helping defeat Hillary, thereby advancing Putin’s goals. In this scenario, Manafort seems to have been our Angela Lansbury to Trump’s Manchurian Candidate.
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Scott Pruitt has left the swamp. Thank God! Now he’ll have all the time he needs to find his wife a Chick Filet franchise. Of curse he won’t be able to chisel any more taxpayer money from his office while he tries to destroy the environment but that may be the only good thing that has come out of his disastrous appointment. Trump claims to love this guy, which is understandable when you consider that they both come from the same cesspool but that was only because Trump is the one who is directing this policy of ruining our environment in order to promote the fossil fuel industries in which he is personally invested. The hell with your kid’s health, as long as the polluters can make money. Among his signature achievements we can list eliminating a rule that limited greenhouse gas emissions from coal burning power plants. He then told out of work miners that the war against coal was over. It’s over all right and coal miners lost. They lost to pollution and dragline mining and nothing Trump can do or say will ever change that.
Pruitt eliminated a portion of the Clean Water Act and left small farmers responsible for runoff from their farms into local rivers. Then he lobbied Trump to end the Paris Accords. He will be replaced by Andrew Wheeler former coal lobbyist, just the kind of scumbag we need running an agency that is there to protect the environment.
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Mona Charen is the very intelligent woman who spoke up at the CPAK conference and accused the GOP of not paying attention to moral values. Christine Amanpour questioned her on a number of subjects and she came up a winner on all of them. Where the hell are the others like her in the Republican Party.
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So what was really wrong with the Iran deal? It looked like it was working. It was but the problem as far as Trump is concerned is that Obama negotiated it. The excuse by Trump and his backers is that the deal doesn’t keep Iran from terrorist or missal activities. True, but the deal was never meant to do that. If you want that, negotiate another deal.
No one ever said that Iran was in violation of the deal, not even Trump. By pulling out weare now in violation of the deal and we are crushing our believability, if we had any left, once the orange liar took over the White House.
Trump says that we cannot prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb under the terms of the treaty but that is in fact, what has happened. We no longer have any means to inspect what they are doing so they will be free to jump back on the nuclear bandwagon. This in turn, will make all the other countries in the Middle East rush to match Iran. So what Trump has accomplished is to start a nuclear arms race in the hotbed of terrorism. Trump is always running off at the mouth about Muslim terrorists and with one dumb move he gives them the means and access to nuclear weapons that they can now smuggle into the US. He really is as dumb as a post.
Everyone with any understanding of the deal knows that we are worse off today then we were yesterday. Trump’s bullshit about the deal leaving an avenue for Iran to develop a bomb 10 or 25 years down the road just doesn’t hold water because if Iran did that we could exercise options and come to a new agreement long before that came to fruition. All the talk about Iranian terrorism has nothing to do with this deal. If that bothers Trump he should open talks to deal with that, but not mess up a deal that is currently working.
Problem just as big: the crisis that is coming over Trump’s promise to reinstate sanctions and to extend them to anyone else who does business with Iran. Now we are talking about all our European and Asian allies. Does Trump really think we can stand-alone in the world market and still survive. If he does, he’s even stupider than this action makes him look.
What did Trump hope to accomplish by this? Who can tell? Who can get into that diseased mind? He accomplished nothing by pulling us out of the TPP or the Paris Agreements. Now this. Is Trump really the Manchurian Candidate? Is his only goal to destroy the United States?
Richard Haas, one of the best minds available on foreign affairs, hinted today that we might suggest to the people of Iran that we would back regime change there. Much as I respect Haas, this is a terrible idea. Our history of doing stuff like this is fraught with disaster. I believe we have already tried this in Iran a couple of years back and as soon as the youth and the people surged into the streets they were beaten to a pulp as America never getting off its fat ass to help anyone, sat back and watched their destruction. In fact, out history of getting involved in other countries governments has been nothing but a major horror show. We have proven in almost every country in Central and South America that we know how to back the wrong horse, mostly because we always do it for political, rather than humanitarian reasons. Actually even Iran stands out as a nation that had close ties to us until 1979 when we decided that we didn’t like their trade policies with Russia and forced their great and intelligent leader, Mosedech out, and replaced him with the incompetent and venal Shah Pahlavi.