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Monthly Archives: July 2018

My Opinion Based On The Facts I Know


The current administration promised to “drain the swamp”. That is a great promise to rally his base however he neglected to state that he would be putting his own “swamp” in place in the form of his cabinet members. he revolving door of staffers has been destabilizing at best and making for an inability to deliver a clean message. He has held on to his “attack” group which gives his words life as it is apparent that he can’t string two coherent and reasonable words together. He has diminished our relations with our long time allies with under thought utterances that belie the facts. His recent excursion to a meeting with North Korea leader, Kim which he declared as  productive was basically a failed play which elevated Kim’s status as a world leader rather than the despot that he is. This is the type of play that TOTUS has done all of his life. The play is to utter some half truth and move to an initial start , then stop short because his attention to detail is non-existent. Unfortunately this trait leave the nation’s fate to his appointee’s whose abilities to negotiate on the world stage is suspect and undeniably lacking. Now he has pushed our long time allies aside with insults, innuendo and lies for the company of a known dictator (who he admires). He has pardoned felons just to show that he has done something “Presidential”. He has imposed tariffs on allies and foes alike with no thought of the immediate and long-range effect on American Citizens while extolling the virtues of a “trade war”. Again this is a Trumpism. It is worth noting that there appears to be no tariffs on the goods and services used by his family members. It is possible to think that what we have in place now is a live puppet controlled by staffers whose agenda is no good for any of us , including them but they have become so imbued with the power tacitly given to them by a minimally informed leader whose main strengths are bullying and name calling  to get his way. This has been effective even to point of cowing Congress who seem to want to get their own agendas (again which are not good for the voters) in place. Our option is simple, forget what the parties tell you and look at the people who are running for office (first time or for re-election) and think “what has this person done while in office”. It easier to vote some one out than to remove them after they are elected. Pay attention to multiple sources of information and perhaps read the Constitution again. Our democracy used to be a model for others but now we are becoming a joke with our adversaries having a good laugh about it. Remember North Korea and Russia among others are not our friends.

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Trumpcare


The Duplex for Jul 11, 2018 Comic Strip

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The Big Hits Are Building


The biggest surprise and possibly pain will come to the most ardent Trump Supporters. The Executive orders repealing regulations benefit big business, not the ordinary citizens. Now coming down the pike is a Conservative High court Judge who will put more pain on all of us. While all of the Tweets are flying, there are regulations thinning out healthcare for many including people with pre-existing health conditions. Our neer do well seat fillers are saying nothing (and that their job to shout BS when it occurs, if they represent us as they say) for fear of a calling out by the Resident. If you are in the mindset that your representative is doing all they can for you then you probably have been living somewhere else for a long time. There are no more statesmen in the Congress, what we have are 500 plus malingerers  plying their trade and getting paid to do it.. This administration is about Trump not America. All administration actions are geared towards the edification of a narcissist not the country as a whole. The current staff in the administration is staffed by the very special interest folks that we have railed against previously but seem to have tacitly embraced now. It is in our best interests to avoid embracing this administration’s actions as they will surely slap us in the face down the proverbial road with the help of our elected legislators.

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More Deregulation Not in Our Interest.


JULY 5, 2018
Meyerson on TAP
Adding Insult (More Precisely, Discomfort and Anger) to Injury. Airline passengers, abandon all hope. On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s Federal Aviation Administration decreed that it would do nothing about the relentless shrinkage of airplane seats and legroom. Rejecting a plea from Flyers’ Rights (a passengers’ organization) and a judge’s order that it reconsider its position, the FAA said that such concerns as passenger comfort were none of its business.
Over the past couple of decades, the average width of a coach airline seat has shrunk from 18.5 inches to 17 inches. The average amount of seat pitch (the distance between your seat and the seat in front of you) in coach has shrunk from 35 inches to 31 inches, though on some airlines it’s been scrunched to 28 inches.
The size of the average passenger has not shrunk correspondingly.
If passengers flying in steerage—excuse me, in coach—have problems with the FAA’s obeisance to the airlines, they’re left with what is effectively the non-option of imploring the airlines themselves. However, the years of seat shrinkage coincide with the years that airlines have increasingly come under the control of private-equity firms and other large-scale investors bent on squeezing more seats on to the planes and more profits out of the airlines. In 2015, a former private-equity executive and American Airlines board member penned a gushing column in The Wall Street Journal, celebrating how private equity’s ownership of American had eliminated the “inefficiencies” (such as the decent treatment of passengers) that had reduced the airline’s profits. Just yesterday, the Journal reported that a private-equity firm had purchased Sun Country Airlines.
Squeezed between the voraciousness of finance capital and the indifference to public welfare of Trump’s regulatory agencies, the American airline passenger has been officially told to lump it—and the lump had better be small. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Business:Ivanka Trump’s Chinese-Made Products Conveniently Spared from Dad’s Tariffs


 
Mary Papenfuss, HuffPost 5 hours ago

Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods won’t touch Ivanka Trump’s foreign-made products for her fashion line.
While Trump rails at Harley-Davidson motorcycles for moving some production to Europe to dodge EU tariffs, the first daughter and senior White House adviser has never manufactured a single product for her Ivanka Trump brand on American soil.
Trump enacted tariffs Friday morning on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods, affecting hundreds of products from boats to medical devices and auto parts. Products spared include those manufactured by his daughter.
That means Chengdu Kameido Shoes in Sichuan province can continue to supply shoes for the Ivanka Trump brand as it has in the past. It’s currently bidding for a new contract to manufacture 140,000 pairs of shoes for Trump’s company, a spokesman told The South China Morning Post.
Hangzhou HS Fashion in Zhejiang province also said it’s filling orders for orders for the G-III Apparel Group, which supplies shoes to Trump’s brand.
Until January 2017 all of Ivanka Trump’s products were made in factories in China and Hong Kong, research director Chris Rogers at Panjiva, a global trade data tracking company headquartered in New York, told Politico. Since then, some manufacturing has apparently been moved to other overseas factories in Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam.

There have been no obvious shipments from China since mid-March, but Rogers speculated shipments may now be more difficult to trace because they could be moving under code names.
Other enterprises and workers in the U.S., meanwhile, are already feeling the heat from a trade war. China’s retaliatory tariffs have targeted U.S. seafood, soybeans, dairy products, cars, apples, whiskey, pet food and cigarettes, among several other products. Farmers are fearful they won’t be able to sell products they had earmarked for China. They also worry that suppliers from other countries will pick up the valuable market — for good — that they have worked for years to cultivate.
“Soybeans are the top agriculture export for the United States, and China is the top market for purchasing those exports,” Iowa soybean grower John Heisdorffer said in a statement. “The math is simple. You tax soybean exports at 25 percent, and you have serious damage to U.S. farmers.”
Despite the president’s mantra to “buy American and hire American” the Trump family retains major business operations overseas, and the Trump Organization continues to manufacture most Trump products in foreign factories.
The president even continues to profit from partnerships involving the Chinese government through state-supported companies and investments, including in developments in Dubai and Indonesia, notes the Washington Post. Ivanka Trump won a number of valuable trademarks in China just as her father was pushing to lift U.S. sanctions against Chinese telecom company ZTE, over the objection of congressional leaders. Trump announced his support for ZTE 72 hours after the Chinese government agreed to put half-a-billion dollars into the Indonesian project. The deal raised “serious ethical issues,” the head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics said.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

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Perfectly Clear


Kevin Kallaugher for Jul 9, 2018 Comic Strip

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High Court Comparison


JULY 6, 2018
Kuttner on TAP
Kielbasa Republic. Question for today: What exactly is the difference between the way Poland’s autocratic rulers have disabled its Supreme Court and the way the Republicans have taken over the U.S. courts?
Poland, where the governing party has an absolute majority in parliament, is in trouble with the leaders of the European Union and many of its own outraged citizens for jamming through a measure requiring mandatory retirement at 65 for Supreme Court justices. This thinly disguised coup will force the ouster of some 27 of 72 sitting justices, and turn the Court into a rubber stamp, removing the last obstacle to full dictatorship.
In the U.S., Republicans under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pursued a policy of blocking as many Obama judicial appointments as possible, slowing the process way down, and bargaining with the administration to appoint more centrist nominees as a condition of agreeing to a vote at all. This was in sharp contrast to the way Democrats treated appointees of President George W. Bush, when only the most extreme nominees were challenged.
When a Supreme Court seat came open after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, McConnell pursued the unprecedented course of simply refusing to act on Obama’s nomination of the relatively moderate appellate judge Merrick Garland. As a consequence, Trump got to fill a seat that was rightfully Obama’s.
So, what is the difference between destruction of an independent judiciary in Poland and the U.S.? Mainly, timing. In Poland, the coup has been abrupt. In the U.S., it has been a slow roll. The outcome isn’t that different—hijacked, politicized courts. ~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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Its All In The Translation {Against The Facts}


The old Testament appears to be the forecasting of the coming of Christ and the new testament’s the chronicling after the Birth of Christ. Between these two Books, there are two other books, the Torah and the Quran both of these are essentially the same except for the named prophets and some other details which can differ due to translation between languages. The current administration has used (often wrongly) bible inferences to justify and gain approval for their nebulous and nefarious actions against us all. The Tax Reform under the guise of benefitting the lower class is a boon to Corporations and high income people. Using a street gang as a reason to deter the entry of  Hispanics into the country, using religion as reason to bar certain religions from entering the country and separating children from their parents. This dishonest action has extended to the military which has promised citizenship to foreign born folks who have enlisted and served with honor then were discharged without notice. Then there’s the issue of military LBGTQ members who have served and still serve with honor being forced in some cases to leave the service due to misinformation about the increased medical liabilities. Now there is the case of the High Court which is supposed to be composed of apolitical folk or at least people who are able to put their political beliefs aside for the good of the country, We have come to a time where the separation of Church and state has become  muddied by  a powerful segment of Conservatives whose “holier” than thou mindset seeks to bring us back to the days of “real witch Hunts”, indiscriminate Lynchings and the condemnation of any religion which they deem as not of God (who as a deity is put up as forgiving and open). It is important to understand that Bias of any kind in the name of religion is inherently  wrong if one is to believe the Bible(s) yet we have many members of government waving the religious flag to  further their personal agendas. I personally think many political types seek votes and will jump on any bandwagon that will get them to that destination. There are too many serving  elected officials whose convictions don’t include the people who support them. To correct the political imbalance one needs to know the candidates and ignore the hype before committing a vote for them.

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Chaos and?


Covfefe now “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?”. Truth , fiction or more chaos? I am wondering if FLOTUS knew or understood what the sign on her back meant? Is this like a “Kick me” sign? I believe FLOTUS is more genuine than her spouse and perhaps too embarrassed to  venture out. I would imagine being married to Trump is no picnic even if he were not President. This is a woman who is well off in her own right and therefore in no danger of being held to Trump by finances. There are several explanations about the jacket messages and to date no one knows for sure what it means (much like COVFEFE). I can see a scenario like a dead of night flight from the White House by FLOTUS with Baron in tow never to return. There is also the possibility of a medical unit sneaking in and out with some one on a gurney being rushed to a hospital for treatment. This Presidency is densely populated by self-serving ” conservatives and high binders” under the guise of Patriotism. These same folks have convinced an ego driven neer do well to enact programs or orders that play to “their” base to the detriment of all Americans. Their hope appears to be to create an America that will benefit them and theirs for  the future while the majority of us languish in the detritus they leave behind.

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Me-Degenerate


Chaos has been used by me and others to explain the current Administration, that I believe is not an altogether correct explanation. I believe a better descriptive word is disorder. In many organizations there are disorganized workers from the loading dock to the CEO. We currently have a CEO whose methodology has been disorder (and disruption). This method of managing keeps underlings off-balance and afraid to confront, correct or adjust when required. The CEO can and does all of these: correct. adjust and confront without compunction or regret. This kind of personality trait allows for a following that is at once glad to follow and under informed. This lack of personal thought and desire to learn by way of publications and real news media is why DJT was elected. It is well known that many Americans are and possibly always will be dissatisfied with the operation of Government but the remedy is not electing  the most entertaining or loudest voice (this applies to the neer do well Congress and elected officials down to the Municipal level). My best description of TOTUS is a ME Degenerate, which I define as Ego driven bully who has used the only tools he has to move himself forward and leaving many “corpses” along the way while training his progeny in the same manner of living.

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