Month: August 2017

23 Minutes of Trump

23 Minutes of Trump

 

Does anyone remember why President Trump held a press conference on Tuesday?

I almost 100% agree with this editorial by James Freeman. Trump really needs to shut up and just work on stuff that helps people. He has these moments of brilliance but then for every moment of brilliance, he tends to surround it with about 100 moments of pure incompetence.

For the assembled members of President Trump’s economic team who stood behind him at Trump Tower on Tuesday, the first six minutes of his press conference must have seemed like a promising start. Here was the President describing a significant government-created problem and offering the beginning of a sensible solution.


In any case, Tuesday’s press conference became even more interesting over the next 17 minutes. That’s when Mr. Trump took questions from reporters and decided to largely abandon his hopeful message on liberating Americans from red tape. Many of his assembled advisors were suddenly fascinated by various spots on the floor of the Trump Tower lobby as the President offered further analysis of last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

As he had on Monday, the President condemned the white supremacists who organized a rally tied to the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Civil War General Robert E. Lee. Mr. Trump also condemned the man who allegedly drove his car into the crowd of counter-protesters as a “murderer.” Mr. Trump then annoyed the media by correctly pointing out that there were violent people on both sides.

But Mr. Trump also said that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Certainly there were very fine people on the side that was protesting the white supremacists, but this column has seen no evidence of very fine people on the other side. Some people who oppose statue removal do so for reasons of historical or artistic preservation. But would any of them have decided to make common cause with neo-Nazis and join in last week’s demonstration? It’s possible that some people showed up to oppose the removal of landmarks without realizing they had joined a parade of bigots. But if that were the case, they would likely have left immediately.

A source with knowledge of the Monument Fund, Inc., one of the plaintiffs which obtained a temporary injunction against removing monuments in Charlottesville, tells this column:

Nobody from our group attended the protests or counter-protests. We all stayed away. As everybody should have done. As President Sullivan of U Va urged people to do. Just stay home. But City Councillors and a coalition of leftist groups invited their followers to show up for counter protests. And show up they did, angry and spoiling for a fight.

If City Council had just said: let the Nazis shout idiot slogans at empty air, ignore them, stay home — no violence would have happened. The police are unfairly criticized for not stopping the fighting. How could they? These two groups wanted to fight. They found ways to get at each other. These are public streets, they could not all be locked down and cleared of belligerents.

This was a tragic event, it will scar the city. It will take a long time for the anger to subside.

Mr. Trump appears to have been peddling fake news here, and he’ll no doubt have the chance to amend his remarks yet again because it seems unlikely he can resist further comment and the issue is not going away.

Source: 23 Minutes of Trump

My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump

My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump

In general, I question anyone that says something like “my Republican Party”. Really? Is it yours?

I have said for at least a decade that both of the big parties are actually smaller sub-parties that vie for control and typically band together for a common cause. The reality is that the majority trend of both parties was away from the American worker that has

  • 2-3 kids,
  • tries to remain faithful to his spouse,
  • shows up for work on a regular basis but probably doesn’t love his/her job,
  • tries to improve his/her home a little every year,
  • tries to keep those kids out of jail,
  • tries hard to get those kids through school and college,
  • enjoys a good movie now and then,
  • enjoys time with family and friends more than the movie though,
  • and expects to pay his way through life while getting treated fairly by those around him/her.

When you abandon that huge demographic, expect to lose to someone that didn’t. That demographic is not always the most active group in politics because they don’t love politics and they probably don’t love government (just keep the criminals away from the family and make sure my roads get paved every decade or so). However, that demographic has been ignored for so long that their sub-parties in the Democrat and Republican camps abandoned their old comrades to band together to elect a person that they thought couldn’t hurt them more than the typical politician.

If you don’t like Mr. Trump being elected, start paying attention to this core of American families.

Here are a few select quotes from the article but it would be better if you click through and read it for yourself.

Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.

But then the period of collapse and dysfunction set in, amplified by the internet and our growing sense of alienation from each other, and we lost our way and began to rationalize away our principles in the process. But where does such capitulation take us? If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals—even as we put at risk our institutions and our values—then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn’t be Pyrrhic ones. If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place?

So, where should Republicans go from here? First, we shouldn’t hesitate to speak out if the president “plays to the base” in ways that damage the Republican Party’s ability to grow and speak to a larger audience. Second, Republicans need to take the long view when it comes to issues like free trade: Populist and protectionist policies might play well in the short term, but they handicap the country in the long term. Third, Republicans need to stand up for institutions and prerogatives, like the Senate filibuster, that have served us well for more than two centuries.

We have taken our “institutions conducive to freedom,” as Goldwater put it, for granted as we have engaged in one of the more reckless periods of politics in our history. In 2017, we seem to have lost our appreciation for just how hard won and vulnerable those institutions are.

Source: My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump – POLITICO Magazine

Trump’s White House Mess

Trump’s White House Mess

 

I couldn’t agree more with one of the recent editorials on the WSJ – especially the last part:
The new White House chief of staff can improve matters but it’s unlikely to be much of a change. And then there’s the question of how long any improvement will last. We’ve seen brief bouts of normalcy from this president before. Staff changes will only get Mr. Trump so far. The problem with his administration isn’t the administrators.

Source: Trump’s White House Mess

Tell Fake News posters to delete their posts

Tell Fake News posters to delete their posts

I think Trump is doing a terrible job as POTUS and would be very happy if he would just resign. I didn’t vote for him because I thought he wasn’t the most qualified candidate on the ballot.

However, I despise it when people post FAKE NEWS (be it a blog, Facebook, Twitter, or other social media). There is a significantly edited version of this video that shows Mr. Trump ignoring the child in the wheelchair. As this video shows, nothing could be further from the truth as Trump spends a considerable amount of time with the child.

If you see someone post the edited version of the video, correct that person. Tell them they are spreading fake news and tell them to take down the fake news. The only reason that fake news exists on Facebook and other forums is that we do not chastise those that spread the lies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVjoSgZaReo&sns=fb