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Category Archives: My Opinion

The Understanding (Or Lack Of)


The good thing about instant news coverage is that we know what is happening around the world and in our nation. The bad thing is the truth sometimes lags behind the lies which sometimes arrive before it. We have become inured to reading or listening to more than one source of information. This hardness has created factions that at once beg for information but lock on to a single source that appears rational but is often not. This attachment to semi or nontruths often comes in the form of “entertainment” news which appears in print and in mass media. Our political system has embraced the “entertainment” news to supplement their “Politispeak”. What I have observed is that the current (1950’s to present) political scene has been filled with sensationalizers and outright liars whose messages seem real only because of the media coverage and the speed at which it travels. Currently, we have headlining seat-fillers whose loyalty is to themselves and their party, not the people who voted them to the office. Our understanding of the issues has to be the basis of our voting with this in mind, we must remember that lies are lies pure and simple. Any office holder or aspirant to an office who lied once will continue to lie when elected (this should be apparent with our current “ins”) no matter which party, left, right or center they espouse. This “aint” no way to run a country.

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Miscellaneous


1. Local Springfield Mayoral candidate Edwards in an interview mentioned that Illinois (Springfield) utility prices are too high for Business never mentioned that it was too high for residents-so residents can better afford high utility prices? Another smooth talker?

2. For years Companies and stores shut down for a day of stock-taking (inventory) in the past 20 plus years someone determined (erroneously I believe) that a certain dollar amount was lost in shutting down for a day to do this important accounting task. I have yet to see any figures that would offset the lost business income compared to the loss of productivity when attempting to service customers while in the process of stocktaking usually with aid of an Inventory counting service. Keep in mind that employees need to be on hand to assist the counters and reconcile errors in counting while attempting service the customers coming in a store or calling (depending on the business). At the end of this exercise, there are still days to weeks of tabulation and rechecking on the supposedly vital activity. The question is: whose bright idea was this?

3. What will be uncovered when the scab of the Trump administration is pulled back?

4. The two (2) middle letters of Politician and politics are “LI”, pronounced “lie”

5. Discover what your representative is about before you vote for the (again).

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Behind The Scenes


It seems that the seat fillers we call Congress are all cowards and as we already know liars! They have been caught unawares on multiple issues stated in TOTUS’s tweet stream and during his campaign rallies. With all the backpedaling and explaining they have had to do, they still back this backward running horse. My firm conviction is that the President’s election is in many ways less important than the members of Congress as many have been in office for longer terms than the President. Add to this their openly poor performance on many life determining issues for us all, we have the perfect storm of Government gone wild. Bitch McConnell has kept his head down while doing his “save my own ass” act instead of leading as he should “loud and out front” as he did when Barry was President. The back room activities (or lack of) in Congress is where our failures start and stop. The upcoming national and local elections are our opportunity to shift the administration towards one that reflects the will of the ALL of us, not just a privileged few. We have been in the grip of a Crisis maker who wants to appear to ride to the rescue as if leading a country is an Action movie. Our sole objective needs to be the correction of government’s function which simply put means using our tax dollars to take care of us and assist our allies in the struggle for peace and prosperity.

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Clown Car with Flat Tires


It has become apparent to me that the combination of a neer do well Congress and a miscreant laden administration has produced poor to no legislation that benefits the people who put them in office. The 2-year long attempt to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act  (ACA) has failed and the act is doing good for most Americans, coupled with the “Tax Reform” that benefitted the people who needed it the least to name a couple. We have a self-serving titular head of the nation who has no self-realized direction or seemingly no will or ability to learn the job but “tweets” his way on a daily basis while expounding on issues that should not concern him at all. He has manufactured crises at the border to get a campaign promise accomplished when the real issue as a global player is to address the issues in those countries where the migrants are coming from. He has voiced an opinion on issues that have been in ongoing international talks for years and he knows nothing about. His methodology in business is to get investors for his projects with hyperbole and superlatives with no substantive details (in other words winging it!). It is unfortunate that our neer-do-well seat fillers (sometimes called Congress) have neither the will or ability to control him while telling their constituents that they are working for them. Our entertainment should not be derived from the supposedly “serious” administrators and legislators we elected. This “Resident” has continued on the campaign trail even after winning the office and leaving the real work to the assorted appointees whose agendas are personal and not broadly for the American voters. We essentially have a clown car with flat tires as a Government.

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Trump’s tariffs are costing Americans $1.4 billion each month, study shows.


As many of the “Trumpedations” are showing and will continue to show is that this administration has one goal and that is to do the bidding of an inept wannabe tyrant and a group of miscreants who if not for this job in the administration would possibly be in jail or out of work.MA

Tax reform taking a toll as will the possible health care repeal.

Thomas Franck, 03/25/2019. CNBC 48 mins ago

President Donald Trump’s trade policies and tariffs reduced U.S. income at a rate of $1.4 billion per month by the end of last November, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Princeton University, and Columbia University.
The collaborative study found that businesses and consumers saw “substantial increases” in the price of goods throughout last year, including a “complete passthrough” of U.S.-imposed tariffs onto imported items. The economists — the New York Fed’s Mary Amiti, Princeton professor Stephen Redding, and Columbia professor David Weinstein — also said Americans suffered by a lack of import variety and disruptions to supply chains.
“Economists have long argued that there are real income losses from import protection. Using the evidence to date from the 2018 trade war, we find empirical support for these arguments,” the researchers wrote. “Losses mounted steadily over the year, as each wave of tariffs affected additional countries and products, and increased substantially after the imposition of the wave 6 tariffs on $200 billion dollars of Chinese exports.”
Amiti, Redding, and Weinstein found that while losses were accumulating at a rate of $1.4 billion per month by last November, total losses from January 2018 through November 2018 ballooned to a conservative estimate of $6.9 billion.
That number may be too low, the economists said, because their model assumes that the U.S. government uses tariff tax revenues to offset the welfare burden. If the U.S. government did not offset the cost of the tariffs to the American consumer with the new tax revenues, the full value of the tariff payments would be $12.3 billion.
The White House imposed a variety of tariffs on goods imported from economic partners of the U.S. in 2018. The tit-for-tat between the U.S. and China has come as Trump and the U.S. Trade Representative try to protect American intellectual property and curb a steep trade deficit.
Trump has had varying success with the tariff tactic, winning both a revised version of the North American Free Trade Agreement as well as alienating key allies including Canada and the European Union. The White House announced a round of tariffs on $200 billion of products imported from China at a 10 percent rate last year.
The White House also announced last year the introduction of a 20 percent tariff on the first 1.2 million imported residential washing machines from South Korea and a 50 percent tariff on machines above that number. LG Electronics told retailers less than one week after that decision that it would hike prices.
The research team also found that American consumers are also harmed during a trade war in terms of the variety of goods they can purchase. Consumers benefit from open trade and the ability to purchase more unique goods — like French wine and Colombian coffee, for example — that might be foregone if trade barriers are high.
In the three years prior to the imposition of tariffs, all categories of goods experienced increases in the number of varieties offered in the U.S., the researchers said.
“However, the imposition of the tariffs is associated with sharp drops in the number of imported varieties entering the U.S. in all sectors except the wave 1 products (washing machines and solar panels),” they wrote.
“These results suggest that some of the tariffs were prohibitive, reducing imports to zero. This can create a measurement problem that can arise if we try to assess the price impacts of tariffs on goods that are no longer imported.”
The trade war also caused “dramatic” turmoil in supply chains, as about $165 billion of trade ($136 billion of imports and $29 billion of exports) is lost or redirected through company and customer efforts to circumvent tariffs.
“We find that the U.S. tariffs were almost completely passed through into U.S. domestic prices, so that the entire incidence of the tariffs fell on domestic consumers and importers up to now, with no impact so far on the prices received by foreign exporters,” the Fed, Princeton and Columbia economists wrote. “We also find that U.S. producers responded to reduced import competition by raising their prices

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Midlines and Common Sense


Politicization has become the rule rather than an exception. That allows for the extremist on all sides to become quasi spokespeople for some of the population. Easily available mass media that we carry on our persons daily allows for the constant monitoring of the daily diatribes and rants that serve to color our opinions in almost real time. With this being said perhaps we all need to assume a middle line on all politics and avoid the trap of right or left and take a center stance in order to view both sides for what they are-influencers! What we believe is what we believe but it is shaded by our adoption of specific political ideas. It must be remembered that each political party and its subset have one goal and that is to win elections at any cost. That cost usually affects the least of us who comprise most of the voting public. If you believe the party you associate yourself with is truly on your side then perhaps I can sell you some property at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There are no political entities who are 100% for you and perhaps never will be yet we continue to elect the same people time after time proving that doing the same activities again and again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Are we insane?

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Politics


It appears to me that the new young members of Congress need to learn the job before taking interviews or stating opinions. While several are classified as independents or progressives and we do need some of that but in line with the general sense of their party. As in any new job, newcomers should learn the job from the old timers who have navigated the waters of politics for a longer time. The new politics may take place in the media but the real work is still done in the backrooms of Congress.

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Conspiracy Theories


There are mainstream and semi-mainstream personalities who promote conspiracy theories as a job. Some monetize these efforts with donations from believers and some other contributors yet the information offered is more hyperbole than fact. Conspiracy theories are just that, theories- until proven to be real. Many of these theories are derived from undeveloped ideas, half-truths and sometimes legends. These skewed versions somehow sound plausible to many due to their personal biases and circumstances. The beliefs in these theories and other off-center beliefs have become fodder for the extreme sides of politics while coloring the facts. Now that the Mueller investigation is done(?), we have more questions than answers and more Trumpian utterings from Congress and the OFFAL office stating exoneration. This is not the end of this as the truth is still unknown and thereby will promote more Conspiracy theories to carry us into the next major election.

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Mueller Report-Again


White House press secretary Sarah Sanders tells Savannah Guthrie that “Democrats and liberal media owe the president and owe the American people an apology” after special counsel Robert Mueller found no proof President Trump colluded with Russia.

You are so right Sarah and we will get better when someone better is in the Whitehouse. You can blame Democrats and the media but you and your boss are so misguided and evil as to reek of fire and brimstone. Your “religious” background should have you presenting a better face than the one we have seen for 2 years.

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Trump visits tank factory and renews attack on war hero McCain


The tall tales and fairy tales continue from a bad storyteller or to put it succinctly , a consummate liar.MA

David Knowles
Editor,Yahoo News•March 20, 2019

At a speech at an Ohio tank factory, President Trump complained that he wasn’t thanked for giving John McCain “the kind of funeral he wanted.”
“I gave him the kind of funeral he wanted which as president I had to approve. I don’t care about this, I didn’t get thank you, that’s OK,” Trump said, to a crowd of workers at the Lima Army Tank Plant in Lima, Ohio.
The audience, which had applauded and cheered through much of the speech, sat virtually silent during the attack on the late senator and decorated war hero.
Trump’s remarks about McCain’s funeral and his burial at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., last September came in a speech that was marked by a long list of grievances about the former Arizona senator, part of a days-long assault.
“A lot of people are asking, because they love me and they ask me about a man named John McCain,” Trump said. “If you want me to tell you about — should I or not? Yes?”
A handful of workers in the audience obliged the president, shouting, “Yeah!”
“So I have to be honest, I’ve never liked him much. Hasn’t been for me,” Trump said, the room descending into awkward silence.
“I’ve really probably never will, but there’s certain reasons for it and I will tell you, and I do this to save a little time with the press later on, John McCain received a fake and phony dossier, did you hear about the dossier? It was paid for by crooked Hillary Clinton, right,” Trump continued, to a smattering of boos. “And John McCain got it, he got it, and what did he do? He didn’t call me. He turned it over to the FBI hoping to put me in jeopardy, and that’s not the nicest thing to do. You know when those people say, because I’m a very loyal person…”
Trump proceeded to bash McCain for campaigning on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act but voting against a Republican bill that would have done just that.
“And the other thing is, we’re in a war in the Middle East that McCain pushed so hard,” Trump said, the silence seeming to grow. “He was calling Bush, President Bush all the time, ‘Get into the Middle East, get into the Middle East.’ So now we’re into that war for $7 trillion, thousands and thousands of our people have been killed, millions of people overall, and frankly, we’re straightening it out now but it has been a disaster for our country.”
Trump said the war was “worse than it was 19 years ago.” The invasion of Iraq actually began 16 years ago. The United States was not at war in the Middle East in 2000.
“So John McCain loved it,” Trump said.
With the tension on the factory floor growing with each passing insult, Trump finally wound down the McCain section of his remarks.
“Now we’re all set. I don’t think I have to answer that question, but the press keeps — ‘What do you think of McCain? What do you think?’ — Not my kind of guy, but some people like him and I think that’s great.”
McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain, has defended her father’s legacy, and Republican stalwarts like Sen. Mitt Romney, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Mitch McConnell have distanced themselves from Trump’s attacks.

Leader McConnell
✔ @senatemajldr

Today and every day I miss my good friend John McCain. It was a blessing to serve alongside a rare patriot and genuine American hero in the Senate. His memory continues to remind me every day that our nation is sustained by the sacrifices of heroes.

18.2K
11:59 AM – Mar 20, 2019

Trump joked about climbing into a tank at the factory, recalling how Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic candidate for president, hurt his campaign by being photographed atop a tank turret.
“I remember he tanked when he got into the tank,” Trump said.

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