Can't one of his advisors negotiate with Twitter to put him on ghost mode and then generate bots so that he appears to get replies and mentions?

My son had an interesting take on (kind of) this topic earlier tonight.

My wife said something along the lines of what you said, about maybe getting him off Twitter, my 18 y/o said it'd be the worst thing he could do with younger supporters. His feeling was that Trump's tweets (though I could argue that his Twitter style is more accurate) were the single most effective medium with younger supporters. Remember, he does know a lot of Trump voters in his current cadre at school, he swears that the tweets had more influence "than every ad, debate, article, everything else combined"

I do think that is interesting, but I guess I'd just note that governing via Twitter is much different than campaigning via Twitter. The latter can be very effective, the former carries big risk.

Granted, it's anecdotal but I know him pretty darned well & his take on the role of Twitter surprised even me. And he's not a big Twitter person generally, uses it strictly for random amusement pretty much, so it's not anything like that skewing him on it afaik.

Such topical spam.

Looks like the "just ignore it" phase towards his mind dumbing tweets has already hit at least for this small subset of folks on this board.

What's the first thing House Republicans do?

Neuter the House ethics enforcement.

Draining that swamp!

I feel like if this election has taught us anything, its that it doesn't matter what's really true, only that the first thing someone says about a subject is the truth.

At least Trump sort of called them out on it and it looks like they may be reversing it?

I don't think people are used to the constant trial balloons right now. Everybody thought that Congress and Trump would just be ramming things through once they take power. I think they've wisely put a TON of trial balloons out there in public to see which parts of the shit hit the fan. They're definitely still going to put through a lot of things they believe in, but the degree to which they do it appears to largely be related to the level of outrage (or lack thereof) that each receives when they put it out there in mostly social media.

We'll see if it works or not in the long run, but I'd rather have this than surprises. Even the ethics thing yesterday was clearly a trial balloon that popped. Also improved Ryan's standing as showing he has a pretty good pulse of what the general population would think of it.

A trial balloon is where you leak something to the press or throw it out on a Sunday morning political show, not where you ACTUALLY VOTE TO MAKE THE CHANGE.

OK

LOL

Another win for Trump. If GM does the same, Trump's going to get a lot more favorable treatment in the next election in Michigan.

Ford to scrap Mexico plant, invest in Michigan; CEO cites Trump policies | Fox News

Ryan said he was against it, but also agreed to bring it to the floor after membership voted for it. After it leaked to the press he got killed and then got membership to kill it after it became clear it wasn't going to pass.

Ryan looks good is a unique interpretation.

Dunno if this is the right place for it, but Megyn Kelly is leaving FOX News to go to NBC.

Log In - New York Times


No report on how much the deal is, but Kelly was making $15mil a year, so it's likely quite a bit more than that.

I don't think agreeing to bring it to the floor is a negative thing. He may not have liked it, but I don't want a House leader who thinks he can shut down the entire system on his own if the majority of people are for it. That's a far worse scenario. He did exactly what he should have done.

So MSNBC is going more conservative? These don't sound like NBC shows and CNBC has a lower audience than MSNBC.

It sounds like she'll have a daytime show on the network NBC, not MSNBC if I'm reading correctly. That's a big step up from cable news.

Did Ford choose to stay on their own or did they get a bunch of corporate welfare like Carrier?

I hate to tell you this, but no one is going to care if this trend continues. If he's putting jobs back into places that desperately need jobs or are about to have jobs move overseas, it's a huge win for him. I agree that we'll see how this plays out over time, but it's a huge PR win for him up front.

The exactness of where her daytime and evening news magazine shows are going to air is due to the fact that NBC News runs MSNBC. So NBC News announcing she's going to have a daytime show every day and a news magazine show on Sunday evenings can be either.

Or, it could be the daytime show on MSNBC and the Sunday evening magazine show on NBC proper (before football).

Edit: Right now, during daytime, NBC has Dr. Phil from 3-4 and the Ellen from 4-5. Both are pretty good shows for the network. So it's likely that Kelly's daytime show is on MSNBC.

At this point, we don't really know.

Damn fake news! :)

Doubt cast that Russian gov't tried to hack Vermont utility, Washington Post says - CBS News

I agree. I don't even have a problem with certain incentives to keep jobs in the states if it makes financial sense. But there is a difference in saving jobs and having the government pay to save jobs.

In the end it'll be interesting to see where the unemployment rate is in 4 years compared to today.

The article mentioned syndication which made me think NBC.

Fox News spun the hell of that story.

In the interview with Cavuto, Ford's CEO said that they were going to build the next generation of the Ford Focus in the plant they were building. The decision to scrap the new plant was made because they've seen a decrease in demand for small cars and don't need the capacity anymore. They will instead build the next generation of the Ford Focus in an existing plant in Mexico.

Cavuto even asked him directly if he would have done this even if Donal Trump were not elected and he said "Yes, absolutely."

The decision to not build the new plant in Mexico had absolutely nothing to do with Trump.

The CEO did give Trump's proposals partial credit for the decision to increase their investment in Michigan (a plant that builds electric cars) by $700 million. But he did state that there were no negotiations with Trump or his administration.

Most of the Russian hacking stuff has been trash. And the Washington Post has been the worst major media outlet at spreading it. The media buying into everything the current administration is shoveling reminds me of the WMD crap. If you read the stuff they just released, it's heavy on circumstantial evidence but light on any real evidence.

Matt Taibbi wrote a good takedown on the Washington Post a month back. Their reporting on this has been terrible.

'Washington Post' 'Blacklist' Story Is Shameful, Disgusting - Rolling Stone

1) Dr. Phil & Ellen are syndicated shows, not network shows. They air on various network affiliates on a market-by-market basis. WXIA/Atlanta has him, that's an NBC. WMAZ/Macon has him, that's CBS. The same stations both have Ellen in those markets, but in Augusta Phil airs on the NBC while Ellen airs on the CBS affiliate. There may be some tendency for O&O (network owned & operated) but none of the networks have a dominant position in the U.S. with those (indeed, it's prohibited by law)

2) That said, I've seen enough local ratings to know that ANY affiliate who gets an ownership mandate to drop either of those high performing shows for a start-up will be a very pissed off local station.

Ah, interesting. I didn't realize they weren't owned by the networks.

Mike Rowe hit this one on the head pretty well. Pretty much what the majority of Americans will take from this situation.

I don't think Rowe "hit it on the head", but I do think that a good many Americans in the Rust Belt will have the same opinion (though perhaps not a majority of Americans).

Oh, I think there's more than that. Most of the Midwest and South would buy in as well.

The thing with minimum wage is we are already paying for it. If someone makes $8/hour they require government assistance elsewhere (food stamps, Medicaid, etc).

I've seen proposals that would target larger retailers. After a certain number of employees or income you are required to pay the higher minimum wage. This would make sense as those companies benefit from our government much more than smaller companies and they should be paying a larger share.

I guess it comes down to how you want it to be doled out. Right now Walmart pays $10/hour and we subsidize the other $5/hour. The alternative is Walmart pays the $15/hour and while this may increase prices, it should lead to less government spending and lower taxes to offset it.

He's right that we need more companies to do what Ford and Wal-Mart did by keeping jobs and buying in the US. It would also help if these companies paid taxes and didn't hoard money in offshore havens when they benefit a great deal from our country. But if they were paying me millions to market their products, I wouldn't bring that up either.

He also doesn't bring up that manufacturing of the Ford Focus is still moving to Mexico. But then again he probably didn't know that since his source was the same Fox News article that horribly spun the story. For some reason, MBBF felt the need to edit that part out.

FWIW, this article has a lot more information

Ford invests $700M in Mich., cancels plan for Mexico plant

These individual announcements will be great PR if the economy stays hot, but they won't matter if things go south. In four years if the economy is strong Trump will win and if it isn't he won't. All of the daily wins/losses don't really matter.

He's already addressed that in his proposed tax changes. He's proposing a corporate tax rate of 15%, which is competitive with nearly all countries that currently house offshore HQ's (Ireland is amongst the lowest at 12.5%). Economists estimate that a drop to 15% of the tax rate would increase the GDP by 4-5% just because of the bump in corporate tax income that would occur when businesses move back their HQ's to take advantage of the more favorable rate.

I'm so old I remember when the deficit actually mattered.

Thanks to Donald Trump, I've added one full time position to my farm.

Of course I filled that position with a person from Nicaragua.

Ford Cancels Mexican Plant but Is Still Moving Small Car Production - NBC News

Some of this stuff scares the crap out of me. Would we even really know publicly (edit: Or rather, would it have been a news story on the "front page") that Ford was building a $1.6 Billion plant in Mexico if it weren't for Trump's "rhetoric"? How many other companies are doing this? Why didn't we ever hear much about this when Obama was the President?

Is Trump the more effective vocal leader of getting his concerned aired nationally? Albeit, it's mostly negative from the MSM, but at least we are learning about this at the general masses level.

Yes, we would. We did. We do.

The other counterpoint here is that as great as 700 people keeping their jobs is the viability of Ford is going to have a much bigger effect on Americans in a huge number of ways. I hope that Ford and other companies are able to operate with duties to stakeholders (including pensioners and retirees) in mind rather than only focusing on jobs. In a perfect world those two are aligned and you can do both, but the world is far from perfect.

Gosh, all this talk has me wondering what people would have thought about Obama if he had ever done anything to help out the auto industry.

Trump's public war with the intelligence community is nuts. It's amazing what lengths he's willing to go to defend Putin.

The "Intelligence" briefing on so-called "Russian hacking" was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017

Source for that? I think the corporate tax rate is somewhat too high, but I'm not sure 15% is a better answer than 25 (current federal rate is 35%, and effective rate is closer to 27, which is a different issue), and you'd need a lot of businesses moving listed HQ's back to the US to increase GDP that much. (I also assume you mean taxable corporate income in the last sentence, not corporate tax income.) But there are also reasons beyond lower tax rates to charter a company or specific divisions in a different country.

That's awesome. What does the new person do?

How many assholes are in that Schumer family? Chuck wants to be the Dem hero by holding up confirmations, and Amy still hasn't left the country like she promised. I'm sure Canadians would love to hear her talk about her vagina for two hours.

That is one scorching hot take. Thanks for sharing it.

Exactly right. The counter point is the problem for sure. We are competing with foreigner that can do our manufacturing jobs the exact same but don't pay workers (or retirees or pensioners) much of anything compared to our standards.

This isn't a knock on Obama, but other than that, another solid post.