The 45th POTUS - Donald J. Trump

[96583UP]

unless there is a pee pee video.

[96583UP]

Boy, Marco Rubio loves standing next to those guys:

Our president is giving a thumbs up.

that's just him proving to little marco that he has big hands

[96583UP]

Spaghetti Americans

that is impressive

[Norah]

Fox news is reporting it?!

[Strat]

Fox news is reporting it?!

Saw that too. What world are we living in?

[Simple Torture]

Fox News is probably dying to break something, I think.

[McParadigm]

Guys, people only leak to organizations that they trust to get the word out. Nobody except a Republican is going to leak to FOXNews.

[McParadigm]

You have Republicans going on record saying "He should be talking to his therapist about this, not airing it on live TV," you have former Republican representatives going on TV and saying "this was a turning point, the emperor has no clothes," and you have Republicans leaking information to FOXNews that simultaneously damages Trump and helps Pence.

I don't understand what exactly it was about that presser that was so different from everything else, but it really seems to have shifted the tone from that side of the aisle.

[McParadigm]

Either they'll wake up tomorrow and calm the fuck down, or they'll start planning on removal and how to best get credit.

[96583UP]

trump is definitely generating great ratings

this definitely is a reality show presidency

true to form: it's just a bunch of defective people screaming at each other

makes for great tv

doesn't make for great governance. doesn't make for great self-enrichment.

seems to me the 'deal with the devil' to turn a reluctant GOP into a supportive GOP was based on the idea that, OK well at least he is on the red team, so at least he will give us the stuff that we want:

1) repeal obamacare
2) repeal the DOL Fiduciary rule
3) big ass tax cut
4) boost military spending
5) let us pollute again at will
6) other pork here and there and everywhere

instead thus far we have:

1) obamacare will probably exist for at least another year
2) no head of DOL even sworn in, unclear if rule can even be repealed
3) is someone actually working on this tax cut or what
4) arguing with lockheed martin about the price of the JSF; jeopardizing boeing's iran deal
5) enacting a high risk / low return executive order to pick on muslims; severely disrupting the labor supply of fortune 500 companies
6) shitting all over the auto industry
7) shitting on the pharma industry
8) shitting on the media industry
9) shitting on the CIA
10) emboldening the tea party left, women's movement, immigrants' rights movement, and other disaffected groups that previously lay disorganized and/or dormant to now organize and facilitate constant protests

way to go buddy

[96583UP]

so maybe they are starting to question if they can actually get the stuff they want with him

and if not

get someone else who can

[BurtReynolds]

so maybe they are starting to question if they can actually get the stuff they want with him

and if not

get someone else who can

It'll be really funny when he starts vetoing republican bills for some vain, arbitrary reason.

Then he's gonna get a visit from the poison pen fairy.

[tragabigzanda]

so maybe they are starting to question if they can actually get the stuff they want with him

and if not

get someone else who can

It'll be really funny when he starts vetoing republican bills for some vain, arbitrary reason.

Then he's gonna get a visit from the poison pen fairy.

Kim Jong's brother was just the test run.

[BurtReynolds]

[Bi_3]

The deep state, although there’s no precise or scientific definition, generally refers to the agencies in Washington that are permanent power factions. They stay and exercise power even as presidents who are elected come and go. They typically exercise their power in secret, in the dark, and so they’re barely subject to democratic accountability, if they’re subject to it at all. It’s agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world’s worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads. This is who not just people like Bill Kristol, but lots of Democrats are placing their faith in, are trying to empower, are cheering for as they exert power separate and apart from—in fact, in opposition to—the political officials to whom they’re supposed to be subordinate.

And you go—this is not just about Russia. You go all the way back to the campaign, and what you saw was that leading members of the intelligence community, including Mike Morell, who was the acting CIA chief under President Obama, and Michael Hayden, who ran both the CIA and the NSA under George W. Bush, were very outspoken supporters of Hillary Clinton. In fact, Michael Morell went to The New York Times, and Michael Hayden went to The Washington Post, during the campaign to praise Hillary Clinton and to say that Donald Trump had become a recruit of Russia. The CIA and the intelligence community were vehemently in support of Clinton and vehemently opposed to Trump, from the beginning. And the reason was, was because they liked Hillary Clinton’s policies better than they liked Donald Trump’s. One of the main priorities of the CIA for the last five years has been a proxy war in Syria, designed to achieve regime change with the Assad regime. Hillary Clinton was not only for that, she was critical of Obama for not allowing it to go further, and wanted to impose a no-fly zone in Syria and confront the Russians. Donald Trump took exactly the opposite view. He said we shouldn’t care who rules Syria; we should allow the Russians, and even help the Russians, kill ISIS and al-Qaeda and other people in Syria. So, Trump’s agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted. Clinton’s was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they’ve been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him. There’s claims that they’re withholding information from him, on the grounds that they don’t think he should have it and can be trusted with it. They are empowering themselves to enact policy.


Now, I happen to think that the Trump presidency is extremely dangerous.

***


And it is important to resist them. And there are lots of really great ways to resist them, such as getting courts to restrain them, citizen activism and, most important of all, having the Democratic Party engage in self-critique to ask itself how it can be a more effective political force in the United States after it has collapsed on all levels. That isn’t what this resistance is now doing. What they’re doing instead is trying to take maybe the only faction worse than Donald Trump, which is the deep state, the CIA, with its histories of atrocities, and say they ought to almost engage in like a soft coup, where they take the elected president and prevent him from enacting his policies. And I think it is extremely dangerous to do that. Even if you’re somebody who believes that both the CIA and the deep state, on the one hand, and the Trump presidency, on the other, are extremely dangerous, as I do, there’s a huge difference between the two, which is that Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving. But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They’re barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. That is a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it. And yet that’s what so many, not just neocons, but the neocons’ allies in the Democratic Party, are now urging and cheering. And it’s incredibly warped and dangerous to watch them do that.

***

The idea that Donald Trump is some kind of an agent or a spy of Russia, or that he is being blackmailed by Russia and is going to pass secret information to the Kremlin and endanger American agents on purpose, is an incredibly crazy claim that has been nowhere proven to be true. It reminds me of the kind of things Glenn Beck used to say about Obama while he stood at his chalkboard and drew those—those unstable charts that he drew, these wild conspiracy theories that are without evidence.

We ought to have a serious, sober, structured investigation of the claims that Russia hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s emails and that there were improper ties between Donald Trump and the Russians, and that ought to be made public so that we can see the information. But this constant media obsession of leaking whatever someone whispers to them about Donald Trump and Russia, because they know it will get their reporters huge numbers of retweets on Twitter and tons of traffic by people who are being fed what they want to hear, is really feeding into the worst kind of hysteria and even fake news that the media says they’re trying to combat. These are really serious claims that merit serious investigation, and that’s exactly what we’re not getting.

[Simple Torture]

Guys.

[Strat]

I love how he was also being condescending about it while trying to explain it to everyone else

[wease]

His education on Uranium consists solely of what he read about it in Green Lantern comics in the 60s.

[philpritchard]

Uses for uranium:

1. Nuclear weapons
2. Other things
3. Lots of things
4. Some bad things

[Green Habit]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/stop-hurling ... 12910.html

This reminds me of this really old meme: