The Trump presidency

[TomUS]

George W Bush is a war criminal and Ellen is a sycophantic piece of shit.

Bush is a war criminal and Ellen is an entertainer who has done much to advance gay rights.

 

[Wilf]

Interesting angle - his tweets pose a threat to national security and actually violate Twitter's own policies on harassment and hateful conduct

'House Of Cards' Creator Asks Twitter To Remove Donald Trump's Account | The Huffington Post

Whilst I'm happy to see any kind of shit thrown at Trump, that really does miss the mark. Opponents of Trump, be they 'liberal' or any other kind need to focus more on Trump's message rather than the medium - and most of all why his populist shite has an audience. When a pathological liar with rag tag army of right wing hatstands can outplay you, there's a real problem.

 

[DotCommunist]

The celebs and the corporations will save us

I don't always agree with this bloke but this time I did
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/celebrity-democrats-fuck-off-1792821096

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

I don't always agree with this bloke but this time I did
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/celebrity-democrats-fuck-off-1792821096

But for all their problems and weaknesses, the Democrats must have done something right: almost 3 million more people voted for the Democratic candidate, than for the Republican candidate.

 

[DotCommunist]

But for all their problems and weaknesses, the Democrats must have done something right: almost 3 million more people voted for the Democratic candidate, than for the Republican candidate.

tbh with trump standing I don't know if I could stay home either. I don't normally do nose-holding but that rule would have been sorely tested...

 

[Lord Camomile]

When a pathological liar with rag tag army of right wing hatstands can outplay you, there's a real problem.

That is one of the most depressing things about this really. You'd think that in a competent society there'd be more of a defense against this kind of thing.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

The point is that you get commentators like the one in your link, going on about how the Democrats have 'lost touch with the common people', 'pander to the elites' etc.; but that narrative just doesn't seem to fit with the fact that more people voted Democrat; and the profile of Republican voters wasn't that of the common man, but that of the higher than average wage earner.

 

[CrabbedOne]

Bush is a war criminal and Ellen is an entertainer who has done much to advance gay rights.

I'm trying to think of a US President who might not be accused of being complicit in war crimes. Coming up empty this century.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Maybe this will be Trump's next move:

When Yeltsin held office, privately owned television stations, such as NTV, reported on the horrific war in Chechnya and even satirized Yeltsin and other Kremlin leaders on a puppet show called “Kukly.” NTV, which was owned by an oligarch named Vladimir Gusinsky, seemed to test Putin in the beginning, airing discussions about corruption and human-rights abuses; “Kukly” added a puppet depicting the new President. Putin was not amused. Within five months of taking power, he dispatched armed Interior Ministry troops to raid Gusinsky’s headquarters; by 2001, Gusinsky had been forced to give up NTV to more obedient owners and had fled the country. Ever since, television has been under strict federal control.

Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War

 

[CrabbedOne]

On Bloomberg Russian Hackers Said to Seek Hush Money From Liberal U.S. Groups

...
“I would be cautious concluding that this has any sort of Russian government backing,” said John Hultquist, director of cyber espionage analysis at FireEye Inc., after the outline of the attacks was described to him. “Russian government hackers have aggressively targeted think tanks, and even masqueraded as ransomware operations, but it’s always possible it is just another shakedown.”
...

Well with Dem paranoia running high it would be easy to mistake an ordinary decent criminal Russki cyber attack with a vast GRU/FSB conspiracy to undermine LBGT coffee shops everywhere.

 

[CrabbedOne]

On Bloomberg Trump’s $1 Trillion Infrastructure Dream Faces the Same Old Nightmares

...
One lesson Trump should take away from his predecessor’s experience is that the public is impatient for results, says Ray LaHood, a Republican who was U.S. transportation secretary under Obama. If Trump doesn’t make an infrastructure deal with Congress a top priority now, when he has the most political capital to achieve it, he’ll face the same complaints as Obama, LaHood says. “At the end of four years,” he says, “if they haven’t produced a big, bold transportation bill and a big, bold funding package, they will have missed an opportunity, and they will have an unfulfilled promise.”

Given the ineptitude of Team Trump in executing even fairly small measures this seems unlikely.

The big problem here the previous administrations faced isn't lack of capital it's an aversion to longterm schemes and a need for fast results.

 

[belboid]

But for all their problems and weaknesses, the Democrats must have done something right: almost 3 million more people voted for the Democratic candidate, than for the Republican candidate.

But not where it mattered

 

[CrabbedOne]

But not where it mattered

Yes that's mostly because California went heavily for Hillary.

 

[2hats]

Sign the petition and call on Congress to keep us safe by making it illegal for President Trump, or any successor, to single-handedly start a nuclear war.

The publicly known details of the protocol indicate a two man rule. The VP/secretary of defense/a.n. other at a similar level (or additional multiple persons at a command tier below that) must authenticate the chosen attack option and they might choose to tweak the process, to impede or halt it (as has been documented to have happened in the past). Furthermore, the gold codes are supposed to be generated afresh daily and are mixed amongst dummy codes for an added layer of security, the national command authority (president, VP, etc) having to memorise the new offset each day to identify the valid response to the authentication challenge. Might be beyond some people...

 

[Reiabuzz]

Can Obama sue Trump for defamation etc for the wire tapping claims?

edit: answered my own question. yes, he can. but probably won't.

Does Obama have grounds to sue Trump for libel?

 

[teqniq]

Trump to sign new travel ban today

I wonder if this one will be legally watertight

 

[CrabbedOne]

The publicly known details of the protocol indicate a two man rule. The VP/secretary of defense/a.n. other at a similar level (or additional multiple persons at a command tier below that) must authenticate the chosen attack option and they might choose to tweak the process, to impede or halt it (as has been documented to have happened in the past). Furthermore, the gold codes are supposed to be generated afresh daily and are mixed amongst dummy codes for an added layer of security, the national command authority (president, VP, etc) having to memorise the new offset each day to identify the valid response to the authentication challenge. Might be beyond some people...

Actually there's really no "two man rule" as existing at the lower levels of the chain. That's a comforting widely believed fiction. It's more complicated than just slapping a big red button but it's all up to the President. All there is is the practical possibility of Pentagon institutional resistance which happened with Nixon.

Arms Control Wonk discusses it here from about seven minutes into the podcast. There reality is its all on a hair trigger with a President perhaps having a space of minutes to decide to launch or not. It takes his authority alone and that by itself is sufficient. The only check is US voters not being reckless enough to put a jumpy head the ball like Trump in the Oval office. Normally such a critter wouldn't have even got into a Primary race but: democracy.

Also described here:

...
There’s just one area where we do know who will make the decisions, and that is the employment of nuclear weapons. This duty will fall to one Donald J. Trump of New York.

That’s a hard pill to swallow. During the campaign, Trump showed himself to be impulsive, prickly, vengeful, ignorant… in brief, ill-qualified for the job of commander-in-chief by any ordinary measure. As Alex Wellerstein, among others, notes, it’s been hard for many people to accept that President Trump, like any other American president, will indeed have the exclusive and unappealable authority to employ nuclear weapons – at any time and in a matter of minutes. No checks, no balances. None at all. None.
...

It's basically the same for the Russians. Putin has a guy constantly at his side with nuclear controls and if Putin is taken out it's delegated to the General Staff. It's not known if the dead hand semi-auto ICBM launch Russian system is still in place but they hint it is.

This is batshit crazy when you consider the country regularly judged biggest first strike risk Pakistan holds its nukes disassembled at separate locations.

 

[coley]

Actually there's really no "two man rule" as existing at the lower levels of the chain. That's a comforting widely believed fiction. It's more complicated than just slapping a big red button but it's all up to the President. All there is is the practical possibility of Pentagon institutional resistance which happened with Nixon.

Arms Control Wonk discusses it here from about seven minutes into the podcast. There reality is its all on a hair trigger with a President perhaps having a space of minutes to decide to launch or not. It takes his authority alone and that by itself is sufficient. The only check is US voters not being reckless enough to put a jumpy head the ball like Trump in the Oval office. Normally such a critter wouldn't have even got into a Primary race but: democracy.

Also described here:
It's basically the same for the Russians. Putin has a guy constantly at his side with nuclear controls and if Putin is taken out it's delegated to the General Staff. It's not known if the dead hand semi-auto ICBM launch Russian system is still in place but they hint it is.

This is batshit crazy when you consider the country regularly judged biggest first strike risk Pakistan holds its nukes disassembled at separate locations.

Looking at his early morning tweets, it's just a matter of time

 

[CrabbedOne]

On Politico ‘Don’t Be So Desperate to Rub up Against Russia’

...
Still, Fried like other Russia experts in the United States in recent years, believes that much of Putin’s motivation has been to shore up his own support at home – both by demonizing the West and by making sure he is not vulnerable to the fate of other leaders in the region who have been toppled by what Putin considers to be U.S.-funded revolutions.

“If we made a mistake of judgment,” Fried said, “it was that we didn’t fully understand Putin’s reaction to the Color Revolutions” in former Soviet countries like Ukraine and Georgia. “We knew we hadn’t [made those revolutions], and we dismissed it,” Fried said, “but I think we should have understood that Putin took this seriously.”

Senior former US diplomat Daniel Fried like most Cold Warriors does not like them Russkis one bit. The headline is the advice he'd offer Trump tough The Donald's schoolboy crush on Putin seems to be fading as great power realities encroach on him.

This last snip is perceptive. Putin is sensibly scared of the US that has gone round knocking over rogue states in rather intrusive way. It goes beyond colorised revolutions. What he doesn't want is an international order where any upstanding despot with a tendency to bomb his own people that rubs the US or a US ally up the wrong way can find himself hunted down with JDAMs. He may not be much for human rights but despotic ones are real important to him.

 

[camouflage]

Then, Stockman drops this bomb and says, “I think what people are missing is this date, March 15th 2017. That’s the day that this debt ceiling holiday that Obama and Boehner put together right before the last election in October of 2015. That holiday expires. The debt ceiling will freeze in at $20 trillion. It will then be law. It will be a hard stop. The Treasury will have roughly $200 billion in cash. We are burning cash at a $75 billion a month rate. By summer, they will be out of cash. Then we will be in the mother of all debt ceiling crises. Everything will grind to a halt. I think we will have a government shutdown. There will not be Obama Care repeal and replace. There will be no tax cut. There will be no infrastructure stimulus. There will be just one giant fiscal bloodbath over a debt ceiling that has to be increased and no one wants to vote for.”

Giant Fiscal Bloodbath Coming Soon-David Stockman | Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog

Can't help wondering... whatcha gonna do Trump? I assume he has a game plan. If it wasn't for his promises about tax-cuts, building stupid walls and shovelling more money into Americas sprawling war machine, I'd half expect him as a Republican (sort of) to just just shrug and let things lapse because 'fiscal responsibility'.

 

[CRI]

FMSs, lovely friends TTT has, yetbthis bloke seems to be encouraged and tolerated by the GOP

Close adviser of Trump's for some time it seems.

 

[CRI]

The point is that you get commentators like the one in your link, going on about how the Democrats have 'lost touch with the common people', 'pander to the elites' etc.; but that narrative just doesn't seem to fit with the fact that more people voted Democrat; and the profile of Republican voters wasn't that of the common man, but that of the higher than average wage earner.

This bizarro myth about the downtrodden blue collar male voters who had not choice but to vote for Trump is absolute baloney. To woo Trump supporters, the Democrats would have to adopt some of his policies - ban abortion, crack down on drugs, make guns more available, keep out immigrants, put more people in jail, drop the ACA. What's the bloody point in that? Poorer Trump supporters will suffer under his administration, but so will all those who didn't vote for him - some more so. Naw, they can go hang. Target the folks who didn't vote or won't allowed to vote. Fight the gerrymandering. Better use of time and energy.

 

[CRI]

Any response from Trump on this, or is he still in a huff that someone was mean to his pal Jeff last week?

North Korea fires four ballistic missiles into sea, angering Japan and South

 

[2hats]

Actually there's really no "two man rule" as existing at the lower levels of the chain. That's a comforting widely believed fiction. It's more complicated than just slapping a big red button but it's all up to the President. All there is is the practical possibility of Pentagon institutional resistance which happened with Nixon.

Arms Control Wonk discusses it here from about seven minutes into the podcast.

My post, as per the podcast: one person (the president) can make the decision and order an attack; two people (the president plus one other) are required to authenticate the source of that order.

(The podcast is mainly concerned with the notion of deterrence and alternatives).

 

[belboid]

This bizarro myth about the downtrodden blue collar male voters who had not choice but to vote for Trump is absolute baloney. To woo Trump supporters, the Democrats would have to adopt some of his policies - ban abortion, crack down on drugs, make guns more available, keep out immigrants, put more people in jail, drop the ACA. What's the bloody point in that? Poorer Trump supporters will suffer under his administration, but so will all those who didn't vote for him - some more so. Naw, they can go hang. Target the folks who didn't vote or won't allowed to vote. Fight the gerrymandering. Better use of time and energy.

Actually what most new blue collar Trump voters wanted is jobs. Boring , doesn't play into your Race War not Class War narrative, but true nevertheless

 

[Reiabuzz]

Any response from Trump on this, or is he still in a huff that someone was mean to his pal Jeff last week?

North Korea fires four ballistic missiles into sea, angering Japan and South

He's tweeted more about Arnie getting sacked from the Apprentice in the last day or two than he has this affair

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Actually what most new blue collar Trump voters wanted is jobs. Boring , doesn't play into your Race War not Class War narrative, but true nevertheless

But more voters in that section of society voted for Clinton than Trump (52% vs 41% in the third of the population that earns less than $50k a year). Many Clinton voters also wanted jobs. That's not really a point of differentiation.

 

[Wilf]

Actually what most new blue collar Trump voters wanted is jobs. Boring , doesn't play into your Race War not Class War narrative, but true nevertheless

Yep, and 'naw, they can go hang' doesn't sound like a particularly effective way to make friends and influence people.

 

[Wilf]

But more voters in that section of society voted for Clinton than Trump (52% vs 41% in the third of the population that earns less than $50k a year). Many Clinton voters also wanted jobs. That's not really a point of differentiation.

Well, put it this way: if the Democrats had been seen to be on the side of those who had lost their industries and jobs - that is, both seen to be and genuinely so - do you think Trump would be in the White House now?

 

[killer b]

my god are we really doing this again.