Trump's America, March 2017: Using His Inside VOICE

no greater honour than having the orange goon who sent you to your death make up shit about your post-mortem emotions

I didn't watch this cuz I'm not *that* much of a glutton for punishment so instead focusing on good news that GOP still totally in the weeds on their ACA repeal, Connecticut special election victories, and yet another delay of MuslimBan 2.0. Keep it up, losers!

These windows into Turnip's perception of the world reveal so many previously-unconsidered variations on how broken a human being can be.

Just stunned though at how quickly the media cleaved to the pivot narrative, even though that is some of the shit that got us here in the first place

The fact that it's the shit that got us here in the first place is why you shouldn't be stunned.

They've been waiting for daddy to quit drinking, and now he's totally going to do all of those things he's promised if we're just good little boys and girls and stop making him so mad all the time.

^^^

none of this shit is surprising

well, the fact that he apparently spoke in complete sentences is somewhat surprising, but it's hardly a reason for applause

i feel stupid (and also this doesn't matter) but can someone explain why last night was not billed as a SOTU?

Cos we're not a union anymore

I don't like "abusive relationship" narrative going on re: Trump and the media. The abusive relationship here is with US citizens and the media, with people thinking the media is actually in the service of public interest. Why would it be? Is Coca Cola working for the public interest?

the SOTH get's to choose what it's called and he decided to call it a joint sessions speech. not sure of his reasoning xp

Jon Schwarz tolls the bell:

@tinyrevolution
Trump's language last night about Medicaid was taken almost word for word from Paul Ryan's Better Way Medicaid plan

"Medicaid is not just healthcare for the poor. It also pays the bills for over 60 percent of nursing home residents, and 40 percent of all national long-term care costs. And the number of Americans who need nursing home care is going to rise significantly over the next several decades as the baby boom ages into their eighties and nineties. Cutting Medicaid over this period is a recipe for people literally dying in the streets (or for luckier ones, on the foldout couch in their kid’s living room)."

https://theintercept.com/2017/03/01/the-only-concrete-takeaway-from-trumps-speech-medicaid-is-doomed/

Isn't it because it's normally not called SOTU in the first year of a new presidency?

Woulda been better if he went full-Yelawolf and called it his Shit of the Union Distress

I think a President technically has to be in office for a year before it becomes an official SOTU.

Been surprised by positive responses to the speech. Is his popularity going to go up several points temporarily? Then he can get the US into a war and boost it some more. Lovely.

he'll get a boost from this. then he'll tweet some dumb shit, insult somebody, get in a fight w the press, issue the Muslim ban EO, etc. and it'll nosedive again.

His popularity has bounced back and forth a bunch since Inauguration so probably. But long term it will probably stay in the toilet

I'm just flummoxed that there are still people who are unable to take like this big picture view of a dumbfuck public figure who has been showing us exactly who he is for decades and who has been vocally espousing a very particular strain of his general douchebaggery for years and who has spent the last year and a half incessantly assaulting us with what a spectacularly irredeemable piece of human garbage he is and how thoroughly resistant to change he is. I don't know how, in the face of that, you can watch him talking slightly more calmly about things that are just slightly less hateful than usual and pretend that he's pivoting or changing or maturing or growing. Fuck every single person who's promoting that narrative, seriously, and may each one of them be tethered to him in the historical narrative of whatever awful shit he manages to do before he's ejected from office.

I'm not sure how the VOICE thing isn't completely overshadowing anything else that's being considered positive about this speech.

Most people think politics are really this easy thing that corrupt politicians have fouled up, so what non-dumbfucks see as evidence of incompetence and cluelessness, they see as "the new Sheriff in town being temporarily stymied by the old corrupt bureaucracy"

yeah. there were audible gasps in the audience when he described it. xpost

God, the headline on NYT right now: "Trump Offers Up a More Hopeful Vision"

the next several decades as the baby boom ages into their eighties and nineties

why we are well fucked for 25+ more years, and not just bc of health care costs.

Reasons why i am planning to die by 55

Without spawn

NPR noon newscast totally emph'd the "presidential" spin

Reasons why i am planning to die by 55

well, i have to see if the Mets win this year

and the only guvmint that matters:

http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/01/investing/dow-21000-trump-speech/index.html

the stock market thing and the whole media narrative around it is troubling. could it be that investors are optimistic because they know they're in an era of deregulation? no, no, that couldn't be it. they're optimistic because of trump's patriotic eagle vision for the country.

trump clearly loves taking credit for the gains since his election. and when there's an inevitable dip/crisis/crash, it's all too predictable how trump will react - it will be somebody or something else's fault, he will be treated so unfairly

it's because currency is imaginary etc xp

The Dow Jones thing to me looks like a big run-up ahead of a big cash-out (which will come only after tax rates have been slashed). It's all short-term thinking, I seriously doubt anyone has any idea (or even cares much) whether the broader economy is headed up or down.

I thought I'd gotten myself on a more even keel, but media backpedaling on the basis of a moment of inconsequential relative temperance has me feeling more panicky despair than pretty much anything the Orange Mummy has done or said in the past month.

what is the VOICE thing i cannot google atm

we predicted the reaction yesterday. He spoke in complete sentences, thanks to the teleprompter. Nothing to panic about. Wait till ACA repeal ('and replace') comes to his desk.

xpost Well, you know how immigrants are committing all of the crimes in the US? We finally have a governmental program to deal with this threat to our well-being and way of life by disseminating information on these heinous crimes far and wide.

I thought that was announced earlier, in one of his EOs

VOICE sounds maybe a little like this idk

And we see back in Nazi Germany there was a paper called—a Nazi paper called Der Stürmer, and they had a department called "Letter Box," and readers were invited to send in stories of supposed Jewish crimes. And Der Stürmer would publish them, and they would include some pretty horrific graphic illustrations of these crimes, as well. And there was even a sort of a lite version of it, if you will, racism lite, in which the Neues Volk, which was more like a Look or a Life magazine, which normally highlighted beautiful Aryan families and their beautiful homes, would run a feature like "The Criminal Jew," and they would show photos of "Jewish-looking," as they called it, people who represented different kinds of crimes that one ought to watch out for from Jews.

we don't have to report them to VOICE though if they can support themselves

nothing fucked up about that at all :)

didn't Bannon also publish black crimes in his rag ?

yep

The most awesome aspect of an idea like VOICE, IMO, is that you know the people who promote and contribute and respond positively to information like this are those who will be rigorous in making distinctions between, say, criminal immigrants and law-abiding immigrants or undocumented immigrants and US citizens when trying to determine who to demonize and kick the shit out of.

the VOICE thing freaks me the fuck out.

i can't wait to be told how this does not resemble nazi germany in any way

it's not even about convincing more people that undocumented immigrants are more likely to violent criminals. it's about providing government-sponsored "information" to the people who were already convinced of it so they can feel legitimized.

btw Van Jones is a nincompoop

https://twitter.com/DougHenwood/status/836929317766561793

might sound flip, but after 8 years of hearing about how markets "crave" stability and then seeing the weird exuberance following the election of the most unstable egomaniac(s) fathomable, touting many policies that are unambiguously bad for many sectors of the economy, i'm starting to think Wall Street might be ... racist

I'm not sure there's a position of this administration and the GOP in general that can't be summed up as (and sometimes explicitly defined as) an attempt to maintain and reassert (mostly wealthy and mostly male but always) white hegemony.

FFS! trump didn't shit himself up the how predicational of him xxp

oh fuck autocorrect ugh

i didn't see it coming tbf, mainly because i stopped trying to see things coming after last year.

I was thinking more of folks who thought this asshole and his family were going to get results

if he'd have appointed advisers who weren't first-timers or morons he might have had a shot (*might*) but that was never going to happen.

i like that knives are out for kushner now http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/jared-kushner-white-house-influence-236758

fingers crossed we get stronger nepotism laws and a steeper estate tax out of all this garbage. a 'trump-kushner tax' on insane inherited wealth would be a fitting legacy for this administration

ahh yes this is a good idea

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/326830-trump-tells-nbc-to-stop-covering-russia-story

honestly, I thought they were going to get a lot more of their agenda crammed through quickly with a republican congress, I did not realize how massively all involved would manage to screw it all up when they had everything they needed to be successful (except brains)

yeah I didn't sleep well for days after the election because of thinking just that. I knew he would suck, but I figured the party woulda found a way around his ineptitude.

knock on wood I guess it's still sadly early.

There was always the question of what Trumps agenda even was. I wouldn't be surprised if he had more commercials promoting a Democratic agenda than Clinton (for good reasons, imo, but that's another discussion).

even the Nunes maneuver hasn't succeeded like I thought it would (mostly cos the press found their stones and are shitting all over his bullshit behavior)

It's still early sure but midterms are tantalizingly close

Hoping ossoff clears 50% in GA so we can hail him president like what the media did to Scott brown

i'd call faster melting of the icecaps a result

That tends to happen each spring no matter who the president is, though.

yeah that's how you were freed from that glacier

Ok lol

lmao

clean hit

delicious

daaaaaaaaaaaamn

global warming's terrifying new math

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39906-as-trump-s-denialists-get-to-work-the-climate-is-changing-170-times-faster

damn son

Krauthammer himself has been a paraplegic since the age of 22. That’s an expensive medical condition. Probably he has group insurance through the Washington Post or another institution with which he’s affiliated, allowing him to spread the cost of his expensive medical care onto a risk pool that includes healthier, cheaper-to-cover people. Or perhaps he has a different arrangement. I do not for one moment resent that my insurance helps cover either childbirth or mechanized wheelchairs, even though I personally need neither service, and nothing Krauthammer says would make me reconsider.
It is callous enough that Republicans apply their every-man-for-himself logic to health care, and land on the belief that those fortunate enough to be blessed with good health should not be burdened with the cost of paying for the medical needs of others. But when the advocate of this argument himself has expensive medical needs, the callousness rises to a level of solipsistic barbarism. A paraplegic man resents having to pay for women who need help breastfeeding their babies. Why should those women have to buy insurance that covers wheelchairs?

oops [ q ]

chait is stone cold

Conservatives will scream "wow, rude" if they acknowledge it at all, but it's such a direct hit.

Bring on the April thread already, US peeps

He got away with all his lies, people still elected him. Will he also get away without getting anything done? By blaming others all the time? I hope not but I fear yes. I am really happy living in good old europe these days. The usa give me the chills.

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

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