The Trump Presidency – 2016

[RedKingGold]

Originally Posted by BYU 14

God I wish I was a WH intern right now!

Would you rather blow the President or be blown up by the President?

[CrescentMoonie]

Taken from Facebook:

I mean, technically, he's draining the swamp. He's just draining the same part over and over again.

[Thomkal]

Originally Posted by Atocep

Boy Scouts dispute Trump claim that their leader called his speech 'the greatest' | TheHill

I like imaging the White House administration having an intern call Trump pretending to be the Head of Boy Scouts to tell him it was the greatest speech they ever heard.

Those Calls to Trump? White House Admits They Didn’t Happen

So in other words, we can't believe anything the President says.

[albionmoonlight]

Dmitry Medvedev on Twitter: "The Trump administration has shown its total weakness by handing over executive power to Congress in the most humiliating way"

Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "Our relationship with Russia is at an all-time & very dangerous low. You can thank Congress, the same people that can't even give us HCare!"

I guess one way to get around accusations of secret meetings with foreign agents is to just try and undermine American institutions on Twitter instead.

[pbot]

Originally Posted by Thomkal

So in other words, we can't believe anything the President says.

The only thing that Trump and truth have in common are the first three letters.

[JPhillips]

From the leaked transcript of Trump's first call to the Australian PM:

“This is going to kill me,” he said to Turnbull. “I am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people into the country. And now I am agreeing to take 2,000 people.”

[QuikSand]

Wow, the transcripts are pretty much what I would have expected, I guess, but it's just painful to read through.

Transcripts of Trump’s calls with Mexico and Australia - Washington Post

[cartman]

He thinks that people in a refugee camp are "in prison".

[Atocep]

“My people stand up and say, ‘Mexico will pay for the wall,’ and your people probably say something in a similar but slightly different language

My favorite

[mckerney]

Originally Posted by Thomkal

Those Calls to Trump? White House Admits They Didn’t Happen

So in other words, we can't believe anything the President says.

We're supposed to believe what he means, not what he says.

To Trump his speech was the greatest the Boy Scouts had every heard, and Mexico should be thanking him for talking about his wall. So those phone calls are something Trump believes he could be told, which is basically the same as them actually happening. And that makes Trump a straight shooter who tells it like it is.

[QuikSand]

pic.twitter.com/sSuwxolM4b

— Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) August 3, 2017

[Thomkal]

Originally Posted by mckerney

We're supposed to believe what he means, not what he says.

To Trump his speech was the greatest the Boy Scouts had every heard, and Mexico should be thanking him for talking about his wall. So those phone calls are something Trump believes he could be told, which is basically the same as them actually happening. And that makes Trump a straight shooter who tells it like it is.

Ya know it's sad that our own President needs an interpreter

[cuervo72]

/wonders how DD is doing in his drug-infested den

[mckerney]

Originally Posted by cuervo72

/wonders how DD is doing in his drug-infested den

Trump really needs an Arrested Development style narrator at all times.

“I won New Hampshire..."
He didn't.
"...because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den.”
It isn't.

"I am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people into the country."
Uhhhh, what?

[Shkspr]

I eagerly await next week's Twitter rant about "Rhode Island, pus-ridden lair of toothless whores".

[BYU 14]

Originally Posted by RedKingGold

Would you rather blow the President or be blown up by the President?

I think he has Kelly Ann Conway for the former and there would be 702 other scapegoats ahead of me for the later. So I'll just leave him messages from {insert organization here} and tell him how great his latest speech was.

[Logan]

17 day golf vacation for the CiC. Hope he can come back relaxed.

[digamma]

Fake news alert: Mueller has reportedly impaneled a grand jury.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by digamma

Fake news alert: Mueller has reportedly impaneled a grand jury.

a brief check of "the_donald" subreddit, I'll cherry-pick this as my favorite highly upvoted comment:

This "investigation" is tax-payer funded opposition research for 2020. Mark my words: there will be no charges or anything of that nature against Trump, but his tax returns and other personal information will be leaked to the press in advance of the next election.

[bronconick]

CNN: Grand Jury
MSNBC: Grand Jury
Fox News: Are zebras a kind of horse?

[albionmoonlight]

Originally Posted by digamma

Fake news alert: Mueller has reportedly impaneled a grand jury.

The Grandest Jury! You've never seen a jury this Grand! Obama never had juries this Grand!

[Thomkal]

Looks like Kelly is off to a good start as Chief of Staff:

Kelly cracks down on West Wing back channels to Trump - POLITICO

[RedKingGold]

By looking at Trump's history and business strategy, I have zero doubt the end game here is litigation. He will react to any viable threat to remove him from office by suing and attempt to entangle this in litigation for years to come.

Richard Nixon, he ain't.

[cuervo72]

Can he get him to stop talking to Sean Hannity?

[RainMaker]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

Wow, the transcripts are pretty much what I would have expected, I guess, but it's just painful to read through.

Transcripts of Trump’s calls with Mexico and Australia - Washington Post

Not a fan of transcripts like this leaking. But it does show the President blatantly lied to the public yet again.

It's tough to read that stuff and not wonder if he's suffering from early on-set dementia or something else. It's just not how a healthy person converses with people.

[thesloppy]

His behavior/manner is entirely consistent with chronic cocaine use. Just sayin'.

[jeff061]

Originally Posted by RainMaker

Not a fan of transcripts like this leaking. But it does show the President blatantly lied to the public yet again.

It's tough to read that stuff and not wonder if he's suffering from early on-set dementia or something else. It's just not how a healthy person converses with people.

It's how a stupid narcissist out of their depth and with a mistaken belief in their ability to bullshit intelligent people act.

[molson]

"We lost a lot of factories in Ohio and Michigan and I won these states – some of these states have not been won in 38 years by a Republican and I won them very easily. So they are dancing in the streets. You probably have the same thing where they are dancing in your streets also, but in reverse"

I'm intrigued by this "reverse dancing in the street" concept. What's the reverse of dancing in the streets? Not dancing in the streets? Or rioting?

[larrymcg421]

Originally Posted by molson

I'm intrigued by this "reverse dancing in the street" concept. What's the reverse of dancing in the streets? Not dancing in the streets? Or rioting?

Reverse Dancing in the Street:

[JPhillips]

Trump tonight:

"There were no Russians in our campaign"

[Brian Swartz]

Had some RL stuff happen the last few days, but to catch up on a worthwhile discussion:

Originally Posted by NobodyHere

What do you think about having a "right" to an attorney?

Depends on whether you mean the right to counsel in general or the right to have an attorney provided for you if you can't afford one. The first is very much fitting with my original point.

Originally Posted by Groundhog

You can get caught up in semantics, but there are two definitions of "rights", one is legal entitlements, and the other is what is moral or just.

The second isn't a right in the 'Bill of Rights' sense. Right or wrong is different from 'unalienable rights', and people who talk about healthcare being a basic human right aren't talking about being moral/just. They're putting it on the level of the second group. This is fundamentally not just about semantics.

Originally Posted by Butter

Isn't the first right in the Declaration of Independence the right to "life"? Does that right only mean that once you are conceived, you have the right to be born? Or does it only mean that you have the right to not be killed by an illegal act that the government was formed to protect?

The second one, more or less. There are many things which can cause death which were obviously not intended to be covered.

Originally Posted by Butter

if you are going to force people to carry fetuses to viability, don't you also have a responsibility to cover the cost of the care of the mother through birthing the child?

Doesn't necessarily follow at all, and I'm regularly confused by this line of argument. I understand how it follows from a certain point-of-view, mind you, but that's not the traditional conservative one which is being questioned here. That view would in general say that the biological parents of the child are responsible for bearing the cost of their own behavior. Again there's a rather massive difference between believing government has a duty to protect life, and believing it has a duty to mitigate unwanted consequences. Whether that difference is meaningful is going to depend a lot on where one falls on the political spectrum, but they aren't even close to being the same thing.

.02

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by Brian Swartz

Doesn't necessarily follow at all, and I'm regularly confused by this line of argument. I understand how it follows from a certain point-of-view, mind you, but that's not the traditional conservative one which is being questioned here. That view would in general say that the biological parents of the child are responsible for bearing the cost of their own behavior. Again there's a rather massive difference between believing government has a duty to protect life, and believing it has a duty to mitigate unwanted consequences. Whether that difference is meaningful is going to depend a lot on where one falls on the political spectrum, but they aren't even close to being the same thing.

.02

Except that the "unwanted consequences" don't happen in a vacuum, and this is where conservatives miss the boat. This isn't "don't want chlamydia? don't have sex."

The birth and upbringing of children is very much a social thing. I don't mean Hillary Clinton's "it takes a village"; that's a different discussion.

What's at issue here is what becomes of the next generation and whether or not the children born into that generation become a drag on society.

Conservatives, traditionally, abhor the social welfare state and the idea that there are generations of welfare babies who are born into welfare and birth their own children into welfare.

You want to talk about logic, it is deeply illogical for conservatives to wring their hands over the societal burden children born into poverty become, while at the same time working to prevent impoverished young women from controlling their own fertility. You can't have it both ways. If it's a moral issue that impoverished young women should bear the consequences for their choices, or that women who are raped should bear the consequences for the choices of others (and remember, "rape and incest" are by no means universally approved exceptions to the conservative anti-abortion orthodoxy), then it's a moral issue for the state to help the children born as a result escape the cycle of poverty.

And, no, that doesn't mean taking away those babies and giving them to wealthy, infertile, white couples. That's ALSO a moral issue.

So, I mean, is the state compelled to act in its own best interest? Because I would argue that it is in the state's best interest to either actively assist its citizens in controlling their own fertility, or at least benignly not prevent them from doing so.

In whose interest is it for a child to be born into a situation wherein that child grows up to have three or four children of their own in the same desperate circumstances?

Who does that benefit other than free-marketers who want distressed labor as cheaply as they can politically acquire?

[PilotMan]

"This culture of leaking must stop." - Roman Catholic Church
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Tobacco Companies
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Nixon
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Bernie Madoff
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Enron
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Banking industry
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Oil Industry
"This culture of leaking must stop." - Trump Justice Department

[albionmoonlight]

I like how "stop being so laughably incompetent that folks feel the need to leak about what you are doing to save the country" isn't part of the strategy.

[RainMaker]

Again, a tweet for every scenario.

Why is @BarackObama always campaigning or on vacation?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2011

"Don't take vacations. What's the point? If you're not enjoying your work, you're in the wrong job." -- Think Like A Billionaire

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2012

When will Obama next go on vacation if he wins the election? The day after.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2012

Pres. Obama is about to embark on a 17 day vacation in his ‘native’ Hawaii, putting Secret Service away from families on Christmas. Aloha!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2013

President @BarackObama's vacation is costing taxpayers millions of dollars----Unbelievable!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2012

[Brian Swartz]

Originally Posted by SackAttack

it is deeply illogical for conservatives to wring their hands over the societal burden children born into poverty become, while at the same time working to prevent impoverished young women from controlling their own fertility.

Not from their POV it isn't. We're now far afield from the original issue that was under discussion, but if you apply non-conservative assumptions to conservative positions(or do a similar exercise with any other worldview), you're going to come up with a lot of conflicts. For the purposes here, it should be enough to recognize that some people think these things do basically occur in a vacuum and they would take issue with other assumptions being made here as well. That doesn't make them illogical; if there held liberal assumptions about the world, they'd probably be liberals, not conservatives.

[Edward64]

I was on the plane last night and was watching CNN special on the 80's regarding Ronald Reagan. It was pretty cool re-living events, some of you around in the 80's should check it out.

There was a Korean airline that was shot down by the Soviets during the height of the Cold War in the early 80's.

The episode said that when intel told Ronald Reagan that this mistake happened because the Soviets really thought the US would do a first strike, he was surprised that Soviets really thought this way and decided to start discussions and have the 2 leaders get to know each other. The first meeting was a get to know each other and it ultimately progressed to a reduction in nukes.

I don't think now that mano-mano talks can happen with NK (and Trump doesn't have the charisma of the Gipper and he'll threaten vs negotiate) but do wonder if Obama could have tried the personal charm offensive.

Just an interesting coulda, woulda, shoulda what-if scenario.

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by Brian Swartz

Not from their POV it isn't. We're now far afield from the original issue that was under discussion, but if you apply non-conservative assumptions to conservative positions(or do a similar exercise with any other worldview), you're going to come up with a lot of conflicts. For the purposes here, it should be enough to recognize that some people think these things do basically occur in a vacuum and they would take issue with other assumptions being made here as well. That doesn't make them illogical; if there held liberal assumptions about the world, they'd probably be liberals, not conservatives.

Logic has nothing to do with "point of view."

What you're talking about is willful cognitive dissonance.

"All life is precious until it's born" is what it boils down to when a one votes for a politician who simultaneously wants to take policy actions that negatively impact a woman's ability to control her own fertility while at the same time taking actions to restrict said woman's ability access to things like SNAP, health care, y'know.

I'm not trying to make a case for ABORT ALL THE BABIES here.

What I'm saying is if evangelical conservatives really thought through the implications of their single-issue voting, they'd realize that on this issue there is no way to have their cake and eat it too. They can have heavy restrictions or bans on fertility control, or they can reduce dependency on the social safety net.

That isn't a Gordian knot that can be cut unless you're willing to go back to before the 1960s and say "20% poverty is a completely acceptable tradeoff in exchange for government codifying my moral beliefs into law."

Which is itself at odds with the alleged moral-religious beliefs of that crew.

And, yes, there are issues where liberals engage in some cognitive dissonance of their own. But those aren't the issues under discussion at this moment.

[cuervo72]

Have sex only under circumstances which are acceptable to us, or you deserve poverty. Basically what it boils down to for that crowd.

[CrescentMoonie]

Or maybe they're right to view abortion as murder, and not "controlling fertility," but dead wrong on compassion after birth.

[Thomkal]

Originally Posted by RainMaker

Again, a tweet for every scenario.

He actually came blame Obama for his latest vacation. Work was scheduled on the White House when he was still in office to do this work (air conditioning I think) for this time when the President traditionally takes a vacation-so probably good he is not there. But yeah still its amazing how he completely forgets that he tweeted against something when Obama was President, but suddenly now it is okay.

[Thomkal]

Republican donor sues GOP for fraud over ObamaCare repeal failure | TheHill

Good luck with that.

[cuervo72]

Originally Posted by CrescentMoonie

Or maybe they're right to view abortion as murder, and not "controlling fertility," but dead wrong on compassion after birth.

And also wrong on birth control and sex ed.

[Brian Swartz]

Originally Posted by SackAttack

What you're talking about is willful cognitive dissonance.

No I'm not. Let's use one of your examples, since I used to believe the way you incorrectly describe.

Originally Posted by SackAttack

"All life is precious until it's born" is what it boils down to when a one votes for a politician who simultaneously wants to take policy actions that negatively impact a woman's ability to control her own fertility while at the same time taking actions to restrict said woman's ability access to things like SNAP, health care, y'know.

Again, not necessarily. You can believe in limited government, and through that prism find that taking money from your fellow citizens to fund such things is wrong, while at the same time believing there is a governmental mandate under the concept of justice to protect the unborn from being unjustifiably killed. Those two things do not necessarily conflict. Everyone -- and I do mean everyone -- wants to do certain things to protect life, and not certain other things(I don't know anyone who thinks every single person should be under constant guard to avoid threats and have an automatic 100k income, for example). Drawing the line at a specific point does not mean you no longer value life, it's simply a recognition of where your boundary is on what government should and should not do.

[Warhammer]

Originally Posted by CrescentMoonie

Or maybe they're right to view abortion as murder, and not "controlling fertility," but dead wrong on compassion after birth.

I am more in this group. However, no one should receive a blank check for having kids and sitting on their butt.

That said, if you go to a class, have to show up weekly for a check in, or have social services go out to a house to check in regularly? Put me down. I am all about teaching a man to fish.

Heck, I'll even shift gears a bit, growing up, the kids that were gifted cars, for the most part, did not take care of them. Those that had to buy a car, or heavily invest to maintain the car, kept their car spotless.

It's a matter of care and responsibility. If you know, regardless of what happens, you will receive something. Who cares about taking care of things? When you have to work for it, people tend to take better care of things because they are invested and it is a matter of pride.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by albionmoonlight

The GOP base really seems to live in this bizarre world where lots poor people are actually secretly rich people who just choose to live in squalid poverty because . . . (and that's where they lose me).

After starting to type up responses to recent posts about 10 times and stopping, I just went back and found this quote that sums up most of my feelings ideally.

[Chief Rum]

Originally Posted by Radii

After starting to type up responses to recent posts about 10 times and stopping, I just went back and found this quote that sums up most of my feelings ideally.

And yet because the left forgot that poor white people actually exist and are also not secretly rich, they lost the last election.

See how that works? No one gets anywhere taking the other's stances and pushing those stances to ridiculous extremes, just to pat themselves on their own morally superior backsides.

All that does is create division.

Instead, let's acknowledge that both sides have good ideas and bad ideas and hopefully they can work together to find a happy middle. And if their supporters stop tearing into each other on social media every day, maybe the reps in DC will start to think they can actually make intelligent policy decisions, instead of catering to the extremes of their own parties to ensure re-election.

[JPhillips]

Working in Bedminster, N.J., as long planned construction is being done at the White House. This is not a vacation - meetings and calls!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2017

Everything's a con.

[cuervo72]

I want to know what the conservative ideas that help poor people are.

[CrescentMoonie]

Originally Posted by cuervo72

I want to know what the conservative ideas that help poor people are.

I'll pretend that's an honest question and say: the conservative approach is to allow private organizations to do the work. Some do a great job of it. Some are just fronts for taking people's money.

The problem with the "conservative" approach is that the religious organizations that actually do the work the right way are under attack from the alt-right/Trump dumpster fire and have been since day 1.

"In their private lives, religious Americans are extremely generous. According to the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving at Indiana University, donations to congregations, denominations, mission board, and TV and radio ministries account for roughly one-third of all annual giving in the U.S."

"In 2001, the University of Pennsylvania professor Ram Cnaan tried to tally the financial value of all congregational social services in Philadelphia, estimating that it added up to roughly $247 million."

"If programs like the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grants are cut, as Trump has proposed, many religious organizations would lose major parts of their operating budgets. This kind of federal-spending cut can have tangible consequences: World Relief, an evangelical organization that works with the federal government on refugee resettlement, cut 140 staffers and closed five offices earlier this year when the Trump administration announced a sharp decrease in the number of refugees that will be accepted into the United States."

"Using a national survey of religious congregations in the U.S., the Duke Divinity School professor Mark Chaves found that 83 percent of congregations have some sort of program to help needy people in their communities."

Can Religious Charities Take the Place of the Welfare State? - The Atlantic

Obviously, there would be a lot to replace if current government programs went away, but the people most likely to do so are typically conservative politically.