Trump General Discusion II
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Danny Boy
Rock n' Roll Doggie FOB
I'm a veteran and I served on active duty for 10 years.
I'd rather see the flag desecrated than the first amendment.
I'd rather see the flag desecrated than the first amendment.
OP
OP
Oregoropa
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
Ok FYM. Let's take advantage of this deal. Don't knock it till you try it. (Not a full-fledged 2nd amendment discussion . . . I know)
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
The only silver -- nay, pewter -- lining of the next four years is that the rank hypocrisy and straight-up idiocy of the right is going to be very, very easy to point out.
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
DaveC
Blue Crack Addict
i was in the military for a few years. i certainly didn't serve in order to live in a country where someone could be arrested for lighting a piece of cloth on fire.
bono_212
Blue Crack Distributor
History repeats BECAUSE it is forgotten.
bono_212
Blue Crack Distributor
For some reason I can't quote Mrs. G's post, but as much as I would never burn a flag, I do find the passion with which you defend it strange, in a sense that it almost seems like you fought to defend that symbol, rather than the people, ideals and country itself.
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
I do too, most vets I know, as much as they may detest it, defend the right to do so very adamantly.
Trump's stance(like so many of his) is unconstitutional, irrational, and trying too hard to appeal to the extreme.
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Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
Trump voters have consented to a fact-free universe that substitutes as "reality" that has given us the least prepared, most unfit person to ever hold the office. Our institutions are unable to deal with a man and his supporters who willingly tell and believe not just lies, butblies that are easily disprovable (3m people voted illegally in the election, Ted Cruz's father and the JFK assassination).
He doesn't care if he lies, and his supporters need to be told that they are believing lies. Even if it seems not to matter, we have to continue to point out lies and not call them "dissents" or "controversies" or "fair and balanced."
His supporters aren't necessarily stupid, but they choose to believe stupid things, and must be told so at every turn.
Last edited:
mama cass
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/30/donald-trump-george-monbiot-misinformation
Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it
George Monbiot
Many of his staffers are from an opaque corporate misinformation network. We must understand this if we are to have any hope of fighting back against them
Yes, Donald Trump’s politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want, and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the past 15 years fighting them.
Over this time, I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government.
I first encountered the machine when writing about climate change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies.
Among those I clashed with was Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI calls itself a thinktank, but looks to me like a corporate lobbying group. It is not transparent about its funding, but we now know it has received $2m from ExxonMobil, more than $4m from a group called the Donors Trust (which represents various corporations and billionaires), $800,000 from groups set up by the tycoons Charles and David Koch, and substantial sums from coal, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies.
For years, Ebell and the CEI have attacked efforts to limit climate change, through lobbying, lawsuits and campaigns. An advertisement released by the institute had the punchline “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution. We call it life.”
It has sought to eliminate funding for environmental education, lobbied against the Endangered Species Act, harried climate scientists and campaigned in favour of mountaintop removal by coal companies. In 2004, Ebell sent a memo to one of George W Bush’s staffers calling for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to be sacked. Where is Ebell now? Oh – leading Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency.
Charles and David Koch – who for years have funded extreme pro-corporate politics – might not have been enthusiasts for Trump’s candidacy, but their people were all over his campaign. Until June, Trump’s campaign manager was Corey Lewandowski, who like other members of Trump’s team came from a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP).
This purports to be a grassroots campaign, but it was founded and funded by the Koch brothers. It set up the first Tea Party Facebook page and organised the first Tea Party events. With a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, AFP has campaigned ferociously on issues that coincide with the Koch brothers’ commercial interests in oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals.
In Michigan, it helped force through the “right to work bill”, in pursuit of what AFP’s local director called “taking the unions out at the knees”. It has campaigned nationwide against action on climate change. It has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into unseating the politicians who won’t do its bidding and replacing them with those who will.
I could fill this newspaper with the names of Trump staffers who have emerged from such groups: people such as Doug Domenech, from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, funded among others by the Koch brothers, Exxon and the Donors Trust; Barry Bennett, whose Alliance for America’s Future (now called One Nation) refused to disclose its donors when challenged; and Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, funded by Exxon and others. This is to say nothing of Trump’s own crashing conflicts of interest. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” of the lobbyists and corporate stooges working in Washington. But it looks as if the only swamps he’ll drain will be real ones, as his team launches its war on the natural world.
Understandably, there has been plenty of coverage of the racists and white supremacists empowered by Trump’s victory. But, gruesome as they are, they’re peripheral to the policies his team will develop. It’s almost comforting, though, to focus on them, for at least we know who they are and what they stand for. By contrast, to penetrate the corporate misinformation machine is to enter a world of mirrors. Spend too long trying to understand it, and the hyporeality vortex will inflict serious damage on your state of mind.
Don’t imagine that other parts of the world are immune. Corporate-funded thinktanks and fake grassroots groups are now everywhere. The fake news we should be worried about is not stories invented by Macedonian teenagers about Hillary Clinton selling arms to Islamic State, but the constant feed of confected scares about unions, tax and regulation drummed up by groups that won’t reveal their interests.
The less transparent they are, the more airtime they receive. The organisation Transparify runs an annual survey of thinktanks. This year’s survey reveals that in the UK only four thinktanks – the Adam Smith Institute, Centre for Policy Studies, Institute of Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange – “still consider it acceptable to take money from hidden hands behind closed doors”. And these are the ones that are all over the media.
When the Institute of Economic Affairs, as it so often does, appears on the BBC to argue against regulating tobacco, shouldn’t we be told that it has been funded by tobacco companies since 1963? There’s a similar pattern in the US: the most vocal groups tend to be the most opaque.
As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. A few billion dollars spent on persuasion buys you all the politics you want. Genuine campaigners, working in their free time, simply cannot match a professional network staffed by thousands of well-paid, unscrupulous people.
You cannot confront a power until you know what it is. Our first task in this struggle is to understand what we face. Only then can we work out what to do.
Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it
George Monbiot
Many of his staffers are from an opaque corporate misinformation network. We must understand this if we are to have any hope of fighting back against them
Yes, Donald Trump’s politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want, and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the past 15 years fighting them.
Over this time, I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government.
I first encountered the machine when writing about climate change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies.
Among those I clashed with was Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI calls itself a thinktank, but looks to me like a corporate lobbying group. It is not transparent about its funding, but we now know it has received $2m from ExxonMobil, more than $4m from a group called the Donors Trust (which represents various corporations and billionaires), $800,000 from groups set up by the tycoons Charles and David Koch, and substantial sums from coal, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies.
For years, Ebell and the CEI have attacked efforts to limit climate change, through lobbying, lawsuits and campaigns. An advertisement released by the institute had the punchline “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution. We call it life.”
It has sought to eliminate funding for environmental education, lobbied against the Endangered Species Act, harried climate scientists and campaigned in favour of mountaintop removal by coal companies. In 2004, Ebell sent a memo to one of George W Bush’s staffers calling for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to be sacked. Where is Ebell now? Oh – leading Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency.
Charles and David Koch – who for years have funded extreme pro-corporate politics – might not have been enthusiasts for Trump’s candidacy, but their people were all over his campaign. Until June, Trump’s campaign manager was Corey Lewandowski, who like other members of Trump’s team came from a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP).
This purports to be a grassroots campaign, but it was founded and funded by the Koch brothers. It set up the first Tea Party Facebook page and organised the first Tea Party events. With a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, AFP has campaigned ferociously on issues that coincide with the Koch brothers’ commercial interests in oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals.
In Michigan, it helped force through the “right to work bill”, in pursuit of what AFP’s local director called “taking the unions out at the knees”. It has campaigned nationwide against action on climate change. It has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into unseating the politicians who won’t do its bidding and replacing them with those who will.
I could fill this newspaper with the names of Trump staffers who have emerged from such groups: people such as Doug Domenech, from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, funded among others by the Koch brothers, Exxon and the Donors Trust; Barry Bennett, whose Alliance for America’s Future (now called One Nation) refused to disclose its donors when challenged; and Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, funded by Exxon and others. This is to say nothing of Trump’s own crashing conflicts of interest. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” of the lobbyists and corporate stooges working in Washington. But it looks as if the only swamps he’ll drain will be real ones, as his team launches its war on the natural world.
Understandably, there has been plenty of coverage of the racists and white supremacists empowered by Trump’s victory. But, gruesome as they are, they’re peripheral to the policies his team will develop. It’s almost comforting, though, to focus on them, for at least we know who they are and what they stand for. By contrast, to penetrate the corporate misinformation machine is to enter a world of mirrors. Spend too long trying to understand it, and the hyporeality vortex will inflict serious damage on your state of mind.
Don’t imagine that other parts of the world are immune. Corporate-funded thinktanks and fake grassroots groups are now everywhere. The fake news we should be worried about is not stories invented by Macedonian teenagers about Hillary Clinton selling arms to Islamic State, but the constant feed of confected scares about unions, tax and regulation drummed up by groups that won’t reveal their interests.
The less transparent they are, the more airtime they receive. The organisation Transparify runs an annual survey of thinktanks. This year’s survey reveals that in the UK only four thinktanks – the Adam Smith Institute, Centre for Policy Studies, Institute of Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange – “still consider it acceptable to take money from hidden hands behind closed doors”. And these are the ones that are all over the media.
When the Institute of Economic Affairs, as it so often does, appears on the BBC to argue against regulating tobacco, shouldn’t we be told that it has been funded by tobacco companies since 1963? There’s a similar pattern in the US: the most vocal groups tend to be the most opaque.
As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. A few billion dollars spent on persuasion buys you all the politics you want. Genuine campaigners, working in their free time, simply cannot match a professional network staffed by thousands of well-paid, unscrupulous people.
You cannot confront a power until you know what it is. Our first task in this struggle is to understand what we face. Only then can we work out what to do.
I can't even get my head around the notion of fighting to defend a flag and find it a hilariously absurd jingoistic cliché. But then I come from a country where I am a very enthusiastic proponent of changing the flag.
I actually have a New Zealand flag up in my house (I put it and my silver fern flag up for last year's cricket and rugby World Cups and haven't taken them down), but if you said you'd buy me a beer if I set it on fire, sure I want that beer.
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
Don the Con "no conflict of interests" Trump is now visually removing himself from all his businesses.
And his minions will buy it just like his "not taking a salary" promise.
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And his minions will buy it just like his "not taking a salary" promise.
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Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
I'm certain that all these racists and billionaires appointed to his cabinet will fight hard for the economic interest of red state middle aged males, who are not at all known for being suckers.
BigMacPhisto
Rock n' Roll Doggie VIP PASS
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And Clinton would have gone to bat for them? Hell, she probably was planning to appoint some of the same Goldman Sachs chumps until Bernie showed up on the scene.
At least we won't have to hear the right talk about deficits and the national debt anymore as they run up the tab.
At least we won't have to hear the right talk about deficits and the national debt anymore as they run up the tab.
bono_212
Blue Crack Distributor
Phew, back home, can use the ignore button now.
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
Trump once again taking credit for something he didn't do... claims he stuck a deal with Carrier and saved thousand of jobs with his really terrific negotiating skills. Except it was government money and tax breaks that allowed them to stay, and they still said many of these jobs will be laid off.
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DaveC
Blue Crack Addict
trump stopped 1000 jobs from going overseas yesterday! never mind the other 49,000 that left...
BoMac
Self-righteous bullshitter
I wonder when those coal mining jobs will be coming back. I mean, China is, according to their official news outlet, getting out of coal, so I guess that means more for America! Yay!
Beijing to bid farewell to coal mining in four years - Xinhua | English.news.cn
Beijing to bid farewell to coal mining in four years - Xinhua | English.news.cn
This is exactly what I said he would do like a couple of days after the election. Some small, meaningless "I save jobs!" thing like this that lets him parade around a plant and save face and his supporters are by and large too stupid to realize this will have no appreciable effect.
BigMacPhisto
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Yeah, but it works for him. Keeping jobs here amounts to keeping jobs here, even if we all know there's some ludicrous incentive for Carrier rather than a change of heart thanks to a discussion with Trump.
Clinton was all ready to keep shipping our manufacturing jobs out until Bernie showed up on the scene. So, we really should give Trump the benefit of the doubt when it comes to protectionism and foreign policy since the alternative was, well, dreadful.
Wait and see is my strategy. It's going to be miserable but there may be a few silver linings.
Clinton was all ready to keep shipping our manufacturing jobs out until Bernie showed up on the scene. So, we really should give Trump the benefit of the doubt when it comes to protectionism and foreign policy since the alternative was, well, dreadful.
Wait and see is my strategy. It's going to be miserable but there may be a few silver linings.
Mack_Again
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
Did we talk abbot Donald's pick for Treasury Secretary? that's hilarious.
Mack_Again
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
why are you so reasonable here
BigMacPhisto
Rock n' Roll Doggie VIP PASS
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And you don't think Clinton would have considered the same guy for Treasury Secretary? I mean, Obama's appointments when he first got in should have put to bed the notion that Democrats would ever have enough of a backbone to do things without Wall Street's blessing.
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
Except HE didn't do anything. These discussions have been happening for over a year, he just came in and walked the plant. He doesn't have power to give money and tax cuts right now. :facepalm:
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Protectionism is bad economics.
Globalism has been hard for a subset of the population but on the whole has been better for the vast majority.
Also, BMP, who gives a flying f*ck about Hillary Clinton or what she would have done? Hello, the election is over, she lost and Trump is president.
His decisions, his actions now stand ON THEIR OWN. It is completely irrelevant, in evaluating his policies (such as they are) to refer to people who are not president and never were.
His decisions, his actions now stand ON THEIR OWN. It is completely irrelevant, in evaluating his policies (such as they are) to refer to people who are not president and never were.
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
Hewson
Blue Crack Supplier
Yeah, but Bernie.
bono_212
Blue Crack Distributor
You're all quoting him again 
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