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Its uncons utional. Period.
They're mudslimes they should be ousted.
Its uncons utional. Period.
We shall see.
Bend over, I'll give you a -10
if its not pizza i'm not interested
Fintan O’Toole: Welcome to Trumperica
Donald Trump’s chaotic signing of grandiose orders has the air of a deluded despot’s last days, not his first
Probably the smartest thing anyone said about Donald Trump before his election was the explanation by Salena Zito in The Atlantic of why he could get away with making wildly exaggerated or flatly false statements: “When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
And yet Zito’s insight has turned out to be insufficient. In the mad days that have followed his inauguration, it has become clear that Trump takes himself both literally and seriously.
He mistakes his own impulses for facts. He does not know the difference between self-aggrandising symbolic gestures and lived human realities, and this tiny-minded literalism has very serious consequences for millions of people.
The most important thing to understand about the executive order keeping immigrants and refugees from seven Muslim countries out of the US is that it has no relationship whatsoever to its stated purpose. That purpose is, supposedly, to keep America safe from terrorism. The order is actually called “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States”.
Memory of 9/11
As the chaos, anguish and shame erupted last weekend, Trump’s surrogates and supporters repeatedly evoked the memory of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
But Trump’s order would do absolutely nothing to prevent a repeat of those attacks. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Saudi Arabia continues to be the primary sponsor of the extremist versions of Islam that feed into militant jihadism. Yet Saudi Arabia is not one of the seven countries whose citizens are affected by Trump’s order.
On the contrary, the Saudi government this week reiterated its delight at Trump’s accession to the presidency and declined to utter the smallest criticism of the order.
By contrast, not one American has been killed since 9/11 by any immigrant or refugee from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – the countries targeted by Trump. Every jihadist who carried out a lethal attack inside the United States since 9/11 was a citizen or legal permanent resident of the US itself.
The most recent major attacks – the Orlando nightclub massacre last June and the killing spree in San Bernardino in December 2015 – were carried out principally by people born in the US. (The San Bernardino shooter was helped by his wife, who was born in Pakistan, which is not on Trump’s list.)
And, in fact, the biggest terrorist threats to US citizens come from disturbed people, many of them high on white supremacist fantasies, who are allowed by US laws to have access to extremely lethal weapons. Trump’s own rhetoric and his close association with elements of the white nationalist right have, at least in their own eyes, further legitimized many of these extremists.
Further, Trump’s absolute commitment to insuring that extremely lethal weapons remain easily available to anyone planning a terrorist attack makes a nonsense of his claims to be “protecting the nation”.
Campaign rhetoric
The problem the executive order is really meant to address is not terrorism, but Trump’s own campaign rhetoric. The order relates, not to actual, living, breathing events or conditions, but only to language.
It is pure postmodern politics: The order is a text that refers only to another text, which is Trump’s stump speech on the campaign trail and its dark promise of a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” (If the lifting of the ban really has to wait for Trump to figure out what is going on, it will last indefinitely.)
Many people within the US media and political worlds, including some Republicans who support the intention of the order, wondered why Trump did not consult more widely before signing it. But this is to entirely miss the point. Once you start to consult, you recognise that you are intending to do something that will have consequences for real people in the real world – and that you have to modify your intentions to take account of those consequences.
What the world is struggling to come to terms with is that this is not what Trump is about at all. He is not engaged in rational politics. He is a character in a story of his own invention. And the only rules he understands are the rules of the narrative.
The president does not read books (though he watches a lot of TV), yet he instinctively understands the rule laid down by one of the greatest of storytellers, Anton Chekhov: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
Trump gets this, and the anti-Muslim executive order shows him applying it. First, remove everything that has no relevance to the story, which in this case is all the real people with real lives that are being thrown into further turmoil, whether it is an Iranian mathematician studying at an Ivy League university or a desperate orphan fleeing Islamic State in Syria.
There is a paradox at work here: precisely because these people are in fact entirely irrelevant to what Trump claims to be doing – keeping America safe from terrorism – they are all the more easily erased. You just tell everybody to shut up and talk about the real story: 9/11, jihadists, Islamic State.
Big guns
Next, Chekhov’s rule requires that Trump has to fire in his second chapter all the shotguns he put up on the wall in his first. That first chapter – his long rampage through the Republic primaries and the general election – was all about loading the big guns with vicious ammunition: fear-mongering, xenophobia, ethnic nationalism, anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim vitriol, white revenge for a perceived loss of power and privilege.
He knows that the shaping of the story requires that these weapons, once loaded, must be fired at somebody.
There has been much talk of liberals being in a bubble when it comes to Trump. But his first days in office have shown that the biggest bubble of all was the one occupied by the sneaking regarders and the old-school political cynics.
These are the people who – some with a slightly desperate smile, some with a superior smirk – have informed everyone that President Trump would not be the same as candidate Trump. In the wishful thinking of old-style conservatives and the buyer’s remorse of people who voted for him in the belief that he could not possibly be as boorish as he seemed, there was an assumption that old patterns still held.
The old pattern is, as the New York politician Mario Cuomo put it, that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Campaigns are primarily rhetorical; being in office is primarily practical.
But this is a political dictum – and Trump is not a politician. He is a reality TV star, a semifictional invention. If your character is a big, blowsy burlesque of a mogul, like Trump’s in The Apprentice, he doesn’t suddenly become a quietly competent chief executive. You stick with your shtick.
Forget poetry, forget prose – they are for people who read books. This is spectacle. This is entertainment. The vulgar, reckless narcissist, the pathological liar, the panderer to prejudice, is a vastly popular character. It gets the ratings with which Trump is so dementedly obsessed. Why on earth would he change it?
And besides, the political skill of being two people – one for the campaign trail, one for the office – requires some subtlety of mind. It may not be especially admirable, but those who are good at it are able to keep contradictory notions in their heads at the same time. They can juggle different realities: what they would like to do and what they can do.
But Trump has neither the brain nor the personality for such complexities. He is the one-dimensional man. And that dimension is all Trump. The narcissist has eyes only for his own reflection: when President Trump looks in the mirror, he sees only candidate Trump. He hears only his own voice from the platform.
To his credit, this is one thing Trump didn’t lie about: he said on the campaign trail that he was his own chief adviser. The president listens to the braggart, the bully, the blowhard that roars in his ear. And what it tells him is what the last Russian Tzar, Nicholas II, constantly told himself: “I wish it, therefore it must be.”
His first traitor
Donald Trump’s frantic signing of grandiose orders has about it the air of a despot’s last days, not his first. Deluded tyrants, their grip on reality faltering, simply issue more directives, ordering nonexistent tank divisions to take up their positions, or firing traitors. It is remarkable that Trump got to fire his first traitor, the acting attorney general, who he explicitly accused of betrayal, just 10 days into office. She will not be the last.
There is no place for argument or consultation or a weighing of consequences: I wish it, therefore it must be. Trump, in other words, takes himself, and his own desires literally. And this is both his greatest strength and his biggest weakness.
It should be borne in mind that literalism has a strong grip on American culture. The born-again evangelicals who were so crucial to Trump’s victory take the Bible literally as the word of God. (They are, of course, highly selective in their application of this principle, but that does not stop them from being literal-minded.)
And the right-wing “originalist” legal tradition that Trump honoured this week when he nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court is also proudly literal: it purports to be able to discern what the framers of the US cons ution really meant in the 18th century and be able to apply this meaning quite literally in the 21st.
Trump’s style resonates with these habits of mind, even in its narcissistic weirdness: he is a fundamentalist believer in the literal truth of the Book of Trump; an originalist interpreter of the cons ution of Trumperica. This places him, for his fans, somewhere between God and the founding fathers.
American carnage
However, taking himself literally is also Trump’s weakness – because what he is being literal about is a dystopian fiction.
The “American carnage” he evoked in his inaugural address, the graveyard landscape and ruined republic, the communities stalked by immigrant rapists and jihadi terrorists, does have some distant correlatives in an actual America. But it is so wildly distorted that it has no practical use as a map of the country Trump is supposed to rule. And Trump doesn’t know the difference between his crazy map, with “here be monsters” scrawled all over it, and the real territory it is supposed to chart.
What has been clarified this week is that Trump will not – and most likely cannot – do what a successful ruler needs to do: separate the fictional place in his head from the country he has to govern.
The president will go on as he has started, with empty gestures that have no purpose other than allowing him to claim that Trump has obeyed the sacred word of Trump. The misery wrought in people’s lives and the damage to the global standing of the US will never matter beside that great imperative.
^You lost, dad. Sure, some piss pot rolled over that EO, but, you ain't rollin' over Trump. He's POTUS and he stayin' POTUS.
You're gonna sit here with me for at least the next 4 years and I'm gonna ride your ass like a $3 .
& you ain't wise guyin' him out of it either. That's how he got it. You ain't doin' to him what he did to "you" if that's what you're thinkin'.
No.
Trevor Noah on USA invading Mexico
https://www.facebook.com/thedailysho...5019817216800/
Last edited by boutons_deux; 02-04-2017 at 08:58 PM.
Trump defends Putin’s murder of critics to Bill O’Reilly: ‘You think our country’s so innocent?’
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/trum...e+Raw+Story%29
Trash is REALLY ING STUPID
Trump president not Clinton
Despite Vows, Do ents Show Trump Retains Close Ties to Business Empire
'Records provide do entary evidence of what ethics experts have been warning about since before Trump took office'
http://www.commondreams.org/news/201...usiness-empire
Nobody's gonna read that.
Trump president not Clinton
Ron Wyden wants to remind you—the FBI knows things about Trump and Russia that they're not sharing
It’s the story that Trump has been trying to avoid since he started his campaign. The one that Senate Republicans promised to investigate, then hoped that everyone will forget.
Don’t need a select committee, don’t need to add staffers or increase the budget … oh, yeah, Republicans are all over this one.
But there are a few people in the Senate who are still trying to bring attention to the little fact that a foreign power interred in our election with the express intent of making Donald Trump president.
Now that the intelligence committees are supposedly on the case—and with the FBI not discussing whatever inquiries it may be holding on this front—the controversy (or scandal!) has been nudged to the back burner. This often happens in Washington: a secret investigation is launched, the story goes dark.
Helping cast those shadows is a press that seems to have instant amnesia about anything Russia related, to the extent that Russian forces attacking towns in Ukraine just one day after Trump and Putin had their contents unknown chat, wasn’t enough to push aside Trump’s latest tweets on television ratings. The connections between Putin and Trump, Manafort, Flynn, Page, and others in the regime seldom merits a mention.
Enter Wyden.
For the public, at this point, there is no way to tell if the intelligence committee is doing a good job investigating these dicey issues.
Republicans on the committee certainly have an interest in not embarrassing, inconveniencing, or delegitimizing Trump.
So it's up to Wyden and the other Democrats on the committee to monitor the probe and inform the citizenry if it ends up being a whitewash.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden holds a key role. Even if Republicans try to bury the investigation at this point, Wyden has to both keep the task alive in the Senate, and keep the FBI and intelligence community from quietly shredding evidence now that Trump is in charge.
Wyden has already indicated that there is information on Trump-Russia ties within the US government that ought to be declassified, that he will push to keep the committee's inquiry on track, and that he will press to make as much of its findings as public as possible.
As Harry Reed did in the fall, Wyden has pressed hard on FBI Director Comey, trying to get the FBI to share in public some of the information that a number of senators have been given behind the scenes. But the FBI continues to sit on the information.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/2/3/1629472/-Ron-Wyden-wants-to-remind-you-the-FBI-knows-things-about-Trump-and-Russia-that-they-re-not-sharing?detail=email&link_id=5&can_id=4217e8eb109c 68bd0c2e4143dd2d8c15&source=email-trump-reportedly-tells-female-staffers-to-dress-like-womentwitter-says-fun&email_referrer=trump-reportedly-tells-female-staffers-to-dress-like-womentwitter-says-fun___162456&email_subject=ron-wyden-wants-to-remind-you-the-fbi-knows-things-about-trump-and-russia-that-theyre-not-sharing
Trump blamed for racism at Texas restaurant: ‘Owner is Mexican. We will not return. America first’
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/trum...e+Raw+Story%29
PVL Trash brings out the best in his supporters
boycott MX restaurants, burn down synagogues, deface/burn black churches, swastikas in the subway cars. FOUR MORE YEARS!
Di Frabo is an Italian restaurant out by the dominion, but likely owned by a Mexican. Lots of nationals in the dominion.Trump blamed for racism at Texas restaurant: ‘Owner is Mexican. We will not return. America first’
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/trum...e+Raw+Story%29
PVL Trash brings out the best in his supporters
boycott MX restaurants, burn down synagogues, deface/burn black churches, swastikas in the subway cars. FOUR MORE YEARS!
Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay cost taxpayers $97,830 in hotel bills
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/eric-trumps-trip-to-uruguay-cost-taxpayers-97830-in-hotel-bills/2017/02/03/ababd64e-e95c-11e6-bf6f-301b6b443624_story.html?utm_term=.27dba4701d81
Two Million Dollars a Day to Protect Trump and his Family, But It's About to Get a Lot More Expensive...
Sources told The New York Post the Secret Service is negotiating with the Trump Organization to take over two floors of Trump Tower, and will run a 24/7 command post with the New York Police Department — 40 floors below Trump’s $90 million penthouse.
Trump's situation is unique in that taxpayers will be paying Trump's own corporation for the cost of the two floors and related infrastructure — aside from the normal costs of Secret Service agents, staff, and equipment and barriers.
As president, Trump and his family will be protected by more than 920 Secret Service agents and support personnel in both Washington D.C. and New York City, as reported by NBC News.
Right now, the cost to taxpayers is more than $2 million a day, the do ents show, a number that is sure to increase whenever the president or the first lady travels — or when the threat level rises.
Meanwhile, the New York Police Department is already handling external security at Trump Tower, the president-elect's Manhattan home base, at an estimated cost of $1 million per day.
Terry Sullivan of the White House Transition Project explained the complexity.
"You have to be able to conduct a global war from the front porch — that is just the reality of the situation.
They would need at least a whole floor, and every apartment on that floor would need to be turned into an office."
Complicating matters further — and driving up costs even more — is Trump's plan to return to New York on weekends to spend time with Melania and Barron.
Former Secret Service agent, Evy Poumpouras, hopes Trump will change his mind.
"This is one of those situations where they really should have an honest conversation with him and just really explain to him that this is not a good idea.
To physically re-create the security that exists at the White House in New York City, it's not going to happen.
There's buses going by. There's trucks going by. When that detonates, that building is not going to withstand that blast."
However, having the government as a major tenant would be a boon for Trump Tower, which has seen sales and rentals drop by nearly 40 percent in the past year — due in large part to stepped-up security and protests.
http://ijr.com/wildfire/2016/11/7434...ore-expensive/
Trump blamed for racism at Texas restaurant: ‘Owner is Mexican. We will not return. America first’
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/trum...e+Raw+Story%29
PVL Trash brings out the best in his supporters
boycott MX restaurants, burn down synagogues, deface/burn black churches, swastikas in the subway cars. FOUR MORE YEARS!
That seems super fake, tbh.
Trump and Bannon struggle to implement more Chaos
With his chaos moves, what is Bannon up to? Who does Trump gain? Who does Trump lose?
Not just 'bad hombres': Trump is targeting up to 8 million people for deportation
Up to 8 million people in the country illegally could be considered priorities for deportation, according to calculations by the Los Angeles Times. They were based on interviews with experts who studied the order and two internal do ents that signal immigration officials are taking an expansive view of Trump’s directive
I Was on the National Security Council. Bannon Doesn’t Belong There.
In his first weeks in office, President Trump has outlined plans to reorganize the White House’s National Security Council.
This is in keeping with tradition: New presidents regularly reconfigure the council to fit their management style and national security priorities.
Some of Mr. Trump’s plans, such as including the director of the C.I.A. as a full voting member of the council, are welcome.
But some of Mr. Trump’s other plans are unsettling and should be remedied as soon as possible — in particular the role he has given to his top political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon
Paul Gowder @PaulGowder
By far the craziest story I've seen about Trump.
He WASN'T BRIEFED on his own order putting Rasputin on the NSC?!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/2...ent-more-chaos
Last edited by boutons_deux; 02-06-2017 at 10:40 AM.
Under Trump, Hill GOPers Struggle To Stay Focused On Their Own Goals
There is mounting frustration on Capitol Hill with how President Donald Trump has conducted himself in his first week and a half in office.
Trump's decision last week to roll out an executive order that restricted travel from seven-majority Muslim countries and temporarily halted the U.S. refugee program, reportedly without consulting his Capitol Hill, Justice Department or Department of Homeland Security, bruised egos and left congressional Republicans stunned. Some worried that this could be their new normal.
"I got the impression that the people who were briefing us know there needs to be more caution, I'm not sure the President knows that," said Sen. Chuck Grassley
plans keep getting overshadowed by a White House and President that shoots from the hip and goes ahead with their own agenda without even consulting the first branch of government.
Trump really is beginning to get in their way.
members who had gathered to hammer out a plan to repeal and replace the ACA spent much of the first day answering questions about Trump's false statement that millions of undo ented immigrants cost him the popular vote in the 2016 election.
I think any time you get away from our message, which is jobs, manufacturing, economy, defense, rebuilding the military, I think you derail the message."
senator after senator was forced to address a draft executive order showing Trump was open to re-examining the merits of torture as a method to gather intelligence, which the Senate voted to halt years ago.
"We view that to be a matter of settled law," Sen. John Thune
Senate Republicans have been forced to answer for Trump's too-cozy-for-comfort relationship with Russia, combative phone calls with U.S. allies like Australia and tendency to shun traditional Republican foreign policy norms.
more news breaks that forces Republican lawmakers to answer for Trump and that takes them away from their two main policy goals.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/can-...ls-under-trump
...and not one mention of President BANNON
The Trump administration has sprung a leak. Many of them, in fact.
So far, the Trump White House has gushed.
Unauthorized transcripts of phone conversations between President Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Australia went public last week. So did details about the administration’s stage-managing of Trump’s Supreme Court pick.
Drafts of executive orders, including one that would grant legal protection to people and businesses that discriminate against same-sex married couples on moral or religious grounds, also slipped out before they were ready for prime time.
The leaks have been a bonanza for news organizations, particularly mainstream outlets such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC and the Associated Press. The pattern of leaks to these organizations suggests the leakers are seeking not just wide distribution of confidential information but are hoping to gain the credibility conveyed by establishment news organizations —
the very news outlets that Trump has frequently derided as purveyors of “fake news.”
They also suggest the extent of rivalries and some possible misgivings within Trump’s inner circle about policies and would-be policies. Leaks, after all, are often designed to isolate a rival or to whip up public pressure to derail a decision.
The breadth of the leaks has surprised — and, of course, delighted — journalists,
who say it gives the public an unfiltered view of what those in power are thinking and doing. The leaks of Trump’s calls to Turnbull and Peña Nieto may have been the most surprising of all; it’s rare for transcripts of presidential phone calls or details of meetings with foreign leaders, especially potentially embarrassing exchanges, to leak so soon afterward.
“Given Trump’s erratic nature and lack of experience, especially in foreign affairs, these leaks may be more important than ever,” says David Corn, a reporter with the muckraking Mother Jones magazine. “They give us a sense of how he’s doing his job” and
what important advisers such as Stephen K. Bannon and Jared Kushner are telling him to do.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...t-draw7&wpmm=1
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