US Politics, March 2018: Why do people leave the White House for good?

My wife was a vegetarian for maybe 15 years. When she would visit some of her family in Omaha they (family and restaurants like) just could not make her a salad with no meat for the life of them. She'd order a salad and it would come with bacon, or fish, or something to negate to whole purpose, as if "salad" meant vegetarian no matter what was on or in it.

In this case, I suspect their real message was: you are deeply wrong to reject meat and if we put some right under your nose when you are hungry, you will come to that happy realization and be saved from your terrible folly.

this is the vegetarian's plight, also people for some reason assuming meat=beef and poultry I guess is a vegetable?

i had a cousin who was vegetarian in her late teens and college. this was the mid-90s in east Tennessee. it made her parents apoplectic.

(which, tbf, might have been a small bonus for her)

Well, somebody shot himself right in front of the White House today

Another year of this and they'll be lining up around the block

Instead of Taco Trucks on every corner, we get these...

https://media.giphy.com/media/ENB1fIlVnMRcQ/giphy.gif

some xposts

i had a vegetarian girlfriend in college who visited family in rural pennsylvania. she told them she didn't eat meat, so they made her hamburger helper.

Georgia rush-removed a $40 million tax break on jet fuel from Delta as punishment for dropping their NRA discount.

Number of tickets sold in the lifetime of the discount program: 13.

just bein helpful

xpost

unbelievable.

Sic, you’re behind, Delta already called their bluff

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/02/delta-ceo-our-values-are-not-for-sale.html

Anyway

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/376573-secret-service-shots-fired-white-house

the only way to stop a guy with a gun is that same guy with a gun

Oklahoma teachers might follow W VA's lead

http://ktul.com/news/local/oklahoma-teachers-planning-a-statewide-strike

This post makes a valid point. Yes, it's bad that Republicans are rescinding a giant corporate tax break to Delta Airlines in order to punish them for not fellating the NRA enough...but giant corporate tax breaks of that sort are themselves bad, and it's important to keep that in mind when it's time to decide whether to scream "Those dastardly Republicans!" or not.

my concern is that corps learn their 'lesson' and will quickly trade any notional social responsibility for their sweet sweet tax cuts

i mean good on Delta for not going back on it, but might it not cow others into keeping their mouths shut or outright supporting wingnut agendas of their state governments?

It doesn’t exactly make GA look like a good destination for corporations

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-skelton-adam-schiff-congress-20180222-story.html

xp I guess this could go in the other thread but while we're on the subject it seems like it would behoove the assorted gun control lobbies to merge and copy the NRA model with membership cards, sticky "lifetime" terms, inflated enrollments etc. I'm not a member of anything besides AAA but I would gladly pony up for such a thing.

it's important to keep that in mind when it's time to decide whether to scream "Those dastardly Republicans!" or not.

Doing the right thing for an bad and terrible reason doesn't absolve you of being bad terrible person. If pedophile gives a homeless single mother money for rent and food, thinking it might help him molest her daughter, he is still evil.

It doesn’t exactly make GA look like a good destination for corporations

that and how the state senate just passed an anti-gay adoption bill

Loomis is rarely nuanced. Because he’s bad at it!

People, our positions should not be defined by knee-jerk reactions to fascists.

Aimless trying to hit the side of a barn door with that metaphor and still has to resort to a clause about intent

Oklahoma teachers might follow W VA's lead

good. socrates/plato/aristotle should shrug until our education system is properly funded. fuck atlas (and the koch brothers and the amway crew etc) with a cache of legally-purchased AR-15s

Is it raining in Florida?

If the E.U. wants to further increase their already massive tariffs and barriers on U.S. companies doing business there, we will simply apply a Tax on their Cars which freely pour into the U.S. They make it impossible for our cars (and more) to sell there. Big trade imbalance!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2018

i am not an economist but trump’s understanding of trade seems... limited at best to my mind

something tells me Japan may have an opinion on that

Delta already called their bluff

It wasn't a bluff? Passed 44-10 in the senate, 135-24 in the house.

I think what was meant was they had no intention of changing their mind so if it was being used as a measure to get Delta to reverse-course, it failed. not that they were bluffing to strip the tax advantages that would benefit Delta out of the bill.

He has no understanding of trade. He's merely repeating what crackpot economist Peter Navarro tells him and Wilbur Ross does not correct. He substitutes Navarro's views for any personal thought because he is too lazy and incurious to engage in any, but found Navarro (via Jared) to be someone who could give academic-sounding voice to his racist xenophobia as regards China in particular. Navarro's views have come to the fore more recently because the collection of people who would talk over and marginalize him have themselves been marginalized by personal rifts.

still has to resort to a clause about intent

resort to? judging their intent was my intent all along. I did not say the action was wrong in itself, because it isn't. but the actor is still worthy of scorn, despite, not because of the goodness of the action.

Navarro's views also appeal to his schoolyard-level zero-sum understanding of the world, which would also lead him to dismiss whatever exposure he may have had to standard trade theory

Nobody wants to buy American cars, they're hopelessly fuel inefficient...

"his schoolyard-level zero-sum understanding of the world"

A perspective we've come to learn has substantial electoral salience, especially among an an ideological-flexible but largely racially homogenous cohort of fellow members of the "poorly-educated"

Oh my god shut up

Wasn't it mentioned in this thread (for sure I read it somewhere) that since his first weeks in the White House people have been trying to explain trade to him, but it's just not taking.

Nobody wants to buy American cars, they're hopelessly fuel inefficient...

Actually, they've gotten much better, in part thanks to (yes) Obama.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-emissions/u-s-vehicle-fuel-economy-rises-to-record-24-7-mpg-epa-idUSKBN1F02BX

Some better-educated too

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/87dt3pDAgu4/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEWCKgBEF5IWvKriqkDCQgBFQAAiEIYAQ==&rs=AOn4CLDSQexNmxbMADNCm6td6I5D6zumzw
Moo

Surprised it took so long for Trump to start with the trade war stuff. Surprised he’s doing it in the post-Bannon era.

Loomis is rarely nuanced. Because he’s bad at it!

The most confusing lib post of the year. I'd had my morning coffee, exercised, and couldn't square it with the guy who posts This Day in Labor History shit.

wonder who's pushing him in this direction. a donor or someone in the admin?

kinda seems like the sort of thing a president shouldn't be able to do unilaterally

Actually, they've gotten much better, in part thanks to (yes) Obama.

Nobody wants to buy them anyway.

donor(s)

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-carl-icahn-trump-tariffs-20180302-story.html

xpost

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/25/navarro-trump-trade-tariffs-423462
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/us/politics/peter-navarro-trade.html

the sort of thing a president shouldn't be able to do unilaterally

If tariffs on particular commodities were taken back to the sole discretion of Congress, it wouldn't be much, if any, better. Just ruminate a moment on how Congress works and this becomes more apparent. Once you've handed the decision over to the executive branch, it is unavoidably handed directly to the POTUS, because of how the executive branch works. The current POTUS is just an outlier when it comes to his tiny-handed grasp of economic policy -- or any other government policy, for that matter.

Of course, Trump doesn’t get that European cars sold in the states mainly built in Chattanooga (VW), Spartanburg (BMW)and Birmingham (Mercedes).

fuck VW for moving out of new stanton

And Sony and me for that matter. It started as a Chrysler plant but hey never even got as far as pouring concrete for the floors.