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

Are the Ford Fiesta, the Focus, the Mondeo and the Kuga American cars though? On the proviso that I know nothing about cars, Ford in the UK and Europe used to design and manufacture cars that were totally different from the gas guzzling phalluses they designed and manufactured for the US market - is that still the case?

FWIW, key crazy takeaway:

Trump has been asking people close to him whether they think Kushner or his company has done anything wrong, according to a senior administration official. Two advisers said the president repeatedly tells aides that the Russia investigation will not ensnare him — even as it ensnares others around him — and that he thinks the American people are finally starting to conclude that the Democrats, as opposed to his campaign, colluded with the Russians.

(Oops, caek has covered this already) (xp)

i owned a ford focus for ~10yrs

i'm american btw

fwiw ford of britain makes completely different vehicles to those ford makes in the US

this is a pretty stupid discussion to be having on a board where almost nobody gives a shit about cars, BUT ACTUALLY Ford started pushing the same bodies and vehicle types in all of their markets worldwide several years ago which is why you can find the Transit and Fusion on at least three continents now, and they do well pretty much everywhere. A cursory fucking google and wikipedia browsing session reveals this.

The reason I care if the president is having problems is that he is still the president, and just as he started trade wars (with allies!) against the wishes of his advisers and without anyone knowing he was going to do it until he did it, he could do other shit, too. Remember, 100 years ago, when he began a tweet with some somber "My fellow Americans, I have decided ..." tone, and then there was a long break, and then he announced, apropos of nothing that he wanted to ban transgender troops? Against the wishes of his military and with no one knowing that was coming? And that, for those few minutes in between tweets, some people thought maybe we were about to go to war? There are 8 fucking months until November.

Interestingly Ford (like Heinz) is one of those American brands that has painted itself as British for generations. (Not that Ford has made any cars in the UK for years).

― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed)

mostly because of douglas adams

Three days late, but excellent thread title.

at what point can they outsource "chaos in the whitehouse" stories to chuck tingle? because it's just mad libs (uh, no pun intended) at this point, no?

Trump Mad Libs (which is the perfect jumble of words itself - Mad Libs!) must exist.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/trump-tweet-mad-libs

https://d3thpuk46eyjbu.cloudfront.net/uploads/production/3353/1500311516/original/Trumptweet2.png?1500311516

tombot: there was a ford fusion in europe but it's a different thing to the ford fusion hybrid, which is not sold outside north america and brazil. the transit is a UK design that ford USA imported (kind of my point).

just to make clear my point since it's been lost in car stuff though: the idea that there could ever be a world in which consumer goods "made in the USA" appeal to people outside the USA on their merits may be a vote winner in "trump country", but it's just not reality (except for apple, which i don't think is what trump is talking about).

one exception might be fashion

but that’s a tiny market

Designed by Apple in California

Basically what Ed said, applied to all consumer goods, not just cars

US cars have a good rep in China, Buick sells a ton of them there. Part of it is that the Chinese really still hate Japan, but hey got to take wins when you can get them.

I am with rushomancy here. Is there anything in the new "Trump stalks the halls of the White House fuming at the TV and berating the staff" story that wasn't in the last dozen "Trump stalks the halls of the White House berating the TV and fuming at the staff" stories? If so, help a brother out and give us the Cliffs Notes.

I've been saying it since January 2017. I don't care. Let's flip the Congress.

it's the same old story, based off of a couple dozen anonymous aides and a 4 star general, with the new controversies replacing the old.

it did include one bit that documents trump accidentally having a good thought

Trump doesn’t see guns through the traditional prism of left vs. right, but rather as a Manhattan business developer, said one senior administration official, adding that he has told staff that he doesn’t understand why people need assault rifles.

i'm sure that by now the NRA has made him understand

it really is uncanny how you only have to change the proper names from the zodiac killer letters pic.twitter.com/MyrhpSfBxY

— Muscular Baby (@Mobute) March 4, 2018

apparently his republican fundraiser thing tonight is going well. he's already managed to jokingly praise Xi Jinping for being a great authoritarian

"He's now president for life. President for life. No, he's great," Trump said. "And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot some day."

it looks like he spent the rest of the speech talking about how hillary clinton needs to go to jail.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/03/politics/trump-maralago-remarks/index.html

Breaking: West Virginia teachers say "indefinite" strike will continue after State Senate's Finance Committee rejects Governor Justice's offer of a 5% raise & instead pushes 4% raise. The state's school superintendents back 5%. @BradMcElhinny @MsCByers https://t.co/Oz87Jy5w9O

— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) March 3, 2018

Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer — please do not go off-message!

The WV GOP is so shitty that even though the teachers went on strike and continued to strike because, among other reasons, a 5% was not enough, the state senate comes back with *less* than 5%. That's some Trump negotiation right there.

classic reagan air traffic controller negotiation move too, right?

Let's see if they fire all the teachers.

one astounding thing to me about US politics is that the GOP managed to somehow portray teachers as villains. i'm not even talking about how the right sees evil liberal colleges and marxist professors and brainwashing machines and "science" and education in general. but even just school teachers themselves are villainized! epitomized by john kasich saying “If I were, not president, if I were king in America, I would abolish all teachers’ lounges where they sit together and worry about ‘woe is us’.” it's so fucking stupid, that idea of the lazy teachers whining and complaining all the time. but somehow that's become republican orthodoxy.

*puffs cigar*
the problem with teachers, see here, is that it needs to be based on free market values. if a teacher is bad, they should replaced, and i mean pronto, why i oughta

Not only are they underpaid, undervalued, and otherwise shit on by the GOP (I mean, they're shit on in blue states, too), the GOP is constantly angling to reduce their power, compel them to teach bullshit, and fund private alternative schools that further undercut their value and power. I heard a story on the radio about how HUD folks were demoralized to begin with, and the hiring of someone like Ben Carson just made them feel so much worse. I can only image that DeVos has done to teacher moral.

Anyway, good luck replacing 20,000 teachers in West Virginia. I hope the entire state of Oklahoma strikes, too. And probably Kansas, too. And likely Mississippi. And any place where the GOP has fucked with the schools so much that the fed-up teachers have no recourse.

Republican orthodoxy is, and has been for as long as I've been alive, that anybody who gets directly paid from the state coffers is a subhuman leech, unless they wear a uniform (cops, firefighters, the troops). Not contractors, btw - contractors are real people because a publicly traded company gets to skim off the payments from the state coffers first, THEN the workers get paid. That's why charter schools are good.

That WV Teacher Trike gofundme: $125,060 of $50,000 goal

xp I mean they've been saying this for 4+ decades. I don't get how anybody doesn't understand this is what they believe. It is as fundamental to their platform as criminalizing abortion.

Because too many parents treat public school like glorified daycare and take for granted the work teachers do? Even though the vast majority of those parents benefited from public school teachers themselves? Out of sight, out of mind. "My Timmy is doing fine, fuck your kid, if they don't like it they can move."

I meant the broader aspect of it, i.e. civil service should not be a job at all unless it's conducted by a privately owned company.

also, teachers are apparently simultaneously lazy and worthless, but also would-be heroes if someone would only give them a gun

(also, a significant chunk of Republican voters never benefited from public school teachers themselves and would be horrified of the thought of their kid ever going to public school, but are yet somehow experts on it and how it should be run)

a significant chunk of Republican voters never benefited from public school teachers themselves

what

a lot of Republican voters are rich people who either went to private schools or religious/Catholic schools that basically function as private schools

or not even "rich" per se, just upper-middle-class

I don't think you can support that with any kind of reliable statistics, I'm sorry

also a lot of people are so dumb that they don't realize how poor their evaluations of teachers are

Republican orthodoxy is, and has been for as long as I've been alive, that anybody who gets directly paid from the state coffers is a subhuman leech, unless they wear a uniform (cops, firefighters, the troops).

do they even care about firefighters though

I mean, school vouchers and similar programs effectively siphoning resources that would otherwise go toward public schools toward private schools are a plank of the Republican platform, which would not be the case if they didn't go there

your reasoning is that they wouldn't support privatizing schools if they hadn't been to private schools?

the GOP would hand the DoD to the likes of Erik Prince if the Army itself wasn't standing in the way, because no bureaucracy can be trusted with our precious debt, according to capital dogma

the enrollment in private schools tends to be A) religious and B) wealthy (stats: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2015/demo/school-enrollment/2015-cps.html), which are two demographics that skew Republican. I don't know why this is controversial