monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

@Blickers,

Blickers wrote:

The stock market doubled under Obama. Funny you don't mention the stock market until there's a short bump after Trump gets elected.

Most of that was the recovery from a deep and sudden recession. However the market did indeed do well - a result of the many disincentives Obama created for business investment. Companies instead hoarded profits; paid dividends; bought back their stock - all rewarding investors handsomely. Job creation was very low and, as a direct result wage growth was low- also as a result of these same stupid policies. GDP growth was also well below historical norms, which, coupled with a ballowning national debt, has left us in rather bad shape.

However that appears to be changing in anticipation of coming wiser economic policies ahead.

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@georgeob1,

Yeah...That's what I said...But I was generous and gave Obammy 10% credit.

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@giujohn,

Quote giujohn:

Quote:

The Fed is responsible for about 40% [of the stock market doubling] Obama maybe 10%. Who's responsible for the rest? Corporate America.

Corporate America was in the process of cratering when Obama took office, so it's obviously not that. The last quarter before Obama first took office, the economy was shrinking at annual rate of -8.2%. Saying corporate America led the way is ludicrous. Yes, Obama got help from the Fed when they knocked the interest rate down, but until the economic plunge showed signs of stopping, nobody was going to invest money in the stock market of a country which looks like it's headed for another Great Depression, no matter how cheap the money.

The various bailouts, (which economic conservatives opposed), along with Obama's economic stimulus package stopped the hemorrhaging, and the economy began the long climb back to health. Conservatives opposed most of this, since conservatives do not believe the government should be part of the economy-so when government works to help the economy they have to find excuses to dismiss what just happened. They did it during the Depression of 1929 and you're doing it right now.

Next, you'll be telling us all the Depression coming on in 2008 would have been stopped if only people had the courage to stick with Dubya's economic policies just a little bit longer. Anything but admitting that American needed a change of economic philosophy and Obama provided it.

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@georgeob1,

Quote georgeob1:

Quote:

However the market did indeed do well - a result of the many disincentives Obama created for business investment.

Alas, more economic shibboleths from george. As the economy was shrinking at an annual rate of -8.2% the last quarter of 2008, it is difficult to see how Obama disincentivized the economy if the GDP stopped dropping and started into postitive territory. Yet, that's exactly what happened. If business was disincentivized as you claim, none of that could have happened. But that's all right george, we know the conservatives blogs will have true believers-despite the evidence-as long as you and giujohn take their views from the right wing media instead of the facts before them.

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@Blickers,

The major cause of the 2008 recession was the subprime mortgage loans to many who didn't qualify.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Recession

Employment in the US has finally caught up to pre-recession levels.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/192356/number-of-full-time-employees-in-the-usa-since-1990/

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Quote:

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
The United Nations has such great potential but right now it is just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time. So sad!
1:41 PM - 26 Dec 2016

He tweeted this from Mar-a-Lago, which is kinda funny. But rather less funny is that this guy know what about past or current UN operations?

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Quote:

Back in October, a Marketplace-Edison Research Poll found that two-thirds of Donald Trump voters didn’t trust government-reported economic data, thanks partly to their candidate’s insistence that the numbers are bogus.

Something tells me this attitude is about to change.

After all, Trump will soon take office with among the most favorable economic conditions — as measured by the government and private data sources — imaginable. And you can bet that he, and his supporters, will gleefully claim credit.

Until things go south, anyway.

LINK

Now, let's make a prediction here. When/if the economy does begin to go into the crapper, the one thing we can say with 100% certainty is that neither Trump nor the GOP nor the great majority of Trump fans will entertain for even a moment that his administration is at fault. This is a rock solid guarantee.

1 Reply

@blatham,

Quote blatham:

Quote:

When/if the economy does begin to go into the crapper, the one thing we can say with 100% certainty is that neither Trump nor the GOP nor the great majority of Trump fans will entertain for even a moment that his administration is at fault. This is a rock solid guarantee.

That goes without saying. Trump voters are the people who believe that the murder rate has been going UP for the past 20 years, instead of steadily down like it really is. Face it-as they see it, if percentagewise there are more nonwhites around than there were 20 years ago, then they figure there must be more murders per 100K inhabitants than there were 20 years ago. It's something that they feel they know, and no facts or statistics will change their mind.

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@tony5732,

I tap into 9 news sites a day. 3 liberal, 3 conservative, not Limbaugh, I consider him a lying hot air balloon, and 3 middle of the road. The trouble with the internet is that there are way too many opinion pieces with no real facts or made up facts. I always check internet posts by going to the news sites.

1 Reply

@Leadfoot,

You do realize that most of the problems we have with terrorists was was caused by Bush 43 and his two insane wars. He established the organizations trying to blow up the west all by himself.

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@Debra Law,

In 1995 good and holy christians murdered 8000 Bosnian Muslim citizens. And raped every woman they could find.

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@blatham,

blatham wrote:

Late-breaking news from the clown universe

Quote:
Donald J. TrumpVerified account
‏@realDonaldTrump
The world was gloomy before I won - there was no hope. Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!

Tweet Translation: Pompous narcissist with messiah complex declares himself the Savior of Hope.

1 Reply

@Debra Law,

You are braver than I am, every time I read his vainglorious bullshit I want to throw up.

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

Debra Law wrote:

blatham wrote:

georgeob1 wrote:
However it is simply a fact that Muslim nationa, almost without exception, have long been far less tolerant of either unbelief or other religions than have Christian ones.

I'm not prepared to accept what you've said in this post because you provide no references and because I don't trust your data sources.

The willful blindness of zealots and bigots is unacceptable. It's not so easy to sweep history under a rug and pretend it doesn't exist. The inhumanity and intolerance of Christians over the centuries (and even at the present time) is well documented. Any claim to moral superiority, like georgeob1's claim, is simply dishonest.

Amusing.
=> Blatham disputes my assertion about the relative differences between religious tolerance in the Western, Christian world and in the Moslem nations, because I offered no references, and he wouldn't trust my sources anyway. had I done so.

=> Now Debra calls me a bigot, and dishonest. Then she affirms the counter proposition suggesting that the "inhunanity and intolerance" over the centuries is a Christian thing, and herself offers no sources or references. (Though her evident lack of historical knowledge is astounding)

Meanwhile the episodic slaughter of Christians and other non Muslims continues in the Middle East continues, and the practice of Christianity remains either prohibited or subject to frequent violence throughout in even the currently relatively peaceful parts of the Moslem world.

Georgeob1: You're building straw men. Stop misrepresenting my words and respond to what I actually said or don't respond at all. Even a very poor student of history can readily recite many examples of Christian intolerance and inhumanity. I doubt you are wholly ignorant and unware of the relevant history. Your attempt to claim moral superiority on behalf of Christians over Muslims is unavailing. In fact, it's dishonest.

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My last post on Muslims here.

Right wing media is awash in anti-Muslim sentiment and that is clearly reflected in the posts of those folks here (and on any other such political discussion site). It is a major and consistent feature of modern right wing "thinking" about the world and finding rational voices is not easy. Rabel notes the Srebrenica massacre where more than 8000 Muslims were slaughtered which is, of course, 5000 more humans killed than in 9/11. It's recent history, it's widely known and reported on but it doesn't get mentioned much, or more likely not at all, by our friends on the right. The significant contributions to western culture and knowledge from the Muslim world is rarely addressed. The millions of Muslims who have lived with us for years, peacefully and productively, is almost always ignored, if understood. Presently, discussion with almost anyone from the right on these matters is very unlikely to be productive. The aspect of all this I find very interesting is the right's hunger for enemies who can be cast as evil and as "the other".

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Quote:

Mick Mulvaney, the Republican congressman and fiscal hawk nominated by Donald Trump to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, will, if confirmed, be in charge of creating and promoting Mr. Trump’s federal budgets, a position that would put him at the center of debates within the administration and with Congress over the president’s priorities. As the O.M.B. director, Mr. Mulvaney would also have power to advance or impede federal regulation, because many proposed rules have to pass muster at O.M.B. before they are issued.

The traits Mr. Mulvaney brings to the job include a pronounced hostility to both federal spending and federal regulation — the basics of functional government. He rode the anti-deficit, anti-regulation Tea Party wave into Congress in 2010 and is a founder of the far-right House Freedom Caucus.

In recent years, he has advocated shutting down the government rather than passing legislation to keep the nation and the economy running, and he was one of several dozen House Republicans who refused to back a deal to avoid default on the national debt by raising the statutory debt limit. In 2013, he nearly torpedoed a $50.7 billion relief bill in the wake of Hurricane Sandy by pressing for draconian spending cuts to offset the emergency funds. He has voted many times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, calling it a “government takeover” of health care.

LINK

There is no distance between Mulvaney and the Koch operations and goals.

Trump has never been part of the Koch operation nor the Tea Party crowd. He has never developed any consistent or coherent political philosophy. That stuff (along with much else) has obviously never interested him. His goal has always been to increase his wealth, his social standing and his power. His allies have always been those who have demonstrated loyalty to him.

But now he is consolidating his power by allying himself with key power centers in the modern GOP and that puts him necessarily in an alliance with the Koch crowd who have now effectively taken over the GOP. That's why Mulvaney got this appointment.

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Quote:

Once considered the Republican Party’s best hope to win the White House, Mr. Christie has endured months of humiliation after he dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Mr. Trump — who mocked him as they campaigned together for eating too many Oreos, and passed him over as the vice-presidential nominee. Now, Mr. Christie has returned to New Jersey a lame duck in his last year to discover voters angry over his absences and a Legislature suddenly unwilling to go along with his agenda.

LINK

This calculating bastard had one job - to get the calculating right. And boy did he **** up at most every turn.

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Typical liberal progressive democrat refusal the be held accountable...

Obama Blames The Media For Trump’s Landslide Win In Rural America

HRC ran as a third term of 0bama - she lost big league.
0bama has rejected by the American voter, HRC was vanquished.

Trump is our next president, 0bama is an asshole.

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‘How Propaganda Works’ Is a Timely Reminder for a Post-Truth Age

In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler argued that effective propaganda appeals “to the feelings of the public rather than to their reasoning ability”; relies on “stereotyped formulas,” repeated over and over again, to drum ideas into the minds of the masses; and uses simple “love or hate, right or wrong” formulations to assail the enemy while making “intentionally biased and one-sided” arguments.

Although propaganda has usually been associated with totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the scholar Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, reminds us in his latest book that propaganda can also pose a grave danger to democracies...

...Mr. Stanley begins by offering a definition of propaganda that extends beyond dictionary descriptions of biased or misleading information used to promote a particular political cause or point of view. “Propaganda is characteristically part of the mechanism,” he writes, “by which people become deceived about how best to realize their goals, and hence deceived from seeing what is in their own best interests.” This is achieved by various time-tested means — by appealing to the emotions in such a way that rational debate is sidelined or short-circuited; by promoting an insider/outsider dynamic that pollutes the broader conversation with negative stereotypes of out-of-favor groups; and by eroding community standards of “reasonableness” that depend on “norms of mutual respect and mutual accountability.” READ THIS

Notice that the techniques and goals of a propagandist match that of the con man. Trump is both and good at both.

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@RABEL222,

That's a lot of news! Usually it's not even the facts that contradict each other, it's which ones are omitted and which ones are glorified. Mike Brown. Perfect example.
A liberal source says something like UNARMED BLACK TEEN, SHOT BY WHITE POLICE OFFICER. This was true.
A conservative source says SUSPECT OF ROBBERY TRIES TO STEAL GUN FROM POLICE OFFICER, SHOT IN SELF DEFENSE. Also true.

A liberal source calls the BLM movement "protest". This is true. There is protest.

A conservative source calls it "rioting". Also true. There is riots.

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