President Donald Trump's Final Days...

[Jack Tripper]

Originally Posted by xenontrioxide

Whether or not there is anything to the collusion issue, it is the Trump camps inability to see how it all looks that is the most astonishing. Trump praises Putin and claims Russia is not in Crimea. Putin says publicly he wants Trump to win and his propaganda machine starts Trump boosting in Russia. All the while Trump doesn't get why this is alarming.

So, he "jokes" about Russian Intelligence hacking Hilary and asks them to produce the evidence he can use to sink her. Dismisses, or should I say denies, reports (somehow) that Russia is really interfering. Then he lies and frustrates the investigation (in more ways than I have time to describe) fires a non-political official responsible for the investigation, claims the investigation is now over, and then immediately welcomes known Russian spooks to the Oval Office, all without slightest concern about the perception of the public and the world. This is the most alarming about this affair.

It's like a married guy who repeatedly denies infidelity being baffled by his wife's reaction when he runs off for a "working" weekend with his secretary.

To put it simply, he's an idiot.

[Rogerbh]

It's not an argument of why he got elected. It's a hope he starts acting presidential instead of being a thin-skinned, midnight tweeting megalomaniac. I just wish he shut his trap for a few days and quit giving material to the comedians. His inconsistent actions on North Korea has me believing that he is going to do the same thing as every other president before him - nothing. Weak willed Presidents, that's all we get. Where the hell is our generation's Teddy Roosevelt?

[xenontrioxide]

Originally Posted by savage560

OK lets clarify this, & I know most of you here hate Trump, but not all of you here represent all or even most Americans & cannot see beyond your liberalism

I'm not a liberal by any measure, in my country or yours. Make no mistake if Clinton had been elected I'd probably be criticizing her cynical brand of liberalism no end, as would a good number of posters to this thread if I'm reading them right. This has nothing to do with left or right, policy or politics, but simply the fact that Donald Trump is a vile, odious, morally bankrupt buffoon who one day got bored playing Monopoly with real buildings and decided to try playing Risk with real countries.

[diamelsx]

Originally Posted by savage560

OK lets clarify this, & I know most of you here hate Trump, but not all of you here represent all or even most Americans & cannot see beyond your liberalism, & I know I didn't want to post this again , but many are not inline with a super liberal agenda here in the US , or even in Europe, even though most are here.

Lets just start with, he was elected by the majority, in the USA, out side of CA , & get over it he won the EC. Why ? Mainly to secure our borders, which were rife with illegal immigrants arriving virtually at will , with the border patrol under Obama to serve as a welcoming committee. The vast majority, of which we have no idea of who they are or nothing about their back rounds. Many are hardened criminals from Mexico & beyond, & ALL that commit a crime intrinsically , by this act, which in most counties WW , including Mexico, is punished by laws, & everywhere but here, is a serious crime. He was elected because our career lifetime politicians have lost their way & are cronies to the elites , who welcome over population in all nations, because it brings down the wages & salaries, & that is beneficial to only the elitists. It also changes the demographics of a nation, which will make this nation more like the nations where the people are immigrating from. In due time, the US will look more like what Mexico & Central America is today. Many of us here , probably won't see this & it will take time, but with this change, it is inevitable to happen.

As more Muhammadan immigrants , legally or illegally arrive from the ME , the more this nation will change, as we know it today. We are discussing things like Sharia Law , which is insanity in itself, & many of those immigrants want that here ,when in fact they should stay in the ME, if that is their desire, which many polls state, it is a large minority in those nations before they immigrate to western nations now. It is a fact for the vast majority of Muhammadans WW, who live in their nations today & many of those people immigrate to the west desire this in the nations they immigrate to. This is why we elected a man like Trump, because most "Republicrat" politicians could care less about demographic changes that are counter to what we have achieved in this nation, when America was the best nation in the world.

OK you remind me of what I used to hear in stores when asking for stuff,"You always want to buy yet never want to pay" in all these regions the US has been at least partly if not fully responsible for destabilizing the region making the people flee for their lives. So how are we not responsible for taking them in? If you did not want these people coming then we should not have meddled in these peoples' affairs in the first place...

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by savage560

He was elected because our career lifetime politicians have lost their way & are cronies to the elites ...

In due time, the US will look more like what Mexico & Central America is today. Many of us here , probably won't see this & it will take time, but with this change, it is inevitable to happen.

...

As more Muhammadan immigrants , legally or illegally arrive from the ME , the more this nation will change, as we know it today. We are discussing things like Sharia Law

Point #1 - Given all the billionaires and lobbyists Trump has appointed to his Administration it certainly looks like the elites are more firmly in charge than ever. Please note that Trump's proposed "tax reform" plan increases taxes on working folks and raises the deficit to fund a tax cut to the wealthy. The politicians are just following the money like they always do.

Point #2 - The increasing concentration of wealth in few hands, the decline of the middle class, and driving working people into poverty has our society looking more like a Third World Latin American country everyday.

Point #3 - There are currently 3.3 million Muslims in the U.S., 1% of the population. The United States caps immigration at 675,000 persons a year. It would take using every one of those immigration slots for the next 50 years to admit a Muslim before Muslims exceeded 10% of the population.

I guess we can look forward to having a MLM - Muslim Lives Matter movement sometime around the year 2067.

[LadyLuck]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

Point #3 - There are currently 3.3 million Muslims in the U.S., 1% of the population. The United States caps immigration at 675,000 persons a year. It would take using every one of those immigration slots for the next 50 years to admit a Muslim before Muslims exceeded 10% of the population.

Since it takes radical Muslims in the order of millions to inflict heavy damage we have nothing to worry about.

[seany65]

Originally Posted by LadyLuck

Since it takes radical Muslims in the order of millions to inflict heavy damage we have nothing to worry about.

Loath as I am to say this as it may give some people 'ideas', but it would only take a few radical muslims to inflict heavy damage if they bombed a nuclear power station.

[tsunamiSD]

Trump: An Unusually Bad Liar

So, when do the wheels finally come off this thing? From the NYT:

President Trump offered a new version of his decision to fire James B. Comey, saying on Thursday that he would have dismissed the F.B.I. director regardless of whether the attorney general and his deputy recommended it.
It was just the latest in a series of statements, some of them contradictory, to whiplash Washington over 48 hours that began with Mr. Comey’s firing on Tuesday evening. And it was unusually harsh: Mr. Trump castigated Mr. Comey as “a showboat” and “a grandstander,” suggesting that his issues with the F.B.I. director went beyond any previously stated concerns.
Mr. Trump said Thursday he had not relied solely on the advice from the Justice Department’s top two leaders in deciding to dismiss Mr. Comey. Earlier, the White House had said that Mr. Trump had acted only after Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, came to him and recommended that Mr. Comey be dismissed because of his handling of last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email. In his Tuesday letter terminating Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump said he had “accepted their recommendation.” And Vice President Mike Pence, talking to reporters, echoed his boss. But by the next day, that story had begun to unravel.

Remember when Sen. Bob Kerrey said of Bill Clinton that he’s “an unusually good liar”? Clinton was. Trump is an unusually bad liar — and it is destroying his administration only four months into his presidency. It is becoming very hard to deny that President Trump believes that the FBI ought to be not just under his authority, but under his control.
If you’re a Republican member of Congress right now, what must you be thinking?

The latest Trump interview once again reveals appalling ignorance and dishonesty

As America continues to ponder whether President Donald Trump is obstructing justice by firing his FBI director in order to stymie an ongoing inquiry into his team’s various bizarre links to the Russian government, the Economist delivered an interview with the chief executive that reminds us of the original and most basic horror of the Trump administration: The president of the United States has no idea what he’s talking about.

And while Trump’s own answers are so bizarre and meandering that it seems overwhelmingly likely he is speaking nonsense out of ignorance rather than rank dishonesty, the performance of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as his squire in the interview is disturbing on an entirely different level. Much as Trump has turned the political appointees at the Justice Department into facilitators of his lies about Jim Comey, Mnuchin acts as an enabler rather than a provider of adult supervision.
Trump, ignorant, will say something stupid. Then Mnuchin, better-informed, will back him up by saying something blatantly false. The good news, such as it is, is that in Trump’s own telling, the president can be easily manipulated by foreign governments who dupe him into avoiding rash actions.

The sheer volume of things that Trump says over the course of the interview is mind-boggling, and practically beyond counting. At times he appears to be willfully lying in pursuit of some political agenda, or at least repeating a half-remembered partisan talking point. But he also asserts that nobody had heard of Mike Pence before he was chosen to be Trump’s running mate, when Pence has in fact been well-known in American political circles for years.

• Trump says that Ireland “never raised their taxes” during the Great Recession, when in fact Value Added Tax, gas tax, and alcohol taxes went up and the government also imposed a new carbon tax and moved to close some corporate tax loopholes.
• Trump says we “always lose” in NAFTA arbitration cases, when in fact that United States has a better won-loss record in such disputes than either Canada or Mexico.
• Trump says we run a $15 billion trade deficit with Canada, when in fact last year we ran a trade surplus.
• Trump says Reagan’s 1986 tax reform proposal increased the deficit, when it did not.
• Trump says we’re “the highest taxed nation in the world,” when in fact the United States has lower taxes than every developed country except Chile, Mexico, and Korea.

At times it’s difficult to know where exactly misstatements end and free associating nonsense begins. The Economist asks Trump why his tax plan is so tilted toward wealthy families and he (falsely) says that it isn’t “because they’re losing all of their deductions.” This wouldn’t change the fact that the plan is regressive even if it accurately characterized the plan, which it does not, since the plan in fact maintains several deductions.

[Arturo2nd]

Yes, we are vulnerable to a dirty bomb, but it would be much easier for ISIS or al Qaeda to detonate it in Europe than try to smuggle nuclear materials halfway around the world.

My earlier post on Muslim numbers notes that it very unlikely that Muslims will significantly alter our culture. In fact, if U.S. mosques can't get a better grip on their nut cases, they run the risks of violent reprisals from our violent right wing militias. For example, Detroit has many Muslim refugees, but the upper part of the state is hotbed of militia activity. A minority with very small numbers and little wealth will always lack the political clout to safeguard their communities.

The weirdest part of the whole Republican strategy is the continuing attacks on Latino communities. The traditional values of Latino cultures are very conservative. Philosophically, the Republican party is a natural fit, but the constant attacks and scapegoating of Latin immigrants drives those communities into the arms of the Democrats. The long term demographic trends make this a politically suicidal trend.

[diamelsx]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

The weirdest part of the whole Republican strategy is the continuing attacks on Latino communities. The traditional values of Latino cultures are very conservative. Philosophically, the Republican party is a natural fit, but the constant attacks and scapegoating of Latin immigrants drives those communities into the arms of the Democrats. The long term demographic trends make this a politically suicidal trend.

Not weird at all. A certain industry is looking towards the Latino population as a new revenue stream in addition to the African Americans they have on account of the drug war. They paid the Republicans and some Democrats in order to step up enforcement of immigration laws. Now the media will frame it as just the Republicans attacking the Latinos but talk to the Latinos, especially the younger ones and they can cite alot of the sins of the Democratic party in this area. Look at the turnout data among Latinos especially broke down by age for evidence of this.