"Just another day in paradise, okay?" April 2017 President Trump and oppo dump thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjVe35M8C0U

Yeah, every President from 1921 on has declared Loyalty Day, Obama included

Yeah, every President from 1921 on has declared Loyalty Day, Obama included

maybe we should choose our leaders by lottery

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/trump-voters-explain-why-hes-doing-great-actually

White House officials had hoped to further vex the journalists by having Mr. Trump announce news in Harrisburg, which would spoil their evening, forcing them to set down their forks and knives and go to work.

But a plan for the president to announce in Harrisburg that the United States was pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement fell through when Mr. Trump decided, after urgent phone calls on Wednesday from the leaders of Canada and Mexico, not to do it — at least for now.

The White House then toyed with the idea of having Mr. Trump announce that he was ripping up the Korea Free Trade Agreement. But he stole his own thunder, telling The Washington Post on Thursday that the United States might terminate the five-year-old agreement.

“It’s a horrible deal. It was a Hillary Clinton disaster, a deal that should’ve never been made,” Mr. Trump said. In fact, President George W. Bush negotiated the agreement with South Korea in 2007, and President Barack Obama renegotiated it in 2010, which is effectively what Mr. Trump is now proposing to do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/us/politics/trump-rally-pennsylvania.html

Chris, a 23-year-old bank teller in Vermont

VICE: Why did you vote for Trump?
Chris: I voted for Trump to weaken the moderate left. After the primary, the mood was that Hillary was going to easily win office. A Clinton victory would have set back the left wing of the Democratic Party for years, at the very least until 2020. Having won both the primary and the general election by wide margins, the party establishment would have had an excuse to sweep Bernie (Sanders)'s "revolution" under the rug, never to be seen again.

How do you feel about the mass protests against Trump?
They're a little too focused on social justice for my taste. Don't get me wrong, those issues are important, but the whole point of making sure Hillary lost was to promote socialism. The Democratic Party already has a solid set of positions on things like minority rights, women's rights, and abortion. Where's the march for healthcare, or Occupy Wall Street part two?

Which of Trump's campaign platforms are most important to you?
Infrastructure. That's one of the few issues where he and the left overlap, and I'm hoping his own party won't derail his planned infrastructure bill when it comes up for a vote.

Also, healthcare. The ACA made Democrats complacent. If Trump destroys healthcare then single-payer will grow in popularity. You can already see polls where support for it is over 50 percent just from the THREAT of the GOP messing with the ACA.

Chris, a 23rd-dimension chess player in Vermont

one thing's for sure, we have the best election system in the world and there is no reason to change anything about it

Yes, everyone knows that the left's biggest enemy is the moderate left. Very urgent to make sure the moderate left is defeated, for as everyone knows, socialist utopia is what comes _just_ on the other side of racial holy war.

guys we already have boring things like "equality", why haven't we overthrown the government yet?! #cheguevara2017

fucking enrages me when people who have privilege downplay the necessity of focusing on those initiatives in real time

Socialists against social justice. Cool platform, dude

hey, don't get him wrong, those issues are important. just not as important as voting for donald trump to accelerate our demise so that we will bounce back so much higher after hitting rock bottom

wild to read perlstein on romney's lies in 2016

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con

“Nixon knew that if you had a dirty job to get done, you got people who answered the description he made of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy: ‘good, healthy, right-wing exuberants.’”

...

And that, at last, may be the explanation for Mitt Romney’s apparently bottomless penchant for lying in public. If the 2012 GOP nominee lied louder than most—and even more astoundingly than he has during his prior campaigns—it’s just because he felt like he had more to prove to his core following. Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, it’s like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the reward—and then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher. Sneering at, or ignoring, your earnest high-minded mandarin gatekeepers—“we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” as one Romney aide put it—is another part of closing the deal. For years now, the story in the mainstream political press has been Romney’s difficulty in convincing conservatives, finally, that he is truly one of them. For these elites, his lying—so dismaying to the opinion-makers at the New York Times, who act like this is something new—is how he has pulled it off once and for all. And at the grassroots, his fluidity with their preferred fables helps them forget why they never trusted the guy in the first place.

fucking enrages me when people who have privilege downplay the necessity of focusing on those initiatives in real time

it's what we learn in our lord of the flies grade schools -- better to pick on the other kids who get teased worse than we do than confront the bullies head on. play that game long enough, get good enough at teasing, and someday we'll be ready to bully the bullies -- then we'll abolish all bullying!

i really haven't met any ppl like Chris irl, i hope they number in the dozens

And they all live in Vermont

just annooooother day

Working hard to promote socialism by working in that most socialist of endeavors, commercial banking.

i really haven't met any ppl like Chris irl, i hope they number in the dozens

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Sunday, April 30, 2017 11:46 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And they all live in Vermont

― El Tomboto, Sunday, April 30, 2017 11:55 AM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i haven't met any here, either!

also, not to let him off the hook, but of all the places in america where voting for trump was a meaningless self-indulgence, vermont has got to be up there

And now for some huge news:

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the dean of the Florida legislative delegation and the first Cuban American elected to Congress, is retiring at the end of her term next year, saying it’s time to move on after 38 years in elected office.

“It's been such a delight and a high honor to serve our community for so many years and help constituents every day of the week,” the Miami Republican told the Miami Herald in an exclusive telephone interview Sunday. “We just said, ‘It's time to take a new step.’”

Her unexpected retirement marks the end of a storied career in which Ros-Lehtinen repeatedly broke political ground as a Cuban-American woman -- and gives Democrats an opportunity to pick up a South Florida congressional seat in 2018.

Ros-Lehtinen, 64, was elected last November to Florida’s redrawn 27th district, a stretch of Southeast Miami-Dade County that leans so Democratic that Hillary Clinton won it over Donald Trump by 20 percentage points. It was Clinton's biggest margin of any Republican-held seat in the country.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article147718764.html#storylink=cpy

I suspect Chris is really Ra's al Ghul

It's no big surprise that a 23 year old can fool himself into thinking he's a deep political strategist. There are worse fools. At least he has political goals other than white supremacy.

or at least in addition to white surpremacy

Democrats give up hope on striking a deal with Trump

Though many are still nervous — there remains deep anxiety about being pulled into a government shutdown fight over border security — party leaders are in a much different place than they were in December and their success in defeating the Obamacare repeal made them feel that political order had been restored after a year of feeling like they no longer understod anything.

In the Democratic debate about how to deal with Trump, total obstruction — similar to the Republican approach during Obama’s presidency, with hopes it’ll produce the same results in elections — is winning, and selective, principled compromise is starting to seem like a fever dream, despite anxiety in some quarters that Democrats will be blamed for more gridlock in Washington that voters clearly don’t want.

What a vindictive moral midget:

The Mauricio Macri administration reverted a decision to award former US president Jimmy Carter the Order of the Liberator General San Martín — the maximum distinction that the country can give to a foreign personality —, under the pressure from US President Donald Trump’s administration, CNN web site reported this week.

The official tribute, which had already been approved by the foreign ministry and was published in the Official Gazette, was cancelled after receiving a specific request by the US government, which would have suggested it would be better to delay it. Carter was to be given the award for his work in promoting human rights during Argentina’s last military dictatorship.

despite anxiety in some quarters that Democrats will be blamed for more gridlock in Washington that voters clearly don’t want.

Learn to say: "The Republicans have all the tools they need in order to govern. Let them govern."

how funny will it be when the "conservative" senate removes the legislative filibuster?

Not gonna happen

A day after Watergate reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward issued a stirring call for the press to hold Donald Trump to account, the president’s chief of staff said the White House is actively considering a change to libel laws affecting news reporting.

“I think it’s something that we’ve looked at,” said Reince Priebus, appearing on ABC’s This Week. “How that gets executed and whether that goes anywhere is a different story.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/apr/30/reince-priebus-libel-law-change-media-white-house

can May's thread be titled: "People don't realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?"

Dear, dear lord.

There really is no ceiling on the amount I would shell out to watch the Pay-Per-View special of him being slowly fed into a wood chipper.

I mentioned this yesterday, but this good news isn't getting enough play: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ileana-ros-lehtinen-announces-no-reelection-bid-2018

Can't help but wonder if as a member of the House Intelligence Committee (and the only one to ask a question that didn't pertain to leaking to the press) she saw more Russia shit and thought, "Shit, my seat, redrawn a couple years ago, looks more unsafe in 2018..."

New thread - Trump, May 2017: 100 days of [unintelligible]

May I never read the phrase 'oppo dump' again.